Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's almost trite now because everyone knows T-Rex is massive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yes, if you actually stand in front of one, you would be seriously impressed just how absolutely vast they are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So I've got a copy of a T-Rex skull downstairs from my office.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yeah, I could fit comfortably through its mouth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it would be just about capable of swallowing me whole, and I'm a pretty big guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Your body, you can fit in it too small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I can fit through it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's not even a particularly big one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a copy of the one that's in the Smithsonian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they get bigger than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You have a two-scale copy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a cast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's just a giant mold made, and then pull that like the dentist do your teeth, but very, very big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, they are...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
12-ish meters long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So what's that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
14 yards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Four and a half, maybe five to the top of the head standing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So another six yards high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then seven-ish metric tons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What's that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
About eight and a half short tons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So a colleague of mine, Tom Holtz, described them as an orca on land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But that's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It is a killer whale-sized animal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
but on legs on land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And those are massive predators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you're looking at something absolutely colossal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I think that is what will stun you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think people don't realize how big a lot of animals are, which sounds weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I used to work in a few zoos and something I think you notice is when you go and see things like elephants or giraffes,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Rhinos, everything's built to the scale of the animal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The elephant house is huge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The doors are huge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The bars are huge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The food is huge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so you don't see them in the context of something that you have a good frame of reference for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I learned this, yeah, when I was at London Zoo and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
was going into the basement of the old elephant and rhino pavilion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And a rhino stuck its head out from like this gap in the wall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the head was twice the size I thought it was once you stood next to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the same with an elephant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I once stood next to an elephant closer than you are to me now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you go, oh, oh, they are so much bigger than I thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I think it's similar in museums.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like even when you get up relatively close to a T-Rex skeleton and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a bit of space between you and it, and then some bars, and then it's usually raised up a little bit on a mount to hold the platform, and then you stand back from that, and you don't actually get to stand under them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And when you do that, yeah, you realize that, yeah, the foot finishes at my knee.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So is a T-Rex bigger than an elephant?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Would that be fair to say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, a very large Savannah African elephant is five to six tons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we're looking at seven plus and a biped and a carnivore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, you know, a big lion, a big lion is 200 kilos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So 430 pounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and I think more than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think it's one of the most iconic animals, period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, if you're listing things that the average person has heard of, lion, elephant, giraffe, tiger, hippo, rhino, there's a few more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But T-Rex is coming somewhere up in that list.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's how prominent it is as an animal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, yeah, it's almost inescapable as a paleontologist, and then doubly so for me who works on dinosaurs, and doubly so again because I do work on tyrannosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, it just dominates conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Massive head, very kind of boxy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's very robust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Big forward-facing eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
massive eyes massive i mean tennis ball sized eyes these things had amazing eyesight um yeah giant teeth there's a cast of a wet tyrannosaurus rex yeah i know so it it looks a bit bigger than it is so this is all root so this would be stuck in the jaw right but that tip part is that's the two the the tip as you call it and yeah um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, so that would comfortably go through pretty much any part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you realize just how thick it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this is a cast of a thing called Carcharodontosaurus from Africa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You get it down in Niger and a few other places like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they're very, very big, not as big as T-Rex, but not a million miles away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then if you look at the teeth in profile, they're a surprisingly similar shape and not far off in size as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you look at them that way on and you realize it's,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
third of the width.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this isn't just massive, it's thick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And of course, being thick, it makes it strong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And with that giant head, with all that extra bone and then all the extra musculature attached to that giant head, they've got this uber powerful bite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
and the ability to just chomp through basically anything it wants to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, they are truly unusual in that regard, even actually compared to a lot of the other very big tyrannosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're often a kind of step above in their proportions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So incredible crushing power in the jar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then as you say, like this really short bull neck, because you've got this massive weight of this head up front, so you need to hold it up and not tip forwards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Really quite a massive body.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, there's two or three other big carnivorous dinosaurs, which people argue are maybe they're a little bigger than T-Rex, maybe they're a little smaller, but it's always in terms of length.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
which is one way of looking at things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, pythons are very long, but they're nothing like as massive as, yeah, a lion or a tiger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
T-Rex is massive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It is built.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So really big kind of barrel-shaped chest, making the body very, very big as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so that's why, yeah, there's things like Giganotosaurus and Mapusaurus in South America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe they get a bit longer, another meter or so in length.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But in mass, we're talking about maybe only two-thirds, three-quarters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So T-Rex is just massively bigger than basically any other big carnivore we know of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then, yeah, little arms, as you say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this is not great, but it's a cast of a T-Rex arm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not the biggest animal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They do get a bit bigger than this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But as I love showing, it's not a million miles off the size of my own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I could do with a diet, but I don't weigh seven tons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, it really is really pretty small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Two claws, two fingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, so two fingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You'll see sometimes that they say there's a third.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is a slight misnomer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you do see this extra little bone here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This doesn't turn up in all of them, and it's an extra hand bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's these, the metacarpals, but it's not supporting an extra digit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So mostly functionality-wise, it wasn't very functional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're not doing very much at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is what's called the deltoid pectoral crest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's really important for basically big arm movements because it's deltoids and pectorals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The radius and ulna are really quite thin, thinner than ours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The fingers are pretty stocky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The claws look big and curved,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they are, but other tyrannosaurs, and indeed other carnivores generally, much more curved claws.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then they have these little things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Where can I say it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There you see there's a little mark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's a ligamentous pit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so what you can imagine is if you're trying to hold onto something and something's wriggling, you want grip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And there's a risk that you just like dislocate your fingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we have ligaments that hold bone to bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And if you just put it flat to flat surface area, there's only so much you can attach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas if you turn that into a little hemispherical dip, you get a lot more surface area for your area, if that makes sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if you have a really big ligamentous pit, it means there's a really big ligament.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
which means your fingers are really strong and they're really resistant to being wiggled around and pulled as if, you know, you've grabbed something that doesn't want you to kill it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, T-Rex has probably the smallest ligamentous pits of any Tyrannosaur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that kind of suggests it's not doing very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And again, when you look at the claws proportionally, they're not that big and they're not that curved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So even though it looks like quite a wicked thing to us, remember, put this on a seven-ton animal whose individual teeth are the size of entire fingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Suddenly that arm doesn't look like it's doing very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What about the feet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So massive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, not surprisingly, you're supporting a colossal amount of weight, but they have this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
beautiful adaptation in the foot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the equivalent bones in the foot, the metatarsals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So for us, make up the flat of the feet, but these animals walk like birds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They've got three toes on the ground and then the metatarsals stick nearly vertically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That overall extends the length of the leg, so you can walk a little bit faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You get a slightly bigger stride length.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Don't worry, I've got the right bone here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But they also have, yeah, there's a good one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That one's a great one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But they also have this really neat adaptation in the middle bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you can see it on this one quite well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And this is actually not a Tyrannosaur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is an Ornithomimosaur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So one of the really ostrich-like ones, Gallimimus from the first Jurassic Park.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It has the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can see the normal bones would be really quite long and square and then flat at the top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And instead, this thing shrinks in the middle and turns into this kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
flattened diamond shape and what that means is the bones either side kind of lock it in fact at the top end it actually tends to wiggle a bit so actually goes left and then right
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And of course, what that really does is then help these things lock together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so this is an adaptation to basically lock the foot and make it stable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we see it in a whole bunch of things independently evolved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Early Tyrannosaurs don't have this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Early Ornithomimosaurs don't have this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The Oviraptorosaurs, the early ones, don't have this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the later ones acquire it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And a couple of other groups as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's about making the foot stable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And what that really does is make the foot energy efficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you can imagine as an animal, you know, we have some cartilage and we've got some ligaments and tendons joining all the bones together and holding joints stable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
When you push down, that's going to compress them to a little degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And when you lift that weight off, they're actually going to spring back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're going to get a tiny little energy return.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's the idea of those aerosols they put in all the trainers and stuff in the 90s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's that same principle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You'll get a little bit of energy return.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But of course...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Big force, particularly for a big, heavy animal, it's going to take the kind of path of least resistance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so if your bones are all kind of loose in the foot, what they're going to do is they're going to tend to splay out and you're actually going to lose that energy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But if you lock the feet together, the bones can't move.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And instead, that's going to further compress those soft tissue bits and give you a bit more spring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It makes you more efficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It means you're putting less energy in to walk because you're just getting a little bit of spring off every single step.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, the big head makes it look more odd, but you look at dinosaurs as a whole and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Over a third, probably 40, 45% is the group called theropods, which were all bipeds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So T-Rex, Allosaurus, Velociraptor, Spinosaurus, many, many others that people may have heard of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're all bipeds built in this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a whole bunch of ancestral groups which are doing something very similar, including various crocodiles or...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
relatives of crocodiles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the birds are bipeds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Birds are actually doing it in a much weirder way than theropods are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The theropods are basically a lizard on its back legs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm oversimplifying a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I can hear paleontologists screaming as I've just said, it's a lizard standing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not a lizard standing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But they're doing a lot of the same stuff in the same way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that is really functionally about where you put muscles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because what you really want to do to walk forwards is you want to basically pull the leg back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
so that you're pushing the body off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the way they do that is the musculature on the tail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we don't have a tail, and indeed mammals that even do have a tail, you know, elephants and even lions, you know, it's a piddly little thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's not a lot of muscle there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But if you look at a lizard, particularly if you look at something like a crocodile, you see this massive, massive block of muscle sitting on the first third to half of the tail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's what dinosaurs are doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's the same thing as lizards and crocs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They have this giant set of muscles on the first half of the tail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's anchoring on the femur, so the thigh bone on the back of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And muscles contract.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's the one thing they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But now you've got a giant muscle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And T-Rex, this muscle is like two and a half, three meters long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's going to be like this wide in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So when that contracts, the leg goes back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
foot stationary on the ground so the animal goes forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We do it with the butt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we're kind of weirdly how we organize our muscles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But this is generally probably a better way of doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because you can get a really long muscle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And of course, the longer the muscle, the more contraction you can have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The hyper version of this is kangaroos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So kangaroos supposedly get more efficient the faster they move.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They get so much energy return that when they're moving faster...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They get more compression from the landing, meaning they get more spring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And how fast does it move?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this is one of those things that's gone backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There was a paper arguing that we'd probably been overestimating various speeds, primarily based on footprints.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's been, I don't know how many papers trying to do T-Rex speed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The most recent one that was pretty detailed, I think had it clocked at...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So I think it was 25 miles an hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So 40 kph was the very upper end of the estimate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So probably a bit less than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, that means it can move.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But that's the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, big things move quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've seen rhino and hippo going at full tilt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yeah, they're a lot quicker than you'd think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And at least part of it is simply stride length.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
When your legs are three-ish meters long, it's hard not to cover a lot of ground with a single step.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yeah, big, big theropods, T-Rex is going to be a power walker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not going to run in the conventional biomechanical sense where both feet are off the ground at one point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's not running as power walking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But when you've got a four or five meter long stride...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is Edward Muybridge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the origin of cinema was a bet as to whether or not, whilst running, a horse had all four feet off the ground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And no one really knew this for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And a guy called Edward Muybridge, he was British, but he was living in the States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He was a keen photographer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And he basically did what people have seen the Wachowskis do for the Matrix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He set up a whole row of cameras and set up a whole bunch of triggers and had a horse run through them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it took loads of photos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And lo and behold, in one of them, the feet are off the ground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The guy won his bet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But he also realized that we already had things like zoopraxiscopes, you know, the little thing you spin with a slit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you see that, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So he did that with horses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And now you have a moving photograph.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's pretty much the origin of cinema was a bet about biomechanics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
All right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
All right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's two big things to weigh up, which are going to be interesting, which is would they even consider us dinosaurs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
a potential meal because we know that animals that have never, animals have to learn stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so animals that have never encountered things before are often that they don't have a response because they don't know what their response should be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No, absolutely nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We would look very weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We would, we would look weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, so, you know, there's lots of really cool records of, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Particularly you've got down in Indonesia and stuff where you've got these insane volcanic spires and it leads to these tiny little valleys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And people go in there and they go, yeah, the animals walk up to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They've never seen a human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They don't know what it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it might look at us and animals are fundamentally cautious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It doesn't know if we're a threat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So maybe it might just find us weird or in some way, shape or form off-putting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so we may not even be considered on the menu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The other thing is we might be too small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
My suspicion is we're not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So animals, carnivores typically take stuff that is much, much smaller than them, despite...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Basically, every dinosaur documentary movie ever shows T-Rex hunting an adult Triceratops, which is like the same size as it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And every documentary, you've got to have lions taking down a wildebeest or even a buffalo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, these are weird and rare outcomes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
These don't usually happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The vast majority of active predation is on stuff much, much, much smaller than you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I totted some of this up for a paper I did on Microraptor, this really small gliding dinosaur from China where we actually have a bunch of specimens with various stomach contents in them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we were coming up with numbers of about like five to 20% of the mass being typical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So prey versus predator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's actually very similar to what we see with modern carnivores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's not far off what we've seen, even with things like tyrannosaurs, where you occasionally find consumed bones from prey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if we put the lower end of that as 5% of the mass of a T-Rex, we might actually be okay if it doesn't consider us worth the hassle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
then assuming you're encountering a big adult and not a half-sized one that maybe only weighs a ton, then we might be all right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
not moving yeah it's nonsense they can see really well like i said like t-rex has giant eyeballs people don't realize that because like whales and like elephants it looks small compared to the size of the animal but what you're in really important for vision is absolute size not proportional size and absolutely their eyes are gigantic
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Probably the biggest on Earth at that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
A guy called Kent Stevens did a paper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He's got a really nice graphic of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you just put S-T-E-V-E-N-S, T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's the one with the googly eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's a baseball or a tennis ball sized eyeball.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And when you think about the incredible visual acuity of something like an eagle, which has eyes not much bigger than ours,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Think about what that's going to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we absolutely know there's been loads of studies on this in mammals and birds and other things as well that basically eyeball size correlates with visual acuity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that can fold in two different ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It can be like general sharpness, like how well can you see a long way away?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So eagles and vultures, it's really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or it can be good in low light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I come across it occasionally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, that's ecliptodontid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So these are giant armadillo-like animals with club tails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, that's Black Beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So giant eyeballs, they can either see very well, they can see a very long way in daylight, or they can see very well at night.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And my suspicion is it's the latter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think they're probably primarily nocturnal when they get that size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I think if it starts coming towards you...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you're truly in the open, then you're in real trouble, and I'm not sure why you do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, the one advantage humans have over almost anything else on Earth, there's a handful of exceptions, is we have range.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I can pick up a rock and hurl it with reasonable accuracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Most things can't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And animals probably don't like being hit in the face or hit in the eyes with a rock at a range.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because, again, they're not going to know how it's happened or how to respond to this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
All they know is they're taking damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that might genuinely be enough to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I wouldn't want to try.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But, again, if I was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
dumped on a plane or a prairie with nothing else but a T-Rex that was interested in me, it's worth a shot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you're in the forest, I would try and get behind a tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're quite good at turning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's been a couple of nice papers looking at the mechanics of the foot and the ankle and how quickly they could pivot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But we're much better because we're just so much smaller.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it would be very kind of Looney Tunes, but I think you could go round and round a big tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But much faster than it could.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's going to get bored or lack interest sooner or later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, let's zoom out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What did it eat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, you could go for the classic joke of whatever it wanted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But the reality is the relatively big herbivores that are around at the time, it's probably largely leaving them alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because, again, just the classic dynamics of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Predators, even like, quote, super predators like Tyrannosaurus, they're still real animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you get injured and you can't hunt, that's probably the end of you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you don't want to tackle an adult Triceratops that weighs the same as you and has meter, meter and a half long horns on its head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's potentially pretty aggressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then even the big... So the hadrosaurs, the kind of classic duck-billed dinosaurs, they're not present with any obvious defenses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They don't have armor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They don't have horns or spikes or anything like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But they're simply massive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, yes, T-Rex has got the teeth and the bite and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
