Episode 143 - Monitor Lizards

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Education, Earth Sciences, Natural Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2022

⏱️ 128 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Monitor lizards are charismatic, surprisingly diverse, full of surprising biological features, and on top of all that, they include the largest terrestrial lizards in history. Also, they’re closely related to snakes (it is Snake Month, after all). That’s a cool group of lizards! In this episode, we discuss what makes these lizards so unique and fascinating, and we dive into their long but often mysterious fossil record to address some major questions about monitor evolution. In the news: vampire squids, dinosaur eggs, octopus intelligence, and pickled snakes. Time markers:Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00News: 00:06:45Main discussion, Part 1: 00:38:00Main discussion, Part 2: 01:19:30Patron question: 01:57:00 IT’S SNAKE MONTH! Check out our Snake Month activities on our social media, Discord, and Patreon! Links to the organizations we mentioned in the Intro:National Network of Abortion Funds: https://abortionfunds.org/about/Answer: https://answer.rutgers.edu/page/aboutusintro Check out our blog for bonus info and pictures:http://commondescentpodcast.wordpress.com/ Join us on Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus content! https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Or make a one-time donation via PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/4c68u4hp Find merch at the Common Descent Store! http://zazzle.com/common_descent Join the Common Descent Discord server! https://discord.gg/CwPBxdh9Ev Follow and Support us on: Twitter: https://twitter.com/CommonDescentPCFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/commondescentpodcastInstagram: @commondescentpodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCePRXHEnZmTGum2r1l2mduwPodBean: https://commondescentpodcast.podbean.com/ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-common-descent-podcast/id1207586509?mt=2 You can email us at commondescentpodcast(at)gmail.comOr send us physical mail at:The Common Descent Podcast1735 W State of Franklin Rd. Ste 5 #165Johnson City, TN 37604 The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org. Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
0:18.8	Hello, Will. Hello, David.
0:21.2	Hello, listeners out there in listener land.
0:23.7	This is episode 143 of the Common Descent podcast, a podcast about evolution, life history, paleontology, and so on.
0:30.5	This episode, we're talking about monitor lizards.
0:33.6	Monitor lizards.
0:34.7	A very cool group of lizards.
0:36.9	And appropriate for this month since it is snake
0:39.3	months, and monitors are pretty close cousins of snakes. Yeah, they're lizard-y and they're in there.
0:44.1	They're in there. And a very cool group of lizards. This episode, once we get into the main discussion,
0:49.6	we will talk about what monitor lizards are, what makes them special, how they live their lives, what's
0:54.6	going on with their bodies, and what we know about their evolution and fossil record, including
0:59.4	some of the famous ancient monitor lizards. Yeah, I'm excited. This is a very, this is probably my
1:06.0	favorite group. Like, of lizards, this is a good choice choice and we haven't done a lot of lizard episodes
1:11.9	on this podcast very true so we'll get into that in a little bit the other reason we're doing this
1:16.7	of course is because we get requests from our listeners this episode topic comes to us
1:21.7	thanks to requests from jonathan johan another jonathan mat, Big Boss Man, and Lizzie.
1:29.7	Thanks, everyone.
1:31.3	Appropriate last name there for this episode.
1:33.3	Right, yeah, it worked out pretty well.
1:35.5	So thank you to the requesters.
1:37.0	We hope you enjoy it.
	...

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