Palaeontologist Thomas Halliday breaks down prehistoric films

those are ancient fish they live during the devonian age i know that one it's pachyocephalus [Music] it yeah it's well possibly this is i think what um i would call that um i'm thomas halliday i'm a paleobiologist and author and i'm here to break down scenes from prehistoric movies right now we're going to take a look at the scene from ice age or the nippy era i'm just saying how do we know it's a night page because of all the ice so ah this is a great scene it just because it features so many of the lesser-known mammals so i think this is meant to be a macrochemia which is a type of animal that is found in south america until really not very long ago only a few thousand years ago which made them really interesting no butts you can play extinction later okay come on guys this could be meant to be one of a couple of things this could be meant to be one of another south american native angular um order or it could be fiomia which is a an early relative of elephants yeah this kind of preservation this is a nod to things like the rancho la brea tar pits where big herbivores typically get stuck in tar which naturally seeps from the ground and as a result you get huge concentrations of uh just specifically herbivores you get like a herbivorous sample of the ecosystem and very few carnivores except those that are trying to scavenge on the already dead carcasses that have just got stuck in the tower sal where's eddie ah he said something about being on the verge of an evolutionary breakthrough these eclipses these are um quite enormous uh and once they get to about this high off the ground i'm sitting down but that's what a meter and a bit off the ground some of them they are armadillos for a long time they were thought to just be cousins of armadillos but they are actually more closely related to some of the living armadillos and you can see that they kind of they have this armored shell and they also often there's a spike a couple of spikes on the tail of that one so they thought analogous to and well ankylosaurus were doing as dinosaurs but this is sort of the mammal version um much more recently so one of the things that you see here is not so much compressing time together as compressing places together so here we have typically north american creatures like a woolly mammoth and typically south american creatures like microkenia and glyptodonts and things like that so they would not have lived together and of course creatures did not just migrate away from ice or mass that's for the liberty of storytelling [Music] is meant to be uh some kind of ground sloth i don't think it's ever specified exactly what sort of thing but ground slopes used to be really really diverse another sort of typically south american group but there are also ones that made their way up into north america as well sloths today are limited to essentially two types so there's the three toad sloth and the two toadsloth and they both hang in trees and they both just slowly eat vegetation and sleep and not much else but slows used to be extremely extremely diverse so the biggest burrows that we have from the fossil record were dug by giant grandsloths and you can still go to see those um in brazil today and they are big enough for a shortish person to walk upright in them they are absolutely astounding in the maya scene so this is what about 15 million years ago in what is now peru there was a uh a marine sloth called thalassoconis which had quite dense bones even for um for a sloth and would swim down and eat the the forests of seagrass so the sloths today are really a shadow of what they used to be there was there's also one general thing about ice age which i think is really good i use ice age in my lectures on mammal relationships because the main characters in it there are there's a the herd which is sid who's a sloth manny who's a mammoth there's diego who's a saber-toothed cat and then there's the human that they're all looking after and those four represent the four major divisions of placental mammals so sid is a zanathan so this is a group of mammals that have unusual backbones they generally reduce their teeth they have sharp claws and it's sloths and armadillos and anteaters and things like that manny's an afrotherian which is an african group of mammals which includes um aardvarks and dugongs as well as elephant shrews and hyraxes and other things like that we as humans are in the group called uh eurocontiglaris which is a horrible long word which is kind of combining names for rodents on the one hand but also primates and our arcane on the other and then finally there's uh the larae theory which is uh diego who and la razor theory is this extremely diverse group that includes everything from bats to whales um but a sabertooth cat is also one of those so i just really enjoy that you can just have a picture of the ice age heard and properly appreciate the initial diversification of mammals i mean as a whole setting it's not at all accurate the animals are pretty well done i mean it's fairly recognizable there's a fiami and a macukinian glyptodont so for for overall biology probably about a two but the models are eight okay now we're going to look at a check film called chester provieco this is um not as obscure as you might think for a 1950s czech film um because it was rebroadcast in america in the 70s sort of iconic among uh paleo art and representations of paleontology and the premise is that these four boys start going down a river on their boat and as they go further along the river they travel further back in time and they encounter ever older environments and ever older creatures and so this scene is when they're arriving it looks like in the carboniferous swamp so the carboniferous was a period approximately 350 million years ago which is best known for being the the era that we get most of our coal fuel from right so the carboniferous it's named for the fact that they're all of these coal measures and this is i think pretty much exactly what a carboniferous swamp would have looked like it's the first time on earth that you get um trees as we would imagine them right that it's the first time where you get these this collection of vegetation and so one of the things that we'll that we're seeing in this bit is quite how peaceful it is i think that when we're this far back we're talking about a time when there aren't really vertebrates on land so there'll be no bird song there'll be no no bright flowers yet flowering plants don't come along until the the early cretaceous um it's a time that is so sort of divorced from our own experience of what the world would have been like so i think the piece of just punting through this swamp is probably about as accurate as you could make a representation of the carboniferous and in fact the advantage