A supermarket tabloid once ran a front page reading “Space Probe Finds Dinosaurs on Mars.” That issue ended up pinned to the wall of the Montana dig trailer in Jurassic Park — and it’s the starting point for a wander through everything that connects palaeontology and space.
Travis and Alyssa cover the 1992 Weekly World News hoax and how it accidentally recreated the founding error of dinosaur science, the supernovae that may have triggered two mass extinctions, the asteroid ejecta you can touch in the Flinders Ranges, the hypothesis that Earth had rings while trilobites were alive, dinosaurs living on the far side of the galaxy, and NASA’s carefully-worded potential biosignature on Mars.
Plus: 65, Strange New Worlds, Love, Death & Robots, and why every screen dinosaur still says 65 million years when the answer changed in 2012.
Recorded on the 60th anniversary of Star Trek.
Papers and sources
Quintana, A.L., Wright, N.J. et al. (2025). “A census of OB stars within 1 kpc and the star formation and core collapse supernova rates of the Milky Way.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Royal Astronomical Society release: https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/violent-supernovae-triggered-least-two-earth-extinctions Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08286
Tomkins, A.G., Martin, E.L. & Cawood, P.A. (2024). “Evidence suggesting that earth had a ring in the Ordovician.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 646: 118991. (Monash University) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2024.118991
Fischer-Gödde, M. et al. (2024). “Ruthenium isotopes show the Chicxulub impactor was a carbonaceous-type asteroid.” Science 385(6710): 752–756. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adk4868
Alvarez, L.W., Alvarez, W., Asaro, F. & Michel, H.V. (1980). “Extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction.” Science 208(4448): 1095–1108.
Williams, G.E. & Wallace, M.W. (2003). “The Acraman asteroid impact, South Australia:cmagnitude and implications for the late Vendian environment” Journal of the Geological Society 160: 545–554.
Hurowitz, J.A. et al. (2025). “Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars.” Nature, 10 September 2025. NASA release: https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/perseverance/
McKay, D.S. et al. (1996). “Search for past life on Mars: possible relic biogenic activity in Martian meteorite ALH84001.” Science 273(5277): 924–930.
Schmidt, G.A. & Frank, A. (2019). “The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?” International Journal of Astrobiology 18(2): 142–150. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550418000095
Russell, D.A. & Séguin, R. (1982). Reconstruction of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauroid. Syllogeus 37.
Weekly World News, 16 June 1992. Cover: “Space Probe Finds Dinosaurs on Mars.” Interior, p. 24: “Dinosaurs on Mars!” Digitised in Google Books.
Transcript:
Travis (00:09)
Welcome back to Fossils and Fiction. My name’s Travis. I’m a media academic and a dinosaur nerd, and I’m joined by my co-host Alyssa Fjeld, who’s an actual palaeontologist, a PhD candidate at Monash Uni down in Melbourne. How are you today, Alyssa?
Alyssa Fjeld (00:25)
That’s me, Travis. I am enjoying the coming summer weather. Melbourne is finally sunny. It’s one of the few sunny days we get, so my windows are wide open. And I’m thrilled to be joining you here to talk about something a little bit wacky on the anniversary, the 60th anniversary of Star Trek.
Travis (00:43)
how exciting that Star Trek is turning 60, and so not just for that reason, but I there are two things that I like in life that I get really overly excited about despite being woefully underqualified to talk about. One is dinosaurs and one is space. And so I think I said to you a few months ago, let’s let’s see if we could do an episode that combines those two. So that’s what we’re doing, and it happens to be Star Trek’s 60th anniversary,
Alyssa Fjeld (01:10)
Travis and I have independently gone off and done a little bit of our own research on the topic in different directions and we found a bunch of cool things to talk about with you guys here today. I’m really excited, because we’re starting with something that is near and dear to my heart from when I was a child.
Travis (01:23)
Ha ha.
Alyssa Fjeld (01:24)
But Travis, I think you can introduce it better than I can.
Travis (01:27)
Okay, in the background of the Montana trailer in Jurassic Park, so to set the scene, Ellie and Alan have this trailer at their dig site in Montana. we see the interior of it when John Hammond comes down in his helicopter and takes them in to try and convince them to come and check out Jurassic Park. Now, that’s all well and good. A lot happens in that scene.
There’s a lot of dialogue, but on the walls of the trailer are multiple newspapers that have headlines like Space Probe finds dinosaurs on Mars. Which is fantastic. And I have noticed these.
over the years and I always assumed it was just made up for the film. But it’s not.
Alyssa Fjeld (02:12)
Right. No. So
the Weekly World News is a satirical publication that I know about in the US. It it it it used to be displayed next to all of the other magazines at the grocery store.
Travis (02:26)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (02:26)
And every time I saw it, it was something ridiculous. And I would beg my mom to buy it. And she’s like, honey, we can’t be giving these people money. And it’s like, I wanna give these pe like, mom, I know you listened to this. Thank you for buying me so many copies of the weekly world news.
Travis (02:40)
And so there was an edition of the weekly world news in June 1992. It was on film on newsstands when they were filming Jurassic Park, which was shot in in mid-92. And someone bought it and
Alyssa Fjeld (02:53)
Yeah.
Travis (02:55)
stuck it up there. The front now the front page of it talks about dinosaurs on Mars. And then there’s an inside there’s a double spread that says Space Probe finds dinosaurs on Mars. Now
There are a few screenshots of this floating around on the internet, but I also found the archived original on Google Books. So actually you can get a high quality version of these images from Google Books. we I’m gonna post them up on our Instagram account as well. And look, that’s fantastic. So that’s where we’re starting, right? Is we’re gonna start
by talking about space probe finds dinosaurs on Mars from the World weekly world news in
June 1992
Alyssa Fjeld (03:35)
all good weekly world news articles come with a photograph, a f a spread on the cover of the magazine. what was the one for this?
Travis (03:43)
So there’s a couple, there’s a couple of really good photos. There’s a photo of iguanas and these are just Galapagos marine iguanas and they’re labelled NASA photo to say these are the dinosaurs we found on Mars apparently.
But that makes sense because I I mean it makes sense in a kind of totally deluded way because of course one of the first dinosaurs was iguanodon and it was named
Alyssa Fjeld (04:07)
yes.
Travis (04:07)
and assumed to be essentially just a giant iguana.
Alyssa Fjeld (04:12)
Yeah. I mean it’s funny, isn’t it? Like we’ll we’ll see throughout this, but a lot of these space dinosaur concepts adhere a lot more rigidly to the idea of dinosaurs that’s more in line with that kind of like old timey lizard creature.
