Learn about why birds are the only surviving dinosaurs. Then, we’ll talk to Alie Ward of the Ologies podcast about why we should all ask smart people stupid questions.
Learn about why birds are the only surviving dinosaurs. Then, we’ll talk to Alie Ward of the Ologies podcast about why we should all ask smart people stupid questions.
Why are birds the only surviving dinosaurs? By Grant Currin
Resources from Ologies host Alie Ward:
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/ask-smart-people-stupid-questions-w-alie-ward
[MUSIC PLAYING] ASHLEY HAMER: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today you learn about why birds are the only surviving dinosaurs. Then we'll talk to Alie Ward of the Ologies podcast about why we should all ask smart people stupid questions.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
NATALIA REAGAN: If you've been listening to this show for a while, this won't come as a shock. Birds are technically dinosaurs. Some researchers even call your run-of-the-mill dinos non-avian dinosaurs to keep them distinct from their modern feathered cousins. That makes birds the only dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction that wiped out all the others. It's hard to believe, right?
I mean, how did ancestral pigeons manage to do what triceratops couldn't. Paleontologists think there are a few big reasons. But first, we have to get a couple of things straight. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago didn't directly send them into extinction. Sure, it probably took out the unlucky souls that were living where the giant space rock struck Earth, near what's now the Yucatán Peninsula.
But it was the huge blanket of dust and the resulting climate change that was really responsible for the dinos' demise. When the climate changed, so did everything else. Earth became darker and colder. And that drastically reduced the amount of plant life available to Earth's herbivores. That, in turn, reduced the amount of meat available to the carnivores.
Without enough food, non-avian dinosaur populations plummeted, and a lot of species went extinct very quickly. But the avian dinosaurs, the birds, they didn't suffer the same fate. One reason is that avian dinosaurs were small, which means they probably tended to breed more quickly. That was a huge advantage in an unstable environment because it meant that they could adapt more quickly. That means they could find new niches in their new normal.
Smaller creatures have another big advantage, they need less food. That's a very big deal when the global food supply . Plummets but not only that, avian dinosaurs also aren't picky eaters. Some species are more specialized than others. But as a group, birds can chow down on all sorts of things from fruit to insects to fish.
That gave them more flexibility on post-asteroid Earth. Heck, I've seen my own chickens eat, well, chicken. In fact, researchers think that's why modern birds have such a diverse array of beak shapes. Their ancestors were able to adapt quickly to munch on whatever food was available. The final advantage-- avian dinos could fly.
That means they could escape bad conditions and find new sources of food without too much trouble. Plus, flying takes less energy than walking. Yet another leg up on their non-avian cousins. Of course, it's hard to be sure that these were the exact reasons for bird's success. But there's no denying that avian dinosaurs were really successful.
Today there are more than 11,000 bird species. Compare that to the number of non-avian dinosaurs that are still around. Oh, wait. There aren't any.
ASHLEY HAMER: Burn.
NATALIA REAGAN: I can hear my little house dinosaurs laughing right now. They're my little T. rexes. Aw.
ASHLEY HAMER: We love questions on this show. We love basic ones, advanced, ones ones that make you go, whoa. But questions aren't always easy to ask, especially when you're afraid they'll make you look dumb. That's one of the reasons Natalia and I love today's guest. And I'm pretty sure you will, too.
Alie Ward is an Emmy Award-winning Netflix and CBS science correspondent and the host of the hit comedy science podcast Ologies And her show's entire motto is ask smart people stupid questions. But although she studied biology in school, she's not a scientist. She only discovered her love of science communication when she started volunteering at the Natural History Museum of LA County. And that's where our conversation begins.
ALIE WARD: Before you're allowed to go on the floor at the Natural History Museum, they put you through kind of a rigorous orientation, and you have to go through these really long programs in order to get like a little pin badge, saying that you are qualified to communicate science in certain galleries at the museum. And so I think learning how to what they call interpret was really important for me, and it was so helpful because in the museum world, docents have to learn this interpretation.
And that is knowing facts but leading people to ask about the facts or leading people to assume or surmise things on their own. And so the idea that you're just a docent in a hall lecturing toward an artifact, an object, or an animal isn't really what docents do. They really ask you to look at it and say, what do you notice about its snout? What do you think it uses that snout for?
And so keeping listeners engaged by keeping them thinking instead of just blabber, jabbering at them, something I really learned. And it didn't pay. And so then I knew, oh, I'm really in this because I like it. Cause I get paid $0 an hour.
Go put on a vest. You don't know when they washed it last. It didn't matter.
ASHLEY HAMER: [LAUGHS]
ALIE WARD: I loved it.
ASHLEY HAMER: How does that inform how you do the show? I mean, that's a great lesson to make people think about things.
ALIE WARD: Yeah. And I think how the museum volunteering informed the show was it really made me think about blurring the boundary between a person who knows something and a person who doesn't know something. And I feel like there's this really big gulf or this perceived gulf between scientists and laypeople where the scientists know stuff and the laypeople are civilians who are never going to get it.
And really, it's just an exchange of information. Scientists were not born knowing everything. And so kind of bridging that gulf by getting people to be more active in learning, I think, is kind of how it helped me. Essentially, it just led to the ask smart people stupid questions ethos of the show, which is it's not me telling people about what I learned.
But I'm almost like in place of the listener, where I'm getting to ask someone. And so really taking the shame out of not knowing something and replacing it with excitement to know more weird stuff. Why ask smart people stupid questions? Why stupid questions?
I think so many times-- and I think people experience this from the time they're in class. They have a question, but they don't want to raise their hand and ask because what if everyone turns around was like, you get that? And a lot of times a lot of people have the same question, but no one wants to ask it.
