The New York Times published an article this week, What’s in a Name? The Battle of Baby T. Rex and Nanotyrannus profiling a $20 million-dollar dinosaur fossil for sale at the David Aaron Gallery in London. The gallery describes the fossil as a, “rare juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton”. Newt discusses the sale of the dinosaur with his guest Dr. Stephen Brusatte, Chair of Paleontology and Evolution in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
On this episode of Newts World. As many of you know, I am a dinosaur enthusiast. I have loved studying dinosaurs, reading about him, visiting museums since I was a young boy. So I was struck this week when an article on The New York Times entitled What's in a Name? The Battle of Baby t Rex and Nano Taranus, profiling a twenty million dollar dinosaur fossil for sale to David Aaron Gallery in London. It seems there's a controversy about this quote rare juvenile Trannosaurus rex skill. My guest today is somebody you've heard before who's done several podcasts with those who I think one of the most brilliant explainers of paleontology alive today. He is quote one of the stars of modern paleontology according to National Geography. He's worked on dig sites and in labs all around the world. Was also the paleontology advisor to the film Jurassic World Dominion. So you can imagine how pleased I am to welcome back my guest, doctor Stephen Prossatt, Chair of Paleontology and Evolution in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Steve, welcome back and thank you for joining me again on Newtsworld. The number of years back, my wife Callista had gotten me a copy of a Nanotyrannis skull from the Cleveland Museum, which sits proudly in our library. So I have a big interest in nanotyrannusis. I do not have a t rex, of course, but I wouldn't mind having one if I could figure out where I put it.
Well, mister Speaker, is always a pleasure because when we get together and talk dinosaurs, it's a couple of guys that love fossils, love science having chats about these things. And you has been very kind to me for the books I've written and to the field of paleontology in general. You've been an enthusiast.
I have to ask you, have you ever been interviewed before by somebody who had a Nana tyrannoskull?
Oh, you know, I've been asked a lot of interview questions before. That's a question I've never been asked, so I don't know.
Literally, when you walk in our house, to your right, there's a Nana Turannos skull sitting there. It's beautiful. It's a fabulous skull. It's a cast, of course, but we got it from the Cleveland Museum of Science, which has a terrific collection, particularly a fossil fish.
And that's the classic skull of this dinosaur. Maybe it's Nanotyrannus, its own species. Maybe it's a juvenile, a teenage t rex. There's a lot of debate about that, but that skull, which was found many, many decades ago and went to the Cleveland Museum, that's really the keystone of this whole debate. And it's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful fossil. So you're very lucky.
It's either the type fossil of a new species or it's just a baby Terrannosaurs Rex.
Yes it is, and I think either of those is very exciting. You know, Either it's a distinct species of a smaller tyrannosaur. This animal would have been about the size of an suv more or less, whereas t Rex as an adult would have been the size of a bus. So it's either its own species of smaller Tyrannus, or it's a teenage t rex, which is pretty neat because fossils of really all dinosaurs are very rare, and it's hard to have fossils of babies and teenagers and adults. So if we have a teenage t rex, that can tell us a lot about how this great enormous king of dinosaurs grew up. So I think either way, this debate is resolved down the line. It's a very interesting and important fossil.
So I'm curious because I'm guessing that to be called a juvenile t rex has it listed at the David Aaron Gowery, it must be substantially bigger than a nanoterremus.
It's really hard to know. So there is this new specimen of this new fossil that's for sale. I don't know a huge amount about it. I know not much more than has been reported in the press, including in this New York Times article. I haven't seen this fossil myself. I haven't studied it. I've just seen some photos. They are marketing it as a juvenile t rex. But other people, other scientists, would look at that same fossil and say, we actually think that's a nanotyrannus, a separate species. So really it's the same thing as your Cleveland skull. The cast of the skull that you have at home. Is it a separate species, Is it a juvenile t rex? We don't really know. We just know that it is a tyrannosaur of some type that's about the size of an suv. It lived at the end of the Cretaceous Period, about sixty six million years ago, and I do think until there are more fossils, scientists are going to be debating this for a long time because these dinosaurs are so rare.
I mean, even a nana Trannus as a predator would have been very formidable if you'd walked into him in the evening. Oh.
