Tetrapod Zoology Podcast – Tetrapod Zoology

Recorded LIVE at TetZooCon 2024. The audience laughter is real!

In this long awaited episode, TetZooCon, and dogmen, dogmen, dogmen, and… badgerman.

In this bumper episode, Darren has lots of news from the world of Darren (but sadly no fat-bottomed rodents), TetZooCon, and Mosasaurs!

Our long-awaited second episode on Mesozoic marine reptiles — the saga continues with Triassic Weirdos, which is a term you shouldn’t use.

Also with some ranting about certain birds are dinosaurs deniers (again).

Listen for great secret surprise!

Crocs, crocodiles, crocodyles, crocodylomorphs, crocodylomorphoformes,and non-crocodylilian crocodylomorphoformes!

… of getting through all the Mesozoic marine reptiles in less than an hour. Tune in to the next episode for the thrilling conclusion… possibly.

In this episode: frogs. And for those who don’t like frogs: frogs.

In this episode, spinosaur brains, ankylosaur throats, and scythes or reapers or claws or something.

This week on the podcats, we talk about wild cats, specifically big cats and small big cats in urban and suburban areas.

Darren and John return! … to discuss the books Mesozoic Art, A History of Painting (With Dinosaurs) and bringing back the Dodo.

Recent excavations in the vicinity of John’s hard disk have yielded a fossilised podcast from the Late 2021 period. Enjoy the retro stylings!

In this episode, fossils of the Kimmeridge clay, naughty fossils from Brazil, Ubirajara, Darren's new book, Dinopedia. Cladistics (sigh), domed-headed nose-pickers, and how they use them, a New Whale™, G̡͉̼̱̳͖͕̱̦͊r̼͕̺̃̾͑ͩ̕e̴̻͙͕͍̺͔͒n͙͍̭̘̲̭͔̆̍͑͢ͅd̛͕̪̠̞̩̰ͦͯe̘̣̖̮͒͢ͅl̴̫͖͉͎̃ͣ͊̐i̶͇͇͓̭̳͚̹͒͑̇u̧͍͉̺̠̅̎ş̖̞̬̦̻̺̼ͭ ̨̜̤̃͗̑̚ͅmͯ͏͎̪͍̙͇̮͖̤o̹͇͙̺ͧ̉̒̽͞r̡̬͍̺̹̰̘͙ͦd͈͖͕̦̦̓̓̕ã̧̞̳x̘̪̱̝͍͌̋ͩ͜, and cladistics headaches again. Oh my.

In this rapid-fire episode, TetZoom Con, Alien Worlds, John's 3Dish T. rex heads and the state of their lips, a discussion on eyes and taphonomy, science writing and stupid rules (never use black, kids!), Freddie the seal and free-running dogs. And finally a main event: Thylacine persistence.

In the eight-oh, FU on Romancing the Stone and Carnotaurus, John's art, Greg Paul again, and Alien Worlds. And for the main event: the Scansoriopterygidae - dead ends that sucked at the evolutionary goal of flying, or, you know, animals adapted to their environment? You decide!

TetZoo(m)Con is at on the 12th of December, save the date.

In this triple-A episode, abelisaurians, including Carnotaurus, and long discussion on soft tissue preservation. We also discuss the topic of a book Darren is writing, the grey popular and semi-technical literature on dinosaurs, and its impact on dinosaur science.

In this episode, Alan Feduccia’s “Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs: Forays in Postmodern Paleontology“ (no, we don’t get the title either), painting sauropods, reminiscing on Dinosaurs Past and Present (again). Monsters of the Deep and cryptozoology hoaxes. And finally, what we’ve all been waiting for: naked pterosaurs!

In this episode, FU from our listeners, also, news from world of Darren and John: 'how to be a science writer', Goldenose, Darren’s ZSL talk, SuperDinosaur. I News from World of News: Persiophis, bats vs birds, tails of Spinosaurus, and our main event: there are not too many sauropod dinosaurs, fool!

For years we’ve been threatening to release transcripts of the podcast episodes. Today, that project reaches the start of what might be seen as what could be the seed of the spark that starts this possibility becoming an eventuality one day. Yes, here’s a TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE ONE OF THE TETZOO PODCAST, originally released in February 2013. It was very kindly transcribed by Mark The Fish (if that is his real name)… kidding, he’s called Mark E. Evans… and we owe him a huge dept of gratitude. So here it is…

 TetZoo Podcast - Episode 1: The Prequel

(originally released January 30th, 2013)

SHOW SUMMARY: Azhdarchid pterosaurs, plesiosaur phylogeny, blue and green peafowl, glass frogs, SciFi movies: Prometheus, Aliens, Star Wars, Star Trek, and the sorry state of movie prequels, tetrapod-zoology related books, and podcast / website info.

(Opening dramatic music)

JOHN: Hello, and welcome to the Tetrapod Zoology, podcast prequel. Today’s the 30th of January 2013, and I’m John Conway, and you’re about to hear the smooth, silky tones of Dr. Darren Naish… Hi, Darren.

DARREN: Hi, how’s it going?

JOHN: Alright, alright, how are you?

DARREN: Ehh (sluggishly).

JOHN: Yeh (mockingly).

DARREN: Alright.

JOHN: Good podcasting, Darren.

DARREN: It’s going well so far… Uh, you said you’d edit it.

JOHN: What kind of podcast do you think people want? Do you think this is what they tune in for?

DARREN: Well… It’s not going well already… Sorry.

JOHN: It’s all right. I can fix everything in post.

DARREN: Seriously, we’re going to have to start again.

JOHN: What? I’m not going to do the whole hi-Darren thing again.

DARREN: Just don’t.

JOHN: Ok… so… Ok… What have you been up to?

DARREN: What have I been up to? Well, uh, I’ve been doing quite of bit of technical work lately on… pterosaurs. And at the time of… speaking, now, there’s a paper on pterosaurs, which is due out today, hopefully. So, that’s been taking up most of my time, uh, lately. Quite a few other things. Recently published a paper on, uh, plesiosaurs. Obviously, I’ve been continuing with various work on theropods and other things, and ichthyosaurs, and other animals I work on. Obviously, I’ve also been busy writing for TetZoo on obscure frogs and seabirds. And, uh, well, there’s always a lot of things planned that I hope to publish on.

JOHN: Cool, cool. We’ll talk about some of them later. But, umm, so what’s the skinny on the pterosaurs?

DARREN: Umm, well, I suppose by the time this podcast goes out the paper will be released, so I can say what I like, right?

JOHN: You can also tell me not to put it out. Can’t you? So there you go.

DARREN: The paper is in PlosOne and it’s due to come out, I think, we’re waiting for confirmation, but I think it’s due to come out tonight, and it describes a new azhdarchid pterosaur from the latest Cretaceous rocks of the Transylvanian Basin in Romania. And it’s a new taxon, which we’ve named Eurazhdarcho langendorfensis. It’s one of several projects that has either come out or is due to come out soon on field work that I and colleagues have done on late Cretaceous Romanian stuff… really exciting fauna. I mean during the latest Cretaceous, during the Maastrichtian, much of Romania was, of course, a giant island. Hateg Island, it’s known as. And it’s famous for its dwarf ankylosaurs, dwarf sauropods, weird archaic, duckbilled dinosaurs… umm, the peculiar maniraptoran theropod Balaur bondoc, this weird stubby-footed, probable dromaeosaur is from there. And there were…

JOHN: The one everyone said had two… two, sickle claws.

DARREN: Yeah, it said that it had two, sickle claws because…

JOHN: But when you look at it… not so much.

DARREN: Yeah, it’s that, it’s that it’s got both the hallux raised as well as digit 2, and that makes it look like it’s got both digits raised in parallel, but that does seem to be a fluke. It just seems that the hallux is…not really sure on that, even though I’ve looked at the specimen. The giant monograph on that animal is certainly due to come out in a matter of days. But in, on this island, ecosystem, latest cretaceous times there are gigantic azhdarchids. There’s an animal called Hatzegopteryx thambema, which is, as you know, one of the biggest, probably the biggest azhdarchids, a wing span of probably 10 to 11 meters, it’s is on par with Quetzalcoatlus, 200 to 250 kilos, according to estimates produced by Witton, Habib, and others. But… we have found that alongside these super giant azhdarchids there are small ones as well, and this new animal, Eurazhdarcho… is a small one, small for a, small for an azhdarchids, wing span of about 3 meters. So there are giant azhdarchids, but there are small azhdarchids living seemingly side-by-side in the same ecosystem, which is one of those things where, you know, if you said… we found this big one with small ones in the same habitat, well big deal. Don’t you kind of expect that? Sort of thing you see in modern ecosystems, you see close relatives… close relatives living alongside one another, but it’s one of those things in palaeontology where you don’t… you might assume it, but you don’t know it until you have evidence for it. It’s not always the case, I mean sometimes you can have animals that are just a one off, right?

JOHN: You have a similar situation with, umm, with Quetzalcoatlus in, in Texas, right? You've got a small one and a big one.

DARREN: That’s right. So the fact that we have these big ones and small ones living alongside one another that led us to basically to go and look at places where, other places where azhdarchids are known and you see several geological units around the world where this pattern is repeated, where you have a really big one, a Quetzalcoatlus-sized or Hatzegopteryx-sized together with a small one. Some places, like in, umm, in the Javelina Formation in Texas, where Quetzalcoatlus is from, you seem to have three. There’s… there’s … Everyone knows there's the giant Quetzalcoatlus, then there's this animal called Quetzalcoatlus sp., which still hasn’t been properly described or named, despite the fact that it was discovered in 1975!