Travis (04:27)
they really abide by, you know, 1930s style dinosaurs rather than what we know even when it’s something from ninety two. So the other thing that’s in this is they actually have fake images from the Viking lander and it has like plausible telemetry captions that say Viking Lander one, camera one, it shows the Sun’s azimuth, I think.
taken, you know, when Viking landed in seventy six, so that was that was all accurate. So they kind of this is what they do, right? They kind of blend real things with completely outlandish stuff.
And there’s also
a hand-drawn artist’s conception of a Martian dinosaur called the Bellasaurus, but
Alyssa Fjeld (05:13)
Mm.
Travis (05:14)
it’s just an iguana.
Alyssa Fjeld (05:16)
So,
like of course it’s a like I imagine they just went to a pet store, you know? Like, don’t get it twisted. The Weekly World News was some high quality crackpot stuff, but there is a real Bellasaurus out there. Bellasaurus Sui was discovered in research by Dong Zimi. sorry, Dong Ji Ming in 1990. So about two years before this kind of came out. It’s a sauropod from the Xinjiang Formation bone bed. There’s about
17 juveniles. and they were about 16 feet in length, not 60. So that might be just a little bit of a I mean, how well
Travis (05:51)
A little bit of an exaggeration.
Alyssa Fjeld (05:53)
who I mean, first of all, I’m sure this was published in English, but like I’m there’s a lot of room for error in translation, and I want to be forgiving of these crackpots because they put a lot of the work in. it’s a bit of an obscure taxa. Like somebody did the research here, I think. maybe it was just coincidence.
But yeah.
Travis (06:10)
But I mean,
doing the research is like well, Google Google wasn’t a thing then, but like getting on the early
Alyssa Fjeld (06:16)
Yeah.
Travis (06:16)
internet and just searching for random things or finding random documents and then kind of half remembering them when you go into the office the next day and slapping together photos from different sources and claiming it’s it’s a entirely
Alyssa Fjeld (06:31)
Yeah, no,
that’s that’s what I was up to at age thirteen, except it was just to my one friend. I’m sorry, Laura.
sometimes they would get things wrong or you weren’t totally sure where it came from. But it’s like, you know, if you had an older cousin that half remembered something he learned at university and he’s trying to tell you about it, like it’s the same experience. It’s like weird older cousin simulator.
Travis (06:53)
Yeah, exactly. And so that’s how we end up with headlines that say dinosaurs on Mars, but it’s just like photographs of iguanas and drawings of Bellasaurus, which isn’t really the Bellasaurus and all these
Alyssa Fjeld (07:05)
Mm.
Travis (07:05)
other things. But then they also start quoting physicists and like
Alyssa Fjeld (07:08)
Mm-hmm.
Travis (07:10)
random people. And I’m not gonna name the people they claim because I’m pretty sure these are real physicists to whom to whom fake quotes have been attributed.
But then you get the classic non denial, like would neither confirm nor deny, and this is all in the text
Alyssa Fjeld (07:24)
yeah.
Travis (07:24)
as well. So it’s all like it’s just brilliant. Like it it’s it’s brilliant in a completely deluded way. And when I told you about this and I’m like, hey, this paper was actually the weekly world news and you said I collect these, I think that’s that was such a classic.
Alyssa Fjeld (07:42)
And there was just nothing else like it at the time and I still don’t think there is today. Like I I think that the the level of effort that went into these articles that were still jokes. Like if you if you were intelligent, you could tell it was a joke, I think. But I miss that. I miss that.
Travis (08:01)
there’s a line in in Men in Black where he’s collecting some of these kind of magazines off the shelf. And he actually says, this is the Tommy Lee Jones character. He actually says like that these are they’re true. Everything they put in these stories is true. And it’s like
Alyssa Fjeld (08:15)
Yeah.
Travis (08:16)
the men in black use them as their own investigative sources. And
Alyssa Fjeld (08:19)
Yeah.
Travis (08:20)
I’ve been
I’ve been binge watching X-Files lately as well, and it’s kind of the
Alyssa Fjeld (08:25)
Mm.
Travis (08:25)
same thing, is there’s there’s a group of guys in there who are kind of close to the truth all the time. And the
Alyssa Fjeld (08:32)
The lone gunman, yes.
Travis (08:34)
Lone Gunman, exactly. And they’re this they’re kind of close to the truth all the time as well. it’s in fact there’s a I just watched the episode where Mulder gets body swapped with an Area 51 employee and
And
Alyssa Fjeld (08:47)
Yes.
Travis (08:47)
and the employee ends up sitting with the lone gunman basically saying, like, yeah, we we invented that idea or and you guys you guys ran with it. So he kind of w was giving them deliberate misinformation, which was screwing up what they were assuming was actually happening out there. But my understanding of the World Weekly News or the Weekly World News is that it originally was a real paper. no, sorry, it was part of a business.
That i essentially this other paper, The Inquirer, went colour and so the black and white presses were sitting idle, and this guy, Eddie Clontz took over the the business and sort of said, what we’re gonna do is take the World Weekly News and start to create these sort of sensationalized stories. But it was just like a circulation strategy. They didn’t set out to actually be satirical.
And then by the late nineties, a decade later, they were, you know, really starting to push it up. And I think their tagline was the world’s only reliable newspaper. So yeah,
Alyssa Fjeld (09:52)
Yeah. Yeah.
Travis (09:54)
we we can like compare it to the onion as well, right? But the the
Alyssa Fjeld (09:59)
No, no,
Travis (09:59)
onion sort of as you said, if you’re smart, you know it’s not true. But I think there’s also an audience out there who thinks it is entirely true. Is that right?
Alyssa Fjeld (10:08)
Which is very
funny when they do buy it, you’re like, buddy,
Travis (10:11)
Whereas Onion assumes you’re in on it. World Weekly News kind of just takes it straight and if you buy into it, that’s your problem, not theirs.
Alyssa Fjeld (10:20)
I I so I was specifically collecting the issues about Bat Boy, which was a long-running arc about a cryptid. and it’s just so clearly a like a kid, like a bald child or a child in a bald cap
Travis (10:33)
Ha ha ha.
Alyssa Fjeld (10:34)
with pointed ears, and they’ve like photoshopped fangs onto him. but one of the really cool things about weekly world news is it I think it kind of gives us like this this sh-
It gives us this snapshot of what was going on in terms of the intersections between science fiction and prehistoric life. And I think some of that influence from what I was doing the research on, it was like there’s this whole concept of like lost world fiction, and then you had cryptids, and at some point in the mid-80s, you started to get this crossover with things like Dale Russell’s Dinosauroid which I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but
Travis (11:11)
it was the presumed evolution of Troodontids right? If they had continued on, yeah, that they would become kind of human like in their features.
