Hello everyone welcome back to another episode of Look What I Found.
This is K and VK.
K Hi VK.
Well welcome back everybody to episode 4 as VK was saying and today we have a Halloween
treat.
Our episode is called Ancient Halloween Arthropod.
Okay I have so many questions but to get us started off I am VK.
I have a PhD in psychology and I'm a college professor.
I've been teaching for over a couple of decades I want to say and K and I have been married
for 21 years at this point.
About a couple of decades also and I'm K I'm a college professor as well I teach physics
and we are doing this podcast because VK and I you know share news that we see about science
articles that come out in sort of mass media and we just want to share our excitement about
some of these articles when we see them from headlines right into sort of the science.
Yeah K and I talk about science all the time and to be honest with you all like in these
dark times in these difficult times with all the stress that we are experiencing the joy
that we find when we delve into science is the thing that gives us a little bit of light
and joy at the end of the day.
Yeah and for all of us when you know there are activities that I like to see as human
creative activities and the scientific enterprise is one of them and so these sorts of articles
when they show in the press is always exciting because it's got press coverage and then it's
also something about our sort of field and our profession in science so it's exciting
and this is the scientific method this is why I'm able to actually record this podcast
today and talk to you guys about this so here we go.
Yeah and I think like what you're saying K about like the creative endeavor people sometimes
think that science is not creative but it really is and I'm hoping we can talk about
that a little bit today in the conversation.
Oh I'm sure we can because you know art and science I think they are not different from
each other in too many ways because they're both seeking truths in their own forms.
You're absolutely right before we get into talking about the centipede we're going to
be talking about.
Arthropod.
Yes thank you K. I just want to invite you all to like subscribe download from whatever
platform that you're hearing us we appreciate you we thank you for checking in please email
us and let us know how we're doing or leave comments for us and we definitely appreciate
the audience so yeah here goes.
Well here goes okay well so this article I think we were excited when we saw this and
think you saw this on CNN and sort of told me about this maybe and I think I found another
live science media sort of coverage for the same thing and it's has themes as Jurassic
Park which is kind of sort of we liked it.
Yeah and yes I'm not saying an immediate yes when you said that I found it on CNN and shared
it with you and the reason for that is that I had a particular idea about the article
based on the image that CNN had pasted in the article and that's from the researchers
but yeah this is where art and science meet and it's a little bit interesting.
A little bit of gotcha science there for you.
Well I don't know if it's gotcha science but there was definitely like a lot of build up
in my mind based on the image and if you look at it like it looks really impressive and
very Jurassic Park.
That's right so well let's get to this so this this article was about I think establishing
the sort of the phylogenetic tree as we think about sort of the tree of life if you will
about who descended from whom for the branch called Arthropods.
Yeah so the article came out on 9th October in Science Advances which is a journal that
is open source so you should be able to access it we'll add the link to the description.
The first thing that was surprising to me about the article was like there's actually
some debate about like which creatures belong to this group.
So I mean let's sort of I mean since I've said Arthropods so many times let me define
it comes from Greek I think the origin is it came it means jointed ribs so if you think
of insect bodies so Arthropods insects crustaceans and archnids are kind of sort of the group
of living beings that that belong to this branch.
So crustaceans would be things like lobsters.
Anything with a shell I think is crustacean so yeah lobsters and sort of shellfish.
Crayfish.
Yeah crayfish.
And archnids are spiders.
Yeah so this is like full on Halloween.
Yeah this is Halloween and the article was about so there were excavations I think and
they dated back somewhere in the late 1800s where they found these giant fossilized remains
of the you know centipedes or millipedes they were eight meters long.
Eight meters?
I thought that was eight feet.