JOHN: Well, you know these things take time. You can’t rush them.

DARREN: Uhh! Pterosaur workers, what can we says about ptero..? Pterosaur workers have to be…it’s just a coincidence, isn’t it? There are some extremely... thorough individuals in the community.

JOHN: (Laughter)

DARREN: And then we also have in the Javelina, we have this animal,.. uh, it's only known by, well, this TMM specimen, TMM848262, or whatever it is. This.. uh, specimen, which has been some, it's only know from the front part of the snout and lower jaw, and it's sometimes been illustrated, including in Peter Wellnhofer's Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs, it's been illustrated as a specimen of Quetzalcoatlus, but it's not, it's rather different. It's quite shorter snouted than... Quetzalcoatlus sp. We don't have any skull...

JOHN: It's got a quite a high snout, too, isn't it? That's the one in the Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs.

DARREN: Yes, right. It's tall and... tall and short... taller and shorter than, than you'd expect for an azhdarchid. And it looks a little bit Thalassodromid-like, like Thalassodromeus and Tupuxuara. And as a consequence a couple of authors, including myself, have actually argued in print that it is a species of Tupuxuara. We now think that's incorrect. Mark Witton wrote an article a few years ago... explaining why that was incorrect. So that means there are three azhdarchids in the Javalina. And umm, so it, we think there are, we can say there are several... communities around the world where you have... seemingly niche partitioning among azhdarchids. The smaller ones are obviously doing different things from the giant ones. And uh, it's this discovery of Eurazhdarcho in the same community as Hatzegopteryx, which has led us to... think that, you know, maybe the... uh, the structure of the... uh, azhdarchid... the, the structure of the ecosystems that azhdarchids are part of is maybe more complicated than... maybe we've assumed before. We always have to be careful in saying things like this, because we're not saying we are the first people to say this, obviously other people have noted the presence of more than one azhdarchid in a... in a unit, before. But it's considering further what does it actually mean for the shape of the communities and everything.

JOHN: Do you think you're getting this pattern because... azhdarchids are pretty much the only thing around... by that.. by that stage?

DARREN: Yeah, that's really interesting.

JOHN: Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

DARREN: Well, well, that is, that is a really interesting point. I mean, we, we... as you, you've just alluded to, the... by the, by the end of the Cretaceous, it seems there are only two or three.. uh, pterosaur lineages around. There's probable presence of nyctosaurs of the very last part of the Late Cretaceous, in the...

JOHN: That's pronounced NIGHK-TOE-SAURS by the way.

DARREN: Who says?

JOHN: Me.

DARREN: (Laughter) Just going to say this. Well, you could be right. I don't know. We... we... we just make.. make these pronunciations up, don't we?

JOHN: It'd be N-I-C-K, if it was NIK-TOE-SAURS.

DARREN: (Laughter) I'm sticking with NIK-TOE-SAURS. Thanks very much.

JOHN: That's awful.

DARREN: (Laughter) Most of the... yeah, most pterosaurs obviously in the Maastrichtian are... azhdarchids. So, if you're going to expect pterosaurs to be doing more than one thing, then yeah, you're going to have to have different species of a... of azhdarchids. From the Romanian perspective, from the perspective of the this Hateg Island ecosystem, it's particularly interesting, because, although this is... the size of this island is... under dispute. Uh, some people suggested it was as small as 7,500 sq. kilometers... which is about the size as, say, one of the small Caribbean Islands. Uh, Puerto Rico is fairly close. Puerto Rico. And other people suggest it was much as... uh, 200,000 sq. kilometers, which is more like Ellesmere Island in the Arctic. You know, that's... that's a big island. I don't know how big the UK is, but whatever it is, it's big. Umm... but we know that there was... whatever however big it was, we know it had a rich diversity of dinosaurs and crocodyliforms, lizards, and Mesozoic mammals, and so on. But one thing that's absent, there are no big theropods. We don't have any big theropods from this island. It's kind of temping to wonder whether the azhdarchids here are kind of exploiting the absence of big theropods. Of course, the problem with that hypothesis is that you immediately say --- well, Quetzalcoatlus is living alongside, you know, tyrannosaurs and so on. It doesn't seem that there... that would be a problem. But one thing that I'm discussing or touching one in the TetZoo article, which is going to go live today, or whatever, is umm.. There are several suggestions that the biggest of azhdarchids, Hatzegopteryx and Quetzalcoatlus, there's the idea out that they could have been flightless. Now, we can't test this because we don't yet have good, wing remains from those giant species. But if there's any where in the world where a giant azhdarchid's going to be flightless, it's probably on an island.

JOHN: So, are there no wing remains from Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the big one?

DARREN: Umm.

JOHN: There's a humerus, isn't there? But no...

DARREN: Yeah, sorry.. wing finger remains?

JOHN: Yes.

DARREN: Yeah, umm... Off the top of my head, I mean it's a bit dangerous to say this, but I don't think there are. I think that every single time that you see wing elements -- distal to the humerus... every time you see distal wing finger elements for Quetzalcoatlus, they're always from the small one, aren't they?

JOHN: Yeah.

DARREN: So, I'm not absolutely sure, but I think... I think that's right. I don't think there's any elements that would allow you... that would inform this debate about flightlessness. And there...

JOHN: (Interrupts) Sorry.

DARREN: Sorry.

JOHN: Also, I guess you could argue they were flighted when they were smaller and umm... lost the ability to fly and therefore they would still would have... umm, wing elements. But...

DARREN: Yeah, all these things are out there. Well, yeah, we know of some modern birds, I'm talking about some species of steamer duck, where individuals are flight... in...in water fowl in general, ducks in general, individuals are flighted or flightless at different times in their life, depending where they are in their molt cycle. And also you can have females that are flighted and males that are flightless. You can have these kind of intraspecific... uh, differences in flightlessness. So those things are at least plausible... for pterosaurs as well. We do have new information specifically relevant to this subject but it's being worked on at the moment. We do have more material of Hatzegopteryx that's under description right now.

JOHN: Right, so it still could be... um, a flighted animal.

DARREN: I don't... I can't, I can't say any more on that... very sensitive area.

JOHN: (Laughter) Your special area. I won't touch you there.

DARREN: (Laughter) Hands off.

JOHN: Alright, so maybe we should move on to talking about what's been on, um... on TetZoo, the blog... recently.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah... what has been on TetZoo, the blog, recently?

JOHN: Well, there's been many things, hasn't there? As there always is.

DARREN: As always is, of course.

JOHN: But I guess I wanted to start with the plesiosaurs.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah... yeah, umm.

JOHN: I am actually very very confused about plesiosaur phylogeny. So perhaps we should run through a little bit about... what they are and the main branches and groups and clades. Umm... just so I can have a grounding, because I'm often quite confused. So, yeah, maybe you start with that.

DARREN: Yeah, so, umm, within Plesiosauria in general, we obviously know that we have the long necked, short headed, small-headed ones, that we, that traditionally are being called plesiosaurs, sort of long-necked plesiosaurs, and then the short necked, big-headed ones conventionally called pliosaurs. Umm... that's pretty basic stuff, right? But we now are very confident that some of the ones that have the pliosaur type of body shape are nested within the long-necked clade. So, people now, following work that was done by plesiosaur researcher, Robin O'Keefe, a couple of years ago, we now refer to the pliosaur-shaped ones as the pliosauromorphs and the long-necked ones as the plesiosauromorphs. And there are members of the long-necked... long-necked plesiosaur clade that are pliosauromorphs, but they are not closely allied to other pliosauromorphs.

JOHN: (Chuckling)

DARREN: So we've got these two body... body styles that definitely evolved like more than once.

JOHN: Sorry, just to be clear... pliosauromorphs and plesiosauromorphs, these aren't clades?

DARREN: (Chuckling) No, that's the general description...

JOHN: They're just the names of... body plans?

DARREN: Body plans, the same of mesomorph and endomorph... which is a human body shape. Umm, but cladistic studies have consistently --- since O'Keefe's work, so from the late 1990's onwards --- they've consistently shown that there are clades that kind of do correspond to plesiosauroidea, the mostly long-necked ones, and pliosauroidea the mostly short-necked ones. But... early members of pliosauroidea might have been long necked. And as I said there are pliosauromorph members of the plesiosauroid clade. So it does seem there is an early divergence into a pliosauroid and a plesiosauroid clade. Umm... there are some... umm... pliosauroids, like the rhomaleosaurs -- it's mostly early Jurassic, pliosauromorph group, some members of that group are really quite long necked and they don't have heads that are as big as those of kind of conventional pliosauromorphs. And if those animals, if those rhomaleosaurs, really are members of the pliosauroid lineage, then that shows that early pliosauroids were plesiosauromorph.

JOHN: (Laughing)

DARREN: You, you... this is very hard without diagrams...

JOHN: (More laughter)

DAAREN: Then the problem is there...

JOHN: I understand why I was confused.

