Joe Rogan Experience #2580 - Kenneth Lacovera

Joe Rogan 0:00 [upbeat music]

Joe Rogan 0:02 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music] Kenneth.

Kenneth Lacovara 0:13 Hey.

Joe Rogan 0:14 Dinosaurs.

Kenneth Lacovara 0:14 Yes.

Joe Rogan 0:15 I reached out because I got so frustrated one day. I went down this rabbit hole of all these people that don't believe dinosaurs are real. Like, what the fuck?

Kenneth Lacovara 0:24 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 0:24 It, and I understand if you, uh, have, you know, just a very limited understanding of why some of the bones that are in museums are recreations and some of them are real, and there's a lot of people out there that are saying some really stupid shit. And so I really wanted to bring in-

Kenneth Lacovara 0:44 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 0:45 ... an actual legitimate paleontologist who's a dinosaur expert that could help illuminate us. 'Cause I think there's a lot of wasted thinking-

Kenneth Lacovara 0:51 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 0:51 ... and a lot of wasted talking about fucking dinosaurs.

Kenneth Lacovara 0:55 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 0:55 It's driving me nuts.

Kenneth Lacovara 0:56 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 0:57 There's so m- I'm sure you must be inundated. There's so many people that think dinosaurs never existed.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:03 Yeah, well, there's a reason why my back hurts, you know? [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:05 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:05 So, um, um, you know, first, like, I appreciate the skepticism, like-

Joe Rogan 1:15 Sure

Kenneth Lacovara 1:15 ... that's good.

Joe Rogan 1:16 Sure.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:16 And, and when dinosaurs were first realized as a thing in the middle part of the, uh, 19th century, it was good to be skeptical, right? That's, that's a big claim. But now-

Joe Rogan 1:25 Well, there were a lot of hoaxes, too. We should be clear about that.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28 There have been-

Joe Rogan 1:28 Yes

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28 ... in the history of paleontology.

Joe Rogan 1:29 Especially in the early days, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:32 But, you know, this would require this massive conspiracy, uh, from different continents, different countries, people that have never met each other, people that didn't live at the same time.

Joe Rogan 1:44 Yes.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45 I think it's hard to scale a conspiracy like this, right?

Joe Rogan 1:49 I have a friend who was on a ranch in Montana when a T-rex was discovered.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54 Yeah. Well, I, I, you know, I'm an eyewitness. I've dug up many, many dinosaurs with my own hands. I've got the scars to prove it. But what I would say is, you know, don't believe me. Uh, science isn't a belief system, right?

Joe Rogan 2:07 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:07 Go outside and dig up some fossils for yourself. And the thing about paleontology is it's a science, and so we can make predictions, and we can test those predictions. So depending on where you live in the world, I can predict whether you will find fossils or not, and if, if you will find fossils, I can predict what kind of fossils you will find because creatures lived at different times, right? And so if you live in, in, uh, upstate New York, you're not gonna find dinosaurs. Your rocks are too old. But you will found, find some cool trilobites, and your ripterids, and things like that, right? If you live in Florida, you're not gonna find many dinosaurs. There are a couple little pockets, but your rocks are too young in general, right? And so you have to find rocks that are between about 237 million years old and 66 million years old to find non-avian dinosaurs. I say that because birds are dinosaurs, and if you have rocks of the right age that are sedimentary rocks, and you have exposures of those rocks, go outside and find dinosaurs. That's what I do.

Joe Rogan 3:14 Now, when were you first exposed to this dinosaurs are fake thing?

Kenneth Lacovara 3:21 I don't know a particular time, but you, you know, you definitely hear it, and-

Joe Rogan 3:25 But did, was it, is this a recent thing? This is what I'm confused. I never heard this my whole life. Like, growing up, I never heard this, never heard it in high school, never heard it until fairly recently, like within the last decade.

Kenneth Lacovara 3:37 Well, I think it's, it's kind of tied to creationism, right? And so-

Joe Rogan 3:41 Oh, okay. Right

Kenneth Lacovara 3:42 ... there are people that think the Earth is 6,000 years old.

Joe Rogan 3:45 Wait a minute, it's not?

Kenneth Lacovara 3:46 Well [laughs] no-

Joe Rogan 3:47 Wait, how, hold on.

Kenneth Lacovara 3:48 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 3:49 How old do you think it is? [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 3:50 Well, I think it's, uh, 4.567 billion years old.

Joe Rogan 3:54 Well, I've got a book I need you to read.

Kenneth Lacovara 3:55 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 3:56 Uh, so when... Is this-- But it has sort of ramped up, like the dinosaur skepticism has ramped up fairly recently, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 4:07 I don't know. I mean, I think the, there's just more people with a platform to say more things, right?

Joe Rogan 4:13 Mm. Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 4:14 Um, but I, I mean, personally, I don't hear it a lot. Like, people don't walk up to me and say, "Hey, you're a hoax" or, "Dinosaurs aren't real." I see-

Joe Rogan 4:21 Maybe they will now-

Kenneth Lacovara 4:22 Well-

Joe Rogan 4:22 ... after this show.

Kenneth Lacovara 4:23 Maybe they will now. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 4:24 Look forward to that.

Kenneth Lacovara 4:24 Probably gonna make a lot of new friends now. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 4:27 [laughs] Uh, one of the things that I've heard you talk about that I think is really interesting for a lot of people is if you looked at the, uh, the history of the Earth, the history of life on Earth, and you looked at it in terms of, like, a calendar, like as if it was, you know, first day is January 1st, like, when do dinosaurs show up? And you said they don't even show up until December 24th.

Kenneth Lacovara 4:54 Yeah, it's amazing. And so, you know, w- we kinda think we're what it's all about, right? But if you start the Earth four and a half billion years ago on January 1st, it's not until Thanksgiving that we get complex life on Earth, and by complex, I mean, like, little squirmy trilobites and things like that. That's half a billion years ago, so that's Thanksgiving. The first dinosaurs show up in the second week of December, and they persist for about 165 million years until an asteroid murders them the day after Christmas, right? And so that's the whole run of the dinosaurs.

Joe Rogan 5:27 That's crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 5:27 Second week of December to the day after Christmas, and then our species, Homo sapiens, shows up 300,000 years ago. That's about 20 seconds before midnight on the last night of the year.

Joe Rogan 5:39 [laughs] That's so wild-

Kenneth Lacovara 5:44 And-

Joe Rogan 5:44 ... to think about it that way

Kenneth Lacovara 5:45 ... and the reason we can find so many dinosaur skeletons is 'cause they were just here, right? Like, if you see somebody at a New Year's Eve party, and you wanna refer to somebody that you just saw at Christmas, what do you say? You say, like, "Oh, I just saw Bob," right?

Joe Rogan 5:59 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 5:59 "I just saw him at Christmas."

Joe Rogan 6:00 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 6:00 And dinosaurs were just here. It's only 2% of Earth history ago.

Joe Rogan 6:04 Right. Um, and there's, there's an issue with the fossil record in general, right? [clears throat] And that issue is that it's very difficult to make a fossil.

Kenneth Lacovara 6:12 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:12 Most things when they die will not make a fossil.

Kenneth Lacovara 6:15 Nope.

Joe Rogan 6:15 So the vast majority of dinosaurs who died, there are no fossil record of.

Kenneth Lacovara 6:21 Absolutely. I mean, imagine in your backyard today, if a, if a deer were to die there-

Joe Rogan 6:25 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 6:25 ... a raccoon were to die there, there's almost no chance that it enters the fossil record, right?

Joe Rogan 6:29 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 6:29 And so the chance of any one individual becoming a fossil is almost zero, but it's not zero, right?

Joe Rogan 6:36 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 6:37 And we get to do the experiment so many times. There's a phrase I love, which is that, um, unlikely things are likely to happen when happening happens a lot.

Joe Rogan 6:45 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 6:46 Right?

Joe Rogan 6:47 That's great.

Kenneth Lacovara 6:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:48 That's, yeah, that's, that's life in fossils-

Kenneth Lacovara 6:51 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 6:51 ... in a nutshell.

Kenneth Lacovara 6:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:52 It, what, do you think that there are a bunch of dinosaurs, maybe some pretty extraordinary ones, that we don't have fossil record of?

Kenneth Lacovara 7:00 Nearly all of them.

Joe Rogan 7:01 Really?

Kenneth Lacovara 7:01 Nearly all of them. Yeah, I mean, um, uh, dinosaurs are preferentially preserved in the fossil record, and so the dinosaurs that we know the most about are the ones that live in places where sediment accumulates. And where is that? That's, that's bottom lands, low lands-

Joe Rogan 7:17 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 7:17 ... right? Like flood plains, coastlines. So if you happen to live there, you have a better chance of making that transition from the biosphere to the geosphere. But if you're a dinosaur that lives up in the mountains somewhere, like the dinosaur equivalent of a, of a pronghorn or, or a bighorn sheep or a mountain goat, you're not gonna get fossilized because mountains shed sediment, right? Mountains are erosional, so you're not gonna make a fossil there. So there's probably whole environments that were occupied by dinosaur species that, that we don't know about that we'll probably never know about.

Joe Rogan 7:49 Right. So that's the thing to, for people to understand at home. When a fossil is made, it's generally made because something gets trapped inside mud or trapped inside tar, like the La Brea Tar Pits.

Kenneth Lacovara 7:59 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 7:59 Something along those... Well, those aren't really fossils, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 8:01 They're r- We would call them subfossils.

Joe Rogan 8:04 Subfossils?

Kenneth Lacovara 8:04 Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 8:04 What, what is the distinction?

Kenneth Lacovara 8:06 Well, they're not really very mineralized, right?

Joe Rogan 8:08 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 8:08 So it's still the original bone material.

Joe Rogan 8:10 Is that because of the age of them?

Kenneth Lacovara 8:12 Yeah, and, and they haven't, um, the, the mineralization process, what we call permineralization, occurs when you have groundwater that has minerals dissolved in it, and then the, the minerals precipitate out in the pore spaces of the bone. Think of, like, the, the stuff that builds up in your shower, right?

Joe Rogan 8:29 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 8:29 It's the same sort of process.

Joe Rogan 8:31 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 8:31 And so to some degree, the, the bones then become a mineralic copy of their former selves. Now, we used to think that was mostly the process, but now we know more and more that you can actually have not only original bone, but original soft tissue preserved in bones as well.

Joe Rogan 8:49 Hmm. That's interesting. And that's recently they found blood, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 8:54 Uh, there's a report of that. I think, you know, um, people are debating that, uh, occurrence. Uh, my friend Mary Schweitzer, who's one of the founders of molecular paleontology, along with Beth Shapiro, who, who you've met-

Joe Rogan 9:06 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 9:06 ... from Colossal, um, I, I read that Mary, um, is uncertain about that discovery. She said that non-mammalian, uh, blood cells should have a, a nuclear bulge, and these ones don't, and also that-

Joe Rogan 9:19 Hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 9:19 ... you know, f- her criterion is that you report only if you can sample that exact structure, not a, not a bulk sample, which I think it was. So I think it's possible. I think it's well possible. Um, but I think, you know, maybe the jury's out on that particular one.

Joe Rogan 9:34 So here it is. Here, "Scientists discover trace of dinosaur blood preserved for 115 million years, shattering assumptions about how long biological molecules can, can survive." Um, so-

Kenneth Lacovara 9:47 Yeah, would not surprise me at all, but you know, I think that, um, other scientists are, are going to be looking, um, for, you know, ways to, to validate that claim.

Joe Rogan 9:58 And so this is the real problem with this whole idea of Jurassic Park, right? Like, we really don't have DNA from these things.

Kenneth Lacovara 10:05 No, we don't. We don't have, we don't have any, uh, non-avian dinosaur DNA. We don't have any DNA that's that old. The oldest DNA that we have from a single individual is a little more than a million years, and environmental DNA, where you just sample the sediment and see what was in the environment, I think is about two million years. Two million years is a long way from Dinosaurville.

Joe Rogan 10:26 Right. Right, right, right. Um, you would have to do some crazy science experiments with a chicken, right? Like, if you wanted to make a dinosaur.

Kenneth Lacovara 10:33 Well, that's another way of doing it, is looking, you know, when, um, as evolution occurs, uh, sometimes genes are, you know, left out of the sequence, but mostly they're just turned off. So something like a chicken has a lot of non-avian dinosaur genes, they haven't been active since non-avian dinosaurs, that are turned off, and you could find those genes and potentially turn them back on again. Or you could look for relatives that have genes that are missing from a chicken sequence and, and patch them back in.

Joe Rogan 11:03 It seems like you would be, like, better suited starting off with, like, an ostrich. Starting off with something that's already on the way.

Kenneth Lacovara 11:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:09 You know? Like a chicken is a little too small. Ostrich is a pretty big sucker, you know? I mean, you-

Kenneth Lacovara 11:14 I think one of the things that makes a, a chicken attractive is they're, because they're, uh, important commercially. There's just been so much work done on chickens, you know?

Joe Rogan 11:22 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 11:22 So we know the chicken genome really well and know chickens really well.

Joe Rogan 11:25 And there's a lot of chickens available.

Kenneth Lacovara 11:26 And there's a lot of chickens.

Joe Rogan 11:27 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 11:27 Yeah. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 11:28 It's harder to find an ostrich.

Kenneth Lacovara 11:29 Yeah. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 11:31 So you know, there was a thing that I saw on Instagram the other day, which is a b- bounty of amazing information. I mean, you can't go wrong with Instagram.

Kenneth Lacovara 11:38 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 11:38 Um, but there was this guy who was refuting, uh, evolution, and, uh, one of the ways he was refuting evolution, he was showing a teddy bear that had become fossilized because it had been exposed to some, like, heavily mineralized waterfall or some shit. And, like, he had this teddy bear, and he's, like, hitting the teddy bear with, like, a hammer-

Kenneth Lacovara 11:58 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 11:59 ... or a stick. You know, like, making noise with it. Like, "Look, this is hard as a rock. This, this is a completely fossilized teddy bear, but clearly this is not millions of years old. Evolution is fake."

Kenneth Lacovara 12:09 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 12:10 It was, it was really interesting, but w- there are circumstances where things can become mineralized much quicker, correct?

Kenneth Lacovara 12:17 They have to be. So the process of fossilization is fairly rapid. Um, otherwise you wouldn't have anything left to fossilize.

Joe Rogan 12:25 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 12:25 Right?

Joe Rogan 12:25 Let's say if, like, Jamie dies. Sorry, Jamie. And Jamie dies in a mudslide.

Kenneth Lacovara 12:30 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:31 It could be anybody, by the way. Okay, sorry.

Kenneth Lacovara 12:32 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 12:33 Let's pick somebody else. Some guy named Tom or something. Ari. Ari Shaffir. There you go. [laughs] My friend Ari Shaffir. What if Ari, Ari dies in a mudslide? 'Cause he's most likely amongst us to die in a mudslide.

Kenneth Lacovara 12:42 He's, he's closest to them at a more frequent basis.

Joe Rogan 12:44 He's always there. He's al- he's always in some-

Kenneth Lacovara 12:46 Risk is higher

Joe Rogan 12:46 ... weird part of the world.

Kenneth Lacovara 12:47 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 12:48 He j- he's a traveler. So, um, if he died in a mudslide, how long before his body would become a fossil?

Kenneth Lacovara 12:55 It depends on the geochemical circumstances.

Joe Rogan 12:58 Best case scenario.

Kenneth Lacovara 12:59 I mean-

Joe Rogan 13:01 Lots of minerals, lots of muck, lots of mud and stuff

Kenneth Lacovara 13:05 Months, years

Joe Rogan 13:06 Months?

Kenneth Lacovara 13:06 Yeah

Joe Rogan 13:07 Months

Kenneth Lacovara 13:07 It has to happen fairly quick, or other processes would destroy the-

Joe Rogan 13:12 Okay

Kenneth Lacovara 13:12 ... body and the skeleton

Joe Rogan 13:13 So if you knew that he died in a mudslide, and you came back two years later, in the s- you knew where he died, you knew the spot, and you dug it up-

Kenneth Lacovara 13:19 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 13:19 ... you would find his fossilized skeleton a couple years later

Kenneth Lacovara 13:22 Well, it would, it would be what we would call a sub-fossil at that point

Joe Rogan 13:25 Sub-fossil

Kenneth Lacovara 13:25 There'd be mineralization that was happening

Joe Rogan 13:28 Like the La Brea Tar Pit stuff

Kenneth Lacovara 13:29 Yeah. And then, you know, uh, by the time they turn into, like, just a rock, which doesn't always happen, but, you know, some fossils have really just turned into minerals, um, that could be thousands of years or even longer. But those initial processes that stabilize the, the organism have to happen really quickly, or the organism will decay away or weather away

Joe Rogan 13:51 Hmm. Right

Kenneth Lacovara 13:52 Yeah

Joe Rogan 13:52 And this is the issue with finding fossilized things, is that most things don't leave fossils

Kenneth Lacovara 13:58 Almost everything does not leave a fossil

Joe Rogan 14:00 Yeah. And the Earth wants to consume. Like, there's a bunch of predators, and a bunch of scavengers, and a bunch of bacteria, and a bunch of things, and things decay, and then you just have weathering and ti-

Kenneth Lacovara 14:12 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 14:12 Especially if the bones are exposed

Kenneth Lacovara 14:13 Yeah

Joe Rogan 14:14 And then there's nothing-

Kenneth Lacovara 14:15 Which-

Joe Rogan 14:15 ... pretty quickly

Kenneth Lacovara 14:15 You know, that's one way of just seeing how old the Earth is, right? Like, if, if you have this, this event that has an almost zero chance of happening, but we end up with a lot of fossils, it tells us that we have a lot of time with which to work, right?

Joe Rogan 14:29 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 14:30 Like, multitudinous individuals over vast swaths of time leave an abundant fossil record, even though the chance of any one individual being fossilized is almost zero

Joe Rogan 14:40 Isn't that crazy? Almost zero.

Kenneth Lacovara 14:42 Yeah

Joe Rogan 14:42 So what was the first dinosaur that was discovered?

Kenneth Lacovara 14:46 Um-

Joe Rogan 14:46 And how did they make this distinction? Because before even the term dinosaur, they j- just kind of referred to everything as a dragon, right? Like, large reptiles, didn't they refer to them as dragons?

Kenneth Lacovara 14:56 Well, yeah. I mean, people have been finding fossils for as long as there's been people, right? And they recognized them as different things at different times. There's, there's a fascinating area called folk paleontology, right? And there's a, a woman, Adrienne Mayor, who's written a couple, uh, books about this. And it's about, you know, uh, uh, ancient people, or even historical people, they come across fossils, and they don't know about dinosaurs yet, right? They don't know about paleontology. So people do what people do, which is we make stuff up, right? We make up explanations. And you can look at certain things, like, you know, if you see some, some dinosaur, uh, vertebrae wea- weathering out of the Gobi Desert, well, you might think they're dragons, right? Or, or she contends that, uh, Protoceratops, which is a, a tiny relative of Triceratops, um, has a very pointy head with a beak, has a quadrupedal body. Well, like, head of an eagle, body of a lion, right, the griffin.

Joe Rogan 15:53 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 15:53 Or, or she might say, um, you know, in during the, uh, the Pleistocene, we have dwarfing of animals that are living in Mediterranean islands like Sicily and Malta-

Joe Rogan 16:03 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 16:03 ... and Crete. Um, well, if you l- if you look at an elephant skull, and you imagine a, a dwarf elephant, the nose hole in an elephant, the nares, are coalesced into a single hole that's up here. It looks like a Cyclops-

Joe Rogan 16:15 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 16:15 ... right?

Joe Rogan 16:16 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 16:16 And so that might be where a lot of these legendary animals come from. But dinosaurs are first recognized from really scrappy remains that start turning up in Britain in the early part of the 19th century. And they can't really tell what they are because their remains are so poor. There's three that are initially, um, named as, as separate species, um, uh, uh, Megalodon and Hylaeosaurus and Iguanodon. And in, uh, in 1842, a British anatomist named Richard Owens, uh, describes them as a group of crocodile lizards, and which they're not, and he gives them the name dinosaur. And he doesn't even know that this is a big deal. He buries it on, like, page 250 of The Mesozoic Reptiles of Great Britain, and he just kind of throws a, a little line in there about there's these, this tribe of crocodile lizards, and we'll call them dinosaurs

Joe Rogan 17:09 Hmm. Today is brought to you by the number one brand for better sex, BlueChew. BlueChew Gold is a 4-in-1 powerhouse that gets your brain and your body on the same page for sex. Two ingredients get the blood flow pumping, and two ingredients prime your brain for arousal. No overthinking, just peak performance in as little as 15 minutes. Look at the stats. Gold is three times stronger, five times faster, and eight times longer lasting than old school methods. BlueChew Gold is the real deal. Right now, buy two months of BlueChew Gold and get the third free with my code ROGAN. You'll also receive free overnight shipping. That's promo code ROGAN. Head over to BlueChew.com for details and important safety information. Check it out. This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience. So when you said Megalodon, you, Megalodon-

Kenneth Lacovara 18:02 Oh, I'm sorry. Megalosaurus

Joe Rogan 18:04 Megalosaurus.

Kenneth Lacovara 18:04 I meant Megalosaurus

Joe Rogan 18:04 Okay. I was confused

Kenneth Lacovara 18:05 Definitely not Megalodon.

Joe Rogan 18:06 Yeah, I was like, "What?"

Kenneth Lacovara 18:06 Megalosaurus. Yeah

Joe Rogan 18:08 Uh, okay. So this, is this one of the first jaws of Megalosaurus that was found?

Kenneth Lacovara 18:12 Yes, it is. Mm-hmm. Yeah

Joe Rogan 18:13 Yeah, I imagine you find... How big is that?

Kenneth Lacovara 18:15 Uh, it's a big dinosaur. It's, uh, I'm not sure of the exact dimensions, probably 25, 30 feet.

Joe Rogan 18:20 25, 30 feet long.

Kenneth Lacovara 18:21 Yeah

Joe Rogan 18:21 So that, that's a large jaw. That's a chunk.

Kenneth Lacovara 18:24 Yeah. Yeah. It's big

Joe Rogan 18:25 So that's what it looks like?

Kenneth Lacovara 18:25 Yeah, there you go. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 18:26 Okay

Kenneth Lacovara 18:26 Well, I don't know. Is that Megalodon?

