Ep 101 PaleoNerds: A New Epoch

                                       Ep 101 PaleoNerds: A New Epoch

SHOW LINKS

Ray calls Ketchikan one of the rainiest cities in North America, soaking up roughly 12 to 13 feet of rain a year.

Ketchikan hosts healthy runs of all five Pacific salmon species, which return to local streams like Ketchikan Creek, Herring Cove, and Ward Creek from July through October to spawn.

A chumpy is a cross between a humpy and a chum salmon, a naturally occurring but sterile hybrid whose spots, coloring, and teeth fall between the two parent species.

Hybrid speciation is a form of speciation where hybridization between two different species leads to a new species, reproductively isolated from its parents.

Our next guest is vertebrate paleontologist Melanie During, a fascinating scientist whose work spans the great Triassic recovery and who is most recently noted for pinning down the season the Chicxulub impact struck the Yucatan peninsula and ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

Dave has long resisted a fossil hunt at Shark Tooth Hill near Bakersfield for fear of catching valley fever, a lung infection caught by breathing fungal spores kicked up from the dry soil, a risk that is genuinely elevated at that dig.

Ray and Dave trade stories about two famous souvenir curses, the bad luck said to follow anyone who pockets petrified wood from Petrified Forest National Park, whose rangers still receive guilt-ridden conscience letters returning stolen pieces, and Pele's curse, the warning that carrying lava rock away from Hawaii angers the volcano goddess.

That same Shark Tooth Hill bone bed yields hand-sized megalodon teeth alongside the grinding teeth of desmostylians, strange hippo-like marine mammals that grazed the Miocene shallows and likely ended up as megalodon prey.

Giant crocodylians dominated the food chain in Miocene South America, fossil evidence suggests.

Liopleurodon was a short-necked, long-headed pliosaur with four flippers and a short tail, though its size was wildly exaggerated in the BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs, where it was shown reaching 82 feet long.

Ray brings new light to the debate, pointing to a 2026 reassessment that shrinks Liopleurodon down to size, with the average animal now estimated near 16 feet rather than the mythical 82.

The world record king salmon, a 97 pound 4 ounce giant, was caught by Les Anderson on the Kenai River in 1985 and still stands as the rod and reel record today.

MUSIC LINKS
The 20th Century Fox motion picture introduction fanfare composed by Alfred Newman in 1933.
Paleo Nerds Theme Song by Ray Troll and the Ratfish Wranglers