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About The Guest: Professor Micheal Archer

Professor Michael Archer is a paleontologist from the School of Biological Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is known for his work in paleontology and is currently working on bringing back the extinct southern gastric brooding frog.

Summary of Episode:

In this episode, we cover what dinosaurs looked like, how they communicated, and the importance of paleontology in understanding ancient life.

“Dinosaurs didn’t go extinct. Birds are dinosaurs.” - Professor Michael Archer

Professor Archer also shares stories from his own experiences as a paleontologist and talks about the potential for bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger.

Unveiling the Appearance of Dinosaurs

One of the most intriguing questions about dinosaurs is their physical appearance.

Were they really green? Did they have feathers?

Professor Archer sheds light on this topic, stating, “We’ve actually found these feathered dinosaurs in China that have the external body skin beautifully preserved, and you can see they’re covered in feathers.” He further explains that some dinosaurs had scaly skin, while others had feathers.

In fact, a recent discovery in Burma revealed a hundred-million-year-old amber with the tail of a feathered dinosaur trapped inside.

This finding revolutionizes our understanding of dinosaur aesthetics and challenges the traditional portrayal of scaly creatures in movies.

Communication Among Dinosaurs

Curiosity about dinosaur communication is not uncommon, especially considering their diverse physical features.

Professor Archer suggests that some dinosaurs may have used their unique crests to produce resonating sounds.

He explains, “It has been speculated they were using these resonating systems, and if they honked, it would have made a weird sound.”

he vocal communication repertoire of dinosaurs was likely more extensive than we previously imagined, adding another layer of complexity to these ancient creatures.

The Scariest Animals in Human History

When asked about the scariest animals that roamed the Earth when humans first appeared, Professor Archer humorously responds, “I think we’re talking to them right now.”

However, he acknowledges the ongoing fear of encountering creatures like white pointer sharks.

He emphasizes that throughout history, there have always been terrifying animals, and the fear of the unknown continues to captivate our imagination.

The Flatulence of Dinosaurs

A recent study on dinosaur flatulence revealed astonishing results.

Tom shares, “Scientists did a study on how much dinosaurs farted. All the theropods, which are giant, long-necked dinosaurs, farted 520,000,000 tons of methane gas each year.”

Professor Archer confirms the plausibility of this finding, stating, “When you calculate the amount of gas coming out, yeah, it must have been a very noisy sort of environment.”

This revelation adds a humorous yet thought-provoking dimension to our understanding of prehistoric ecosystems.

The Potential Resurrection of Extinct Species

The concept of bringing back extinct species, such as the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger, sparks both excitement and ethical considerations.

Professor Archer explains the potential benefits of resurrecting these species, stating, “When you pluck out a key animal from an ecosystem, sometimes all the other sorts of animals may have depended on it.”

He highlights the importance of maintaining ecological balance and suggests that reintroducing these species could help restore harmony to their respective ecosystems.

The Future of Paleontology

As we look to the future, the field of paleontology holds immense potential for further discoveries and advancements.

Professor Archer discusses the ongoing efforts to bring back extinct species, such as the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger, through genetic editing.

He explains, “They will go into a Tasmanian devil’s genome and then start changing its DNA to match the thylacine DNA.”

his groundbreaking research opens up new possibilities for the revival of extinct species and offers hope for the preservation of biodiversity.

TRANSCRIPT

00:02

Hello and welcome to Big Questions from Small Minds, the podcast where we ask professors questions that seem too massive, too complicated or even stupid. We also have lots of intelligent questions. No, not ours. They’re questions from actual small minds, children’s. Phil, what’s on the agenda today?

00:29

Tom, it’s paleontology.

00:32

or dinosaur.

00:39

Awesome! This science is the king of them all! It has the biggest creatures, the most death, and bonus asteroids. I think it ends with an asteroid. Spoiler! Oh sorry, whoops. Hehehehe. Today we’re talking with Professor Michael Archer, a paleontologist from the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Michael is currently working to bring back the extinct…

01:08

Southern gastric brooding frog. This episode is gonna be Dino Mines! How does your brain work? What will the world be like in 100 years if we don’t fix climate change? Why do I have to sleep? Can robots have emotions? Big questions from small minds. So Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s a pleasure. I just wanna start off with like an easy question.