Joe Rogan 18:28 I-

Kenneth Lacovara 18:28 I'm not sure that is

Speaker 18:29 That's a picture from the article about it, so I kind of guess it is

Joe Rogan 18:30 Megalosaurus

Kenneth Lacovara 18:31 Megalosaurus, sorry

Joe Rogan 18:32 What's that, Jamie?

Speaker 18:33 It's a picture from the article about it, same article that the-

Joe Rogan 18:35 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 18:35 Okay

Speaker 18:35 ... other one was

Joe Rogan 18:36 It looks like-

Kenneth Lacovara 18:37 So if you look at, look at the, um, Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and so these are the first artistic, uh, reconstructions of dinosaurs based on these really scrappy remains.

Joe Rogan 18:48 Hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 18:48 And they just have no idea what they are. They're made by a, uh, really the first paleoartist named, uh, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and, uh, they look like monsters 'cause he doesn't know what they are. They look like a, like a CRISPR accident between, like, a lizard and a pineapple. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 19:03 Is that what they look like?

Kenneth Lacovara 19:04 So there they are. And you can still go, uh, and see them today. They're, they're a little bit south of London. And so that was our first conception of what dinosaurs were

Joe Rogan 19:13 How old is this stuff?

Kenneth Lacovara 19:14 Uh, these are, I think, 1850s, uh, middle part of the, of the 19th century

Joe Rogan 19:22 That's when they made these sculptures?

Kenneth Lacovara 19:23 Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 19:24 Wow. Go back to the actual sculptures, Jeremy, please.

Kenneth Lacovara 19:27 So this is-

Joe Rogan 19:27 Oh

Kenneth Lacovara 19:27 ... you know, based on that 1842 report of what dinosaurs are. So that's what we think they are.

Joe Rogan 19:33 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 19:33 And then in 1858, the world's first nearly complete dinosaur is, uh, skeleton is found, guess where?

Joe Rogan 19:41 Where?

Kenneth Lacovara 19:41 New Jersey.

Joe Rogan 19:42 Really?

Kenneth Lacovara 19:43 Yeah. So the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton founded in Haddonfield, New Jersey. If, if you look up-

Joe Rogan 19:48 Is that it?

Kenneth Lacovara 19:49 No. Uh, look up Hadrosaurus, and, uh, Hadrosaurus is, uh, found in a marl mine in, uh, in southern New Jersey, a little town, uh, right outside Philadelphia. And, um, it's the first mounted dinosaur skeleton. They have enough bones to m- mount, and it's, it's taken up to, uh, yeah, that left picture, the black and white one. Yeah. Uh, so that's the first, uh, mounted skeleton-

Joe Rogan 20:15 Is that a really picture?

Kenneth Lacovara 20:16 ... of a dinosaur. I think that's an illustration of the mount. Um-

Joe Rogan 20:20 Yeah, that doesn't look like a picture. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 20:21 Yeah. So it's taken up to New York. The same guy that did those sculptures in London then, um, does this. And, uh, so they're mounted in New York, they're taken to Philadelphia, and, uh, it's kind of the founding of the Academy of Natural Sciences, which fortunately just, uh, ceased, uh, being open to the public. Um-

Joe Rogan 20:42 Fortunately or unfortunately?

Kenneth Lacovara 20:43 Unfortunately.

Joe Rogan 20:44 Oh, I thought you said fortunately.

Kenneth Lacovara 20:45 Very, no, very unfortunately.

Joe Rogan 20:45 I was like, what?

Kenneth Lacovara 20:46 No, no.

Joe Rogan 20:46 Are you a hater?

Kenneth Lacovara 20:47 No, I, I love the academy.

Joe Rogan 20:48 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 20:49 Um, uh, so they are, uh, they're, they're mounted, they're taken to the academy, and it kinda, it, it creates this incredible, like, public interest that people are lined up around the blocks to see this dinosaur skeleton, and, uh, kinda creates the dinomania that, you know, we still have in the world today. And that really... So I, I always say that, you know, England is the birthplace of dinosaur paleontology, but southern New Jersey is the cradle of dinosaur paleontology.

Joe Rogan 21:15 Interesting.

Kenneth Lacovara 21:16 And so first, the nearly complete skeleton found there, 1858, and then the world's first tyrannosaur discovered was not T-Rex. There's about 28 species of tyrannosaur that we know of. First one discovered also in southern New Jersey, about a mile from the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, where I work.

Joe Rogan 21:34 Now let me ask you this about the first dinosaur. Hadrosaurus, is that how to say it right?

Kenneth Lacovara 21:37 Um, Hadrosaurus-

Joe Rogan 21:38 Hadrosaurus

Kenneth Lacovara 21:39 ... was the first nearly complete one.

Joe Rogan 21:41 How did they know whether it stood upright or w- w- I mean, they had it posed in this very looming-

Kenneth Lacovara 21:46 Yeah

Joe Rogan 21:47 ... like, like-

Kenneth Lacovara 21:47 They didn't, and they got it wrong, actually.

Joe Rogan 21:49 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 21:49 Yeah. So you'll see those old reconstructions, um, kind of have them making like a tripod, kind of like a kangaroo does when it's, when it's, you know, just-

Joe Rogan 21:57 Oh, okay

Kenneth Lacovara 21:58 ... kinda hanging out. And we don't think they did that today. Uh, we would put the, the spine, like, uh, parallel with the ground.

Joe Rogan 22:05 Could you see-

Kenneth Lacovara 22:06 Right

Joe Rogan 22:06 ... uh, could you just show us an image of what they, they think Hadrosaurus looked like?

Kenneth Lacovara 22:10 Yeah, we have, um, if you'd-

Joe Rogan 22:12 So that's the, that's the skeleton, and you think, like, what is an accurate representation?

Kenneth Lacovara 22:16 Yeah, I think that's pretty good. If you look at, um, our museum, the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum and Hadrosaurus, we have a fleshed out reconstruction that I think is, you know, as accurate as we can be right now.

Joe Rogan 22:28 Well, isn't that an issue, though? With the f- fleshed out stuff, you're just kind of guessing. Like if, I'm sure you've seen what a hippo skeleton looks like.

Kenneth Lacovara 22:36 Yeah, yeah, like a monster, right?

Joe Rogan 22:38 Crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 22:38 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:39 Crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 22:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:39 Like you would never imagine.

Kenneth Lacovara 22:41 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 22:41 It looks like Hungry Hungry Hippo.

Kenneth Lacovara 22:42 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 22:43 Like all, you know, big, sweet, cuddly.

Kenneth Lacovara 22:45 Right.

Joe Rogan 22:46 It's not really, but looks like it is in kids' toys.

Kenneth Lacovara 22:49 Mm-hmm. Yeah, there you go.

Joe Rogan 22:49 So that's what you think it looked like?

Kenneth Lacovara 22:51 Yeah, I mean, that is our best approximation. Uh, you know, we-

Joe Rogan 22:54 But it's just a guess, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 22:55 Well-

Joe Rogan 22:55 Because you don't really know what the tissue looked like.

Kenneth Lacovara 22:58 Yeah, I mean, more than a guess, but it could have soft tissue features that we don't know about for sure. The color, we're guessing. That we don't know.

Joe Rogan 23:07 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 23:07 And so what we do is we look at modern analogs. So what does a, you know, what does a herd animal look like? Or we have a baby Hadrosaurus. What does a, a small f- forest herbivore look like? And, and for that we use the baby tapir, right? 'Cause they have that-

Joe Rogan 23:19 Okay

Kenneth Lacovara 23:19 ... camouflaged color. So color we don't know about. Um, we don't know, like, if they were shrink-wrapped or real blubbery, that sort of thing.

Joe Rogan 23:28 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 23:29 And then they could have soft tissue structures that, that we won't know about. Um-

Joe Rogan 23:33 Jamie, just for fun, pull up the hippo skeleton-

Kenneth Lacovara 23:36 Yeah, that's crazy

Joe Rogan 23:36 ... versus an actual hippo because it's so kooky. 'Cause that to me is one of the most drastic ones.

Kenneth Lacovara 23:42 Yeah, or like a goose, right? If you don't know-

Joe Rogan 23:44 Oh, yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 23:44 ... what a goose looks like and you don't know the feathers, it looks like a little demon.

Joe Rogan 23:47 Or even a rabbit.

Kenneth Lacovara 23:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:49 Rabbits look crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 23:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:50 Um, so-

Kenneth Lacovara 23:51 Yeah, there you go

Joe Rogan 23:52 ... like, like look at the skeleton of a hippo.

Kenneth Lacovara 23:54 Right.

Joe Rogan 23:54 How nuts is that?

Kenneth Lacovara 23:55 It's bizarre.

Joe Rogan 23:56 I mean, that is wild.

Kenneth Lacovara 23:57 Right.

Joe Rogan 23:57 You would imagine that would be, like, the most terrifying, ferocious, demon-looking creature. But then you see him, you're like, "Oh, hello buddy."

Kenneth Lacovara 24:06 Except they are terrifying.

Joe Rogan 24:07 No, they're fucking terrifying.

Kenneth Lacovara 24:07 Super dangerous.

Joe Rogan 24:08 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 24:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:09 They're, they're pretty amazing creatures.

Kenneth Lacovara 24:11 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:12 And responsible for, I th- They're like the second most deadly animal in Africa.

Kenneth Lacovara 24:16 You do not wanna be around a hippo.

Joe Rogan 24:17 Yeah. Super aggressive-

Kenneth Lacovara 24:18 Yeah

Joe Rogan 24:19 ... giant pig-like thing.

Kenneth Lacovara 24:20 Chase boats.

Joe Rogan 24:21 Yeah. So obviously if we had a hippo skeleton, we would fuck that up.

Kenneth Lacovara 24:26 Oh, yeah, for sure. And an elephant, like, would we put the trunk on an elephant? I'm not sure that we would.

Joe Rogan 24:31 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 24:31 Right? And then-

Joe Rogan 24:32 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 24:32 ... what do you know about an elephant-

Joe Rogan 24:33 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 24:33 ... if you don't know about the trunk?

Joe Rogan 24:34 Right, right.

Kenneth Lacovara 24:35 Right. So, uh, there's a lot we don't know about dinosaurs, but that's what keeps us in business, right? If, I mean, if we knew everything, we'd stop.

Joe Rogan 24:41 Of course.

Kenneth Lacovara 24:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:42 Um, so w- how much do we know about skin texture?

Kenneth Lacovara 24:47 Um-

Joe Rogan 24:47 'Cause there have been some fossilized-

Kenneth Lacovara 24:49 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 24:49 ... impressions of the texture of the skin, correct?

Kenneth Lacovara 24:53 Yeah. So it depends on the group of dinosaurs. So Hadrosaurs, which we know best because Hadrosaurs seem to like wetland areas, and so does sediment, uh, we have tens of thousands of Hadrosaur remains.

Joe Rogan 25:06 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 25:06 And we know them from their skeletons, we know them from their eggs, from their embryos, from, from preserved skin. S- there's a few Hadrosaurs that are preserved in 3D, and we can see their skin, we can see their gut contents. In one case, we can see gut parasites.

Joe Rogan 25:22 Really?

Kenneth Lacovara 25:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:23 So you've got skin, you've got gut, you've got gut parasites?

Kenneth Lacovara 25:27 Not gut, but gut contents. You can see, like, uh, sediment, and they get pollen out of the gut of Hadrosaurs, so you can see what plants they were eating.

Joe Rogan 25:35 What is the best w- p- thing that Jamie can look up, you could find the most complete-

Kenneth Lacovara 25:39 Um, there's a ... hadrosaur, uh, that goes by the name Leonardo.

Joe Rogan 25:43 Oh.

Kenneth Lacovara 25:43 Um, so I don't give dinosaurs names, but I call Leonardo JDRI 115H.

Joe Rogan 25:49 Oh, like a prisoner.

Kenneth Lacovara 25:50 [laughs] Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:51 Why do you do that? You don't want them to be-

Kenneth Lacovara 25:52 Well, 'cause they're my specimens.

Joe Rogan 25:53 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 25:53 They're not my buddies, you know? But if you look up, uh, uh, Duck Bill Dinosaur Leonardo, you'll probably find it.

Joe Rogan 25:59 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 26:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:00 Um, so when they found this, what year was this when they found this fairly complete version of it?

Kenneth Lacovara 26:05 Oh, I think it was, uh-

Joe Rogan 26:07 Oh, look at that

Kenneth Lacovara 26:08 ... around 2000 maybe.

Joe Rogan 26:09 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 26:10 I went out and saw it and did a little bit of work on it in 2003 I think.

Joe Rogan 26:14 That's really-

Kenneth Lacovara 26:15 But yeah

Joe Rogan 26:15 ... pretty complete.

Kenneth Lacovara 26:16 I mean, when you see that thing, it's like being in a room with a dinosaur.

Joe Rogan 26:19 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 26:19 It's 3D. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:20 Well, that's the issue that I have where people say there are no complete dinosaurs.

Kenneth Lacovara 26:25 [laughs] Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:25 This is like one of the things that gets repeated in these dinosaur debunking-

Kenneth Lacovara 26:29 Yeah

Joe Rogan 26:29 ... videos. And I'm like, "Guys, that's not true. That's not true."

Kenneth Lacovara 26:32 Well, we have-

Joe Rogan 26:34 They have really close to complete, like close enough-

Kenneth Lacovara 26:37 Yeah

Joe Rogan 26:37 ... that it's much more likely that they're fucking real than everybody's in on this hoax.

Kenneth Lacovara 26:41 Right, and completeness is-

Joe Rogan 26:43 Look at that. Is that like the tail?

Kenneth Lacovara 26:45 Sticking out. Yeah, that's the tail right there. Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 26:47 Whoa. That's nuts. So what am I looking at? Like what is that-

Kenneth Lacovara 26:51 Uh

Joe Rogan 26:51 ... feature?

Kenneth Lacovara 26:52 Well, the tail there, it looks like you're looking at, um, I think you're looking at some, some neural spine coming off the tail.

Joe Rogan 27:02 But you're a geo- geologist though, right? Like, so what is this geological-

Kenneth Lacovara 27:05 Well, I'm a, well, I'm a paleontologist as well. Um-

Joe Rogan 27:07 Right. But you are both, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 27:09 I am both.

Joe Rogan 27:09 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 27:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:10 That's right.

Kenneth Lacovara 27:10 Um-

Joe Rogan 27:10 So what is this-

Kenneth Lacovara 27:11 I don't know that-

Joe Rogan 27:11 ... geological feature? It's like, was that what a, was that a mudslide?

Kenneth Lacovara 27:14 Well, I mean, if I'm guessing, it kind of looks like... Well, it's, it, it looks fluvial to me.

Joe Rogan 27:21 It looks like a crazy tree.

Kenneth Lacovara 27:21 So it looks like, those look like floodplain deposits to me.

Joe Rogan 27:24 Mm. Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 27:24 And sometimes where you get those colors, like the purples, that could be paleosols, which are ancient soils that are preserved. Uh, but that's pretty typical of what a lot of, uh, the bad lands in, uh, in the US looks like, so-

Joe Rogan 27:38 That is really cool

Kenneth Lacovara 27:39 ... I'm not sure. I mean-

Joe Rogan 27:40 Imagine finding that. Imagine just stumbling upon that. You're like, "Hey."

Kenneth Lacovara 27:43 Well, I have. [laughs] Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:45 Well, yeah. You have.

Kenneth Lacovara 27:45 So-

Joe Rogan 27:45 You don't have to imagine. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 27:47 Yeah. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 27:48 Exposed fossils protruding from a hillside-

Kenneth Lacovara 27:49 Ah, there we go. Okay, now in Alberta

Joe Rogan 27:51 ... in Alberta.

Kenneth Lacovara 27:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:52 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 27:52 There we go. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:53 Complete with fossilized skin.

Kenneth Lacovara 27:55 Alberta has some amazing dinosaurs, amazing dinosaurs.

Joe Rogan 27:58 So how many of these do you think had feathers?

Kenneth Lacovara 28:03 Well, that's an area of debate right now in-

Joe Rogan 28:05 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 28:05 ... paleontology. So, uh, birds have feathers obviously. Birds-

Joe Rogan 28:09 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 28:09 ... are literally dinosaurs.

Joe Rogan 28:10 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 28:11 Um, it seems like the theropod dinosaurs-

Joe Rogan 28:14 Would you like a cup?

Kenneth Lacovara 28:14 I'm good for now.

Joe Rogan 28:15 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 28:15 Thanks. Um, the meat eaters, although they're not all meat eaters, but that group, uh, that like T-Rex is in, Velociraptor's in, they seem to be mostly feathered, so they have at least a feathered ancestor. Whether they retained their feathers or not is, is the question. And then on the other side, we see some indications of things that have, we might call them feathers or, you know, sometimes they call them like branched integumentary structures, which means modified scales. So it seems like dinosaurs on both sides of the dinosaur family tree have some modifications of their scales that are feather-like, and so it begs the question, is the ancestral dinosaur like that? We don't know the answer to that right now.

Joe Rogan 28:56 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 28:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:57 Um, there's a really cool exhibit in Montana in Bozeman at, uh, the museum there.

Kenneth Lacovara 29:03 Yeah, Museum of the Rockies.

Joe Rogan 29:04 Yes.

Kenneth Lacovara 29:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:05 Where half of the raptor-

Kenneth Lacovara 29:06 Mm

Joe Rogan 29:06 ... is, the raptor's the wrong size though. They made the raptor big like a Jurassic Park raptor.

Kenneth Lacovara 29:12 Well, some were big.

Joe Rogan 29:13 Really? How big were they?

Kenneth Lacovara 29:13 Yeah. Well, like Velociraptor in Jurassic Park is, th- they should not be big.

Joe Rogan 29:18 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 29:19 A Velociraptor has a skull that's, that's about like that.

Joe Rogan 29:22 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 29:22 Like-

Joe Rogan 29:22 It's like the size of like what? Like a house cat or something?

Kenneth Lacovara 29:25 It's like a, like it's like a pissed off turkey.

Joe Rogan 29:27 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 29:27 Right? [laughs] So like if, if a Velociraptor's in your kitchen, it's more of an opportunity than a problem. You know, just like throw some carrots on and, you know-

Joe Rogan 29:36 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 29:36 ... have some, uh, Velociraptor roast, uh, later that night.

Joe Rogan 29:40 So why did they do that in Jurassic Park? Why did they make the Velociraptor so big?

Kenneth Lacovara 29:44 I think just more entertaining that way.

Joe Rogan 29:46 For fun.

Kenneth Lacovara 29:47 But there are dinosaurs in that group, uh, like, uh, Deinonychus, uh, that are big, and like the, uh, Velociraptors in Jurassic Park. So there really were dinosaurs like that, that were as big as that, they just weren't Velociraptor.

Joe Rogan 30:02 Got it.

Kenneth Lacovara 30:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:03 And so this exhibit in Montana at the exhi- the, uh, museum, what's interesting is it shows one possible option-

Kenneth Lacovara 30:10 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 30:10 ... where they're the traditional Jurassic Park looking dinosaur, and then the other one is covered with feathers.

Kenneth Lacovara 30:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:16 And, uh, so one side of this specimen or this piece, this exhibit, is feathered and one's scaly.

Kenneth Lacovara 30:23 Well, and-

Joe Rogan 30:23 The feathered is way cooler

Kenneth Lacovara 30:25 ... in the case of Velociraptor, we can actually see the quill insertion knobs on its ulna.

Joe Rogan 30:29 Oh.

Kenneth Lacovara 30:30 Right.

Joe Rogan 30:30 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 30:30 So we can see, just like you would see on a, on a turkey or a, a vulture or something.

Joe Rogan 30:34 Um, see if you could see the one, the side that shows the f- There it is. That's the-

Kenneth Lacovara 30:38 Oh, yeah

Joe Rogan 30:39 ... that's the exhibit.

Kenneth Lacovara 30:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:40 That's the exhibit. That is fucking sick. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 30:42 Yeah, so I think, you know, that, that crazy looking feathered side-

Joe Rogan 30:45 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 30:45 ... I think that's plausible.

Joe Rogan 30:47 Why, why they have to have them humping?

Kenneth Lacovara 30:48 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 30:49 Is that what they're doing?

Kenneth Lacovara 30:49 No, he's probably, he's catching it.

Joe Rogan 30:50 Oh, he's catching it.

Kenneth Lacovara 30:51 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 30:52 Seems like he's not.

Kenneth Lacovara 30:53 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 30:54 Uh, his face. [laughs] Look at his wig. He looks like Rod Stewart.

Kenneth Lacovara 30:57 I mean, it looks crazy. Oh, yeah. That does kind of look like that there, doesn't it? That's for sure.

Joe Rogan 30:59 Yeah. Yeah, the, the feather, that's like, they went really far with the artistic re-creation-

Kenneth Lacovara 31:05 They did. They did

Joe Rogan 31:05 ... of, you know, their interpretation of the colors and-

Kenneth Lacovara 31:07 And we don't know what color they were, but, you know, think about the world today. There's a, there's a correlation between small things are more colorful-

Joe Rogan 31:15 Mm

Kenneth Lacovara 31:15 ... and bigger things aren't. Like think about what-

Joe Rogan 31:17 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 31:17 ... what color is a hippo and a rhino and a whale?

Joe Rogan 31:20 Polar bear.

Kenneth Lacovara 31:21 And, and, uh, well, they're a little different 'cause they have the, the, uh-

Joe Rogan 31:23 Grizzly bear.

Kenneth Lacovara 31:25 Yeah. Um-

Joe Rogan 31:25 All brown

Kenneth Lacovara 31:26 ... or, you know.

Joe Rogan 31:27 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 31:28 But big things, generally gray, right? It's kinda disappointing. Um, 'cause it's, it's expensive to make pigment, right?

Joe Rogan 31:35 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 31:35 Metabolically expensive.

Joe Rogan 31:37 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 31:37 And if you're really big, you're not hiding, you're not fooling anyone, you know? And so I think big creatures kinda come in the factory color, which apparently is like gray.

Joe Rogan 31:47 What about tigers though?

Kenneth Lacovara 31:49 Well, they're big-ish, right? They're not elephant or hippo size, right?

Joe Rogan 31:54 They're pretty fucking big.