DARREN: There are conflicting phylogenies, which is one of the problems as well. So there's a pliosauromorph clade called the polycotylids... so relatively short necks, relatively big heads, and there are actually competing positions as to where they go in the phylogeny. So, conventionally, because they look pliosauromorph, they've been included within pliosauroidea. And there are some recent phylogentic studies that find polycotylids -- find these pliosauromorph animals -- to be close relatives of pliosaurids, like Liopleurodon, and then animals like Trinacromerum and Kronosaurus. So some studies do find these pliosauromorph animals to go within the pliosauroid lineage. But other studies that find that they've actually got -- polycotylids have actually got a lot of features that are otherwise typical of long-necked, pleiosauromorph taxa. And those studies find these pliosauromorph polycotylids to be deeply nested within the plesiosauroids, the mostly long-necked clade. And the group that the TetZoo article is mostly about, the Leptocleidids... they are involved in this as well because they've been... they're pliosauromorph, so again they're short-necked, relatively big-headed. And they've often been allied with rhomaleosaurs. They've also been regarded as the ancestors of polycotylids. So again you have totally conflicting phylogenies, where some people put them in the... say that they are pliosauromorph, and they go within the Pliosauroidea. And other people say they are pliosauromorph, but they are deeply nested within the Plesiosauroidea, and they may be close to polycotylids. They show that within the clade of plesiosauroids, that includes elasmosaurs and cryptoclidids... uh, this shows that there's a reduction in neck length, with leptocleidids being kind of inter... having intermediate neck proportions and polycotylids having shorter neck proportions. So... very hard to show without diagrams. I mean I think I did show a few cladograms on TetZoo. There are competing cladograms... um, where the positions of some these groups are totally changeable according to which analysis you follow. And uh... and there are studies currently in press that have completely conflicting results, as well. So it doesn't look like this debate is going to be resolved any time soon. But basically, there is a... there is a pliosauroidea. There is a plesiosauroidea. Because names like "plesiosaur" are now so confusing, some people deliberately use "plesiosaurian" to refer to all members of plesiosauria. And they only talk about... so you only talk about plesiosaurians and plesiosauroids.

JOHN: (Chuckling) Right. I'm sure everyone will remember that.

DARREN: (Laughter) It's dead simple. So... I'm sure you follow...And there are some recent phylogenies that have even found some pliosauromorphs, like rhomaleosoids, to be outside the clade that includes plesiosauroids and pliosauroids. So, they actually have... rhomaleosaurs as the sister taxon to a clade that includes all of the plesiosaurs. And that clade is being called neo-plesiosauria. So that...

JOHN: Neo-plesiosauria. Great.

DARREN: Yeah, that's another typology. Yeah, yeah... yeah.

JOHN: Umm... so, what sorts of time periods do these various groups turn up in?

DARREN: Umm, well, plesiosaurians as a whole are a...originate in the late Triasssic. We've got various fragments of them from like the Rhaetian. And they seem to be like early rhomaleosaur-type animals. And then, umm, it does seem that you have, umm, major radiations of both pliosauroids and plesiosauroids, including man of the classic groups like the cryptoclidids and the pliosauroids. You have those in the middle and late Jurassic. But then there seems to have been a major turnover around about the Jurassic-Cretaceous event. And then it's almost as if everything is kind of, umm... there's a major explosion of, of intermediate taxa, and pliosauromorph taxa that aren't related to the pliosauromorph taxa of the early and middle Jurassic. So they're groups like, classic groups, like umm... again there are competing ideas. And one of the things that's kind of happened within recent years is some of the ideas about the affinities of certain groups have changed. So, some people have proposed that various early and middle Jurassic, long-necked... so plesiosauromorph taxa. Some people have suggested that...

JOHN: I think, I think long-necked is better.

DARREN: Ahhh, ok. Some people have...

JOHN: And short-necked.

DARREN: Keep it simple. I'm with you. Ok, yeah... yeah. Some people have said that, that some of the long-necked ones from the early part of the Jurassic are early elasmosauroids... elasmosauroids... most famously associated with the late Cretaceous. Umm, whereas, more recent studies have found that they aren't elasmosauroids, these Jurassic ones. They're just kind of an earlier experiment in long-necked plesiosaur evolution. Uh, and they aren't closely related to elasmosauroids, in which case elasmosauroids are like only a Cretaceous event. There's a group from the very end of the Cretaceous that have always been called aristonectids. And they're really weird long-necked --or intermediate-length necked-- umm, plesiosaurs with multiple teeth, as many as like two-hundred teeth are sometimes associated. It's been suggested that they were, umm, suspension feeders of some sort. They're mostly known from the southern hemisphere, from Antarctica, New Zealand, and South America. And they've conventionally been interpreted as close relatives of the mostly, middle-Jurassic cryptoclidids. But... some newer studies have shown these aristonectids, in fact, are a subgroup of elasmosaurids. So again, this kind of cuts... if that's true, it, it reduces the number of lineages that are meant to have persisted from the Jurassic into the Cretaceous. So what we're seeing at the moment is a general... generally developing toward the idea that the plesiosaurs of the Cretaceous represent a radiation from just one or two lineages that made it into the Cretaceous. And that they were... their radiation was a separate event from the Jurassic radiation.

JOHN: Right. And so the... in the article you talk about... now remind me, which clade is it that is suppose.. that is controversial as to whether it's a radiation from plesiosauroids or pliosaouroids?

DARREN: Well, the article is mostly about leptocleidids.

JOHN: Leptocleidids.

DARREN: Yeah, so they are relatively short-necked, so they're pliosauromorph. And they've kind of got intermediate proportions. Some of them have got longish necks of say like twenty-four cervical vertebrae. Umm, and their heads aren't as big as those of classic pliosaurs. Umm, so yeah, they are a controversial group. Some people have regarded them as, umm, late surviving relics of the kind of rhomaleosaur radiation of the early Jurassic. That is, that is interpreting them as members of the short-necked, pliosauroid clade. But other people... and we argue in our recent paper... we argue that instead the evidence better supports them as deeply nested within the mostly, long-necked clade.

JOHN: Allied to elasmosaurs and umm... are the other things that were meant to make it through the Jurassic-Cretaceous event?

DARREN: Yeah, part of the clade that includes the cryptoclidids, which are the ones famous for having lots of small needle-like teeth, the elasmosaurids, famous for their stupidly-long necks, and the polycotylids, the ones that also are controversial because they are, umm... pliosauromorph in body form.

JOHN: So this would mean this is a substantial reduction in the number of ghost lineages...

DARREN: Exactly.

JOHN: ...from late Cretaceous into the Jurassic, mid Jurassic and even early Jurassic?

DARREN: That's right. There is a major paper coming out about this coming out -- I'm not involved in it-- by Roger Benson and Pat Druckenmiller. And umm, that is one of their main conclusions, that the number of lineages that make it through the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary changes substantially according to this new phylogeny.

JOHN: And the pliosauroids... how many lineages of them made it through? Are they still in good shape in the early Cretaceous and the...?

DARREN: Yeah, they seem to have survived till pretty late in the Cretaceous, till, I think, possibly around the Cenomanian. So that's kind of like late, middlish Cretaceous, about, I don't know, 95 million years ago, or so. Because, umm, animals like Brachauchenius and Kronosaurus do seem to be allied to pliosaurids or members of the pliosaurid clade within pliosauridea.

JOHN: Yeah, if they turned out not to be pliosaurs, I'm afraid the whole pliosaur thing falls apart for me. I can't think of any other pliosaurs. They are the pliosaurs.

DARREN: You've got Liopleurodon.

JOHN: Yeah. OK. That's a late Jurassic one, isn't it?

DARREN: Yeah, yeah.

JOHN: I thought Liopleurodon was very similar to Kronosaurus.

DARREN: Well, it's similar, but I wouldn't say very similar. I mean they are kind of similar. One of the problems of Kronosaurus is it's one of those classic animals where... I think, I don't know about you, but I certainly have an image of it in my mind. I'm sure most people do. And that image is substantially inaccurate, because it's based on the erroneously augmented skeleton at Harvard, which, uh, has been given extra vertebrae to make it much longer. So it looks much longer than the actual animal did. And it's... when you think of its skull, you think of the Harvard mount, but it was substantially restored in plaster to look different than the original thing.

JOHN: Actually, I was... lucky enough to be in Queensland when Colin McHenry was going through all the, umm, Kronosaurus material. So, I actually saw a lot of the original fossils, including a nearly complete skull...

DARREN: No way. Wow.

JOHN: ...which we moved around and put together. I mean it was shattered up. But, umm, it was, it was quite impressive. It doesn't really look anything like that Harvard mount. It looks quite...

DARREN: Yeah, yeah, I've seen...

JOHN: ...it's very triangular.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah, I've seen Colin's reconstructions, and I, so far as I know, he still hasn't published them. But umm, some years ago, he showed a... at a conference I remember him showing a reconstruction of his view of Kronosaurus, and it was radically different from anything you've seen in the literature. It looked really weird, as well. It a... its head was proportionally huge.

JOHN: Yeah, it does seem like its head is really huge. And as I say, very triangular. I actually don't have a very good notion of what Liopleurodon looks like. I think that's the one I'm less familiar with.

DARREN: Well, interestingly...a kind of similar situation. We do have a good handle on what Liopleurodon... looks like. And most people, if they want to know, and if they're not looking at specimens, they look at... Andrews's monograph from the 1920's, I think. But, umm... but Liopleurodon and Simolestes, another pliosauroid of some sort. Again, controversial ideas on what it is. But... those two animals were monographed in detail by Leslie Noè... umm... for his PhD. But he hasn't published that work. And I have access to that work, and so I have a good handle of what the skull of... certainly what the skull Liopleurodon looks like. And... again it's something that really hasn't been reflected in, umm... mainstream literature, and certainly not in things like, uh... the classic version of Walking with Dinosaur and various...

JOHN: Walking with Dinosaurs, yeah.

DARREN: Yeah, things you've seen in books... they don't... they aren't... they're close, but they're not an accurate match in terms of what it's meant to... what it really looked like, as far as we can tell.