Alyssa Fjeld (11:15)
Yes. Yeah. It’s like this it’s
very creepy lizard looking guy. He’s obviously bipedal. It’s like a Star Trek kind of alien, you know, it’s more human than it is dinosaur. But you had a lot of intersection at that point between people who liked dinosaurs and people who liked cryptids. And it was a media environment that was very friendly to putting these dinosaurs in unexpected places like space.
Travis (11:43)
I think it makes a lot of sense, like dinosaurs as cryptids kind of plays into the same the same sense of wonder and mystery of, as you say, the lost world, like could they still be out there? It’s it’s a really interesting trend. And the thing is, if we want to tell stories about dinosaurs, where’s the fun in just telling a story about dinosaurs as dinosaurs when you can make them chase and eat humans and interact with humans as well? So
Alyssa Fjeld (12:10)
Yeah.
Travis (12:10)
But but
there’s only like a limited number of ways to get humans and dinosaurs into that into the same mix. You’ve either gotta have the
Alyssa Fjeld (12:16)
Yeah.
Travis (12:17)
humans time travel, you’ve gotta have a Lost World type story, where the dinosaurs
Alyssa Fjeld (12:21)
Yeah.
Travis (12:22)
have somehow persisted into the current day.
Alyssa Fjeld (12:25)
Yeah.
Travis (12:26)
You gotta do something with space and time warp stuff where with
Alyssa Fjeld (12:30)
Yeah.
Travis (12:30)
which is still kind of either time travel or space travel or
It’s still time warpy stuff in the in the or still lost world. It’s just instead of lost on our world, they’re lost on another planet. So there’s just
Alyssa Fjeld (12:44)
Right, which is what they do. There’s
like a Voyager episode that I I didn’t know existed. And I was talking to a different palaeontologist and he’s you haven’t seen the Parasaurolophus Alien episode? And I was like, The what? yeah, but that is an episode of Voyager where the dinosaurs were super intelligent, developed space travel, just the Hadrosaurs, just Parasaurolophus,
Travis (13:06)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (13:06)
and invent a spaceship, and they fly into space on like a like a century ship.
And they’re still they got like little honkler horns and they chitter and it’s it was an episode. It was the episode of all time. It was interesting. but yeah, in this case it’s a it’s dinosaurs persisted after their natural extinction somewhere else, which is one of the forms this kind of takes. and if we look back at the the history of dinosaurs as well as the history of these kinds of like not necessarily space, but the stuff that was just before space.
So obviously we gotta start with iguanodon. So we talked about the iguanas of Mars, right? And iguanas are kind of how dinosaurs were thought to be at first when they started
Travis (13:48)
Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (13:48)
putting reconstructions in museums. You know, the legs were like to the side instead of beneath them. and the name iguanodon was given to this particular species because in 1825 the teeth kind of looked like how an iguana’s teeth looked. So, you know.
Naming in paleontology is complicated, but not always in in that direction. at this point in time they were reconstructing it basically like a giant iguana. So it it’s on all fours, it’s got the thumb spike out of its nose, because they didn’t yet realize that was a hand appendage.
Travis (14:19)
That it was
a hand hand spike, yeah. Because why would you have a spike on your thumb?
Alyssa Fjeld (14:21)
And Yeah,
exactly. Like i w if you don’t have the modern analog and you are a naturalist in the eighteen hundreds, that’s probably as good as you’re gonna do. I I think, you know, there were a lot of things they didn’t know yet about biology. And if we look at what like fantasy literature is doing in the space between the eighteen fifties and the nineteen nineties,
A lot of the early concepts of dinosaurs in space would have been this kind of guy. Like it’s an iguana, it’s in space, and the reason we’re putting it in this story is like mostly as a plot device, I feel, was kind of the function for a long time. But then it I think with the dinosaur renaissance that was happening in the nineties in 1992, you could kind of get these fun tabloid stories out of it because now we’re learning so much more about dinosaurs. It turns out maybe they’re smart.
Maybe they had feathers. What else don’t we know? Maybe they could be on Mars.
Travis (15:16)
Yeah,
maybe they’ve been there the whole time.
Alyssa Fjeld (15:19)
Yeah.
So a hundred and sixty seven years like it the domino meme, it starts with like iguanodon having the nose spike at the Crystal Palace and it ends with iguanas on Mars.
Travis (15:30)
Makes to it makes total sense to me, right?
Alyssa Fjeld (15:31)
That’s our lineage. That’s the lineage of our discipline.
Travis (15:35)
I look this makes total sense to me. And I you know, when I I actually did an interview with the Common Descent podcast with David and Will, and I think we were talking about the links even between space and dinosaurs there. about
Alyssa Fjeld (15:48)
no.
Travis (15:48)
kind of the the same
The the overall renaissance trends, right? So dinosaurs are kind of this exploratory thing from the eighteen fifties on, and they become the frontier of science. And then you get by the time you get into the space exploration era, the Apollo era, that is the exploration thing. And so then come the nineties, they’re both well established, dinosaurs have sort of faded off a bit, and it’s just makes sense to join them together. And this is where so
Although it had happened before that, the the nineties in particular was the place that that really became a thing. Dinosaurs in space was a thing at that
Alyssa Fjeld (16:27)
yeah.
Travis (16:27)
point. It’s not just magazines. Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (16:30)
It was it was in that Scooby Doo movie, you know, the one where they go to Roswell.
It was I mean, gosh, where wasn’t it? I feel like the nineties was so about this.
Travis (16:40)
Well there was also a
Alyssa Fjeld (16:42)
Episode two or episode movie, there was a Land Before Time movie about this. They sing a little song and then they disappear with a meteor. And Troodons It’s all coming together.
Travis (16:52)
See,
it all links together. But there’s also Dino Riders, right? Which is kind of
Alyssa Fjeld (16:56)
Mm.
Travis (16:57)
spacefaring civilizations that get cast back into time and the same thing. And that’s a, you know, it’s one of these 90s cartoons that is just made to sell toys. But the actual plot, as such as it is, is yeah, two warring factions go back to the Mesozoic and suddenly they’re riding dinosaurs and shooting each other from the top of the dinosaurs. That’s a great plot.
Alyssa Fjeld (17:16)
Which is I mean, it’s like
if Dinatopia was having a genre shift and got a little bit darker. but there’s
Travis (17:23)
Yeah. But it’s not any
different from sixty five either, right? The so the the Adam
Alyssa Fjeld (17:28)
Yes.
Travis (17:29)
Driver film that came out a couple of years ago does exactly the same thing. It sends
Alyssa Fjeld (17:34)
Yeah.
