Episode 157: Transcript
Episode: 157: Dinosaurs and Furries (with Riley Black)
Transcription by Alexander
Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, do you have a favorite dinosaur?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:03] I do. I get really confused, because I think my favorite dinosaur is the Brontosaurus because, like when I was a kid, Brontosauruses were just so cute with their long necks and their big floppy bodies. They seemed like the cutest and they're just like eating leaves off the trees and just hanging out. And then I read that Brontosauruses were canceled along with the planet Pluto like around the same time. It was just like all the Brontosauruses went to Pluto and then Pluto disappeared with all the Brontosauruses on it. And like, I'm really confused by that. I guess now they're Apatosauruses, but I just, I can't keep up, but I really fell in love with Brontosauruses when I was a kid. How about you, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:00:41] I just wanted to add that the guest that we will have in this episode wrote a book called My Beloved Brontosaurus about that exact thing, about growing up loving Brontosauruses-
Charlie Jane: [00:00:53] They were so cool.
Annalee: [00:00:53] - and feeling like a great loss. So my favorite dinosaur, currently, is the Brachiosaur. And that's because there's been new evidence I think in the last like maybe 10 or so years showing that they have all these air sacs and air passageways like in their sinuses in their head that might have allowed them to do all kinds of incredible vocalizations. And you know me; I love to just imagine that dinosaurs were a sophisticated language using civilization, much like our own. And so I like to think, “Yeah, the Brachiosaurs, they were like doing politics and like, you know, art and singing to each other.” So I love that about them.
[00:01:39] And the other thing I really like about dinosaurs is that they kind of indoctrinated me into loving science, because when I was a little kid in the 70s, I remember reading about the dinosaur extinction. And it was a huge mystery at that time, because it really wasn't until the 80s and 90s that it was established that there'd been this bolide impact that ruined the dinosaur planet. And so I was just fascinated by the idea that like there was this big mystery that like no one had solved. So I always loved dinosaurs for just getting me excited about scientific speculation and ground truthing and trying to figure out what had really happened millions of years ago.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:17] Hell yeah.
Annalee: [00:02:18] So dinosaurs were a lot of people's gateway into science, and that's just one of the many awesome things about them. You are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast where charismatic mega-fauna are treated like the divas they are. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. And my latest book is called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare in the American Mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:41] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer and also fantasy. And my upcoming book, which comes out next year, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
Annalee: [00:02:54] It is so good. I just finished reading the revised version, and it is like incredible. I cried my face off. So good.
[00:03:03] So today we are talking about the latest science on dinosaurs and especially their extinction, but also how they lived. And later in the episode, we will also be delving into a topic that you, our listeners, have requested many times. And that topic is furries. Luckily, we have a special guest who is an expert on both topics, which is incredible.
[00:03:27] Riley Black is an award-winning science journalist who has published several books about dinosaurs, including My Beloved Brontosaurus that I mentioned earlier. And her latest book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, won the AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books. She's also a furry. And when she's not digging up fossils, she writes about the cultural meaning of furry identity.
[00:03:50] Also on our mini episode next week, we'll be talking about pirates again. This time we're discussing Black Sails because I'm finally watching it. And I basically just need to tell Charlie all about how gay it is, but also how it's not gay enough and just sort of process my feelings about it.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:06] We're going to get into it. And speaking of which, you could be listening to that mini episode if you just support us on Patreon. You know, you can just give us a few bucks a month or whatever you can afford: the more, the better. But like anything you give us just helps keep this podcast going and lifts us up into the atmosphere where we can escape from the bolide cloud that's like wiping out all life on the planet. And if you join us on Patreon, we have a Discord where you can hang out and like get correct opinions 24/7. Correct opinions are always available in the Discord. And you know, you can just be part of our community. So check us out at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. All right. Let's get into the dinosaur times.
[00:04:51] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:05:24] Now, I want to welcome our awesome guest, Riley Black to the show. Welcome Riley.
Riley: [00:05:29] Thank you so much for having me here.
Annalee: [00:05:31] Yeah. So I wanted to get started with what's happening right now in the greater field of studying dinosaurs. Are there any new discoveries that are getting you super excited that you want to tell our listeners about?
Riley: [00:05:46] I mean, there's always something new. There's always new species and finding new skeletons of old ones. One of the things I'm most excited about right now is a lot of fieldwork that's going on; and it's ongoing, so we're only just beginning to see the results of this. But in Patagonia, right around the KPG extinction line... So as I'm sure we'll get into - most of what we know comes from North America. But we don't really know a whole bunch about what went on in the rest of the world. This is a global event. This is one of the big five mass extinctions, right?
Annalee: [00:06:15] Yeah.
Riley: [00:06:15] So we're starting to get new dinosaurs from like close to the boundary in South America. And we're starting to get a sense of who was around. What families still existed? What was the dinosaur diversity like? Was it sort of on par with how it was 10 million years earlier with something different going on? So we got a small sauropod, which I think is amazing. It's like a cow sized sauropod named Titanomachya that they named a couple months ago. And then we got a new Abelisaurus, something like Carnotaurus, if you know that one - the meat eating bowl with the horns sticking out over the eyes.
Annalee: [00:06:49] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:49] Wow.
Riley: [00:06:50] It's actually from the same formation, in fact. So we get new dinosaurs to kind of put together. But I'm really excited to see some of that come out.
Annalee: [00:06:58] And are those new species or just evolved versions of species that we'd seen that were 10 million years earlier or what?
Riley: [00:07:06] These are new species and they seem to live at more or less the same time as some of the ones that we knew before. So the new Abelisaurus, it comes from the same part of the formation as Carnotaurus did. But we also only have one Carnotaurus that's ever been found as famous as the dinosaur is. So this is all part of it, right? You get new species, but they're not necessarily evenly distributed or they might be separated by a million years, which to a paleontologist is like nothing. But when you think that's a million years, they might not have lived shoulder to shoulder. So we're just getting these new species and how they fit into their ecology. That's going to be the task going ahead.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:42] Are there like big questions about dinosaurs? Like, is there a big kind of global question about dinosaurs that we’re kind of in the process of answering with these discoveries?