Absolutely, t Rex is the ultimate because this thing was forty feet long, it weighed seven or eight tons, Its head was the size of a bathtub. It could crush us in its jaws. T Rex is the ultimate. So if you compare any other dinosaur to t Rex, it's gonna seem maybe a little bit more lame. But come on, this Nanotyrannus or teenage t rex, whatever it is, was a big animal in its own right. It surely would have weighed about a ton. It could have run pretty fast, it could have chased you down, and it had a whole mouthful of sharp teeth, so you would not have wanted to come anywhere near this animal.
Do you think in market value it would make a difference in price if they concluded it was a nano tyrannus or is it still so cool it'll probably get the same price.
This is something that when the New York Times reporters were writing this article and they talked to me about it, if they asked me this question, and it's a good question when you're marketing something. This is something they're trying to sell for a lot of money. Of course, you're going to try to market that in the way that makes it most exciting for people and most exciting for hopefully for museums that might want to purchase it. And I don't know what sounds better to you. I'm not sure. Really, do you think a nanotyrannus is better? Do you think selling it as a babyt rex sound? But I don't honestly know. I think both of those things are quite interesting. And so you see auctions sometimes where these smaller tyrannosaurs are up for sale and they call them nano tyrannus. So you see both and I don't honestly know which one would on its own fetch a higher price, said.
I was surprised to learn that in twenty twenty two, a Dynoonicas, which is the inspiration for the Veloci raptors in Jurassic Park, sold for twelve point four million dollars.
I'm really surprised these dinosaur auctions and sales. Yeah, they're happening with more frequency these days. It does seem like we're in a period of time where dinosaurs are in with the world of private collectors and art collectors and so on. There's just a trendy thing happening, and there's a lot of auctions. You hear of new auctions all the time or new sales, and it makes sense to me, right, I mean, I love dinosaurs, and there's something fascinating and enthralling about these animals, and so some of the price tags are getting pretty high. Some of them do surprise me when you're getting into the many millions of dollars, But I think it just shows that there is this enduring fascination with these animals, and there's a lot of people around the world that would love to have their own dinosaur, and I totally understand that.
Well. I noticed that there's a t reaction named Stan who was sold at auction for thirty one point eight million dollars in twenty twenty, and he was bought by the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism. I assume going into a museum. I mean Abu Dhabi's really working at this tourism business. They have a relationship, for example, with the Lover and have a sort of Middle Eastern louver building, which is pretty nice, But thirty one point eight million for a single skeleton is pretty darn and pressive. I suspect encourages people to go out in the field, and particularly on private land and try to find these things.
That number when that fossil is sold, that thirty one million number. That shocked me, and it shocked a lot of paleontologists, and it got us worried, frankly, because if a dinosaur goes for that much money, of course other people are going to want to get in on the action, and it means that there's now a really high price a bounty if you will, the dinosaur bones out there. So of course it encouraged a lot more people to look for dinosaurs. That's a great thing. But also if the price tags go ever higher, it makes it less likely that museums can purchase these one of a kind dinosaurs, more likely that they're only affordable to the ultra rich, the really ultra rich, the kind of people that have tens of millions sitting around. So I think it's a double edged sword there. But thankfully that fossil stand that t Rex is going into a museum, as you say, in the Middle East, the museum still being built. I'm very excited about that. I think it's a great thing. First of all, that fossil will be conserved and it'll be put on display, and it will also be put on display in a part of the world where there are not so many dinosaurs fossil. So I think this will in a way be a great ambassador for both paleontology and American paleontology. T Rex is an American dinosaur, so I think it's wonderful that children and families throughout the Middle East can go see this dinosaur in the museum down the line we know.
I think prior to stan the most famous t Rex purchase was by a public institution, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which bought Sue for about eight point three six million back in nineteen ninety seven, which today be about thirteen point five million give an inflation. But I mean, I've been out there. It's really a very impressive exhibit. I mean, you can understand why some of the donors who support the museum thought that they would certainly be rewarded in popularity and in attendance by having Sue there.