to um traveling to the carboniferous is that there's nothing there that's going to be adapted to blood sucking on big vertebrates either so it's probably a lot more pleasant than some of the swamps today to go to actually that's a very good shot there of um the the bark of a of a scale tree unlike modern trees they were able to photosynthesize all the way along their bark so they have this sort of green texture to them and each of those diamond shaped patterns once held a leaf when it was growing which has then fallen off and as it grows higher and higher you get a long thin trunk which then divides at the top and you can actually see the representation of that in the in the background there so it's it's a very good example there's the fallen tree that is eventually going to turn into pete and intercool i mean this is great this this film is just such a great illustration that is a fantastic scale tree model and below that you've got enormous horsetails growing this is exactly the sort of environment that the carboniferous is really famous for and you can still see some of these um for us today if you go to the fossil grove museum in glasgow you will see the trunks of scale trees sort of stumps of them in their life position um as they were back in the carboniferous um so it's a wonderful place to visit oh i mean that's a that's an easy an easy nine or ten out of ten i mean that's fantastic not dramatic but accurate and the next film we're going to look is ponyo [Music] okay so those there are um are some sort of uh lobe-finned fish that are swimming along an underwater road so fish as we think of them are not one um biological group there are some fish that are more closely related to us than they are to other fish which means that biologically if you want to say that something is a fish either you have to say that it's just to do with their ecology and the fact that there's doing all that swimming or you have to include us within it so either you are a fish or fish doesn't mean anything or fish just means something ecological or culinary and these are lobe fin fish which means that they're more closely related to us than they are to say a trout or a shark their fins have one single bone at the base which is just like our humerus or our femur and that which then divides into two which is like our unknown radius or our tibian fibula and then it goes into the fin raise so here we're seeing some sort of uh devonian fish the devonian is the time period which um was approximately 400 million years ago so it's from a little before 400 million years ago to a little bit after oh and on the tree there climbing up are those meant to be trilobites they might be um trilobites are a group of arthropods that is pretty iconic really i mean they they appear in the in the cambrian right at the beginning of um complex predator prey relationships and ecosystems more than 500 million years ago and they last all of the way uh up to the end perimeter extinction 250 million years ago so they're extremely long-lasting they had incredible uh eyes that um could focus at um at all distances simultaneously possibly their eyes are made out of um crystals as opposed to our sort of weird biological jelly lenses um so yes trilobites are a fantastic group of creatures that um yeah incredibly diverse and behind them as well i mean that looks like those fish there which have the single uh fin that's stretching over the tail and also the top and the bottom of the body that looks kind of like jawless fishes i think um so some things that are very distantly related to us and would also been around in the same kind of time period as their trilobites and these loping i don't see her you can see a fish there on either the right of the screen which has this kind of crescent moon shaped um head and that is another one of these jawless uh fish and it's just it's really good to see um the diversity of of fish evolution that was going on in the devonian because this is a period before there were any vertebrates on land so insects had gone on to land plants and fungi had gone on to land arachnids had gone on to land in the devonian vertebrates were essentially restricted to life in the ocean and we're getting towards the point where there are some that are quite like us tetrapods these lobe fin fish are beginning to sort of develop the uh capabilities that will eventually lead to them going on to land but it's it's a wonderfully sort of diverse place [Music] those are ancient fish they live during the devonian age i know that one is it yeah it's well but buffalo libras is i think what um i would call that um yeah so that that is a a placoderm placido means platy skin because the placodomes have these um sort of armored armored front halves the back half of them no scales it's sort of soft body and bathroom says that the armor sort of extends out onto the fins but these are some of the earliest jawed fish pachyderms and um we are in the sense placadomes as well because they the placoderms gave rise to all of the other jawed fish including um cartilaginous fish like sharks and the bony fish like us and that one is dipnorencus okay so if he's got a name i don't know about whether dipnerenkus is a real name but that's not one i've heard before but dipnoi is the word for lungfish so that is clearly meant to be specifically a lungfish of the lobe-finned fish there are three main groups there's the lungfish there's coelacanths which are a group that was thought to be um completely extinct for hundreds of millions of years until one was trolled up from the deep sea only a few decades ago and were discovered to still be alive and then the third group of lobe fin fish which is also still alive are the tetrapods us the four limbed creatures the fact that i could you know recognize some of the um some of the species that were there to definitely being a bother or leaper so that's that's a long fish yeah they're very accurate i mean obviously it's a fantastical film but i'd say i don't know eight nine ten i hope i can be very generous with these things thanks for watching you can get my new book otherlands by clicking the link below and click here to subscribe to penguin and watch more videos like this

Channel: Penguin Books UK

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Keywords: Penguin, Penguin Books, Penguin Books UK, break it down prehistoric, prehistoric break down, palaentologist break down, thomas halliday otherlands, ponyo break down, ice age breakdown, ice age reaction, Palaeontologist, cesta do praveku, cesta do praveku explained, thomas halliday, ponyo reaction, ponyo fish scene, ice age migration scene, devonian period explained, caboniferous period, ice age accuracy, thomas halliday palentologist, ponyo explained, thomas halliday reacts

Id: qbgWBVY0gR4

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022