Riley: [00:07:51] I don't think there is like a central dinosaur question beyond like, find them and dig them up. Like, where are they hiding? What are we missing? Oddly enough, it's kind of funny. We're often missing the middles. We don't know a whole lot about... or let me back up one moment because otherwise this won't make sense. The age of dinosaurs is divided into the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, right? So beginning, middle and end. We know a lot about the early and late parts of each of those periods. Not so much about the middle.
[00:08:19] We don’t know much about the Middle Triassic, Middle Jurassic or Middle Cretaceous, when a lot of like our favorite groups are getting big and doing interesting things. So it's like we get big Tyrannosaurs and Ceratopsids and duck bills and stuff at the end of the Cretaceous, but we don't know a whole lot about the formative period: the issue zero for these dinosaurs. So that's, I think, what people are looking for.
Annalee: [00:08:40] And what about your own fieldwork? I know that you often spend your summers going out in the field and digging up fossils or working with museums on fossils that they have. Do you have any trips planned this summer or have you already been doing some stuff?
Riley: [00:08:53] I thought this was going to be a quiet one. It's been a little bit weird since the pandemic or since the pandemic started. We had those two gap years where like a lot of networking was generally lost and people are really just getting back out there. But I have a couple of trips that I'm hoping to join later this summer. One is to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Southern Utah. And it's part of the reason I moved to this part of the country. Part of the reason I live in Salt Lake City is because it's from about 75 million years ago. So it's the same age as dinosaurs that you find in Alaska, in Alberta, in Montana, in the Late Cretaceous. Lots of Tyrannosaurs and horned dinosaurs and things like that.
[00:09:30] But it's new. It's relatively novel in terms of paleontology's attention to it. So there's lots of good stuff to find, basically. So I'm hoping to get out there and find something really cool. I found lots of bone bits before. I found a Dromaeosaur - or a raptor - claw last time I was out. But it would be fun to find something articulated. And then a little bit after that, I'll go even older, pre-dinosaur time, to the Permian. Because I love my non-dinosaurs, too. So this would be like when our proto-mammal friends, things like Lystrosaurus, were wandering around.
Annalee: [00:10:01] The synapsids.
Riley: [00:10:02] Yes.
Annalee: [00:10:03] So tell us what's interesting about that period for you, the pre-dinosaur period.
Riley: [00:10:08] It's kind of funny, right? Because we think of the age of dinosaurs as this big, almost inevitable thing, but it wouldn't have happened without a mass extinction.
Annalee: [00:10:16] Right.
Riley: [00:10:17] So you basically knock the synapsids out of prevalence, give reptiles a shot to basically out-breathe proto-mammals and begin that age of reptiles. So it's kind of like this look into an alternate timeline where, you know, previously, you know, had, you know, fishapods and things coming onto land, the evolution of the amniotic egg, all that wonderful stuff that lets life stay on land. And the Permian got its feet under it and it was really going. And then it's the worst mass extinction of all time.
Annalee: [00:10:44] Yeah.
Riley: [00:10:44] So I think it's wonderful to see things that look nothing at all like us, things that look like crocodile dogs, but they're more closely related to us than to any reptile. So I like that it's this alternate history almost.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:56] Crocodile dogs.
Riley: [00:10:56] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:10:57] I'm all about crocodile. I feel like wasn't that like a Roger Corman movie, Crocodile Dog? I'm pretty sure it fought Sharktopus.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:04] That's what we should be de-extincting. Screw mammoths.
Annalee: [00:11:07] I know, seriously.
Riley: [00:11:08] Just skip right to the hybrids. Just make what us mad scientists want to see.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:13] Exactly.
Annalee: [00:11:14] So does that mean that the Permian was a period when mammals might have evolved more quickly? Like if we hadn't had the diversion into the age of dinosaurs, we might have had mammals more quickly because of the synapsids who are these kinds of mammal reptile hybrids.
Riley: [00:11:29] I mean, we might not have had mammals at all. That's the interesting thing, is that, you know, part of what made mammals what they are, especially the miniaturization, you know, getting all those jawbones jammed up into the ear. And a lot of the things that come with small size, like a heightened metabolism, that came from living in a world that's full of all kinds of reptiles. So if the proto-mammals - the synapsids - continued, you know, basically unabated if there was no mass extinction, or if it was only a minor crisis, we might not have gotten mammals. We might have gotten a lot more sort of reptile-like things. It's a whole speculative zoology sort of menagerie that you could imagine. And things like this might not have actually evolved.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:08] Oh my god, so a whole alternate history.
Riley: [00:12:11] Yeah, this is like a deep divergence. Because mammals, the first mammals show up to about the same age as the earliest dinosaurs, about 235 million years old. And reptiles, basically, this is like a Batman/Joker thing, right? They kind of molded us into what we were.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:23] Yeah.
Riley: [00:12:24] And without that influence, the entire history would have been different.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:28] So if you're someone who writes alternate history, forget about the South winning the Civil War.
Riley: [00:12:32] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:33] We want a different outcome to the - is it the end Permian extinction? Is that what we're talking about?
Riley: [00:12:38] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:39] Okay, so you, Riley, you wrote this amazing article for Popular Science last year called “How Did Dinosaurs Have Sex?” and it's got this, I love the illustration of these two dinosaurs in bed holding cigarettes.
Riley: [00:12:51] That's what the fingers were for, just for holding cigarettes.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:53] Yeah, clearly. And like, you know, I never thought about this question and how hard it is to figure out their mating patterns. What do we know so far about this? And like, what are we finding out?
Riley: [00:13:06] I mean, I love talking about this topic because there's so little that we actually know, but it's a good prompt to talk about, you know, what we know about animals in general, mating habits, and physiology and how it works. So nobody has yet found a pair of dinosaurs in the act. It would be wonderful if - it would be terrible. I've written about a couple of these discoveries because we've found things like turtles that have died, you know, while mating. And it's like, that's, you know, the little death should remain little. It shouldn't be the death. We could conceivably find non-avian dinosaurs together like that, as yet we have not. We could also find track ways or footprints because we imagine there had to be a whole bunch of positioning, kind of leaning on each other to make this work with those big tails in the way.