JOHN: It seems to be quite a pattern with a lot of these... large, quite famous, animals, they're actually much less studied than you'd think. There's not as much in the literature than you'd think. And people haven't accessed it as much as you think they would.

DARREN: Yeah, I find that's true for so many things in descriptive... zoology, though. You... you name a subject or a taxon, uh, a particular species, or whatever, and you'd... off the top of my head. off the top of anyone's head, if they know this stuff, they can think of like one or two studies. And if you actually write down how many things have really been published on it, it's, it's frightening. I mean, I remember seeing, just for example, a list of how many studies there were on the descriptive osteology of birds. And you might think, surely, there's hundreds, there must be hundreds I haven't heard of. But when you look at the total list, someone must have gone to a great trouble to collect everything ever done, the number's really small. And if you've ever looked into this subject, if you've ever gone, you know, tried to collect the literature... it's, umm... you as an interested researcher will be aware of certainly more than half of it, maybe two-thirds of it. There's often not much. And yeah, you're right, a group like pliosaurs, I mean if you've got anyone who knew anything about these animals to write down... I don't know... write down the authors who've written about these things, just off the top of your head, and they write down ten or twelve authors. That's it. That's probably it. That's probably all that's... all there ever is. There's a...

JOHN: Yeah, I guess what I... you'd also expect some of the bigger, more spectacular, animals to get more attention. Umm, for example, there is quite a lot on Tyrannosaurus rex. If you want to know what it looks like, you can find this out... very easily. But there's lots and lots of... large famous animals --Quetzalcoatlus, Deinosuchus, large plesiosaurs-- which are quite famous, but this sort of material doesn't exist. And we've been laboring under delusions for a long time.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah, and there's complicated reasons for all those things. But yes, there are, you're right, there are reasons.

JOHN: Yes...OK... that you can't really talk about. (Laughter)

DARREN: Well, well, we can allude to it. There is, there is this kind of, umm, I think in descriptive anatomy, zoology, palaeontology in general there is this kind of agreement that you don't work on something when someone is supposedly doing it. And because... it's just a fluke, you know, that at this particular time, we're at a time in history, let us include ourselves within the workings of the 20th century... we're at a time in history where we've come out of this Victorian stage of initial descriptive work, we're now entering this new phase of descriptive digital work... and in between, people have just come out of the end of the Victorian phase saying --We need to do these again, we need to describe them properly. But that's hard work, it takes a long time. And if you even think about, say, the middle decades of the twentieth century, that's probably the phase when people started saying --Oh, I'm going to work on all of those. I'm going to work on the pliosaurs. I'm going to wok on the saber-tooth cats. I'm going to work on the fossil elephants. And then you have these small numbers of individuals that are kind of dominating those fields. And, yeah, they often aren't able to produce the works that we expect there to be... within a few decades, bringing us up to now.

JOHN: Yeah, I guess that's true. There hasn't been that many people in the field. And anatomical work is incredibly time-consuming, isn't it. Descriptive anatomical work is very time-consuming. So... it's not really surprising, I guess. But, uh, I guess it is surprising for the more spectacular things, which you'd think people would want to, umm... get out there into high, impact journals, as quickly as they could. Umm... but in some ways that detrimental to actual, proper anatomical description, in any case.

DARREN: True, yeah.

JOHN: Right, so, umm... what else have we got on TetZoo that we might want to talk about? Pheasants?

DARREN: Pheasants, turkeys, peafowl?

JOHN: Peafowl or glassfrogs?

DARREN: Glassfrogs? Well, you tell me.

JOHN: Uh, let's talk about the fowl, to start with. I think we've got time. We're doing pretty well. So...

DARREN: Cool, yeah, yeah. There are so many things. So, so, here we are, very early on in 2013, and one of my plans is, uh -- Oh my god, stop writing new stuff, finish the stuff that needs to be finished. Some people have said a couple of time that there are several, I don't know how many, but there are quite a few SERIES of articles on TetZoo that I've started...

JOHN: Series-EZ

DARREN: I never know the correct plural for that term.

JOHN: Series-EZ

DARREN: Is that true? Do you think that's right?

JOHN: (Laughter) Ser-EYE

DARREN: There are many groups of articles concerned with the same subject that have just never been completed. And that's not because I'm not interested...

JOHN: (Laughter) Groups-EZ

DARREN: (Laughter) I kind of get to a bit that sort of has me stuck, or I have to move on for other reasons and it then lays fallow for a while. So I promised myself -- finish all these groups of articles that desperately need to be completed. And, uh, I'm trying to do that at the moment with the, uh, petrels. But then there is a pressure in blogging... in that you feel you need to... you know, you should have something there fairly regularly, every few days, something to keep people visiting, because people are very fickle. The amount of visitors drops off like a cliff edge...

JOHN: Well, you know, people who do blogging, and they try to do it for a living, they're like three times a day, aren't they?

DARREN: Exactly, yeah, I know...

JOHN: It's crazy.

DARREN: How they do that... I suppose they can do that because they are getting enough recompense for it...

JOHN: But I suppose, but to be honest, I'm not interested in what anyone has to say three times a day. You have to digest your thoughts more than that.

DARREN: Yeah, I don't, I don't look at any blogs that have that level of frequency, because with all due respect to the individuals concerned, their thoughts are often extremely superficial, and uh...

JOHN: There's no time to digest anything. So yeah, I don't think that's really an option. But even like once a week like you do, or is once every four days, or something like that?

DARREN: Something like that... every three or four days, I guess.

JOHN: ...tremendous amount of pressure and work.

DARREN: So, yeah, yeah, there is pressure to produce something new. And what often happens is that because I haven't had the time to finish a lengthy piece, is that I go and look at the pictures I have kicking around. I've got thousands and thousands of images of, you know, museum specimens and animals I've seen, and whatever. And understandably, the majority of those pictures are of fairly accessible things, I don't... it's quite difficult to get obscure... good images of obscure animals. Those that are available on the internet often aren't available.. for, you know, just random use. They're not creative commons, or whatever. They're not open... they're just not really available without you making special arrangement. Now, I don't have those pictures, myself. I do, of course, like a lot of people, I do have lots of pictures of... charismatic big mammals and showy birds, because you go to any wildlife park and you get thousands of photographs of those. So, in a panic, I go and look at my pictures --oh, there's a pretty picture of a peacock... or a turkey... well, let's run with that... I can use that... I can say a few interesting things about those animals. And before you know it, you've gone off on a little tangent --oh, let's talk about the exciting world of peafowl... and the fascinating history of turkeys. And that is how... the a...

JOHN: (Chuckling) A bill becomes a law?

DARREN: (Chuckling) That's how.. that's how a bill becomes a law. That's how the recent thread on a... game birds... umm... got started. Just with that --oh, yeah, a picture of a... peafowl are mostly Asian and turkeys are mostly North American, they don't encounter each other that much in the wild. But having said that, they probably do, because now there are feral turkeys and feral peafowl all over the world. But whatever... umm, yeah, it was a good excuse to use a...

JOHN: Who'd win? Who'd win?

DARREN: Who'd win in a fight? Peafowl would. Turkeys... a domestic turkey, umm, is a big, strong, feisty animal, but, but peafowl are more formidably armed and faster and generally nastier in my experience. (Laughter)

JOHN: (Laughter)

DARREN: Maybe that's an idea for another article --Who'd win in a fight between a turkey and a peafowl? But game birds --huge, fascinating, diverse, bizarre group of birds. One of those groups of animals, you know, really want to get stuck into them at some stage, write about them at length, but haven't had the opportunity. So, uh, having touched on turkeys vs. peafowl, then I thought, well, you know, turkeys are interesting. I've written about them a few times before, about their... I'm interested in elaborate display structures and sexual selection, and so on. So there's always stuff to say about turkeys and peafowl, along those lines. But there's also the evolutionary histories and the fossil members of these groups. And that allowed me to talk about the less-well-known oscillated turkey, which you don't hear about as much as the other turkey, the one which people just call the wild turkey. And, uh, you don't hear so much about the green peacock, whereas everybody's heard of the Indian one, the often semi-domestic or domestic blue one. So, umm...

JOHN: I found that interesting because the green peacock is actually larger, isn't it? And it does have the train. It's not...

DARREN: Yeah, it does. Yeah, it's pretty much the same as the Indian...

JOHN: The same thing, but bigger, more spectacular.

DARREN: Well, yeah, I mean... I owe a debt of thanks to my good friend, Markus Bueller in Germany for sending me the photographs of the green peacock that he saw in the Berlin Tierpark, I think it is. Umm, because... oh my god, that just is an awesome animal, it just incredible, it looks enormous, formidable. You can understand why some people call these birds --dragon birds. I mean, it's got these kind of iridescent scale-like feathers. It's... it looks like a really.... it looks like a really chunky, big, heavy bird, which of course, it is. But also this remarkable posture, it's got. It's... you look how long the neck is in those photographs I used. It's a... it's a... it's a crazy-looking, big bird.

JOHN: Yeah.

DARREN: And I think... given, you know... so many of us interested in theropod dinosaurs, and feathery dinosaurs, and the origins of birds, the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, it's like you look at an animal like that and, wow, it's really inspiring and interesting.

JOHN: Why do you think they're not better know? Just... very few people know that there are two sorts of peacock. And certainly don't know that the one they're familiar with is the... lesser peacock.