Sue is my favorite dinosaur of all time. I grew up in northern Illinois, from a little town called Ottawa, So hi, everybody out there from Ottawa who might be listening. About seventy five mins miles southwest to Chicago, and Sue was purchased by the Field Museum when I was a young teenager, and I was incredibly excited. And then in the year two thousand it was put on display and I was sixteen years old, ben and I remember very well. I tried to convince my parents to let me skip school that day to go see the opening of the exhibit, which was in the middle of the week. For some reason, I think that was maybe just for journalists. I don't know, but I really wanted to weasel my way in there to see it. And they wouldn't let me do it. And you know, Paul, props to my parents. They valued education more than anything. But we did go and see it very soon after, and I've seen Sue dozens of times over the years. It is in many ways, I feel my hometown dinosaur, and that fossil, probably more than any single fossil, really inspired me as I was studying paleontology. So I am thankful that that dinosaur, which when it was sold in the late nineties, that price was exorbitant. I am so thankful that a museum was able to work with donors and sponsors to get the funding to make sure that fossil was put on display, because there's an alternative universe out there where an oligarch buys that fossil and it disappears and it is never put on display, and I never see it, and I'm never inspired, and millions of others in Chicago that to visit the museum are never inspired to. So my great hope is that when these one of a kind dinosaurs are discovered, that some way or another, they find their way to a museum.
Most of these do end up in some kind of a museum environment, but I remember I think it was the number three guy at Microsoft personally owned two t Rexis in his home.
If you have the Microsoft money, that'll do it. But you're referring to Nathan Miervold, who's very well known to us in the field of paleontology. I mean, he's a polymath, incredibly brilliant guy, and he has done research. He's done primary research. He's published academic papers on dinosaur fossils in peer reviewed journals, the same ones that I publish in and other scientists too, So we greatly respect him in the field. And I think as an aside, I'll just say that's one of the neat things about paleontology is as a science, it is fascinating to people. It attracts a lot of different people that wouldn't necessarily be drawn to a lot of other sciences. So I think that is one of those things about dinosaurs that enduring mystery and fascination that brings so many people together, and he's a great example of that.
Hi, this is newt If you live in California or you happen to be visiting, I'd like to invite you to my two upcoming book events in January Challis and I are both going to be at the Richard Nixon Library and Museum in jor Belunda on January ninth at seven pm. Check Its are available now at Nixon Foundation dot org. And Chlis and I are both going to be at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi Valley on January tenth at five pm. Tickets are available now at Reaganfoundation dot org. I hope you'll join us for a book signing and a talk and a chance to get together and kick off the new year at the Nixon Library and the Reagan Library. I have to ask you just a little bit about not just Toronto source, but this entire group of dinosaurs who reoccur. I mean, there's sort of a parallel evolution over millions of years, and if you go back, I guess what, thirty forty million years you at Alisaurus. There are a whole group of dinosaurs who end up very similar to t Rex. It is really big rear legs, really big powerful head, and really tiny arms. And I'm curious, from your perspective, why do you think the tiny arm giant predator keeps reemerging.
This is why I love talking to you, mister speaker, about dinosaurs, because we can get in the weeds these fascinating bits of science, and this is one of them. T Rex is an incredible dinosaur, sublime dinosaur in so many ways. But there were other meat eating dinosaurs over time that also evolved to look something like t Rex, to become around the size of a bus, to develop really big heads with lots of sharp teeth, and to make their arms smaller as they did so. And as you say, the alosaurs are some of those dinosaurs. There's a group called the carcarodontosaurs. I know that's a real tongue twister, but one of the most famous ones is Jiganotosaurus, which was the villain in the new Jurassic World film from twenty twenty two, the one that I worked on. And there's many other examples. So there seems to be something about dinosaur where time and time again, over and over again, these different groups of meat eaters all developed about the same size and similar types of body. So I think it means that there was something very successful about that design about making a living, about hunting food, about getting enough food, at being able to get enough nutrition and cover enough area, and so on with that type of body. And what it really is is the head seems to get so big that it takes over most of the functions of the arms and the smaller ancestors. So in the smaller tyrannosaurs or smaller alosaurs, the ancestors of the big ones, the arms were longer and they had sharp claws, and they were probably used to grab prey and to slash a prey. In the big ones, time and time again, the arms get small, the heads get big. The heads are probably doing almost everything. They're grabbing the food, they're biting the food, they're killing the prey, they're chopping up the prey, swallowing the prey. And that seems to be the case. But that's very different than say, how mammals have evolved. You know, different types of meat eating mammals, saber toothed tigers, wolves and dogs and so on. They don't do that. And I think that speaks to just the differences of dinosaurs and mammals and the types of biology they have in physiology and so on. And there's so much more we could go into the book. I did The Rise and Fall the Dinosaurs a few years back. I have a few chapters on these big theropod meat eating dinosaurs, because to me, they're so fascinating. These are some of the most incredible animals I think that have ever lived in the history of the earth. Bus sized predators with heads that we could fit inside, that crush the bones of their prey.