even if they're a bit rubbish, the claws on the hands, but like just grappling another animal, which is the same size as it, there's a risk you're going to get a foot trodden on that it's going to get off some kind of body slam or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then even if you do bring it down, you're never going to eat it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like if you bring down an animal that weighs five tons, it's nearly your own mass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're not going to eat it before it goes rotten.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's a huge amount of kind of not like wasted energy, but you've probably put a lot of effort into this and you're not getting that much reward out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And again, there are exceptions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You've got things like lynx are the classic one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Lynx are not very big cats, and yet they'll hunt adult deer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Way bigger than them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Lions hunt things like buffalo, but they're operating in a group, so it's a bit of a cheat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there are some things that do this, but fundamentally, the vast majority of carnivores tackle stuff that's way, way smaller than them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's what we see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Every record we have of basically any large carnivorous dinosaur where you have stomach contents where it's like consumed something or healed bite marks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We get quite a few.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a handful of them where there's an obvious damage to a bone in more than a couple of cases with a tooth broken off in the bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the bone has healed over it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you know it got away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're juveniles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're relatively young animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's what they're targeting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It makes ecological sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's what modern animals do for very good reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Juveniles are relatively small and weak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They don't have the horns or frills or armor or shields and other stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're naive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You often have to learn what predators are or you have to learn how to avoid them or to check the wind or...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
even physically see them before, you know, see them kill something else before you know that they're a threat and juveniles forage badly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, they're relatively inefficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So actually they need to eat more for their size than an adult does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then on top of that, they're not very experienced at foraging in the right areas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And even if they can find a good patch, the adults were often beat them up and chase them off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're talking about juveniles across various species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is just a universal pattern of being a smaller animal versus a larger or a younger animal versus a larger animal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're dumb, but they're inexperienced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But they're often feeding in suboptimal areas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this is the place with all the best food.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The adults will kick you off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So now you have to feed somewhere else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe the food isn't as good, in which case you need to eat more of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it takes longer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or maybe it's the one next to the edge of the forest where the T-Rexes hide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
but either way you're stuck there and then you don't really know what you're looking for and you haven't got the armor so guess who's getting eaten like this is again there's lots of exceptions you can't have nature without things like that but this is the absolute rule of thumb for how foraging and growth and predation operate across everything from fish to starfish as fish as predators starfish praying mantis all the way up to things like big cats via stuff like crocodiles it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's how it works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it'd be very weird if it didn't also operate for dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then, as I say, we've actually got the direct evidence for this from bite marks and stomach contents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're taking small stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Bite marks give a lot of information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's a powerful signal in paleontology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've done really quite a lot of work on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they can tell you an awful lot if you've got the right understanding of the burial conditions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because you...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Weird thing that I think a lot of people don't appreciate is you basically can't take fossils at face value, particularly when you're trying to get into stuff like behavior and ecology, because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Between the animal dying and the paleontologist digging it up, potentially quite a lot has happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's where it's really easy to start misinterpreting things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because if you just go, I had one like this not too long ago where I was an editor on a paper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the authors had done a pretty good job, to be fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it was this discussion of whether or not several animals were together at the time of their death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It said multiple theropods together in this quarry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, right, but there was loads of debris and you had loads of things like fish scales and other small bones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, okay, but this looks like these animals potentially died somewhere else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then a flood or a river washed them into this bay or a channel or then the water level dropped and they ended up together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But that doesn't necessarily mean they were together when they died.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so just because you've got three animals together, what is potentially the story of how they got there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you have to consider multiple explanations and then try to figure out what is the most likely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or what can you test with various bits of evidence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there was some Tyrannosaur inflicted bite marks on a duck bill from Mongolia that I worked on years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The first one was from Mongolia, but it was held in Japan in a Japanese museum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I was working with the Japanese on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm not a taphonomist, so the study of decay and the history of specimens, and I am in no way, shape, or form a geologist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I did zoology for my degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But the guys I was working with, they were really hot on erosion and damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they were looking at some of the way the bones had been damaged, and they're like, okay, we're pretty confident that the bite marks are sitting on top of erosion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What does that mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it means that the animal had died and it was found in sand covered, but in what would have been a river channel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this animal has died, washed downstream, ended up on a sandbank.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The sand is whipping past because I've been in a sandstorm in China and it is not fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's starting to etch some of the bones and damage them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And after that, there's a bite mark?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
After that, you're getting bite marks coming in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that can only be scavenging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That thing has been dead and sitting out for days, possibly weeks before something came along and chewed on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It pretty much can't have happened any other way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you have to take these really subtle signals to reconstruct the story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then you can start piecing some other stuff together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So in this case, the skeleton is pristine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's one of the best hadrosaur skeletons out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's certainly the best from Mongolia I've ever seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And all the bite marks from one bone, the humerus, the upper arm bone, every mark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We went over the rest of the skeleton, nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the humerus is chewed to bits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's bites all over it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But when you look, there's two really distinctive patterns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's deep circular punctures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And remember what the shape of this thing looks like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
At the ends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then along the delta pectoral crest, okay, it's much, much bigger than a hadrosaur, but this bit, remember that's where all the big muscles attach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's all of these types of, this is from a different bone, but different animal, but all these types of close parallel scratches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so that looks like selective feeding because it's using its giant crunchy teeth at the ends to get the bone off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And this is off a buried skeleton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then it's got these... Actually, T-Rex has really small teeth at the front of its mouth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Right in the front where our incisors are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're called incisiform teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They look like incisors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're a fraction of the size of the big ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they've got a really weird flat back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's what these are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's hidden this with...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The front of the mouth and pulling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's why it's just on the deltoid pectoral crest because that's where all the muscles are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's, I always liken it to getting something like an Oreo and you take the top off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you scrape the cream out with the teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think most people have done that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But, but that's what it's doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's got this little row of teeth and everywhere you get lots of muscle, you get little rows of teeth together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it kills and dismembers with the big teeth up the side and then it feeds with the little front teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And all of that has evidence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In the bones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What hunting strategy does it use?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Can we...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Figure that out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that comes down to the, um, to that foot stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, they're relatively efficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
compared to a lot of other things and particularly compared to the herbivores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that means they're probably looking at long distance rather than speed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that makes sense because even though the kind of stuff we're talking about, like I said, maybe they get into 20, 25 miles an hour, that's pretty quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But some of the smaller stuff is going to be a lot faster than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And remember, that's a real upper estimate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're probably not that quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're just jogging after you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But they've got the distance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, it's much more hyena or wolf-like strategy than, like, a cheetah going for hyperspeed or a lion going for a relatively quick burst, and it either gets you or it doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the people kind of end up going, well, like, but that's ridiculous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, they're not even that quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, yeah, but if you're hunting...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
something big that's not that quick either and so that's a misconception like when i'm talking about juvenile dinosaurs i don't mean just out of the egg and weigh a kilo like a juvenile triceratops can still weigh a ton and be the size of a rhino they're not that fast and again if you get a head start on them because as i said i suspect they're nocturnal
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because that's the other thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's really hard to hide a T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Even lions and tigers struggle to kind of hide in long grass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
When you're three and a half, four meters tall, you can't hide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe in a forest, but even then you're probably going to stick out and it's going to be hard to maneuver between the trees.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we've got big Tyrannosaurs living in what we know to have been relatively open environments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe there's some stands of trees, but it's not like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
a woodland or a forest or anything like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So they're living in the open and surviving in the open.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So they've got to have a way of doing this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I think it's either or some combination of being nocturnal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's relatively easy to sneak isn't quite the wrong word, but approach things to cut the distance down for your initial strike and then just running them down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because yeah, maybe a one-ton Triceratops or one-ton Hadrosaur is rather faster than you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
but if you've covered the first couple of hundred meters to get up to your top speed before they start running, then you're probably much closer to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then will they exhaust faster than you'll keep going?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, probably not 100% of the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No predator's that effective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I suspect that's what they're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it fits with what we know of their size, their vision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They've got a very good sense of smell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, that makes sense at night.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It makes less sense if you're diurnal and operating primarily in the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you've got to hide this thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then we know they're pretty efficient versus relatively fast but not that efficient prey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're obviously both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
A, because we've got things like the bite marks I just described, which is pretty much definitive scavenging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then we've got the healed bite marks with T-Rex teeth buried in bones, which is pretty much definitive active predation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we've got evidence of it doing both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But can we possibly figure out what was the primary strategy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That gets much harder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
My guess is they're probably still primarily actively carnivorous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because if you look at stuff that's reliant on being...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
a scavenger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, the true scavengers, like the vultures and condors and stuff like this, you have to be ultra long distance, very energy efficient travelers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're soaring in thermals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're barely using any energy to fly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's really hard to get very far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
How far were they spread?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Where did they live?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the ones we found, you've got them from Alberta down to probably New Mexico.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's some, I want to say there's some Tyrannosaurine, so very close to T-Rex teeth that may or may not be T-Rex in New Mexico.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's similar teeth in Mexico proper down in Coahuila.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So about halfway down Mexico.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Mongolia also?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Mongolia, you have a thing called Tarbosaurus, which is a very, very close relative of T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's the nearest species or nearest genus that we have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But T-Rex is probably occupying almost all of Western North America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So at times the East was kind of split off and separate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But the entire surface of Earth had dinosaurs on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, we've got them in Antarctica.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We've got them in Antarctica, even close to the mass extinction event.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, this is, this is like how many dinosaur species were there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, I basically wrote an entire book chapter about this because there's so many, but this would make the number high, but this would make the number lower, but this would make the number high, but this would make the number lower counter versus counter arguments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
that you can guesstimate almost any number and probably be very accurate or very far out yeah but we should say that a large number of dinosaur species are constantly being discovered yeah so we've named give or take in the realm of 1500 1600 valid species that is not everyone agrees on every species but most people would be satisfied with that number
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But we also name in the realm of 40 to 50 a year, and we've been doing that for at least the last 10, 12 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That number is rocketing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Shows no signs of slowing down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's loads of... Like, we still never really explored India very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We're starting to find entirely new beds in places like Ecuador.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Argentina, we know, has a ton of stuff, but we've never excavated there very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Australia, we know, there's a ton of stuff we haven't excavated there very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there's lots of places...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
even now, to still go through.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The same way, more or less, that people did in the 1750s or whenever you first start getting them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
For dinosaurs in particular, but this is true of the vast majority of stuff, there's essentially two ways of doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The simple one is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Where you have quarries of particularly things like lithographic limestone, so the printing limestones, or stuff that's very similar to that, sometimes that's often volcanic, you get these super, super, super fine layers of sedimentation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's where you get these places of exceptional preservation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whenever you see, like, the feathers or...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Almost always, whenever you see feathered dinosaurs, it's like, oh, we got the skin, we got the claws, and like the whole skeleton's laid out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Archaeopteryx being like the first bird in this absolute classic example, it's from these beds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And there you find them by basically splitting limestone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We don't usually dig for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's because there are quarry workers and people who are already doing this because the stone is useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because there might be one decent fossil for every, you know, few hundred tons of rock you shift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In which case, you could get every paleontologist in the world there for a couple of years and you wouldn't find very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You rely on the fact that there's hundreds of guys doing this constantly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then sooner or later, they'll find something and then you've got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's the super easy way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The only slightly more complicated way is you go to somewhere where geologically we know it's the right age and it's the right kind of rock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And ideally fossils have been reported from there before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And again, you know, geologists map all the world's geology years ago in quite a lot of detail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's gaps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's places where we don't have the details.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But in general, we know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you go there and then you walk around and you look.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's basically it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you always get the, so there's this constant, and I think, you know, borderline myth of the idea that dinosaurs and mammoths and lots of other fossil things like entered lots of indigenous cultures because it's impossible that the guys were wandering around, say Dakota and the native Americans didn't come across some dinosaur fossils.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That I'd agree with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's pretty much impossible they didn't come across some dinosaur fossils.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Did they come across a whole skeleton laid out on the ground?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No, because those don't usually exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because even if they're tougher or, it doesn't matter if they're tougher or weaker than the surrounding rock, dinosaur bones are, you know, in some way, shape, or form, they're lithified, they turn to rock, and they will absorb some of the minerals from whatever they've been buried in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so even in places like Mongolia and Northern China, where I've been to, where actually the fossil bone is quite a lot tougher than the sandstone that it's embedded in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like you can find a bit of bone and pull it out, like almost like rub it with your hands and the sand comes off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's your bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They will decay pretty quickly, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Sand storms, you know, sand just etches stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The tiniest bit of moisture, particularly in winter, gets into the cracks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Bones are incredibly porous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That freezes, that expands, that cracks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Bones just shatter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yeah, you find shattered bone on the surface everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What you rarely find is a decent bone on the surface, let alone a skeleton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there has to be something that's sticking out just a tiny bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that you can see it, but it's still buried.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The greatest one that I saw or that I didn't see, it happened with a friend of mine when we were in northern China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And he went, yeah, I can see a bit of a claw sticking out of a hill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It was like this much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You could see, you know, less than a centimeter coming out of a hillside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, so, you know, that's the dream.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Dig a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And there's a little bit more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Dig a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a little bit more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Dig a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a little bit more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the system we were running there is some guys were searchers and some guys were diggers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So he and I were searchers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We're told, okay, you guys, you guys, he found it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You found something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Go and look for something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We'll dig it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so we come back a couple of days later and check in on the digging team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So what is it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, it's a complete skeleton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It was a thing very, very close relative of Velociraptor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Ended up naming it Linheraptor, so the raptor from Linher, which was the nearest town.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it was, yeah, the legs were a little messed up because water had got to them, and the end of the tail was missing, and that was about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So like 90 plus percent complete skeleton, and it had been found with...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
five mil, a couple of sixteenths of an inch of bone sticking out of a hill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's what you want because every so often behind that is a whole skeleton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you're looking for skeletons on the surface, they're going to be gone before you get to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it depends where you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It depends how many people you've got.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It depends on your budget.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it really depends on the rock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, again, like going into China or Mongolia, where this little guy's from, the bone tends to be relatively strong compared to the sandstone that it's in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That means that, A, it's fairly tough and resistant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it also means that it's really easy to dig.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, again, I've dug stuff by almost like pulling it with my hands or like getting my fingers in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Getting something like a chisel or a hammer, you can just cruise through this rock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But you have to be really careful not to touch the bone, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it depends how strong it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So again, some bone is incredibly strong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Some isn't because they've all fossilized differently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What we're usually doing is applying glue to it, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's this wonderful stuff called Paraloid, and it's a special glue for fossils.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And as I said, bone's super porous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's really good at sucking up liquids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and Paralloy's really great because you can dissolve it with acetone, and it basically doesn't react with anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you can fill your fossil with glue, but then if you want to take all that glue out, you can pretty much just dissolve the glue back out again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Very cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, what you would normally do is, for something, say, in China...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
where the rock is relatively soft and the bones relatively tough and where we don't have any manpower and shipping problems, which is a real issue in other places, you basically map out where you think the skeleton's going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So in the same way that you were doing it, like, you know, if you can imagine...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
like a cake or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And someone said, I put a toy dinosaur in there and you've got to find it without damaging it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So like, well, you'd stick your finger in the cake and just kind of dig until you hit the edge of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you go in somewhere else and go in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's what we're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We're just going in from kind of all sides.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And once you've hit three or four bones, you kind of know which way it's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
it's going into the hillside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Usually sometimes they're very weird and mixed up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you can just like almost trace the outline of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you'll just dig all the way around that, which might involve taking the top off a mountain, depending on where you are in the desert.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It tends to be a bit easier, but yeah, we we've had stuff where like the first three days is just 10 people with pickaxes, just digging a hole to get down to the right level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, we've used jackhammers and stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We've used a backhoe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We've just literally driven it into the desert and just dug a big hole next to the fossil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the classic thing of covering it in a plaster of Paris jacket, strips of burlap sacking, plaster of Paris and some water, wooden beams if you want to make something really big and really solid, and just basically wrap it all up and then take it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And again, that's what they were doing 150, 200 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That hasn't changed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Where it gets more complicated is if you've got really hard rock that's very hard to get through, particularly if the bone is fragile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Then it becomes difficult because if you want to get a jackhammer in, the vibrations means you're going to shatter your bones before you've even cut through the rock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So then you might be down to doing it manually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then it was like... Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Hand chipping it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The other way you end up with that is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like the classic Jurassic Park thing, like the second scene and they're digging in the desert and there's the whole skeleton laid out and five or six guys all digging around it and exposing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's actually quite common in the States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the reason is huge amounts of those excavations are being done on government land, their national parks or whatever, or protected land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And very often the rules are you're not allowed wheeled vehicles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