[00:13:49] So a lot of what we know is really what we hypothesize and it's based on skeletons. You know, you might as well take your two favorite dinosaur figures and try and mash them together and figure it out because it's not too far from where we're at. Yeah, we want to know. And if you're something like an alligator or a croc, you know, you're buoyed up in water. You've got, you know, that's your G thing going for you. But on land, you know, imagine a T. rex - 40 feet long, nine tons - two T. rex of that size trying to mate and not fall over and break their legs. Like, it must have been astonishing and hilarious at the same time. I don't go with the prehistoric planet, you know, very soft, very romantic. It would have been ridiculous. Like we would have been laughing our asses off if we could have seen dinosaurs do it.
Annalee: [00:14:30] So what would they have done with this big tails? Like what do we, what are you, what is the latest science tell us about, um, let's just say T. rex sex.
Riley: [00:14:38] Yeah. I mean, it likely would have been head-down, ass-up because you need to get like the access to cloaca. As far as we know, no one has found this yet. We've found one fossilized cloaca so far. So basically the cloaca is, you know, the one service exit and entry point for all sorts of bodily tubes.
Annalee: [00:14:58] A lot of birds.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:58] Right. Yeah. Birds have it.
Riley: [00:14:59] Yeah. Birds have, crocs have, and many birds, especially what we think of as more archaic birds: things like ostriches, emu, as well as ducks, waterfowl, uh, tinamous, things like that. They have intermittent organs. The males have a phallus. So there's a way to bridge the gap. So at least we have a little bit of leeway. It's not like, um, songbirds where it would require the cloacal kiss.
[00:15:19] They were probably a lot more croc-like in their anatomy. So meaning that there would have been basically an organ to transmit sperm and there also would have been a clitoris as well. This is something that's a way understudied. Like we didn't even know there were snake hemiclitores until last year, for sure.
Annalee: [00:15:33] Wow. Today I learned.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:35] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:15:36] That's amazing. I'm so glad snakes are having fun.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:38] Yeah. Why was this discovery not on the front page of like the New York Times?
Annalee: [00:15:43] I think we know.
Riley: [00:15:44] I will send you a link. That was basically my article. Yeah. Like since the 19th century, we've talked about one type of organ, but not the other. So in terms of non-avian dinosaurs, they would have had to bring basically the cloacae close together, like reasonably close together to make this work. It's like that they shifted their tails out of the way and one was kind of leaning on the other or throwing a leg over their back. But that's just looking at the skeletons and kind of guessing. Like who knows? I know there's a book called All Yesterday's that imagines prehistoric life sort of things that would be possible. We can biologically justify, but we haven't seen exactly in the fossil record yet.
[00:16:20] It's like, what if Stegosaurus was hung like a turtle? Turtles are terrifying in terms of their genitals. And if Stegosaurus or armored dinosaurs were similar, that might answer some questions for us. But as yet, we don't have direct evidence. Soft parts don't fossilize all that well. But someday, with all the fossil rocks and stuff out there, someday somebody is going to find something relevant to this. Because we have dinosaur courtship. Just briefly, we have like a dinosaur courting ground, like a leck, where these big theropods, things like Allosaurus, were scratching at the ground, much like a lot of birds do today. So it's like, it's possible to find these things. They're just exceedingly rare.
Annalee: [00:16:56] So that means that Allosaurs were doing kind of like mating dances.
Riley: [00:17:00] Yeah, it probably wasn't as elaborate as our favorite sort of Attenborough bird moments. But they were at least doing like their best little scratch at the ground, trying to show off a little bit.
Annalee: [00:17:11] I want to imagine that they used those feathers for something amazing. You know, they had like some incredible display, but I leave it to you to uncover that. So this kind of brings us to something that I see in a lot of your work, and I think is really important, which is that you always write about dinosaurs really engagingly as existing in ecologies, right? I think that in popular media, oftentimes dinosaurs are like kaiju, like you see one, and it's like the big dinosaur bounds out of the forest. And we never see how they're part of this like vast, interconnected web of life forms that are all dependent on each other, and maybe eating each other, maybe you know, symbiotic with each other, helping each other out. So what I'm wondering is, where in the fossil record do we find the evidence for these relationships between animals, between animals and plants? How do we find that? And why is it really important to think about that?
Riley: [00:18:06] It comes from, you know, the heart of what paleontology is, and that we're always comparing the past and the present, the things that we know are true today about sort of animal biology. We can project that to some extent in the past, like we haven't found a dinosaur heart, but they must have had them, they were vertebrates, and we can start to study that sort of thing. But there's also direct evidence. So one of my favorite examples, and there's quite a bit of it, is leaves that have been munched by insects, or bored into or otherwise. Because leaves, number one, it gives you a great idea of what the local ecology was like. The leaf shape kind of tells you something about what rainfall and humidity was like, that if you have basically big, smooth, like how waxy leaves with the drip tips, these points where like water will drip off so algae doesn't collect.
[00:18:49] Then you're probably in a very humid, like tropical rainforest. And if there are insects munching on that leaf, then you can say something about the kinds of insects that were around, maybe not the exact species, but there are insects filling these roles in the past. And if there are insects, then we start to think about, well, what's eating those insects? And if we're finding fossil lice or aspects of prehistoric nests or things like that. So often, you know, in paleontology, you pick your study group, right? You pick your particular group of organisms, you become an expert on dinosaur anatomy.
[00:19:19] But as you said, like, it's just kind of a dinosaur in a white room by itself - that we need to look at the other clues in terms of even the rocks themselves. Was this a pond? Was it a floodplain? Was it a desert? Giving some kind of context and then a sense of what to go looking for based upon even what we see now, like in what kind of environment would you expect to find a fossil ant nest or a termite nest? And then what does that say about what other critters in the ecosystem are eating? So I kind of have the privilege in that I'm an amateur and I'm a science writer that I can pull all these threads together. I don't need to have a consistent, you know, research program to focus on one thing. But I think it's so important to have that broader view that even unto themselves, all these animals were ecosystems, you know; like we have feather lice from the Cretaceous. So dinosaurs had parasites - things living on them or even in their guts - bacteria to help them break down plants and things like that. So I love bringing that view to people that really that what you see is this big monstrous thing is just the entry point to this whole world.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:19] So, let’s talk about extinction. You published a recent book, Last Days of the Dinosaurs, and it's about kind of who survived the extinction, but also kind of the latest evidence of what it was like at the time. So what actually happened in the immediate aftermath of the extinction event and who survived and why did they survive? And, you know, just kind of walk us through it.
