Dave Hone

You know, things like velvet worms.

You know, it's just blow your mind.

You know, Sicilians and stuff like this and their reproductive behavior.

It's just...

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

It's really good.

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...

I regularly talk about, Oh, this is 70 million years old, but this is 78 and this is 104.

And people are just like, Oh my God, how on earth do you deal with those numbers?

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.

Yeah.

Last Thursday was quite a long time ago.

66 million years is mind boggling.

Like I, I, I can't fathom it.

Um,

But that's it.

I think the evolution thing is, A, my suspicion is quite a lot of it happens.

It's not quite Stephen Gould punctuated equilibrium, but I think stressful events probably prompt a lot more than less stressful events.

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.

But you've just got to remember that it's almost a numbers game.