Victoria:
This week, we have some very special guests. They’re the hosts of the Common Descent Podcast, David and Will. David and Will are paleontologists and science educators.
They both got their master’s degrees in paleontology at East Tennessee State University. David’s research identifies fossil remains of snakes, lizards, and other small reptiles from fossil sites around the world. The goal is to help us understand how these animals have changed over time. Will’s research examines how modern-day alligators’ bones change as they grow from young to adult. The goal is to help us better identify alligator bones in the fossil record.
These days they’ve changed their focus from science research to science education. They both work as science educators at the Gray Fossil Site and Museum in East Tennessee. And they host the Common Descent Podcast, a podcast all about fossils evolution and the history of life.
This week’s questions were submitted by students at Bromwell Elementary in Denver, Colorado, and West End Kindergarten in Knoxville, Tennessee.
The Common Descent Podcast is one of my favorite podcasts. So I’m so excited to be talking to David and will today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Will:
No, that’s a pleasure.
David:
Thanks for having us.
Victoria:
All right. So we’ve got a bunch of questions that were submitted. We’ve got some questions for both of you to answer, and then we’ve got some questions that are specifically for each one of you about your specific research.
Will:
I’m ready.
Victoria:
(Gabi – What and how many fossils and other stuff have you found and dug up in your whole scientist job?)
All right. We’ll start off with the questions for both of you. This first question is from Gabi. What and how many fossils and other stuff have you found and dug up in your whole scientist job?
Will:
Let you take that one because you got more than me.
David:
I have dug up fossils in a few different places, but the two main places that I’ve done excavation.
The first was in South Dakota. So the first time I ever went out on a fossil dig was when I was an undergraduate college student. In the Black Hills of South Dakota, we went and we were digging up fossils of animals that lived right around the end of the ice age. So we were finding mostly little things coming out of a cave site. So remains of rodents and rabbits and snakes and salamanders and tiny things like that.
And then more recently I’ve done work at the Gray Fossil Site, which is here in East Tennessee, which is a site that was home to a whole bunch of different things, tapirs, and rhinos, and lizards, snakes, birds, bats, rodents, and things in the forest and around the pond.
Victoria:
(Charlotte – What project of the projects you are working on is the hardest to find stuff out?)
Awesome. All right. This next question is from Charlotte. What project of the projects that you were working on is the hardest to find stuff out?
Will:
That’s a good question. For me personally when I was doing my research on the alligators, the trouble I ran into is I was studying their skulls, and I had to take the skulls apart. So I needed to get alligator skulls that I could have permission to take apart and I needed them from all different ages. And so what that meant is certain groups were easy like that middle sizes, you know, so still kind of big, you know, four feet to like seven or eight-ish feet. I had lots of skulls, but then itty-bitty baby gators that are like less than a couple of feet and the big gators that are more than 10 feet, I didn’t have much of, or I wouldn’t have been allowed to take apart the skulls. So finding the right specimens, is what we would call those, finding the right specimens to research is sometimes really tricky. And that was a big part of my struggle.
Victoria:
(Shanaya – what kind of ecosystems do you study?)
Yeah, that makes sense.
Okay. This next question is from Shanaya. What kind of ecosystems do you study?
David:
Ooh, well, I’ve studied. So I mentioned the fossil sites that I’ve excavated from, and I’ve done research on those and I’ve done research on a couple of other sites, mostly in North America, mostly dating within the last 5 million years or so. So these would have been pretty familiar ecosystems, slightly different species. You know, some of these are in the ice age, so there were mammoths and things, and some of them were earlier than that. So you have mastodons and rhinos in North America. But for the most part, when I’m studying ancient ecosystems, I’m looking at the tiny components of those ecosystems.
So some paleontologists are all about the elephants and rhinos and horses and alligators and stuff. But I’m typically looking at snakes, lizards, salamanders, turtles, that smaller animals that are a little harder to find in some fossil sites, but that are often times very informative about the ancient ecosystem because you are small animals are usually going to be more specific in their needs. So a big species like elephants can be over miles and miles and miles of their continent that they live on.
Will:
They can move between ecosystems.
David:
Yep. But most small species, and this goes for mice and shrews and lizards and snakes, tend to be more restricted. They live in more specific spots. So small animals can tell you a lot about your sort of micro ecosystems of the past.
Victoria:
(Rebecca – have you ever found a dinosaur?)
Cute, cute little guys.
Okay, this is the next one. Rebecca wants to know, have you ever found a dinosaur?
Will:
I have not, even while digging at the Gray Fossil Site, I never found bird. So technically, no, I’ve never found a dinosaur. The closest I’ve come to finding a dinosaur, I’m trying to think, technically I think the only reptile I’ve ever found was the snake.
David:
While excavating.
Will:
Yeah.
David:
At Gray here in Tennessee?
Will:
Yeah. So that’s, I think that’s the only reptile I’ve ever found. I never found any of the alligators I studied.
David:
I actually did get to dig on a dinosaur site.
Will:
Yes, you did.
David:
Many years ago, out in Colorado, which is over near where Victoria is. I worked out in a place called Garden Park and it was me and a whole bunch of other volunteers and workers from the museum, the Denver Museum. And we were digging a late Jurassic sediment. So this is the Morrison Formation. So this, you get all sorts of dinosaurs in those rocks. And I personally dug up a tiny, almost unidentifiable piece of a long neck dinosaur leg. I don’t know what kind of long neck dinosaur it was. It didn’t even look like a leg. It was like a piece of a leg.
Will:
A chunk.
David:
It was a chunk of a leg, but the paleontologist there who knew dinosaur bones said that looks like a piece of a sauropod long neck dinosaur leg. And so, I don’t know what it is, I don’t know where it went, but that’s the dinosaur bone that I dug up.
Victoria:
Awesome. I bet it’s somewhere down in the subbasement collection storage at the Denver Museum.
David:
That’s right. And it’s all and it’s mine. I dug it up.
Victoria:
Yeah. Somewhere your name is in the DMNS database.
David:
Yeah, that would be super cool.
Victoria:
I interned there when I was in college and I would catalog everything. And so I’d write everyone’s names and you like, got to know who would frequently find things and who was, you know, just like a one or two day visitor at a dig. So it was kind of fun.
Will:
Oh, that’s cool. It’s like a little bit of detective work on the history. I like that. Very cool.
Victoria:
(Zeger – how do you know which fossil belongs to an animal when you see it?)
Zeger wants to know how do you know which fossil belongs to an animal when you see it?
Will:
It’s a good important question.
David:
Yes, it is.