They're astonishing animals. And of course they required other dinosaurs to have grown very big in order to be able to pray off of them. You can imagine how much these guys had to eat in order to sustain themselves, especially if, as some people think, they may have been warm blooded, in which case they would have been burning up a lot more energy than say, a crocodile does. And these were apparently obviously pretty good predators in terms of running, would have been very formidable. I mean, if they were appearing in Montana this week, you would definitely weakened the tourist attraction of going out in the woods by yourself.
You got it. I mean, these animals were feats of nature. The thing that really impresses me about them is not just their huge size. That's interesting enough, amazing enough, but one of the things we now know is that these dinosaurs they didn't just have brawn, they had brains as well. We know they were quite smart. And the reason we know that is because we use cat scanners to see inside of the skulls of dinosaurs. So maybe many of you listening, some of you at least have had a cat scan and you've gone in the tube and the X rays of the scanner, you know, allows the doctor to see inside of you with that having cut you out, And we can do the same with a t rex skull of velociraptor's skull. And when we do that, we can see the brain cavity, we can build a digital model of the brain, We can measure the size of the brain compare it to living animals, and that tells us that many dinosaurs were a lot smarter than we used to think. And t Rex was probably one of the smartest dinosaurs of all. So it was a completely formidable predator with brawn and with brains.
Well. I was at the Smithsonian one year and they had borrowed the kind of cat scan that automobile companies used, So they had this huge machine that they were putting fossils in and it was fascinating to watch. But you know, one of the points you make about the brain. You can actually tell how an animal is adapted based on this brain case. And my impression is that predators like t rex had remarkably good vision. I mean, is that your sense.
Yes, you're correct, You're absolutely correct. We can tell that both from looking at the brain through the cat scans. We can see the regions of the brain that control the sense of vision, and those are fairly large. But what really tells us they had good vision is they had huge eye sockets, and in t Rex in particular, the eyes faced partially forward, so they would have had three D vision, stereoscopic vision, depth perception, just like we do, and that's actually a pretty unusual thing among animals. So it means they could have seen in three D. They could have seen their prey, they could have seen their environment. That was one of their key hunting tools surely. And we can also tell from their brain and from their ears that they had a really good sense of smell, really good sense of hearing. So these were predators that were well endowed with the whole toolkit of senses to seek out their prey well.
And that ability to have exquisitely effective eyesight. Their descendants, the eagles and the hawks have very similar patterns.
Yes, and that's a wonderful thing that although t Rex is extinct and Triceratops and Brontosaurus and all of those classic dinosaurs, they've been dead for a long time, but the descendants of dinosaurs live on as birds, and we can study birds. We do study birds. We love birds, so many of us love going bird watching or have birds as pets. And through watching birds appreciating birds, we can get a sense for what some dinosaurs were like. And birds are quite smart, birds have great senses. Birds are active, energetic, dynamic, adaptable animals, and dinosaurs would have been like that too.
You were describing how a t rex would have grabbed its prey and would have torn pieces out of its prey, and was doing this with these very tiny arms that basically had no use. I was reminded that the one place I can think of this parallel is watching a killer whale. That if you watch them, they take on a huge whale and they gradually devoured and it's all done, of course, with their mouth. They have no limbs that enable them to operate. Very similar, I think in a way to how t Rex would have behaved.
Yeah, I think that's a very keen point and good observation. And sometimes I've done this before, you know, I've called t rex like a giant land shark, and kind of in the same way that these you know, whether it's big sharks, whether it's killer whales. When they're in the water, they don't really have arms or legs anymore, not proper ones. They have flippers to swim, and so they can't just grab prey the way that say a dog or a cat could, so they use their heads for everything. And I think that's what t rex would have been like, and it's a very unusual way of hunting. It's just different than any of the big predatory animals today. The biggest meat eater today on the land is a polar bear, plenty ferocious. I mean, of course we don't want to run into polar bears, but a polar bear could have been swadded away by the jaws of a t rex. So that just goes to show how much more extreme a t rex was compared to anything that's on land today.
Do you think the evolutionary advantage of the tiny arms was that, since they weren't necessary, they just saved the energy of growing bigger arms. You know, some people have argued that if they hunted in packs the smaller arms man, you didn't bite your neighbors. Often.