full stop at all to protect the environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can walk in and walk out, but you can't drive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, well, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
When we're in the desert in Mongolia, in China or China or Mongolia, and we're allowed to do this literally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
My, my boss drove into town, hired a guy with a JCB.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He drove out, picked it up with the bucket and drove it back into town and put it on the back of a flatbed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we drove it to Beijing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
you're out in a protected area and you can't you've got two choices you can take it out by hand but that means it's got to be light enough that half a dozen people can lift it which if it's a block of stone the size of this desk you know couple of meters by a couple of meters by a meter high is basically impossible so that means you either got to carve chunks off so take the head off take the arm off and whatever and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you can get it out that way, but it's not ideal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's always the risk of breaking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're losing some information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And if you want to make a really spectacular display, you don't want to join through every big bit of bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You want to show the public one piece.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the alternative is to get rid of every bit of rock you possibly can to make it light enough to helicopter it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so normally, so in China, if we hit, yeah, if we hit that bit of bone going in, we're just like going in round the sides until we've hit it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Take the top off, take the bottom off and just take it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the skeleton is completely encased in rock and it's as safe and secure as it can be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then we'll do the preparation work back at the lab.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you're going to have to lift it with a helicopter and they've got a weight limit of only a couple of tons, or if it's not, then you need to pay twice as much for a much more expensive helicopter, then you take off every gram of rock that you think you can to get the weight down so you can ship it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it varies massively.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Summing the size of Stan...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's months of work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're probably doing that across three or four years with a team of half a dozen people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but it was the Larson brothers from the Black Hills Institute who dug it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so they're a commercial outfit, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So they dig stuff up to sell it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, but they also make costs and sell them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, this, oh, I brought my others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I do have a cost, a cost of one of Steve Stan's teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, so like you can buy costs of Stan's teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You could buy costs of the head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, you could buy the whole skeleton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a famous, you see Stan in a whole bunch of different places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a, there's a stand just up the road from here at Oxford.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oxford's got a cost of Stan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I was just at Lime Regis, a famous fossil locality in the south of the UK a couple of weeks ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
One of the fossil stores has a skull of Stan in the window.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Stan turns up again and again and again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yes, we'd call that the overburden, the extra stuff overburden.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's all the rock that's sitting above the layer with our fossil in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And when you're lucky, that's a foot of sandstone and you shovel it out in an hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I've seen guys in South America, there was a team in Argentina.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think it was my old boss, Olly Railhut, showed me this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they took like 20, 30 feet off the top of a hill to get down to this fossil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, so something, you know, probably half an acre in size, 20, 30 feet of rock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What's with the plotting and the diagramming?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You may well have seen something like this for archaeology shows or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Nowadays, again, tech's getting better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
People are using drones and stuff for this or taking hundreds of photos and then building photogrammetry models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You just got a 3D model in the computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or just kind of modeling what we're looking at here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but where you found everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it goes back to that stuff we were saying about the process of fossilization or the process of what's happened to that animal from death to discovery is, okay, a classic thing is bones being in a line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you can imagine if, you know, bones are lots of weird shapes, but mostly, or certainly lots of bones, ribs, arms and legs, things like this, they're quite long bones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if they're in a current, they will tend to spin in the axis so that they are facing the current.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if you're finding all the bones are in a line,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That probably tells you that this thing has had quite a lot of water washing over it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're then probably going to be missing most of the small bones because the big heavy bones won't be shifted by that current, but maybe the small ones will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it might tell you where to go and dig further down the hill, quite literally, but it can also just tell you, okay, this thing, there's no way this thing died here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It absolutely got moved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we need to factor that in when we're trying to interpret it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or we've got this one weird bone and we can't work out what on earth it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, maybe it's from something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because if we know a whole bunch of stuff washed together, maybe that's a random bone from a different animal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, maybe that was eaten or there might be a different story if it was washed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Any of that kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that's where you want to have as much information as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there's this unbelievably beautiful skeleton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Boreal Pelter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is a helicopter lift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Absolutely phenomenal preservation from Northern Alberta.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Its full name is Boreal Pelter Mark Mitchell Eye.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's called Mark Mitchell Eye, named after Mark Mitchell, the preparator, who basically spent, I think Mark spent the thick end of two years on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like this was his job and he did all the stuff as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He's doing some other prep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He's doing some field work, but Mark basically went in every day, nine to five cleaning the rock because the rock was hard and the bone was soft and it's extraordinarily well preserved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Boreal Pelter is one of the ones where we've even got some of the evidence of patterning and it suggests that it's darker on top and lighter underneath.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this illustration, I think that's, yeah, it's Julius Chitoni did that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He's a Canadian paleo artist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so that color pattern is roughly accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Give or take some very large uncertainties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's going to be something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's so awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So these guys are... That's hard to eat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Near enough armored pine cones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Though it's very much the adult condition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The juveniles seem to be far less, if not unarmored.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We're back to the juveniles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But that's why that armor is absolutely going to be effective as armor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
anti-predator, but it's probably evolved primarily for combat and display between members of the species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because otherwise, if this stopped you being eaten, the babies would have it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And also found miles and miles and miles out to sea, or the Paleo Sea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this is from a site which normally gives us big marine reptiles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So predatory plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Mosasaurs and stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then it turned up an ankylosaur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, nodosaur in this case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like Mark and like that suggested, you know, this can be, even on an animal that size, for our pelters, you know, four or five meters long, we've only gone to the front two thirds of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, this can be like needle level stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's how you get to the 30,000 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, exactly that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If it's that quality and you want to get everything open.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then something like Stan...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
actually really complicated skull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The skull's full of lots of little bones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The bones are really fragile, so that just adds to the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, at least the ankylosaurids, the skull is just this giant solid block of bone, which makes life a little bit easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, they're going to put those hours in, and that's really going to help them sell the animal, which is ultimately what happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, Stan sat in the Black Hills Institute for decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, 87, and they sold it in like 2020.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So they had it for...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
30 years, uh, sitting in their kind of little museum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then my understanding was basically the brothers broke the company up and that's why they sold it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, far more than I think anyone thought it was going to, I mean,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I liken, you know, if you're not buying like teeth or an ammonite in some small fossil shop, you know, when you're buying, talking about things like whole dinosaurs and whole tyrannosaurs, I think it's a bit like the art market in it's worth what people will pay for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so, you know, plenty of T-Rexes had sold for a few million dollars and therefore everyone thought it would, might be five, you know, 10 would be an absurd sum of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then it went for 30 and it's like, okay, well,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I was going to say someone wanted it that bad but clearly not two people wanted it that bad because if only one guy is prepared to bid 30 then it goes for
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
you know, a million more than the next highest bidder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But presumably two people, if not three, bid it to get that high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I know they've got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that record has been since beaten apparently by... By Apex, the Stegosaurus, which I still haven't seen, though a friend of mine has sent me some photos of this thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Is it impressive to you, this thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Not especially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's why I can't imagine that it sold for that much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a really nice Stegosaurus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a pretty big Stegosaurus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've seen other very good Stegosaurus, and I don't understand why that's worth that much more than something like Stan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it shows you the market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we're here in London.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a Stegosaurus called Sophie in the Natural History Museum in London.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Sophie is a young animal, so she's not very big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, it's a sizable specimen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'd say five-ish, six meters off the top of my head total length.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But Sophie's, like, truly exceptional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, there's a couple of plates missing, a handful of ribs, a couple of bones in the tail, I think a couple of toe bones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, this is by far the most complete Stegosaurus out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That sold for, I think, £250,000, so maybe $400,000 about a decade ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this has now gone up, like, a hundredfold for an animal which is quite a bit bigger, but is way less complete.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So for me, those two things kind of balance out because size is always impressive and that's what the public likes, but also a complete one is better than a half a one or two thirds of one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So how has the price gone up a hundred or from yeah, 400,000 to 40 million in 10 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
but roughly the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, that's the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
A T-Rex has a massive premium on it because it's, yeah, a Stegosaurus is one of those top tier, you know, it's, you can virtually do the less, you know,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
T-Rex, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's in that first six or seven... Okay, these days Velociraptor, thanks to Jurassic Park.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But that's the list of seven or eight things that any random human...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
who doesn't care about dinosaurs and doesn't know anything about dinosaurs, but they've probably heard of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Stegosaurus is in that list.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm going to have an idea of what it looks like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh yeah, it's got the big stuff stuck along the back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You'd get that answer from almost any, 99% of people on the street.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, it's not a T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So how it's worth, yeah, 50% more...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's not even a particularly complete skeleton, Apex, to my understanding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't get it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, I'd probably drop...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
half a billion or so on the best museum you'd ever seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but you want to... So it's twofold because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, there's the communication and the education part of it, which is something I'm massive on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I think research is pointless if you don't communicate it at some level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm not saying everyone needs to communicate everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you're working on the nuances of a calculation of the volume of a black hole or something, yeah, probably doesn't need a press release or a new museum exhibition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But fundamentally, we should be talking about our work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But also, you've got to store this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, many fossils are fragile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They need to be kept, not necessarily in climate control, but at least you want a basement that is much more even than, you know, just sticking it in a box in a warehouse somewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you've got to be able to store this stuff to be able to study it or it's kind of pointless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, but with the rest of that money, I'd buy a ton of land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
like the quarries that gave us Archaeopteryx in Bavaria and have given us a ton of other stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've worked on a load of pterosaurs, the flying reptiles from there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
These stuff are mostly commercially run or just straight up privately owned and not being commercially run.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Someone's just inherited it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's just sitting on this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's more that they're not necessarily exploiting it with fossils in mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but, you know, one billion on its own would go a very, very long way, almost infinitely, if you're just creaming off the interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then funding excavations and supporting scientists who are already embedded in other museums or other universities or other research institutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the rest is for buying up land so that those people can do the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You look at somewhere like, you know, Brazil and there's, I can never remember the name of it, but there's, again, one of these zones of exceptional preservation where superlative pterosaurs, fish, we've had a handful of dinosaurs and a whole bunch of other stuff has come out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's just a giant commercial mining operation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yeah, when they hit a fossil, when they think they're close to it, yeah, they stop and pull it out and they'll send it to a museum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And more often they'll sell it to a museum and museums only have so much money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas what if I owned that quarry?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then I made sure everyone who worked there was trained and got a bonus every time they found anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then I just handed everything they dug up straight into a museum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there will be some element of a crowdsource.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but it's more that like no researcher ever needs to spend money to access that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No museum needs to go and find a new donor to give them half a million to go and buy this one specimen knowing that it might still go missing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, to some Silicon Valley billionaire's foyer or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's like, well, I own the land, so it's mine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So problem solved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've jokingly written a couple of times about how all science funding in the world should go to paleontology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the idea being that like, yeah, if you want to investigate black holes or neutrinos or chemical crystallography or panda genetics or whatever it is, you can do that anytime you want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like that,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's not going to change a million years from now, as it will from tomorrow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But fossils are in places that erode, and if we don't dig them up, they're gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we should dig all the fossils up now, and then we've got forever to study them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But if we don't dig them up now, who knows?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe there was something twice the size of T. rex, and it sat on a hillside for six months, and then the wind got to it, and it's gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that was the only one that ever preserved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, we'll never know now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
To be clear, this is a joke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm not suggesting we should stop doing cancer research and physics and other things, but we're in a fundamentally different field where our science is literally disappearing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
it hits the ground and seismic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then they go, look, look, here's the whole skeleton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They tried it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It doesn't really work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, we've tried looking for stuff with drones that helps you getting into some inaccessible areas, but until the resolutions probably better, you've still got that problem of like looking, you know, with human eyes, which are binocular and being able to, you know, just tilt your head completely changes how you see something in a way that flying over, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
just won't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I know they've tried looking so because the bones are porous they tend to suck things up so actually dinosaur bones can be really radioactive if they're in areas where there are
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
things like uranium so yeah there are drawers which have lead boxes around them and stuff like this for dinosaur bones or just sign saying do not handle they're very low level radioactive like you'd have to like stick it in your pocket for six months to run any real risk but they're radioactive much more so than the background so can we do that turns out not really um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So again, maybe tech will advance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But for now, humans are quite incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, we are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But also, paleo is kind of at the bottom of the pile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's not many of us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We don't have a lot of funding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It takes real money to adapt stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we're scanning stuff with MRIs and things like that in hospitals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it mostly doesn't work very well because the problem you've got is, like I said, the bones take on some of the properties of the minerals in which they're embedded, which means their density is really similar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And things like MRIs or seismic activity is basically looking for differences in density.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, if it's the same density as the, you know, it's like I put some green plasticine in some blue plasticine, there's going to be a bit of a join and they're going to be very, very slightly different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But ultimately, you're not going to be able to detect that through most means if you're looking for density or mass or anything like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, that's not a million miles off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think Darwin had an analogy like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We've got a few words on a few pages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Spread out, but between them, you get an idea of what the story is and where it's going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, or dumb luck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, the dinosaurs were doing absolutely fine until a dirty great rock hit them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you can't, you know, Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis movies aside, there's only so much you can do about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, there's a lot of bone on there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we mentioned a couple of other things like Giganotosaurus, so this giant carnivore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you put Giganotosaurus T. rex in...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's the one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that's on my old blog.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not my image.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What are we looking at on the left and the right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you've got T-Rex on the left in orange and Giganotosaurus on the right in red.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
As I said, they're pretty similarly sized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But just look at the robusticity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like the front of the snout of T-Rex is all bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yet the major opening, this is a thing called the antorbital fenestra, the opening in front of the orbit, is absolutely massive in Giganotosaurus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's like half the skull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The opening at the back of the skull is much bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The opening in the lower jaw is much bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And actually the jaw, what you can't see side to side is much thinner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the heads are the same size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And as animals, they are about the same linear dimensions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But you can just see there's just way more bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not overbuilt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's evolved that this is the right amount of bone for the stresses and strains for what it's doing and how it's acting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But you compare it to anything that's not a very large tyrannosaur, and suddenly you see just how much bone has gone into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It is a very large...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's an absolutely large head, but it's a very heavy head with a lot of bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And a lot of that bone is there to resist all the forces of all the muscles because it has this giant, super powerful bite, which again, you can see in the teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the bone and the muscles kind of evolved together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So one of the big things Tyrannosaurs have, and this goes all the way down to the earliest Tyrannosaurs were like our size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like little ditty things, like two, three meters long, be a meter and a half tall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But they have fused nasals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the pair of bones that in us, there's not a lot there, but obviously in something like a dog or something like a baboon with a long nose, it's like the whole top of the snout.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And there's two, one each side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In tyrannosaurs, they fuse together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it forms a solid bit of bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the whole top of the nose is solid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then that makes the skull just fundamentally more rigid and able to take more power through it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The very early ones weren't super biters, I suspect, but they do have the little flattened teeth at the front.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So I strongly suspect...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
the fused nasals at least originally is for resisting that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because again, if you've got a long nose and you're pulling with quite a lot of force at the very tip, that's going to bend your snout.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What's the story of the evolution?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Tyrannosaurs go back to the middle Jurassic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Tyrannosaurs ran for 100 million years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So from about 160-ish, 165-ish million years till the extinction started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
66.5, I think, is the current dating on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, you've got 100 million years of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the Middle Jurassic, annoyingly, is probably the bit of the Mesozoic, so the whole dinosaur period, that we know the least of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Just by chance, we just don't have many rocks exposed of the right age that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
fossil bearing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But we got two or three Tyrannosaurs from that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yeah, they're really quite diddy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, they'd be chest high to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Two or three meters long, including the tail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Probably more like three, a lot of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Little heads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Long arms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They look like every other carnivore going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's not a lot special to them at this point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They've only just separated from their nearest groups, which is actually something like the ancestors of Giganotosaurus, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They do have the fused nasals early on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They do have these special little teeth at the front of the jaw very early on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're feathered early on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Definitively, we have...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
skeletons with feathers on them that are early tyrannosaurs uh at least until the early cretaceous um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, they're knocking around as relatively small animals in Europe and Asia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We have a couple from the UK.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We have a whole bunch from China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's stuff from like Kyrgyzstan and places like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think there's a relatively early one from Russia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then when they get into the early Cretaceous, they start getting quite a bit bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So something like Eutyrannus, if you want to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There you go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Eutyrannus is fuzzy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We have three specimens definitively feathered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, it gets to six, seven meters long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's something funny looking about the sexy smaller earlier version of the T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But again, this is seven, eight meters, maybe weighs half a ton or a ton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like we are very much on the menu for an animal that size and it's massive and dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Quite what triggered them, there's general patterns in evolution of size change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And one famous one called Cope's Rule I've worked on a fair bit, which is the idea that over time things tend to get bigger and they do for various different reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
one of which is just pure, almost like diffusion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you start small and you evolve...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
well you can't get much smaller but you can always get bigger so you naturally kind of diffuse away whereas if you're a blue whale you probably can't get much bigger and its descendants will probably end up being smaller but there are reasons that bigger things do better you can hunt more stuff you're more energy efficient you can move more efficiently um you're dominant in contests particularly with conspecifics if you're trying to win a territory or win mating rights