Will:
That is one of the first things you have to learn when you are excavating for fossils, is how to tell a fossil from a rock. And it’s not always easy, depending on where you are, those two things can be very easily confused. The fossil site here in Gray that I dug at, it was a bit easier because the bones are still bone. They haven’t been mineralized to where they’re effectively rocks and the stuff we’re digging in is not rock. I’m not having to chisel stuff. I’m digging in clay. So if you find a hard thing and it’s smoother than it is rougher. You’ve usually got a bone and then eventually you get to where you can recognize the shape, just by practicing, you know. So if you started digging the way you would tell is you would raise a hand and go, excuse me, is this a bone? And someone who worked there and knew what they were doing would come over and identify it for you. And eventually you would see enough and you would get enough practice that you too could go: “That looks like a bone, not a rock”. So a lot of it is just practicing your eye.
David:
And when you are a student of paleontology, or if you work in a museum and you get trained, one of the biggest things you get trained on is how to tell what type of bones look like, what bones from different types of animals look like. So that hopefully eventually you can pick up a bone and go, ah, a leg bone of a man of a reptile and get yourself closer and closer to knowing what it is.
Victoria:
Yeah. The worst feeling is when you think you find something really cool and you’re like, Oh, come look, come look what I found. And then they’re like, no, this is yucky, and they just throw it over their shoulder. Yup.
Will:
Lots of lots of those moments at fossil ID nights for something. Oh, I’ve had this for years and years. It’s a cool rock.
David:
Very cool.
Will:
Very cool rock.
Victoria:
(Brady – what made you want to be a scientist and why?)
Yep. Alright, Brady wants to know what made you want to be a scientist and why?
Will:
Oh, very good question.
David:
I think for me when I was a kid, science was always my favorite subject because I liked learning about the world and I liked learning about how things worked. I especially liked animals and I especially liked fossils. And I think as I grew up, what happened is I just I discovered that I liked learning so much. And then I liked sharing what I learned. That’s science seemed like a pretty good place to go, because then your job is research, is observing things in the world, coming to conclusions about them, figuring out why they’re like that, how they got like that. And then part of being a scientist is then writing it down and sharing it, which I also like to do. It’s what I like so much about education, is you get to share the cool stuff you learned. So I think my becoming a scientist was cause I like learning cool stuff and telling other people about it.
Will:
Mine was definitely dinosaurs. I was a dinosaur kid through and through and through all the things you think about a dinosaur kid. That was me. And so I was about five. When I said I’m going to be a paleontologist, and had to explain it to all the adults when they’d ask what are you going to be when you grow up. And then, I did it.
David:
Sure did.
Will:
So yeah, it was pretty straightforward.
Victoria:
(Gavin – what is it like being a scientist?)
This is a good follow-up question to that. Gavin wants to know what is it like being a scientist?
Will:
That’s a good question. It’s different depending on who you ask. Scientists cover all sorts of stuff, you know, paleontologist, biologists, physicists, chemists, you know, medical scientists, all sorts of stuff like that, research engineers. So it depends.
For me specifically, personally, it was very interesting cause I grew up wanting to be a scientist and then went and did my research and was very proud when I finished it, but realized I didn’t like doing research as much as I did talking about and teaching about the research. I liked talking to people and answering questions and giving tours of the fossil site, way more than I enjoyed working in the lab. And so, I had to kind of shift what being part of science meant for me. But it’s different for everyone else, because then I know people who love doing the research and would happily pay you if they didn’t have to answer questions.
David:
And for paleontologists, even within just paleontology, some people spend lots of time in the lab. Some people are out in the field digging. Some people are on the computer all the time, doing statistical analyses. Some people do a little bit of all of that. We’ve basically the two of us have gotten to do a little bit of most of what goes into it and have both decided what we’ll is just explaining. Our favorite part is sharing the information and teaching staff.
Will:
And I think the common feature that you can say of what it’s like to be a scientist is you have to be willing, but also kind of excited to always be learning. Because science is always updating. That was actually one of the reasons we wanted to start making a podcast is because we both graduated. And then we both went into other jobs than being in the lab, and you know, a year or two went by and we started realizing, oh, I’m forgetting stuff. And I don’t know what the most recent information is on this animal or on this topic. And we wanted a way to keep us up to date because science doesn’t stop. So you, once you graduate from going to school to be a scientist, you have to keep teaching yourself the whole time.
Victoria:
(Maja – What is the rarest fossil you’ve found?)
Yeah. That’s one of the things I love about listening to your podcast because it’s stuff that I’ve either forgotten or stuff that’s new.
Okay. Another fossil question. Maja wants to know what is the rarest fossil you’ve found.
David:
Now I know. I have an answer to this. That isn’t I think quite what the question is going for, but I know we’ll have a great story about this. So you go first.
Will:
So once again, I’ve only dug here in Tennessee at the Gray Fossil Site, which is just about 5 million years old. So we have lots of cool mammals. And one of the mammals that we know is there is an ancient horse. A fossil horse that would have been very small. You know, it would have been shorter than probably most of the people who asked our questions. It was a very small forest horse, but the only reason they knew we had that horse is because they had a tooth and two toe bones, not much at all. They don’t know what kind of horse, what it looked like overall, but they have a little horse.
I was digging one day and I found what is now our other horse tooth. And I was like, Oh, Hey, I found a tooth. I didn’t know how to identify an ancient horse tooth yet. I was new to it. But I was like, I found a tooth. And people came over and then one of them looked at it and went, did you find this right here? I was like, yeah. And he’s like, did it, they didn’t move. Like you didn’t shift it or anything while you’re digging. I was like, no. And like, confused about all the questions. And then he called four more people over, and all of the people in charge of the dig site were surrounding me. And this was my first summer digging. And I had everyone who was in charge of me around me looking over my shoulder at this horse tooth I just found. And then they gave me a tool that was about the size of a toothbrush to start digging the rest of the day with, to see if I could find any more horse. And I didn’t, but I have found one quarter of our horse material.
David:
A very rare horse.
My story is actually not about finding a rare fossil while digging, but finding a rare fossil in the lab. So also with the Gray Fossil Site, all of our fossils go inside to the museum and then they eventually, once they’re cleaned and everything gets stored in our fossil collections room. And many years ago, my friend Steve and I were tasked way, we had a research assignment to start identifying snake fossils. And when you’re identifying snake fossils, you know, you’re looking for their bones and usually this means backbones. So your backbone is made of lots of vertebrae, which are the single pieces that go into your backbone, your spine. Snakes have lots of these, and they fossilize really well. And so Steve and I looked at, I think during that project, like three or 400 snake vertebrae from this fossil site, it was a lot of looking under the microscope and going, that looks like a water snake vertebra, that looks like a rat snake or something like a rat snake, that’s definitely a viper, like a rattlesnake or something. And then eventually we came across a vertebra that one of us went, Hmm, I don’t know what this is. And then showed it to the other one. And he said, I also don’t know what this is. And then we found seven of those. We found seven snake vertebrae, backbones, that didn’t fit any other snakes that we knew of. And we started comparing them to living snakes and to fossil snakes, we showed it to our professors and they said, wow, we don’t know what that is either.
