Welcome to the Cocky Ride Home for Friday, August 20th, 2021.

I'm Jackson Bird today.

What is the necrobium?

And why do some think it's crucial for restoring our ecosystems?

More and more zoo animals across the U.S. are getting their own special animal vaccines,

but why doesn't your pet cat need one?

And Disney's animatronics are getting a huge AI makeover.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

So I talk a lot about fossils on this show, and when discussing how a specimen ended up in the

place where we found it thousands of years later, the explanation is often something like

the animal got trapped somewhere or died of some injury, and then it just

stayed there, exactly where it perished for millennia. It wasn't moved or somehow disposed of.

But how often do you encounter that now? Huge animal carcasses just left out to decompose exactly

where they died? I mean, sure, you may

encounter the picked-at corpse of a smaller animal in the woods on occasion, but even those often

get cleaned up by park rangers eventually. The huge carcasses of predators that turned into some of our

more famous fossils, well, those kinds of animals don't even really exist anymore,

and many smaller ones have been domesticated, earmarked, essentially, to be turned into food or killed by human hunters.

So we just don't see huge dead animal bodies littering the land anymore.

As Isabel Kaminsky puts it in BBC's future planet, we have sanitized the land

of the spectacle of death. But did all those carcasses play a key role in our ecosystem? Would leaving

more dead animal bodies out in the open help restore deteriorating ecosystems? That's the theory of

...