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Bigger things usually beat up smaller things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there's going to be selection favoring them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then big things don't usually do well in extinction events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that tends to reset the clock by killing off the big stuff and then smaller stuff does better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So mostly there's evolutionary advantages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But a fairly big one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, it's the classic thing of there's a day-to-day advantage of being bigger and that might last for a few million years right up to the point that suddenly there's the biggest drought the Earth has encountered in five million years and then all the big stuff just gets nailed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, there's just less fundamental space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, there's more mice than there are elephants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There are more elephants than there are whales.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, there's only so much biomass that an ecosystem can support.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Right, so they're less likely to survive because they need more fuel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, what would feed a mouse for a year won't feed an elephant for a week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if, and, and of course the mice are going to have an easier time finding a few little seeds than elephants going to find tons of food.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then they've got less genetic diversity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There might be 5,000 mice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There might be 200 elephants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So who's likely to have more genes or who's likely to have selection acting on those genes to produce a survivor, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, the one with five or ten or a thousand times the population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then, yeah, on top of that, you've then got the very slow reproductive cycle, which then, again, gives evolution not a lot to work with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If as an elephant you're breeding once every five years and as a mouse you're doing it once every eight weeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that starts kicking in seriously, kind of euteranocysin up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that's when you start getting, they're not just bigger animals that are getting to a comparable size to the other big dinosaur carnivores of the time, you start getting those bigger heads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But even then, relatively late in Tyrannosaur evolution, so getting into kind of the middle part of the late Cretaceous, you see a split.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we have a group called the Eleoramines, which have really, really long, thin skulls.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they look much more like a kind of, as a Velociraptor, they look much more like a giant Velociraptor
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
ish than a tyrannosaur still relatively small arms but it's a very long snout and so this is a fast biting animal with a relatively light bite so it's probably taking really quite small stuff proportionally and then the other side you've got the tyrannosaur eins which are the really big headed ones and so that is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
A few ancestral things like Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus, both from Alberta.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then Dasplidosaurus, a thing I named called Jucheng Tyrannus in China, and then Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you've really only got three or four of these ultra giants, which are all kind of 10 meters plus in size, and then have the really broad skull with the real kind of excessive bite force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But even things like Albertosaurus,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
which is a big animal, seven, eight meters, a ton or so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're not quite T-Rex, but they're definitely more robust than the other contemporaneous carnivores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there is this progression of getting bigger, getting a bigger head, the teeth get bigger, but there's fewer of them, building up the bone biting and the power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But with some interesting evolutionary off-branches in the way that, yeah, cats are largely much of a muchness, but then you get things like bobcats and lynx, which are actually quite bulky, stocky little cats that don't have the long tail and are doing something quite different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I have a problem with the term apex predator, because ecologically, apex predators are generally defined as things that eat other predators, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So a great white shark is because it's eating stuff like tuna and sea lions, which are themselves predators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's a predator of predators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas people love saying lions are apex predators and they love saying T-Rex is an apex predator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're eating herbivores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is not some weird and unusual thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're the largest predator in their ecosystem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they are a giant one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
My friend Dairon Nash has moved to using the word arch predator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's like some kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
massive thing but avoiding the term apex because i think that leads into a it it it's a subtle terminology thing but uh an important one i just learned something today so i didn't understand i thought i was i was using the word apex predators but everyone keeps using it when i don't think they should
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And now you're getting into linguistics and it's like, well, if everyone uses it to mean that, does it now mean that rather than what it should mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then I'm probably losing that argument because actually you'll probably find way more stuff calling it an apex predator than you will an arch predator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But here we are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But you're saying T-Rex didn't eat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Other predators?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, it's probably not going to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we can get into, though I'd prefer not to because it's tedious, the argument of whether or not there's these small things which some people have said is a different group called Nanotyrannus or a different species called Nanotyrannus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But fundamentally...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
T-Rex is definitely weird, even compared to all the other giant tyrannosaurs that are very closely related to it, because it is by far, ludicrously by far, the largest carnivore in its ecosystem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it doesn't really have competition, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, so this is a Velociraptor skull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There are some carnivores that are a bit bigger than this, but not enormously so, which we're knocking around as T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The skull's the same time tooth crack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Right, but you think about that, and that's like going...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's like going to Africa and going, okay, there are lions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What's the next biggest predator?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, well, there's a weasel about this big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like it's that kind of size difference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you don't get that normally in ecosystems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it didn't have some of the other big dinosaurs around it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Not carnivores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's huge herbivores, but there's no huge carnivores around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's going to be eating Triceratops, Nedmontosaurus, and Parasaurolophus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's even a couple of giant sauropods knocking around in some places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's going to be hoovering them up, but how often is it going to eat
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, Velociraptor isn't there, but how often is it going to eat something the size of an adult Velociraptor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, they're a fraction of our size and we're probably too small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is like lions hunting mice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like you're just not going to, unless one like virtually runs into your mouth, you're not going to go and try and eat it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, well, I mean, so, I mean, there's no real winners.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's just, you know, turnover, because ultimately the birds, you know, it still lost out when things went wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And as we were just talking about, you know, things do tend to lose out when they're big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're just so much more vulnerable to extinction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But clearly, dinosaurian ecosystems...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
had much bigger herbivores and therefore by extent much bigger carnivores than any system we've seen before or after.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Even in relatively sparse ones like bits of the late Triassic, so when the dinosaurs are really just getting going, or the very early Jurassic, but you've still got some multi-ton herbivores and then you've got some multiple hundred kilo predators, so about as big as elephants and lions get today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then once you're in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, it is entirely normal to have multiple species that are 10, 20, 30 tons plus as herbivores and anything up to 5 tons as a carnivore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, T-Rex is probably the biggest of them, but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
carnivores that exceed fully terrestrial carnivores that exceed a ton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's dozens of species of dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, they're probably just ecologically dominant in the way that mammals are now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Crocs get bigger than lions and tigers, but they're fundamentally tied to the water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But you don't see crocs roaming in the Serengeti or anything like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, the really big crocs even now get to over a ton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So those are very serious animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I think big polar bears...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
are in the like 500 kilo range.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Though again, they hunt a lot of stuff in water and then things like grizzlies are at least partially herbivorous or omnivorous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In theory, at least, the really giant mosasaurs are much bigger, in the same way that, unsurprisingly, whales are much bigger than terrestrial carnivores now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park, unsurprisingly, has rather exaggerated it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the one from Jurassic World, it's like twice the size it should be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But some of these things were still like 15, 20 meters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, some of them are absolutely giant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We had one dug up in the UK just a couple of years ago, and I got to see...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
skull of it, or a cast of the skull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yeah, it's about the same size as a T-Rex skull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, nothing reasonably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, the really big ones are going to be...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The only other thing you can really add is the, this might be a very British adage of, it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, maybe there's something a bit smaller, which is just hyper aggressive, and that would be enough to win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like the classic honey badgers chasing off lions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not that a honey badger would win in a fight, but if the honey badger is prepared to put up that much of a fight and the lion really doesn't want to get hurt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
then, then he kind of technically wins.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but going to T-Rex, like what could reasonably challenge it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a couple of other giant Tyrannosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a couple of giant Carcharodontosaurs from South America that are comparable in linear measurements, but are probably rather smaller and rather lighter, in which case your money's going to be on the bigger guy with the bigger bite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that simply is T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the bite is important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I think it is because, yeah, these guys, the Carcharodontosaurs, they're much more cutting and they're really killing stuff probably by grappling with the arms because they do have big muscular arms with big claws and then slashing away at stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So I think they're probably doing something more like, almost like wolves or hyena or hunting dog where they're harrying stuff
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
and slashing at it and you're basically bleeding them out and wearing them down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
very fast bite so it's very simple mechanics you know if you have a very long jaw you're going to close faster but with less power at the tip than if you have a really short one that's deep and so that really is it um but yeah let's say there's there's things like yayar means and then there's things like yeah velociraptor and a lot of its relatives really very and not just small but you know narrow it is narrow snouted there's not going to be a lot of fundamental strength here
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The teeth, very numerous, very small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So they're much more about grabbing something tiny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Velociraptors eating rat-sized stuff, that's going to be probably its primary diet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're going to struggle, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I remember doing some work for one documentary, and they literally wanted Velociraptor fighting a T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I said, like, you do know this is like, we're going to shoot some meerkats killing a lion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, well, you can film it, but no one would believe it because, you know, these ankle-high things trying to, like, savage a shinbone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I'm sure they'll make some holes and it'll lose some blood and it may not be very happy, but it's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't think they're going to win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, enormously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, they get a bit bigger than this in terms of the skull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, they're kind of thigh high to me, like a meter or so to the top of the head, two meters long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas in the movies, they're like standing taller than guys who are six foot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's just,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
massively massively scaled up and then these kind of big kind of domey heads then they're not the really long narrow snout maybe we could take that tangent what does Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchise get right and wrong
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, get wrong a hell of a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, I just want to press with my answer because I always get asked about this understandably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, I get that it's a movie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But if someone's going to ask me, what does it get wrong?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm going to give them an answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I do get people going...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, you're just nitpicking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, you know it's fiction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, you know it's made up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I do know, but someone asked the question, so here's the answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I mean, that's my take.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, I've worked on documentaries where they're claiming that accuracy is absolutely critical and 100% important, and they won't put anything on screen that I haven't told them to, and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Then many of those things turn out not to be quite as true as advertised once you get round to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So I'm aware that when even documentaries will take massive liberties, you can't be too harsh on what is popular fiction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
On the other hand, I am also aware that it is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
by far by a ludicrous degree the most popular bit of any kind of media that includes my work as it were or something that i'm actively engaged in and know about and so whether or not it should have that influence for whether or not the filmmakers should have responsibility it does it does have that knock on um so i mean it's simple as stuff as tyrants can't see if you can't move yeah it could
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't know where that came from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
As far as I can tell, Crichton just dreamed it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In The Lost World, his sequel book, he hints that there's a research paper that says it, and that's kind of where he got it from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a second paleontologist character who's advising Dodgson, the evil InGen guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And he says, oh, no, that's from such and such's research.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I tried looking it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist and never did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So I think it's just straight fiction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, it works for the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
it works for the book and it works for the movie, but it's as far as I can tell, it's straight fiction and Crichton just made it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If it's buried in some bit of literature, he's done better finding it than I have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I've had a really good look and I know how to look and I've never come across anyone who's found it either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It just warps the perception.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Velociraptor, cheetah speed, pack hunters, super intelligent, giant-sized animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And, okay, 1993, it's a bit more forgivable, but even then we were pretty confident they had feathers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Is any of that true?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Probably not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The pack hunter aspect?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that's something I've written quite a lot about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The evidence for pack hunting in any dinosaur at all
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
is almost non-existent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It basically doesn't exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's going exactly back to, again, that stuff we were talking about, bite marks and toponomy and the history of specimens and how you interpret them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's really, really tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the main one which was put forward is there's this famous association in Montana of Deinonychus, which is often confused with Velociraptor, including in the books and movie, basically a bigger version of this that's rather older from the early Cretaceous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And a thing called Tenontosaurus, which is kind of Iguanodontin, so Iguanodon with the spiky thumbs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
basically otherwise a fairly run-of-the-mill herbivore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And there are two sites, I believe, for this, but there's one that's much more important where you have a Tenontosaurus carcass with Deinonychus carcasses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so the interpretation of this is, well, this is a group that brought down the herbivore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And of course, the immediate kind of counter-argument to that is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
well, why did they all die there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like when, you know, when lions kill a wildebeest, they eat it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They don't all just die next to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or even if they did kill it and start eating it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then like, if they got into a fight and killed each other, well, lions as a species are not going to hang around for very long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If every time they kill something, they get into a mortal fight and kill half the pride.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's nothing obvious that killed them, but it's at least possible that this was something like a predator trap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So predator traps are really neat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the La Brea Tar Pits is a classic example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The idea is a herbivore stumbles into something like tar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You've got your deer or wildebeest or mammoth or whatever it is waist deep in tar and going, I'm dying, I'm dying, I'm making horrible noises.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And, you know, Smelodon walks over and goes, great, and wades out after it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And he's now stuck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then lo and behold, you now have something like La Brea where they've got like, the numbers are something absurd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, I think they've got like three mammoths and one ground sloth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then it's like a hundred direwolves and 40 smelodon because it's just sucking the carnivores in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you get these really distorted ratios.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't think that's the case of the Deinonychus denontosaurus stuff because there's ways that you can probably rule that out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But there are probably places like this where it's happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, the other one is the toxin one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Cleveland Lloyd, so it's just coming up on your screen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's another one with loads of dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's Allosaurus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But we've definitely seen it with... I think this has come up with something like lions or wolves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like they found loads of them dead by a lake and it turned out, or this pond.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And this pond had got some really sort of nasty algal bloom toxin in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the interpretation was the same kind of thing is that a couple of deer were drinking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This stuff's toxic and kills you within minutes, keels over, dies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Wolf smells dead meat, comes over, starts eating it, has a drink, keels over and dies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then it's not getting, you're just dying from the toxicity rather than being like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
yep let me deconstruct that like almost instantly so it's really easy because this this is my book on dinosaur behavior this is just the kind of thing i'm talking about so the the tyrannosaur trackways of a group of tyrannosaurs is i think four or five tracks total so it's like two from one animal two from a second animal and one from a third animal that's not the end of the world that's somehow how
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
trackways formed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, you know, the rocks broken up, they stood on mud and then they didn't, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
One of them has got a left and right and the other two don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's very fragmentary, but that's not a problem with the interpretation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The problem is this is interpreted as a group of them moving together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because they're going in roughly the same direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they're roughly equal sizes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
okay but like i've seen solitary animals moving in groups um a guy i know quite well in south africa i got a south africa regulator for my teaching actually um and he's one of the big guys at south africa national parks and he gives me the skinny on all kinds of weird stuff and he's telling me a few years ago that one of his park rangers had observed leopards hunting together in a group and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Now, leopards are basically not just solitary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're like antisocial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They beat the hell out of each other if they come near each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I've also seen, you know, you get game trails are a thing, paths that single animals take.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If a female is in heat, like males will track her down and follow her.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you'll get one set of footprints, and then a couple of hours later, a male will come past, and a couple of hours later, another male will come past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And now you've got three sets of footprints all traveling in the same direction on the same bit of path, but they live on their own, let alone hunting together, which is a massive step above this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the one I've talked about quite a bit in my book is Spotted Hyena, Krakuta Krakuta, which is the one, there's a whole bunch of hyenas, but this is the one everyone knows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're the big laughing hyena.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And can see plenty of Attenborough type documentaries of them, seven or eight of them, or even 10 or 12 of them going into a herd and ripping apart wildebeest or zebra or whatever it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But actually, if you read the scientific literature, this is really rare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They mostly hunt on their own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Now, they do live in these social clans with hierarchies and complex social interactions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They are very social animals, but they mostly hunt on their own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So even if you find loads of trackways of them moving together, or again, there's one, if not two, for tyrannosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We've got multiple tyrannosaurs together, and that's been argued for pack hunting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
At best, that argues they might have lived together, but it doesn't tell you whether or not they hunted together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So how can we make a decision on one way or the other?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, I mean, I tend to be ultra conservative in this context, and I think we should probably avoid saying things that we're not quite confident about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't want to ever go down the, we must have really definitive 100% convincing evidence because this is paleo and we don't have that kind of data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
just as I talked about with things like the predator prey size ratio stuff, there is data we can start to use on living species about what tends to trigger hunting in groups or living in groups and what data there might be from stuff like brain sizes or other track ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or again, we do have bite marks indicating prey size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you start finding repeated attacks on big prey,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
from relatively small predators, that would be quite convincing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
As you said, maybe we had bite marks of multiple different sizes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Now that on its own, it comes hard because obviously scavenging, you know, tyrannosaurs are an exception.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Most dinosaurs, most carnivorous dinosaurs have pretty similarly shaped teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So how easy is it to tell
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
An adult from a juvenile from an adult from a different species that's just a bit smaller.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Probably pretty tricky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, for me, I think the kind of gold standard, which I don't think we're ever going to find, but you never know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You could, in theory, get a trackway of something like a herbivore with a whole bunch of carnivore tracks coming in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We do have a couple like this, but they don't have what I'd really want to see, which is if you trace the footprints of the individual carnivores and if A's in early on A's footprint go on top of B's, but later on B's go on top of A's, they must have been there at the same time because there's no way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
they could have been even minutes or hours apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if you had that, then those two must be together, or at least within sight of each other, and one's not turning around and roaring or having a fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you can do that with seven or eight, all converging on one herbivore, and then everything goes manic...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, that's really pretty convincing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I am a bit of a Sherlock Holmes fan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
and he references Cuvier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Cuvier was this legendary French anatomist, Baron Cuvier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He was the first guy to posit that things went extinct working on mammoths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And he said, well, there's nothing like this alive today, so extinction happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Which before that, we didn't really know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And Holmes has a line about just as Cuvier can restore an animal from the smallest bone, so I can restore the events from the smallest detail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm paraphrasing, but I'm not far off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, there's truth to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You have...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
used an analogy that Conan Doyle specifically used for Holmes going back to paleontology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's how on the nose you are with that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, we got off topic before we even got onto Jurassic Park.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
On just Velociraptor, you said that, you know, yeah, the size, the pack hunting, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The pack hunting, just to round off on that, it's like, I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe there's actually been some more recent stuff on Deinonychus looking at things like isotopes in the teeth and feeding traces and some other stuff that's hinting that maybe there is more going on there, which is great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm not anti the idea that this exists, but you absolutely get this buildup of the idea that Velociraptor is a pack hunter comes from Deinonychus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I think the evidence from Deinonychus is really weak in exactly the way that, okay, lions are group hunters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We know they are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Does that mean that leopards are and tigers and puma?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So why on earth do you think that just because, even if Deinonychus is, that doesn't really tell you anything about Velociraptor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Group hunting has all kinds of more complicated dynamics going on it than just close relatives tend to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can flip that around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