And eventually we put together enough information to be able to say that what we had found was a new species of snake. In fact, in terms of scientific terminology, it ended up being a new genus and species. So a whole new type of fossil snake that we were able to identify because we discovered it in the collections of our fossil museum.
Victoria:
That’s awesome. What did you name it?
David:
We named it Zilantophis schuberti.
Victoria:
That’s a pretty popular question that students ask. If you could name a new species and what would you name it?
David:
Yeah, ours. So schuberti. It’s pretty common in science for when you name a new species to name it after a person. And Schubert Thai is named after Dr. Blaine Schubert, who is the director of the museum. And he was our professor, and he studies reptiles. So we knew he’d like having a snake named after him. And we thought this is a nice way to honor him.
And then the first part of the name Zilantophis. Ophis you see in a lot of snake names, it’s from the Greek first snake. And then Zilant, so this is where we got a little clever. So one of the reasons that we were able to identify it as a new snake, it has features on its bones that no other snakes have. And one of the big features was on the backbone, it had these little wide shelves on the left and right side, stuck out. They stuck out on the side, we looked at it and we were like, Oh, they look like it has tiny little wings on his vertebrae, which they weren’t, they’re just, you know, little, little flanges, little things sticking out on the side, just the shape of the vertebra. But we were hooked on, we should give it a name that has wings in it or something. And so Zilantophis is named after Zilant which is a mythical Eastern European flying snake from mythology and we named it Zilantophis because it starts with a Z and that’s a cool letter. It sounds cool. And it links back to it sort of being ancient and it has these little wing-like shapes and then that kind of backfired on it.
It is because when we published it, a bunch of news articles came out that said flying snake discovered in Tennessee. Oh no, that’s actually not what we meant. We did. It didn’t actually have wings. It was just the shape of the boat. Oops. At least it’s a cool name.
Victoria:
(Fayette – what is your favorite fossil?)
Oh man. That is a really cool name though. I like it.
Okay. Another fossil question here. This one’s from Fayette. What is your favorite fossil?
David:
I am very biased. My favorite fossil is seven vertebrae of Zilantophis schuberti.
Will:
That’s reasonable.
David:
Yeah. Cause that’s my snake.
Will:
If I had like a favorite, like fossil in history. Mine. Hm. Mine would probably be, there’s a few of these, but the fighting dinosaurs.
David:
Oh yeah. From Mongolia.
Will:
Yeah. Those kinds of fossils are always high on my list. It’s a fossil of a velociraptor and a Protoceratops. So a little claw dinosaur and the small, it looks like Triceratops without horns. And tiny. It seems made fight when they were buried most likely by like a sand slide or a sand storm and died grappling each other. That’s a generally very popular one, but fossils like that, that capture a moment of behavior, I’ve really liked.
David:
Yeah. There are some. There was a study that came out just a few years ago. That was a snake fossil from Germany, I think. That from, I want to say it was like 50 million years old. Don’t quote me on that. It was old. It was somewhere in there. And it was a snake fossil. And inside, within the bones of the snake fossil, where the bones of a lizard that looked like it was the snake’s last meal, and in amongst the lizard bones where the remains of a beetle that looked like they were probably the lizards last meal. We have this three in one sort of nesting doll fossil, which is some every now and then you get those, and it’s very, very cool.
Will:
It’s like a turducken boat. It’s all unappetizing.
David:
Yes.
Victoria:
(Sarah – Do you have any pets?)
Oh my goodness. That’s awesome. So cool.
Speaking of animals, Sarah wants to know, do you have any pets?
David:
Yes. Here, right with, with us right now, my two pets. I have a cat, who is the best cat. And I have a snake, a live snake, not a fossil snake, a living snake, which is a rat snake. And they’re both pretty cool pets.
Will:
They are pretty cool. All the pets I have are back home with my parents, with my mom. She has our dachshund and four cats, lots of cats.
Victoria:
My parents used to have four cats, too.
Will:
All of them have been rescued at one point or another. And two of them are the kittens of one of the ones we rescued and got out before we got her to the vet.
So my mom is done rescuing pets.
David:
One cat was always enough for me.
Victoria:
I have a couple of friends who, when COVID happened and the animal shelters were trying to get all their animals into foster homes. They took in a foster cat who then gave birth to three other kittens.
David:
Oh boys.
Will:
That happened to us with Guinea pigs one time. It was the school Guinea pigs needed a home, and we’re like, yeah, we can take them. And then we had three Guinea pigs instead of the one.
Victoria:
(Maya – Do animals like lizards, snakes, and alligators have diseases like COVID that affect them?)
Oh, man.
All right. Next question. Maya wants to know do animals like lizards, snakes, and alligators have diseases like COVID that affect them.
David:
That’s an excellent question.
Will:
Fanstic. Absolutely. Yes. Almost all animals have diseases that affect them. I’m sure there’s one out there that we have not identified something for. But yeah, all animals have their diseases and usually it’s their own diseases. Like lizards, snakes and alligators won’t get our version of the cold, but they might get another virus that’s similar, but it’s specific to them. And they absolutely can get plagues like that happens with lots of animals.
David:
Oh yeah. You get a, so COVID-19 the disease that’s affecting humans right now is a virus, it’s caused by a virus and yeah, there are viruses and lizards and snakes that cause respiratory issues, so breathing problems, there are viruses that cause neurological issues. So problems with the brain and with the nerves. All sorts of different viruses. I think there’s, I’ve read of something called a crocodile poxvirus.
Will:
Yeah.
David:
Which I think is a skin, it causes like lesions and stuff.
Will:
They do have some stuff like that. They also, I know stomach infections has happened where if a food item or something effectively goes bad in their stomach, if it’s too cold outside, it can cause the disease.
David:
And there is actually a bit of a plague going around in snakes these days here in North America. In 2006, researchers identified what is called Snake Fungal Disease, which is not a virus infection, but a fungus infection, a disease-causing fungus. And since then it has spread across many States in the U S and up into Canada. And it’s infecting lots of different species of snakes. It causes problems with the skin, mostly, like crusts up their skin and it can cause them to not shed properly. And it’s actually, it’s like the recently it has been a real concern for snakes in certain parts of the US. It’s their own sort of snake disease plague that’s going around that some scientists are very concerned about.
Victoria:
(Noah – Have you ever found remnants of humans while looking for fossils?)
Yikes. That’s scary.
Next question is from Noah, and Noah wants to know, have you ever found remnants of humans while looking for fossils?