01:38

Paleontology. Paleontology specifically is study of ancient things, mostly ancient life. Anthropology is study of ancient humans. And archeology is the study of the things that the humans have constructed.

02:00

So paleontology really covers everything and in fact it covers ancient humans as well. So anything that was alive at some point ends up being a fossil is the realm of paleontology. Quite a big area of expertise. It sure is and we love it. Okay, I’m going to jump to a kid’s question.

02:22

How did you know what dinosaurs looked like? Were they really green or did they have feathers? We’ve actually found these feathered dinosaurs in China that have the external body skin beautifully preserved and you can see they’re covered in feathers.

02:43

They didn’t have scaly skin. Some did. Some of the herbivorous dinosaurs, we’ve got mummies. So we have skin impressions of what they look like. And for those animals, you can see scale. So some looked a bit like what you see in the movies.

03:07

There was a fossil recently found in Burma, an amber. There’s a hundred million year old amber and it was actually the tail of a dinosaur. And the tail had caught in the sticky amber and broke off. Wow. It looks like the tail of a feathered bird. That’s amazing. That feathery velociraptor totally changed the feel of Jurassic Park. I reckon so, sure. Hello guys, rub my belly.

03:36

I’m gonna eat you now!

03:58

So when we want to know what the dinosaurs look like, hey, we’re surrounded by them. You even eat Kentucky fried dinosaur. Yeah.

04:11

Okay, on to a kids question. Can dinosaurs communicate with each other? I guess we’ve all wondered about that. Some of the dinosaurs have very strange crests on the top of their head. And it has been speculated they were using these like resonating systems and if they

04:41

The repertoire of vocal communications in dinosaurs was probably much higher than we actually would have a reason to otherwise suspect.

04:59

So when you were a kid, did you spend your time digging up the garden in the backyard of your parents' house? Look, I was the luckiest kid in the world. I was really a science nerd. I think I was hardwired like that. And even when I was like 10 years old, I didn’t want to mix with people. I wanted to mix with things, nature. But the gift of the earth to me was a giant boulder.

05:28

that a glacier had ripped out of Canada somewhere and moved down to New York State, where I was, and dropped it in our backyard.

05:39

And I looked at that boulder.

05:43

It can look like a normal simple rock. There were things in it.

05:48

Anyway, I quickly got my father’s chisel and hammer and went to work on that boulder. And there were fascinating animals in there that I’d never seen. Whoa. But I did know there were people in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City who might know. So I got on a steam train. I went to the American Museum of Natural History.

06:15

And there I met this wonderful man, Norman B. Newell.

06:21

And he said, what do you got in the suitcase? And I said, bottles. And he said, come on. And he took me inside, took me into his office, opened up the suitcase. And his eyes bugged out. Because these actually came from a time period in Earth’s history that they didn’t have much in the way of specimens in the American museum. Oh, wow.

06:45

I think he was more than interested in talking to me. He was hoping he was going to persuade me to donate some of that to the American Museum. Quite an origin story for getting into fossils and finding them literally sitting in your own backyard. I was on a roll at that point. I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I’ve dug in my backyard and all I’ve found is clay and some old beer cans. Well, owning a clay can be pretty interesting. That sounds like something you’d tell your kids.

07:11

Clay can be interesting. Keep playing. Absolutely. I’m not sure about the beer can. OK, kids question.

07:23

What were the scariest animals when humans first appeared? I think we’re talking to them right now, it’s you and me. Good answer, well done. Before that everything was pretty good. Okay, scary animals? I still can’t bring myself to go leaping into the ocean. Because I’m still thinking white pointers, they’re not extinct. Maybe they’re still waiting there for me.

07:50

They just want to turn me into a fossil. There’s a lot of scary animals out there.

07:58

Now it’s time for your favourite game show. Guess the fossil. Here’s a thing that I might show you. Ta-da! Michael is holding up what appears to be a big, dark brock. One guess what that might be.

08:17

Is that the ruminant remains of a… No.

08:24

Is that a dinosaur poo? Yes, very good. Alright. It’s one of the herbivorous dinosaurs. I don’t know which one. It looks like a lump of rock. But if you examine it under the microscope, it’s filled with all sorts of fragments of plants. So whatever they were eating, it had to come out the other end, just like it does with the dog and people. And how rare would you say finding dinosaur poo is these days? Could you stumble upon it in the forest or do you have to dig it up?