DARREN: Yeah, well, they've never done as well in captivity. They're more sensitive. They're less easy to breed and to look after. They're sort of like... I think they're quite demanding in terms of husbandry, and they're not as adaptable in terms of the temperature they're able to cope with. They don't breed so happily. And maybe because they have more complicated... there's some dispute over their particular mating system, their particular, you know, social style. But it maybe because we don't really understand what's going on there. Whereas the Indian one, the blue one, is dead easy to keep. It's easy to transport. It's not fussy. It can live anywhere. It's much more able to look after itself. So I think it's just that. It's a quirk of... of kind of husbandry, so far as I know.

JOHN: And with the, umm, sorry... the green peacock, the female is also... bright in color?

DARREN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that ties in with this debate about the social system of these birds, because, obviously, in the Indian, the blue one, there's very strong and obvious sexual dimorphism. Not only does the female lack the train, but she's also... she doesn't have all that crazy... iridescent blue on her. She's mostly brownish with white... a lot of white on her body, as well. Whereas the green one, in fact, they molt, obviously. They molt the train. So if you see a male without a train and a female, unless you know these birds extremely well, I think you'd be hard pressed to differentiate them. They're really similar. In fact, the only major difference, so far as I can recall... the only major difference between the sexes is the presence of absence of the train. In birds where there's a reduced amount of sexual dimorphism, or where the sexes look similar, there often isn't this kind of... the sort of mating style, social style, that we associate with say, the Indian peacock. That is males aren't... they're not polygynous or polygamous, that is they don't just solicit matings from as many females as possible. In animals where sexes are similar you often have, you know, sharing of nesting and incubation and chick-care, and so on. There tends to be something approaching... partial or total monogamy. And some people say --this isn't well understood because these birds are not well studied in the wild-- but some people say that this true for the green peacock. And that would certainly make sense in view of this difference that we see in sexual dimorphism. So... that's really interesting because these two birds do appear to be closely related. They've been... it's thought on the basis of genetics that they've been separate for a couple of million years.

JOHN: That's very close, though, isn't it?

DARREN: It's close... it's fairly close. They're nested within a larger group of peacock-like, game birds --the parvonines, which includes Great Argus pheasants, and several other lineages. And they do appear to have the Indian peacock-style of polygamy or polygyny, so, showy males with crazy big display feathers, that... solicit matings from as many females as possible. So if it's true that the green peacock really is that unusual, then it's unusual not just relative to the Indian peacock, but relative to other parvonines, too.

JOHN: So, it's sort of an apomorphic state?

DARREN: Potentially.

JOHN: Is that right?

DARREN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, apomorphic. Yeah, it's unique to that lineage, that taxon. Lot of work to do on these birds.

JOHN: Yeah, obviously. Again, as we were saying earlier, you know, it's surprising what hasn't really been worked on, isn't it?

DARREN: Hmm. hmm.

JOHN: Yeah. Umm.. glass frogs.

DARREN: Glass frogs. Centrolenides. Yeah...

JOHN: Centrolenides. What do we need to know about these frogs?

DARREN: Well, the basic things... So, again, we're just going to be repeating things for people who've already read the articles on TetZoo, right? Which is...

JOHN: We'll see.

DARREN: We'll see. OK. So, glass frogs, this group of very small, as in, total body length is between 2 and 6 centimeters... of tropical, South and Central American frogs, famously named for their translucent tissues. Their undersides, you know, are near transparent. You can see their organs through their skin. But even on the dorsal surface, their muscles look translucent, you can bones, and such, and organs.

JOHN: Green bones.

DARREN: Yeah, now, some of them have green bones. They don't all have this, some of them have white bones. But green bones are present in members of several groups. It's a fairly large group, about 160 species. Umm, at a guess, I would say, it's probably... you're probably going on for 60 to 70 species that have the green bones. So why do they have the green bones? Well... nobody knows.

JOHN: I ask the questions here, Darren.

DARREN: (Laughter) It was rhetorical.

JOHN: (Laughter) I want to know why we don't have more transparent animals. Because we've got some. Umm, these frogs and there's fish... there's glass catfish.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah.

JOHN: Umm, but it seems pretty rare. I suppose there's disadvantages to it. Umm...

DARREN: Yeah, there's major disadvantages to being transparent or translucent.

JOHN: So why do we have any?

DARREN: Yeah, umm, well, the conventional explanation for the presence of pigmented skin, umm, or even pigmentation covering tissues within the body is that it's to do with blocking harmful UV light, which potentially causes mutations in cells, and all kinds of problems. Umm... so, on that basis you shouldn't expect anything to be transparent or translucent. One thing that has been pointed out, and I think it came up on the discussion thread on TetZoo, is that glass frogs have large amounts of guanine, the chemical guanine... umm.. often in animals of whitish structure... covering some of their internal organs. So, maybe they're using that to protect their organs from UV. Umm, but that still explain why they have translucent or transparent skin, in the first place. And, uh, yeah, this is... at the moment it's just one of those things that everybody knows, but nobody has, to my knowledge, nobody has investigated. Is it something to do with camouflage of some sort? We all know that animals that live on leaves want to look greenish. So is it a kind of cheap and lazy way to be greenish, by just being translucent, so the color of the leaf shines through your body? That's one possibility, I don't know. Umm... but yeah, just... is it to do with disrupting a search image, you know, because maybe from some angles they don't look...?

JOHN: Well, yeah, so you don't have an outline... as clear as you would otherwise. Uh, certainly, transparent fish are very difficult to see, aren't they? Especially in the water. But these frogs, they don't, they don't... are they spending most of their time in the water, or..?

DARREN: No, I mean, they're mostly terrestrial. They're mostly stick on... they're mostly stuck on leaves. They're mostly arboreal.

JOHN: Leaves, yeah.

DARREN: And, uh, some species stick on the dorsal side... the upper surfaces of leaves and others on the lower surfaces of leaves. They all... nearly all of them lay their eggs on leaves overhanging streams. And in quite a few of them the tadpoles drop into the streams, and so you have stream-dwelling tadpoles. But the frogs themselves, the adult frogs are not stream-dwelling. Some of them do guard their tadpoles once they're in the water, I think. I know that quite a few of them do guard the eggs. And I was going to suggest that if they're guarding their tadpoles in the water then that could be selection for looking clear in water. But I'd have to check that... I can't remember...

JOHN: But, also, if you're guarding, perhaps you don't want to look clear... because you want to be seen.

DARREN: You want to be visible to scare off insects and things.

JOHN: Yeah.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know. Uh... I did really like the, umm... the last time, this is again another TetZoo things that's recycled from a couple of years ago --I took some text from an old article that was about, umm... glass frogs are part of this major part of anurans, frogs and toads, properly known as anurans. Umm, they're part of this major group called the hyloides, which includes, basically, all the kind of toad-shaped ones... uh, I shouldn't say that because that shape has evolved many times within anura. But hyloides includes tree frogs and true toads and their close relatives, and glass frogs are with that...

JOHN: Bu-DO-morph!

DARREN: Bufomorph (bufonidae)

JOHN: Bufomorph, yeah.

DARREN: Yeah, they're within that clade. And, umm... umm... I, uh.. one of the reasons...

JOHN: Sorry.

DARREN: You totally threw me off, yeah. Umm, in terms of, you know... we've got... there's quite a lot of work that's been done on the origins of toads, how old toads are, and about toad biogeography. And we have toad fossils going back, like, umm... definitely, like, 40 - 50 million years. And there's some late Cretaceous possible, true toads. And toads are actually one of the youngest groups within hyloidae. So presumably, lineages like centrolenids, like the glass frogs, are kind of, you know, about that old or older. But we have no fossils of them at all... so far as I know, not a single, glass frog fossil. So every...

JOHN: Maybe you just can't see them.

DARREN: (Laughter) Wouldn't it be interesting if you could see their fossils really obviously because their fossils were still green. I don't know... how that would work. I did ask Linda Trueb, who's an anuran expert... I did ask her if she knew why the bones are green. She knew it was to do with the staining by biliverdin, which is a bile byproduct in the body. I don't know how...

JOHN: Green bile.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, how come some animals end up with stained bones and others don't? And what's the... what's going on here... why is that, I mean? Umm, it's nothing to do with photosynthesis, which has been suggested informally a couple of times. We do know...

JOHN: That would be cool, but yeah.

DARREN: Well, did you know...?

JOHN: That would explain the transparency, too, wouldn't it?

DARREN: It would, it really would. We know of one amphibian that has, umm, that has... algae living inside its tissue. It actually is able to get some reward from photosynthesizing cells inside it. It's a salamander. But there's nothing like that going on in glass frogs, so far as I...

JOHN: Symbiotic type thing, yeah.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah. And I was also really attracted to write about them because of the giant humeral spines they have, which are, I think, really cool. Umm, frogs and toads are one of those groups of animals where the average person thinks they're just squidgy little things and they don't do anything, maybe they have tongues they can use to catch flies with, whatever. But in actual fact, the number of giant fangs, and huge bony head crests, and spiky patches on their hands or their arms. Umm, the number of these things that have evolved within the group... they certainly have evolved many times. And we know of several lineages of anurans that have independently evolved fighting spurs and spikes on their forelimbs. And some of these glass frogs... you look at... you can actually see in it.. they're only present in the males... but you can easily see in an animal photographed from the side or the front this huge spur that's like two-thirds as long as, at least, the humerus. And these are used in male grappling matches. I don't... I have some photographs of them performing these. There are some groups of glass frogs that wrestle by... well, kind of wrestle...wrestling by clutching each other's bodies. And then there others.. and they're on the same ground level, standing on the same height, on leaves, whatever. And there are other that hang, suspended by their hind feet, hanging in midair. And I don't know... I'd love to know what kind of injuries they cause to each other, whether they stab each other or rip each other up, or something.

