Creature Classic: Evolution's Best Mistakes!
Creature Feature
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Note from Katie: As I question nature's wisdom with regards to the third trimester of pregnancy, I thought I'd offer you one of my favorite past episodes about how doofy and convoluted evolution can get. Today on the show: They're not dinosaurs, they're from BEFORE the dinosaurs, and they're very, very, very strange. Giant apex predator shrimp thingies, centipedes you could ride on, the tully monster, evolution's most amazing mistakes! I'm joined by paleontologist and science educator Dane Pavitt. Check him out at www.theaveragescientist.co.uk and www.youtube.com/danepavitt
Footnotes:
Last week's mystery animal sound source
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:11.2 | Welcome to Creature Feature, production of IHeart Radio. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm your host of many parasites, Katie Golden. |
| 0:17.3 | I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show, |
| 0:21.3 | They're not dinosaurs, but they're really cool. Oh my God, what's that thing? |
| 0:32.3 | That's right, folks. We are talking about pre-dinosaur animals who are really cool, really wild, really, really hard for paleontologists to put together the sordid history of pre-dinosaur animals. |
| 0:48.7 | We should have had a movie about these guys taking over a park and making people question, you know, whether or not |
| 0:57.7 | science has gone too far. So, joining me today is paleontologist, science communicator, museum |
| 1:04.3 | educator, and perhaps most importantly of all, a metal guitarist, Dane Pavett. Welcome. |
| 1:11.1 | Hey, thanks for having me. I'm so excited. So I am not really an expert in these |
| 1:17.4 | sorts of animals, the pre-dinosaur guys. In fact, dinosaurs, I'm not even that well-versed in |
| 1:25.0 | because most of what I know are animals that are still alive given that it's the easiest to observe their behavior. |
| 1:34.0 | But I think what is so fascinating to me about paleontology is the lack of direct observation that you can do and how you guys are kind of like almost like forensic |
| 1:45.3 | detectives piecing together these animals. Yeah, absolutely. So there's various different |
| 1:51.6 | branches of how we can do this. We can kind of pass together the sort of most likely |
| 1:56.0 | conclusions about, yeah, if you want to talk about animal behavior specifically, we can use |
| 1:59.7 | comparative anatomy. So you have this phenomenon in evolution, you're talking about animal behaviour specifically, we can use comparative anatomy. |
| 2:05.9 | So you have this phenomenon in evolution, you may know about, of convergent evolution, |
| 2:11.1 | where different organisms will evolve similar features to solve similar problems in their environment. |
| 2:16.5 | So you can look at the fossil record and you say, this animal has this particular shaped arm bone. |
| 2:18.7 | That means it was probably digging or it has this feature in the spine, which means it ran a certain species. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from iHeartPodcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of iHeartPodcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.