08:54

I’ve found one piece in all the looking that I’ve ever made. Surprisingly, it’s soft, it’s mushy, and there are other animals that they think poop is the finest thing you can eat. Poop is pretty rare. Speaking of things that don’t hang around very long, I recently read scientists did a study on how much dinosaurs farted. They should change their name to stinkisaurus. All the seropods, which are giant long neck dinosaurs,

09:24

520 million tonnes of methane gas each year. That is a lot of farts.

09:34

And that may have led to a global warming. Is that possible? It is possible when you calculate the amount of gas coming out. Yeah, it must have been a very noisy sort of an environment. What’s louder than a dinosaur roar?

09:51

It is interesting, you go back to the Jurassic Park movies. I loved a movie. Do you remember the scene where the two kids are up in the tree? What this dinosaur did was it came right over to the girl, it sneezed on it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Dinosaurs don’t have a diaphragm so they would just dribble the snot. They would not have been able to blow it out on that poor girl.

10:17

Would it be safe to say that the dinosaurs couldn’t smell a Laphartsa? Well, I think they could have smelled, but maybe not the same way that we do. You know, when you see a snake putting out its tongue, it’s actually picking up molecules, the same molecules that we will detect as a smell, but they pull it in and they put it up into an organ in the top of their mouth called the Jacobson’s organ. And that chemically interprets what was in the air that the tongue brought back into the mouth.

10:45

It may well be that some of the dinosaurs had similar systems for assessing the chemistry that was around them. Which is probably when they knew not to keep their head near the rear end of another dinosaur. Do you think all the dinosaurs would get upset that today we get around in our cars, setting fire to them? It would really upset me. Like, Hey, that’s my health mare in there. As a paleontologist.

11:14

What’s daily life like? Do you wake up in a tent, go outside, look for some old bones? What do you do? I love making discoveries. And that’s really what it’s about. Doesn’t that sound good? You know, it doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand up with excitement.

11:31

It is discoveries, it’s constant discoveries. And every time you smack one of these rocks and you open it up, and there’s some treasure that hasn’t seen the sunlight for 30 million years.

11:46

When the rock opens up, there’s something staring at you that you had no right to even expect to ever see. Some strange animal that we didn’t know existed on the earth. That is huge. It’s like beautiful and existential. That’s fantastic. I’ve seen videos of people who go out into riverbeds and they’ll pick up a rock and they’ll tap it open and there’s a trial abide or a shell in there. Is there a trick to picking up that one rock?

12:15

Well, usually you don’t just pick any rock and whack it.

12:20

We tend to look for clues, like when we’re walking around Riverslake, you’ll often see pebbles or something like that suggesting there might have been a little accumulation of something weird at that time in that rock. Or we might find a little bit of flowstone, which is the kind of stuff you find in caves, telling us, oh, maybe there was a chamber in there. Then we might have a closer look all around that area, not just that rock, but just check all around it. And if we see anything, it could be a bone or a shell.

12:47

At that point, out come the hammers and things, and then we start to explore it a little more. And if it gets really serious, like at Riversley, all the fossils are in limestone, we actually have to use explosives. We use them very strategically to crack the limestone into big blocks. And then we take the blocks back to the University of New South Wales, where we dissolve the limestone and out come the bones. It’s wonderful.

13:14

Very good. I know, of course, Justin is terrible, so it’s a terrible night.

13:24

Okay, kids question.

13:27

Why does a T-Rex have small arms?

13:32

Oh, the only source I hate to say it, are boring.

13:37

We’re fascinated by so much of the other things that are in the fossil record. Everybody’s got dinosaurs. This is really important. Some of the ones that fascinated me as kids were trilobites. I love trilobites. I dreamed about them. They looked like a massive cockroach. What? They’re so sweet.

14:04

They always extinct in the Permian, but before the dinosaurs, these were the things that ruled the world. You go back about 500 million years ago.

#### 14:16

The normal chaurus. These are predators. It looks like a cross between a stingray, a turtle and an octopus. Yeah, I don’t know what to think about that. There were ferocious animals long before, animals even on the land.

14:33

I’ve often said to the speakers of science fiction movies, learn about paleontology and you realize some of the strangest, weirdest things that would scare the living daylights out of anything, have actually lived on Earth. You just have to know about the fossil record to find them. When paleontologists are on a site digging and they’re all camping out, do paleontologists ever play pranks on each other? You know, put a like a dinosaur skull on their head and run through the mess hall and pretend to be a ghost.