African hunting dog, wolves, things like bush dogs, there's various canids that all hunt in groups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then you've got things like main wolves, which are effectively solitary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The hyenas, spotted hyena, are, yeah, these super social animals, but the brown hyena, the striped hyena, and the odd wolf are solitary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you just can't do...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
group versus solitary of close relatives or anything like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I am very sure a ton of dinosaurs were aggregates, lived in groups to some degree, and I'm very sure some of them were social with complex lives and hierarchies and even pack hunting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Which ones...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I have very little idea because I think the data is so sparse that we can't really say it with any confidence for anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In my opinion, I think that can be got at.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think we need to start getting at it with the sort of stuff I'm talking about, like get a better understanding of what drives sociality in lions versus tigers versus leopards, you know, relatively close relatives who overlap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Don't forget in India, leopards and tigers overlap with lines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The Asiatic line is still there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you can talk about ecosystem structure and prey size and prey type and all this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe we can start piecing that together a bit better and then apply that to stuff like the trackways and the isotopes and all the rest of it, bite marks and these mass mortality sites.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So I think it can be done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But personally, what were pack hunters?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't think any of them were in the sense that I don't think we've got good evidence for any of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, probably for some of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, I think it's well within their scope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
One of the papers writing about this, ironically arguing against pack hunting in Deinonychus,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
said that, well, it's probably not the case because you don't really see pack hunting in birds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so if you don't see it in birds, then dinosaurs being their ancestor, if birds can't evolve it, then maybe dinosaurs couldn't have evolved it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Which...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm not sure is a great logical argument because of the complexities of social behavior anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then there are a couple of birds which actively hunt in groups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Things like the giant ground hornbills, Ethiopia and South Africa are a really good example of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that point is incorrect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then we see, if not true sociality, we see cooperation in crocodilians and we're seeing degrees of social behavior in things like iguanas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the idea that like, well, birds are super advanced and dinosaurs can't do it because the stupid reptiles are too stupid and therefore dinosaurs are more like them, which isn't quite what they're saying, but it's sort of the unwritten idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, we have social behavior and cooperation behavior in crocs and in lizards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that really gives you the impression that dinosaurs, theoretically, at least are perfectly capable of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, because, you know, animals are doing complicated things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, you know, in the case of lions, a large part of this is down to territoriality and the males ultimately are defending the territory and that's effectively protecting the females.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But of course, what they're mostly protecting them from is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
other males.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there's a ludicrous bit of self-interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But that's effectively how it's operating as a system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it could just be
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
predatory type cheetahs are my go-to example for this so cheetahs are the weird ones compared to the other cats because females are solitary but males are social so brothers will when when you know if the female has five or six cubs the brothers will stay together in a group and then the girls will go off on their own and if you're if you're the only brother or the only survivor you were usually hung up hook up with a gang of other males so cheetahs are pack hunters if you're male and a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's not about territory defense or occupation for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's about prey type.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Is it possible to know the sex of a T-Rex or any of the other dinosaurs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like what, what can paleontology show us?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So in theory, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In practice, it's way more complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So unless you get very lucky, we have a handful of specimens that still have eggs inside them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Instant giveaway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, but that's like two or three, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What you can look for is both reptiles and birds have a thing called medullary bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And when you're laying eggs and you need a lot of calcium very quickly, because that egg shell goes on basically like kind of like the last minute during egg development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you need a lot of calcium very quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So during the laying season, these animals grow this really weird kind of bone texture on big things like the femur and the humerus, like really big bones in the body.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's got a weird texture because it's full of blood vessels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's full of blood vessels so that you can basically apply a lot of blood supply to it quickly, suck up some of the calcium from that bone, take it through the system, put it on the eggs, lay your eggs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We can find that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if you have a dinosaur bone and it's the right kind of thing, so you can't do it on like a finger or a claw or a bit of rib, but nice big bone, you could cut a chunk of that out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
grind it down to the point that it's virtually transparent, fraction of a millimetre thick, put it under a microscope and have a look.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And if you see the right bone texture, there's some exceptions, but that's very probably medullary bone and you have yourself a female.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the instant assumption is, okay, so you can tell female from male.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No, we can tell laying female from everything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So males won't have medullary bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Young females won't have them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Females outside of the breeding season won't have it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Females inside the breeding season, but maybe they've been really sick this year, don't have it, or they laid their eggs early and now they don't need it anymore, won't have it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So occasionally, if you cut up a bone, which of course we try not to do that much,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
you can get the signal of medullary bone and infer that you have a female in the breeding season.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But there's no, like, large bone structure differences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, maybe there is, but we haven't seen it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You look at things like kudu or black buck and all kinds of antelope or even most deer, and the males have horns or antlers and the females don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you look at something like Triceratops and all the Ceratopsians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a big clade of, oh, it must be 40 species by now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And every single one of them has the frill and has some kind of horn somewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You don't have the hornless ones or the frill-less ones in the way that we do with a lot of these.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Pelvis differences works on humans and apes and maybe a couple of other mammals, but it's mostly not very good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's because we give birth to such a gigantic baby with a gigantic head compared to our sizes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
that women have different pelvises to men.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then there's size differences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, the skull is not as reliable as the pelvis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then, again, you just need to look at, you know, humans are always slightly dodgy with this because of, you know, our evolutionary and cultural history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But, like, you know, there's population differences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, there are maned female lions in places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There are maneless male lions in places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Reindeer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Female reindeer have antlers in winter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Rudolph was a girl, because every illustration of Santa and his reindeer ever, they all have antlers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's a female reindeer, not a male, if it's winter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So basically, we don't know much about the dating and the sex lives of T-Rexes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, not much, but you can make some inferences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, for example...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, all Tyrannosaurs, uh, have at least some kind of crest on the head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The early ones have like this midline, it really doesn't work on a human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They have like a midline crest running along the top of the nose that sticks up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The later ones largely don't, but they do have this weird armored structure along those fused nasals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then they have little horns over the eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Those, as far as we can tell, don't really have any kind of obvious mechanical function.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And loads, like outside of the feathered dinosaurs, the vast majority of carnivorous dinosaurs have some kind of crest or display feature on the head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So I've always favored the term socio-sexual selection to cover both sexual display and sexual dominance and communication, but also social ones, because those two things are hard to tell apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Female lions find males with darker manes sexier, but male lions find males with darker manes more intimidating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So one of them is sex, but one of them is social.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It can, but then you get things like the other one I go for is black swans, these beautiful Australian birds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They have these really weird curly feathers on their wings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And males and females both have them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And males prefer females with curlier feathers and females prefer males with curlier feathers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's an obvious sexual link.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then females fight too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Females fight over the best nesting spots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the females with the curliest feathers tend to win those fights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
How does that make sense?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This gets into classic sexual selection theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's what's called an honest signal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You couldn't have those curly feathers if you weren't able to support them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because they're their primary feathers on the wings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And what it actually does is it makes it harder to fly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you're basically going, look how tough I am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've grown this big and I can fly and carry on with my giant curly feathers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
because I'm really tough and I'm in good shape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's the same with the lion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The reason you get pale lions in the south is because it's close to the equator because it's too hot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there's the trade-off because if you have a really black mane, yeah, all the males know you're rock and all the females know you're super sexy, but you just die of overheating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The trade-off is if the heat's going to kill you, you're probably better off being a bit paler
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
and surviving in order to reproduce than you are being jet black or just dying instantly as soon as it gets hot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's probably what's happening with the theropods.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
All the little crests and horns, Ceratosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Tyrannosaurs, Allosaurs have big crests over the eyes, and all kinds of others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've written about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think this is the trade-off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're going for the sexiest look, and the sexiest look is the biggest horns or the biggest spikes and whatever is on the head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Probably also then with the brightest colors and the most display patterns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But also this gives you a way to your prey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you're trying to hide or you're trying to sneak up on something, being brightly colored or having stripes or all this extra stuff on your head, you get spotted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then that's the trade-off is if I'm this big and my horns are this big and this red and yellow and I can still run those guys down and hunt them and kill them and eat them, then look how great I must be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas that little guy, he's only got weedy little crests and they're really dark because he's so bad at catching stuff, he doesn't have the extra energy to grow big crests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's why, but when you're a herbivore, you don't have that pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Particularly something like, this is Protoceratops, but something like Triceratops and these guys, they're living in big groups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can't hide from a predator when you're a group of 20 animals that are 10 tons each.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So who cares?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You just grow the biggest signal you can possibly grow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And lo and behold, they have giant frills and giant horns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there are things which we think operate closer to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there are, these are the two kind of classic ideas of sexual selection, and both are probably true to certain degrees in various different species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
One is the honest signal, or it's the kind of a handicap hypothesis, because you're holding yourself back whilst proving you can still do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I ran the marathon, you know, carrying a couple of weights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're obviously stronger than the guy who ran the marathon without.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, and so that's why it's an honest signal and it's why it's a handicap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But the other one is what's called the sexy sons hypothesis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the idea is a female might just find a male attractive for no other reason than random.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
some component of her brain or whatever it may be that that just looks cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you can actually sort of get this as a human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, forget human beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can look at a bottle and go, that bottle's kind of nice and that bottle's kind of ugly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Where do you put, like, birds are interesting with this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Where do you put peacock feathers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So they're probably more handicap hypothesis because the colors that go into them and the sheer size and shape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And these things basically can't fly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're really vulnerable to predators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Probably not entirely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's almost certainly randomness going on in there as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the eye spots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We know that eye spots are attractive, are probably encoded in some way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, so going back to the sexy sons, the idea is females prefer something different for whatever reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And there might actually be some reasons females prefer things that are different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Different usually means...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
separate and outside and that usually comes with it variation like inherently also variation is evolutionary turn on yeah basically
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, well, so you've got to remember, again, it's really easy to look at that sort of thing with a human perspective, where maximum reproductive output, I think the record, there's some obscure record, it's something like 66 children, which is probably apocryphal for a Russian woman who had loads of triplets and quads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But like, humans don't have many offspring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But most animals...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
lay dozens of eggs or hundreds of eggs or thousands of eggs at a time so actually so diversity pays off more there so diversity can pay off we we think that's probably a major part of the reason that sex evolved in the first place is it gives you resistance to changing environment and it gives you resistance to parasites and diseases which often reproduce way faster than you do
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, bacteria can divide in a few hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We reproduce every 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's quite a difference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If we were all asexual clones and you're vulnerable to some disease, you're probably going to get wiped out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Look at the, you know, Irish potato famine or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So different may be appealing simply because it is different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's giving you variation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And there's at least some evidence for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's swordtails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So anyone who keeps little fish, if anyone's who's a tropical fish keeper, swordtails are really quite common little tropical fish that you can get in all kinds of aquarium shops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they're a very boring fish shape, but the lower lobe of their tail has a big spike on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's the name.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they're really close relatives of a group called the Mollies, which basically don't have that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And in the wild, these are Amazonian fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They don't usually encounter each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But even if you go and get not even the domesticated form, because these things have been bred for decades at this point, you can go and get some wild Mollies and give them a wild male swordtail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they think he's so much better than all the male Mollies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They will go for that one and they will preferentially mate with that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We don't know the exact mechanism, but it appears to be it looks similar enough that I recognize it as a potential mate, but different enough that this is exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then this is where the sexy sons kick in because the females are now assuming those animals are successful and they can hybridize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or maybe it's just a male who just happens to be a little bit blue or a little bit red or whatever it may be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, well, the female offspring, the daughters are probably going to inherit mother's preference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I really like red and the males are probably going to have red in them because their dad had more red.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So guess what the next generation does?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's more red and the females like more red and you don't have to come back much further.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And suddenly all the males are bright red.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's closer to beauty than I think almost anything else would be with still a naturalistic explanation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, a T-Rex might have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the very fact that they have these apparently socio-sexually selected signals, the little crest and stuff in the head...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there's a branch of sexual selection called mutual sexual selection, and the black swans are an example of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The classic sexual selection is, yeah, your peacocks and your lions and things like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Males are bigger and more flamboyant and whatever it is, and they're doing all the competing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But you get mutual sexual selection, and this is really common in a whole bunch of things that people are familiar with but don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Loads of seabirds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Starlings, the common starling that we have in Europe and has been introduced into the US.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Parrots, various other things where basically males and females invest similarly in rearing the offspring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so the idea generally, both with Handicap and Sexy Son, but particularly with Handicap, is the idea is the males are proving their worth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're basically saying, I'm the biggest, strongest, healthiest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've got the best genes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I should be the father of your offspring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They go around showing off and then mate with as many females as possible, while the females then do all the work and make the nest and look after the chicks or rear them or give birth or whatever it may be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so the idea with mutual sexual selection is, well, what if there's not much food around?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Things like puffins, penguins in the Arctic, where the male sits with the egg and the female toddles off, gets food, and then comes back two months later or whatever it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
On their own, they can't rear the offspring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They have to have a male investment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, now...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
suddenly the male's now putting loads of effort in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the male's now in the same position that a female would be in under the normal conditions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You don't want to be the sexiest, toughest, biggest male, and you can only mate once.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
All right, there's various cheats, but we won't get into that just yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're only going to mate once, and you're going to put all your effort into helping rearing offspring rather than chasing down as many girls as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Are you going to go for the biggest, fittest female as well, or are you going to go for the small, weedy one that doesn't look very well?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
you go for the best one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, how do you know that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, cause she's got a crest as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so suddenly you now get mutual ornamentation, just like the black swans, where the males are checking out the curliest females and the females are checking out the curliest males.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you'll see they mutually pair up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is what we see with things like starlings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Males like the brightest females.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Females like the brightest males.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They tend to form pairs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The darkest and least bright ones are obviously kind of left with each other at the bottom of the pile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They tend to pair up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it means that when you get signals in both males and females, like every triceratops or every tyrannosaurus, it at least hints that they're going down this route.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
and that they might cooperate for reproduction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and the problem is it's compromised by lots of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that goes back to your earlier question about telling males from females apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The vast majority of dinosaur species, like 90 plus percent, are known from a single specimen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And a specimen is not necessarily very complete at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It might be a couple of bones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It might be one bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It might be a tooth in a couple of cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The actual number, where we've got a decent number of real whole skeletons that we can actually compare to each other...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Less than 10, probably more like five or six.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You could probably reconstruct a lot, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And if nothing else, just the superlative brain cavity will tell you quite a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, the intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Must have been very, very smart with a brain that big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can probably reconstruct some of the behavior, a lot of the behavior, social behavior, a lot of the stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you're going to see stuff like, you know, it's the famous one of, I think it was a Neanderthal,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
there was a famous question of like, you know, at what point do you think society exists?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it may have been one of the leakies, but the answer was basically this skeleton, because it was someone with a really, like a properly busted leg and then it fully healed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, if that person was on their own,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
just dead someone had to look after them for months to get that level of healing you only do that to someone you're really devoted to and probably a group of people because even one person can't look after one other person in right so that's your society and yeah you think about the the pathology of skeletons in the human race how you know how many of us have broken a bone
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Most adults have probably broken a couple of bones, even if it's just a finger or a nose or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then you think about what medicine has done and you would be able to see treatments of complete compound fractures of guys who survived horrific car crashes and treatments of cancer, bone cancers and stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You would see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, how's that happening?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Either they're magic or they've got some kind of, in which case they'd probably cure it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
instantly, or there's some kind of technology in society supporting that change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it's the right amount of data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We can find dozens of skeletons that we can't do very much with, and then the right one...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Things like stomach contents or bite marks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's a super powerful bit of data, but it doesn't turn up that often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's not like you can get it off every skeleton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's the pool of data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I think that's what people miss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
As paleontologists, we get caught up on single superlative specimens and then try and take them as a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
like a silver bullet almost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So mycoraptor, I mentioned this before, little flying dinosaur, crow's eye or gliding dinosaur, crow's eyes thing from China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We've got at least a dozen good specimens of it by now and multiple ones with stomach contents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's one I've described with a little mammal foot inside it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's one with a bird inside it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's one with a lizard inside it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And there's one with a fish inside it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
on their own, and this happened for at least two of the papers describing these things, it's like, it ate fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
These are fish-eating animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No, that one ate one fish once.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That one ate one bird once.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That one ate one mammal once, and that one ate one lizard once.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So what have we actually got here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I suspect we've got a group of generalists and we just happen to have found them eating different things at different times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But equally, it's also possible, at least, that, yeah, this is one of these things and it had learned to eat fish when the others hadn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And actually, this was most of the fish eaters and the others ate whatever they could get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe one caught a bird up a tree in a nest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe one found it dead on the ground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You don't really know what one of these things on its own is fascinating, but potentially misleading.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and that's... So one thing I've definitely written about is, yeah, the independent lines of evidence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Can you get stuff that is as far as possible truly independent from the other data, and does it give you the same answer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then when it does...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's incredibly powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Spinosaurus or the Spinosaurus as a whole is my go-to example for this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the guys, the famous big sailback and the weird crocodile-like head, though some of them look rather different to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And if you look across all the species and specimens that we have, they're incredibly fragmentary and very badly known.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But they're all basically associated with...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