David:
Good question. That is a very important concern when digging for fossils. In fact, the Gray Fossil Site here that we both work at, when it was first discovered, it was discovered by construction workers, not by paleontologists. They were doing work on the road. And when it was first found, they found bones. And one of the reasons that they had to stop and call somebody was to make sure they hadn’t found human remains.
Cause if you find human remains while you’re digging here in North America, especially if you have either found ancient humans, which means native Americans, and you have to contact native American representatives, or recent humans, and you have to call the police cause you found human bones. But I have never in the places that I’ve dug, I have never found a dug in a place with human remnants.
Will:
Yeah. The places we dig are too old to have human remains, and there’s never been a recent human buried at any of them.
David:
I’ve dug in places young enough to get humans. So in South Dakota, we could potentially have overlapped with early humans in North America, but we never found any up in that cave. So, so far, I have never found humans while digging.
Victoria:
(Calvin- During the Pliocene, was the mammoth the biggest animal on Earth?)
Okay. Let’s see. Calvin wants to know during the Pliocene was the mammoth the biggest animal on earth.
David:
Ooh, good question. So yeah, no, I like the use of Pliocene, the Pliocene epochs. So mammoths have been around in the Pliocene and Pliocene epochs, the last 5 million years or so.
And they have been among the biggest animals on land.
Will:
Yes.
David:
So some mammoths were among the biggest land animals of their time. There were other elephants, other mammoths mastodons, palaeoloxodon is famously very, very big, much, you know, significantly bigger than elephants today, but they were not the biggest animals of their time. Cause we had whales.
Will:
Yes.
David:
There were whales back then, and there were big sharks, and there were other sea creatures that get much bigger than land creatures.
Will:
And whales are our biggest animals ever, still today.
David:
Blue whale is the largest species of animal so far that we know of to ever have lived on the planet earth.
Victoria:
(Calvin- are there any dig sites in Tennessee where kids can help?)
All right. Another question from Calvin, are there any dig sites in Tennessee where kids can help?
Will:
Ooh. Yeah, so we do have kids come to our foster site cause we do a summer camp stuff. And we also do other programs. You worked on setting up the big dig program.
David:
Yeah. At the Gray Fossil Site every now and then we have programs where families and kids can come and participate in work on the site. We also take volunteers to help us dig in the fields and that’s for older like high school aged kids. And also our museum staff works at a site just north of Tennessee in Southern Virginia called Saltville, which is an ice age site. And they take volunteers there in the summers that we dig too. So at least here in East Tennessee, there are a couple of places where at the right time, and if you’re the right age and with the right program, people can come in and help dig.
Victoria:
I bet Calvin will be doing that after COVID yeah.
David:
Reach out to us. Calvin. We’ll find you a place to help us out.
Victoria:
(Christine – What do you do to prepare for your podcast?)
All right. This next question is from Christine. What do you do to prepare for your podcasts?
Will:
Ooh, cool question. Very good. We actually do quite a bit because a lot of the times, the topics that we do for our podcast are suggested by people listen to the podcast. So a lot of times something will be requested that we are not at all experts on. Usually we know enough to kind of know where to start, but sometimes we don’t even know that. And so we have to do a decent bit of research, and depending on the topic, depends on how much or how, you know, new that research is to us. But we have to take lots of notes to make sure that we have our information. Make sure that it’s correct. And it’s up to date. We have to learn a whole lot. And then we’ll look up the news and take notes on some of the most recent to news articles.
And then after we record our podcasts, we then edit it to make sure it sounds good because while we’re talking every now and then we do stuff like that, where we pause and we um, and we forget, or we come across a scientific name that we don’t know how to say, and we have to try two or three times.
David:
Or that cat I mentioned earlier, it’s bugging us and we have to pause.
Will:
So then we’ll edit it so that it, you don’t have to listen through all the ums and then weird noises.
David:
And the cat.
Will:
And the cat.
David:
Or the train. We have a train nearby at some time we have to pause for. There’s a lot to deal with.
Will:
And then once we get it put together, we put together our blog posts that are most of the notes, the links to the notes that we took, or we got our information from these, available to people, and then we put it up. So it’s the big goes into it. Yeah.
David:
And it’s all about, as we were saying before, the whole idea is we are learning stuff and then sharing the stuff we learned with people. And if we want, we have a specific way we want to do it. And so it takes some dedication.
Will:
I have definitely developed some new favorites because of episodes that were requested.
David:
Oh yeah. We’ve learned all sorts of cool stuff. It’s great.
Victoria:
(Anna – if you could be an animal, what animal would you be?)
Yeah. Some of the topics and your episodes are just fantastic.
All right. And this is the last question of the questions for both of you category. This question is from Anna. If you could be an animal, what animal would you be?
David:
Now I saw this question and I was thinking, cause I haven’t thought about this in a very long time, right? Since I was a kid, I haven’t thought, Oh, what animal would I be? And I was thinking back to remember the answer that I had as a kid.
Will:
You used to give.
David:
Now, Victoria will know why this is funny because one of the running shtick in our podcast is that my favorite animal is snakes. And Will’s favorite animal is Crocs and alligators. And we like to fight over which is the best. But I was thinking back to when I was a kid, and my answer to this question used to be crocodile. I used to say, if I was going to animal, I’d be a crocodile because you can do whatever you want and nothing messes with you. No one wants to fight a crocodile.
Will:
Well, I had a similar thought when I read that, cause I was like, well, there’s your canonically for the podcast. There’s a correct answer. But my favorite non croc animal is orangutan. And I’ve been watching tons of rescue videos recently, just binge watching on YouTube. And I relate to them being a long armed red-haired free primate. So yeah, if I could be orangutan and I could just hang out in the tree eating fruit with some hand feet, I’d be up for that.
David:
Yeah. I would not turn down the opportunity to be an orangutan. That’s a good choice. Also something that could fly.
Will:
Yes.
David:
Now I would also accept like a cool bird of prey. Like a hawk or an eagle. Yeah, that’d be really neat.
Victoria:
(Johann – I think lizards are harmless, but my mom is very scared of them. How many kinds of lizards are there? I know the ‘saurus’ part of dinosaurs means lizard.)
Good answers. All right. So now we’ll move into our questions for David segment.
This first question comes from Johann. And the question is, I think lizards are harmless, but my mom is very scared of them. How many kinds of lizards are there? I know the ‘saurus’ part of dinosaurs means lizard.
David:
That is an excellent series of questions.
So the first part about lizards being harmless. Yeah. Most lizards are totally harmless, especially here in North America. Most lizards are your skinks and your fence lizards and things like that. And the worst that could possibly happen with those lizards is if you bother them too much, they might bite you and give you a little nip on the fingers or something. But for the most part, lizards are not dangerous. There are some exceptions in the Southwest United States. There are two species called the beaded lizards. So these are the Gila monster and Mexican beaded lizard, which are venomous. If they bite you, you could get envenomated and that will make you very sick. And then there are some like Komodo dragons over in Indonesia who have, it seems a degree of venom to them, but even if they get into their huge could actually, they have the biggest lizards living in the world today. They’re like 10 feet long. So not all lizards are harmless, but for the most part. You’re cool, you know, lizards aren’t really going to hurt you. And even the ones that are dangerous are going to be, for people, it would be self-defense. Lizard’s not going to come after you and try to take you down.