15:03

I live for these things. They’re such fun.

15:09

I could tell you so many stories, but I’ll just mention one. When we were in River State, we were on the Gregory River. It’s beautiful.

15:18

And we knew, we thought we knew, there were only freshwater crocodiles in that Gregory River. One of my good colleagues, Paul Willis, he was really into crocodiles. And every time we would find, say, like a marsupial lion or another thalassine fossil, he’d say, my crocodiles could eat 10 of those for breakfast. So he was always putting us down. And some of the girls who were in the lab were kind of tired of hearing how great crocodiles were.

15:50

Anyway, he would offer to take volunteers out at night on a canoe and with a torch, spotlight crocodiles to show red eyes just at the surface of the water. What some of the girls had done was they’d gone upriver and found a very large log floating in the edge of the river.

16:11

And they put giant bicycle reflectors, you know, red reflectors, like nearly almost a meter apart. And God knows how big a saltwater crocodile that would represent.

16:25

At any rate, I’m paddling Paul up the river and he’s in the front and we’re looking for these freshwater crocodiles. At any rate, we went past the spot where they told me where it was and we thought the log is sunk. I didn’t say anything. We started to come back and all of a sudden Paul said, hang on, hang on, I’ve got something. And he could see this red eye. And I said, oh, that’s good, Paul. And I turned the canoe around and I started to paddle it towards this spot. Pretty soon Paul said,

16:54

Hang on, hang on, stop. Don’t go any closer. I said, why Paul? He said, that’s no freshwater crocodile. Paul, you know, there’s only freshwater crocodiles in this river. There’s no saltwater. And I just kept paddling even more vigorously. Paul started to shriek. And when we got about three meters away from it, I rolled the canoe over.

17:20

Half of Paul’s body never got immersed in the water. His legs and arms were motorboating so fast that he got to the banks and then all the cameras and the flashes go off. And he suddenly realized he’d been had. Yes, lots of these things happen on the top of your head. Great, thanks for telling us that. Did white mamas use their tusks for getting food?

17:52

Fully mammoths almost certainly would not have been able to use the tusks for digging out food. If they curled, and a lot of them did, how do you do that? You can’t use them to dig anything at all. It’s more likely that they were using these tusks as instruments to fight with, maybe to push away predators. Like modern elephants today, that most of their tusks come out straight or just curved a little bit.

18:19

And yes, they can use those to push things around and pick things up. But I don’t think the mammoths could have done that. There’s now a whole group of people working with extinct or ancient DNA of mammoths. And they fully expect to have them back in Siberia.

18:37

Remember the Jurassic Park movies where Sam Neill, when he first saw the dinosaur, he just fell over. He couldn’t stand up. Oh my God. That would be what would happen if people started to see mammoths running around the world again. I hope that we get it back. There was a story back in the 1950s of a group of scientists that had a dinner and they ate a holy mammoth. They probably fed him to the dogs and then said,

19:07

then maybe they ate a bit of that mammoth snow. Well, I for one am excited by the opportunity to eat a mammoth if they bring them back. Right, you just need bigger dinner plates for a steak. Ha ha ha. Mmm, yummy, yummy. If they are successful in bringing back woolly mammoths, do you think that existing elephants will become jealous that they’re not the coolest mammoth anymore? No. Mammoths evolved from Asiatic elephants about 5,000 years ago, that’s yesterday.

19:38

But we know they evolved. They’re specialized, adapted Asiatic elephants that evolved to survive the coldest areas of Siberia.

19:52

George Church and Harvard University and a whole team that he’s put together, they don’t intend to bring back 100% mammoth. What they’re doing is working with the genome of an Asiatic elephant and they’re changing some of the genome to match the DNA that they’re finding in the frozen tissues in Siberia. So they’re looking for the genes that will make it hairy, that will give it big tusks, that will give it blood.

20:23

that can operate in cold temperatures. So they’re going to transform an Asiatic elephant into a practical mammoth. It’s going to probably look a bit like a mammoth. It’s going to behave like a mammoth. And that’s the important thing. But it’ll still be essentially a modified Asiatic elephant as was the original mammoth. Wow. That’s huge. That’s amazing.