When you look at the Gestalt, you see a whole bunch of stuff for these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So they do have a surprisingly crocodile-like head and crocodile-like teeth compared to every other carnivorous dinosaur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And when you do the mechanical analysis, you see they function in a very similar way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And indeed...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, here's a Spinosaur teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
With very nearly circular cross-section.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Really distinctive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Similar to crocodiles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Similar to dolphins.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Similar to fish-eating fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, points to fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Crocodile-like head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Points to fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Crocs eat other stuff too, but still.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're usually found in or near aquatic systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Now...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Fossils in general tend to turn up in aquatic systems because you've got to be buried to become a fossil, so water association is common.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But even so, that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They turn up in places where lots of other dinosaurs don't tend to turn up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
including carnivores, which suggests they're eating something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you look at the isotopic signature of the teeth, often it correlates with crocodiles, fish, turtles, and stuff that lives in water, and doesn't correlate well with other land-living dinosaurs that lived in the same time and same place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you put all of that together...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's really hard to argue, oh, in addition to the tiny detail of baryonyx, the British one was found with fish scales inside its chest cavity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you put all of that together, and yeah, I'm not saying it only ate fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm sure it ate big shrimp and turtles, and we know they were predating on terrestrial dinosaurs and pterosaurs, because again, stomach contents and teeth and stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But fundamentally, this is an animal or a group of animals doing something different to the other carnivorous dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's probably linked to water and it's probably linked to fish as a predominant way of living.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So in the UK, it will be out in November.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In North America, January or February 2026.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Written with Mark Whitten, who did that picture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a beautiful creature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Which I think is in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Mark's done a ton of new artwork.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He helped write the book, but he's also the artist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Not very is my take.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Does it live in the water?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Does it step in the water?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, so I think it's basically a big wader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a poor analogy, but it's a very weird giant stork.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or heron.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Was giant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So potentially bigger than T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Linearly, not in mass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, really quite narrow chest versus that T-Rex barrel, but potentially 15 meters long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So bigger than any T-Rex we found, at least in terms of length.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this really quite long head with a kind of wavy jawline, like animals have, most carnivores have straight jaws.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This one has a kind of somewhat wiggly jawline.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It really narrows at the front and then opens up again into like a little, it's called a rosette.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you've got like a little semicircle and then a dip and then the jaws go back and then the teeth line waves up and down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
These really conical teeth, which doesn't sound very exciting, but it makes them different to every other carnivorous dinosaur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like no other thing has a conical tooth, which is a classic fish thing, or at least biting hold of something that wriggles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The nostrils are not at the tip of the nose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're pushed back at least somewhat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It has a bunch of crests on the head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's got quite a long neck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Spinosaurus, and at least a couple of the other closest relatives to it, a thing called Ichthyovenator from, I can't remember if it's Thailand or Laos, I think it's Laos, has this giant elongated bit to the top of the vertebrae, and so it gives it this giant sail along the back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Spinosaurus, at least, possibly Ichthyovanita, probably not any of the others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Then has this weird, like, thin, like, newt-like expanse to the top of the tail, giving it kind of like a giant oar paddle appearance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Mostly they have very large arms with giant claws on the hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, and Spinosaurus at least appears to have really quite short legs, but the others don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, but again, so Spinosaurus is like totally iconic, but if you look at something like Baryonyx from the UK or, um, Suchomimus from Niger, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's still got the same head, it's still got the same neck, it's still got the same arms, but it doesn't have this sail and it doesn't have this tail and it probably doesn't have short legs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Spinosaurus is super weird and exaggerated version of what is already a kind of super weird group of theropods.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So Spinosaurus is properly strange.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then, as you kind of hinted at, like super controversial as well, because various papers have...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
claimed it's a diver or a really good swimmer, and I think the evidence for that is very weak at best.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So your book is going to be... You're going to start some shit with your book?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think I already have, to be honest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, I've written...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've written three major papers and one in particular with my colleague, Tom Holtz, where we frankly savaged the idea that it's a good swimmer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then other people have since, including actually some of the authors who were on the original paper claiming it did swim well, have now effectively reversed their position and said it didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
so probably still t-rex i mean the the jurassic park spinosaurus was pretty good for its time um because some of the stuff that i've just talked about particularly the short legs were suggested way back in 1910 1912 but it was really uncertain um now it appears to be more likely the case than not the tail was unknown at this point so it was given a very generic tail um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But the crocodile-like head is pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The neck's a bit short.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The sail is a bit too... It's almost just like a semicircle stuck on the back, and it's a bit more complicated than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But personally, I'm quite a big fan of the Jurassic Park 3 Spinosaurus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think for its era, it's really quite good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It is massive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there is this... They're from, I've got to say, Morocco.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because Spinosaurus is found throughout North Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a massive pair of jaws or snout that's in a collection in Milan that's absolutely outsized, just like an absolute giant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that points to a truly monumentally sized Spinosaurus, which is where all these upper estimates of 15 plus meters come from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's just this one set of jaws.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, it's about right, but it's just a bit too muscly and a bit too bulky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But in gross appearance, it's pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Does it have a chance against the T-Rex?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No, because it's got this unbelievably long, thin jaw, which was much stronger than something like Baryonyx is fundamentally not that strong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The jaws are very long and thin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the teeth are, yeah, they're big, but they're not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
big big um you know the the whole like it grabs the t-rex neck and then like snaps it well spinosaurus actually its neck is really strong going up and down and he's very weak rotating or going side to side so it's got the weakest kind of possible neck to like rotate and snap the t-rex and then t-rex has got like the strongest neck of any
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
like very in some level generic but quite important things it gets right t-rex is about the right size and shape and is massive and you don't actually see it run you see it power walk if you watch the jeep chase again you'll see it only ever has one foot on the ground the weird thing for me is how much some of them vary so like i'm a big pterosaur guy i do lots of work on pterosaurs the flying reptiles the pteranodons in jurassic park
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Two, The Lost World.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You see them very, very briefly in one of the last shots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they're okay, but they're not great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it's clearly a bit of a throwaway shot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The ones in Jurassic Park 3, I think, are mostly excellent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Really, really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the ones in Jurassic World are terrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like a massive regression...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's loads and loads of details that are right in JP3 that are completely wrong in Jurassic World.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you're like, why did you take a really good model and make it much, much worse and less accurate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And again, it's fiction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
At one level, who cares?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But as you said, I don't think... See, the weird thing for me is I don't think it would affect...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
how they're perceived by the public.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Some things I get, like, for example, in Jurassic World, the pteranodons pick people up with their feet and fly off with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Pteranodons' feet don't work like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It would never be able to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it would never have the lift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I get, for dramatic purposes, you might want to show that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Okay, fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, this is your big sequence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You need that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But for the rest of the animal, it's weirdly inaccurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I don't think the public would know...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they might well care if it was much more accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I don't think it would be any harder to make it accurate than to make it inaccurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've spoken to a colleague of mine who I won't name just in case I get him into trouble, who's a big dinosaur nerd, but also a big creature creator and designer and has done a whole bunch of proper Hollywood A-list movie stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I asked him about this and I went,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
okay, but is it just easier to take the model that you've got and mess around with it than to, if I came in and said, you need to fix that, you need to fix this, you need to fix this, you need to fix that, and he basically went, no, it's about the same amount of effort.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
we don't have the director or the producer or the lead designer going, no, I want that arm a bit longer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I want that tail a bit brighter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Can you add a few more bits there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't like those scales.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So he said, we're doing that constantly anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So doing it to one set of design specs versus another set of design specs is no more hassle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In other words, he said, it's no harder to make it accurate than to make it inaccurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, if that's truly the case, then just make it right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you can claim a level of accuracy and engagement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, it's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a thing called the Jurassic Foundation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
After the first Jurassic Park made an absolute fortune, I think it was Spielberg directly, may have been through Universal, but anyway, they set up the Jurassic Foundation and it's a small fund of money for research on dinosaurs and related animals and academics can apply for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
One of my PhD students got some money from the Jurassic Foundation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, that's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He didn't have to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
He went, paleontology's helped give me this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm going to give back a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And after what must be 30 years now, it's probably funded an awful lot of research and helped young researchers get a start.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there's a level of engagement there that I think hasn't been in subsequent films, which you can kind of see for once it goes from being a one-off to being a franchise and it's changed hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, how many different directors has it had now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Spielberg did the first two and then done about the next five, must be two, if not another three more people, and 30 years later, it's all changing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and again, there's some oddities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So like, Gallimimus, I mentioned it earlier, so one of the Ornithomimosaurs, the model for Gallimimus in Jurassic World
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
is nearly identical to that from Jurassic Park.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
One of the differences, which you can barely see on film, but I know this is true because I found it in Jurassic World kids' books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I flicked through it when it came out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a close-up of the head with an arrow to the teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Gallimimus doesn't have teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's got a beak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So someone has taken the original model and actively spent time adding teeth to an animal that didn't have them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I would understand it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm not saying I agree with it, but I'd understand if it was a rule of cool and like, yeah, but it would look so much better with all these gnarly big teeth and whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, you can't even see it in the final thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They've got tiny little heads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In the film, all they do is like run past the camera briefly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not like they're a big carnivore and they're engaged in like one of the big battle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not like you can't even barely see them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Nolan with the black hole in Interstellar, where they ended up publishing a paper on the calculation to visualize it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, that's legendary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, as I say, I, I, I wish it was better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, the only thing I'd, I'd flip it around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a joke I've made more than once, but like, just, just don't take it as a documentary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No one wants to watch his James Bond and goes, that's how international espionage works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, he's got the laser watch and the exploding car, and he's like, maybe treat it a bit as fiction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've heard from a friend of mine who worked at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, which I mentioned before, in Alberta, which is an absolutely phenomenal place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And she said, after the first one, genuinely...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, it was not common, but more than once, people were annoyed that they didn't have the real dinosaurs out back because they'd seen them and they knew that the real ones were out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Which is a testament to Industrial Light and Magic and Stan Winston, but also slightly horrifying that anyone watched Jurassic Park and literally thought that... Also, why would you go to a museum?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You go to the zoo if it's alive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What do we know about... Not much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a T-Rex brain, or at least a very rough cast of part of one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's the actual look of... Yeah, this is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So dinosaurs, in fact, most reptiles, I wonder if you can see it on the Velociraptor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Not really, unfortunately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's elongated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but it's more that they have, we are weird in that we have a brain that basically fills the inside of our skull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What most animals have is actually a little kind of sub skull inside the main skull, which is called the endocast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
or endocrinium, and the brain is in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And even then, it's not like full of brain, because we've packed an awful lot of brain into our limited space, and they then have quite a lot of goo and fat and other stuff around it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it means for dinosaurs, and then reptiles and birds in general, in the old days, you could basically cut one open, but now we'll CT scan through them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can take an internal mold of the endocranium, the brain case, and then whatever filled that would have been the brain and its surrounding tissues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's how you get something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In this case, someone literally cracked open an old skull and basically took an internal mold in the same way that you do an external mold for the skulls.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that tells you quite a lot about certain things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, for example, you've got a bulb at the front, which is the olfactory bulb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So brains are very stereotyped.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, ours are super weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you have the olfactory bulb at the front, and behind that you have the optic bulb or the optic lobe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So roughly how big they are will tell you roughly how much of the brain is devoted to, for example, sight and smell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if it's a lot, it's pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If there's not much, it's not very good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That goes quite a long way already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
One thing we've done in the last few years is you can also get into the, it's not shown here, I wouldn't be part of this, but the inner ear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We can CT scan into the structure of the bony inner ear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And from that, you can actually get an idea of what frequency of sounds the inner ear was structured to be pitched to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Which doesn't actually tell you very much, but it's phenomenally cool that you can do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We should say you also have quite a bit of a background in biology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, my go-to one-liner is I'm a zoologist, but I work on dead stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
My degree was zoology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
My official job title now is reader of zoology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I teach zoology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't teach paleo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, living animals was always actually my primary interest, and I kind of fell into paleo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then I wanted to drag that with me because I'd been trained in behavior and ecology, and it's what I was most interested in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So then applying that knowledge and understanding...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But then when you get into intelligence is when it gets really awkward because working out exactly which bits of this are probably linked to like the main fundamental processing and what you link to actual intelligence is tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
On top of that, we don't really know what's been the big challenge of the last couple of years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This question was T-Rex and other dinosaurs, super intelligent of neuron density.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
How many basically nerve cells can you pack in per bit or volume?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because birds have some weird tricks, which means they get a lot more brain per volume.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And just how much of the brain case was brain and how much was like goop around it, we know varies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you get kind of fairly big upper and lower band.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the other big thing we always have to do is factor in size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Big animals need bigger brains to operate them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So whales have really big brains, but whales weigh tens of tons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're not smarter than us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you have the classic thing is the encephalization quotient, which is at a very simple level, it is the volume of brain scaled against the size of the animal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we have huge brains compared to how big we are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we're massively up the chart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you do have a few things with worms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I should probably stick to vertebrates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Some stupid stuff which has a surprisingly small brain for its size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Most things that aren't primates...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And things like crows and parrots sit very neatly on a couple of different curves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a curve for reptiles, a curve for birds, a curve for mammals, and things like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And basically, that's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But also, actually, our understanding with mass estimates for dinosaurs is good but not great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so you could easily be out by...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
you could easily be out by like 20 or 30% on the volume of the brain inside the brain case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you could be out by 20 or 30% on your mass estimate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, now suddenly it's very easy to make the brain too big and the animal too light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's super smart or make the brain too small and the animal too heavy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's super dumb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's awkward, unfortunately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and then that was shot down within a few months by a team of paleontologists and a couple of other neurologists who really went to town on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Just counting the number of... Trying to estimate the number of neurons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, it was the neuron density thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yeah, I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I unsurprisingly support the revised one, which was done by a whole bunch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, the Caspar paper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've spoken to Caspar about it, a couple of the other authors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, which is kind of what you'd expect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, a couple of other people at various times have suggested they're really smart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And again, you know, birds have this thing of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
they have this weird thing of neuron folding and they can basically pack in a lot more than you'd expect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, that's why crows are that smart despite having tiny brains relatively even compared to their overall size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, but, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm being obviously overly facetious, but if ultimately part of your scaling is how big is the animal versus how big is its brain, that's most of a T-Rex brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a fraction of the size of a chimp brain, and chimps don't weigh seven tons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, it's a kind of Hitchens-like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But, like, you just look at it and go, that's about the proportion we'd expect for a croc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Now, crocs are smarter than people think, but they're sure as hell not monkeys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're going to have to really come up with something much more convincing than, oh, well, if you just pack them and scale them this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
A bit of a ridiculous question, but is it possible to find evidence of tool use?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, in theory, it depends quite how you define a tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So birds building nests is arguably tool use to a certain degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm aware of... I suspect it turned out not to be the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I was shown a very rough, not very well-prepared fossil...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
20 years ago now no 15 years ago now where someone said we think this might be a early bird nest and therefore potentially even a dinosaur nest and nothing's ever been published so my guess is once they excavated it and had a good look at it they went nah it's nothing really um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but even then, like, you know, chimps make loads of tools, but it's mostly made of wood, and they're mostly just breaking stuff, and then the odds of that preserving are very low.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You do get things like chimps and otters, sea otters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They have their favorite anvil and hammer stones to break stuff open, but again...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
the reason they picked that stone is because it's really heavy and good at breaking oysters or breaking nuts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not going to leave or probably not going to leave stereotypical points on the rock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And even then you could just go, well, maybe it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
you know, just got bashed up in a river or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Something like midden use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a whole bunch of animals and birds who...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
basically crap in the same spot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They have their spot and that's where they go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So rabbits do this, sloths do this, aardvarks, even things like wildebeest and zebra, not zebra, impala would tend to go back to the same place every day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But the fossil record of coprolites, fossilized feces and fossilized waste from dinosaurs, it exists, but it's extremely rough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because, of course, this is the stuff that's already been digested and broken down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's already kind of gooey and broken up and doesn't have a lot going for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If they do it in water, it's going to dissipate instantly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If it rains, it's probably going to fall apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Things like dung beetles and flies will break it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Even if it gets covered by sand or whatever from a sandstorm, it's probably still going to compress and separate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So are you ever going to find it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Maybe, going back to our trackway stuff, but even if you do, what species...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
left that we know a big herbivore did this but was it triceratops or was it an ankylosaur those animals are very different things doing very different things and it would tell you different things about their behavior if we know yeah so one one piece of behavior i forgot to ask you about so t-rex engaging cannibalism yeah almost certainly well certainly i think we've got um there's a t-rex bone with a t-rex embedded tooth in it with overgrowth yeah there's i think it's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I want to say it's an Albertosaur rather than T-Rex, but there is a Tyrannosaur jaw in Alberta with a T-Rex tooth stuck in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you can pull the little tooth out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then there's a T-Rex foot bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
with these distinctive feeding traces on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And this actually goes back to that early point about T-Rex being weird, being the only big carnivore it's an environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because if this was even Mongolia at that time, but anywhere else, there's three or four or five big carnivores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so you find a bone and it's chewed up by a big carnivore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We don't know who did it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But when you see a big bone chewed up in a T-Rex ecosystem, well, you know, if it's anything bigger than this, you know, it was T-Rex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so when it's a T-Rex bone with T-Rex bite marks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
QED.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it must have been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's fascinating, isn't it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That they would attack themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Cannibalism turns up in a whole bunch of stuff, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
but it's very rare as like a fairly habitual behavior.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It could, but it's unlikely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And in this case, so again, we see there are loads of facial injuries in tyrannosaurs, in carnivorous dinosaurs generally, but particularly tyrannosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They have really beaten up heads, like half or even two thirds of adults have scarring and facial injuries, but you see healing on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