There's a lot of ideas that have been proposed. We have a project that I'm part of that one of my former postdocs, a really brilliant young scientist named Greg Funston, is leading and we're working this up into a paper as we speak. Actually we're talking about this even today over email or getting this ready, and we have some ideas for what the arms of t rex were for or what they were not for. I think the key thing is the arms are really small. The arms of a t rex are only the length of our arms, but they're much more muscular. They had a huge muss. We can tell that because muscles leave marks on the bones where they attach. So t Rex was weird. It had arms that would have been the length of a human arm. So imagine a bus. These were the animals the size of a bus. So imagine a city bus with human arms sticking out of the front. How weird is that? That's really really obscene? Almost but those arms were so muscular that they were still doing something. If they were doing nothing, evolution would have got rid of them, just like the legs of a whale. For instance, the ancestors of whales had legs, they moved into the water. They didn't need an evolution got rid of them. So the arms of t Rex were doing something. The muscles that are really strong on those arms were the ones that would have been used to grab onto things. So we think maybe they were using their arms to brace themselves when they were feeding or when they were mating.
When you go back to the forerunners of for example, t Rex or Alosaurus, do they tend to have much bigger arms.
They do, And that's what's really intriguing. The ancestors of t Rex, the ancestors of Alisaurus, and the ancestors of some of these other types of dinosaurs that independently became big predators. In all cases, those ancestors were quite small, and the very first tyrannosaurs, for instance, were only the size of dogs, and some were the size of humans. But that's it. And they were not only small. They had long legs, they could run really fast, they had smaller heads, they had more delicate, dainty teeth. They were still meat eaters, but their teeth were quite thin, and their arms were long, Their arms were much longer. Their arms had big sharp claws at the end. So clearly these dinosaurs which were not at the top of the food chain, these smaller ones would have been living in the shadows of other dinosaurs, but they were using their arms to do more things. And then over time their descendants got bigger, probably the arms became less useful and the head took over most of those jobs at the arms had, but the arms did not become useless. They were still doing something.
You're always so interesting. What are you working on and thinking about? Now?
The big thing now in the world of dinosaurs is that we have a major anniversary coming up, and that's a two hundredth anniversary of dinosaurs. The very first dinosaur that ever got a name was Megalosaurus back in eighteen twenty four February of eighteen twenty four to be precise, in England, and it was the first time that scientists had recognized that there were these giant reptiles that used to live, whose bones were fossilized and could be and a lot of these bones were found by workmen and quarries, digging canals and so on. During the Industrial Revolution in England. First of all, and then farther around the world. So that anniversary is coming up. It's amazing for me to think about everything that's happened over the past two hundred years. You know, two hundred years ago humans had no real concept that dinosaurs existed. Now dinosaurs are everywhere, you know, we take them for granted. But we've learned so much during that time. And for me, we're working on this t rex project. That's one thing we're doing. We're doing a lot of work in my lab, not just on dinosaur evolution, but also on mammal evolution, how mammals took over from the dinosaurs. But one of the things we're turning our attention to is more about dinosaur intelligence and dinosaur senses and dinosaur cognition. Can we actually look at fossils and say more than just oh, this dinosaur had a big brain. Can we actually get into the head of a dinosaur. Can we make comparisons to modern day animals that might tell us something about the types of brains dinosaurs had. How many neurons they had, you know, the little powerhouse cells of the brain, what kind of behaviors they were capable of, would they have recognized their self in a mirror. Could they have navigated a maze? It sounds totally fanciful, But there's so much experimental work on the modern animals that are close relatives of dinosaurs, birds and crocodiles, and there's so much work now on cat scans of dinosaurs skulls that maybe we can bring these lines of evidence together. So I'm getting obsessed with that and part of a team. It's a big international team. My good colleague Larry Whitmer, a great dinosaur expert who you may know you know Ohio, is a big part of this. And then we have colleagues in Sweden, the Czech Republic who are some of the world's experts on animal cognition and animal brains, Masospuff and Problemiamic, and we're all starting to work together, us and our students about this. I have a new PhD student who is just starting, another student who will start next year, Ada Manning, and really mead here in Britain and going to be working on dinosaur brains and dinosaur intelligence. I think that is so fascinating and I can't wait to see what we find.
Will this lead to your third book?