JOHN: Sounds pretty serious, I mean, as long as a humerus, they presumably could kill each other with things like that.

DARREN: Well, exactly. Exactly. I just don't know. I have a load more photographs I was provided by a glass-frog worker, which I will be using on TetZoo, soon. I'll do that once this azhdarchid (paper) is out of the way. Yeah, I don't know if there are humeral injuries resulting from these battles, but it's certainly a very interesting thing about these animals.

JOHN: Little Shop of Horror. Little Shop of Horrors.

DARREN: So the plan is for this podcast that we're just going to include some like random crap in the middle, right, just say whatever I like?

JOHN: Absolutely, yeah. I think that should be... in fact be a good portion of the podcast. Otherwise it's just us reciting what's on TetZoo, which is OK if people can't be bothered reading it, but...

DARREN: And who's going to sit through a half hour of glass frogs and plesiosaurs?

JOHN: (Laughter) Well, I'll cut most of that out. It was mostly to get to this.

DARREN: Have you ever seen Little Shop of Horrors?

JOHN> I have. I saw it when I was a kid, though. And it was on video, VHS, and it said-- "Jack Nicholson in Little Shop of Horrors." And, of course, he's in it for about five seconds, two minutes, maybe.

DARREN: He's not in it.

JOHN: Jack Nicholson is in it.

DARREN: No he's not.

JOHN: How can you even talk about this if you don't know? Are you talking about the original one, the black & white one?

DARREN: You're talking about the original. I'm talking about the 1982, Frank Oz...

JOHN: Well, obviously.

DARREN: (Sigh)

JOHN: OK, so, the original one has Jack Nicholson in it, but not for very long. Ok, so the 1982 one.

DARREN: Yeah, the Frank Oz one, the one with the brilliant animatronic... I haven't seen the original, oh my god, I need to watch the original. That's terrible. But you've seen... you've seen the nineteen-eighty... I think it's 1982, you've seen the new one?

JOHN: I haven't. I've seen the original.

DARREN: What?

JOHN: I've seen the original. I haven't seen anything else.

DARREN: Oh my god. So you haven't... you don't know about the Frank Oz one?

JOHN: No.

DARREN: Uh, OK... well that's the whole point of this conversation.

JOHN: OK, let's talk about a different film we've seen. We'll do Little Shop of Horrors next time.

DARREN: Uh, OK.

JOHN: I'll watch it. I'll watch it.

DARREN: You need to watch it.

JOHN: OK. Does it have the --"Feed me, feed me"?

DARREN: (Laughter) Yes.

JOHN: That's in the original, too.

DARREN: Right.

JOHN: OK, but we should talk about a film we've both seen. Prometheus. Have you seen Prometheus?

DARREN: Prometheus. I've seen Prometheus. Yeah.

JOHN: Yeah, great big pile of (swear word).

DARREN: I was just going to say, I was just going to say, are we allowed to swear?

JOHN: You know, I haven't decided yet. If I decide that we need a clean rating, I'll go and add animal noises over all the swearing.

DARREN: Yeah, because I have a lot of junior fans.

JOHN: Yeah, I'll just... but they can (swear word).

DARREN: (Laughter) Well, I'm going to keep it clean, even though we're talking about Prometheus. But, oh my god, I've only seen it once. I've seen it in the cinema. I'm waiting for my brother to get the BluRay version, so we can watch the extended beginning, extended middle, and extended end, or whatever.

JOHN: Is that a good idea? I mean, it's pretty bad. It's painfully bad.

DARREN: I enjoyed it enough. I'm not ashamed to say that I can really think a film is pretty terrible but still want to watch it again. And I did feel that for Prometheus. Although, what a mess. And the thing that insults me the most that as a huge fan of the Alien quad-trilogy, whatever you want to call it. It's like...

JOHN: Well, we don't count the last one...

DARREN: Well, no...

JOHN: Or even the third one. Let's call it the...

DARREN: Well, Alien and Aliens, then. Whatever. Being a fan of the...

JOHN: Aliens' universe, let's call it.

DARREN: The whole franchise. Just having the still-warm corpse urinated all over by the monster that was Prometheus is really nasty. Oh my god, I hate it when... I can say a similar thing for the newest, the newer Star Wars films. The fact that we all know that there's this expanded universe thing people have built up over decades, where for Star Wars and for Alien and Aliens. people have come up with these numerous comic and novels, all these like little stories that potentially explain the hitherto unexplained aspects of the story. And then to just sort of discard all that, just forget it, it doesn't exist. There's many stories in the Dark Horse, Aliens comic. Not many. There are several stories that are about the Engineers, or the Space Jockey, as it was known, that you see in Alien. And, uh, you know there's a rational explanation as to what kind of alien. Rational explanation? You know, there's a good explanation as to what kind of alien it is.

JOHN: Good explanation.

DARREN: Well, a substantially better explanation, that it's a giant, pink, semi-albino man in a stupid-looking suit. So, it's just an insult. And also, the explanation for the xenomorphs. You know, xenomorphs are... again there's many many stories in comics and novels and such where xenomorphs appear as components of an ecosystem. You know, they've evolved. They're like animals, polymorphic animals that change shape according to the biology of their hosts. And now that's all been done away with, because now --oh, by the way, they were just invented by these guys, who invented them at some biotech weapons facility. It's just...

JOHN: It's all stupid. But I'll tell you what really irritated me was the Chariots of the Gods thing. The thing about this is that it's just so overplayed these days. If you're going to think of a new thing, you have to at least give it a new twist. So these aliens, the Engineers, are meant to be kind of responsible for us, right?

DARREN: Yeah, they seed planets, including this one (Earth).

JOHN: Yes. And the way they discover this is by finding out that their DNA is identical to ours. And they look like us. Were they meant to have seeded the planet millions and millions of year ago, at the beginning of life, or were they meant to have come around and interceded between us and chimps?

DARREN: Yeah, when you see the very first, the opening scenes of the film, when you see an Engineer...umm, remove... they remove some robe or something, and they take some special little capsule thing, and their body actually disintegrates, and you see their tissue being dissipated in the water. The idea... I understand the idea behind that is, that is the body of that individual is actually seeding the planet. So they actually sacrifice themselves in order to bring life to other planets. So...

JOHN: They couldn't use scrapings or anything? (Laughter)

DARREN: (Laughter) Well, there's another spin on this that we haven't mentioned so far, it's along the same lines as what you've just said, the von-Däniken-esque, Chariots of the God thing. There's a... the theme that runs throughout the entire movie is basically the story of Christ. Have you heard this?

JOHN: No, I haven't. Enlighten me.

DARREN: Well, OK, well, in the original, in Aliens, we're told that the planet where the ship is found is called LV... oh, dear... LV4426?

JOHN: I'm sure we'll get all kinds of angry emails.

DARREN: I'm sorry, fanboys, fangirls. I'm not nerdy enough. Not on this particular fact, anyway. Um, whereas we're told in Prometheus that that's not the planet they've gone to. They've gone to another one. And they've gone to LV, something, something, something, else, and if you... I read somewhere that if you assume that LV stands for Leviticus. And if you therefore check that code as a verse. How does the Bible work? Is it chapters and verses? I'm such a bad atheist.

JOHN: Books.

DARREN: Books, and then books are broken into... I think it's chapters and verses.

JOHN: Yeah, it's like you can pin it on a specific clause in the Bible. And if you check that specific clause, it's something to do with the... something to do with God saying that --he who has, he who has given me up, basically can't be helped, and should be hunted down and destroyed, or something. And if you encapsulate, if you imagine that as the broad philosophy of what the Engineers are doing in Prometheus, then there's an awful lot in the story that is... I don't know, kind of like has a Biblical ring to it. I mean we've got the whole sacrifice thing, we've got the fact that we know that they are meant to have been on LV-whatever. We know they're meant to have been there about, I think they say, two-thousand years ago, so around about the time of Christ. And we know that they were... it's actually been such a long time since I've not only seen the movie but since I've discussed this. I discussed this at great length on Facebook with actual people, as well. Isn't there some stuff in there about how they find out that one of ships was programmed to take those capsules to Earth?

JOHN: Yes.

DARREN: And the point of the capsules is that they do nasty stuff. They're like bad, man.

JOHN: Yes, because for some reason, now they don't like us.

DARREN: Yeah, because... now, again... forgive me, it's been a while, but isn't there the implication somewhere that they're getting...? Well, I made the point of reading interviews with Ridley Scott and other people, and the were saying that definitely, definitely at one time, they did consider the possibility of the Engineers avenging the death of Christ. So they definitely considered this. And I've mentioned that Leviticus thing, and I'm afraid it's gone from memory now, but there's definitely other things in the story that are allusions to Biblical mythology.

JOHN: Well, I can believe that. I mean, also, just in the dialogue and what they sort of talk about, it's very, umm...

DARREN: There's the whole virgin-birth thing, as well, isn't there? Where the main, female character, I forget her name, but she has to have the medical pod, and she gives... she's told she's infertile, but yet she still conceives.

JOHN: She wasn't a virgin, though.

DARREN: She wasn't technically a virgin.

JOHN: (Laughter) We've just seen in the previous scene.