I thought it was eight meters but you know eight feet eight meters it's much much much
bigger than us and you know we were sort of thinking about a centipede walking the earth
with sort of giant bodies it was so I mean and that's what the fascination was so they'd
found these fossilized bodies but they'd never found a head so they didn't know whether it
was you know whether it was sort of the norm or they were just a particular branch of giant
sort of centipedes millipedes arthropods whatever we're going to call them and this article
was really about actually using some really cool high-tech imaging to look at some fossils
that discovered in the 1970s.
Yeah so I do want to say that I think they do extend to about like eight feet which is
about like three meters.
Okay not eight meters.
Yeah because eight meters so each meter is like about three feet three feet yeah it's
a little bit under that but yeah three works as a good heuristic and for those who remember
covid times if you were living in the UK for those of us who are watching or listening
to us in european countries you know like the distance recommended was about a meter
the the thing that I do want to say is that like these creatures lived like a bazillion
years ago.
Yeah I have a little bit of sort of info on that too because you know so geologically
we think the earth is about four forty five hundred million years old which is about 4.5
billion years old and interestingly I think we know this because the age of the moon and
the age of the earth are approximately kind of sort of at the time of formation are the
same and that's kind of how we dated that so that's when things began on earth and then
we have sort of the heathen or Hayden era which is the 4500 million years ago and then
you have the arcane period which is 4300 to 2500 million years ago and that's kind of
when cells and photosynthesis began and then you have 2500 million years to 500 million
years which is called pro-terozoic and it's permanent oxygen in the atmosphere so that's
when the burst of life really happened and then 500 million years to now is called the
fanerozoic where land plants came about so this is about 300 million years ago is where
this fossils coming from yeah and it's astonishing when I was doing some research for this cave
I was actually very fascinated and horrified at the same about the size of this thing okay
so for me the quest was like why was it this size like was it was everything else also
big and it turns out that during that time on earth all creatures were very big yeah
they seem to I mean I read a couple of sort of notes on this and I can't recall right
off the bat maybe this was Wikipedia's got some very interesting entries on this so I'd
certainly urge people to check it out sort of you said geologic ages and you get a lot
a lot of information there so coming back to your point I think it was because of the
oxygen in the air they think that there was lots of oxygen in the air so things just started
to grow very big is it something that I've heard yeah you're right about that and that's
actually even on the government website so if you go to the paleontologists who are affiliated
with the government and they have a website that's what they say that fascinating yeah
that one of the claims that the geologists and geophysicists believe is that and paleo
biologists believe is that one of the reasons they're so massive is that there was tons
of oxygen I find that very interesting and also like I gotta be honest with you a little
bit like anxiety provoking like does that mean oxygen is dropping well I mean it's kind
of sort of been steady across time I think and also sort of just as on a side note for
people some you know you might start to wonder how are we dating back 4500 million years
ago so there's lots of glacial information so we sort of know that there were glacial
ages so I think there were and so there was and I think there's radioactive traces that
are coming back from that so we'll probably do one of those an episode later down the
line talking about these these early datings but it's not carbon-14 dating that much I
know very interesting care like I think yeah having like some conversation about that and
at a later point would be helpful the other speculation I read about why these creatures
were so big is that natural predation was less and I'm wondering if that's because like
because it was so massive there weren't that many yeah no Jurassic Park tells me otherwise
dinos ate dinos I know but it was also a small space it was a small island I don't know what
was going on so yeah anyway so coming back to this article so they you know they had
found these giant sort of centipede millipede arthropod or arthropod fossils and they wanted
to go back and sort of answer the question of whether you know giant giantism if you
can say that as a word I would call it like I can't ism yeah that's what I call it so
there were a lot of new words I learned and we get to some of that a little later as well
whether that was common during this time for this sort of species and also where in the
phylogenetic tree of the millipedes and centipedes which are the existing sort of branch of this
sort of ancestral descendants I think to place them was was the main goal of the study yeah
and that's where I was deeply disappointed I know you know you sent me this article I