20:50

Why do you think that bringing back the extinct Tasmanian tiger is important? I think it’s extremely important that we bring it back. When you pluck out a key animal from an ecosystem, you don’t know sometimes all the other sorts of animals may have depended on it. The ecosystem itself may have required that animal to keep the whole thing balanced, and this is what we call a trophic cascade of extinction.

21:18

Now I think the thylacine is a similar sort of a story, the Tasmanian tiger. It was Australia’s king of beasts, a fascinating animal. I’m in love with this one. You’re talking about an animal. Little smaller than say an Alsatian or a German Shepherd. It was maintaining the balance in all the sorts of animals in that ecosystem. That’s why I think we need to bring the Tasmanian thylacine back again. Maybe we can solve all those problems.

21:48

Will they bring it back the same way they’re going to bring back the mammoth by mating it with something else? Yes. It’s a little easier with the thylacine because we have the whole genome and it’s quite intact. We have all the DNA that we need. In the case of the thylacine, what will happen is they’ll probably work with a living animal and it may well be something like a Tasmanian devil or a numback. And they will do genetic editing.

22:17

to transform the DNA to match the extinct animal’s DNA. So we know what the thylacine’s DNA looks like. That DNA has been sequenced. We know exactly what the whole recipe for making a thylacine is. And they will go into a Tasmanian devil’s genome.

22:39

And then start changing its DNA to match the thylacine DNA. So then they’ll put that transformed cell into the egg of a Tasmanian devil. And what pops out of the south end of the Tasmanian devil should be a thylacine. Wow. There also used to be crocodiles that would climb trees and you crave them as drop crocs. Can you please promise us on this podcast that you will not try and bring back drop crocs?

23:08

because crocodiles are scary enough as they are. I don’t need them falling out of trees on me. It’s funny you should say that because I would say that’s not impossible.

23:22

That particular kind of a crocodile, we discovered a lot of them in River Slate. And there they lasted a very long time, you know, almost right up to just when humans arrive. So there may well be specimens there where that kind of DNA could actually be recovered. I gave a lecture once saying, what would be the next thing we bring back? And I suggested we bring back one of those crocodiles. Because one of the big problems we got in Australia is cane toads.

23:51

They’re terrible. They’ve been introduced to Australia in the 1930s. My pet call that I had for five years, I loved him, he loved me, we were best mates. And I moved to Brisbane, I let him out in the backyard and he did a cane toad. He was dead 20 minutes later. He died in my arms. I was destroyed. Nobody at that point, 1975, knew cane toads were poisonous. Now we know.

24:19

but we still don’t really know how to control them. Well, if we can bring back that crocodile, man, these little drop crops, they could just hoe into those toads and it might help solve the problem. I feel like that could just lead to an even bigger problem where we all have to have reinforced umbrellas. Exactly.

24:42

Like, what advice would you give to budding paleontologists? Would you tell them to dig up their own backyard like you did as a kid? It’s hard when you’re in the middle of a city to sort of do something like that. And in fact, the fossil club is a great club to join for kids. They have families that join and they’re always going out on field trips to fossil sites. So you get a chance to actually collect fossils. Get involved with a group that’s already doing it.

25:09

and that’s where you meet friends, you get experiences that are great. Then start visiting museums, come see us in the university. We’re happy to have you come in the lab and have a look at what we do. Fantastic. What tips do you have if they do come across a bundle of old bones? That’s a good question. First of all, take a good photo. That’s really important. Put a scale in it so that you can see exactly how big it is and then ideally if you can get back to it later, don’t disturb it where you first find it.

25:39

But get that photo, send it by email to us in the university. And I’m happy to assess what you’ve got and tell you whether it looks important or whatever. And then we can advise you and work with you about, you know, what should happen at that point. Oh, wow. I’m definitely going to look up that fossil club. Fossil club. For my nephew. Oh, for my nephew. Yeah. And then I’m going to take my nephew for his benefit.

26:05

Michael, thank you so much for coming on our show. It’s been very, very interesting. It’s a pleasure. And thank you for sharing all your knowledge about dinosaurs and animals and everything. It’s been fascinating. Really, really enjoyed it. It is contagious. I have to warn you. Once you start getting into this, it’s very hard to get out of it. Links to everything we’ve talked about today can be found at smallmind.au. Keep curious people and keep asking the big questions.

26:33

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