Riley: [00:20:39] Yeah. So the funny thing is what drew me to the story in the first place is we usually think “big rock hit planet” and it's kind of obvious what might happen.
Annalee: [00:20:46] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:46] Yeah.
Riley: [00:20:47] This was the worst case scenario in so many different points. There have been impacts of larger craters that did not do what this one did. It was the particular low angle, probably somewhere close to a 45 degree angle. You had a six mile chunk of rock from like the early formation of the solar system that hit in what's now the Yucatan Peninsula. And it hit a lot of ancient limestone. So basically the remains of ancient reefs. And that's going to be important a little bit. So basically these rocks that were created by life.
[00:21:13] So you have the initial impact. You have, you know, tectonic activity far from the site, you know, as far away as Montana. You have, you know, tsunamis that might've been worldwide. There's a paper that came out last year saying it wasn't just the immediate area in the Pacific Ocean. We have evidence of these tsunamis created by the impact. And so you would have felt rumbling. You probably wouldn't have seen that classic image of the comet coming down to the sky. It was too fast. There's just been a regular Spring day and, you know, the Hell Creek Formation. And then all of a sudden the ground is shaking. And over the course of that first 24 hours, all the debris from that impact - so the pulverized rock aspects of the asteroid itself - it's thrown up into the air. It's spread basically through the atmosphere. And it's coming down all over the planet. These little specks that individually, it doesn't make a lot of difference, but there's enough friction on each of them altogether that it creates an infrared pulse. And the air temperature rises to about 500 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's enough to make dry forest litter catch on fire. So unless you live in the water or it can get underground, there's no way to go.
[00:22:19] Like, people think of the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs as this protracted thing, it might have been within 24 hours of impact for the vast majority of them.
Annalee: [00:22:28] So they would have been, like, essentially boiled alive by the atmosphere. I mean, also things would have been lighting on fire, but that 500 degrees, like, yeah, you're just cooked.
Riley: [00:22:38] Absolutely.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:38] Wow, I really did think it was like as months of, like, slow...
Annalee: [00:22:43] Sorry, continue with the story.
Riley: [00:22:45] I mean, you can leave it there and be just like, “Oh my gosh.” I was thinking about it last night. If there was a hit like that now, like, we’d be fucked. Like it’s, “Oh my gosh, it would have been the worst, you know, it's the worst single day that there was.” But following that, you have all this smoke, you have all this debris in the air. You also have all that stuff that the asteroid hit. So it was a limestone, right? It's full of sulfur-based compounds. We know from stuff we've done to the atmosphere that sulfur-based compounds, when aerosolized, are really good at reflecting sunlight back out into space. So you not only had the famous dust cloud, but you also had sunlight being reflected back enough that photosynthesis, like, almost ceased. Like, you can see this in the oceans where these little photosynthetic organisms called Cocculus, these little disks that make spheres when all together.
[00:23:33] Before the impact, you had those that photosynthesized and those that could photosynthesize and feed on, like, basically detritus in the ocean. So after the impact, you only have the ones that can survive on basically the detritus and the debris. All the photosynthesizers are gone. So photosynthesis almost stopped...
Annalee: [00:23:49] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:49] Wow.
Riley: [00:23:50] …Entirely on the planet for a period of at least three years.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:53] Holy cow.
Riley: [00:23:53] So we had a horrific first day. Three years of photosynthesis, like, severely curtailed, if not stopped. And yet, many critters survived. There were mass extinctions of mammals or mass extinctions of lizards and snakes and birds. All the groups that we think of, survivors, also suffered heavy losses. We lost entire groups, like the non-avian dinosaurs, the flying Pterosaurs, Mosasaurs, these big sea gulling lizards, ammonites. Ammonites actually made it a hundred thousand years after and then kicked it for reasons relating to their own biology. So even if you made it through all this, you might have been weakened enough as a group of organisms that basically the clock was just ticking.
[00:24:29] So entire groups, about 75%, I think, of known species. Most of those are marine. About 75% of the species we know about vanish entirely. And you wind up in a world within a million years, though, getting the first legumes, like bean plants, the first rainforests. You know, mammals are growing large at such a size that their brains are tiny. So, you know, right now I've got my cat, Joey, and my German shepherd, Jet, right next to me. If Joey's brain was in Jet's body, that's like the size difference for brain to body size. Mammals are getting so big, so fast that their brains cannot keep up evolutionarily. So it's this great spring back that happens within about a million years after the impact. But those first 24 hours to three years, yeah, that it was really bad.
Annalee: [00:25:15] Why did mammals grow so big so quickly afterward? I mean, obviously, a million years is not quickly, but like relatively quickly.
Riley: [00:25:22] Yeah. So you have animals that are getting to about like black bear size when previously the largest mammals that we know about from the Mesozoic are about the size of a badger. So it's pretty significant.
Annalee: [00:25:32] Yeah.
Riley: [00:25:33] Part of that is because the non-avian dinosaurs are gone. They are not sort of influencing habitats anymore in such a way where it's like, you know, mammals are thriving, but mostly a small size. So now that pressure is off. They can grow to larger size and not be conspicuous enough to be picked off by something most of the time.
[00:25:51] You still had some giant birds and Titanoboa and things like that, but the non-avian dinosaurs are out of the picture. And part of this just changes the vegetation. You have angiosperms that create a lot of fruits, things like, you know, the aforementioned bean plants and things like that, that basically more nutritious punch for each bite are proliferating. Prior to the mass extinction, it was the conifer relatives, things like monkey puzzle trees and John Redwoods, that after the extinction, because of an infusion of iron into the soils after the impact. So all that pulverized rock, as it came back down to introduce iron back into soils, enriched them. You have bean plants adding nitrogen. It's really favorable to fast growing angiosperm flowering plants that make a lot of good, like, fruit and other things like that to eat.
[00:26:35] So it was basically all this is coming together just the right time that you get these dense forests that are full of food and mammals evolutionarily could like write their own check, basically. The world was completely open.
Annalee: [00:26:47] Yeah, their predators are gone and they've got like really yummy beans. So were legumes survivors, partly because their seed, their seeds were able to withstand that heat or we don't necessarily know, or I don't know; I'm very excited about legumes.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:00] Yeah.