To answer the other part, how many kinds of lizards are there? So lizards are specifically a group with animals, right. Crocodiles aren’t lizards, and turtles aren’t lizards, dinosaurs are in lizards, even though they are sores, which comes from the Greek that means lizard or reptile. A lot of scientific names we’ll use -saurus, which means lizard or reptile. A lot of dinosaurs are called -saurus, a lot of there are pterosaurs, the flying reptiles, that are called -saurus. But true proper lizards today in the world, there are about 7,000 living species of lizards.
Will:
So a lot of lizards
David:
A lot of lizards. Now, technically speaking, snakes are a kind of lizard. They are a branch off of lizards. So if the account snakes, there’s like 10,000 species of lizards. So we usually count them separately. So there are about 7,000 species of lizards in the world today. They are extremely numerous and diverse.
Victoria:
(Johann – I watched a movie on YouTube that said if the tail tip of a red and black snake is red it is poisonous, and if the tip is black the snake is not poisonous. Is that true?)
Wow. Lots of lizards. All right. This is another question from Johan. I watched a video on YouTube that said if the tail tip of a red and black snake is red, it is poisonous. And if the tip is black, the snake is not poisonous. Is that true?
David:
That is not true. So when it comes to identifying venomous snakes, you always have to be careful, and there’s a lot of tricks and tips that people will give you. And unfortunately, a lot of the tips and tricks are often incorrect. So we work in like one area, only work in certain places. So there are red and black snakes in the United States, but also across the Americas, some venomous, some non-venomous. So in our part of the US, a little bit farther South from here, you can get coral snakes, which are red and black in part, and they are venomous, but then you also have milk snakes, which are not venomous at all. And the trouble with, you know, you’ll hear people talk about that you can tell it’s venomous if the red and black touch, or if they don’t touch, or if the tip is black or red, and the trouble with those is that different species are going to look different, and they’re going to be different in different parts of the world. And also sometimes snakes just come out weird colors. Like sometimes a snake will be born with its colors all weird, and that can confuse the tip or trick you’re trying to use.
So the best way to be able to identify a venomous snake is to look up what snakes live where you live, and learn how to identify the specific species that are near you. It’s difficult to find a good go-to tip that really covers all the bases. That’s better than just learning what you have in your area. Because if you are mistaken, right, if you see a snake and you think, Oh, that’s venomous, but you’re mistaken. Well, now there’s this non venomous snake that some people might be scared of it, or people might try to get rid of it, or the snake might get hurt, or people might panic. And then of course, on the other hand, if you say that’s non venomous and you’re wrong, well, now you risk getting too close to a venomous snake. So the best rule is learn what your local venomous snakes look like. And if you come across a snake in the wild and you’re not sure. Don’t go anywhere near it.
Will:
Yeah, 100% sure.
David:
Yeah. If you’re not sure what it is, just don’t go near it. Maybe take a picture from really far away and then ask somebody later.
Victoria:
(Zoey – how long do snakes, lizards, and other reptiles live?)
That’s a good plan. Okay. This next question is from Zoey. How long do snakes, lizards, and other reptiles live?
David:
Good question. So, like I said, there are many thousands of species of lizards and snakes, and so it’s going to differ a lot. I think typically most lizards and snakes are probably living like 10 years or so. Oftentimes when you look up a snake as pets, a lot of times you’ll see like 10 to 20 years as pets. Usually animals don’t live as long on average in the wild, because in the wild they’re in more danger of getting eaten by a predator or getting sick or something I’ve heard. I feel like I read somewhere that Komodo dragons can live quite a while longer than that, a few decades maybe. And then of course, turtles are famous. A lot of turtles will only live, you know, 10, 20 years, but there are some that, you know, tortoises that can live over a hundred years. And I know that crocs and gators can live pretty long too.
Will:
They basically live the same amount of time as us, like without hospitals, you know, we tend to max out around sixties and stuff, but with them we can hit seventies and eighties. And yeah, crocs and gators are about the same fifties they’re normal when they’re in the wild, and then eighties their normal when they’re in a zoo.
Victoria:
(Riley – Is climate change affecting reptiles like lizards and snakes?)
Cool. This next question is from Riley. Is climate change affecting reptiles like lizards and snakes?
David:
Oh, excellent question. And the answer is yes, absolutely.
So as the climate changes, what we’re seeing is changing temperatures and changing precipitation, and those can have impacts on your vegetation, right? Your trees and your grasses and stuff, and that can have impacts on your animals. So just changing ecosystems can affect the lizards and snakes that live there.
Changing temperatures can also change where these animals are able to live. So most lizards and snakes and reptiles in general are stuck in the warmest places. Right? The, I mentioned thousands of species and most of those thousands of species live in the tropics where it’s nice and warm. Well, as temperatures get warmer, those animals are finding that they can spread a little farther.
On the other hand, animals that have to live near water. So turtles, for example, or water snakes. If the water in their habitat is drying up, then they might actually be shrinking in the amount of space that they’re able to live in.
And then at the same time, you know, I mentioned that fungal disease that’s going after snakes. A lot of diseases do better in warmer temperatures. And so there is some concern that as temperatures get warmer, we might also see certain diseases become more common in animals, especially animals that live in warm places.
So it absolutely, there have already been studies that are pointing it, maybe seeing snakes and lizards changing, where they live or when they are active or when they’re reproducing, it’s changing their life cycles. And then this isn’t a snake and lizard concern, but turtles and gators have a wholly different reproduction related concern with temperatures.
Will:
Yeah. With turtles and crocs there, eggs incubate, you know, if you’ve ever heard of incubating an egg, like a chicken egg, they have to incubate them in their nest. For turtles, they bury them in; for crocs, they make a big amount of leaves in plant material. But they use the heat of the sun mostly to get them the right temperature. And the temperature of the egg actually decides whether it’s a male or female alligator or turtle that comes out. And if things start getting hotter and hotter, it will end up only being clutch of eggs, you know, a nest full of only males or only females, depending on which one you’re talking about. And so you could start getting problems where there’s not enough of both to have enough babies, you know, later on.
David:
Yeah. They might have to change their habits or where they’re living to adjust for that.
Will:
And we have seen that they are moving, you know, many of them like here in North America are moving North as their habitat is shifting as things heat up. Yeah.
David:
So the answer is yes, in all sorts of different ways.