Travis (17:34)
kind of human looking aliens back into ti back in time and puts them in the Mesozoic in the Cretaceous, specifically right as the asteroid hits. Like, go for it. It’s it’s we’re
Alyssa Fjeld (17:47)
Incredible.
Travis (17:48)
s we’re still telling the same story.
Alyssa Fjeld (17:50)
Yeah,
I mean this is what, Ray Bradbury’s Sound of Fury from the eighties, seventies. And for this podcast, I also got this little masterpiece. Speaking of the dinosaurs are here and somehow we’re also here. Don’t worry about it. This is some sword and fantasy stuff. Or sword and planet, I should say. this is
Travis (18:08)
So this is a book
called Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffrey.
Alyssa Fjeld (18:12)
Yeah, so this lady also did Dragon Riders of Pern, which does kind of the same thing you’re describing, but with dragons. this is a story about this lady and her little Eohippus friend and this lumbering monstrosity. And I I got a little of the way into it. It’s well written. I can’t say the dinosaurs are like this though.
Travis (18:32)
No. Alright,
we’re we’re gonna come back to the fiction stuff
Alyssa Fjeld (18:35)
Yep.
Travis (18:36)
for now, but let’s let’s move on. The other way that space and dinosaurs are really intertwined that I think is worth talking about, or space and paleontology probably more specifically, is through mass extinctions, right? So at least three of the five mass extinctions have been caused by space stuff. or I at least are thought to have been caused by s by space stuff. So
we all know that the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact in the Yucatan peninsula was kind of the proximal cause of the direct cause of of the end Cretaceous and therefore the end of the dinosaurs. But a lot of research also points to the Devonian and Ordovician extinctions having been caused by supernovas. So again, this is just
this is not stuff that’s happening on Earth but coming directly from space. So there’s an article from the Royal Astronomical Society that says “at least two mass extinctions in Earth’s history were likely caused by the devastating effects of nearby supernova explosions, according to a study by researchers at Keele University.” so supernova is when a star explodes. The death of a really big, really old star, it explodes, sends out a huge
Huge amount of gamma ray bursts out into the universe. And if they happen to be close enough on a galactic scale, which is still not very close, but close enough, it could impact the planet’s atmosphere, it could cause things like acid rain, potential harmful ultraviolet radiation by changing the composition of the atmosphere or stripping away the atmosphere.
as well as the actual blast of gamma rays itself, which which can be impactful on Earth. So they these researchers believe that the supernova explosions could be to blame for both the Devonian and Ordovician extinctions, which occurred 372 to 445 million years ago respective respectively. The Ordovician
extinction killed sixty percent of marine invertebrates at a time when life was mostly in the sea and then the Devonian wiped out seventy percent of species. This is all coming from that article which I mentioned which I’ll put in the show notes. So yeah, we we think about just the comet, but actually even on a scientific basis there’s other reasons to think space and paleontology intersect in really cool ways.
Alyssa Fjeld (21:03)
Yeah, and a lot of this research came to us from outside the field of pure palaeontology, right? We had astronomers, chemists, geologists confirming this stuff. And most of what they look for is something called a boundary layer, which is a layer in the rock. It sometimes you can visually see it, sometimes you can only see it when you do tests on it, but it’ll contain a higher level concentration of platinum group elements that signal
That the layer is there, right? So these are elements that are very, very rare in our crust but are common in meteorites. So anytime you see that spike, you can see that you’re in that layer. You’d also look for things like shocked quartz, which is a specific type of quartz that only forms under really, really high pressure gradients. And if you’re seeing that in conjunction with these other things, usually that’s an indication that you’re at an impact site.
Travis (21:50)
Yeah, so this is how the Chicxulub impactor was found, right? The Al the Alvarezes came across or or sort of put together this question of why is there a layer of iridium all around the world at the same level? and by the way, there’s dinosaurs below it but not above it. So what what’s that about? And then
Alyssa Fjeld (22:04)
Yeah. Yeah.
Travis (22:07)
and then as you say, things like shocked quartz and spherules which
Then the spherules research, which is these little little collections of minerals that that have been melted and reformed, or tectites, sometimes they were referred to as and I’m sure someone out there will correct me on the science. some other research has shown that these tectites or spherules had been stuck or wedged into the gills of fish.
in North Dakota and so this is at the this is research on the Tanis site and
because of the growth cycle where the fish were at at that time of year it suggests that the we know the impact happened probably in spring because of that. So which is
Alyssa Fjeld (22:50)
Wow.
Travis (22:50)
so cool. Like we we can’t pin down the exact year. We can say I think the current estimate is 66 and a half million years ago but that’s not like to the exact year.
But we can
Alyssa Fjeld (23:01)
Yeah.
Travis (23:01)
say it happened in spring, which is pretty cool.
Alyssa Fjeld (23:04)
Yeah. I it’s just amazing what you can learn, like the specific elements of some of the discoveries that have been made in the past even just couple of years. there’s one that I’m really excited to talk about with you guys called the ring hypothesis here in a second. but if we’re talking about asteroids, you can drive to the Flinders ranges, walk up to the rock face and put your hands on a layer that has been thrown three hundred kilometers by an asteroid.
There’s a lot of neat stuff you can touch out there, but that’s one of the neat things you can touch. This is an impact structure in the Gawler Ranges of South Australia. It was a volcanic region, eroded kilometers below the original crater floor. The impact probably happened about 580 million years ago, so during the mid-Ediacaran. If you remember, this is a pretty important time for early evolution of life. We’re looking at simple cellular structures.
We’re looking at this formations of simple tissues, and then we see a pretty big explosion in life not too long after this. So it’s always important to think about what’s going on during these major transitions. The ejecta near the base of the Bunyeroo Formation in the Flinders Ranges is 300 kilometers east of where it should be. The officer basin cores to 550 kilometers with shocked minerals, small shatter cones, and iridium anomalies, which are all indications of impact strike.
It was a shallow sea at the time, like most of the Flinders ranges. debris would have rained down into that shallow sea and settled into the seafloor mud. So sometimes this would have even settled into those anoxic layers.
Travis (24:36)
This is something that also happened at the end of Cretaceous extinction, right? Because it hit in a in a relatively shallow area, it allowed it kind of a high a more high impact than it if it had hit in the deep ocean, I think, is my my understanding.
Alyssa Fjeld (24:49)
Right, and one of the ideas is that this particular impact would have has would have had an impact on life at the time. So this would have been before you get the Ediacaran fauna, this would have been during the time of the Acritarch which are a somewhat I think there’s controversy around whether Acritarchs represent early life or not. I I I can’t remember where the discourse is on that, but the idea being that this drove acrotark turnover and diversification,
Rather than the preceding period of glaciation. So this could be one of the things that was driving that evolution during that crucial period. But it’s really difficult to make these kinds of connections because the further back we look in time, one, the fewer rocks we have, the shorter our ability to narrow that.
band of time down becomes. We we don’t have those nice Eocene one to two million year intervals at that point. It becomes much more difficult to pin individual sites down. And especially with Acritarchs you don’t really have, I think, globally distributed species. So it’s a lot of things to kind of try and correlate. But it would be interesting if true.