DARREN: (Laughter) She wasn't... she was inseminated by conventional means. So, I don't know, I don't know. I just remember it being rather more convincing. And my point, my point here is basically similar to what you said about the Chariots of the Gods thing... is... it's like, come on... I don't want to, I mean... you know, Biblical mythology, that's like big mythology, that's like classic stuff, that's almost like Star Wars level, you know. And again, the Star-Wars-vere because it has a Biblical thing to it, as well. But my point is that it's an amazing piece of mythology, it's like you know, got all these key components it it. So if your going to come up with some compelling, you know, brand new, SciFi thing for the 21st century, for Christ's sake can't you come up with something original? Don't just rip off something that we've read in a book, already. That's my point.

JOHN: (Laughter) To be fair, they ripped off several books and mushed them all together in an incoherent mess. That's what they did, which, hmm, that's at least a semi-original way of copying.

DARREN: (Snicker)

JOHN: What, actually, and I've haven't talked to people about this much because Jenny gets sick of hearing me rant about stuff like this. Umm, but I've heard in podcasts, people complaining about the characters. And they're just (swear word) characters. They're not internally consistent. They certainly don't act like scientists or people that would be on a trip like this. They act like (swear word) idiots.

DARREN: Yeah, totally.

JOHN: RID-LIDIOTS (Play on director Ridley Scott's name)

DARREN: So, they discover amazing evidence for a civilization and they're all mopy and depressed and...

JOHN: I'm scared, I'm out of here, I'm out of here, I've seen a dead boy. This is the biologist.

DARREN: Yeah, you've seen these memes... I think Memo (artist C.M. "Memo" Kosemen) generated a load, where biologist is encountered by deadly-looking, penis-like, cobra monster. What does he do? Prods it until it crawls up his arm and smashes through his space helmet. Umm, the guy (in Prometheus) who's meant to be the tech expert, he's got those ball things. He's meant to be the expert on navigation... (he) gets lost.

JOHN: I know. This is the thing...so, they actually chose the characters that were least likely to do the things that they did. So, their biologist at first gets scared of the dead body, won't even look at it, says he's going to get out of there. Then, just a few scenes later, he's the one that isn't afraid of the deadly looking, penis, cobra, worm thing --and also acts not like a biologist. And their mapper is the one who gets lost. It's like they deliberately did this to us, just so we'd go --oh, come on.

DARREN: There's also... I agree with all of it. There's also the point where the behavior, sorry, the speech of the people is absolutely unrealistic. Again, I've heard other people say this, so it sounds like I'm ripping off their perspective. But if you look at Alien, you know the bit just before the chest-burster comes out of John Hurt's body? There's lost of scenes in Alien where people are sitting around talking about crap. They're talking about how much money they're going to get, or, you know, small talk, just normal crap. Whereas in Prometheus, it's like every single conversation is unrealistically contrived. All the conversations are about big picture stuff, and about --oh, where do we fit in the universe? Do you know what I mean? It's just unrealistic.

JOHN: Yeah, but I think that's because they completely overloaded the mythology aspect of the film. And they had to cram it all in somehow, right? So they wanted the whole, Chariots of the Gods thing. They wanted their Biblical references. There's probably other stuff in there that we haven't seen or thought of. They thought that this would make it richer, but instead it just makes it an incoherent mess. And, also, just because the people are so dumb. I didn't care about any of them. They can all die. It's stupid.

DARREN: No, I agree. Why did Charlize Theron (actress) and the other lady, why did they run in a straight line when they're...

JOHN: (Laughter)

DARREN: I've heard all this... have you heard the Red Letter Media, the Red Letter Media response to Prometheus?

JOHN: No.

DARREN: Google it after this. Red Letter Media, Prometheus --it's very funny. He goes through all of the different stupid things that crop up in the film. I think when it gets to the very end of the film, you've sat in a cinema, and you're like --look to the person at your left, look to the person at your right, and shrug, muh! That's not a good sign. And that was my reaction at the very end of Prometheus. It's like --What the hell just happened? (Laughter) I paid good money for this?

JOHN: (Laughter) I refused to...

DARREN: So, I'm looking forward to seeing it on BluRay.

JOHN: Are you? Yeah, I refused to see it in the cinema because I just knew, I knew that this was going to happen. Prequels, they just, they don't really work.

DARREN: Ah, but they so can.

JOHN: There's a reason you didn't start back in the story. There's a reason you started in the middle... when you were making the original film.

DARREN: I still think they could be done right, but I'm just struggling to think of one...

JOHN: They could be done better.

DARREN: There's a... one film that I find fairly interesting, it's not a particularly good film... it's a prequel, but they haven't yet made the other films. (Laughter) I forget what it's called. It's set in L.A. and it's about these kind of giant, alien, biotech kind of craft things that come down from the sky, and they put down a blue light and people like get floated up into space. And then the aliens are only interested in brains. Because the aliens are kind of like... How do they work? They... I think the aliens take on the bodies of other alien species, but take out all the spinal tissue and the brain and just put their own brains back into other bodies once it's worn out. I've forgotten what it's called. Sky something?

JOHN: Oh, Skyline? Or something like that. Is that it?

DARREN: Yeah, that sounds right. And it ends...

JOHN: That's the one that's got a 3.5 rating on IMDB (IMBD. com), I believe.

DARREN: What's that, out of ten?

JOHN: Yeah.

DARREN:: Yeah, well, there you go, I said it wasn't it wasn't a very good...

JOHN: It puts it, it puts it in the bottom one percentile.

DARREN: Yeah, the prequel context to it was interesting, which is that it ends with the main character... his brain going into... his human body is discarded and... I've totally explained this wrong because obviously his brain goes into like an alien body. But as an alien, he's... now he's in an alien body, but he's like good, yeah. So he like breaks out and rescues his girlfriend. And the idea is that he's... the film ends with being like this super powerful, kind of like creature thing. And if you listen to the commentary, they explain the idea is they were setting up how... you know, you know, the mythology for every super hero is like how did the super hero get like that in the first place. He got bitten by a spider, or whatever. Well, in this case, he's like, that was just the prequel, now we get to the...

JOHN: (Laughter) Right, so, but how is this different from a film that hopes to have a sequel?

DARREN: (Laughter) Hmmm.

JOHN: I think the very definition of a prequel is --that it has to be made second.

DARREN: Ah, yeah, yeah. It's uh... yeah, a good point, yeah.

JOHN: Because then it would just be the first film.

DARREN: The first one.

JOHN: (Laughter) A prequel without a sequel. Um, yeah, in other words you can't think of a single, good prequel?

DARREN: Umm, I... there must be loads, but I just can't think of uh...

JOHN: See, I just don't think there are. I think it's a fundamental artistic mistake.

DARREN: Yeah.

JOHN: People thought that, umm... What was it, was it X-Men: First Class, everyone hated that, too, didn't they?

DARREN: I thought it was pretty good. (Laughter)

JOHN: (Chuckles) I don't know. I didn't see it.

DARREN: I liked it.

JOHN: Is that the one about Wolverine? What was that one? How he got his claws and everything?

DARREN: Wolverine is a totally different film. And I haven't... I think I've seen it. I remember that being pretty terrible. But, umm, X-Men: First Class, Wolverine's not in it. It's about, it's about Magneto, played by Michael Fassbender, and a whole bunch of other people.

JOHN: But I think they're a bit different, the comic-books films, because you've got a whole, well established, universe. So you've got stories you can hook into. And you can make them out of order. But it's not like you're making up the prequel after you've already made the first film... like Star Wars, like Alien(s)... which I think is a disaster. Because you've got a lot of baggage that you sort of have to explain, which... and everyone knows how it ends. So, you're sort of in a straightjacket in terms of the story.

DARREN: Yeah, the surprises you can pull.

JOHN: People know where it's going, and it just... And also, people have invented all this for themselves, to start with. They're always going to be disappointed if you go and mess it up.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah, a lot of people, a lot of Star Wars people... the only bit of the Revenge of the Sith that they like is the last couple of minutes that explain how everything came to be for the start of Episode 4. But I actually found that.. you know, again, too contrived. It's kind of like --Do we really need to see Anakin going into the suit? Do we really need to see Moff Tarkin and the emperor...?

JOHN: (Sarcastic) Oh, that's what happened! He went into the suit. Oh, now I get it.

DAAREN: So, the whole cartoon series Droids never happened because R2D2 and C3PO were on the blockade runner the entire eighteen years between these movies. And it's like... and I'm not a huge fan of Droids, by the way. I just thought it was... Have you ever seen Droid?,

JOHN: No.

DARREN: The cartoon?

JOHN: (Chuckles) I'm not a nerd. I just talk about these things with nerds.

DARREN: Anthony Daniels as C3PO... just like in the movies.

JOHN: What, it's a? What is it, uh?

DARREN: It's like a cartoon series for kids called Droids, and was about the adventures of, the adventures of R2D2 and C3PO before they end up on the...

JOHN: Oh, yeah, yeah, because they're not meant to know them, and it's fairly clear in the first film that they don't, right? In Star Wars, the original, they don't know these droids.

DARREN: Oh, well, there you go, they did. Obi Wan was actually intimately familiar with R2D2, he's known him for years and years.

JOHN: Yeah, just forgot.

DARREN: Then he pretends he doesn't. I've never seen you before. Like an old-girlfriend kind of thing.

JOHN: So they're going to remake them? They're not going to remake them. They're going to make more ones.

DARREN: Yeah, J.J. Abrams has just confirmed as director for Episode 7 (Star Wars).

JOHN: You know what my prediction about this is?

DARREN: Umm, go on.

JOHN: It's going to be crap. (Laughter)

DARREN: (Laughter) Would you say that the..?

JOHN: Everyone thinks it's going to be good because everyone loves J.J. Abrams, but it's going to be crap. It's going to be crap.