was like oh cool and I jumped into it okay let me tell people I wasn't so disappointed
because well first of all what they did was they didn't find new fossil but they took
fossil specimen that was obtained from this region in France which was known to be dated
back to this period of about 300 million years ago but it was kept in a museum so they went
in and pulled out the museum samples and did some really cool micro computer tomography
imaging so basically it's like cd scanning these old fossils and then recreating it completely
without destroying it okay so when you describe it it sounds really cool but when I was reading
the article my first thing was like seriously like you've had these fossils in a museum
from the 1970s okay so no new fossils were found that was the first thing but after I
spoke to Kay about this I did realize there's something beautiful about that actually like
the fact that science never gets rid of the data like we hold on to it and that has value
because not only does that mean that as techniques change which is what Kay is talking about
you can learn new information and add to old ideas but it's also really like at any point
your work can then be checked for verifiability right like that's important because and this
is such an important point we can I'm pretty sure we're going to say this a few more times
and down the road that the notion of science you can never prove something is true you
know our sort of machinery of science is very important to have a falsifiable hypothesis
we want to know when we're wrong we want to know when something that we've held on to
that used to work suddenly does not work anymore that's the whole essence of moving forward
in science so you know I think we preserve that sort of through this doing this and this
was an excellent sort of an example of a study of doing that I felt I agree with you I was
just like very disappointed that like giant centipede skeletons were not found I know
and actually to make that point even sort of more stark so first of all they found that
the these are going to be juvenile samples so they were just an inch long so you know
yeah thank you that was I was like wait what hang on but you know but they did find tracks
which is kind of sort of how they know when they walk so you know there's some interesting
you know fossil records and in the as we were saying that this is an open source paper so
you can actually access the whole publication so and buried in this if you thought that
the paper was dense right at the very end you'll find this thing called supplementary
information and if you poke on that there's lots more data and you know that's kind of
sort of where I saw the tracks you could see the images it's hard to see what you can kind
of see yes you know they show you how it looks in the fossil records it's pretty cool and
from the tracks they thought adults were 40 centimeters long I mean you know that's a
pretty large centipede I wouldn't want to mess with it oh no oh no 40 centimeters is
about a foot plus yeah I mean by no means am I like dissing the centipede that's right
well the other thing that they found so in the fossils they had heads preserved so that
you know this is kind of sort of answering a question that was that there were no heads
for these guys so they actually could find even if they were juveniles you know you sort
of get a good proportion body to head so they could they could sort of reconstruct that
and that part I found very interesting K because you know the way this is where art and science
come together right the way the image is presented in CNN you know it looks like the centipede
is up like a snake and it's about to strike and I was like into like what did it eat it's
eight foot long you know yeah and and they talk about it you know in the so you know
first of all the imaging techniques are pretty cool so they took a lot of pain and effort
in sort of doing that right but then after that it was still about getting images that
they could put in the paper so there was a lot of photoshop and a little bit of AI that
was involved in producing these images to be visually appealing they said which I find
very interesting but here's the interesting thing that I found about their eating habits
they do think they kind of like earthworms in that they eat the detritus on the ground
but that detritus yeah so that that can include a whole lot of things it's euphemism for poop
y'all yeah that's what it is it's it's it's insect poop kind of sort of and you know there's
these giant not centipedes I think millipedes so I think I learned the other thing is millipedes
apparently are detrivores so they eat sort of dead leaves in sort of excrement matter
but centipedes are hunters they're predators they eat they hunt other things yeah that's
what I had known which is why I was very excited to find out what they ate and there's apparently
you know ongoing debate about this which is why the head right is so important because
they needed to see what the mouth structure was like if they were fangs or you know whatever
like teeth or you know and they didn't find it they found sort of suction vacuum holes
I think yeah but I think they could not rule out that they might have eaten a carnivorous
diet which means like they were actually like centipedes and hunting yeah I read it more
like there was less evidence of that happening and it could have happened you can't sort