Kenneth Lacovara 31:55 They're pretty big.

Joe Rogan 31:55 Look it.

Kenneth Lacovara 31:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:56 Siberian.

Kenneth Lacovara 31:56 But they have camouflage, right?

Speaker 31:57 Perplexity says Jurassic Park was making, uh, supposed to be using this dinosaur, but Velociraptor is easier to say, so they used that word instead.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:05 Yeah, that's Deinonychus that I said is big.

Joe Rogan 32:07 Oh, that's-

Kenneth Lacovara 32:08 Yeah

Joe Rogan 32:08 ... so they really did make it accurate. They just used the wrong name.

Speaker 32:13 Just, yeah, for Hollywood sake, I guess, or budget.

Joe Rogan 32:15 Why? W- were people too stupid to understand the word Deinonychus?

Speaker 32:18 I don't know.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:19 That's silly.

Speaker 32:19 Michael Crichton might have been the one that-

Kenneth Lacovara 32:20 Velociraptor is a cool name, but-

Joe Rogan 32:22 It's very cool.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:23 But this is cool, too.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:24 Yeah.

Speaker 32:25 That's the explanation I got here.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:27 Yeah. But use Velocirap- Velociraptor's a more dramatic, easier to say name.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:32 Right.

Joe Rogan 32:33 I don't know.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:34 I think you could've said Deinonychus and freaked people out.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:37 I think so, too.

Joe Rogan 32:37 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:37 And tho- that first Jurassic Park movie, like, that was state-of-the-art science ex- you know, except for that. Um, but then they kind of got locked in and kind of frozen in time, and so they, the movies become less and less accurate over time because they, they stick with, like, the 1993 models, whereas science has progressed since.

Joe Rogan 32:55 Interesting.

Kenneth Lacovara 32:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:57 Interesting. So what did they screw... What's the difference?

Kenneth Lacovara 33:01 Well, like, the one thing is, like, our knowledge of feathers in the theropod group of dinosaurs-

Joe Rogan 33:06 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 33:06 ... like, they never got on board with that, right?

Joe Rogan 33:08 Anything else?

Kenneth Lacovara 33:09 Um, you know, I mean, a lot of it can be covered by the fact that they're genetically engineered, right? And so they're, they're mixing dinosaur-

Joe Rogan 33:18 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 33:18 ... times and places and things like that, so a lot of things that never lived together. And then it gets a little silly in the Jurassic World movies, where they just start to make up dinosaurs that never existed-

Joe Rogan 33:27 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 33:27 ... right? Like, uh, what is it called? An, an Indominus rex, I think.

Joe Rogan 33:30 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 33:30 Right?

Joe Rogan 33:31 It's like when Fast & Furious, when they drove a car in space.

Kenneth Lacovara 33:34 Right.

Joe Rogan 33:34 After a while, you gotta go crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 33:35 Right. You gotta jump in the shark at that point.

Joe Rogan 33:36 You have nine of these movies. You gotta-

Kenneth Lacovara 33:38 Yeah

Joe Rogan 33:38 ... you gotta get creative. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 33:40 Now, they did do a good job. My, my big baby, Dreadnoughtus, that I discovered in South America, was in Jurassic Park: Dominion, and I actually think they did a really good job with the anatomy of it.

Joe Rogan 33:49 And Dreadnoughtus was the one that was absolutely enormous, but it had a tiny little brain, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 33:56 Well, all of those big sauropod dinosaurs, sauropods, like, think Brontosaurus, right?

Joe Rogan 33:59 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 33:59 The long neck, long tail, quadrupedal ones. They had small heads, and they had small brains. Um, you could probably fit, uh, you know, two Dreadnoughtus brains in a pint glass.

Joe Rogan 34:10 What?

Kenneth Lacovara 34:10 You know? And it's a 65-ton organism. So they weren't thinking deep thoughts, you know? I think their day is pretty much-

Joe Rogan 34:16 Mm

Kenneth Lacovara 34:17 ... eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.

Joe Rogan 34:17 Just chew, chew, chew.

Kenneth Lacovara 34:18 You know, sex every now and then.

Joe Rogan 34:20 Chew shit.

Kenneth Lacovara 34:20 And that's about it.

Joe Rogan 34:21 Let me see what that image looks like again, Jamie.

Speaker 34:22 Which one?

Joe Rogan 34:23 The, uh, the one that you just showed, the first one.

Speaker 34:26 That would be here.

Joe Rogan 34:27 So that's how big it was.

Kenneth Lacovara 34:29 Yeah, it's big. It's about 13 African elephants. It's about nine T. rex.

Joe Rogan 34:33 Wow. And so is that the biggest dinosaur we've ever discovered?

Kenneth Lacovara 34:37 Well, you can define biggest in different ways. You can say what's the longest, what's the tallest, or what's the most massive.

Joe Rogan 34:42 Right, largest mass.

Kenneth Lacovara 34:43 So this is in a group called the titanosaurs, and the titanosaurs are, in general, the most massive dinosaurs, and-

Joe Rogan 34:50 Look at that thing compared to a 737.

Kenneth Lacovara 34:52 Yeah, it's big. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 34:52 That's nuts.

Kenneth Lacovara 34:53 So what I would say about Dreadnoughtus is it's the most massive dinosaur for which we can confidently calculate a weight, but there are other, more fragmentary, uh, titanosaurs that are clearly in that same size range. But they might only be known by a couple of, of, uh, dorsal vertebrae, back, backbones, or, you know, a piece of a leg or something like that.

Joe Rogan 35:15 Hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 35:15 And there's no math in the literature that turns a fragment like that into a mass. The best way of estimating the mass is we know now from, from living quadrupedal animals, imagine, you know, I say, you know, "Joe, build a, a table for me, and I'm gonna put 65 tons on it," right?

Joe Rogan 35:33 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 35:33 So you would scale the legs to the weight that it has to carry, right? And so we know from measuring the minimum shaft circumference of the humerus, the upper arm bone, and the femur, the upper leg bone, that that dimension scales with body mass, and it's a very tight correlation with modern organisms. So for Dreadnoughtus, we were fortunate in that we had the humerus and the femur, so we could make those measurements, pop it on that scale, and it comes out to be 65 tons.

Joe Rogan 36:02 Hmm. And how much-

Kenneth Lacovara 36:04 Yeah, that's it there

Joe Rogan 36:04 ... of-

Kenneth Lacovara 36:04 So you can see the-

Joe Rogan 36:05 Is it-

Kenneth Lacovara 36:05 ... the humerus on the left and the femur on the right.

Joe Rogan 36:07 Is that image with the, that shows the skeleton, is that what we actually have of it?

Kenneth Lacovara 36:12 We have a lot more.

Joe Rogan 36:13 Oh.

Kenneth Lacovara 36:13 But that, that is from our paper, that image, and it, it shows, uh, it shows Dreadnoughtus. And then that bone tissue on the left there, um, you can tell if you look at an organism's bone tissue whether it's growing rapidly or not. So, you know, if you're an adolescent, um, you can see it doesn't have, uh, very well-ordered bone tissue near the edge of it because the way bone grows is first b- bone cells just kind of get thrown down, uh, in, in a mess, and then later on, they get structure. And so in the case of Dreadnoughtus, at 65 tons, you can see there, um, where that arrow is, above that, very disordered bone cells. So it was growing rapidly at the time of its death at 65 tons. So we don't really know how big these things could get.

Joe Rogan 37:00 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 37:00 And the chance of you finding the biggest, right, you're not gonna find the biggest that ever existed.

Joe Rogan 37:04 Right, right. That's the problem.

Kenneth Lacovara 37:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:06 You know, that's, that's one of the weird things about crocodiles, right, is that, and you would wonder, like, how much of that is carryover from dinosaurs. They, they seem to just keep growing, and they don't seem to have, like, an age limit. They die eventually, but they, they don't die like a dog does, where you can-

Kenneth Lacovara 37:26 Yeah

Joe Rogan 37:26 ... kind of predict, oh, you know, if, you know, Roscoe gets fed right and taken care of, he might ma- make it to 14. No, they kind of live for a long time, like hundreds of years perhaps.

Kenneth Lacovara 37:38 Yeah, well, um, crocodiles have what we would call indeterminate growth, right?

Joe Rogan 37:42 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 37:42 They just get, they get bigger as they get older, and then things like birds, mammals, we have determinate growth, right? Um, but crocodiles, who are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs, right, they're not dinosaurs. They don't have a dinosaur in their ancestry, but they're cousins. Um- They have done everything. They've done the ... You know, we, we know that crocodiles are alive today, but there were crocodiles that were going down like the shark route. They, they were going, it, it looked like they were going fully marine. Um, there was a, a pelican-like crocodile that was in Egypt in the mid-Cretaceous Period, and it had, uh, like hundreds of tiny little teeth and, and we think it had a pouch like that. Um-

Joe Rogan 38:23 What is that one called?

Kenneth Lacovara 38:24 Uh, it's called, um, mmm, Stomatosuchus. Stomatosuchus.

Joe Rogan 38:30 Whoa.

Kenneth Lacovara 38:30 Yeah. Yeah, there you go.

Joe Rogan 38:32 Whoa.

Kenneth Lacovara 38:33 Yeah. Isn't that crazy?

Joe Rogan 38:34 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 38:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:36 Now why do we think it had a pouch?

Kenneth Lacovara 38:39 Well, just the, the distance between the, the jawbones, and it's just a lot of space there if, I don't know if you'll-

Joe Rogan 38:45 Wow

Kenneth Lacovara 38:45 ... see a picture of the original fossil from, I think, 1911. Um-

Joe Rogan 38:50 It's very interesting that people think of a pelican as being benign.

Kenneth Lacovara 38:54 Not if you're a fish.

Joe Rogan 38:54 Yeah, [laughs] or, or a pigeon.

Kenneth Lacovara 38:56 Yeah, right.

Joe Rogan 38:57 I've seen pelicans eat pigeons and you're like, "What the hell?"

Kenneth Lacovara 39:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:00 I thought you guys were cool, and y- I thought you delivered babies.

Kenneth Lacovara 39:03 So in the-

Joe Rogan 39:04 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 39:04 ... in the Triassic, there were-

Joe Rogan 39:07 That's a stork, actually

Kenneth Lacovara 39:08 ... there were-

Joe Rogan 39:09 Whoa

Kenneth Lacovara 39:09 ... crocodiles that were, uh, you know, maybe even running on two legs, like maybe b- It's a little controversial, but maybe bipedal crocodiles.

Joe Rogan 39:17 Oh, fun.

Kenneth Lacovara 39:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:19 Well, are you aware-

Kenneth Lacovara 39:19 Big ones

Joe Rogan 39:20 ... of one of the nuttiest of all conspiracy theories?

Kenneth Lacovara 39:23 I'm not sure.

Joe Rogan 39:24 One of the nuttiest of all conspiracy theories is there used to be a race of lizard people that were highly advanced that lived along with the dinosaurs many, many, many years ago.

Kenneth Lacovara 39:35 Yeah, we don't have their fossils.

Joe Rogan 39:36 Millions and millions of years ago. No, we don't have the fossils.

Kenneth Lacovara 39:37 What do you mean you used to?

Joe Rogan 39:38 [laughs] Yeah, bro, they're-

Kenneth Lacovara 39:39 They're still here, bro

Joe Rogan 39:40 ... I'm trying to warm him up to these ideas.

Kenneth Lacovara 39:42 [laughs] Sorry, sorry.

Joe Rogan 39:43 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 39:45 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 39:45 This is the one that ran on two legs? Wow. That's sick.

Kenneth Lacovara 39:49 Uh, Postosuchus you wanna look for.

Joe Rogan 39:50 So it's, it's sort of a T-Rex style crocodile.

Kenneth Lacovara 39:54 It's like a wally gator from hell basically.

Joe Rogan 39:57 Whoa.

Kenneth Lacovara 39:57 Right. Yeah, like that. So, and crocodiles were in charge, uh, when the first dinosaurs evolved. So in the, in the Triassic, the dinosaurs, the little dinosaurs that were trying to make it, they were living in the crocodile world, and crocodiles were big and scary and were doing all kinds of crazy things.

Joe Rogan 40:14 That's wild to think of, that they were there before the dinosaurs.

Kenneth Lacovara 40:17 Yeah. Crocodiles are old.

Joe Rogan 40:19 That's so crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 40:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:20 And they're still around.

Kenneth Lacovara 40:21 Yep. Very successful.

Joe Rogan 40:21 Have you, are you aware of some of the really crazy stories from the Congo from, I think it was like the 1800s, where they claim to have seen 40-plus foot long crocodiles? So it's this indeterminate growth thing, and there's the, the question, like is this a gross exaggeration? They based it on the size of the, the craft that they were on, the boat.

Kenneth Lacovara 40:39 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 40:39 Is it gross exaggeration, or is it possible that there were dinosaur, or excuse me, crocodiles that had reached that size that had been eventually killed off once people invented guns?

Kenneth Lacovara 40:50 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we don't have any skeletons from modern crocodiles that are that big, but in the Cretaceous, there were definitely crocodiles that big.

Joe Rogan 40:57 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 40:58 There's, um, there's one from North Africa called, uh, Sarcosuchus imperator that was like 35 feet long. There's a-

Joe Rogan 41:03 What a great name.

Kenneth Lacovara 41:04 I know.

Joe Rogan 41:04 I've seen what he looked like.

Kenneth Lacovara 41:05 Um, yeah. Sarcosuchus.

Joe Rogan 41:07 Sarcosuchus imperador.

Kenneth Lacovara 41:08 Imperator, yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:10 Sar-

Kenneth Lacovara 41:10 Imperator

Joe Rogan 41:11 ... cosuchus.

Kenneth Lacovara 41:12 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 41:12 Something came up. Look at that.

Kenneth Lacovara 41:13 Yep. And then there's one from New Jersey called Deinosuchus that is in that same size ran- size range. It's like, uh-

Joe Rogan 41:19 So that's his skull compared to what? That last skull that you just had, Jamie, what is that compared to? What is the one underneath it? A regular crocodile?

Kenneth Lacovara 41:27 Yeah, that's like a, yeah, a-

Joe Rogan 41:30 Yo

Kenneth Lacovara 41:30 ... some sort of modern crocodilian.

Joe Rogan 41:32 That thing's insane.

Kenneth Lacovara 41:33 If you look up-

Joe Rogan 41:33 And how big was that?

Kenneth Lacovara 41:34 Um, well, look up, um, Sarcosuchus and Staab, S-T-A-A-B. He's a, he's a sculptor, a friend of mine. He did all of our work for the museum, but he made an amazing reconstruction-

Joe Rogan 41:47 That's it right there?

Kenneth Lacovara 41:48 ... of this. There's one of him sitting on its back, which is really cool.

Joe Rogan 41:51 Oh, that's next to it there. Ooh, that's pretty cool.

Kenneth Lacovara 41:53 Um-

Joe Rogan 41:55 So that's how big these things were.

Kenneth Lacovara 41:56 Really big. Really big.

Joe Rogan 41:57 And what-

Kenneth Lacovara 41:57 They probably ate dinosaurs.

Joe Rogan 41:58 [laughs] Ai, yi, yi.

Kenneth Lacovara 42:00 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:01 And what year are we talking about?

Kenneth Lacovara 42:02 When they lived?

Joe Rogan 42:03 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 42:04 Um, this is in the mid-Cretaceous. I think it's Cenomanian, so around 95 million years ago.

Joe Rogan 42:10 Why, do we know why things were so big back then?

Kenneth Lacovara 42:14 Well, um, no, but another way of looking at it is it's a different age of giants. We live in an age of giants now. The biggest animal to ever live is alive right now, right?

Joe Rogan 42:24 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 42:24 The biggest trees to ever live are alive right now.

Joe Rogan 42:27 Whales, right.

Kenneth Lacovara 42:28 Yeah, the blue whale and the, and the, um, the redwoods.

Joe Rogan 42:31 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 42:31 Um, so we have some really big things now. Um, since dinosaurs went extinct, there was a hornless rhino called Paraceratherium that was like 20 feet tall-

Joe Rogan 42:43 Mmm

Kenneth Lacovara 42:43 ... which was crazy. Um, but you know, the Mesozoic when dinosaurs lived, it's a long time, and all kinds of things happened. There were tiny little dinosaurs, and some got really big, and I think there was sort of this arms race between the big predators and the big herbivores. Yeah, there's Paraceratherium.

Joe Rogan 42:58 Whoa.

Kenneth Lacovara 42:58 So a huge, huge hornless rhinoceros. Isn't that cool?

Joe Rogan 43:02 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 43:02 So this thing was basically trying to be a sauropod dinosaur, you know, after the dinosaurs went extinct.

Joe Rogan 43:07 And how do we know what this thing looked like on the outside?

Kenneth Lacovara 43:11 I-

Joe Rogan 43:11 How much of a version of this do we have fossils of?

Kenneth Lacovara 43:14 We, we don't have its soft tissue, so it's, you know-

Joe Rogan 43:16 So it's just guesses that it had all this rhino-like-

Kenneth Lacovara 43:18 It's ... Yeah, I mean, we can see that it's, um, uh, that, where its relatives are, and so, you know, I guess you would look in that family to see what kind of traits they have.

Joe Rogan 43:27 Mmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 43:27 But yeah, look how [laughs] big that thing is.

Joe Rogan 43:29 So some of it has it looking like a rhino. Some of them have them looking like the skin of an elephant, but it's really just guessing.

Kenneth Lacovara 43:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:36 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 43:36 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 43:37 Um, when you said redwood trees are the biggest, here's another wacky conspiracy theory. You'll love this one. There's a lot of people that believe that there's evidence that enormous mountains that exist somewhere that have flat tops are actually the stumps of trees that were cut down by giants.

Kenneth Lacovara 43:53 Wow. Well, those would be some big trees

Joe Rogan 43:56 There have been many-

Kenneth Lacovara 43:57 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 43:57 ... many YouTube documentarians doing scholarly work on this particular issue.

Kenneth Lacovara 44:02 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 44:02 Like that one right there.

Kenneth Lacovara 44:03 Right.

Joe Rogan 44:04 Devil's Tower.

Kenneth Lacovara 44:04 I can tell you what that is. Uh-

Joe Rogan 44:05 No, no, no, you can't.

Kenneth Lacovara 44:06 It's, it's a tree.

Joe Rogan 44:06 No, you're gonna, you're gonna give us propaganda-

Kenneth Lacovara 44:08 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 44:09 ... from the government. What that is is a fucking tree, bro.

Kenneth Lacovara 44:11 Right. Well, yes, the government line would be that that is columnar basalt. It formed in the throat of a volcano.

Joe Rogan 44:18 Show me that, the other one, the Devil's whatever it is. What's it called again?

Kenneth Lacovara 44:22 Devil's Tower.

Joe Rogan 44:22 Devil's Tower in Wyoming. That's from famously Close Encounters-

Kenneth Lacovara 44:26 Yeah

Joe Rogan 44:26 ... of the Third Kind-

Kenneth Lacovara 44:26 Yeah

Joe Rogan 44:27 ... which is an amazing movie.

Kenneth Lacovara 44:28 That's right. And I think the Native American legend is that those are scratch marks from a giant bear.

Joe Rogan 44:33 Whoa.

Kenneth Lacovara 44:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:35 Um, so how was this made?

Kenneth Lacovara 44:38 Um, basalt, which, um, is a, uh, it's the rock that is under most oceans, and it can also come up through volcanoes, uh, when it cools slowly, it, it forms these hexagonal columns. Uh, if you know the Palisades along the, the Hudson River right outside New York, columnar basalt. Giant's Causeway in Ireland, columnar basalt.

Joe Rogan 44:59 Hmm. Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 44:59 So it's that. It's slowly cooling basalt. It has time, time enough while it's cooling to form those hexagonal patterns.

Joe Rogan 45:06 Oh, okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 45:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:06 Interesting.

Kenneth Lacovara 45:07 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 45:07 Um, sorry to divert you-

Kenneth Lacovara 45:09 So imagine that-

Joe Rogan 45:10 ... with foolishness

Kenneth Lacovara 45:10 ... that's just the throat of the volcano-

Joe Rogan 45:12 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 45:12 ... so imagine putting the volcano back around that, right?

Joe Rogan 45:15 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 45:15 So pretty big. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:16 So we had these enormous crocodiles that ate dinosaurs, and what do we know, or do we have an, a, an idea of what the shift was where dinosaurs started becoming enormous and ferocious?

Kenneth Lacovara 45:28 Yeah, there's an extinction at the end of the Triassic period about 202 million years ago. It's a, the climate crisis because of the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. So we have Pangea at this point, and, and a lot of people think that Pangea is how the continents started. It's not. It just, it's just one moment in history when all the continents happen to bump into each other.

Joe Rogan 45:47 Hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 45:47 Um, but Pangea starts to rift apart during this time period, and the Atlantic starts... Imagining the, the Atlantic kind of unzipping from the top and the bottom, right, as the continents pull apart. And we get this big, it's called a large, uh, magmatic province developing, which means lots of, um, volcanic activity, and not like volcanoes like, uh, like in Sicily that are, you know, blast stuff into the sky, but more like oozing lava on the landscape, fissures, right?

Joe Rogan 46:17 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 46:18 Um, this causes a, a lot of CO2 to hit the atmosphere, and we get rapid climate change, and we get the, uh, the fourth mass extinction then at the time. And that really knocks back the crocodiles, and the dinosaurs, for whatever reason, kind of get the jump then after this 'cause usually after an extinction, there's a lot of niche space available. So things go extinct, imagine those, like, job descriptions becoming open.

Joe Rogan 46:45 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 46:45 And now you can evolve into those roles, and for whatever reason, the dinosaurs are the ones that bounce back better after the fourth mass extinction.

Joe Rogan 46:54 And so was it cooling because of, uh, the volcanic eruption and all this stuff in the air?

Kenneth Lacovara 46:59 In this case, it was warming because of the-

Joe Rogan 47:00 Warming

Kenneth Lacovara 47:01 ... because of the CO2. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:02 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 47:03 We've had the first four mass extinctions, the first two were about cooling. The second two were about overheating.

Joe Rogan 47:10 And so for whatever reason, dinosaurs were better suited to adapt.