Victoria:
(Avery – Where do you go to study lizards?)
Alright, Avery wants to know. I think you’ve already answered this a little bit, but I’ll go ahead and ask the question again. Avery wants to know where do you go to study lizards?
David:
Oh, so it depends on what kind of lizards you want to study. So like I said, most lizards live in the tropics, so like the Caribbean or the central America is a great place for lizards. But for example, if you want to study chameleons, Madagascar is where you want to go. And if you want to study Komodo dragons, you got to go to Indonesia where they live. There are some lizards that live much farther North, you know, fence lizards and things that you can find farther North.
And then in the fossil record, it also depends on what kind of lizards you want because different lizards have shown up in different places. If you want to study one of my favorite groups of lizards, you have to look in ancient oceans. Because there was this group of extinct lizards called Mosasaurus, which were ocean-dwelling big lizards. And if you want to study those right the Western interior of the United States, right down the middle of the country, out of South Dakota, Kansas type area is a great place to find the fossils of those ancient ocean lizards.
So there are so many different kinds of lizards that you have to know which ones you want to study to know where to go, to find them.
Victoria:
(Dylan – How and why are the animals changing over time?)
Okay. And this is our last question for David. Dylan wants to know how and why are the animals changing over time?
David:
Oh yeah. So in the description of my research, I mentioned that I’m looking at how these animals are changing over time. Well, a lot of that is similar to what we were saying with the climate change question. So as time goes on, environments are always changing. And sometimes, you know, humans can impact the environment, but other times changes happen for all sorts of different causes. You can have temperatures raising or lowering; you can have sea levels changing, forests coming and going, continents moving around, current change. And what this means is that environments are always changing very slowly for all sorts of different reasons. And what that means is that the animals and plants and life that live in those habitats are always having slightly different conditions that they have to deal with.
And sometimes they respond to that by moving, we see this a lot in the studies that I’ve done on fossil snakes and lizards and stuff here in North America. A lot of the change we see is them just moving to different places. So for example, at the Gray Fossil Site, we have fossil remains of beaded lizards, which today only live in the Southwest of the continent, but used to be over here, they moved for some reason.
Other times the animals will adapt, they will evolve, they’ll develop new features or new behaviors or new habits over time. And so we’ll see different groups, different types of snakes and lizards and other animals developing over time. So if you study fossil sites from 50 million years ago, you’re going to see different species and different groups of these animals than if you study fossils from 5 million years ago. They’re changing not only where they are, but what they are, and what they look like, and how they behave, things like that. And it’s fascinating to study. It means that the fossil record, every group of animals in the fossil record is following their own unique story, which is pretty cool to see.
Victoria:
That is really cool. All right, so we’ll move on to the questions for Will.
Will:
Oh boy.
Victoria:
(Becca – Do you study alive alligators? If so, have you ever been bitten by one? Did it hurt?)
This first question is from Becca. Do you study alive alligators? If so, have you ever been bitten by one? Did it hurt?
Will:
Awesome question.
David:
Great question.
Will:
When I was doing my research, those were not alive alligators. Those were skulls, the bones from alligators that had either died or hunters who will go get alligators don’t use the bones. So they’ll often, you know, can donate those. And I was studying the individual parts of their skull. So I had to use alligators that were already dead.
But I have worked with live alligators. When I worked at the aquarium, I used to help people meet alligators. I bring out little baby alligators that people could see up close and see that they weren’t monsters and see how the skin on their tail felt, and help people get to know these animals that in Florida were in their backyard. And so that they hopefully weren’t as scared, or, you know, could see that these are cool animals.
And yes, I have been bitten, but it was by an itty-bitty baby. The alligator that bit me was not even two feet yet, which is not like super-duper small, but it’s a pretty small for an alligator, and it bit me on the palm of my hand.And it didn’t really hurt because the head of that alligator was smaller than the Palm of my hand. So it just felt like I had, like, if you’ve ever fallen and caught yourself with your hand on the street, you know, the concrete or the blacktop, and scraped up your hand. That’s kind of what it felt like, just little teeth scratch me.
Victoria:
Oh my gosh. That’s like cute, and also not cute at the same time.
Will:
I was so excited. It was my first alligator bite and it was the best it could have been because I didn’t have to go to the hospital afterward. I checked mark that off.
David:
In contrast, I have been bitten several times by snakes.
Will:
Yes.
David:
Never dangerous ones. Always, always harmless.
Victoria:
Do these hurt?
David:
No, I’ve never had a snake bite that hurt. I’ve always been very small snakes and snake teeth are not for slicing or crushing or anything. They’re just for holding. So they’ll leave little marks, but it doesn’t, if it’s a small snake, it doesn’t hurt.
Will:
And it feels like forms like just, yeah.
David:
Sometimes you get barely feel it. Yeah. Depending on the snake.
Victoria:
Audrey wants to know. I went, saw a white alligator at the zoo. Is it true? That those are really rare. How can you tell if a fossil is of a white alligator?
Will:
Fantastic question.
David:
What a question.
Will:
Absolutely yes. White alligators are rare and if you see a white alligator, it means one of two things.
It’s either albino. Which means it was born with no skin pigment. So pigments gives your skin color. It’s what makes freckles or your skin light or dark. Some animals are born with no color. And so they are white. They typically have pinkish or off colored eyes because their eyes also are lacking color. So you just see like the blood vessels showing through that pink.
And you’ll see it albino alligators, but most of the time when you see white alligators, they’re leucistic, which means they only have white skin color and they have normal colored eyes and they’ve got pigment, but they’ve only got the white pigment. And so sometimes you’ll see like blotchy ones that have spots of normal alligator color and spots of white. Those are very rare.
Typically, you’ll only see those in zoos and alligator rescue places and alligator farms that are growing them for meat and skin, because alligators are ambush predators, they sneak around and they hide. And then they jump out at the animals that are trying to eat. And if you’re the color, if you’re dark colored like the dark water or you’re hiding in your hide, great. If you’re bright white, you don’t. Which means as babies, they’re more likely to get eaten by other animals because alligators start out small. And as adults, it means they can’t sneak up on things. But in a zoo we feed them. So it doesn’t matter if they’re sneaking.
David:
Albino is a condition that you can get and leucistic-ness. Leucisticity These conditions you can get in all sorts of different animals. I don’t see any reason why any animal couldn’t be albino.
Will:
Horses can’t be albino because it is a fatal genetic flaw. I know from my cousin who worked with a horse vets for a while. Because it’s genetic.
David:
You can be albino, it’s just that horse.
Will:
You just want to survive.
David:
But yeah, then you can have that genetic trait of not having any pigment. There are albino snakes. I’ve seen albino giraffes and albino all sorts of people can have albinism. Yes, you can have people born with no pigments. So this is just a rare genetic mix up that can happen in pretty much any animal species.
