Joe McCormick

speaker

4,384 appearances 9 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard yesterday

Joe McCormick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 9.

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Stuff To Blow Your Mind · From the Vault: The Wallace Line, Part 2 · 22 Sep 2026 podcast

Well, one example of this, uh, there's this early Permian reptile. voice-verified

a reptile called Mesosaurus, the sort of shaped like a little crocodile. voice-verified

It lived exclusively in freshwater lakes and rivers almost three hundred million years ago, and its remains have only been found in southern South America and southern Africa. voice-verified

Wait a minute, if it only lived in fresh water, like lakes and rivers, how did it get from Africa to South America? voice-verified

And as far as we can tell, nowhere in between. voice-verified

And then you've got other examples like this, like there's a Triassic land-based therapsid called uh Synonathus, also found in the fossil record of South America and Africa, among a few other equally baffling locations like voice-verified

Antarctica, huh? voice-verified

These examples showed, along with lots of other evidence that we have now, that these two land masses used to be one. voice-verified

That, you know, the range was one continuous range hundreds of millions of years ago, and these animals died, their remains were deposited, they were quickly buried, they became fossilized, and then the land split apart, and the Atlantic Ocean in between was formed. voice-verified

So that's one example of how biogeography can tell. voice-verified

Tell us not just about the animals but also about the land. voice-verified

Coming back to Wallace, at the time Wallace lived, plate tectonics was not yet an accepted theory. voice-verified

In fact, um voice-verified

It wasn't even really proposed in a form that would be recognizable to us until I think like the 1910s around then. voice-verified

Uh, and it wouldn't be widely accepted by geologists until the 1960s. voice-verified

So Wallace and his contemporaries did not know that the continents and land masses of the earth moved around, splitting and rejoining on the time scale of tens or hundreds of millions of years. voice-verified

Years. voice-verified

But Wallace did know that the surface of the earth could change drastically due to other factors, and one of those was climate. voice-verified

Climate patterns determine Earth's average temperature and weather, and in instances long ago when Earth's surface was colder and more of Earth's water was locked up in polar ice caps, sea levels were lower, much lower. voice-verified

As a result, many areas that are now ocean were once dry land, and many parts of the world that are now islands surrounded by shallow seas were once. voice-verified

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