Kenneth Lacovara 47:14 Yeah. And so now we enter the Jurassic right after that, and the dinosaurs, they start to get big. They start to get really diverse in the Jurassic, and then in the Cretaceous, the last of the, of the three ages of dinosaurs, um, that's kind of like the full flower of the dinosaur world. And, and they're really numerous. They're on, they're on every continent, including Antarctica.

Joe Rogan 47:35 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 47:36 And they're just in all kinds of forms.

Joe Rogan 47:38 It's just fascinating to me that 65 million years ago, the impact in the Yucatan, that you, that is the, that's the start of the extinction of the dinosaurs. But yet the crocodiles, they make it through-

Kenneth Lacovara 47:51 Yeah

Joe Rogan 47:52 ... fairly well. Like-

Kenneth Lacovara 47:53 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 47:53 ... during that 65 million year, what is the difference between the kind of crocodiles that existed pre-impact and post-impact? Were they of similar size, or had they had already gotten to that particular form that they are at now?

Kenneth Lacovara 48:06 Um, the super giant crocodiles weren't around then. They were closer to-

Joe Rogan 48:10 They were already gone?

Kenneth Lacovara 48:11 Yeah. They were closer to modern ones. So, um-

Joe Rogan 48:14 Is this an assumption, or is this j- is this just based on what we've found these kinds of fossils?

Kenneth Lacovara 48:19 It's based on what we've found.

Joe Rogan 48:19 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 48:19 Yeah, sure.

Joe Rogan 48:19 But it's possible that we could find-

Kenneth Lacovara 48:22 Sure

Joe Rogan 48:22 ... super large crocodiles that were in the 60, 65 million years.

Kenneth Lacovara 48:26 Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, we're learning a lot about this impact, which we now know is about 66 million years. Um, and so an asteroid hits the planet, right? It's, it's maybe up to 18 kilometers across, going about 20 meters per second, hits the planet off the coast of the Yucatan, blows a crater in the Earth's crust that's about 110 miles across, um, initially by, like, 12 miles deep, right? Imagine, like, you've been to the Grand Canyon, I'm sure. That's, that's a mile deep, right?

Joe Rogan 48:57 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 48:57 Imagine what 12 miles would look like. That's crazy.

Joe Rogan 49:00 And like that.

Kenneth Lacovara 49:01 Yeah. Um, and so imagine the volume of rock. That's, uh, I've looked it up. It's basically about the area of Massachusetts times 12 miles. So imagine that mass. But you take that mass, it's pulverized into maybe millimeter-sized pieces, but it doesn't matter. It still has that mass. Throw it up through the Earth's atmosphere, you've given it a tremendous amount of potential gravitational energy. Now, when that stuff comes back in, it's gotta balance the energy books, and it does that mostly by friction with the atmosphere. So, you know, you remember the, the films of the Apollo space capsules flaming back into the atmosphere, right?

Joe Rogan 49:37 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 49:38 So think about that day, trillions upon trillions of millimeter-sized space capsules, each one flaming back into the atmosphere, each one heating up a little parcel of air around itself, such that we think that day within an hour after the impact, temperatures got up somewhere between toaster oven- And pizza oven. So if you're on the surface of the Earth that day, you're literally toast. So who gets through? Well, little things on land that can burrow. Who are good burrowers? Little mammals, crocodiles, turtles, lizards, and some-

Joe Rogan 50:09 Right, the crocodiles are in the water

Kenneth Lacovara 50:11 ... and burrow. Crocodiles are good burrowers.

Joe Rogan 50:14 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 50:14 And some birds. All of the non-bird dinosaurs, the non-avian dinosaur egg nests that have ever been found are just some crater that some mama dinosaur scraped in the ground where she deposited her eggs right on the surface, so 100% of their life cycle on the surface of the Earth.

Joe Rogan 50:29 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 50:29 No place to hide.

Joe Rogan 50:31 Wow. And so where'd the birds go?

Kenneth Lacovara 50:35 Well, some birds are burrowers, right? And so today we have-

Joe Rogan 50:38 But chickens aren't, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 50:39 Chickens are not, um, but we have burrowing parrots today, burrowing penguins, burrowing owls.

Joe Rogan 50:44 You mean that's the only way they survived, is by burrowing?

Kenneth Lacovara 50:46 I think.

Joe Rogan 50:47 Interesting.

Kenneth Lacovara 50:48 I think.

Joe Rogan 50:48 And-

Kenneth Lacovara 50:48 Because that heat is, um, it's like those outdoor restaurant heaters. It's radiative heat, not-

Joe Rogan 50:53 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 50:53 ... convective heat, so it's line of sight. So you gotta get out of the line of sight of the sky, and so you have to get underground somewhere. Now, there was... Was there some big dinosaur in a cave by chance at that moment? Like, yeah, sure, but, um, I'm talking about, like, a breeding population.

Joe Rogan 51:08 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 51:08 I think they're functionally extinct-

Joe Rogan 51:10 Right, right

Kenneth Lacovara 51:10 ... the day of the impact, which is shocking. They're around for 165 million years, right, dominating the Earth for most of that time. If you were here the day before that asteroid hit, you would look around and you would say, "Well, this is how it's always going to be," right? "These guys are always going to be in charge."

Joe Rogan 51:25 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 51:25 And the next day, the asteroid hits, and I think they're functionally extinct that day.

Joe Rogan 51:30 Wow. Um, what do you think the historical depiction of dragons is all about? And why is it so ubiquitous across so many different continents and so many different cultures? Like, why do they have stories of these giant lizards, including historians that have account... Like, doesn't Her- I think Herodotus, does Herodotus have a, an, an account of an, some sort of a, a dragon creature in Egypt that they killed? I think there's, like, legitimate historians where you're like, "Okay, well, he told the truth about all these other things, told the truth about, like, the Labyrinths of Hawara or wherever it was," but why, what is that? What is, what are these stories of dragons?

Kenneth Lacovara 52:15 Yeah, I don't know, but, you know, if you look at the skeletons of various animals, I mean, the, you know, you can see many, many vertebrae. If you look at the, the tail of a sauropod dinosaur or the neck of a plesiosaur, you find a titanoboa-

Joe Rogan 52:27 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 52:27 ... in Colombia, um, or if you just find a, a modern snake skeleton, um, you-

Joe Rogan 52:33 Here, look at this. Herodotus described winged serpents, often retold today as an account of dragons. The key distinction, he said he saw heaps of bones, not living, flying creatures. The main passage is in Histories 2.75 to 2.76. What he actually wrote, Herodotus says he traveled to a place in Arabia opposite the Egyptian city of Buto to investigate reports of winged serpents. "When I came thither," ooh, I wanna be able to say that.

Kenneth Lacovara 52:59 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 52:59 "When I came thither, I saw bones of serpents and spines in quantity so great that it is impossible to make report of the number." Then he recounts the local explanation. Each spring, winged serpents flew from Arabia towards Egypt, but ibis birds intercepted and killed them at a mountain pass. This, he was told, explained why Egyptians honored the ibis. What is an ibis?

Kenneth Lacovara 53:25 Yeah, an ibis. It's like a, I think it's-

Joe Rogan 53:27 Ibis?

Kenneth Lacovara 53:27 Yeah. It's a, I think they call them friend of the farmer in Egypt. They're kinda field birds. They're, uh... They have a long, curved beak, and they, they, like, follow the plows and get insects.

Joe Rogan 53:36 Crazy that they kill dragons. These serpents [laughs] are like water snakes. Their wings are not feathered, but mostly like the wings of a bat. So small. Huh.

Kenneth Lacovara 53:47 Yeah, I, you know, there's a lot of bad zoology-

Joe Rogan 53:49 Small

Kenneth Lacovara 53:49 ... back in history, and, you know, these people are-

Joe Rogan 53:51 But is it possible that this was, this tiny one was a real creature, a winged serpent, and we just don't have any skeletons of them?

Kenneth Lacovara 53:59 Well, I mean, we don't have any skeletons of them, so.

Joe Rogan 54:02 Right, so this is just pure speculation. Explicitly identifies these with the serpents that he said to invade Egypt. Collectors supposedly drove them away by burning storax and aromatic resin. Huh.

Kenneth Lacovara 54:16 So an ex- an example is in, um, in Sicily every spring, farmers find, um, megalodon teeth in their fields, right? Because there's, there's old, uh-

Joe Rogan 54:29 Wow

Kenneth Lacovara 54:29 ... marine deposits there, and they have shark fossils in them.

Joe Rogan 54:32 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 54:32 And when you get the, the freezing and thawing in winter, the, the stones, or in this case, fossils, work their way up to the top, right? And so they could clear the field one year, and they come back, and the next year, there's these fossils in them. And they had no concept of deep time. They had no concept that this could've been a marine environment. So what did they call them? They called them serpent tongues or glosso petrae they called them.

Joe Rogan 54:54 Serpent tongues?

Kenneth Lacovara 54:55 Serpent tongues.

Joe Rogan 54:55 Interesting.

Kenneth Lacovara 54:55 So they thought that they were serpents that would lose their, uh, their stone-like tongues for some reason.

Joe Rogan 55:02 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 55:02 And they would find those. And so people were trying to make sense of their landscape.

Joe Rogan 55:06 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 55:06 Right? And they find these things, and they, they don't understand deep time. They don't understand geological processes, obviously.

Joe Rogan 55:13 And it becomes folklore.

Kenneth Lacovara 55:14 And so they try to, they make an explanation, right?

Joe Rogan 55:17 'Tis the season for giving, for calling, for cheer, texting and calling loved ones straight through the new year. But who can keep up with this daunting feat? Visible Wireless, the plan to meet. This season, switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack, with unlimited 5G data and a hotspot to match. With plans starting at just $19 a month at a rate that's guaranteed for a year, it's the gift that keeps on giving. Now, that's holiday cheer. Use promo code HOLIDAYHACK, $19 a month for service on the Visible plan. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. There's also, uh, an issue with the depictions of things that we know currently exist, like when I was in Eg- uh, excuse me, when I was in Italy, uh, I was in Ravello, and there's a, an really old church in Ravello. And the church is, I think it's o- a thousand years old, and what's really crazy is it is on the base. It is, uh, built on top of an even older church.

Kenneth Lacovara 56:22 Mm.

Joe Rogan 56:23 So they have, like, a glass floor, and you can look through and see the original church, but it's, like, really old. Like, they don't know how old it is. But one of the cool things on the wall, and I took a photo of it, it's on my Instagram, was of, um, a whale, and it's a tile artwork of a whale.

Kenneth Lacovara 56:39 Mm.

Joe Rogan 56:39 And it's from the biblical story of Jonah and the whale And, uh, you see this artwork and, like, what they thought a whale looked like is crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 56:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:49 It had giant teeth, and it looked like it, I think, did it have wings? Mi- No, no. That's it. It had a hand.

Kenneth Lacovara 56:55 Ah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:55 Well, yeah. I guess it could be wings. Kinda wings. So that was the tile artwork. That's the picture that I took that's on that, uh, that church-

Kenneth Lacovara 57:04 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 57:04 ... in Ravello.

Kenneth Lacovara 57:05 That's wild. Um, look up, uh-

Joe Rogan 57:07 Isn't that crazy? Like, that's what they thought a fucking whale looked like. Like, it looks like part lion or something, part bear, part fish.

Kenneth Lacovara 57:15 Look at, um, Steno and shark, and, um, you'll see this is kind of the first, um, illustration of-

Joe Rogan 57:23 Steno and shark

Kenneth Lacovara 57:24 ... of, um-

Joe Rogan 57:25 Steno?

Kenneth Lacovara 57:26 Yeah, Steno.

Joe Rogan 57:26 More like one word. Is that a, all one word?

Kenneth Lacovara 57:28 Uh, S-T-E-N-O.

Joe Rogan 57:30 And shark, or...?

Kenneth Lacovara 57:31 And, yeah, and then look up shark.

Joe Rogan 57:33 Oh, okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 57:33 Yeah. Nicholas Steno and shark. And so-

Joe Rogan 57:36 Got it

Kenneth Lacovara 57:36 ... um, he would find these, uh, these shark teeth, and so this is his illustration of what a shark looked like, he thought. And, but what he was doing here, Nicholas Steno is sometimes, um, called the father of geology because he was the first one to say, "No, these are not these, uh, serpent tongues. They look like shark teeth, and so they must've been in the mouth of a shark, even though we're finding them on land."

Joe Rogan 58:01 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 58:01 Right? And so, uh, he actually came up with three laws of geology, which we still use today. They're very simple, which is the oldest stuff is on bottom, the youngest stuff is on top. Um, if you see a valley and there's the same rock on both sides, you can imagine that they were once, uh, connected. Um, and so he's the first one to really start to turn geology into a science, but it had a really slow start, and, and this is, you know, pretty far in our history.

Joe Rogan 58:30 What year was this?

Kenneth Lacovara 58:30 Um, he is, I think, you can look it up there. I think he is 1500s. Is that right?

Joe Rogan 58:36 Now, we knew about sharks back then.

Kenneth Lacovara 58:38 1600s.

Joe Rogan 58:39 We knew about sharks.

Kenneth Lacovara 58:41 Yeah, but people didn't understand how there could be sharks on land.

Joe Rogan 58:44 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 58:45 Right?

Joe Rogan 58:45 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 58:45 Shark fossils on land.

Joe Rogan 58:46 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 58:46 And so, like, the antiquity of our planet is a fairly recent discovery. There's a guy named, um, James Hutton, who's a man of the Scottish Enlightenment, and he w- he's what we could really call the first geologist, and that's not until, um, like 1795, I think, is when he published his book, The, The Theory of the Earth. And he did something that just makes me love geology, you know, forever, which is he figured out that we live on an old planet with a hammer and a rowboat. And so he, he went to this place called Siccar Point, um, uh, S-I-C-C-A-R Point, uh, off the north coast of Scotland. I've been there. It's like geology church for me. And, um, he looked at, at what he could tell were ancient beach sediments, and they're tilted, and they're crosscut by other beach sediments, and then that whole thing is tilted, and then the whole thing is uplifted into a cliff coast. And he realized that, "Well, you know, I'm, I'm an old guy, and I- I've never seen any changes like this happening, and so it must take a really long time to deposit these sediments for them to lithify." Yeah, that's it. It's gorgeous.

Joe Rogan 59:56 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 59:57 So look there. So you have those vertical beds, see, on the, on the right-hand side.

Joe Rogan 1:00:02 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:00:02 Well, imagine you have to turn those over so they're horizontal 'cause sediment is deposited horizontally, right? You can't deposit it like that. So imagine you have a, you have a horizontal beach. It's building up layer after layer. That gets lithified, meaning turned into stone. That whole thing gets turned vertically, and then you see where it's crosscut there. That means waves came across there, cut through it, and then a whole other layer, when that was horizontal, is deposited. Those are lithified, turned into stone, and then the whole thing is rotated again to the orientation that it has today and then uplifted into a sea coast. And he realized that couldn't happen in, in just a short amount of time. But-

Joe Rogan 1:00:41 How did he formulate this idea? Did, I mean, did we have an understanding of, like, volcanic activity back then?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:00:49 Not well, and, and so Hutton actually, you know, part of what he did was he looked at the formation of granite, and granite was thought to be, back then, like a sedimentary rock where the particles would accumulate. And he collected evidence that no, granite forms from molten rock, and it's part of a rock cycle. And so, um, he really founds an idea that we call uniformitarianism. It's a big word for an idea that means the present is the key to the past. So we can see processes in action today and imagine how they might have, have built the world in the past. And-

Joe Rogan 1:01:23 God, imagine being a, an academic back then or whatever it was, a scholar, and, and trying to... Well, you can't really coordinate with other people about this 'cause how few people even understand what the hell you're talking about.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:01:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:37 What a small group of human beings that are even pondering these things in the 1600s. Is that what you said?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:01:44 Yeah, uh, well, um, 1700s.

Joe Rogan 1:01:46 1700s.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:01:46 Yeah, and, and it was so unorthodox. So the, the most learned people in Europe at the time thought the Earth was 6,000 years old.

Joe Rogan 1:01:53 Ugh.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:01:53 Isaac Newton thought the Earth was 6,000 years old.

Joe Rogan 1:01:56 Did he really?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:01:56 Yeah, when Darwin got on the HMS Beagle, he was a young Earth creationist. He thought the Earth was 6,000 years old.

Joe Rogan 1:02:03 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:02:03 And so this guy is, like, really swimming against the current here.

Joe Rogan 1:02:07 And he has to worry about being, like, locked up. Like, you could be a heretic.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:02:10 Well, he, no, not at that time. This is, you know, Scottish Enlightenment, so there's all kinds of ideas, uh, flying around. And he actually wrote this as he was dying. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:02:19 Oh, good move.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:02:20 Yeah. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:02:21 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:02:21 Um, so he didn't live long.

Joe Rogan 1:02:23 When you're on the way out-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:02:24 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:02:24 ... that's when you publish the good stuff.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:02:25 And he was, because of that, I think it wasn't, it wasn't really a very polished piece of text, and it's very hard to get through. And then his ideas were picked up by, uh, by an Englishman, uh, Charles Lyell, who was a good writer and who, who wrote The Principles of, uh, of Geology. Hutton's work was The Theory of the Earth. And so, uh, Captain FitzRoy gifts young Charles, Charles Darwin a copy of The Principles of Geology as they're about to go on their voyage. And, and Darwin was a member of what was called the Venerian Society, which is, um, this basically young Earth society of scientists. But Darwin, ever a sponge for information, he reads this as they're sailing from, from England to Saint Jago in the, in the Cape Verde Islands. And- He starts to have his mind changed, and he gets there, and he starts to see evidence of, of geological uplift and, and processes of, of cycles. And then they get to, uh, Montevideo in, uh, in what's now Uruguay, and he holds up the whole expedition because he thinks there's a mail boat coming behind them that might have the second volume of The Principles of Geology, and it does. And he, he soaks this up, and then by the time he gets down to Patagonia, he's paraphrasing Lyell, or we would say today plagiarizing Lyell, and he's become, um, this, this advocate for this uniformitarian principle that the present is the key to the past. And, and what Hutton wrote is, "The Earth shows no vestige of a be- of a beginning, no prospect of an end." And now all of a sudden Darwin goes from thinking the Earth is 6,000 years old to thinking about deep time, to having this vast tapestry.

Joe Rogan 1:04:03 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:04:03 And that gives him the intellectual space to imagine evolution through natural selection.

Joe Rogan 1:04:09 Wow. Just imagine being an intellectual back then where there's not a lot to go by, and trying to formula- trying to look at all this stuff and go, "What is going on?"

Kenneth Lacovara 1:04:22 Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

Joe Rogan 1:04:24 And, and everybody wants to think there's a dude, and he just told Adam, "Name all these things," and [laughs] that's it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:04:30 It was hard. I mean, and you know, it's not that long ago. Like, Thomas Jefferson didn't know the Earth was old. Thomas Jefferson never heard the word dinosaur.

Joe Rogan 1:04:37 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:04:37 You know, it's not that long ago.

Joe Rogan 1:04:40 That's crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:04:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:41 That's hard to believe.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:04:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:42 But obviously this is a thing that has happened all throughout human history, like there's a, a new discovery. Oh, look, we figured out fire. Oh, look, we figured out shelter. Oh, look, we figured out, hey, this is a shark tooth. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:04:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:57 Why is it in this field?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:04:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:58 Hey, wh- why is this, why is this land going like this?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:05:01 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:05:01 It's just so interesting to think that these people were the first people to try to put this puzzle together, and how few people they had to collaborate with. Like, how few people... Like now today, if you, you talk about volcanoes or geologic activity, everybody knows about it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:05:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:05:18 Back then, like, how many people re-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:05:19 Mostly, except those dumbasses on the internet who don't think dinosaurs are real.

Joe Rogan 1:05:22 Well, they still think volcanoes are real.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:05:24 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:05:25 They st- they still know some things.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:05:27 I guess. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:05:27 They still understand, like, the shifts of tectonic plates, and the things that we know why earthquakes happen. Most people are aware of those things. But if you're, uh, an intellectual back then, there's probably so little to go by. And you're trying to come up with some completely radical theory of how things got to the position that they're in right now, and you start to try to explain it to people that are Young Earth creationists. You want to bling, bring up natural selection-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:05:57 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 1:05:57 ... and random mutation, and all the different things that he's trying to put into people's heads.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:06:02 Yeah, that's why Darwin was so reluctant to publish. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's, science is by nature conservative, and it's hard to push the boundaries.

Joe Rogan 1:06:10 As it should be, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:06:11 As it should be, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:13 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:06:13 And, um, so you know, it took Darwin 25 years to, to publish his thoughts, and he was very insecure about it. He was worried about the ramifications for his family. His, his, uh, wife, Emma, was, you know, a very devout Christian, and he was-

Joe Rogan 1:06:28 Wow

Kenneth Lacovara 1:06:28 ... terribly concerned about it.

Joe Rogan 1:06:29 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:06:29 He even, he was, he was a insecure guy, and at one point he didn't think that he had the intellectual standing, 'cause he wasn't really a, an expert in any one particular topic. So he decides he's got to become an expert, so he takes nine years off from writing Origin of Species to become the world's expert on barnacles.

Joe Rogan 1:06:46 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:06:47 And for nine years he studies barnacles in his study.

Joe Rogan 1:06:50 That's dedication.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:06:52 And his little son, Frankie Darwin, has a friend over one day and turns to his friend and says, uh, "Where does your dad do his barnacles?" Right? 'Cause he just thinks-

Joe Rogan 1:06:59 Ah

Kenneth Lacovara 1:06:59 ... that's what dads do, 'cause that's all Charles Darwin does for nine years.

Joe Rogan 1:07:03 That's crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:07:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:04 Why barnacles?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:07:05 I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it was just, like, an open niche for him.

Joe Rogan 1:07:09 Huh.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:07:10 Yeah. When, [laughs] when, when my son was, like, four or so, um, he had a friend over to the house, and he turned to his friend and said, uh, "Where's your dad keep his dinosaurs?" [both laugh] That's what dads do.