DARREN: Well, I don't know...

JOHN: Everyone will go --How could he let us down like this? He can let us down like this because it was never meant to have this many films.

DARREN: I don't know, I don't know, I'll remain optimistic until I see it. And I thought Star Trek (2009) was brilliant, and Star Trek: Into Darkness looks awesome, having seen the trailer, which is a good guide to how good a film's going to be, right?

JOHN: Here's what I object to in Star Trek. All these recent Star Trek films are about some dude, really angry, getting revenge.

DARREN: Yeah.

JOHN: We need a new plot, a new plot. Is Into Darkness about this as well? I bet it is.

DARREN: Yeah, it's about... (Intense laughter from both Darren and John) Bumdy Cumbersnatch, or whatever he's called. Umm, what's his name, Cuthbert Bundersnitch? Do you know who I mean? The guy who played... He played Sherlock Holmes in some... I can never remember his name.

JOHN: Bummersnatch.

DARREN: I'm always... I'm not sure I'm getting confused with the Jabberwocky poem, or something. But yeah, the British actor, and he plays this baddy character who's out for revenge. And a lot people were saying --Oh, is it Kahn?

JOHN: No, seriously? Seriously, it's a guy out for revenge? Again?

DARREN: Yeah!

JOHN: Really?

DARREN: ----

JOHN: I didn't know this.

DARREN: Have you not seen the trailer?

JOHN: No.

DARREN: Good god, what do you do with your time? Yeah, check it out, the trailer's pretty awesome.

JOHN: Well, yeah, but they've had the same plot for last six Star Trek films. We need a new plot. I mean, go back to rescuing whales, for all I care.

DARREN: That's what I was going to say. Star Trek: The Search for Spock...umm, no... the Voyage Home, the one with the whales and the giant fish tank.

JOHN: Yeah, but that was in the... 70's, 80's?

DARREN: I reckon it was early to mid 80's. I'd guess, I'd say 83 or 84?

JOHN: So it's been quite a while since we've had anything but a revenge plot. Actually, you know, there was that Borg one, wasn't there?

DARREN: Umm, First Contact. Yeah...

JOHN: But with the Borg getting revenge, maybe they were? And they had the Borg leader, which was stupid.

DARREN: It's, it's, no, it's just to do with the time line getting screwed up, isn't it? Because it starts with a Borg cube heading into Federation Space. And then the Borg emit tachyon particles, or some time travel, chrono particles, or something, and they go back in time, and the Enterprise just happens to follow them, and wind up in...

JOHN: That's another thing they all have, is time travel.

DARREN: Yeah, because if you just go around the Sun fast enough it's inevitable...

JOHN: It's revenge from the future. This is what we have.

DARREN: (Laughter)

JOHN: Actually, that's a good title. I think they should call it that.

DARREN: Revenge from the future.

JOHN: Star Trek 57: Revenge from the Future.

DARREN: What a parody that would be.

JOHN: Yes. Alright. So we've done half an hour on films, now.

DARREN: Yeah.

JOHN: Great. We should wrap it up. Umm, what are out sponsors this month, Darren?

DARREN: We have sponsors?

JOHN: No, we don't have any sponsor. We should have...

DARREN: I was going to say...

JOHN: Let's have some sponsors. If you want to sponsor this crap, then email us. What's our email address?

DARREN: Uh, I don't know. Should I just use my email address? I really haven't thought about this... How about a Paypal account, I don't know?

JOHN: (Laughter) I don't know yet. I was thinking about registering one. I haven't done it yet. I'll dub it in later. Umm, where can they find your stuff, Darren?

DARREN: Uh, go to Google. Tetrapod Zoology, currently hosted at Scientific American (blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology). If you're on Facebook, there's a Tetrapod Zoology Facebook page. And I Tweet at @TetZoo... Most people can't find me.

JOHN: You'd think you'd be Tweeting from TetZoo.

DARREN: Yeah, you Tweet at. Yeah, from @TetZoo. There's also a hashtag TetZoo (#TetZoo), which is often full of hilarious quips and sidelines.

JOHN: So, that's where they can find you on the Twitters, and the Fezbooks, and the internets? The Fezbooks.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah.

JOHN: Ah, you can find me on the Fezbooks and the Twitters. Umm, my handle is impossible to spell. It's NIGHK-TO-TERUS (@nyctopterus). If you can't spell it, well shame on you.

DARREN: Are you sure it's not NICK-TO-TERUS?

JOHN: Shut up. And they should visit my website JohnConway.co, especially if you can't spell any of the other things. There's links to all that. Umm, what else? They should buy our stuff, shouldn't they? They should buy our stuff.

DARREN: Oh, hey, have you got a copy of All Yesterdays (Book: All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals) to hand?

JOHN: Umm, umm. (Cat meowing)

DARREN: I have but it's some distance away.

JOHN: Yeah, I don't actually.

DARREN: Yeah, one thing...

JOHN: Hang on, hang on, it's not a video podcast, Darren.

DARREN: Well, stop wasting your time looking around then. Ah, I thought it was, initially, when we discussed this, so one of the things I did, I have a big stack here, listen (book thumping noises).... a big stack of new books, which I was going to talk about.

JOHN: Well, you know, I think we should do a video podcast at some stage, but not...

DARREN: I think we should, yeah. No, seriously, one thing, I get a lot of books to review for TetZoo. And I review them all. I always do. But it takes me, and I think this is pretty ordinary for people who write proper reviews, it takes me like one to two year to get round to reviewing a book because I have to read it first. And there's so many good books come out, that about the time I actually write about it, it's not timely. I'm talking about a book that's come out a couple of years ago. And there is a book, which I've just received, I just want to mention it, it's called the Unfeathered Bird by Katrina van Grouw. I'm probably pronouncing that incorrectly. Published by Princeton. I'll show you. look. Look at the size of it. It's huge. It's awesome. It's beautiful. I mean, the Unfeathered Bird. Look at this art. Can you see?

JOHN: Yeah, yeah, it's very nice.

DARREN: Some stork skulls. It's full of stuff like that, and loads of illustrations of birds behaving normally, but they're shown without the external stuff, without the skin and the feathers. So you're looking at skeletons or musculature studies. So, I think, I'd like that to be like a regular thing, you know, talk about new books and stuff.

JOHN: No, no, that's cool. We can do that, yeah. That's a good idea. Uh, and I think maybe occasionally we should do a video podcast.

DARREN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOHN: Maybe especially for books.

DARREN: Yeah.

JOHN: Umm, but that's, uh.. They can buy that if they like, but, of course, they have to buy our stuff.

DARREN: Yeah.

JOHN: Umm, are there books you still get royalties on, apart from All Yesterdays?

DARREN: Umm, umm, umm, umm. TetZoo --Tetrapod Zoology: Book 1

JOHN: Tetra-POOD Zoology: Book 1

DARREN: Ah, well, the Tetra-POOD Zoology. Well, that's now a limited edition. There's seriously only a couple of hundred copies ever published. And they sell for two to three, hundred pounds on Amazon, sought after collectors issues. I've only got one. I'm not parting with it. And the other people I know who've got them won't give them up, either. So, umm, I still get royalties for Tetrapod Zoology: Book 1. But other than that...

JOHN: So people should buy that.

DARREN: People should buy that. Umm, obviously, All Yesterdays is still doing very well in terms of sales. So, umm...

JOHN: Yep, so buy that, too, if you haven't bought that already.

DARREN: Yeah, The Complete Dinosaur: 2nd Edition, which has got my substantial review of the fossil record... the history of birds, is in its time. Obviously, it only came out at the end of last year, so. A lot of people are getting that. A lot of people got that over Christmas.

JOHN: Yeah, you getting royalties for that?

DARREN: I don't think so. No, no.

JOHN: (Chuckles) Don't bother flogging books you don't get royalties from.

DARREN: I don't get royalties from anything. I think royalties are a myth.

JOHN: You get royalties... You're about to get, umm, a check, a Paypal for All Yesterdays.

DARREN: Well, that's different because that's a self-published book, isn't it? But every other book I've done has always been through a mainstream company.

JOHN: But you get it for Tetrapod Zoology, right?

DARREN: Yeah, because that's a self... well I suppose, that's through small publisher. If you use a mainstream publisher, that's just not how it works. Maybe I should...

JOHN: OK, stick to, stick to flogging ones that you actually get money from.

DARREN: Uh, that's it then.

JOHN: We need direct money. Also, I'm going to put a donate button on the website... OK, so I've sorted this out now. The email address is [email protected] ([email protected]) and the website to go to is TetZoo.com, so head on over there. And we'll be back in two weeks.

DARREN: Excellent.

JOHN: Right, OK, I think we're done.

(Slow jazzy music plays show out... then chirping crickets)

THE END

Transcribed by Mark E. Evans (February, 2014)

[email protected]

"Biblical mythology, that's like big mythology, that's like classic stuff, that's almost like Star Wars level"

-- Darren Naish

"Yeah, if they turned out not to be pliosaurs, I'm afraid the whole pliosaur thing falls apart for me."

-- John Conway

In this almost brand-new episode: News from the World of News, Asteriornis the wonderchicken, Dineobellator the velociraptorine, and a stem-anthropoid from Peru. In News from World of Darren and John, Monsters of the Deep, photoluminescence paper, and TetZooCon 2020. What’s New at TetZoo covers Occuludentavis, the passing of Clack and Carroll, and the fact that there are not too many sauropods. And finally, Leakey's aposematic hypothesis, and non-standard takes on hominin evolution.