Riley: [00:27:01] So far as we know, the first legumes show up like after the impact within about a million years. The oldest one we know about comes from a place called Corral Bluffs in Colorado from about a million layer, about a million years after impact. So they're one of the groups where just like similarly to how reptiles like dinosaurs took over after the Permian extinction. Just by breeding really quickly, you know, breeding relatively young, having lots of offspring and angiosperms are doing the same thing. The Paleocene where they grew faster, reproduce faster and basically took up space before other plants got there and were able to diversify very, very quickly.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:33] So what you're saying is the paleo diet should be a lot of beans.
Riley: [00:27:37] A lot of. I mean, that's your protein.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:40] Eat beans.
Annalee: [00:27:41] Well, this is the paleo gene diet, right? It's like different, different diet, but yes.
Riley: [00:27:48] So I want to eat like my earliest primate ancestors.
Annalee: [00:27:50] Yeah, exactly.
Riley: [00:27:50] Just bugs and beans.
Annalee: [00:27:53] Amazing. So I wanted to finish up talking about dinosaurs by asking you about advising the creators of the recent Jurassic Park movies, which I mean, all of us let out a collective cry of sadness that they didn't introduce feathers. So what was that like? Like what kinds of stuff did you get to talk to them about?
Riley: [00:28:11] I mean, I will give them credit for adding feathers on some, but it's sort of, it was very like here and there. You'd get a feathered raptor. But it swims in ice water like it's from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In terms of advising them, I basically made myself a pain in the ass until they called me. I remember in the lead up to the first film, when it was announced, there would be a fourth Jurassic Park film writing articles. I was blogging for Smithsonian at the time and National Geographic and some other places, right? Like this is what I would like to see as a longtime fan of the series, as a dinosaur lover. Like, this is our chance to do something updated, something new, introduce new species, get feathers on there, do all this great stuff.
[00:28:48] And apparently, this caught the attention of people at Universal. And I was primarily working with the marketing team, so I wasn't working on the films themselves. But if you've ever bought a Jurassic World toy, many aspects of the video games, even if you go to the Jurassic World ride in Universal Studios Hollywood, some of the dino facts, I sent them around like placards, like in the cue line. It was mostly that kind of stuff where you couldn't really touch the dinosaurs in the movie, per se, because, you know, they have the dimensions that they do. They need the descriptions that they have.
[00:29:18] I can't say that Baryonyx would be a, you know, sort of non-aggressive fish eater when it's chasing after somebody, but that all these other critters that were going to be part of the toy lines and everything else, that they wanted to have like the exact scientific measurements for insights into their behavior. And I've kept it up through the three films. You know, I still get a call from them every now and basically be their dino fact checker.
[00:29:41] And I guess I don't know whether I survived the island or not. So here's something funny that they did. They made me the resident paleontologist for Jurassic World. So I'm doing my actual science advising, but they made a page for me on the official movie website. You can get a dinosaur tour from Riley Black when you come visit the island. But then we know what happens to the island in Jurassic World. I don't know whether I lived through it or not.
Annalee: [00:30:07] Oh, you did.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:08] It's really up to how much Chris Pratt liked you. So I want to know what you thought of The Good Dinosaur, because there's been a lot of Pixar discourse lately. And like, what did you think of The Good Dinosaur?
Riley: [00:30:19] I remember sadly being a little bit disappointed by it. I thought it was like a great idea and they didn't go far enough with it. They were going to do, you know, the asteroid never hit and dinosaur evolution continues unabated. I know that we need to have anthropomorphic characters and it was, you know, went through all this production trouble. It was supposed to be very much like an inverted boy and his dog story. But I feel like in terms of the creature designs, I wanted more speculation. I wanted to see animals. You know, dinosaurs they had never seen before. You know, 66 million years is a lot of time to play with. And the fact that we still wind up with Tyrannosaurs and sauropods and things like that.
[00:30:58] There's one scene, I think it's with the Styracosaurus that has all these little forest creatures amongst our horns that come out. And those are pretty neat. They did some really rad designs for those. I love that part. But it was hard for me to get into, you know, aside from the story and everything else, because I felt like they had this blank check to do all these wild things with dinosaurs, with their anatomy, with their coloration, really like do that Dougal Dixon speculative zoology stuff that I grew up loving. And they just gave us Sinclair dinosaurs from 1967, basically.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:30] Oh, man. I know we have to move on, but just really quickly, if the extinction hadn't happened 66 million years later, do you have thoughts about what dinosaurs would look like today? Like how they might have evolved or...
Riley: [00:31:41] Yeah, it's hard to say for sure, obviously, right? Because it's the timeline that we will never see, based upon what was around back then. I think in that time period, we might have seen the extinction of the Tyrannosaurus. It's hard to be an apex predator and hang on, you know? We think of Tyrannosaurus as the ultimate, but they were really just at the top between 80 million years ago and 66 million years ago. And they have a history that goes back 150 million years. So basically, they're around the Jurassic. They were around, like, at the same time as Stegosaurus' little pipsqueak raptor things. And it took basically all these other apex predators disappearing before they got their shot. So...
[00:32:19] I think that, you know, Tyrannosaurus probably went and went out, and you would have had more things like Utahraptor. You would have had Dromaeosaurids stepping into the larger carnivore rolls, evolving in different ways. I think you would have seen duck-billed dinosaurs maybe get some more ornamentation, because they loved their head care. Those were the ones like Parasaurolophus, the big horns sticking off the back of their skulls and things like that. I think we would have seen sort of the disappearance of some of the prominent groups at the time, and some of the existing ones, especially the small ones, would have got weirder and started proliferating in different ways. And there might have been some larger mammals.
[00:32:53] I still think that somewhere there is not as big as a, you know, Apatosaurus or something like that, but that there's a big Mesozoic mammal somewhere. They had that potential in them. We have proto-mammals that got to elephant-sized, you know, in the Triassic, living amongst the earliest dinosaurs. So I would have really lived to see what mammals would have done under this basically continued prevalence of the non-avian dinosaurs.
Annalee: [00:33:18] I mean, yeah, because we have enormous mammals in the ocean. Like, why not on land? You know, I mean, I understand some of the reasons why not on land in terms of physics, but, like, still, like, we've got blue whales. I mean, I'd love to see a land whale.