And so you know that feeling when someone raise their hand. They're like, why does it even look like that? And then everyone's like, oh, thank God. That person asked.
So I think at some point, I realized in learning like museum interpretation, how many people had the same kind of curiosities. Or if something wasn't clear, it's better to get clarity on it. And I think once I started doing that and hearing, that's a really good question from the ologist, I was like, OK, I'm just going to keep asking.
So being a proxy for the listener to some extent is really helpful because I can do that on their behalf. And it's usually on my behalf, too. And I have enough of a background in science, having studied biology and having been this lifelong lover of science, that sometimes I can ask a little bit more advanced questions that help us kind of backtrack and get the basics. But I also-- no one knows everything about everything.
One thing I love is I'll have people who have been on the show ask questions to ologists in future shows because they're on Patreon or whatever and learning that a moon expert doesn't know anything about turtle skeletons. She's an amazing scientist and planetary geologist. That doesn't mean that she knows a lot about terrestrial reptiles. And so a lot of people assume that if you're a scientist, they just implant this chip where you know everything about every science ever.
And that's just not the case.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nobody knows everything. The only way you'll know more is by asking. So don't be afraid to ask questions. Again, that was Alie Ward, host of the hit comedy science podcast Ologies. You can find the link to that and more in the show notes.
Alie will be back again tomorrow when she'll share what her favorite ology really is.
NATALIA REAGAN: Let's recap today's takeaways.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, we learned that birds are dinosaurs, and the reason that they were able to survive the aftermath of an asteroid hitting Earth was their ability to fly to better environments, eat a wider array of food, and essentially adapt to the constantly changing landscape. I'm constantly surprised by how good at stuff birds are if that makes sense. My sister just sent me a photo of a turkey that was in her driveway. She lives in the Bay Area.
There was a turkey on full display. It looks just like a thanksgiving turkey with the full feather fan and everything. And she said that she saw this entire flock of turkeys roosting in a redwood tree, which is very tall.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, man.
ASHLEY HAMER: I cannot imagine a bird that big flying up there. But then I looked at all these YouTube videos and apparently, turkeys can fly very well for short distances at least. But they can go really high. I did not know that.
NATALIA REAGAN: They're very impressive. I mean, I've seen peacocks do the same. But yeah, they can actually get pretty high up in trees. And you're like, how the heck did you do that? That's not designed for flying.
That's designed to get you some action.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. Well, I guess if it kept them from moving around that much, it wouldn't have been selected for, I guess.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah. I mean, even-- like chickens were bred to basically be fatter and flightless essentially for human consumption, the fatter they are. They have a very strong flight muscles, but they're so big that they can't lift their little fat plump bodies. Their wings aren't big enough. Carol and Jeanette were originally, I think, two of six or eight chickens.
And all of them one by one were gotten by the raccoons. But Carol and Jeanette actually can fly pretty well. They're pretty savvy animals, like I said. And being a generalist is something that people don't realize how fortunate you can be. If you can eat a lot of different types of food, that means you can survive in so many different environments.
You see it with nonhuman primates. There are monkeys called macaques. They're the secondmost widely distributed primate in the world, and they can thrive in all these environments because they can eat pretty much anything and everything like humans and birds can do the same. So that right there will allow you to thrive in environments that might be completely new and inhospitable otherwise.
So 66 million years ago, I mean, I don't know where they would have gone, but they might not have had a lot of options. So eat or be eaten.
ASHLEY HAMER: I do pride myself on my ability to eat anything, so I think I could survive if we had an apocalypse.
NATALIA REAGAN: Actually, it might just be you and a bunch of pigeons that survive 2020, Ashley.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, man. I think we got a movie on our hands.
NATALIA REAGAN: In a world without humans, only Ashley Hamer and a flock of pigeons survives on the mean streets of Chicago, Illinois.
ASHLEY HAMER: They'll have to teach me their ways, really.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah. It's filled with foul language and foul play. We also discovered why fabulous Ologies host Alie Ward asked smart people stupid questions. Because when she was a docent at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, she learned the value of leading museum goers to learning something new. And she knows her Ologies audience appreciates her, quote unquote, "stupid questions," because well, they're probably wondering the same thing, too, right?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
NATALIA REAGAN: I love that because I mean, that's one of the best things to do is just ask the questions that you know everyone else is thinking or maybe too afraid to ask. And as an ologist, I teach biological anthropology, and that's one of my favorite things is when students stump me when I get a question and I don't know the answer. When I was teaching face-to-face last semester, I had a list that I would mark down every class where they had a question that my answer was I don't know.
And then it was a learning opportunity for everyone because in the next class, I would open up lecture with answers to their questions. And sometimes I'd go to Twitter and be like, hey, primatologist, entomologist, ichthyologist, whatever ologist, help me out here. I think it's great.
ASHLEY HAMER: And sometimes they can hit upon a question that nobody knows the answer to. And then there's a thesis. There's a PhD. There's something that they can do with the rest of their life.
NATALIA REAGAN: Bingo. Yeah. And that's what's so exciting, especially when you can see these students turning a corner or finding a new path, because that's the thing when you take a general ed class, like my class. They might not even know what anthropology is. And by the time the class is over, they're like wanting to become an anthropologist. And oh, it's so exciting. So I'm sure Alie inspired a lot of ologist or future ologist at this point.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's so great.
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's first story was written by Grant Currin and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting and editing by Natalia Reagan. Our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Keep asking those stupid questions to smart people and join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cut bangs, text your crush, and, of course, stay curious.
[MUSIC PLAYING]