Will:
But because it’s in the genetics. When we find fossils of animals, we typically cannot tell whether they were albino or leucistic whether they were all white.
David:
We don’t get fossils of the skin usually. And even when we do, usually won’t have, if we find remnants of the skin, it’s not going to have color.
Will:
Yeah. So it’s been very rare that we’ve been able to tell what colors fossil animals were. So we could maybe someday find one that only had white pigment, but if we found one that was missing pigment, we wouldn’t assume that they were albino, we just assume the pigment didn’t fossilize.
David:
Now, if it’s a young enough fossil that you can get ancient DNA from it, then you might be able to identify the genetic signal of an albino condition.
Will:
Or like the Siberian fossils of mammoth skin, woolly rhinos, and dire wolves that have frozen. And we have the fur, we actually have.
David:
There is in ice, and you have the stuff, so you can actually see the color.
Will:
Good question. Very good question.
Victoria:
(Johann – Can you please tell me what the difference is between an alligator and a crocodile. I think their mouths are different.)
Yeah. All right. The next question is from Johan. Can you please tell me what the difference is between alligator and alligator and a crocodile? I think their mouths are different.
Will:
Absolutely. They are, this is one of my favorite questions. Cause there’s cooler things than people realize. So yes, alligators and crocodiles. The typical way you’ll be taught to tell the difference is to look at the shape of their snout, their mouth. On alligator, they are U shaped. They’re shaped kind of like if you look at the toe of your foot, you know, your shoe, it is long and rounded on the end. But if you look at a crocodile, they are V-shaped, pizza sliced. And they are skinnier and typically a little longer. But that is true because the only place you find alligators and crocodiles is in Florida in the same place. That’s the only place you find them occupying the same water because there’s only two alligators in the world, the American and the Chinese. And then most of the other ones that you’ll see are crocodiles. Most of the other toothy things in the water like that are crocodiles. And then caiman down in South America. So that’s one way.
The teeth is an even more surefire way typically, unless they’ve got a tooth issue. Alligators have an overbite when they close their mouth, all the top teeth stick out and down and all their bottom teeth are in. So their teeth hangout. And crocodiles, their teeth zipped together. You see top and bottom teeth together. And some of the bottom ones stick up almost like little tusks stick up out of the mouth.
But most importantly is the water they can drink. Alligators are like us. They have to drink fresh water. They drink saltwater they’ll get sick. That doesn’t mean they can’t visit the beach. You know, we can go swimming in the beach, but if you spend all day in the beach and you swallow too much sea water, you’re going to get a stomach because we can’t handle that much salt. Crocodiles have special glands on their tongue, on the bottom of their mouth, that can get rid of the salt and salt water. Which means that crocodiles can swim in the ocean and actually live if there and be fine. So they both can live in the same water and visit the same water. But only crocodiles can cross parts of the ocean. And there are actually crocodiles, we call saltwater crocodiles, that travel between islands and have been found miles out at sea. So that’s really the big difference between them.
Victoria:
Wow. That is so cool.
Will:
Right?
Victoria:
I always just knew the mouse thing.
Will:
It’s the easiest one, because for the salt glands one, you have to go check their tongue and don’t get that close. Look at the snout and that’s good enough.
Victoria:
Yeah. Don’t walk up to someone and say, can you open your mouth?
Will:
Is this water too salty for you?
Victoria:
(Theodore – how old do alligators grow?)
Okay, this next question. I think you already answered, but I’ll go ahead and ask it again. Theodore wants to know how old do alligators grow.
Will:
Absolutely. We did partially answer this, but I’ll go into more detail, since you said grow. Alligators typically live to be 50 to 80, depending on how well they’re being taken care of and you know, just the individual alligator. But you’ll often hear people say, and they’ll say this about lots of reptiles, that they grow their entire life.
David:
They never stopped growing.
Will:
They never stopped growing. And that this is why you get those record breakers that are ridiculously huge. And you’ll hear people talking about 20-foot outliers, which isn’t ever true whenever you hear people talk about that. The biggest alligator that’s ever been measured was 15 feet long and research shows that is as big as they can get.
David:
Because reptiles, in fact, don’t grow forever.
Will:
They don’t. Alligators will keep growing a little bit when they get older, but they effectively stopped growing in like length in their size and they just start putting on weight. So. They will keep growing, but it is so little, you can’t tell. And once they get to a certain size, they just start getting fatter because once you are big enough. Now you want to way more than the other alligators so that when you wrestle, you win, because now an alligator is now big enough to take down most stuff that lives with it. Now it has to be bigger than the other alligators, and it’s easier to get fat than it is to get long.
David:
So the idea of growing in size overall until you reach adulthood and then stopping growing and just getting heavier is very relatable.
Victoria:
(Ben – How do their bones change?)
Yeah. I was going to say, I wish I could keep growing in length in person, and just like a couple inches more I could reach the top shelf.
Okay. The next question is from Ben. How do their bones change?
Will:
Great question. Their bones change in really cool ways. So the study of bones changing over time, of like a single animals’ bones changing it’s called ontogeny. And so it’s the same thing that happens to us. Like if you were to measure yourself compared to your parents, their head is not as big, you know, for like a little kid versus an adult. Your head is bigger as a baby compared to your body than as an adult, like if you ever saw a five-foot-tall baby, their head would be ginormous because we’re mostly skull cause we got these big brains. Lots of animals do that and alligators are no exception. Everyone knows alligators have long broad snouts, but as babies, they actually have these little button noses, just little tiny snouts. They look more like little ducklings than they do an alligator. They also have very big eyes. As they grow their eyes get smaller compared to the skull, compared to their body and their nose gets longer.
My research was on how are each of those bones changing. And what I’ve found out is that once their mouth actually gets to a certain size. It isn’t getting any longer, the eyes in the back of the skull are actually getting shorter. And that’s what makes it look like their snouts getting longer, the bones in the nose and the mouth actually stay the same shape from relatively small alligators up to very big ones. They don’t change much. But the backbones, the bones around the eyes and just in front of the eyes changed like crazy. And so which parts of the head were changing is what I was looking at. And yeah, what we see with alligators, they go from a short nose to a long one. And they go from longer legs to shorter legs as they get older.
David:
And you can see those same kinds of ontogeny changes from baby to adult and all sorts of animals. And we study it in fossil gators and crocs and dinosaurs. It’s a pretty cool area of study.
Will:
Cause sometimes it’s barely noticeable. Like it doesn’t change much. And other times it’s crazy extreme where you can barely tell the baby to the adult.
Victoria:
(Billy – what is the biggest alligator you’ve ever seen?)
So cool. Okay. Billy wants to know what is the biggest alligator you’ve ever seen?