Riley: [00:33:31] Yeah. And it wasn't just like a planet that's like, you know, dinosaur, dinosaur, dinosaur everywhere you turned your head. There were environments there would have been fewer. We have environments, especially in ancient South America, where crocs are taking on dinosaur-like roles. There are crocs that we thought they were dinosaurs, and we started finding their teeth, only to find out they're basically evolving to fill in some of the same ways. So I think as we look elsewhere around the planet, basically outside our favorite spots in Western North America and in parts of East Asia, there's going to be a lot of surprises. And I can't wait to see how that shifts sort of what our dinosaur visions are like.
Annalee: [00:34:05] Awesome. OK, so we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk to Riley about another area of her expertise: furries.
[00:34:17] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:34:19] So Riley, thank you for going with us on this journey from dinosaurs into furries. Our listeners and folks in our Discord keep asking us to talk about furries. So at last, we have captured a real life furry. Here you are in the studio in your natural habitat.
Riley: [00:34:35] Yes, tranquilized in the wild.
Annalee: [00:34:37] In your natural habitat among your books. So I'm wondering, first of all, like whether you see a connection between your lifelong interest in dinosaurs and your furry identity. Is there a connection? Or is it totally unrelated?
Riley: [00:34:51] I mean, I wound up dating a dinosaur. My girlfriend's fursona is an Allosaurus. That was not a factor in why we started dating. But I do love Retro the Allosaurus. Basically, if you think of a highlighter, pink and yellow highlighter colored Allosaurus. But in terms of just like how that fit into each other, I think it's partly just imagining yourself as something different. So especially as a kid who grew up in a household that was not very safe for a kid to be in, I looked up to dinosaurs as critters that could be my friends, maybe protect me from things. But just spending that imaginary time, imagine what it would be like to be in those places, maybe even be a dinosaur myself.
[00:35:33] And even though there wasn't necessarily a straight line to furries through it, I mean, I grew up in the era of dino mania. There were anthropomorphic dinosaurs everywhere, like Denver the dinosaur, McDonald's doing promotions with cassette tapes that you could bring home dinosaur stories on them, Dinosaucers, you know, Dinosaurs, the Jim Henson TV show, like just everywhere. So I feel like the DNA is rather close. And I know a lot of people in the paleontology community are furries as well, or scalies as the case may be. But I feel like there is something there about just a love of the fantastic and the colorful and the strange that's shared DNA between them.
Annalee: [00:36:13] So wait, so there's furries and scalies, but is there a feathery? Like is there like if you're if you're into a feathery, a feathered creature, are you a furry or a scaly?
Riley: [00:36:22] I guess it depends on what kind of critter it is. Usually, honestly, I wish that I could tell you exactly my apologies to anybody who belongs to this group. And I don't know. Usually you just go with the bird people because they hang out all together. All the bird people tend to fly together. I think they're closer to scales, given they're technically reptiles and scalies typically encompass things like dinosaurs and dragons or really anything that's kind of saurian in nature. But that's sort of a subset of furries in general. And that's the only group that I can think of that really has a specific name before we get into specific BDSM communities or things like that within furries.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:58] So you wrote an amazing article for The Guardian coming out as a furry years ago. And what made you want to go public with this aspect of your identity? What made you feel like it was important for you to come out?
Riley: [00:37:09] Yeah, I feel like there are two reasons. And I appreciate you asking that because there's sort of the proximal reason, and the ultimate reason. Proximal reason is, you know, I'm a writer, I freelance, I have to pitch stories. I felt this is something that furries were getting into public consciousness at the time. And this is where you have waves, right? Where you kind of have a subculture, a particular community. They start to get some attention. There's pushback against them. And then we have the wave of people saying like, “No, it's actually OK. This is what's actually going on.” And that was, I think, around the time that I wrote that piece in 2016. So it felt like, OK, like I can make two hundred bucks talking about ‘please stop hating on furries’.
[00:37:51] But just more personally, I think that was it was me trying to come out more broadly. So, you know, in hindsight, I can see a lot of different things, but at the time I was still closeted. So, like, I didn't know that I was dysphoric. I had no idea that I'd see PTSD, that I'm autistic, that I'm queer in all sorts of ways. And I feel like that first coming out was really a matter of me starting to show myself and claim myself.
[00:38:17] I grew up in a household where I was not safe to be a kid, which led me to a marriage that was abusive. And I felt like I couldn't be myself. I had to come out to my now ex-spouse. You know, it felt so weird to like come out as a furry, as if it was anything bad. And I felt that sense of like, “No, I am shrugging off this shame. I am claiming at least a piece of myself” was a large part of it. I wanted to prove that I could do it for myself. And it really, like, furry led me to transition.
[00:38:48] Getting a reference sheet, which is a very common thing in furry culture – you have a reference sheet of your character that shows all their silly details and colors, so when you get art someone has something to work from. You know I had a character when starting out – a jaguar with black fur and glittery blue spots that presented male like I did at the time. And a friend gender swapped that reference sheet. And I was like, “Yeah, that's it. That's absolutely it. Like, I need to start HRT immediately.” So it was pretty significant in terms of the egg crack that just took the whole shell off.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:19] That’s amazing.
Annalee: [00:39:19] Yeah. Well, like you said, it's about showing who you really are. And then also, I think doing that in public and having people see you. And then sometimes they see more than you see yourself, you know, like this person who was like, hello, maybe this is a girl. And you're like, oh, yeah, maybe so. At the same time, I feel like still there's misconceptions about furry life. There's so much just people making fun of furries, like both within fandom, like where we spend a lot of our time, but also just in the wider culture. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on why it is that, you know, so many groups, marginalized groups, even like fans and queer people still feel like they can look down on furries.
Riley: [00:40:02] Yeah, I mean, to your point, your listeners won’t be able to see it. But I wore my tank top to this as “Yiff in Hell”, which basically from that old saying we maybe slung our way sometimes. I think it's because, you know, so much of the fandom, it does have a sexuality to it - where it's involved in sexuality in kink spaces. And it makes people uncomfortable because of the broader culture that we're in. So it's always easy to talk about the weird stuff that furries are doing, because you know we're doing it versus the weird stuff you're doing at home. And it's easy to point the other way.
