The Rise Of Mammals And A Cephalopod Celebration. June 17, 2022, Part 2

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🗓️ 18 June 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

The Wild and Wonderful World of Mammals Mammals may be the most diverse group of vertebrates that have ever lived. (Don’t tell the mollusk enthusiasts over at Cephalopod Week.) Many people share their homes with another mammal as a pet, like a dog or cat. The largest creatures on earth are mammals: Ocean-dwelling blue whales are the biggest animals that have ever lived, and African elephants are the biggest animals on land. And lest we forget, humans, too, are mammals. The history and diversity of mammalians is the subject of a new book by paleontologist Steve Brusatte, “The Rise and Reign of the Mammals.” Steve joins Ira to talk about why mammals have been so successful over the years, and why extinct mammals deserve as much love as the beloved dinosaurs. A Squid-tastic Night Out How do you fossilize a squishy squid? Do octopuses see in color, and do they have arms or tentacles? Which came first, the hard-shelled nautilus or the soft-bodied octopus, squid, or cuttlefish? And what does ‘cephalopod’ mean, anyhow? This week, Ira ventured to the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Connecticut for a special Cephalopod Week celebration. He was joined by experts Barrett Christie, the director of animal husbandry for the Maritime Aquarium, and Christopher Whalen, a postdoctoral researcher and invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. They also discussed the challenges of caring for cephalopods in an aquarium environment, some of the amazing abilities of these animals, and what it’s like to discover a previously unknown cephalopod genus and species in fossilized material stored in museum archives. Together, they tackled audience cephalopod questions large, small, and multi-armed. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Iraflato. You know, I may be a little biased, but I think mammals
0:05.7	are among the most incredible and diverse creatures on the planet. Now, that is not to say we don't
0:12.5	love our cephalopods. Of course, this is cephalopod week, and we will have more on that
0:17.6	later in the hour. Many of us, right, we have mammals as pets.
0:21.1	You have a dog, a cat, maybe a gerbil, or a hamster, and the largest creatures on earth
0:26.5	are mammals.
0:27.7	You've got your blue whales in the ocean and your African elephants on land, and we can't
0:33.6	forget we ourselves are mammals.
0:36.7	So this hour, we're going to investigate the wide world of mammals, including where do they come from?
0:43.7	Evolutionary, wise I meet, with my guest, Steve Brousscidi, paleontologist and author of the Rise and Rain of Mammals. He's based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Welcome back to Science Friday, Steve.
0:56.6	Hi, we're always a pleasure to chat with you and really excited today to talk mammals. We've
1:00.9	talked dinosaurs before. I've studied dinosaurs a lot throughout my career and now I've moved on a lot
1:06.6	to mammals because, as you say, mammals are really fascinating, and mammals are us.
1:11.2	We're a man.
1:11.5	All right.
1:33.0	Let's get into it. I want to invite my audience in on this, too, because we're going to be taking questions this hour. We want to know from them. What do they want to know about the post-dinosaur rise of the mammals? From the ones that have been long extinct, and I don't think a lot of people knew that there are long extinct mammals, but I did reading your book, to our closest relatives. Our number, of course, is 844-8-255-8-44-sci-talk, and as always, you can tweet us at SciFri. So let's address the,
1:43.9	I have to say, at the elephant in the room. I don't know
1:47.3	if there's a pun intended there. They just come out. As you say, you're a dinosaur guy. What,
1:51.8	what got into you to start talking about mammals? I think it's a natural progression, really.
1:57.7	So I started my career, studying dinosaurs. I did my PhD on dinosaurs. I've
2:02.5	written books about dinosaurs. And I love dinosaurs. I'll continue to study dinosaurs. But as I've
2:07.9	studied the origin of dinosaurs and then the evolution of birds from dinosaurs and then the extinction
	...

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