Will:
Good question. I believe the biggest one I’ve seen in person, like a life, and it wasn’t like the skin or a stuffed alligator. The biggest alligator I’ve seen in person was a 12, maybe 13-foot alligator that was at a farm. The biggest alligator I’ve seen wild was on the herping trip we went on in South Carolina and an alligator actually swam over to us when we were walking around, because most likely people will feed it, which is why you don’t feed alligators.
David:
No. Because then they go, Oh, humans.
Will:
They come over to visit. And this alligator from my estimates of a good, you know, 15 feet away up on the bank was at least 10 feet long.
David:
Yeah, which makes it the biggest alligator I’ve been in the wild. I’ve seen bigger ones in captivity.
Will:
And bigger than that, it’s very rare. Like 12 foot is about as big as alligators typically get. And then every now and then 13, 14, and what once or twice 15 footers had been found. Yeah, but for the most part, yeah, a dozen feet is as big as a gator gets.
David:
Crocs get bigger.
Will:
Yeah.
David:
Sarcosuchus crocs?
Will:
Yeah. The ones that you find in Australia and around there are the biggest reptile alive today.
And the largest one ever measured was 20.3 feet long and weighed 2,300 pounds, just over a ton. That’s little long who passed away a few years ago.
David:
That’s a lot of crocs.
Will:
That’s one of my favorites.
Victoria:
Wow. That’s crazy. I just thought some pretty big cracks. I went to the Australia zoo in Brisbane and there were some pretty big ones there.
Will:
Yeah. Well the, the average max size for a gator’s 12 foot, the average max size for a sarcosuchus is like 17 feet.
David:
That’s too much crocodile.
Will:
I have seen a sarcosuchus crocodile in person that was that big. A Jack, the Ripper, was his name, and he was at a nature reserve and he was out of the water, sleeping on bank.
And I was on a walkway above him. So I could see all 17 feet of him. His belly was three times as wide as I was at the shoulders. That was a big crocodile and his teeth were about the size of my thumb.
Victoria:
That’s great.
Will:
I spent all day staring at that.
David:
I believe it.
Victoria:
(Anja – What do alligators eat?)
Oh my gosh. That’s crazy.
All right. And this is our very last question from Anja. What do alligators eat?
Will:
Good question. This is one of my favorite little things about alligators because they eat a bit of everything. They are not picky eaters, but what’s really cool about it is what, how it changes as they grow. Baby alligators, eat very different things to grown up alligators. And part of the reason for this is if they all ate the same things that means the parents would be fighting with the babies for food. So we call this niche partitioning, and it means that they are hunting different things so that they aren’t competing until they get to the same size and then they fight.
But as far as what they eat, baby alligators start out with very short pointy teeth that are great for catching insects. And that’s a bulk of their diets, little insects, little water bugs. They’ll eat little like minnows and tadpoles, but for the most part bugs.
And then as they get bigger, they just start taking bigger and bigger food and effectively if it lives in or near the water, alligators will eat it. Fish, you know, small mammals, snakes, birds, as they get bigger, they can start taking on tough stuff. They’re really well known for eating snails, just swallowing them whole and digesting them, shelling all in the belly. They’ll eat turtles. They actually have special teeth in the back of their mouth that are not very sharp at all that are for cracking turtle shells. So it’s just like a nutcracker in their mouth, and they have one of the strongest bites of any animal alive today. And are able to crack turtle shells fairly easily.
And then once they get up to full size, they can take down deer and wild pigs, dogs, and cats are very common on the menu. So while they don’t attack people very often, they will attack pets, raccoons, and other things like that. And at their bigger sizes, they also can eat other gators.
Like there’s nothing stopping them. If a small gator gets in their way, when they happen to be hungry, that’s food.
David:
So the answer is whatever they want.
Will:
Whatever they want, as long as they’re big enough. And when you look at things like crocodiles, the food items get really ridiculous. Like Nile crocodiles, who are specialized at taking down things the size of cows. So it depends on which one you’re looking at, but for gators, whatever is in or near the water.
And sometimes according to certain research, even fruit. We used to think that whenever they ate plants, it was an accident, but there have been some videos of alligators and came in human care. So they weren’t in the wild, but eating fruit on purpose, actually pulling it off a tree. So they sometimes may even eat fruit. We’re still learning about exactly how common that is.
Victoria:
Wow. That is so cool.
Alright, well that is all of our questions. Do you have any questions of your own for the listeners?
Will:
Oh, good question.
David:
Well, I wasn’t prepared to think of it.
Will:
Right?
David:
I would say, I mean, I think we’ve got all sorts of really great questions. And we were talking before we started recording how we’d love hearing people’s different questions, because some of them are very broad and general, and some of them are very specific. And it’s really exciting to get to answer all sorts of those different questions.
Will:
I would love to know, if you could be an animal, which one would you be? Cause that was a fun question. And that’s, I feel like that’s always a very personal question to different people. And so I’d love to know that.
David:
Yeah. And I would I’ll follow that up. I mentioned that Will and I have a feud. Okay. A lifetime feud between what we think the best coolest greatest animals are. So I’d like to ask. Will says crocodilians.
Will:
Yes.
David:
I say snakes. Listeners, what do you think the best or favorite type of animal in the world is? Yeah, Victoria, what do you think the best at group of animals is?
Victoria:
Ooh, that was a tough question. Well, when I was a kid, I probably would have said dinosaurs.
Will:
Good answer.
Victoria:
I might still say dinosaurs, but be a little more specific, I think hadrosaurs are very cool because they have massive dental batteries. And so they were kind of like sharks, and that they just kept growing their teeth. And so they would have hundreds and hundreds of teeth in their mouth at any given time. And I think that’s really cool. And it’s also really cool to findhadrosaurs teeth. And it also makes it really easy to study Hadrosaur teeth. Because you have so many of them that if you could take a chemical sample of it, no one’s going to get too mad at you.
Will:
Hadrosaurs is a good answer.
David:
That’s a good choice.
Will:
I’ve always loved hadrosaurs cause of the crests and all the evidence for them being very noisy. That I don’t know why, but I really liked that.
David:
And we liked that question of what do you think the best group is? What do you think the best animals are? Because there is no wrong answer.
Will:
No.
David:
You could do a documentary about any species on the planet.
Will:
There is one right answer. I believe. Fascinating.
David:
Right. There is one right answer.
Will:
And it is, the surveys have said both times it was crocs.
David:
But what does everyone out there think? We’d love to hear it.
Victoria:
Thank you so much for joining us today on Ask a Scientist. And thank you so much for talking and answering all the questions. I really enjoyed it. I hope the listeners did too. I’m sure they did.
Will:
Oh, this was a lot of fun. These are some really great questions.
David:
Yeah. We had a ton of fun. Thanks for inviting us to join you.
Victoria:
Yeah, thank you for joining me.
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