[00:40:34] It's also, you know, it is like saying “I hate disco” where there's a surface level, maybe aesthetics thing, but also a lack of knowledge of how this plugs into queer history and community and what it means. So I feel like it's an easy knee jerk thing to say. Because, you know, you're basically punching down on a group that everybody, you know, punches down on. And to some degree, I'm not going to say that we deserve it, but, you know, furry community is full of folks who, you know, make a lot of money and software and can afford the fursuits and everything else. We deserve being made fun of a little bit, or at least teased, I think, a little bit about what we do. But the outright, I think, shaming, I think that that comes with it. Or why would you want to be a furry? Does that mean that you do all these other things? I think it's easy enough to stop. All you got to do is look us up. We're everywhere, really, you know? But it's just because we mark ourselves out as different. And I think in general, this is a time of, you know, just more overt queerphobia and transphobia in the world. And people can feel like they're venting those feelings and beliefs while it's safe, because they don't have to recognize that we're predominantly a queer community. They don't have to recognize the history or how we're plugged into these things. It's just easy to do because everybody else is doing it.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:57] Yeah. Anytime there's a group that's like noticeably different, it's just like easy for us to displace all of our weird anxieties and hostilities onto them and just scapegoat them. It's not my favorite. So let's talk about misconceptions. Like, what are the biggest misconceptions people have about furries and furry life?
Riley: [00:42:15] I mean, even though I've acknowledged that there's, you know, a good bit of sexuality in the film, which I think is good because I think it's an open space to really find and express yourself. I know it was important for me in that aspect, especially like in art. I have a whole bunch of trauma around this, but if I see art of it or I get it in art and I have positive feelings, that can be a healing thing. But I think people think that it's exclusively a sexual fandom, that you basically show up to play. And that's all that there is to it. I mean, we've had that since like CSI and like some magazine articles in the 90s.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:45] CSI.
Riley: [00:42:46] Yeah. Oh my goodness. I remember seeing that episode like when it aired and being like, but I think the furries are okay, though. I don't know why we just like them. I think one of the other misconceptions about the fandom is that anything that is anthropomorphic is automatically furry. So that like Disney's Robin Hood is automatically furry. Zootopia is automatically furry. A park mascot is automatically so. And that's not the case because the thing that I love about furry is that it's a self-creating community.
[00:43:17] We don't really have sort of necessarily canon films or books or things like that. There's stuff that's created by the community. There's stuff that we appreciate because it plugs into our interest. But it's really like we're celebrating each other. Really, there's a community of people that you say, I want to be a part of this and we choose you back. And if somebody says like, I'm not a furry, then they're just not. Or if something is, you know, a corporate mascot that seems like very furry, like it's not a furry. It's just an anthropomorphic representation. We might love it. We might bastardize it in all kinds of art and everything else. But furry really is the community that we make it.
[00:43:53] And just, you know, another basic one that's always good throughout there is like, you don't need a fursuit or to get a ton of art to be part of the community. There are people who are musicians who do competitive video gaming, who love tabletop, who just go to dance. It really is a community that like, it's kind of like a pride parade every time there's a convention. You don't need to, you know, break the bank to get a fursuit to be part of it.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:14] I was just going to say, I do know a lot of people who don't consider themselves furries who had a sexual identity when they watched the Disney Robin Hood movie. Like, I think that that is a thing.
Riley: [00:44:23] Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, I was just getting electrolysis before this conversation. I was talking about shark movies with my electrolysist and she's saying, “You know what, I really like when animals eat people.” It's like, “There is a word for that. And I'm not sure if you're ready to have the vore discussion.”
Charlie Jane: [00:44:43] Oh, my God.
Riley: [00:44:44] So there's always lots of...
Annalee: [00:44:45] Well, I feel like now, especially that we're like cheering orcas on who are like, you know, capsizing yachts, like there's just a lot of like cross species solidarity going on, you know, against certain kinds of people who really should be eaten, perhaps even non-consensually eaten.
Riley: [00:45:01] I mean, but this is the thing that I love for a fandom is that it seems to be this thing apart, right? It seems to be this strange subculture to some, but it's really open and has so much within it that I feel like if somebody wants to, you can find something for yourself. You can find something that you love and a way to express yourself in it. It really is about freedom of expression in exceedingly queer ways.
[00:45:22] And, you know, the anthropomorphic animal aspect of it, yeah, it is a central part. So it makes us furries rather than Trekkies or something else. But within that, as long as it's like, yeah, I sometimes think about what it'd be like to be a dog. Like, all right, yeah, come in. You want to go to the arcade and play some video games? There's something for everyone.
Annalee: [00:45:40] Dog video games. Yeah, it's so interesting because as you were talking about like the connection to the queer community, I kept thinking about how drag has become so widely… It's less accepted in some ways, but it's been widely represented in the media. And now there's drag queens who are on Instagram doing everything from like talking about astronomy to like talking about pet care. And it's just like a thing. And I mean, it doesn't feel to me like the furry tradition is that much different from the drag tradition. It's about like putting on an elaborate costume or even not elaborate to express who you really are, like putting on something to show off in a sense. And so I guess that leads me to my question, which is, what are your favorite representations of furries in media? Like, I feel like the CSI thing comes up a lot as like, oh, like “that was not good.” So what are good ones?
Riley: [00:46:34] Unfortunately, I feel like we haven't had a whole bunch of good ones, just because there hasn't been very much furry representation in general. I remember there was like a throwaway line in Mascots that I think - the most recent Christopher Guest movie - about like, you know, everyone's in mascot costumes and they're worried about like a furry snuck in there because they're going to try and have sex with everybody or something. And that's the last thing I can remember.
[00:46:55] But I will say it's like, we do have a lot of crossover in geeky community, especially in like VR chat, you know, gamers like Sonic Fox, watching Games Done Quick, which is going on while we're recording this. There's a number of people that my girlfriend's like, “I was like, oh, yeah, I've been at a convention with that person.” It's like, I feel like in a lot of online geeky and nerdy spaces, there are furries that have sort of rose above the prominence of the fandom itself and are a little bit more visible.
[00:47:23] But in terms of just like broader representations of someone who is like definitely a furry, definitely a part of the community and film or comics or other things, I feel like I just it just hasn't really been there in the same way that like drag has, which, you know, if you write things,
Annalee: [00:47:39] Yeah, I know. Yeah, listeners, this is your time. Like, please.