Travis (25:52)
It yeah, I mean it sounds you’re you’re the expert on the on the Cambrian and the things that ran around during the during that period.
Alyssa Fjeld (26:00)
Like thinking about how they lived more than I like thinking about how they die. But
Travis (26:04)
Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (26:05)
one of the things that came out in 2024 that tickled my fancy immensely, and I think for many others was also quite fun to learn about was this pro proposal by Tompkins, Martin, and Cawood regarding 21 craters from the Ordovician spike. So between 466 and 440 million years ago.
All within like 30 degrees of the paleo equator, despite 70% of continent crusts sitting outside that band. So if you remember what the Ordovician kind of looks like, these are not continents that are kind of clustered at the equator the way they are now. So what might have happened, and this is what this paper is hypothesizing, is that a large asteroid passed within Earth’s Roche limit. So there’s a certain amount of distance that Earth or any other body that generates gravity can have from passing space objects, and if it goes
Be if it gets too close, you basically get sucked in. If you’ve watched Project Hail Mary, you know all about this. But when this asteroid is pulled in by these gravitational forces, when it breaks up in the atmosphere, it forms a debris ring sometimes. And this would mean material raining down onto the surface for millions of years, but it also would mean maybe.
That, you know, like if the Eurypterids popped their little heads out of their pre primordial oceans and looked up, maybe they could see the ring around Earth. Like some of the first eyes on our planet might have got to see something really special. but it was not a good thing necessarily for life because if we continue this speculation, if we extend it out based on what the paper’s saying, this is a ring that would have caused shadowing and contributed to the Hernantian ice house.
Which is no good. but the Trilobites may have lived there. They too may have peeped it with their little eyes, the my animals and their rings.
Mm.
Travis (27:56)
That is pretty cool. And it’s interesting because we we think, you know, when when Earth was forming, it was very likely that there was some sort of ring system around the Earth at the point it was forming, which is what, four and a half billion years ago. But to think, actually that it was much more recent than that, only half a billion years ago, right? That’s pretty cool.
Alyssa Fjeld (28:19)
Yeah. And again, it’s it’s still speculative whether or not the breakup of this asteroid would have created the type of debris field that makes the rings, but there was a lot of very cool paleo art being generated by some very talented people depicting this hypothesis. And I think that if we’re going to think about dinosaurs in space, now we can imagine even older prehistoric animals on a little Saturn analog. I like that for them.
Travis (28:42)
when you talked about the Audovician creatures coming out and looking up at the sky and maybe seeing a ring, it made me think of a moment. There’s a tweet from the actor Vincent D’Nofrio from twenty nineteen. I don’t know if you know this, and
Alyssa Fjeld (28:58)
I know this one.
Travis (28:59)
particularly why this is good is he Vincent D’Nofrio was in Jurassic World, of course, as Vic Vic Hoskins, the security guard.
So Yeah,
Alyssa Fjeld (29:07)
He’s been in a lot of things. He was Gomer Pyle.
Travis (29:10)
I mean he’s yeah, he’s he’s a legendary actor.
Alyssa Fjeld (29:12)
Okay.
Travis (29:14)
and you know I if I if I’m ever in a Jurassic Park film, I want my time on screen to end being eaten by a dinosaur, and Donofrio got that. So that’s that’s fantastic. exactly.
Alyssa Fjeld (29:26)
Yeah. He’s living his best life, but he tweeted.
Travis (29:30)
He tweeted, and the tweet was
I’m gonna just read the read the full thing here and then we’ll come back to come back to it. Pigs can’t look up. But I could pick a pig up one night and raise it to the sky and tilt this pig ever so gentle. I could make sure this pig’s eyes line up with the stars. Imagine seeing the stars for the first time. I want to be treated that kindly and see the stars for the first time. Now, that I don’t know why, but
You talking about the Cambrian animals just made me think.
Alyssa Fjeld (30:01)
I would tilt that
trilobite ever so gentle until the stars were in its eyes. I c that’s pretty, isn’t it? And that’s who knows what the first animal to look up at the stars and have thoughts about them was, you know?
Travis (30:17)
Well, th this brings us to another really interesting space fact, which seems kind of counterintuitive, but it’s basically that dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy. So let me now this doesn’t mean that dinosaurs weren’t on Earth. What it means is Earth was on the other side of the galaxy. And because Earth was on the other side of the galaxy, the stars were
unrecognizable. We we wouldn’t look up at the Cretaceous night sky and understand what the stars were. which is which is kind of unnerving, right? Because we we that’s that’s our for humans’ existence on the planet, we’ve used the stars and the night sky as guidance and to think but actually n not all that long ago, like a moment that’s very much in our imaginary, the Cretaceous, it
It was completely different. So let me put some real numbers around this. A galactic year is the sun, our sun, with all of the planets and everything else orbiting the sun, lapping the galaxy about once every 225 to 250 million years. And the very first dinosaurs stood up almost exactly one lap ago. So they would have been in sort of the same spot relative to the rest of the galaxy.
But it’s worth noting that everything else was moving at the same time, so it definitely would have been different. But it also means that when the first dinosaurs sort of emerged around 230 million years ago, if that was a full lap, then about 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous, it was about a quarter of a lap. So T-Rex wasn’t kind of across the galaxy, it was just around the corner, like
Quarter of a quarter of the clock around. But the genuine half orbit was at 112 million years ago or 125 around then, which is in the early Cretaceous. So yeah, dinosaurs existed sort of on the other side of the galaxy, relative to the galactic center, still on Earth. There’s no fixed grid here. We all orbit each other as we go. But I think that’s pretty cool.
Alyssa Fjeld (32:25)
Yeah, so the last time the sun was genuinely on that far side, the animals on the ground would have included the polar dinosaurs Victoria. the Umarella formation, I I can never spell this, but Leaellynasaura is a favorite of the Inverloch dig crew here. It is named after Pat and Tom Rich’s daughter. And this is a fluffy dinosaur that would have had large-ish eyes and a very long flushy tail in order to survive months of dark.
winter weather. So it was a very different sky they were looking up at and a very different world they inhabited. inverlock dig crew, please at me if I got any Leaellynasaura details
wrong. I’m nervous talking about your boy.
one of the things that I like to think about a lot anytime I feel like the world is crumbling and my degree is useless in the face of like climate change and stuff is I like to think about would there be paleontologists in space? And I think unequivocally, if we lived in like a Star Trek Star Wars universe, yeah, there would be. But also
If you think about it, if there’s life on other planets, it means there’s a history of life on those planets. And you always need people who are capable of understanding the evolutionary history of whatever race you’re trying to make diplomatic ties with. So, what’s going on in the world of non-Earth meteorites and extraterrestrial biology, xenobiology, if you will?