whereas this foot does not show healing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's got multiple different bites.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The idea that you'd bite a foot whilst fighting someone and then go back and bite that one foot again, that's pretty, not impossible, but pretty unlikely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and they're more like the feeding scrape traces than they are the big puncture wounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So again, not impossible, but very weird for that to occur as a fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, they're fighting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're fighting probably quite a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, but whether or not you actually eat something that you've killed or that you stumble across as a body, it's definitely happens occasionally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Otherwise we wouldn't have the record of that, but there's a reason carnivores often don't eat carnivores and particularly don't eat their own species, which is parasitism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, carnivores in general are loaded with parasites because they spend their whole lives eating food which has parasites and stuff in it, and so they tend to accumulate a lot of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What's the one thing that's definitely going to have the most parasites in it that can infect you as, for example, a lion?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's another lion that eats the exact same stuff that you do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So whilst it is food, and particularly if you just want a big fight, you might want to eat, in general...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
cannibalism is pretty rare because it's generally not a good idea if there's other food available.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, if you're starving to death or the other guy ripped your leg half off and you don't think you're going to walk for six weeks...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Not that you'd think, but you know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, and now, and now there's a body in front of you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's two tons of meat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, maybe you should tuck in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We try to, but the thing is it's, it's, it's always getting better, which is, so that's what I tried to finish on in my book on behavior is I felt I'd written a couple of hundred pages of, we keep screwing this up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We've overstated this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think people have misunderstood this, this, you know, the trackway stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, this is not as confident as we think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You need to look at these alternate explanations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This behavior shows that that behavior probably doesn't correlate the way you said it does yada, yada, yada.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, I now feel like I've just written a book trashing my entire field and all my colleagues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
many of my colleagues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then you flip it on its head and going, we've got techniques that were undreamed of 10 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We've got data streams that were undreamed of 10 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we've actually got a much better understanding of living species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then on top of that, we're just constantly finding new animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, we have not just new species, which are often, I think, a lot less important, but just new specimens of ones we know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because again, it's building up that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
database you know we drifted off talking about sexual selection but like yeah you if you want to know growth one or two animals doesn't tell you how an animal a species grows 50 or 100 does and then that reveals a hell of a lot more about things like sexual dimorphism and growth rate and how vulnerable juveniles are and population structure maybe how they're reproducing so
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'd like to think I knocked down a few towers that probably a few people were fond of, but I think we have the raw materials to build much better, stronger edifice of behavior.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But as you say, it's always going to be based around often very piecemeal evidence and possibilities and probabilities rather than certainties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Mostly probably pretty quickly, but it really is the answer that I think most people are now probably familiar with, which is it's an asteroid impact or some kind of extraterrestrial body.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
hit just off the coast of the yucatan peninsula in mexico about 66 million years ago that basically atomized the asteroid but also importantly the bit of the ground it hit or below the seabed that it hit was basically the worst kind of rock and so it put up this enormous ash cloud and basically you have a nearly instantaneous nuclear winter i mean immediate devastation
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, anything immediately next to it is obviously just like vaporized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But, you know, this is the sort of thing that it's like hot enough to set fire to the atmosphere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think the one I read was it's something like a piece of rock about the size of Mount Everest traveling at something like 10 times the speed of sound.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So just the momentum between that speed and mass thing is just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
you know, beyond extraordinary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so, so every, there are five recognized mass extinctions in the history of life on earth and all of them are ultimately some form of climate change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, whether it's volcanic eruptions or hyper oxygenation or an ice age or whatever, it's, it's, it's climate changing too quickly for things to adapt to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
and that starts, you know, that just cripples entire populations and entire species, and then if you do enough damage to enough things, you start getting ecosystem collapse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, this moth has died out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, it turns out that moth is the primary pollinator of this tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, that tree produced nuts, and that was the entire winter survival store for this squirrel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, that squirrel was the main...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
food of this cat and now suddenly the moth going has killed four other things and and everything that's attached to that um so that that's really what did for them and sadly the big things well everything dies but the big things have a lot of trouble recovering yeah so i mean this this is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, a classic example is, oh, well, you know, what is paleontology good for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, one actually really is extinction, which is very relevant right now in that we have a very good handle on when you have extreme climate stress, what tends to suffer more and what tends to suffer less.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And as we say, big things fundamentally do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They require more resources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They require more area of land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You need to roam further, which means, you know, if you're a mouse and you happen to have a little bit of land and that bit doesn't get hit, you're fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas if you're an elephant and you need all of this land and even a chunk of it goes wrong, well, that's probably maybe not enough for you to survive anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, yeah, big things suffer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
disproportionately badly from these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And mostly as well, we think terrestrial things generally do worse than things in water because water is a great equilibrating medium.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, it takes ages to heat up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It takes ages to cool down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yes, if you live in
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
specific coastal conditions or something, maybe you can't travel that easily, but whales can go from pole to pole quite happily and plenty of other fish do too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if it's too hot or too cold or too nasty here, you can just swim somewhere else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas if you're an animal and you hit a desert or you hit a mountain range or you hit a river, you stop moving and you're trapped and then you die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So dinosaurs, well, yeah, the worst possible combination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They were mostly big, and they were mostly on land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And, yeah, it's not really surprising they did very badly out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'd be amazed if they didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, there's been various reports over the decades of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
the KPG or KT extinction, the Cretaceous-Paleogene or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction of dinosaurs surviving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And none of them have held up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's usually been bioturbation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So literally things like prairie dogs digging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And of course, they'll dig a tooth up and then move it through the layers or things like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or plant roots can move stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or just soils can get churned up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I would be shocked if they didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Not like, oh yeah, the dinosaur survived and the Loch Ness Monster and stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But like, yes, it was a global devastation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yes, it's what ultimately killed the dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I'd be amazed if there wasn't some equivalent of Hawaii or New Zealand or some other tucked away island or valley where actually dinosaurs were fine for anything from a few hundred thousand to a couple of million years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But on a global scale, it's a dot on a map.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the odds that we'll ever uncover...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Any rocks, fossiliferous rocks of that age that we then have access to, that we then find a dinosaur in, that we can then date properly, I think is almost non-existent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it would just be weird if they didn't survive somewhere for a bit, or even quite a few of them in places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We see it all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, the lemurs in Madagascar, all the stuff in New Zealand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's tons of weird archaic stuff hanging around in Hawaii.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, Galapagos finches and tortoises are the tortoises that you don't see anywhere else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In Australia with the marsupials, they're almost... And then the monotremes are almost unknown outside of there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is a pretty normal bit of biology for animals that were so dominant globally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We know there were patches that were largely unchanged.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Otherwise, we wouldn't have had the mammals surviving and the crocodiles surviving and the birds surviving and newts and frogs and everything that did survive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm sure a few of those patches had some dinosaurs in them, but it is ultimately what killed them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Look at Australia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, the marsupials have done pretty well there for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can imagine if the next mass extinction happened,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
you know, flattens a large chunk of Indonesia, for example, kangaroos could island hop pretty easily, make it to mainland Asia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, that's extraordinarily unlikely because once your population's been crashed like that, you do have the problems of things like inbreeding or maybe you're a great specialist to a certain area or you're surviving because you're isolated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're in a valley or you're on an island and then dispersing again becomes really or breaking out into those areas becomes much, much harder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because, because you've still had the extinction event and the environment is no longer what it was that you evolved into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, and when, once those systems start to recover, those other animals are going to adapt much better to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, at one level, I probably wouldn't be here if it hadn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, my guess is probably not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't think it's quite the, what was it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Simon Conway Morris had that book, Inevitability of Man, that even if you rewound it, everything would come back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm not,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't think it's that far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I certainly don't think it's anything quite like the butterfly effect of, you know, if one mammal had been trodden on by one T-Rex, then humans would never have evolved either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yes, Scandentia, I think it's the group.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Basically, they're rodents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I mean, there were probably primates around in the Cretaceous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Some of the molecular clock stuff suggests that primates were around alongside the dinosaurs that we've never found before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
any osteological evidence of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, there's been a backwards and forwards about were dinosaurs already on their way out or were they a bit limited by the very end Cretaceous?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think the more recent analyses have shown that's probably not the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In other words, they were basically doing fine right up to the extinction event.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so, yeah, if the asteroid hadn't hit, there's no reason to think that they were on some kind of terminal decline.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Something else may have hit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There may have been
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, some other environmental disaster or something may have happened or maybe they're more vulnerable to stuff than we know of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But there's no I don't think there's any really good reason to think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
they wouldn't have carried on relatively well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, even post-dinosaur extinction, you had a window where the mammals and the birds were pretty competing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There was a lot of big birds getting going and various big carnivorous terrestrial kind of hyper-predatory ostrich-like things, like the forsythia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there's no guarantee that mammals would have even taken over post the dinosaur extinction, since initially they were in a bit of a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
A fair bit of competition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, that's the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You look through, yeah, the Mesozoic, the late Triassic...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
dinosaurs are there alongside a whole bunch of other big and unusual and interesting reptiles and and some other early pre-mammal like things that closer to mammals than than the reptiles but once you've gone into the jurassic you've now got a solid like 120 130 million years where almost anywhere on earth if you saw an animal bigger than like a raccoon it was probably a dinosaur
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's how incredibly dominant, you know, as dominant, if not more dominant than modern mammals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But is it fair to say that they were mostly dumb?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because I think that comes down to, A, that bit of kind of classic, almost Victorian speciesisms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And you get these insane hypotheses like dinosaurs as a species or as a lineage became senile, so they forgot to breed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That was literally a suggested idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Uh, you know, the mammals ate their eggs and all of this kind of stuff, you know, dinosaurs only lived alongside mammals for a hundred million years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It'd be weird if they all went extinct at the same time because suddenly egg eating evolved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, you know, you, you've got problems like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But also, again, that general speciesism, which even goes back to stuff like Linnaeus and his taxonomic ranks, and even stuff like Aristotle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You've got humans are superior in some way, and we're superior to the other mammals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And of course, mammals are closest to us, so they must be quite good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then they've got to be better than lizards, and then lizards have to be better than frogs, and frogs have to be better than fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So that gets you into the, well, reptiles must be stupid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they're not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, that's been hypothesized plenty of times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Dale Russell, a Canadian paleontologist, the famous guy, came up with this human-like truodontid that was done for a TV documentary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think the one that Christopher Reeve narrated, that I think is a remake, but I've seen the original that Dale had made for his TV show, and it's still...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's sitting in the collections of the National Museum of Nature in Ottawa for Canada.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's really, really cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's like this five-foot dinosauroid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That was it there on the screen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, Dorchester.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's in England.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I knew there was a couple of copies of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Trudon always comes back as the most intelligent dinosaur because it has really quite a big brain for its size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It does have a high encephalization quotient, so it's always been...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
like tagged as like a very good candidate for being the smartest dinosaur and basically he just hybridized that with the human but of course why would these things end up as like plantigrade quadrupeds and why would they go back to five fingers and actually i think he's only got three to be fair he's got very human like feet why has it got no tail what why would those things suddenly disappear there's no real reason other than just kind of human exceptionalism but like i mean you could argue that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Some parrots, some crows are phenomenally intelligent and show extremely clever behaviors on a par with apes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So at some level, some dinosaurs were extremely intelligent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and sociality and predation pressure and then the changing environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, the shrinking of the forest, pushing apes out of the trees into the environment or into the open environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I mean, if you have 160 million years in a global domination, I mean, this is the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You talked about lost behaviors, but the lost lineages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I wrote about this in one of my books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You want a weird animal, you go to a volcanic island.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You go to New Zealand, you go to Hawaii, you go to the Galapagos, and yet those are the places that basically don't really form fossils.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you think the dinosaurs we know about are strange.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What was the stuff knocking around there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We're never going to know, sadly, but for everything you think birds are cool, think about penguins compared to your average bird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They live on an ice shelf for six months of the year and can't fly and massively modified skeletons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And, you know, compared to your average bird, penguins are unbelievably weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So, yeah, take an average dinosaur and take it to like penguin level, ostrich level, hummingbird level evolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's going to be weirder stuff out there than we found.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Much weirder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If you travel back in time, you probably, your mind will be probably blown by the weirdness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because those things are almost always in small, isolated places that don't preserve fossils very well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so the odds of us
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
ever coming across them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, you see it to a degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you've got the stuff that comes out of what is modern Transylvania, Hatseg.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That was a series of islands in the Mediterranean at the end of the Cretaceous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And some of the weirdest dinosaurs are from that chain of islands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's not very isolated compared to, again, something like Hawaii or New Zealand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
but it's fitting the exact pattern.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You get dinosaurs on islands, they turn weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, dinosaurs were real animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, sounds really painfully obvious, but they weren't monsters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They followed...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
the same rules might be pushing it but certainly like guidelines like ecology operates in certain ways if you're bigger you need more food but you're more efficient you just are that's pretty much just physics and scaling so big dinosaurs are going to follow the rules of bigger animals and small dinosaurs are going to follow the rules of smaller animals they just will
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
quite how they violate it in certain ways by having unusually long necks or unusual physiology or eating an unusual diet or because there was a weird plant that was alive then that isn't now or whatever it may be that there's obviously a huge amount of variation and uncertainty but fundamentally we know what makes animals and ecosystems work and dinosaurs are animals in ecosystems
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're not that strange at some level and therefore reconstructing their actual biology is challenging, but far from impossible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I've been asked that on live TV before, only not with the sarcastic tone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yes, I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But again, we kind of touched on it, but I think there's probably very little of any kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
paleontological law that ended up in things like chinese culture with the chinese dragons and all of that stuff you know that one comes up repeatedly the only one i do know of again from alberta um is buffalo stones uh that then apparently some of the native americans had which are actually bits of ammonites so ammonites the curly spiral shelled cephalopods are related to octopus and squid
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So they have all these little segments to the shells and the right species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And when they break open, they have like two little pairs of legs and then a bulge and then a little bulge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it looks very roughly like a bison.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And apparently these were...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
thought to be like somehow miniature bison uh they're very rare because ironically although the dinosaur bones are extremely common um it was very swampy and so you didn't actually have a lot of sea coming in so you didn't tend to get things like ammonites and ocean going animals and then the shell would have to break in the right way but apparently for the local tribes sad i can't remember who it is in that bit of canada um but yeah these were these were quite valued
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, if you've got a Buffalo stone and I've seen a couple of them and yeah, you have to squint a bit, but as a little Buffalo, it's not far off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, but yeah, but that whole, like, were they finding mammoth legs and were they finding T-Rex's and was this inspiration for this animal or this mystical animal?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I don't,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
think they were, because you just don't tend to find them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So where do you think, like, you know, because dragons show up in a bunch of different myths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, right, but that's the thing, they turn up in British mythology and we barely got any dinosaurs here at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You only find them when you start digging for coal mines, which we weren't doing in... Is it basically dramatization of, like, of snakes and lizards and stuff like this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and just general exaggeration and welding stuff together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, that's one thing you could, I guess, potentially argue is that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, we find tyrannosaurs in North America and in East Asia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In fact, there's a whole bunch of stuff in the end Cretaceous, which is often very common because it's a relatively recent in the grand scheme of things in the history of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The fauna of East Asia, China, Mongolia, Eastern Russia is very similar to what you get in Canada and the USA and down in Mexico.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so you find the same rough stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're not exactly the same, but you get ceratopsians, you get tyrannosaurs, you get the big-edged dark pterosaurs, you get ankylosaurs, the armored ones, this, that, and the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So if these were influencing all those different cultures, why don't Chinese dragons look like Mexican dragons or equivalent of Thunderbirds or whatever?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, because it probably wasn't influencing them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
If they were all seeing the same skeleton, they'd probably all produce the same kind of mythical animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I mean, if you dredged up a colossal squid, I think you'd have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or even just dugongs and manatees.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, they're...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Several times I've pitched a book to publishers where I want to write a book that basically makes the point that there is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Almost nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, you can always dream up something totally ludicrous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There is basically nothing in science fiction that doesn't already exist on Earth in some way, shape, or form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I think people would be stunned about some of the weird stuff that's out there that they just wouldn't realize are real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, things like velvet worms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, it's just blow your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, Sicilians and stuff like this and their reproductive behavior.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
jaw-dropping i mean i love teaching about them i do a class on diversity of life and i do i was about eight weeks of vertebrate diversity and i love just dropping things in and the students are like what do you what do you mean that exists what do you mean something like that's normal for this group yeah yeah they do that what from that like that class but everything you've studied with the dinosaurs what have you learned about the evolution of life on earth that mechanism
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It sounds obvious, but I think the bit that still fries my brain is just the raw numbers, because I think we're very bad at considering...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I regularly talk about, Oh, this is 70 million years old, but this is 78 and this is 104.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And people are just like, Oh my God, how on earth do you deal with those numbers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I don't, they're just numbers because I can't conceive of it really any better than you can that they are astronomical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Last Thursday was quite a long time ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
66 million years is mind boggling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like I, I, I can't fathom it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But that's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think the evolution thing is, A, my suspicion is quite a lot of it happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not quite Stephen Gould punctuated equilibrium, but I think stressful events probably prompt a lot more than less stressful events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Population crashes and all these things that then odd things survive, and then that's changing your genetic component and all the rest of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But you've just got to remember that it's almost a numbers game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, it's that bad analogy of like, oh, evolution is just rolling dice and hoping you get all sixes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it's like, no, a friend of mine said, no, it's rolling dice, but it gets to keep the sixes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then suddenly getting a hat full of sixes isn't that hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But also you're in the context of even rare species, you know, ultra rare, short of stuff that like we've nearly killed off, but like very rare species have populations in the thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
and are probably around for hundreds of thousands of years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And very few, you know, other than a few things like whales and apes and elephants, mostly have dozens or thousands of offspring at a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So a few thousand animals that have a few thousand offspring at a line for a few hundred thousand years, yeah, it's billions and billions and billions of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's the rare stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You look at Mola Mola, the ocean sunfish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think Mola has just been split up into like five species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's one of the weirdest looking animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Love it, love it, love it, love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, what a fish that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Swims with a giant dorsal, and I think it's a giant anal fin, and then they flap alternatingly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Does it have a face?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
A little one at the front.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Eat jellyfish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Super open oceanic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they get really big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You see that one with the diver.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I think these are the record breeders for animals, and they have something like 100 million eggs at a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whoa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Don't quote me on that, but it is something in those kinds of numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, you don't need a very large population of sunfish to start having an awful lot of numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Are you going to Google it and see if you can find it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Number of eggs or something?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
