Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Venus and every week I sit down for a 40-minute

conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

And if you're curious about whether or not I can say expert, I can.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Julia Clark, the Wilson professor of paleontology

at the University of Texas at Austin and a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology where

I ask her, what was poppin' in prehistoric America?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Venus. I'm so excited for this week's episode

because honey, I have been very curiously about dinosaurs. And then I'm mining my own business

and I meet Dr. Julia Clark, who is a Wilson professor of paleontology at the University

of Texas at Austin and you're a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.

That's correct. So you are an expert in dinosaurs and their history.

Yeah. So what I study is, I like to say I study how new behaviors and structures arise

in deep time and the group that I study that in is dinosaurs. And what I'm talking about

is how did dinosaurs gain flight? How did they get feathers?

Wow. But yes, I studied dinosaurs.

So when we got to Texas, I started, I think it's not even just Texas. A lot of my life,

I've often wondered when I look around a place, I wonder what this would have looked

like before it was completely developed and there was old school stuff everywhere.

So it's 250 million years ago. What kind of animals were roaming the earth?

I'm going to take a guess and then you tell me if I'm wrong. Was it like a gigantic single-self

fucking like sea anemones or like gigantic manatees that were the size of like three buses?

Or was it like only like sea life because there was like so much oceans 250 million years ago?

...