Joe Rogan 1:07:24 Yeah. Wow. It, I mean, we're, we're really so fortunate that, uh, civilization has lasted as long as it has, uh, hopefully we don't screw this up, but that we have accumulated so much information. You know, 'cause if we had to start from scratch, if there's some sort of massive natural disaster-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:07:42 Oh, yeah

Joe Rogan 1:07:42 ... and we had to start from scratch, within a few hundred years we'd forget most of this.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:07:47 I always think about, like, who would I take with me if I had, like, five people to start civilization over, right? Now, one of them would definitely be a metallurgist, 'cause, like, how would we ever figure that out again?

Joe Rogan 1:07:57 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:07:57 It's just amazing that we figured that out.

Joe Rogan 1:07:59 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:07:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:59 Right. Right. How to make an alloy. Oof.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:08:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:03 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:08:04 Or how to, you know, we're gonna beat these rocks out of a mountainside and, and put them in fire and get copper. You know, I mean, that's-

Joe Rogan 1:08:11 How do you harness electricity? How about that guy?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:08:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:14 Bring an electrician.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:08:14 Bring him, too. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:15 Bring a g- an engineer who understands how to make a generator.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:08:18 Yeah. [laughs] Or a refrigerator.

Joe Rogan 1:08:21 Right. Most people are fucked if that happens. Most people are fucked. We're just so fortunate that in this volatile world that we live in that's filled with potential for natural disasters, and now manmade disasters, that we have managed to stay alive for so many hundreds of years, and figured out how to write things down, and now we got to the point where there's YouTube videos about dinosaurs being fake. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:08:44 [laughs] Full circle.

Joe Rogan 1:08:44 Which is weird. Which is re- why it's really interesting to me. I'm really always interested in people that have very steadfast beliefs that they hold despite the evidence.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:08:55 Yeah. Which is-

Joe Rogan 1:08:55 You know, because I've been guilty of that, uh, in the past, and, uh, I try not to be. But I think that is a, uh, a thing that people have where if they have an idea, and they have openly espoused that idea, they will defend it, and they will find ways to defend it even if it's not rational. Like, they become married to that idea. That idea is their identity.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:15 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:16 It's an issue.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:16 And that's sh- it's the opposite of science, right?

Joe Rogan 1:09:18 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:18 And I mean, scientists are people and, and flawed.

Joe Rogan 1:09:22 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:23 You know, we, you'll rarely hear a scientist use the word prove, right? What we say is we have failed to falsify, right?

Joe Rogan 1:09:31 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:31 Leaving the possibility open that it could be falsified-

Joe Rogan 1:09:34 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:34 ... in the future. I, I heard your episode with, with Brian Cox. Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:09:37 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:38 He's, he's great.

Joe Rogan 1:09:38 He's great.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:39 And, um, you know, he was talking about like, a scientist should be happy when their ideas are overturned.

Joe Rogan 1:09:44 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:44 That means we're making progress, right?

Joe Rogan 1:09:46 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:46 Now in reality, scientists are humans, and there's some ego involved, and it's hard, but he is correct, right? I mean-

Joe Rogan 1:09:52 Yes

Kenneth Lacovara 1:09:52 ... that's how you make progress. You, you hypothesize, you test, and if you falsify that hypothesis, then you say, "Okay, that's not it. Now let's find out what it is."

Joe Rogan 1:10:01 Right. The problem is sometimes it progresses one funeral at a time, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:04 That's right. Yeah, that was-

Joe Rogan 1:10:05 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:05 ... uh, Max Planck said that, I think.

Joe Rogan 1:10:06 Right. Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:07 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:07 That's the issue, is that people have egos. And-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:10 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:10:10 ... and again, if, if someone has been teaching for a decade or so this one particular thing, and all of a sudden, oh, that's horseshit.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:16 And you have to think, "Oh, my God, I lied to all those kids. No, I didn't. This is ri- this is horseshit." And you start drinking and yelling. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:24 When I was a, a young geology student, it was, I had some old professors that were, like, pre-plate tectonics.

Joe Rogan 1:10:32 Whoa.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:32 That really only happened in the '60s.

Joe Rogan 1:10:34 Really?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:35 And yeah, it's new.

Joe Rogan 1:10:37 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:37 And so they were hanging onto this old idea called geosynclinal theory, which I can't explain to you because it doesn't make sense, right? It was super complicated because it doesn't make sense, and they were still trying to, like, shoehorn that into our understanding of plate tectonics. And so it's just, it's really hard for people sometimes to let go of their ideas.

Joe Rogan 1:10:54 That's wild.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:55 So as recently as the '60s.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:10:58 That's when the transition was happening.

Joe Rogan 1:11:00 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:11:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:01 And how did they, how'd they figure that out?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:11:04 Um, it kind of goes back to this, uh, US naval officer and Princeton professor, Harry Hess. And, um, during World War II, uh, he was working with the Navy to develop, uh, magnetometers that would help, uh, detect submarines, right, U-boats and things. And they were getting all this background signal from the ocean itself, and he realized that the, the ocean floor is magnetized, and he started to map this out, and it seems to be magnetized in stripes, right? And so what are these stripes? Well, he found out that... Because we didn't really know the bathymetry, right, the form of the bottom of the ocean. And we started to see that there's mid-ocean ridges, like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and these stripes of magnetism are parallel with those. And so he hypothesized that new crust is being created a- at the mid-ocean ridges, which is true, and that the magnetosphere of the Earth periodically flips. And if it's in one configuration, the rocks will be polarized in what we would call positive. If it's in the other, they would be negative. And so as the magnetosphere periodically breaks down and flips polarity, you can see that recorded in the rocks. And that became the idea of seafloor spreading, which is the m- the motor that then pushes ocean crust, but also pushes continents around the world. And before that, like, the idea of continental drift, that's the older term that was proposed in the, in the '20s, I think, by Alfred Wegener. People just kind of laughed him off the scientific stage because they said, "Well, how could continents move? What's the mechanism for that?" So they didn't have a mechanism, and then Harry Hess comes up with the mechanism, and that's when plate tectonics started to really become the... It's almost like the discovery of DNA in biology. Like, plate tectonics in geology just kind of makes everything make sense.

Joe Rogan 1:12:52 That's one of the big things that a lot of people are terrified of, is a pole shift.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:12:57 Yeah. We don't know really, um, how quickly that can happen. It happens, uh, if I'm right, on average about 800,000 years, but, but, like, you know, sometimes it can be millions of years. Sometimes it can be less. What happens when the magnetosphere breaks down and reconstitutes? Like, is that, is that a couple of months? Is that a couple hundred years? In that time, I think we lose our protection from, you know, the solar rad- uh, from the magnetosphere and the, the gamma rays. So yeah, we don't really know.

Joe Rogan 1:13:31 So if this has happened, if this happens every 800,000 years, when was the last time it happened?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:13:35 Yeah, about 800,000 years ago.

Joe Rogan 1:13:37 Oh, fun.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:13:38 Yeah. But highly variable, so.

Joe Rogan 1:13:41 I don't like how you're saying that.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:13:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:42 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:13:43 Now, when I was working down in Patagonia for many, many years, um, that was before we really repaired the hole in the ozone layer, which is a great environmental success story. We did that.

Joe Rogan 1:13:54 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:13:54 Um, but I was under that hole, and it would be a chilly day. I'd be working in my parka, but my skin felt like it was in a microwave. It was just, like-

Joe Rogan 1:14:03 Wow

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:03 ... really weird heating of your body.

Joe Rogan 1:14:06 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:06 Which is why I go to the dermatologist twice a year now.

Joe Rogan 1:14:09 Did you get sunburn?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:11 Yes, but it just, it felt different, Joe.

Joe Rogan 1:14:15 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:15 It's not like when you go to the beach to... This just felt like you were being baked. It felt different.

Joe Rogan 1:14:20 Australia had an issue with that, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:21 Yeah, they're pretty-

Joe Rogan 1:14:22 Australia-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:22 They're far south. I was further south in Patagonia.

Joe Rogan 1:14:25 They had a, a bunch of... The last time I was there, they had these things that they would have the ads everywhere for skin cancer.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:32 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:14:32 I was like, "This is weird."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:34 And then someone explained to me, yeah, Australia's had a problem with the ozone layer over Australia.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:39 Mm. Yeah, I think their lifestyle is pretty outdoorsy, too.

Joe Rogan 1:14:41 Very much.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:42 So yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:43 Yeah. So what do we know about pole shifts? We know that the, the poles are moving right now.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:51 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:14:51 Right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:51 They are, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:52 And what is the speed they're moving at?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:54 Well, so the, the, um, the magnetic pole moves, right?

Joe Rogan 1:14:58 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:14:58 Um, I don't know the speed. You can look up maps and see where it was at, at different times. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:15:03 But it's currently moving. Like, we can measure the-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:15:05 It's, it's always moving.

Joe Rogan 1:15:06 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:15:07 Yeah. And, and it kind of moves in a, you know, poorly shaped, uh, circle. Um, and I don't think, uh, this isn't my field. It's, you know, more, uh, geophysics. Um, uh, but I don't think we fully understand what causes the magnetosphere to break down and, and regenerate, right? I mean, it, basically, we have a magnetosphere because we have a- A solid iron nickel core surrounded by a liquid iron outer core, and they rotate at different speeds. And so you have, you know, metal rotating inside metal. That's basically a generator, right?

Joe Rogan 1:15:44 Hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:15:45 Um, so that generates the magnetosphere, which is a very good thing to have. Um, but I am not sure exactly what causes it to, to break down over time.

Joe Rogan 1:15:55 Um, so when it's-- You said it's moving in a circle. Is it akin to, like, the precession of the equinoxes?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:16:02 Um, it's, it's not related to that.

Joe Rogan 1:16:05 Not related, but moving in the same sort of way-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:16:07 It's, it's-

Joe Rogan 1:16:07 ...like a wobble?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:16:08 It's not a, it's not a perfect circle. It's-

Joe Rogan 1:16:10 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 1:16:10 ...I know you could look it up, but it's-- there's a map of where the, you know, the, the magnetic pole is over time.

Joe Rogan 1:16:17 And what evidence do we have that shows that every 800,000 years ago this happens?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:16:22 Ah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:23 And what is the devastation or what is the result of this, this shift that we can observe from 800,000-plus years ago?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:16:30 So in the right geological circumstances, and you need, um, a really quiet body of water. So that could be, uh, in the deep sea, or it could be in a deep lake. If you get fine, uh, grains of, um, of iron-rich particles settling, right, magnetic particles, they will orient themselves to the poles as they settle. And so you get rock layers that have a polarity to them. And geologists will go out, and they will drill in mountainsides, and they have to keep their core oriented, and then they will test the, uh, the magnetic direction of those rocks. And you can see over time that they shift from one way to the other. And now what happens in that interval when it's switching, I, I don't think we know that. I think it's a pretty short interval, and, like, we probably don't have a fossil record that records that time very well.

Joe Rogan 1:17:22 So explain what that means, though, that it shifts. So north becomes south, south becomes north?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:17:29 You could say that, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:17:30 So just whoop.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:17:31 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:32 And we don't really know what effect that has on the Earth, on the climate, on...

Kenneth Lacovara 1:17:38 I don't think it's well known. It's not known to me, um, but I do not think it's well known, no.

Joe Rogan 1:17:45 Is there a way that we could figure that out? Like, could we put that into Perplexity, see if Perplexity has an answer-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:17:49 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:17:49 ...for what the fuck happens?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:17:51 Well, the thing is-

Joe Rogan 1:17:51 'Cause that sounds crazy. That sounds like it could be the end of civilization.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:17:55 Well, it's a small interval of time, and it's very hard to catch a little interval of time in the fossil record, right?

Joe Rogan 1:18:03 A small interval of time-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:18:04 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:18:04 ...that occurs every 800,000 years.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:18:07 Or so.

Joe Rogan 1:18:07 Or so.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:18:07 You know, in some cases, like at the very end of the Cretaceous, there's about a five-million-year span where there's no magnetic flip.

Joe Rogan 1:18:14 Oh, interesting.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:18:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:15 Do we know why?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:18:16 No. At least-

Joe Rogan 1:18:17 Oh, boy. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:18:17 I don't know. But that's not great for me, right? Because we use these flips. It's kind of like, um, imagine you have, like, a, like, geological strata is like a pole, and you have these stripes on the pole, and they have different widths. Well, you can find your piece of the pole here, and somebody else has a piece of the pole there, and you can match them up and say, "Oh, there, there's the layer that's the same from Africa to South America."

Joe Rogan 1:18:40 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:18:40 Well, at the end of the Cretaceous, it's, like, five million years and no flip. So, and that's mostly where I work, so I, I can't use that tool. I don't have anything to match up.

Joe Rogan 1:18:49 Interesting.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:18:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:50 And how'd they figure out that it didn't flip during that time period?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:18:53 'Cause when you, when you find rocks of that age that are in, um, deposited in those quiet environments, the, the pole is just always facing the same direction.

Joe Rogan 1:19:02 For five million years.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:19:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:19:04 And is there any kind of a working model of the potential disaster that would incur?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:19:12 Not that I've seen.

Joe Rogan 1:19:13 That would occur? If, if you had to guess-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:19:16 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:19:16 ...like, if you had to say, like, what, what could happen if the pole shifted tomorrow?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:19:21 Well, it's interesting. I mean, I would guess, and this is guessing, um, that we would probably have an increased rate of cancer. Uh, we would maybe also have an increased rate of mutation. And so maybe this is something that historically has been, like, a, a spur to evolution. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:19:37 Hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:19:37 ...but, you know, I can't imagine anybody would think of it as a good thing.

Joe Rogan 1:19:41 Let's see what our AI sponsor says.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:19:43 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:19:43 Perplexity says, "Yes, a magnetic reversal could affect life, but the evidence does not support it causing a global catastrophe or mass extinction. During a reversal, Earth's magnetic field weakens and becomes more complicated, but it does not simply disappear. The atmosphere and remaining magnetic field continue to protect the surface. What could change? Radiation exposure. Weaker field lets more charged particles penetrate the Earth, uh, penetrate closer to the Earth. Some additional radiation could reach the surface, but the atmosphere remains a substantial shield. A reversal would not leave life directly exposed to space." Ask Perplexity this: What is the most potentially catastrophic version of a pole shift that has been proposed? So ask that follow-up question.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:20:32 Interesting about navigation. A lot of, a lot of birds and some creatures in the sea use the magnetosphere for, for navigation, so that would really mess them up.

Speaker 1:20:41 Did you say proposal or something?

Joe Rogan 1:20:43 Yeah. Well, out-outcome of a pole shift that's been proposed. Now we're gonna get to the truth.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:20:55 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:20:57 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:20:58 Worst-case scenario.

Joe Rogan 1:20:58 This is where it gets scary. This is-- For a magnetic reversal, we've kind of been discussing, one of the most catastrophic proposals is a global environmental crisis. Severely weakened field allows more energetic particles into the atmosphere, damages the ozone layer, increases harmful ultraviolet radiation, and contributes to ecological disruption and extinctions. Researchers proposed this scenario in a 2021 study, but its sweeping consequences remain disputed rather than established. The Adams Event Hypothesis. Oh, I don't like that. Examined, uh, the Laschamps excursion about 42,000 years ago, a temporary magnetic reversal rather than a last, uh, lasting reversal about 780,000 years ago. Uh, they proposed that the weakened field combined with unusual solar conditions triggered this chain of events. More energetic particles ionized the atmosphere, changing its chemistry. Ozone depletion increased the ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface, changes in atmospheric circulation. Okay, so there was some changes and some issues. Uh, and these, uh, stresses contributed to the disappearance of Australian megafauna and Neanderthals. The authors also speculated that increased UV exposure encouraged humans to seek shelter in caves. Hmm.

Speaker 1:22:15 Is that the cave we've talked about with, like, 20, 30,000 people lived in it?

Joe Rogan 1:22:19 Right. Right. Um-

Speaker 1:22:21 Maybe wire

Joe Rogan 1:22:21 ... Derinkuyu, you mean.

Speaker 1:22:22 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:22:23 Yeah. You know where that?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:22:24 No, I'm not.

Joe Rogan 1:22:25 Okay. Derinkuyu is a very weird, uh, archeological discovery in Turkey where a guy was... His chickens kept going missing through, like, a hole in the wall, and this guy breaks into this hole in the wall and then realizes it's kind of the beginning of a tunnel, and then follows the tunnel in and finds an underground city that goes, what does it go, like, 100 meters into the ground? It's, uh, suitable to house 20-plus thousand people, and including there's, uh, air holes to the surface. There's places where they believe they had grain storage. They have no idea how old it was.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:23:04 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:23:04 They have no idea who built it. They have no idea why, but maybe some of the speculation is that there was some sort of a natural disaster or maybe even more likely some human invaders that they were trying to avoid.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:23:18 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:23:18 So this is Derinkuyu.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:23:20 Wow. Wild.

Joe Rogan 1:23:21 And I think, was this found in the '90s, Jamie?

Speaker 1:23:24 It says '63.

Joe Rogan 1:23:26 '63. So this guy, like, just say, "What's this?" And then finds this thing.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:23:31 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:23:32 There's no record of it. It's carved into the ground. I mean, it's all carved into stone. It's really crazy, and when you, when you learn how big it is... Can you, can you show, like, an image of the-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:23:42 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:23:42 ... the one t- there. That's what it looked like. So this is a reputa- representation of what is actually underground.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:23:48 Wow.

Joe Rogan 1:23:48 Like, how nuts is that?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:23:49 That's amazing.

Joe Rogan 1:23:50 That these people lived there for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years, 'cause they really don't know how old this is, and this is underneath them the whole time, and no explanation. Also, no historical record.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:24:02 That's wild.

Speaker 1:24:03 Also, I think last time we talked about they've only uncovered a portion of it, right?

Joe Rogan 1:24:07 Right. Right. So, so far they know that it could house 20,000 people.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:24:11 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:24:12 But who knows?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:24:12 Wow.

Joe Rogan 1:24:12 It might be more of it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:24:13 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:24:14 And then there's another one that's similar to that in China. The China one's really weird. There was a guy who had a pond, and he was draining his pond. And then upon draining his pond, he realized that there was some sort of an opening in the ground, and then went through this opening in the ground, and there is this enormous underground chamber that's carved out of stone with staircases, and it's bananas.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:24:38 Wow.

Joe Rogan 1:24:38 When you look... And unfortunately, since the time of this guy's discovery, some people, it seems like they've carved other, like, intricate artwork into the walls-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:24:47 Hmm

Joe Rogan 1:24:47 ... that probably weren't there. So you have, like, more than one timeline that's dealing with this. When w- and when was this discovery?

Speaker 1:24:55 Yeah. Oh.

Joe Rogan 1:24:57 '92? Yeah, I think it's '92. Right here it says it. Yeah, that's it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:25:02 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:25:02 So look how nuts this is. So no historical record.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:25:07 That's wild.

Joe Rogan 1:25:07 Like, China has some of the most amazing historical records-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:25:09 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:25:09 ... 'cause it's an ancient civilization.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:25:11 Sure.

Joe Rogan 1:25:12 And this guy found this draining a pond.

Speaker 1:25:17 Oh, what does that say?

Joe Rogan 1:25:18 It says they kept-

Speaker 1:25:19 Two dozen more

Joe Rogan 1:25:19 ... draining ponds, and they found-

Speaker 1:25:21 Oh, got it [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:25:21 ... two dozen more like it. Like, so this is a huge underground complex that... And if you look at all the machine lines on the walls, like, how it's been carved, like, what tools were they using? Like, how did they do this? How, what was the engineering involved? How did you get all the stone out of there? No record anywhere mentions who made them or why.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:25:42 That's wild.

Joe Rogan 1:25:43 Wild.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:25:44 I started my career working in, um, in the Bahariya Oasis of Egypt.

Joe Rogan 1:25:48 Hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:25:48 And, um, you know, we were there for dinosaurs, but since we worked there in 2000, 2001, they started finding mummies there, and these were, like, Roman-era mummies, and they have found thousands of them since then. Um, and they, they now call it Valley of the Golden Mummies.

Joe Rogan 1:26:05 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:26:06 And, uh, so during Roman times, you know, Egypt was ancient to them, and it was very fashionable to be buried like, like an ancient Egyptian.

Joe Rogan 1:26:15 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:26:15 And there were thousands of these then.

Joe Rogan 1:26:17 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:26:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:26:18 That's cool. Um, my friend David Choe, uh, he did a thing back in the early Vice days where he went into the Congo looking for a dinosaur because there's, like, people in the Congo that swear that there's something that lives deep in the Congo that, the way they describe it, it sounds like some long-necked dinosaur, Brontosaurus-looking thing. Are you aware of that?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:26:40 I'm not, but, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:26:41 You never heard that?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:26:42 ... I'd like to, I'd like to take a look at it. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:26:43 Yeah, me too. But you never heard that, uh, that rumor?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:26:46 Mm-mm.

Joe Rogan 1:26:46 See if you can find what the hell that's supposed to be. There's a name that they have for it. Yeah. Uh, you wanna try that name?

Speaker 1:26:53 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:26:53 Mokele-mbembe. So, uh, the way they describe it... And by the way, these are people that have no access to history books. These are people that, like, a lot of these villagers, they have no access, no contact with the Western world when they were describing this, which is really weird. So they're describing a Brontosaurus, and at least this is how people have drawn how they described it. So in the 1980s, Roy Mackal, microbi- microbiologist from the University of Chicago, conducted multiple expeditions to locate the animal, and eyewitness testimony described it. The head was distinctly snake-like A long, thin tail and a body approximately the size of an elephant, or at least that of a hippopotamus. Legs are short, with the hind legs possessing three claws. The animals are a reddish brown in color and have a rooster-like frill running from the top of their head down to the back of their neck. However, no expeditions have found evidence of the animal other than eyewitness testimonies. Now, it's interesting to me, that sounds like it has feathers, right? It sounds like some sort of a feathered dinosaur that they're describing that lives in the water. And the problem with the Congo is the Congo is huge.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:12 It is.

Joe Rogan 1:28:12 It's enormous, and it's-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:14 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:28:14 ... really dangerous.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:14 Really dangerous, really dense.

Joe Rogan 1:28:15 Like, getting in there... Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:28:18 And if you go there, you know, especially now, there's, like, a Ebola outbreak.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:28:23 And then that's probably the easiest thing to deal with. There's, like, some serious war going on there.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:29 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:28:29 Very, very dangerous place to be.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:28:31 So not a whole lot of people going out looking for that dinosaur.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:34 No, you know, the thing that, that I always think about when you hear about, like, these, these cryptobiological species-

Joe Rogan 1:28:40 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:40 ... is there has to be a breeding population of them to exist, right?