Travis (33:52)
Xenobiology
or astrobiology It’s
Alyssa Fjeld (33:55)
Yeah, yeah.
Travis (33:57)
it’s essentially a paleontology problem, right? Because trying to figure out if there was life on Mars a billion years ago is not that different to figuring out if there was life on Earth a billion years ago or
Alyssa Fjeld (34:07)
Yeah.
Travis (34:08)
what it looked like.
Alyssa Fjeld (34:09)
So part of that means that when any space agency like NASA is considering, for example, whether or not they are capable of finding evidence of life on Mars and sanitizing their rovers to prevent contamination of sites, they do have to think about our discipline’s standards of evidentiary proof for different things. So
Whatever a precambrian scientist looking at the rocks would observe and use as evidence for or against whether or not something is alive or organic in structure, that’s what NASA and these space agencies need to do. So there is a Martian meteorite, ALH 84001, discovered in 1984 that claimed to have fossil nanobacteria.
it might actually just be an abiotic structure. It’s not that the scientists were wrong. It’s that the standards for their evidence that they needed to have to prove that something was what they said it was changed. And you could see that the change that the claim changed to adapt with the evidence, which is how good science should work.
We also have a discovery in Chyava Falls in July of 2024. The preservation of leopard spots and poppy seeds in the bright angel formation of the Jezero crater sampled from Sapphire Canyon. So what are these structures, Travis? Can you tell us more about that?
Travis (35:28)
I can because I’ve I’ve I’ve read these articles and again despite not being an actual scientist I go off and read these things.
Alyssa Fjeld (35:35)
You’re a journalist, you’re doing your job.
Travis (35:36)
yeah yeah yeah call call it that. rather than just a total nerd with with a library library card. so yeah, essentially in this sample from Jezero Crater, they found what they think is a potential biosignature.
And so that’s what NASA actually referred to it as, is a potential biosignature.
So they were very cautious, more cautious than that earlier discovery you just mentioned, which was sort of yeah, announced in in well the the the fossil features were found in that meteorite in ’96, but the meteorite was found earlier. But everybody got really excited about that, and it’s since been disputed. So I think that really informed the way that this
Other one from 24-5 was kind of released to the public the way it’s been described. Essentially, what I’m saying is, I think if they had found this evidence two, three, four decades ago, there would have been a lot more excitement about it, but they kind
Alyssa Fjeld (36:33)
Mm.
Travis (36:33)
of have deliberately underplayed it as a result of that. And so they’re saying now it’s a potential biosignature, showing that these leopard spot.
or poppy seed elements within the rock, probably formed with under ancient water, from organic carbon, under chemistry that could be part of microbial metabolism. So basically lots of coulds, shoulds, woulds but yeah, it’s it’s sort of the strongest evidence we have that there was in fact at some point life
life on Mars. And this
Alyssa Fjeld (37:10)
Yeah.
Travis (37:10)
is what I think is gonna, you know, science fiction always goes to the big moment that we discover life elsewhere in the universe. or they discover us in in many,
Alyssa Fjeld (37:19)
Yeah. Yeah.
Travis (37:21)
many cases. But there isn’t probably going to be a big moment like that. It’s going to be gradual accumulation of el evidence to show that yeah, okay, there’s
Probable ancient life on Mars. And then maybe there’s and there’s some evidence to show that there’s some sort of organic compounds in the geysers erupting off off one of the Jovian moons. And so we’re gonna start to add that together, and maybe at some point somebody will get under the ice on one of those moons and find further evidence of possible microbes and those sorts of things and
We’re just gonna build up the layers over time until it’s essentially indisputable that there is life elsewhere in the universe. And then at some point maybe we’ll find some complex life or some microbes. But yeah, I think this this first step to me anyway is certainly a big move towards that. And NASA’s absolutely right to hedge it, to say
Not that they found life on Mars, but that they found potential biosignatures. And in doing that in a really careful way, using the evidence basis of paleontology
Alyssa Fjeld (38:33)
Yeah.
Travis (38:34)
on those rocks and on the Martian meteorites that have been found here on Earth and in trying to figure out what potential astrobiology might exist elsewhere in our solar system, let alone beyond, is is kind of an interesting
Wait, but I love the fact that this is a callback to, you know, where we started the conversation of with the weekly World News talking about dinosaurs on Mars.
Alyssa Fjeld (38:55)
Yes.
Yeah. So I feel like dinosaurs on other planets is a trend that kind of comes and goes. And it came in the 90s and there’s honestly quite a bit of alien dinosaur material been that’s been coming out in recent years as well. one of the things we could talk about would be how long it takes for science to reach the public. So you mentioned that now scientists tend to be a lot more cautious.
There’s also a lot more of us doing a lot more complicated work, a lot more inferential science. And I think it becomes increasingly difficult for the average person to understand how that research is conducted. So when we do make fantastic discoveries, it feels fantastic in the same way that like I think science fiction can sometimes feel really fantastic. Jurassic Park was based in
the science of the day about dinosaurs, but to the average person watching it, that was also the spectacle. So I think with what I would consider the continuation of or the modern dinosaur renaissance, we’re also getting just a a whole fresh wave of these guys. And as always, it’s really interesting to see how they turn them into aliens.
Travis (40:08)
Yeah, so well, you mentioned this issue of sort of science correcting the public expectation, right? So Jurassic Park has always said 65 million years in the past, which is I I my understanding is that that that was more or less correct at that point. But then we got 66 million years, and I might have even said 65 and a half before in our conversation, now that I think about it. But in 2012
Right, the the date of the KPG extinction was moved to about sixty-six million years. So it’s a million years difference, which in geologic terms is is not much, and in cosmological terms even less, but it’s still relevant to say, well, actually when we talk about the KPG extinction, we should say sixty six million years instead of sixty-five.
Alyssa Fjeld (40:55)
Yeah. I mean, there’s even debate over whether KPG is still a way to refer to it, right?
it was it used to be the KT boundary, now it’s the KP boundary, KPG boundary. You know, there’s been a lot of change in terminology within the field that is not caught on with the average studio executive, right? So like it is a very small error to have it off by one million years, but like surely when, you know, the guy who made 65 looks up
When did the dinosaurs go extinct, you know? He’s getting the right number. Why not just put the right number?