Oh, the third book well, you know, I did the dinosaur one a few years back, which again thank you for the very kind reviewed for Fox News of the Rise and Fall the Dinosaurs, and I followed up with the one on mammals, the Rise and Rain of the Mammals. That's the last time we spoke on the podcast was all about mammals. And I do have a third in the works and I'm just starting to write it. It'll be with the same publishers, and it's going to be about birds. So it's going to be about the origin of birds and the history of birds, the one hundred and fifty million years of evolution that led to today's birds. Evolution that included routes of Earth history, penguins that were eight feet tall, terror birds, elephant birds, birds with wingspans almost the size of fighter jets, all the way down to you know, tiny hummingbirds. All of this great, incredible diversity of birds today, over ten thousand species of living modern data dinosaurs. Really, that's just the tip of the iceberg of what have been many more species of birds that have lived over time. Sometimes birds have been the top predators in their ecosystem. Other times birds have adapted to do all kinds of remarkable things with their wings and with their feathers, and I'm just starting to dive into this. I'm starting to write it now this month, the New Year is kind of my starting point here, and this will take me about a year and a half to write. It'll come out probably in twenty twenty six, but keep your eyes tuned for that, and of course I'd love to talk to you more about it when it comes out.
That would be fascinating. It's interesting that when you look in the Paleocene and the scene you could have imagined an alternative with the birds actually won out because they were certainly remarkable competitors, and the number of carnivorous birds that were not somebody'd want to run into in a dark alley.
No, and you're absolutely right. There were some ecosystems after the asteroid killed it dinosaurs, you know, t rex was gone. That job at the top of the food chain was open, the top predator job. Mammals eventually filled those roles, sabertooth tigers and dogs and cats and so on, but for a period of time in some ecosystems it was birds, birds that had survived the asteroid that got bigger and became the top predator. So in a way, dinosaurs kind of continued their rule at the top of the food chain in some ecosystems for many millions of years until mammals were able to catch up and finally take over. And I know that's going to be a big theme I'm going to explore in the book because whenever I do public talks, whenever I talk to people, especially kids, and I say, what birds do you want me to really talk about in my book, And almost all the time I hear somebody say the big giant predator ones that lived after the dinosaurs died. So I look forward to writing about those.
That's what makes it the most fun. I've always been surprised when you talk about flight, for example, that I think forty percent of all mammals or bats, yes, So competition for using the era is much more complex than people might.
Know it is. And I think we don't appreciate that about bats just because most bats are nocturnal, we don't really see them. I mean, they're small, they hide away, they're mostly sleeping or inactive during the day, but there's tons of them and they live almost all over the world. And dinosaurs, though and pterodactyls as well the reptiles that live during the time of dinosaurs. They evolved flight before bats, so dinosaurs had their time continue today of course, as birds bats are the newcomers on the scene. And really today there's such a wealth of flying animals. We're in an almost unprecedented time in Earth history where there's such a great diversity of flying creatures.
Steve, I want to thank you for joining me helping our listeners understand more about the dinosaurs and the auction world and extraordinarily interesting issues that we're beginning to learn how to deal with. I loved reading both of your books, so of course your latest book, The Rise and Rain of the Mammals, is actually a superb book. Then, because a dinosaur person, how could I not love The Rise and Follow the Dinosaurs? And I recommend both of them to everybody. And I think that having a childlike interest in the world that has been keeps you younger and keeps your brain open. And I appreciate you for being one of the great advocates of all of us understanding what's going on.
Well, thank you. That means a lot, and I appreciate you as well. You've done a lot for the field of paleontology. You've done a lot to keep this field in the public eye. Your interests, your enthusiasm, your work with museums, and the things you do, like say when you reviewed my book. These things all matter. So you know, a big thanks for me for your help with this field. And the last thing I'll just say is, you know, any of you listening, if you're into dinosaurs as much as the speaker and I are, and you're ever confronted with this opportunity to purchase a dinosaur at an auction, think about donating that to a museum. That's one of the ways to carry on a legacy in paleontology, to ensure that children that families for generations to come can also become enthused about dinosaurs.
Thank you to my guest doctor Steve Brussette. You can get a link to buy his latest book, The Rise and Rain of the Mammals, a New History from the Shadow of Dinosaurs to us on our show page at neut world dot com. Newt World is produced by Gingerish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guardnsie Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Ginglishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying news World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newt World concern up for my three free weekly columns at gingerishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is nuts World.