Joe Rogan 1:28:44 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:44 Like, like, there can't be one Loch Ness-

Joe Rogan 1:28:47 One Bigfoot

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:47 ... monster or one Bigfoot.

Joe Rogan 1:28:48 Right, right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:48 There has to be a breeding population. And, you know, if that's 1,000, like, you're not gonna miss 1,000 plesiosaur-sized creatures in the Loch Ness, right?

Joe Rogan 1:28:58 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:28:58 You're just not gonna miss it. Or, and you- you're probably gonna have evidence if there's 1,000, you know, giant apes walking around Washington, right?

Joe Rogan 1:29:07 The Loch Ness one is... Look, you ever been to Scotland?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:29:10 I love Scotland.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:10 I love Scotland.

Joe Rogan 1:29:11 Awesome place.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:11 Best place to hike.

Joe Rogan 1:29:12 People love to get hammered, and they love to tell stories, okay?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:15 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:29:16 And when you, and you live next to a giant lake-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:19 That whiskey's pretty good

Joe Rogan 1:29:20 ... and you're worried about kids drowning, you make up stories about monsters.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:23 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:29:23 And then also, you're bored, so these stories about monsters, they get more exaggerated and more fantastic and, you know.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:30 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 1:29:30 "Colin, come over here and tell your story."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:32 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:29:33 And the guy tells this fucking crazy story of a, a monster that he saw when he was fishing one day. Of course, it's fun.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:29:39 Like, having... Especially when you're dealing with people back then, I mean, this originates back when there's no books, okay? And then you get to books, and these stories have been told forever and ever, and you don't really know what the fuck is in that water because there's no way to know.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:29:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:29:53 You, you don't have a submarine. No one goes in there. A lot of unknown. That makes sense to me. Bigfoot also makes sense. The woods are big. Who knows what's out there? It's when people who live in an environment talk about something. Like, there... I watched a documentary, it was a kind of a sad documentary, of this guy who was looking for a giant sloth in the Amazon, and he was convinced that he was gonna find a giant sloth in the Amazon that's gonna make, make his career. But it just goes over the period of time where he continues to look for this sloth. And all these people keep saying, "I saw it. I saw it." He's like, "Where is it?" And he keep, keeps looking, and he's years in, and he realized, like, "Oh my God. This might be bullshit. I might have wasted years of my academic career searching for an animal that's long extinct."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:30:40 Yeah, although, you know, there's a lot of unexplored parts of the Amazon, right? Or, or-

Joe Rogan 1:30:43 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 1:30:44 ... little explored. And, like, when was the, uh, when was the okapi discovered? Wasn't that in the '60s? I mean-

Joe Rogan 1:30:49 What is the okapi?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:30:50 Um, it's a big, uh, plant-eating animal in Southeast, uh, Asia. Uh, but you know, I mean, it's, it's rare to find a big unknown animal today, right? But yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:01 The okapi?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:02 Oh, I've seen that before. Yeah, that thing-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:03 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:31:03 ... is cool.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:04 And I think they weren't known until, you know, last century.

Joe Rogan 1:31:08 That's nuts.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:09 And, um, so you know, uh, I mean, there are definitely things out there to be discovered, but you have to be skeptical when it's in a place like Scotland or Washington State, you know?

Joe Rogan 1:31:20 Oh yeah, for sure.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:22 But the Congo.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:23 Yeah. I mean, I'm... Every time biologists go to a place like the Congo or the Amazon, they find new species. Now, most of those species are, like, beetles and things.

Joe Rogan 1:31:32 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:32 But who knows what's out there, right?

Joe Rogan 1:31:34 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:35 Well, that's what's interesting. Like-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:37 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:31:37 ... you know, you know they have found those particularly large chimpanzees in the Congo. There's a, a tribe of very large chimpanzees.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:43 Like, actual chimps, not the-

Joe Rogan 1:31:45 Yeah, they're actually chimps

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:46 ... bonobos, 'cause the bonobos live there too.

Joe Rogan 1:31:47 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:47 Yeah, not bonobos. They call them Bili apes or the Bondo ape, and it's just a much larger chimpanzee.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:53 Yeah, interesting.

Joe Rogan 1:31:54 And they ground nest. They ground nest like gorillas.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:57 Huh.

Joe Rogan 1:31:57 It's really, really weird.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:31:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:58 The locals call them lion eaters. They have two versions of the chimpanzees. They call them tree beaters and lion eaters.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:32:04 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:32:05 It doesn't really mean they kill lions.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:32:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:32:07 Like, they call them lion killers, but, like, it's probably exaggeration. Although they did catch one eating a leopard, but they don't know if this one was... And this is, like, scientists. Like, there's a guy, a Swedish wildlife photographer, Carl Aman, I th- I believe is his name. He started looking for these things, uh, in the 1990s, and he got a bunch of camera trap photos of them, just particularly large chimpanzees, like, some of them as big as six feet tall. They even shot one at a, uh, an airfield.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:32:36 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:32:36 There's this photograph of these two guys with one they shot, and it's a chimpanzee that's the size of a gorilla.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:32:42 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:32:42 It's really weird.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:32:43 Whoa.

Joe Rogan 1:32:44 And so this was, this is a real animal. Like, there's video of them. They have fecal samples. They have bones. They have all kinds of things. They had s- really some confusing bones too. Like, one of the skulls has a crest like a gorilla's-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:32:56 Hmm

Joe Rogan 1:32:56 ... you know, which would indicate, like, massive mandible muscles.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:32:59 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:32:59 But it, they, s- so they thought maybe it was a hybrid of a chimpanzee and, and, and some other ape.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:04 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:33:05 But now they think it's, no, it's just one weird group of chimps that ha- seems to be quite a bit larger than-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:10 Huh

Joe Rogan 1:33:10 ... the regular chimp. So you can fi- find that photo-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:12 Wow

Joe Rogan 1:33:12 ... of the, the dead one with the, at the airport, 'cause the, the dead one at the airport's kooky. Like, you have these dudes behind it, and they're like, they shot it at an airport. And you look at it-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:21 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:33:21 ... and you're like, "What is... That is so big."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:23 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:33:24 Like, "That's the biggest chimp I've ever seen in my life." And so, uh, the point is, like, these things were just rumors for a long time because-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:32 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:33:32 ... this is such a remote area and because it's, it's very hard to get funding to go look for some- ... crazy monkey that no one is sure is real or not-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:42 Sure

Joe Rogan 1:33:42 ... and you have to convince your university

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:45 It's very hard to get money for discovery. I mean, I, I faced that early in my career. Like, you know, it's always, "Well, how do you know you'll find something?" I'm like, "I don't know, but I do know how to find answers."

Joe Rogan 1:33:54 Look at that photo.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:56 Wow.

Joe Rogan 1:33:57 Isn't that crazy?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:57 That's big.

Joe Rogan 1:33:58 That thing's huge.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:33:59 It's really big.

Joe Rogan 1:34:01 Like, how weird. So, I mean, there's things that are real that don't seem like they should be real.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:34:06 You know, like the hobbit people they found on the island of Flores.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:09 Yeah, Homo floresiensis.

Joe Rogan 1:34:10 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:10 It's amazing, right?

Joe Rogan 1:34:10 Yeah, yeah. I just had a whole podcast about that the other day.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:12 Yeah. That's so cool.

Joe Rogan 1:34:13 Um, it's, it's-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:15 And I remember when that came out.

Joe Rogan 1:34:16 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:16 There was immense pushback, right?

Joe Rogan 1:34:17 Yes.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:17 And they said, "No, it's gotta be a pathological individual" and then-

Joe Rogan 1:34:20 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:20 ... they started finding more and more. And now it's, you know, n- and now I think it's convention that these, that was a species that existed.

Joe Rogan 1:34:27 Yes.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:34:27 And then they found, um, uh, was it Gregory Fourth? Was, wasn't it? Uh, brilliant guy who was on, who was explaining to us, to, he was one of the, the people that went over there. He had actually heard about them from the people that lived on that island in the 1980s.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:41 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:34:42 Long before it was ever discovered.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:34:44 And then, um, got eyewitness accounts of people who claimed to have still seen them on the island as recently as, like, a couple months before the discovery.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:54 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:34:54 Yeah, it was really kooky stuff.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:34:56 It is.

Joe Rogan 1:34:56 And then there's people that have, uh, there's a depiction that these guys had that went to the island or a, a d- a description of a, a tall monkey that they had encountered that was walking on two feet in the 2019.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:09 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:35:09 Really weird.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:10 That is weird.

Joe Rogan 1:35:11 And there's, then they found bones, uh, that indicate that they lived or a similar type species lived in the Philippines, they found them in China. They found them, the Homo naledi, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:22 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:35:23 There's another one in Africa.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:24 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:35:25 Really wild stuff.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:35:26 So it's like-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:26 It's a recent discovery.

Joe Rogan 1:35:28 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:35:28 It's, it's cool, you know, that there's so much still to be discovered.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:33 We're, we're really-

Joe Rogan 1:35:34 There's so many mysteries

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:34 ... seeing, like, the, the hominid group is, is more like a bush now.

Joe Rogan 1:35:38 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:38 You know? There's this, it's rare that we are the only species of human a- alive on the planet today. Usually there's a bunch.

Joe Rogan 1:35:44 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:35:46 Yeah. Like the Denisovans-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:48 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 1:35:49 ... and all these different ones that-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:49 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:35:49 ... keep discovering.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:49 We're learning so much more about them.

Joe Rogan 1:35:51 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:35:51 Um, you know, and there's so much good Neanderthal research happening right now, and they're no longer portrayed as, like, these, these brutish cavemen. Like, they were, they were making stone tools. They, uh, you know, it looks like they had art, uh, maybe burials. I, I think there's some evidence to that. Um, and they were us. That they're in our genes as well. Um, you know, one of the things that, like, I think I'm happiest about, have you ever had your, your DNA run by, like, 23andMe-

Joe Rogan 1:36:18 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:36:18 ... or one of those?

Joe Rogan 1:36:19 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:36:19 So according to 23andMe, I have more Neanderthal markers in my genome than 99% of their customers.

Joe Rogan 1:36:27 Wow. That's crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:36:29 I'm-

Joe Rogan 1:36:29 I'm 57%.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:36:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:36:31 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:36:31 My, my wife said, "I could have saved you 100 bucks," you know? [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:36:35 [laughs] But that's based on the old idea of Neanderthals being dopes, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:36:39 Right. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:36:40 They did have larger brain capacity, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:36:42 They had, uh, larger brains than we do. Yeah, they were, uh, a little more broad-shouldered, definitely stronger than, than we are. Um, but you know, to some degree they're still with us, I think.

Joe Rogan 1:36:53 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:36:53 You know, you heard, you heard, uh, Beth Sha- Shapiro say-

Joe Rogan 1:36:56 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 1:36:56 ... on your show that if you, if you took the Neanderthal genes that are in humanity today collectively, you could put back together almost the entire Neanderthal genome.

Joe Rogan 1:37:06 Yeah, which is wildly unethical. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:37:09 Well, yeah, yeah. It would be, and we should not do that. But it-

Joe Rogan 1:37:11 Or should we? I mean, if I lived in China, I mean, I think I'd prop- propose that to the government. You know? I'd be like, "Listen, let's fuck it."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:37:21 Yeah, that would be a supremely bad idea, I think.

Joe Rogan 1:37:23 Would it be? I don't know.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:37:24 Eh.

Joe Rogan 1:37:24 Maybe they'd be happy you did it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:37:25 Maybe.

Joe Rogan 1:37:25 Maybe they'd be like, "Thanks for bring, bringing me back."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:37:28 Yeah, I don't know.

Joe Rogan 1:37:28 You know?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:37:28 We have a lot of problems already today, I think, though.

Joe Rogan 1:37:30 Well, it's, isn't it interesting that we are, uh, so, um, we're so enamored by our ability to manipulate science and manipulate matter and life that we're willing to bring back the mammoth. Everybody thinks that's a good idea. Like, there's zero pushback if you decide to bring back the mammoth. People are like, "Yeah, definitely should do that." They brought back the dire wolf, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:37:50 Mm-hmm, yep.

Joe Rogan 1:37:51 No problem.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:37:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:37:52 I mean, a few people's like, "That's not really a dire wolf," but if they brought back a Neanderthal, everybody would be like, "Hey."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:37:57 I think so, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:37:58 "You can't do that."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:38:00 "That's us."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:38:01 Isn't that weird?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:02 It is weird.

Joe Rogan 1:38:02 It's kinda, it's kinda weird.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:03 I, I mean, I think Colossal's doing amazing work. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:38:06 Oh, they definitely are.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:06 Yeah. I'm a, I'm advisor-

Joe Rogan 1:38:07 Shout out to Ben Lamb.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:38:08 Ben Lamb.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:09 Ben Lamb's great. Uh, I'm a, I'm an advisor to the company. Um, and so it's just fascinating. I go there and I, I feel like I'm in a movie. It's incredible.

Joe Rogan 1:38:17 It's very Jurassic Park-y.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:18 You've been there, right?

Joe Rogan 1:38:19 Yeah, I took my daughter.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:20 Yeah, it's incredible.

Joe Rogan 1:38:20 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:38:21 It's inc- it's really awesome.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:38:23 Like, they're trying to bring back the thylacine, which is crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:38:27 But bringing back a Neanderthal would be a giant problem. That's a, that's a, that's a, like a movie.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:31 I think-

Joe Rogan 1:38:32 That's a terrible movie

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:32 ... well, nobody I know wants to do that. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:38:34 Nobody you know that wants to talk about it. I bet people have thought about it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:37 Well-

Joe Rogan 1:38:38 Working long hours in the lab, drinking coffee, go outside for a cigarette. "You know what'd be fucking cool?"

Kenneth Lacovara 1:38:43 [laughs] I don't know.

Joe Rogan 1:38:45 "We should bring back the fucking Neanderthals." If you got, if someone found Denisovan DNA, and they found out that Denisovans actually had a very large cerebral cortex and were probably smarter than us, would y- would it be cool to bring them back?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:01 Well, uh, n- not to me, but you know, there are people out there.

Joe Rogan 1:39:06 Why not?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:07 Well, I, I like the way, uh, the nature does it.

Joe Rogan 1:39:11 Oh, okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:12 So.

Joe Rogan 1:39:12 Except when it comes to animals that aren't as smart, and then we're willing to bring them back. Isn't that interesting?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:17 Well, you know, I, my view of, like, the things that Colossal, uh, is working on, like the mammoth and, um, and the thylacine, the-

Joe Rogan 1:39:25 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:25 ... the marsupial wolf and the dodo and the, the bluebuck, I mean, these are creatures that recently went extinct-

Joe Rogan 1:39:32 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:32 ... largely at our hand And so this is still their world. You know, people conflate the idea of mammoths and dinosaurs.

Joe Rogan 1:39:40 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:40 Mammoths were just here. I mean, the last mammoths went extinct about 3,000 years ago.

Joe Rogan 1:39:45 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:45 Right?

Joe Rogan 1:39:45 They were on an island, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:46 Wrangel Island-

Joe Rogan 1:39:47 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:47 ... off Siberia. So 3,000 years ago, that's a world that has pyramids and written stories and beer, right? Like-

Joe Rogan 1:39:53 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:53 ... if you're in a world that has beer, that's our world, right?

Joe Rogan 1:39:56 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:39:56 And they, they have a, they have a place in that world. Their ecosystem is, is still here.

Joe Rogan 1:40:01 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:01 They're just absent from it.

Joe Rogan 1:40:03 Yeah. I get it, but still, let them, let them stay dead. Why do you have to bring them back?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:11 Well, put it this way, if, um-

Joe Rogan 1:40:12 I'm just, I'm playing devil's advocate.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:40:14 Clearly.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:14 So-

Joe Rogan 1:40:15 I want them to bring them back. I think it's cool

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:16 ... let's say, I don't know, pick a species. Pick the, the cheetah.

Joe Rogan 1:40:20 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:20 So the cheetah goes extinct on Monday, and if I said, "Joe, I could bring back the cheetah on Tuesday," would you do it?

Joe Rogan 1:40:28 Hmm. Me?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:31 I mean, it's only been one day. They've been gone for a day.

Joe Rogan 1:40:33 Yeah, I think cheetahs are cool.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:40:35 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:35 Well, what if-

Joe Rogan 1:40:36 I'd want to bring them back

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:36 ... what if it's a year later and I said, "Well, I, I could bring back the cheetah now," a year later?

Joe Rogan 1:40:43 I would say yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:44 It's still the same world, right?

Joe Rogan 1:40:45 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:46 What if it's 1,000 years later?

Joe Rogan 1:40:48 Well now, you're messing with reality because-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:50 It's-

Joe Rogan 1:40:50 ... the ecosystem has adjusted and changed.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:40:53 A, a bit. I mean, you know, 1,000 years ago is, you know.

Joe Rogan 1:40:56 Well, interestingly enough, we have a few animals that have, um, adaptations that exist because of animals that were eating them that were extinct, like the pronghorn.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:41:09 North American pronghorn-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:10 Right, they're so fast

Joe Rogan 1:41:10 ... is fast as shit.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:12 'Cause they're running away from cheetahs-

Joe Rogan 1:41:13 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:13 ... that no longer exist.

Joe Rogan 1:41:14 That no longer exist.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:41:15 Yeah, isn't that crazy?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:16 But, like, 1,000 years ago, that's, like, uh, William the Conqueror, right?

Joe Rogan 1:41:19 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:19 Like, that's the same world.

Joe Rogan 1:41:20 Oh, yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:20 That's this world.

Joe Rogan 1:41:21 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:22 So, you know, where do you draw the line? And-

Joe Rogan 1:41:24 Right, right, right

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:25 ... I draw the line at, like, you know, during the time of humans. That's still basically this world.

Joe Rogan 1:41:30 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:30 And they have a place in this world.

Joe Rogan 1:41:32 Well, that was the, Mr. Fourth, when we, we, uh, had the conversation about these tiny hominids, uh, th- one of the things was what, what would you do if you found them? Are you allowed to catch one? You know what I mean? Like, is this like a, is this like, uh, kidnapping a human?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:48 Yeah, I think it would be, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:41:50 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:50 They're people.

Joe Rogan 1:41:51 Kinda-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:51 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:41:51 ... but they're covered in hair, and they don't have stone tools.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:54 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:41:55 And we don't even know if they have a language, right?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:41:58 Mm, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:41:58 So is it a monkey?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:00 I mean-

Joe Rogan 1:42:00 Right? But anything smarter than a monkey, we're like, "Leave it alone. Leave it alone." But if it's a monkey, like, yeah, put it in the zoo. Like, no problem. You go to the zoo, the monkeys are there. But something just a little smarter than a monkey, you're like, "Oh man, that's fucked up."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:12 Yeah, I think so.

Joe Rogan 1:42:13 Leave it alone.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:13 You know, like, you go to a zoo, and you look at a gorilla, and, like, there's somebody home.

Joe Rogan 1:42:16 Oh, I don't like it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:17 Right?

Joe Rogan 1:42:17 I don't like it at all.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:18 Like, there's totally somebody home.

Joe Rogan 1:42:19 I, I do not like primates at the zoo.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:21 No.

Joe Rogan 1:42:21 It drives me crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:42:22 I went to the Denver Zoo, uh, with my kids, and there was this, uh, this was a quite a long time ago. There was this one particular area where they had all the primates caged, and this one monkey was wailing, just screaming, and I think he was just frustrated, just-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:39 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 1:42:39 ... this was just living in hell.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:40 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:42:40 He's in prison. He's just like, "Wahhh!" And I'm like, "I don't like that sound. That sounds like pain. That sounds like suffering." Like, why the fuck do they have... Can't we just make, it's 20, whatever it was back then, 2020, whatever it was. Can't we just have video of these things now? Do we, do we need to, to have them locked up like this?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:42:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:42:59 This, like, seems, especially these little tiny-ass cages. I, it's one thing if you have a giant enclosure, and they get trees and free food and, and no eagles eating them. Great, fun times.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:43:11 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:43:12 But the actual little zoo cages with a primate in it is really fucked up.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:43:17 Yeah, yeah, it is. I remember, um, in grad school, I went to the National Zoo one time 'cause it was free, and I was in grad school, and, like, that's what I could do. Um, I saw this elephant. It reached through the, uh, the bars in its enclosure, and it grabbed this pointy rock, and it started scraping the sidewalk with it. And then it scraped its leg, and then it set the rock down, and it felt the sidewalk, and it felt its leg, and it was comparing the two.

Joe Rogan 1:43:41 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:43:41 And you could see, like, it was, it was really thinking about it. It was, it was a smart being there.

Joe Rogan 1:43:47 Right. It's, it's trying to measure the hardness of things and see if it could dig its way out.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:43:51 [laughs] Maybe, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:43:53 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:43:53 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:43:54 Maybe. Maybe thinking of there's gotta be a way out of this. That's hell. I, I just... Uh, it's great when you have kids 'cause they get to see animals-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:44:02 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:44:02 ... that don't. But it's, there's something really dark about a lot of those places. One of the co- one cool one is the San Diego Zoo, if you've ever been to San Diego Zoo.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:44:11 I have been, and, you know, zoos do so much great conservation work.

Joe Rogan 1:44:14 They do.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:44:14 Like, they are really, you know, some of the engines of conservation that are keeping species that are right on the brink from teetering over. I think the San Diego Zoo is largely responsible for the emerging recovery of the, of the California condor.

Joe Rogan 1:44:27 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:44:27 You know, they were down to 22 individuals, I think, in-

Joe Rogan 1:44:30 Whoa

Kenneth Lacovara 1:44:30 ... in around 1970. So they collected all of them from the wild and had a very careful breeding program to, to try to get them through this genetic bottleneck, and they started releasing them. And now there's a new population of California condors in Zion Canyon in Utah. And so I think there's only about 550 of them alive right now, but they're, you know, they're up from 22. They're, they're moving in the right direction, which is great.

Joe Rogan 1:44:53 Yeah. No, that is cool.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:44:54 And that's an example of zoo conservation. You know, they do, they do great work in general.