Travis (41:29)
Why not just put sixty-five a sixty-six instead of sixty-five, right? Yeah,
Alyssa Fjeld (41:31)
Yeah. Yeah.
Travis (41:33)
that’s exactly the thing. And I think that’s the Jurassic Park effect in some regard that it’s set things so firmly in the public consciousness. And we see that even with the dinosaur designs that we see nowadays. So every T Rex looks like the Jurassic Park T Rex, and it’s very hard to move beyond that.
Alyssa Fjeld (41:51)
Right, as Mark Witten discusses in his book King Tyrant, which you guys should check
Travis (41:55)
Ha ha ha.
Alyssa Fjeld (41:56)
out, call back to Mark Witten.
Travis (41:58)
Not to mention our previous interviews and Alyssa’s interviews with Mark Whitney, absolutely. So okay, let’s let’s just have a quick look at 65 and a few other kind of fictional accounts of dinosaurs and space as they as they intersect. So 65 is this film which came out in 2023, directed by Scott Beck and Brian Woods. It stars Adam Driver. what I what I found really interesting about this, and this is something that was not
in the public domain when the film came out. and by the way, this is spoilers. There’s a full spoiler chat here, so if you feel like you don’t want to hear it, that’s that’s fine. But this was not in the public domain, not in the ads, for example, when it came out. Is it just looked like these were human characters, but actually as the film went on, it kind of turns out they’re not, that they’re from a different planet called Samaris. And so essentially this ship crashes on Earth
After coming into contact with an asteroid storm, and we find that the Earth, that the planet that they crash on is populated by dinosaurs. despite not being human, they speak in English, and they look perfectly human, and there’s nothing really to distinguish them from not being humans, despite the fact that they are not, because they’re aliens. And I really feel like
I really feel like that was maybe added in late later that at some point
Alyssa Fjeld (43:15)
Yeah.
Travis (43:16)
something was cut out and maybe the film was even re-edited to make this be the case. But the other thing that happened is that the asteroid storm and particularly one of the asteroids that they collided with in their ship before crashing on Earth 65 million years ago, of course, they sent the asteroid on its way, the one that actually collided with the planet.
at the end of the film and that’s sort of supposed to be the big reveal that they caused the problem. So yeah, there’s a lot of problems with 65 but that one is kind of there as a a and it it’s a through line that is used in a lot of these science fiction stories.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:54)
Yeah, like I think I think 65, like a lot of mid-tier movies that are about this kind of stuff, it it does a good job of capturing how the public kind of thinks about this stuff sometimes. You know, it’s it’s a weird plot, but the way that they kind of imagine these dinosaurs and depict them, it’s like, well, this is somebody’s idea of what a dinosaur is, you know?
I don’t know why it always has to be that like the the visiting human analogs have some responsibility for the asteroid. Like that can’t just be a bad thing they couldn’t stop, but we can’t talk about this without talking about the new Star Trek Strange New Worlds episode, Vallis Marineris. that’s season four. It aired this year, very, very recently. A solar storm throws the enterprise back 65 million years.
Travis (44:38)
Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (44:39)
Landing party meets dinosaurs. The ship is captured by Martians who are at war with some insect species.
Travis (44:45)
Okay, so this
is the brilliant thing, right? That not only do we have on the surface of the earth humans from Earth, but we also have Martians. Yes.
Alyssa Fjeld (44:54)
And
Atlantis planet, bug creatures. This is like what I’m here for. You know, this is this is what Kirk would be doing this to in a TOS episode. so the Martian leader learns that Mars is a wasteland in our future, seizes the Enterprise’s antimatter fuel cells as a weapon, and it blows up the Atlantis planet, creating the asteroid belt.
Mars’s orbital shift and eventual death, and a fraction like a fragment of that breaks off and becomes the asteroid that kills the dinosaurs.
Travis (45:25)
So it’s more or less the same story that sixty five years.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:28)
Look, it’s better than the Voyager episode, okay? The super intelligent Parasaurelofuses
Travis (45:33)
Ha ha ha.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:35)
It’s hard to have a worse dinosaur space episode.
Travis (45:38)
There’s a Rick and Morty episode that does that too, that dinosaurs dinosaurs escape the planet voluntarily, and when they return, they’re very disappointed to find that primates are in charge rather than dinosaurs.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:50)
Honestly, I I I one of the things that I kept seeing was, well, there’s like some theories out there that dinosaur technology, if it had existed, wouldn’t have fossilized. And that theory was by like two people that got left out of a lot of different conventions and things, but it’s like I think that kind of stuck in the popular consciousness around the eighties. that’s when you got that dinosauroid, the Troodon th
Travis (46:16)
Mm.
Alyssa Fjeld (46:16)
alien thing.
Travis (46:19)
There there’s
Alyssa Fjeld (46:19)
But yeah.
Travis (46:19)
a line there was a line even in a I wanna say a New York Times, maybe New York magazine, one of those kind of publications that was a similar sort of thing, right? Saying essentially that geologic time compresses things so much that if you look at human human technological development, it’s only been
Alyssa Fjeld (46:38)
Mm.
Travis (46:39)
more or less three, four, five thousand years in terms of our our more advanced technologies.
Alyssa Fjeld (46:46)
Yeah.
Travis (46:47)
If you take that time period and compress it over geologic time, over 65 million years, into
Alyssa Fjeld (46:53)
Right.
Travis (46:54)
into something, it becomes a really thin layer that you essentially can’t see in the record. And that’s presuming there’s nowhere that it’s destroyed or crushed. And so if I I take this to be a thought experiment that if dinosaurs within the last
five thousand years of their existence had set up colonies and launched mining operations in the asteroid belt
Alyssa Fjeld (47:19)
Yeah.
Travis (47:20)
and dislodged one of those asteroids and center towards Earth, that the geologic record wouldn’t show evidence of that. I find it hard to believe that that would be the case, but anyway, it’s an interesting thought.
Alyssa Fjeld (47:34)
We gotta do is wait like
a hundred more years for them to develop warp drive, and then we gotta wait for some lady named Janeway to get blasted to the Delta Quadrant,
Travis (47:43)
Ha ha ha.
Alyssa Fjeld (47:44)
and then we’ll find out. They’re out there. They could be out there right now. but the interesting thing about the 2026 episode that we’re talking about is that it actually has some very coincidental timing with the discovery of where the Chicxulub asteroid may have come from.
Travis (47:59)
as I understand it, it was only a few years ago that researchers kind of more definitively identified that the asteroid that hit Earth was a carbonaceous chondroit from out beyond Jupiter’s orbit rather than a closer in asteroid. Whereas that’s actually kind of where this planet was that was destroyed in this Strange New Worlds episode. So it’s actually
Alyssa Fjeld (48:24)
Yeah.