300 million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Oh, I undercut it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's still a lot of eggs, though, when you think about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not that small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
300 million of one mil is still quite a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But that's the bit of evolution that I think I understand why people don't get it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We are mostly talking about millions in population times millions of years times thousands of offspring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and it's kind of a numbers game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, how could this evolve?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, the right selective pressure, and when you've got 100 billion offspring, probably a few of them have that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but it's also a massive compromise, which is the bit that people always miss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's Darwin's line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's descent with modification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yes, over time you can end up with extraordinarily weird things, but mostly what's happening is you're changing something fairly simple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You're making edits to the existing plan, which is why you don't have animals with tentacles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They have legs, which have joints, which have fingers, and they all have one bone, then two bones, then a bunch of little blocky bones, and then a few more, and then the little ones that make up the digits for hands and feet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Basically everything has that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
because you're modifying that pattern.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And occasionally we had something weird, like, um, most of the modern lung fish have basically reduced those down to, well, they, they had a more simple plan to begin with, but reduce it down to a stump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then they've got something like a flailing tentacle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, you know, snakes have got rid of them or the various legless lizards and things like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And again, Sicilians and all the rest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, you're subtly changing certain things in certain ways is mostly what's going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then those build up over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But also against that compromise of there's things that do and don't work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's things that are interlinked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so you can't modify A without modifying B.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
modifying a will kill you therefore b never modifies because the two are genetically linked in some way or yeah like the compromise of the lion's mane making it darker makes you sexier but more likely to kill you you you i think people think evolution is like perfecting things in some way and they're not they're bodge jobs you know that's why we have a blind spot in our eye but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
things like squid don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but it already had a swim bladder that it was probably processing a minimal amount of oxygen through, and the swim bladder evolved for a certainly different function.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, but again, you've got stuff that's not a million miles away from that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You have things like frogfish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
which are fully marine, but kind of clamber through seaweed and stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And they've got pseudo-functional limbs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Again, it's that Tiktaalik is not a weirdly derived frogfish, but it's not like it's a fish that suddenly came on land or a fish that suddenly evolved legs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There was already that selective pressure that was pushing it into a new opportunity, which gave it an
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
and then on and on and on, and that's what keeps going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it also brings up another thing, going back to dinosaurs and the behavior stuff, which, again, I think has been a problem, is the functionality thing and how there's always been, I think, this big perception of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
single traits having single functions which isn't how a huge amount of biology works for some yeah like eyes are used for seeing they don't really do anything else um but i think there's a lot of again it comes down to a lot of the sexual selection stuff but things like horns on triceratops that's probably quite good for fighting off predators but it's also quite good for fighting other
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
triceratops and then things like elephants dig with their tusks as well as fight other elephants as well as fight lions as well as stripping the bark off trees so you've got to be very careful about how you think of functionality in two different ways one way is what possible things could that thing do and what possible things could have been the main selective pressure before so you think about elephant tusks as i say they do all these different things but when an elephant's just got
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The tiniest little nubs, like the first elephant whose teeth are growing the wrong way and have pushed out of its jaw and now it's got a couple of little spikes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It can't really dig a hole with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's certainly not digging for water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're probably not great against a predator because you'd basically have to get on your knees to try and lean over and try and stab it a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But you can show off to the girls and you can immediately fight another elephant who's head-to-head the same height as you and you've got a massive advantage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So evolutionarily, they probably started as some kind of sexually selected feature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But now, functionally, they are probably compromised by the fact that having the best fighting tusks, but also having the tusks that are best at digging up water to keep you alive during a drought, is putting selective pressure on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And those are... Although sexual selection appears in both ends, those are two different things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Digging for water is critical, but it's probably not what started it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I think that's where we get trapped with things...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
like say the paddle tail of spinosaurus or stuff like or you know or t-rex arms it's like well why are t-rex arms like that well maybe we need to consider what a slightly longer arm is like or what it was being functioned for and its ancestors or how it works in other species or what else it might do rather than every paper is like did it do this or did it do this or did it do this it's like you know it could be all of them
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's a very different question to try and answer, but people don't tend to think of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And it ends up being very binary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And again, biology is not like that because it's a compromise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What does a miniaturized version of this look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And what might that function for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or how does it function in ancestral forms?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
A really good example of that is giraffe necks, which have been argued about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
about, you know, forever and a day it was giraffe necks are to help them feed up high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then in the late 90s, early 2000s, a couple of papers coming out going, actually, maybe it's sexual selection and competition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then that drove down into arguments about, well, what does a short neck look like in the acarpia?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's near as relative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And what do short legs look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And how do they work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And plus a whole bunch of other studies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And ultimately it came out that we were right the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is all about feeding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But it's a really interesting way of thinking about it and looking at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
10 and a half, 11,000 species of dinosaur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Are birds dinosaurs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Isn't that wild?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's just a yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
How many people know this, by the way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So there's an interesting one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I did a radio show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's probably seven or eight years ago now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
with a couple of, you know, drive time afternoon, nothing serious, nothing science or anything like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I mentioned something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And one presenter was, oh my God, what do you mean birds are dinosaurs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the other one is, what do you mean you don't know birds are dinosaurs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's hitting that tipping point of common knowledge, I think, where...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Does everyone know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I think an awful lot of people know and are now kind of used to it as an idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So what's evolutionary, the connection between birds and dinosaurs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, they literally are in the same way that we are apes and mammals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Birds are dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
direct, if you trace back the evolution of all the birds, so hummingbirds and albatross and ostrich and kiwi and parrots and pelicans and penguins and whatever else, and take them down to their ancestral point, and then go back quite a few more million years...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
their nearest relish to them is a dinosaur.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It is actually something very close to Velociraptor, or at least a small version of Velociraptor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the birds have literally descended from dinosaurs, therefore they are dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We have literally descended from other apes, we are apes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It is that form of evolutionary connection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Feathers are in Tyrannosaurs, so feathers go back at least... So ironically,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
because the fossil record is very incomplete.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Most of the things that are closest to birds, we know from the early and late Cretaceous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So the last kind of 50 million years of dinosaur evolution up to the extinction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And actually birds almost certainly go back another 50 million years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So birds did not appear as a result of the dinosaurs going extinct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Birds lived alongside the dinosaurs for a hundred million years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The birds were not new on the scene, and it's all like, oh, the dinosaurs died, and from the ashes rose the birds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
No, they've been knocking around forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They just survived because they're small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In a very large part, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's almost certainly what really helped them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But birds took a kicking in the Cate extinction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So did mammals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Loads of bird lineages went extinct, and only a handful got over the line, but they did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, we have feathers in, as I said, we've got middle Jurassic Tyrannosaurs that are 165 million years old, so 100 million years before the extinction, that have feathers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Simple feathers, they'd be like those you get on most baby chicks, so they're not with the big kind of classic pick-up-a-feather in the street or on a field of the big vein up the middle and then the kind of paired flat pieces.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This would be much more like a hare, but we have them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We've got something which is very close to a bird but might not quite be a bird with modern feathers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In the Middle Jurassic, we've got definitive stuff like Archaeopteryx in the Late Jurassic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then into the Early Cretaceous, we have a series of fossil beds in China which are just heaving with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, and there's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Tyrannosaurs have feathers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Velociraptor and the dromaeosaurs had feathers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Troodontids had feathers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Ornithomimosaurs, we've mentioned, they had feathers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so did a whole bunch of other groups as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's about eight or nine kind of major groups, kind of the size of something like, yeah, literally like carnivores or...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
deers, you know, some massive groups, about eight or nine of them were fully feathered, as far as we can tell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So feathers massively predate bird origins, but it was a major part of their evolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, it's probably a fundamental twofold one, which is feathers insulate you, they keep you warm, and most dinosaurs were...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's an archaic term, but it's what most people know, warm-blooded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So they were much more like us and birds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They had a stable, high body temperature, regardless of the environmental conditions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so if you're burning a lot of calories to stay warm, you want to kind of keep that heat, and feathers really help you do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then the other thing is, yeah, the obvious thing is sexual selection and communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Feathers do stuff that scales can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can shed them in winter and change color and come back as another one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
That's quite a handy trick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can change them between juveniles and adults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So baby birds have one type of feather.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Adults have a different one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We know of dinosaurs that do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, we've got adults and juveniles with different feather types preserved in the fossils.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um, yeah, you can produce all kinds of weird colors and displays.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You can, you can erect feathers, you can hold them up and fan them out like a peacock or a pheasant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas scales, you can't really do that a bit, or you need a huge amount of bone like predaceratops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
there's two good reasons that they would probably evolve and exactly pulling them apart or which is more important and again they're they're probably bifunctional as soon as you start making feathers and making them more colorful where you're staying warmer so that's an advantage or as soon as you start making feathers to make them warmer it probably won't be long until someone evolves them to be a bit brighter red and then we're back to oh my god red right but but that's what's happening and then they're gonna they're probably gonna push each other potentially
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
they absolutely do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I think, yeah, I think it gives them opportunities that, that,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
scales and solid structures simply don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, the sole ability, I mean, I say like, you know, peacocks and pheasants, they are a massive disadvantage to males when they've got these extra plumes on them because they're so big and heavy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Peacocks can barely fly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But the fact is, you can still kind of fold them up into a fairly neat package and kind of hide if you really wanted to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas if you're something like Triceratops,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
that billboard on the top of your head is not only enormous, but also bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's massive, it's heavy, and you've got to lug it around the whole year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Whereas peacocks at least can go, well, all the girls have settled down on their nests now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm just going to get rid of all this extra weight and dump it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I guess maybe not much more so than I would anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
as in I already, because again, I don't really think of myself as a paleontologist in a lot of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's not that I don't love my work, but it's,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I'm a biologist and this is what I'm looking at, but I'm fascinated and amazed by lungfish and flying frogs and caterpillars and onychophorans and butterflies and a million and one other hagfish and things that I think are cool and interesting and fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I could happily read about them or watch them in a zoo or documentary or whatever it may be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
almost every bit as much as I would with dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I probably appreciate the dinosaurs and pterosaurs in a very different way because I have such a greater intimate knowledge of the science in a way that I try and read the lion literature because I'm really interested in predation dynamics, but I can't keep up with it whilst doing all the other stuff as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So like the difference of like, what prey are they taking?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
At what percentage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
What influences?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
How are they competing with leopards?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a literature, body literature on this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
People are studying lions and what they hunt and what they eat and where they do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a, there's a whole bunch of stuff on particularly the, the African carnivores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Cause there's so many of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
They're so big and their populations aren't terrible compared to like South America or North America or, or a lot of Asia, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, going back to your question, yeah, I appreciate all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's all cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Some of it is definitely more awesome than others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I work on some of the giant pterosaurs, the ones with 10-meter wingspans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and it's hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
My partner's family's from Uganda, and we were in Uganda last year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I was watching Marabou Stork circle overhead, and you're like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
wow, these things are huge and amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then I'm like, the wingspan's about a fifth of the stuff I work on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Actually, these are quite piddly in the grand scheme, you know, it's like an airliner going overhead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And when you think about it in that context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, I mean, because that's it with the... I know people tend to be obsessed with size, and you kind of get it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, blue whales are fundamentally cooler than smaller humpback whales, even if humpback whales are cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Like, it's hard not to be impressed by Patago Titan or Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops or Quetzalcoatlus or any of these, like, ultimate giants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a reason we love great white sharks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a reason we love giant squid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a reason we love lions and grizzly bears and stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The dinosaurs do kind of do it better than anyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And the marine reptiles and the flying reptiles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's just so insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, both size and diversity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, and longevity as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, you look at...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You know, elephants have come and gone and, you know, the whales, okay, the whales have reached superlative sizes, but they're relatively new on the scene.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Could easily have gone extinct in the last century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, you know, there's truly titanic dinosaurs for at least 100 million years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And almost absolutely everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There's a handful of places that we found where it appears that dinosaurs didn't really get in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Something else kind of took over, you know, a bit like Australia with the marsupials versus the other eutherians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, fundamentally, it was a dinosaur planet for...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
After the Triassic, less so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
At the end of the Triassic when they're first getting going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But, yeah, Jurassic and Cretaceous, yeah, it's 140-ish million years of, yeah, just absolute dominance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, because I thought we'd get into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I mean, giant is an absolute diddy one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, so this is Protoceratops Andrews Eye.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I've done loads of work on Pridoceratops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's from Mongolia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is a latest size Juvenile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So I've got a big head and the big head's kind of like this, but I really couldn't fit it in the bag.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this is to scale Juvenile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is a cast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So this is not original, but someone has molded and copied it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So it's not carved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's a cast and a mold taken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So yeah, this is 100% accurate to the original specimen, or at least extraordinarily accurate to the original specimen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Young guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But yeah, I mean, at full size, it's going to be like pig or sheep size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So big, but not massive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I've got it partly because it's affordable, because I can't afford to buy the big skeletons and skulls.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I've done a huge amount of work on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And in part, it goes back to those earlier conversations about...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
populations and if you really want to understand animals you need an understanding of what a real population and a growth of what these animals looks like and protoceratops is i would argue probably the only dinosaur where we can really do that or at least as close as possible as you could get to any modern animal as an analog we've got well over 100 good skeletons though not
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
probably only about 70 or 80 in really accessible museums that's still a hell of a lot we have everything from here's a tiny baby on this is a really not cheap and nasty 3d print i had made but that's a hatchling sized one or not much bigger than a hatchling sized one
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
all the way up to the big adults we've now got embryos as well which we didn't have until about 10 years ago so we've got embryonic animals all the way up to big adults they're all pretty much from one place in mongolia and they are as far as we can tell from a relatively narrow window in time only about 100 000 years which in the grand scheme of things is very close
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So you've got one population from one place from one time with 100 animals from embryos up to big adults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So now if you want to look at, as I do, something like sexual selection and when does growth of the signal kick in and at what size and what evidence for dimorphism, well, suddenly you've got a population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
You've got something you can work with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that's why parasitoceratops is so important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I think way more important than even a lot of my fellow paleontologists realize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I genuinely think we should be pouring a lot more research into them because they can tell us stuff that pretty much no other dinosaur can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because you have the population data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we can treat it as a population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So going way, way back to a conversation about telling males and females apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And I said, big problem is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
population data or at least the number of specimens that you have when basically you've only got one two or three um i did a big study on this a few years ago on garyos the really long snouted crocodilians from nepal and india and pakistan with a giant bulge on the end of the nose and even though the males are all bigger than the females and the males all have this weird nose growth though that's mostly soft tissue but they have a weird depression in the jaw
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
in the end of the snout where the nostrils sit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We got a sample size of something like about 110 animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So these are very, very rare animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
So we had to ransack every museum worldwide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I was sending, my students sending emails to huge numbers of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Have you got one sitting in your collection lost?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Can you get it for us?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Can you take these photos or these measurements?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We can measure it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
We put the data set together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then we found that actually, apart from the very biggest males, it's really hard to tell males and females apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And this actually really closely matched some modeling data that I'd done with a colleague, Jordan Mallon in Ottawa, looking at this for alligators and trying to compare it to dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because though we talked about mutual sexual selection before...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Mutual sexual selection in particular, you tend to get things that are extremely similar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Males and females are very hard to tell apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But there's also, there's a gradient, you know, all the way up to things like peacocks, all the way down to you can't tell them apart, like parrots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And for some features, when they take time to get growing, or because dinosaurs grow over a very long window and are sexually mature over a very long window, you run into the problem that a big female will look like a small male.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we can't sex them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And lo and behold, this is what you get with the gharials.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
The really big males are obvious because they're so much bigger and they've got this big depression in the snout.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But medium-sized and big females look like medium-sized or smaller males and very small males.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so, yeah, that's basically what we have with dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Even with Protoceratops, where we've got a data set of like 100...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
papers have come out saying there's very mild sexual dimorphism or there isn't sexual dimorphism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Sexual dimorphism could be very strong in Protoceratops, but we can't find it because we can't tell the males from the females because we haven't ID'd enough through something like medullary bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And so you're in this horrible situation where, because going back to the T-Rex thing is like, well, maybe it's mutual sexual selection and therefore they're cooperating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And that would be cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But also maybe males are much bigger, but we can't tell because our data set's too small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
In which case they're not under mutual sexual selection and we've got it all wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
It's maddening because it's so, if these were living animals, you just watch them or you just genotype them or you sex them and you just know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And we just don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But on the other hand, we do have the mechanism to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There are a handful of places where you get a bunch of predaceratops together, where it's a mass mortality site.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, let's go and drill every bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because if that's the breeding season, we might find seven or eight females, and then the others are pretty much by default males, if we know it's the middle of the breeding season, because all the others have medullary bone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And now you know where your male-female split is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Now let's analyze those two data sets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And then maybe we'll see a difference and maybe we won't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
There are ways in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, there's ways in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
This is the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Yeah, there are ways in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And maybe we've got to get lucky because maybe it's not the breeding season yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Or maybe that just happened to be a group of all males, and therefore we're not going to get the signal we're looking for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But there's enough of them, and they're common enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
And yet, still digging in Mongolia, we keep finding new species, we keep finding new cooler stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
But I'm like, can we dig up some more Predoceratops?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Because actually, however cool these new things are...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Genuinely, if you want to know what dinosaurs are and how they worked, another 100 Protoceratops will actually probably tell us a lot more than 50 new species, however cool 50 new species might be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Well, thank you very much for having me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
I hope I haven't worn out my welcome with dinosaur story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park
Thank you.