Joe Rogan 1:44:57 They also have, uh, large enclosures in-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:01 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:45:01 ... the San Diego Zoo.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:01 They do. It's a very nice zoo.

Joe Rogan 1:45:03 And you can go in, like, one of those Jeeps, and you drive around, and animals come up, and you can feed them.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:07 It's pretty, pretty weird. They don't, they don't seem to be tortured. I always say that, like, the animals that seem the happiest at the zoo are giraffes. They don't seem bothered by the zoo at all 'cause they're just like, "Another day with no lions."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:20 Just wandering around. Like, they're the only animal at the zoo that y- they will let you feed them, a baby can feed them. Like, a ba-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:27 Right

Joe Rogan 1:45:28 ... a child.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:28 A small child can hold up a, a leaf of lettuce, and they'll come over with their crazy tongue and wrap it around the lettuce, and everybody screams, "Oh my God."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:35 Right. I don't get the impression that giraffes are, like, the, the sharpest knives in the drawer, you know?

Joe Rogan 1:45:39 They definitely aren't.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:40 No.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:41 Well, they fight with their heads. You ever see they fight?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:44 Yeah, it seems like a bad idea.

Joe Rogan 1:45:46 They whip their neck. They whip their necks. It's crazy. It's j- that's what those little horns are for. They're, those little things that they have are to fuck each other up with.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:54 Did you see, um, Apple TV's Prehistoric Planet-

Joe Rogan 1:45:57 No

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:57 ... with David Attenborough?

Joe Rogan 1:45:58 No, I didn't.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:45:59 Um, so, like, great CGI. Um, but they had my dinosaur, Dreadnoughtus, in there. He's in episode two, and I had the thrill of hearing Sir David say, "Dreadnoughtus," you know-

Joe Rogan 1:46:09 Ah

Kenneth Lacovara 1:46:09 ... which is, which is my ringtone now, by the way.

Joe Rogan 1:46:11 Oh, that's cool. [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:46:12 Um, but they had a, they had a fight scene of Dreadnoughtus who were, like, slapping each other with their heads like giraffes do, which I think they would absolutely not do. Their necks are really long and lightly built, filled a lot with air, and their heads are tiny. Like, a giant Dreadnoughtus has a head that's not much bigger than a horse head. Right?

Joe Rogan 1:46:30 Why didn't they consult with you or someone like you?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:46:33 Well, I, that's a good question, Joe.

Joe Rogan 1:46:36 It seems like a-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:46:36 Which I'm not sure

Joe Rogan 1:46:37 ... some producer got involved, some jackass.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:46:39 So they had a very good paleontologist, uh, Darren Naish, who is in, uh, in, uh, England. Uh, but Darren sends me a message a couple weeks before it debuts, and he says, uh, you know, uh, "Kenneth, I, I have to tell you something. Um, we wanted to portray this idea that dinosaurs must have had amazing soft tissue structures that we'll never know about, so I decided to give Dreadnoughtus pop-out neck bladders like a grouse." And he says, uh, uh, "This was my decision, and I realize you'll have to answer the neck bladder question for the rest of your days." And it's true. If, if you could bring that up, Jamie, uh, Prehistoric Planet, Dreadnoughtus. Um, and so every-

Joe Rogan 1:47:19 Why, why did he make that?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:47:20 I don't know. And so everywhere I go now to give a talk, I have to answer the neck bladder question.

Joe Rogan 1:47:25 And this was just one guy's idea?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:47:28 Yeah, yeah, and it, so they, they-

Joe Rogan 1:47:29 Did you have a conversation with him at, well, saying, "I don't think that was a good idea"?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:47:33 Well, it was too late. It, he was telling me, like, two weeks before the show.

Joe Rogan 1:47:36 Why would he do that?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:47:38 Why would he do that to my dinosaur in particular? I'm not sure, but yeah, there we go.

Joe Rogan 1:47:42 Ew.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:47:42 So yeah, and so in the show, they go like, [imitates popping] and, uh, as part of their mating ritual.

Joe Rogan 1:47:47 Oh, come on.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:47:48 So-

Joe Rogan 1:47:49 That's, like, so creative

Kenneth Lacovara 1:47:50 ... I'm, I'm giving a-

Joe Rogan 1:47:51 That's such a creative guess

Kenneth Lacovara 1:47:53 ... I'm giving a talk in, uh, San Antonio tomorrow, and I guarantee I will get the neck bladder question.

Joe Rogan 1:47:59 Look how it's, like, said, like, almost like it's fact here.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:01 [laughs] Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:48:02 "Despite his external bulk-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:03 Right

Joe Rogan 1:48:03 ... the internal physics of Dreadnoughtus relied on weight reduction. Its vertebrae were pneumatized, containing a complex system of air sacs that replaced-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:11 Well, that part's true

Joe Rogan 1:48:12 ... heavy bone with air, but not the outside.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:14 Not the outside.

Joe Rogan 1:48:15 Those, those big white things, he just made those up.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:19 Made up, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:48:20 And, like, even the, the distance between them, the size of them-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:24 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:48:24 ... all just creative.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:25 Yeah, no evidence-

Joe Rogan 1:48:26 That's kooky

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:26 ... for that. There's no evidence for that.

Joe Rogan 1:48:27 That's really kooky.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:28 But these big dinosaurs do have pneumatized skeletons, which means that they have air bladders that go through their skeletons. Their skeletons are very honeycomb, so they-

Joe Rogan 1:48:36 Mm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:36 ... they lose mass, but they don't lose a lot of strength.

Joe Rogan 1:48:39 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:39 And if you're that big-

Joe Rogan 1:48:40 Like a bird.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:41 Like a bird, because birds are dinosaurs.

Joe Rogan 1:48:43 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:44 So if you're the size of a house, if you took elephant anatomy and scaled it up to Dreadnoughtus size, I think its proteins would start to denature, which means cook, right, inside of its own body.

Joe Rogan 1:48:55 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:48:55 And so their big metabolic challenge is shedding heat. So how do they do that? Well, one thing is that long neck and long tail gives them a lot of surface area per volume, so they can shed heat that way.

Joe Rogan 1:49:05 Like elephants' ears.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:49:06 Yes, but, like, super long, right?

Joe Rogan 1:49:08 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:49:08 Dreadnoughtus had a 40-foot-long tail and a 30-foot-long neck. Um, but then they have these pneumatic invasions. They get more and more pneumatized over their growth, the growth of an individual. And we're not sure, but it seems likely to me that, that those pneumatic tubes that go through their skeleton are connected to their lungs, and they have what we call bird-style lungs, which kind of should be called dinosaur-style lungs, 'cause they had them before birds. Um, but the way a bird and a dinosaur breathes is in this two-step process. They don't have bellows lungs like we do, where we always mix good air and bad air. Dinosaurs don't do that, and birds don't do that. So that when they take a breath in, it doesn't go into their lungs. It, it's staged in this lower air bladder, and then when they breathe out, that air goes across their lungs only in one direction. And then the next time they breathe in, that air that just went across their lungs gets staged in an upper air bladder. The new air comes into the lower air bladder, and next time they breathe out, new air across the lungs, that old air then is expelled.

Joe Rogan 1:50:12 Whoa.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:50:13 Yeah, so it's a really efficient way of breathing. And, uh, as a result of this, birds are really good in, in what we call hypoxic conditions, right, low oxygen. That's why, like, the barred goose can fly over the Himalayas, right?

Joe Rogan 1:50:25 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:50:25 No, no bat can do that, but a barred goose can do that.

Joe Rogan 1:50:28 Oh, wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:50:29 Yeah, and so this might be a way, if it's connected to the pneumatic invasions in their skeleton, where they can dump heat into their environment.

Joe Rogan 1:50:38 Um, we, we were in Scotland, and, uh, there's this lady that was, uh, she was a, what, what is it called when a person trains birds? What is it called?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:50:46 Oh, right, um, hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:50:49 Whatever it was.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:50:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:50:50 A person that trains birds.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:50:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:50:52 And, you know, you had the glove. You put the glove on-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:50:53 Yeah, yeah

Joe Rogan 1:50:53 ... and she had an eagle.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:50:54 Yeah, uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 1:50:54 And the eagle landed on my arm, and I was shocked at how light they are.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:50:58 Mm, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:50:58 And it's because of the bones.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:00 Yeah, and, you know, birds-

Joe Rogan 1:51:01 It's a big bird

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:01 ... have a lot of, yeah, but they have all kinds of weight-saving adaptations, hollow bones. They've lost their teeth, right? Teeth are heavy.

Joe Rogan 1:51:07 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:07 That's, so birds just have beaks. And this happens, you can see in the Cretaceous Period, the birds starting to lose their teeth. So there's-

Joe Rogan 1:51:14 Mm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:14 ... there's birds alive at the end of the Cretaceous, like one called Hesperornis, which looks kind of like a cormorant today, um, looks very, very modern but has teeth still, right?

Joe Rogan 1:51:23 And then there's birds like the shoebill that seem like they're from, like, 100 million years ago-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:27 Yeah, that's a crazy looking bird, isn't it?

Joe Rogan 1:51:29 ... but somehow they're still... Oh, those things are so weird.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:51:31 And then they start cracking. They, they, they slam their jaws together and make that nutty sound-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:35 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:51:35 ... that sounds like gunfire.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:36 And you know the, uh, the hoatzin? Um, it's a, it's a bird, when it's born, it has claws, like, you know, harking back to its non-avian dinosaur days, and they climb around.

Joe Rogan 1:51:46 Really?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:51:48 When it's born

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:49 Yeah. There it is

Joe Rogan 1:51:50 That's a real live bird?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:52 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:51:52 Okay. That's a dinosaur. That is 100%-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:54 That's cool

Joe Rogan 1:51:54 ... percent a dinosaur

Kenneth Lacovara 1:51:56 Is that a actual picture or is that AI?

Speaker 1:51:58 I just pop- just typed it in.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:01 Yeah, it's cool.

Joe Rogan 1:52:02 That's a actual picture of it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:03 That's wild, isn't it?

Joe Rogan 1:52:03 What a freaky looking thing.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:06 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:52:06 Heartless looking demon.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:08 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:52:08 Look in his eyes.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:09 You know, that's the thing. Reptiles, um, dinosaurs, chickens. I- we keep chickens. They're insensate. You know, you look in their eyes and it's just like-

Joe Rogan 1:52:17 Oh, there's nobody there

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:18 ... it's just, yeah, there's no-

Speaker 1:52:19 Why is that called a stink bird?

Joe Rogan 1:52:20 What's that, Jimmy?

Speaker 1:52:20 It's called a stink bird.

Joe Rogan 1:52:21 Stink bird? Why is it stink bird? Do they think they have-

Speaker 1:52:24 Smells bad, predators won't eat it.

Joe Rogan 1:52:26 Whoa.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:27 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:52:27 What? I wanna take a whiff.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:52:30 [laughs]

Speaker 1:52:30 It looks a little like-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:31 But you can see, like if you look at that thing or you look at chickens, have, have you ever seen, like, chickens running in slow motion?

Joe Rogan 1:52:37 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:37 Like, they're dinosaurs.

Joe Rogan 1:52:39 I have chickens.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:52:39 Yeah. I've, I've seen chickens eat, my chickens eat a mouse.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:43 Yeah, mine too, and frogs.

Joe Rogan 1:52:44 Oh, frogs, huh?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:45 Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:52:45 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:52:46 But it's incredible how ferocious they are. We-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:48 Record them running in slow-mo-

Joe Rogan 1:52:50 Hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:50 ... and it looks like Jurassic Park.

Joe Rogan 1:52:52 It does.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:52 It's amazing.

Joe Rogan 1:52:53 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:52:54 It does.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:52:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:52:55 Yeah. It's, uh, it's very interesting to watch how predatory they are-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:00 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 1:53:00 ... when they do get ahold of something like a mouse.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:02 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:53:02 'Cause, uh, you know, I've shown videos on this podcast, like, countless times where people don't know. I'm like, "You ever seen what-"

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:07 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 1:53:07 ... "a chicken does to a mouse?"

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:08 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:53:08 And they show them. They're like, "What the fuck?" Like, there's a cat playing with the mouse, and the chicken snatches the mouse-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:13 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 1:53:14 ... from the cat and just-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:15 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:53:15 ... destroys it immediately

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:15 They're vicious. They're terrible to each other too.

Joe Rogan 1:53:17 Yeah. Oh, yeah, they are.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:17 Like, if one gets injured, they'll just peck the wound.

Joe Rogan 1:53:19 Oh, yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:20 And they'll just... They're, chickens are just-

Joe Rogan 1:53:21 Oh, they're heartless

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:21 ... chickens are little dinosaurs.

Joe Rogan 1:53:23 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:23 They're mean. They're, they're mean. That, that's what pecking order's all about. That's a real thing.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:27 Yeah, it is.

Joe Rogan 1:53:28 And you gotta separate chickens.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:29 It is.

Joe Rogan 1:53:29 It's, like, it's a real problem.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:30 They kill each other.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:31 Yeah. We only get hens, so we have, you know, eliminated some of that stress.

Joe Rogan 1:53:34 We only get hens too, but we fucked up this time, and one of our chicks was a rooster.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:39 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:39 So now we have a rooster.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:41 We had a rooster before. We had to get rid of him 'cause he started attacking people.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:44 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:53:44 But this guy's cool. So-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:46 We get them from this, uh, site online, and you can pay an extra 25 cents to have them sexed. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:53:51 Well, they, we paid that too.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:52 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:53:52 They just fucked up.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:53:53 Uh.

Joe Rogan 1:53:53 We've, well, we've had twen- we have right now 20 chickens, and over the course of the times that I've had chickens, we've probably had 50 or 60 all, all told forever. You know, when a bunch of them die off-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:07 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 1:54:07 ... you get new ones. This is the only time they ever made a mistake. It was only one mistake.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:11 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:54:11 And we were looking at this one chick, and as he was getting bigger, we're like, "Why is he bigger than everybody else?"

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:15 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:54:16 "And why he's got that little fucking thing in his nose?" Like, "I think that's a rooster."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:19 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 1:54:20 And m- my wife was the first one to figure it out, and she's like, "He's a rooster." And then as he just, you know, a few months in, you're like, "It's clear."

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:29 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:54:30 He's way bigger than them.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:31 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:54:31 And, and he starts, "Buck-uck-uck-uck-uck." Well, there he is.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:34 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:54:34 Fuck, we got a rooster. But this guy's keeping it together. We've had him for a year now, and he doesn't fuck with anybody. He's really chill.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:41 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:54:41 You know? Luckily, 'cause the last rooster had to go.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:44 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:54:44 I think he probably became soup.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:46 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:54:46 I don't know what happened.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:47 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:54:47 Gave him, gave him to one of my guys.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:48 We don't, we, our chickens have names, so we don't eat them. We, we bury them.

Joe Rogan 1:54:51 Yeah, we have names-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:52 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:54:52 ... for our chickens. We have names for some of them. Once th- it got over 20 with some of the new ones, a lot of them haven't been named.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:54:58 Right. A couple names we've recycled though.

Joe Rogan 1:55:00 Oh.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:00 [laughs] We've had a couple-

Joe Rogan 1:55:01 That's a great idea

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:02 ... of Frenchies. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:55:03 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:03 You know?

Joe Rogan 1:55:04 Well, it's a great way to get free food. It's not free, obviously. You have to pay for chicken feed and all that stuff, but it's like karma-free protein.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:12 The eggs are great, aren't they?

Joe Rogan 1:55:13 They're fantastic.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:13 Like, once you have, like, pastured, grass-fed chicken eggs-

Joe Rogan 1:55:16 Oh, yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:16 ... you, you can't go back to the store-bought ones.

Joe Rogan 1:55:18 Well, it's just they're so fresh.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55:20 You know exactly where they came from.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55:21 You know exactly what your chickens are eating.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55:24 There's no concern whatsoever.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55:25 And it's also, like, it doesn't harm anybody.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:28 I put them raw in my smoothie every morning.

Joe Rogan 1:55:30 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:30 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:55:30 You're brave.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:31 [laughs] Well, you know. Um, have, have you ever been to the Explorer's Club dinner?

Joe Rogan 1:55:36 What is that?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:37 Uh, you know, the Explorer's Club in New York, right?

Joe Rogan 1:55:39 I've heard of it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55:40 I'm not totally familiar with it.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:41 Uh, so it's like the, the global center for exploration.

Joe Rogan 1:55:46 Okay, cool.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:55:46 And, uh, we have a dinner, uh, every spring, and it's, it's a huge event. There's, like, 2,000 people, uh, that come, and, um, the, the appetizers famously are, are insects.

Joe Rogan 1:55:59 Oh.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:00 And so you get, you know, scorpions and, um, tarantulas and the silkworm grubs-

Joe Rogan 1:56:07 Mm-hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:07 ... and some things, you know, crickets, I, I, I like. There's-

Joe Rogan 1:56:10 Cicadas

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:11 ... bullfish eyes. Yeah. I, my very first Explorer's Club dinner, I think in 2003, no, four, um, Buzz Aldrin's wife was feeding me scorpions on a stick.

Joe Rogan 1:56:22 Whoa.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:22 [laughs] I was like, "What the hell is happening to me?" [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:56:25 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:25 It was wild. Yeah. You should come sometime. It, so the club itself is up on the, uh, Upper East Side of Manhattan. It looks exactly like you think it would, right? So-

Joe Rogan 1:56:34 Oh, in old wood and-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:36 Lots of taxidermy, old wood paneling.

Joe Rogan 1:56:38 Nice.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:38 All these artifacts. Every human that's ever walked on the moon has had an Explorer's Club flag with them.

Joe Rogan 1:56:45 Oh, wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:56:46 That's cool.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:46 Neil Armstrong had a flag in his sleeve.

Joe Rogan 1:56:48 Hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:49 Um, and it, that's in our archives at, at the Explorer's Club.

Joe Rogan 1:56:52 And is it just, like, people that explore everything, all over the world, archeologists, paleontologists?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:56:58 Like, what is it?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:56:59 Yeah. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:57:00 Different people take these weird trips?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:57:02 Well, it's, you know, it's, um, hardcore explorer researchers. Those are fellows. Members are, um, people that have done a lot of exploration, you know, for good causes, and there, there's also friends. They're supporters, uh, of the club. Uh, you know, I got to meet, uh, Sir Edmund Hillary there before he died-

Joe Rogan 1:57:20 Oh, wow

Kenneth Lacovara 1:57:20 ... which was incredible. He told my wife and I the story of climbing Everest like it happened last weekend, like we were the first people he ever told.

Joe Rogan 1:57:27 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:57:27 It was amazing. I've gotten to meet... I was, um, yeah, honestly I'm still processing this, but I was, I was lucky enough to receive the Explorer's Club Medal in, in 2019, and which, like, many of my heroes had received that in the past, including the Apollo astronauts. And it happened to be the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, so I got to go to a lunch with basically all of the living Apollo astronauts. And we were sitting at a table with Michael Collins and, and Buzz Aldrin. My son, who was like 10 at the time, nine or 10, was sitting next to Fred Haise from Apollo 13, and I kept leaning over to him saying like, "Burn this moment into your memory so you remember it when you're 90 years old-"

Joe Rogan 1:58:10 Mm

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:10 ... 'cause these are the first people to leave the planet, first people to walk on the moon. It was incredible.

Joe Rogan 1:58:14 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:58:15 Um, so when you're at this explorer's club, how come they can't just give you wings? How come they have to feed you bugs? Is it just a novelty?

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:22 Eh, it's kind of a tradition. Yeah, it's a tradition.

Joe Rogan 1:58:24 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:24 Like you go to the explorer's club, uh, bar, and there's always a, like a martini glass filled with crickets-

Joe Rogan 1:58:30 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:30 ... for bar snacks.

Joe Rogan 1:58:30 Just to be silly.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:58:32 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:58:32 And so who's funding all this? How does this place stay open? It sounds like a pretty extravagant organization.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:37 Um, well, it, you know, there are dues, and, um, I, a, a big portion of their yearly budget is made from the Explorer's Club dinner, which has become-

Joe Rogan 1:58:46 Oh, okay

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:46 ... you know, a very-

Joe Rogan 1:58:46 So it's a big celebration.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:47 It's a big celebration.

Joe Rogan 1:58:49 Yeah.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:49 You know, celebrities go and-

Joe Rogan 1:58:50 Well, I mean, it is so important that people are willing to take these crazy trips.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:58:55 Like Gregory Forth going to Flores and all, all these different-

Kenneth Lacovara 1:58:59 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:58:59 ... places where people go. Like without that, our un- limited, currently limited understanding would be so much smaller.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:59:05 Yeah. And you know, a lot of what the Explorer's Club does now is, um, to, to fund young explorers, to fund conservation projects. We have a, we have a program called the EC50, which every year is about, you know, 50 like up and coming explorers, and um, it plugs them into the kind of networks they need to get their expeditions funded and to get, you know, all the logistics done.

Joe Rogan 1:59:28 Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:59:29 Um, it's also a place where like if you're stuck somewhere in the world and you contact the club, then there's a good chance that, you know, there's somebody that can help you or even like put a rescue mission together.

Joe Rogan 1:59:38 Oh, wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:59:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:59:40 Well, that's probably very important.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:59:41 Yeah. When the, uh, when the, the submersible, the Titan, uh, imploded, um, the club was in the process of putting a, a, a search mission together when it was found out that it was destroyed.

Joe Rogan 1:59:54 Mm.

Kenneth Lacovara 1:59:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:59:56 Uh, I wanted to bring us back to, um, dinosaurs and the original hoaxes 'cause it seems like this is part of the problem with the, the conspiracy narrative that's online, is that there were quite a few people that were profiting off of dinosaur bones hoaxes in the early days of dinosaur discovery.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:00:16 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:00:17 So how did that all start, and what was the, w- what was the, was there a financial motivation to do this? Like-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:00:24 Yeah, I think so. Um, you know, there, there have been cases where, uh, fossils were fabricated. Uh, more recently in like the last 20 years, some really good, um, fossil hoaxes have been made in, in China, but they've been discovered by paleontologists. Like it, you know, sometimes it might take a little bit of time, but paleontologists uncover that these things have been fabricated or patched together-

Joe Rogan 2:00:51 But what were the original-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:00:52 ... or, or something

Joe Rogan 2:00:52 ... hoaxes, though?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:00:54 Um, I'm not really sure. Uh, uh-

Joe Rogan 2:00:56 'Cause I know there was a controversy. There was like several people that kept discovering dinosaur bones, and then it turns out there was like a r- sort of a, like a competition amongst these guys to uncover-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:01:07 Oh, are you maybe talking about the, the famous Bone Wars, um-

Joe Rogan 2:01:11 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 2:01:11 ... between Cope-

Joe Rogan 2:01:11 I think I am

Kenneth Lacovara 2:01:11 ... and Marsh? The, so those are-

Joe Rogan 2:01:13 That's it

Kenneth Lacovara 2:01:13 ... real fossils, but they had this horrendous competition with each other. It was a, uh, a Yale professor, Othniel Marsh, and somebody from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, uh, Edward Drinker Cope, and this is in, um, the, the latter part, uh, latter portion of the 19th century.