Travis (48:25)
kind of
Again, taking parts of the science and maybe being correct.
Alyssa Fjeld (48:30)
So one of the one of the things Weekly World News did publish on occasionally is something called the Phaeton hypothesis. So the idea that there is an exploded planet somewhere in the solar system that is is gone, it exploded. that’s the phaeton hypothesis, and it is it came about in the 1700s, it was popularized by the Olbers It essentially proposes like an Atlantis but in space.
And the idea is that the planet would have blown up, creating a lot of the structures we see now, explaining some of the movements of these planetary bodies. But it doesn’t work because the total mass of the objects in the belt, if you squeeze them all together, would be about 4% of what the moon has. So it would not even be a moon-sized object at that point, let alone a planet. And the modeling says that the debris from an explosion wouldn’t do what the asteroid belt.
Does. It looks different if you just blow up a planet. It doesn’t work like Saturn’s moons in science fiction. But the exploded planet’s a better story, you know? Like we all want to see the Death Star blow up a planet. But yes, I think that was a really interesting intersection between my interests and space yet again.
Travis (49:40)
The other thing that’s worth noting about the s that Strange New Worlds episode is the title Vallis Marineris is from
Alyssa Fjeld (49:47)
Yes.
Travis (49:47)
a system of canyons on Mars that create visible lines on the Earth’s surface. And I think that they those canyons were the source of the speculation that there were in fact levees and aqueducts on Mars.
Alyssa Fjeld (50:03)
Yes, yes. That was the
Travis (50:03)
in the past. Yeah. So w
again from the very from the early astronomers that were able to see those features and looking at them assuming that they were human or or or alien made features.
Alyssa Fjeld (50:16)
Right. I mean that’s where we get John Carter of Mars, like the really early stuff, not just the bad movie with Keanu Reeves.
Travis (50:21)
The last piece of media that I want to talk about here is an episode of the Netflix anthology series called Love, Death, and Robots. And I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but it’s it’s a really cool, interesting series. There are some definite hits and misses, but the interesting thing is, I think a lot of people who who watch and like the series.
have different episodes that they think is the hit and the miss. And so that’s that’s for me always an interesting question with an anthology is not every story is going to appeal to every person. and if you watch you know you will find different ones. So I quite liked this, even though it’s completely absurd and
Alyssa Fjeld (51:02)
Yeah.
Travis (51:03)
also
It’s absolutely not by any means, I would say, one of the best episodes in Love, Death and Robots. But it’s
Alyssa Fjeld (51:09)
I mean Mr. Beast is there, so
Travis (51:12)
got Mr. Beast. And so, you know, okay, so the episode is from volume four, so the fourth season. it’s episode seven. It was released in 2025 and it’s called The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur. Essentially, it’s a death race in space on dinosaurs, which is
Pretty cool.
Alyssa Fjeld (51:31)
I mean who wouldn’t want to, you know? Like a little bit.
Travis (51:35)
Yeah, exactly. So we’ve got Mr Beast as the kind of MC for this whole thing, and so it’s like a Mr Beast death game in space, riding dinosaurs, right? So that’s even better. You just throw him in there too.
Alyssa Fjeld (51:46)
Yeah. It’s what he wants to be doing.
Travis (51:50)
Yeah, exactly. What we have is this marriage of these aristocrats
Lord Shal Chalon of Europa and a Duchess from Callisto, so again kind of you know in the far future where there’s space settlements and they’ve come together to celebrate their union with this blood sport. what happens is we have a a series of races or riders and they have to get on these giant triceratops. I mean giant triceratops not like this triceratops is a big animal but these are huge.
Alyssa Fjeld (52:19)
Okay.
Travis (52:19)
These are absolutely
huge. And then they fight each other from the from the backs of them. and so Mr. Beasts is saying things like, We salute those about to die. And you see one of the main characters so once they’ve kind of killed each other, killed a lot of the racers from the triceratops and people have been stampeded and everything else, then they bring
Alyssa Fjeld (52:39)
Of course.
Travis (52:40)
out a T-Rex, because of course. And
Alyssa Fjeld (52:43)
Of course.
Travis (52:43)
so the T-Rex
just eats one of the eats one of the characters, and then it also dies and then people drink the T Rex’s blood, which is just, you know, of course. Why not?
Alyssa Fjeld (52:54)
This is some
Klingon stuff.
Travis (52:58)
so I don’t I I don’t even know what to say about this, but it’s kind of great if you want to watch it. It’s but not great,
Alyssa Fjeld (53:03)
Yeah.
Travis (53:04)
not great from a story perspective or anything else, but just great because it has so many great elements that probably don’t work together but individually fantastic.
Alyssa Fjeld (53:15)
It’s like
if Warhammer and Dinotopia had a horrible, horrible child together.
Travis (53:22)
It’s very much also based on the like Roman gladiatorial thing of fighting big animals and killing them and then often consuming them as well. So this, you know, resulted in lions and elephants fighting in the in the Colosseums of Rome.
Alyssa Fjeld (53:39)
Like I’m not not convinced that Mr. Beast isn’t just the reincarnation of some kind of Roman emperor who this is That’s what I’m saying, you know, like this is what
Travis (53:45)
I c he’s definitely a Claudius, yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (53:49)
he this is his jam. He would do this every day.
Travis (53:52)
Absolutely.
Alyssa, this has been this has been a hilarious romp through Dinosaurs in space and I love it. it’s also a very different episode to what we usually do, but so I want to say to people out there listening, if this is something you’ve enjoyed, if you’ve enjoyed our little random conversation about dinosaurs in space, let us know. We’d love to
Alyssa Fjeld (54:13)
Yeah. If
there’s like a media and item that you want us to check out and discuss, or if there are any topics you’d like to hear us yammer about, I’m always happy to do a little bit of research. And of course we always want to give you guys the kind of content that you want and expect from us. So thanks so much for joining us.
Travis (54:29)
That’s right, we’re we’re
we’re content pigs, so we’ll we’ll serve it up.
Alyssa Fjeld (54:34)
And we will be tilted ever
so gentle.
Travis (54:36)
And on that note, we try and keep the podcast ad free now, but the best way for us to do that is through memberships. We have a member, Alyssa, which I’m really excited about. So I want to say, Paul, thank you so much for signing up for membership. And if you want to be cool just like Paul, go along to our Fourth Wall store, check it out, sign up for memberships. You get 10% off merch in addition to having your name shouted out here in the credits.
Alyssa Fjeld (54:59)
Bye everyone.
Travis (55:01)
Bye.