of rule it out but it looked like more that they were these detrivores creatures okay
I've got to be honest with you all this was the biggest debate we had and I'm still sticking
to my guns because we literally pulled up the paper like looked at each other and went
this is what I am reading and gave us like this is what I'm reading and we were looking
at the same line and I'm still insisting that they were surely eating flesh I don't think
so but but we'll leave it there they were 300 million years ago the other thing though
which I think the authors really you know found really exciting and here's another word
that I found from from this article cecile cecile apparently are so cecile eyes or is
is when the eyes are embedded in the body versus stocky eyes so where the eyes are on
a stock so I think they found for this that this particular arthropora had a stocky eyes
so they were wondering if it was amphibious because it could help by peeping out of water
yeah I mean KSS used like a lot of technical jargon I just called them like headlight eyes
because that's how they like struck me when I read them because I was like they're like
headlamps like on top of your head you know like those bicycle lights that people put
on their heads exactly ET exactly they're not they're not in your head which I think
would have given them like if they were smaller not if they were eight feet if they were smaller
they might have given them a comical appearance really maybe I mean you know and here's the
thing sort of who we are imagining these things and we have sort of little idea to what the
environment might have been you know so that's that's always left to our imagination up here
so that's pretty cool yeah and I won't deny that I'm maybe trying to find humor in something
that is actually really freaky I'm five foot nothing and you know being chased by an eight
foot long centipede would not be fun no it would not be fun and you know it didn't matter
if you're six feet tall you still would run so that's that's kind of sort of the idea
yeah so that was this paper which was kind of interesting you know I mean and I think
a little bit of the weakest point I think it was it had the gotcha headlines you know
about a car sized centipede or something like that and it really wasn't yeah I mean what
got me on CNN like I told you all was the image it just looked like something out of
like one of those movies like Jurassic Park and I was like oh my god this is gonna be
so exciting but this also I think one of the things that I appreciated about this week's
discussion with Kay was that not every discovery in science is like you know exciting but it's
necessary and important yeah I mean and and the methodology is so important so you know
it's it's it's it's interdisciplinary again so this is a classic example you know computer
science meets x-ray imaging meets tomography meets geology meets fossil science you know
it was this the whole package together so and it's evidence-based right so now we're
going back and saying hey why don't we check out since we've got this cool imaging technique
if that fossil had a head it might answer a question that's in the field and that's
kind of sort of what got it into this particular journal I think absolutely and I think one
of the other things I took away from that idea that you mentioned about like going back
to old data right like my mentors in grad school always told me like never ever ever
destroy anything you know don't destroy a piece of paper on which you wrote an idea
because you never know and I think that you know this paper definitely reminded me of
that that you know data scientists don't destroy data for a reason yeah no definitely and this
kind of data especially right is is coming from so far back in our past and we have
to we have to preserve it and and and to be able to use it without being able to damage
it I think is ultra cool absolutely I completely agree so despite my disappointment that this
was not like a much more gory and Halloween ish read and this was actually it turned out
to be a nice conversation as all conversations are with K only treats here no tricks alright
very good this was a good one we KS a good find although this is took us in I was hoping
to find a car sized centipede as well so so it was a little disappointing not to affirm
that but depends on your definition of car size I mean it's definitely like an eight
feet yeah that could be a car that could be a car that could be a car alright very good
so it was a great hanging out week four with you all so as we could say thank you for listening
and we appreciate your sort of inputs if you want to write to us you should be able to
find our email and we are looking forward to doing more of these with you guys yeah
absolutely please don't forget to like subscribe download we we would love to hear from you
all if you all have comments please add them to whatever platform you're listening on we
really appreciate you all for next week we are continuing our debate we haven't figured
out whether we want to focus on AI which is my choice or Star Trek frogs which is my choice
so we shall find out yeah so you all will find out with us which one we're going to
focus on for next week it's also because you know as decision time comes closer for the
elections we're also feeling decision fatigue so take it easy and hang in there you all
yeah take it easy everyone bye.