Joe Rogan 2:01:31 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:01:32 And so they're... Like paleontology is, is new to the world. It's new to North America, and every time they go out and find something, it's a new species, right? 'Cause nobody has ever done this. So they're building these tremendous lists of species. Um, they end up out west in Wyoming, like sabotaging each other's quarries. I think there's gunplay at one point. It ends up with congressional hearings in Washington. It becomes, you know, scandalous and, and very widespread. But they were dealing with real fossils. They just hated each other, and they were in this incredible competition. Cope challenged Marsh that, what he said, you know, "When we die, let's donate our brains to science and see who has the bigger brain."

Joe Rogan 2:02:08 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 2:02:08 Like, that's the kind of A-holes these dudes were, you know? Like it's insane. They're nasty people.

Joe Rogan 2:02:14 Oh.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:02:15 And all of this starts right where the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, where I work, is. Like right there, a- about a mile away, there's a marl pit where that first ever discovered Tyrannosaur is discovered. And so, um, uh, Cope is notified by the miners that there's something there, and he goes and he sees this Tyrannosaur and he excavates it, and he describes it, and at this point he, he wants the approval of this great Yale Professor Marsh, right? So he invites him down. When Marsh is in that quarry in Mantua Township, New Jersey, he takes the quarry owner to the side and cuts a secret deal with him so that all the fossils they found henceforth would be shipped up to the Yale Peabody Museum and not go to Cope at the Academy of Natural Sciences. And that starts this, this, you know, battle between them. And then there's a famous story that, uh, Cope had this Elasmosaur, uh, skeleton, which is like a big Plesiosaur, and Marsh like ostentatiously corrected him, taking the head of it and putting it on the other side 'cause he got the animal backwards, you know? So just trying to embarrass each other and sabotaging each other, and they were, they were not nice guys.

Joe Rogan 2:03:26 It's just weird when that kind of behavior happens amongst the people that are supposed to be the intellectuals.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:03:34 Yeah. Yeah. There's clearly like huge egos on, on both sides. But they have, they found so many fossils that like I have to refer back to them constantly, and when you look at, at a species name, um, you know, in public it'll just have one name like Dreadnoughtus, but it'll usually have, in science it'll have the- The genus, the species, and then in parentheses, like the discoverer and the year. And like I'm always having to write down Cope and Marsh because they just found so many North American species.

Joe Rogan 2:04:03 Wow. So-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:04:04 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:04:04 ... they, so they weren't involved in any hoaxing?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:04:07 No. No hoaxing. It was, uh, you know, they got some stuff wrong, and they were very, very driven to name new species, so some of the species that they published have since been knocked back, uh, and, you know, or other paleontologists will, will say, "That's not really a different species. That's already this, that's the species that was already known."

Joe Rogan 2:04:26 Okay, so-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:04:27 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:04:27 ... I'm confusing this with something else then. Like w- wasn't there a bunch of cases, once they started finding dinosaurs, of people hoaxing dinosaur bones?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:04:36 Um, I'm sure there have been. I'm not really, uh, aware of the history of that.

Joe Rogan 2:04:40 Find out what's the-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:04:42 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:04:42 ... put in what is the most, uh, famous or notable hoax of dinosaur bones.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:04:49 Already on that.

Joe Rogan 2:04:50 Thank you, sir.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:04:50 Uh, don't really get a good answer though.

Joe Rogan 2:04:54 Hmm.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:04:54 There's the- when I asked it the first time, most successful hoax, it w- brought up something about the China thing, so I re-asked-

Joe Rogan 2:05:00 Hmm, yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 2:05:00 ... and said, "What are the original hoaxes?" First thing it brings up is something about fossils, which isn't hoax, dinosaur bones. Um, and then 1845, there's some sea monster bones.

Joe Rogan 2:05:11 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 2:05:12 Then the Cardiff Giant. Uh, but that's a man, that's not a dinosaur.

Joe Rogan 2:05:17 Right. Mm, okay. So just, so o- one of the issues is that a lot of the bones that you see, like if you go to the Museum of Natural History-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:05:26 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 2:05:26 ... those are not real bones.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:05:28 Well, it depends. Um, so sometimes the actual bones are mounted. Um, for small fossils, you might have the whole thing. For big ones, y- you almost never find a big animal that's complete.

Joe Rogan 2:05:39 So when you see a T-rex at the museum-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:05:41 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 2:05:41 ... and it's a full T-rex-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:05:43 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:05:43 ... with the claws out, how much of that is an actual T-rex? Sometimes zero, right? Sometimes the entire thing is a recreation.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:05:50 Well, sometimes, yeah, because they have the original one in collections.

Joe Rogan 2:05:53 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:05:54 And so that's more common now because it's, it's not great to mount the bones of a big creature 'cause two things. One is that you have to do things to the bone. You have to put like metal clamps on them, and back in the old days, they would drill holes in them-

Joe Rogan 2:06:05 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 2:06:05 ... which is terrible. But also, it inhibits study, right? And so if a paleontologist wants to study like the, the fourth cervical vertebra, now it's up 40 feet and you need a, a scissor lift or, you know, or you can't look at the ends of it because they're covered up by the other bones. So best practice now, you know, really is to keep the stuff in the collections and to mount the recreations. Like at, at our museum, at the Edelman Fossil Park, we have, uh, like a Dryptosaurus that's a 3D print. Um, we do put smaller skeletons on display because if we wanted to study them, we can easily take them out of the cases and-

Joe Rogan 2:06:42 Hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 2:06:42 ... and study them. But it's not, um... You know, you should, and we do, we list if something is a replica or if it's the original material, and-

Joe Rogan 2:06:51 Was that always the case?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:06:53 It's not always the case in museums even today, um-

Joe Rogan 2:06:55 Right, but that's where the conspiracy weirdos, where they get-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:06:59 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:06:59 ... fixated. Like, "That's not even real bones," because it's not. It's actually a recreation of the real bones.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:07:05 Yeah, and then-

Joe Rogan 2:07:05 But the real bones allegedly do exist somewhere, but oftentimes not all of them, so some of it is speculation in terms of like what they've added to it, correct?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:07:16 Depending on the creature, some of it can be. So the best practice if you're going to mount the real bones is to make the, the, the replicated pieces a different color, right? And you see that done-

Joe Rogan 2:07:27 Yes

Kenneth Lacovara 2:07:27 ... in a lot of museums.

Joe Rogan 2:07:27 Yes.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:07:27 So it's easy to tell, like, those are the original bones-

Joe Rogan 2:07:30 Right

Kenneth Lacovara 2:07:30 ... and those are the ones that they've added for the sake of completeness.

Joe Rogan 2:07:33 Right.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:07:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:07:33 And how do they make the distinction? Like how do they estimate what the other bones were if we don't have a complete fossil?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:07:41 Um, we use what we call phylogenetic bracketing, which simply means you, you look at the creature that you have, you find relatives on this side, relatives on this side. Anything they hold in common is probably something that was held by the group in the middle, right? Like in the case of Dreadnoughtus, we didn't have the skull, right? We had just a little bit of premaxilla and a single tooth. So we looked to a close relative that was found in central Patagonia that was really known only from the skull called Sarmientosaurus, and so we used that in our reconstruction as the skull of Dreadnoughtus, like as a stand-in because-

Joe Rogan 2:08:15 Hmm

Kenneth Lacovara 2:08:15 ... we didn't recover the skull. Um, as far as the neck, the neck was like 40 feet long, but we only have two vertebra from the neck. There's a dinosaur from northern Patagonia called Futalognkosaurus that is known mostly from its neck, so we used those other vertebra as a stand-in for the ones that we were missing. But from the rest of the skeleton, we had almost all of that, right, and almost all of the tail, so, you know, we know that part really well, whereas there is, you know, some uncertainty with the neck and the skull of Dreadnoughtus.

Joe Rogan 2:08:47 Hmm. That's cool. So where, if you were gonna look for a new, undiscovered dinosaur species today, let's imagine that, you know, you talk to the king of the world and he gives you an unlimited budget and says-

Kenneth Lacovara 2:09:00 Mm-hmm

Joe Rogan 2:09:00 ... "I think, Kenneth, that there's more out there, and I think you can find it." Where would you go?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:09:06 Yeah. Well, there's way more out there, for sure.

Joe Rogan 2:09:08 For sure.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:09:09 Um, so, you know, we all kind of use the same formula. You have to find rocks of the right age, depending on what you're interested in, right? Um, those rocks have to be sedimentary rocks. And then today you need exposure. And so that's why you see us paleontologists mostly working in badlands and deserts. It's not that dinosaurs particularly lived in those environments. It's that that's where we have access to the rocks today. And then the fourth thing, which I like to have, is to get as far away from other paleontologists as possible, right? Because you have a better chance then at what you're discovering being something new to science. And so I've kind of made my career by going to the places where people weren't willing to go to before, like the southernmost Patagonia is a super harsh environment. Even in their summer, it's cold, and it's terribly windy. My, my first year down there, I provisioned cereal for the crew to eat for breakfast. Can't eat cereal for breakfast in Patagonia 'cause it blows off your spoon before you can eat it. [laughs]

Joe Rogan 2:10:05 Oh, wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:10:05 Um, so it's like that. And, um, so you get those- Three things, the first three things, and you will find fossils. You get the fourth thing, and there's a good chance that what you find is new to science. So the places where I would go and, and largely have been are, uh, Patagonia is just an incredibly rich treasure trove for dinosaurs. Um, several different areas in China are incredible. The American West is still terrific. You know, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Utah, um, still fantastic. Um, I would love, like, if, if I had, uh, not only that funding, but, like, you know, if you could wave the political magic wand, I'd love to do more prospecting in North Africa. You know, I'd love to go to Libya and, um, you know, uh, Algeria. And because in the Cretaceous Period, it's this coastal environment. Sea level's very high in the Cretaceous, and there's a mangrove ecosystem that cuts through basically what the middle of what North Africa is now. That's where we found Paralititan, which at the time was the, the second most massive known dinosaur. That's where famous Spinosaurus is from, and, uh, you know, I'm sure there's lots of other dinosaurs there in this, like, equatorial Tethys Seaway. Before the Mediterranean, it was open on both ends. It's called the Tethys Seaway. Um, so that's an area that I would really like to prospect.

Joe Rogan 2:11:30 That sounds amazing.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:11:31 Now the-

Joe Rogan 2:11:31 It'd be a shame if you didn't

Kenneth Lacovara 2:11:33 ... the ultimate thing, like, if you wanna talk about, like, your super-duper magic wand, would be Antarctica.

Joe Rogan 2:11:39 Really?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:11:39 Right. Yeah, because Antarctica is already at the South Pole during the time of the dinosaurs, but it's not glaciated, and it's this boreal forest, but it still gets half a year of darkness, and we don't have an environment on the planet today like that, right? There's no modern analog to a forest that gets half a year of darkness like that.

Joe Rogan 2:12:00 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:12:00 And we know there were dinosaurs there, and we don't know really hardly anything about them. There's a little bit of outcrop on the Antarctic Peninsula and on Vega Island off of that, and, and paleontologists have found some dinosaurs there, but it's a whole continent, and there's gotta be thousands and thousands of dinosaurs and new species under that ice cap, and we have no idea what's down there.

Joe Rogan 2:12:22 When you've been on these expeditions, you must have had a few sketchy experiences.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:12:27 Oh, yeah, for sure.

Joe Rogan 2:12:29 What's the sketchiest?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:12:30 Um, well, it depends. I mean, um, falling is a big, uh, health hazard to us. The-

Joe Rogan 2:12:36 Yeah

Kenneth Lacovara 2:12:36 ... probably the, the time that I thought I was about to die was, um, I was in, I was on the Montana-Wyoming border. I'm not actually sure which state I was in at the moment. Uh, but I had a, a slab of rock tied on my back that had pterosaur tracks on it, you know, the flying reptiles, and it was probably, I don't know, 75 pounds. And, um, I'm, I'm climbing up this rock face, and I should've had ropes, but I thought, like, "Ah, it's not that big. I could, I could do it." You know, it was, like, 20 or 30 feet. I get about halfway up, and the rock starts breaking off in my hands.

Joe Rogan 2:13:07 Uh-oh.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:13:07 And I'm like, "Oh, shit." And so I, I look down, and I can't see where to put my feet to go back down.

Joe Rogan 2:13:14 Oh, God.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:13:14 So now I'm hanging on the side of this outcrop, and I'm thinking, like-

Joe Rogan 2:13:18 Oh

Kenneth Lacovara 2:13:18 ... "This is how it's gonna be," you know?

Joe Rogan 2:13:20 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:13:21 And so I hung there for I don't know how long. It seemed like a long time for me, and I just said, "Well, I, I'm just gonna have to try." And so I start going up, and the rock is breaking off in my hand. I'm going up, and it's breaking off in my hand. I finally, you know, roll over the, the lip of this cliff, and I was sh- I was shaking when I got to the top of that. I thought, I thought that was gonna be the end of me.

Joe Rogan 2:13:39 Yeah, with a 75-pound rock on your back, that's crazy.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:13:42 Yeah. Uh, there have been times in Patagonia where, um, you know, to my first field season at the Dreadnoughtus site, we had to get there by rafting down this roaring glacial stream, and we had to take all of our supplies across the river by stream, and then we would jacket these dinosaur bones in burlap and plaster. I had no way to get a vehicle there, so I hired a couple of gauchos and their horses, and we would, we would take these plaster-jacketed bones, put them on a sled, pad it out with prairie grass, and tow them out of the desert with horses. And I knew I wasn't going to have, like, a real project unless I could get a vehicle there, and all the locals were saying, "You, there's no way to drive there." But on the last day of that field season, I, I went off by myself, which I would kill my grad students if they did. But went off by myself in the pickup, went way up north, found this old rickety bridge across the river, and spent the whole day picking my way through the badlands and, and showed up that night in camp with, with the pickup truck. Um, but there were a couple of places where I would put the wheels of the pickup over the hill, and I'm just seeing sky.

Joe Rogan 2:14:41 Ooh.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:14:42 Right? And I would, I would get out and, like, look, and then I'd get back in, and I'm seeing sky, and I drive over the edge and lock the brakes and bounce down the hill. And then you-

Joe Rogan 2:14:51 Oh, boy

Kenneth Lacovara 2:14:52 ... you have to keep it straight, or you're gonna roll, right? And that's how we got there. And then when I came back-

Joe Rogan 2:14:56 Did you even have a spare tire?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:14:58 We, I had a spare tire.

Joe Rogan 2:14:59 [laughs]

Kenneth Lacovara 2:14:59 Yeah, and sand tracks. Um-

Joe Rogan 2:15:01 This is what it looks like?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:15:02 Yeah. So this is the Dreadnoughtus site here, and, uh, you can see it's a really rugged-

Joe Rogan 2:15:06 You got a truck there

Kenneth Lacovara 2:15:07 ... terrain.

Joe Rogan 2:15:07 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:15:07 I got a truck. Yeah, imagine driving through what you see behind me there.

Joe Rogan 2:15:11 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:15:12 And so it was hairy. And then when we came back the next year, I had a little bit of money, and I hired a guy with, uh, one of those, like, road scrapers.

Joe Rogan 2:15:20 Oh, okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:15:20 And we scraped, like, a 15-kilometer-long road in the ground. It wasn't a good road, but it was a road, and that's when I knew we were gonna have a, a project. But, you know, that, there were moments then. And then one time in, um, in Egypt, um, there was a, a Bedouin who thought I was a grave robber. And, um, so he's on the, one of these little, like, Bethlehem donkeys. They're almost comical because their feet are almost touching the ground. But he's coming at me, and he's got, like, a scimitar, and he's... You can see a long way in the desert. It was, like, a mile away, and I'm kind of like, "Okay, can we get this over with?" Because it's taking a long time for him to get there. And so he hops off the donkey, and he's yelling at me, and I have an entrenching tool. You know what that is? It's like a little army shovel, but it, you can fold the handle-

Joe Rogan 2:16:02 Okay

Kenneth Lacovara 2:16:03 ... at a right angle, and I always have one of those with me, 'cause it's great climbing tool, and a digging tool, and you use it for camp things, but also it's a weapon. And so I'm looking at this guy, and if he moves with that scimitar, then I'm, I'm coming across with my entrenching tool. But, um, I very slowly, I showed him my other hand. I went down very carefully and got my walkie-talkie, and I lifted it up, and I got my Egyptian colleague on the walkie, who's, like, five miles away.

Joe Rogan 2:16:27 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:16:28 And he explained who I was and what I was doing. He, he thought I was a grave robber. And then he said, "Ah, and I'm a doctor?" And I said, "I..." And then, you know, then he knew what I was doing, and then he was, like, my buddy after that, you know?

Joe Rogan 2:16:40 Oh.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:16:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:16:40 Well, that's lucky.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:16:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:16:42 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:16:42 So, so there are moments, um, everybody has them in the field. Uh, but there are so many more great moments. Like, everywhere I've gone in the world, the world is just full of nice people, you know? And I've just met so many great people and made so many great friends. In that same oasis that I was working at in Egypt, I, i- in the, in the little village, like, there's no supermarket, right? So there's, like, the orange stand, and the bread stand, and the cucumber stand. And so I had left my expensive camera at one of these little stands. I think it was the orange stand. And I was out in the desert for, like, three days, and I wasn't even sure I'd left it there. And this camera is definitely worth more than these people make in a year, right? And I come back, and, and this guy sees my, my Jeep coming down the little dirt road, and he runs out in the middle of the street, and he's got my camera, and he's jumping up and down and very happy that I'm coming back so he can give it to me, you know? And, like, just so nice. And i- in, in Egypt, like, if you, you have to be careful about complimenting people, 'cause if you say, like, "Oh, that's a nice sweater you're wearing," like, boom, off, off comes the sweater. "Here, take my sweater," you know? And then you have to explain that, you know, "Well, it's not my size," or whatever. These kids in this, uh, mud brick lodge where we stayed for a couple of months, they, uh, they always have, like, a surplus of teenage boys to do every little job, right? And I taught them how to play American football, and, and, you know, and, and, uh, and so they liked me. And on my birthday, they gave me a water buffalo, right? Which is worth a fortune to them. They gave me a gamusa, a water buffalo, and I had to explain to them, and we named it Daisy. Um, I had to explain to them, you know, "I can't take Daisy on the plane, so could you take care of this for me when I go back to America?" You know? [laughs] And, like, everywhere I've gone, there's just been such nice, generous people.

Joe Rogan 2:18:24 That's awesome, man.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:18:25 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:18:26 Well, listen, thank you very much for coming here. Thanks for all your work. Thanks for all your courage to make these excursions and expeditions and bring back all that information.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:18:36 Yeah, I forgot, I got something for you.

Joe Rogan 2:18:37 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:18:38 Can I give it to you?

Joe Rogan 2:18:38 Sure.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:18:39 Yeah, so this, um, so at, at the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, where, where I am in New Jersey, we have an extinction layer there, right? And we have collected over 100,000 fossils, representing over 100 extinct species right in that layer, the last moments of the Cretaceous Period. So this is a tooth from an extinct crocodile called Thoracosaurus. And this individual is from the extinction layer, meaning this very individual died in the world's fifth mass extinction.

Joe Rogan 2:19:11 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:19:11 The asteroid murdered that actual crocodile.

Joe Rogan 2:19:14 Wow. That's cool. That will stay right here safely.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:19:19 Yeah, so I want you to have that. And I also brought this, um, uh, this is from our, our research collection, um, but this is a tibia of a species of crocodile. Do you know what gavial crocodiles are today? Or gharials are also called, those narrow-snouted ones in India.

Joe Rogan 2:19:37 Okay.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:19:38 Um, so this is a Cretaceous, uh, gharial crocodile, but that dude is another victim-

Joe Rogan 2:19:45 Wow

Kenneth Lacovara 2:19:45 ... of the asteroid strike. And so that's, like, the wonder of this place. And so you can go there, and, like, it's the best window we have in the planet in that pivotal, calamitous moment that wipes out the dinosaurs and really makes the modern world as we know it.

Joe Rogan 2:19:58 So how old is this?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:19:59 That's 66 million years old.

Joe Rogan 2:20:01 Holy shit.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:02 Yeah. And we find that with the fallout from the material that got blasted out of the crater. And the best thing about this place is that, you know, obviously we manage and curate that research layer very carefully. But, but above that, we have a layer that's still full of fossils, and we invite the public to come and, and dig from those layers. And every kid, every grown-up that goes in there who tries a little bit and who's not afraid to get their hands dirty, and I hope you do it with us someday, finds a 66 million year old fossil with their own hands that they get to take home.

Joe Rogan 2:20:29 How many fossils are there?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:30 [laughs] Millions, probably. Millions.

Joe Rogan 2:20:34 Wow.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:20:36 This is awesome.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:37 Yeah, isn't that something?

Joe Rogan 2:20:38 Very.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:20:39 Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for being here, man. I really appreciate it.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:42 It's a pleasure.

Joe Rogan 2:20:43 And your book, Why Dinosaurs Matter, go get it, folks. Is there an audiobook?

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:48 There is, and I read it.

Joe Rogan 2:20:49 Yes.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:20:50 That's what I want to hear.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:20:51 Beautiful. Thank you.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:52 Thank you.

Joe Rogan 2:20:53 Appreciate you.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:53 It's been fun.

Joe Rogan 2:20:54 Thanks for having me.

Kenneth Lacovara 2:20:55 Thank you.

Joe Rogan 2:20:55 Bye, everybody. [outro music]