Riley: [00:47:44] Oh, my gosh, I would love to like even just in a comic scene, like, you know, someone carrying their fursuit head going to the fridge to get a, you know, drink and just having a chat with someone before hitting the dance floor again, like just those basic moments are right there.
Annalee: [00:47:56] Like normalizing moments, which is what we live for. OK, so Charlie and I wanted to finish up by doing a lightning round with you of fur or not. So we're going to name some characters and you're going to tell us if they're furry and why or why not. So the first one: Wolverine.
Riley: [00:48:15] Not. And Wolverine's an X-Man. And so, like, so far as despite wearing a costume and carrying the carrying the name, there is nothing particularly wolverine-ish about Wolverine.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:29] What about Wolfsbane?
Riley: [00:48:30] I think that's getting closer. If I saw Wolfsbane at a convention, I’d say, “OK, yeah.”
Charlie Jane: [00:48:36] Yeah, I mean, I got to write Wolfsbane and I think of her. She turns into an actual wolf.
Riley: [00:48:42] Yes. Yes. And then we're getting into like the therian and community and that's a whole other constellation of things.
Annalee: [00:48:47] Yes. Yeah. I feel like werewolves maybe might fit better. OK, so next one, Caesar from Planet of the Apes.
Riley: [00:48:56] No, because he's just living as a as an ape the whole time. There's no costume or transformation.
Annalee: [00:49:03] So it has to be a costume. Yeah, it can't be just an anthropomorphic ape.
Riley: [00:49:08] It has to be some kind of alter ego. Yeah. If we saw Caesar in his private moments being like, “Oh, geez, I can't keep the Caesar thing up like any longer.” That's OK. Now we're getting into the right territory.
Annalee: [00:49:17] 24/7. That's very hard.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:21] I mean, we already talked about Robin Hood, the animated Robin Hood. Do you think that that's just not because, again, they're just Fox people the whole time?
Riley: [00:49:29] I would say just for its importance to the fandom. Yes, like I feel like that is something that we've like is not necessarily under like the formal definition, but that we have embraced and said, no, that this is our thing now. This is so formative to so many furries, you know, so many Disney films, even films that you know, furries have worked on through the years that, yeah, I think it's a significant enough entry point.
Annalee: [00:49:54] OK.
Riley: [00:49:54] then I'm going to say yes to Robin.
Annalee: [00:49:55] All right. So the Robin - Disney's animated Robin Hood - movie certified furry. What about, speaking of Disney, The Little Mermaid? She transforms.
Riley: [00:50:05] That is true. She transforms. T.F. is very big amongst us furries. It is a partial transformation, which I don't know if I've ever seen somebody's character or a fursuit that is sort of a centaur in that or a mermaid or something hybrid of that nature. I think that, you know, if Ariel has the fish tail but her front half became like a squid or something, then I'd say yes, definitely furry. But keeping the humanity sort of face to it moves it just beyond the reach of the furry dome, I think.
Annalee: [00:50:41] So that counts out centaurs too. Centaurs not furry.
Riley: [00:50:44] That's right. The Centaur World centaurs, I would say yes, like just squeaking in, but like it just needs… Like, Fantasia’s centaur? No.
Annalee: [00:50:53] All right. OK, this is good. I feel I'm learning a lot here. OK.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:56] Me too.
Annalee: [00:50:56] So the animals from Animal Farm, because they are kind of people, but they're also farm animals.
Riley: [00:51:05] Yeah, I feel like that falls under the same Caesar thing where if you added sort of anthropomorphism there, because that's the big thing about what makes furries, right? It's thinking about it not as a sort of sentient animal, but a person taking on animal attributes. So I think it's a similar thing, what I just said about Caesar, where it's like they're kind of coming out from the wrong direction to count for furry.
Annalee: [00:51:25] OK, so uplifted animals are out.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:27] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:51:28] But in science fiction, it's called uplifted animals. I hate that phrase, but I think people know what it means.
Riley: [00:51:32] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:51:32] All right, Charlie, do you want to ask the last one on our list?
Charlie Jane: [00:51:34] Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm just going to pivot. I know you wanted to be asked about a different one, but I want to ask about Izutsumi from like Dungeon Meshi, because we've been talking Dungeon Meshi obsessively. And like Izutsumi, she's a cat girl, but also she used to be full human. And then something happened.
Annalee: [00:51:49] She's like half cat. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:50] And now she's like a half cat, half human girl. But she used to be full human. So she actually has she's had a transformation. How about Izutsumi? Does she count?
Riley: [00:52:00] Yeah. And not to spoil it, but there are those couple of episodes where Izutsumi is acting very, very catlike indeed. I think Izutsumi might be like the line at which we make the division on one side or the other. So where we find balance. I think the anthropomorphic aspects are there, the animal aspects are there, the sort of losing some of humanity at certain points. So I'll say yes, Izutsumi is kind of like the furry border before we get to not furry. And I mean, so many of us like love that show and Izutsumi is great.
Annalee: [00:52:36] Also, my nephew has been warning me that there's vore later, kind of.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:40] I mean, from the standpoint of the monsters, it's all vore.
Riley: [00:52:44] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:52:45] That's true. But I mean, like I probably shouldn't spoil it, but yeah.
There's someone who is more anthropomorphic who maybe it's eaten a little bit.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:54] Okay.
Riley: [00:52:55] Just a little eating.
Annalee: [00:52:58] Just a little eating.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:59] I mean, it's a show about eating.
Riley: [00:53:00] I mean, these are conversations that we have in the community where it's like, I'm into maws, not vore. It's like, okay, but good to know.
Annalee: [00:53:06] You know, like vegetarian animals only.
Riley: [00:53:09] Absolutely.
Annalee: [00:53:11] Can vampires be furry?
Riley: [00:53:13] They would have to be some kind of...
Annalee: [00:53:15] I mean, they are eating people.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:16] I mean, Dracula turns into a bat.
Riley: [00:53:17] Yeah, yeah.
Annalee: [00:53:19] And sometimes they turn into wolves.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:21] Well, that's werewolves.
Annalee: [00:53:22] Well, no, werewolves turn into wolves, but also sometimes vampires turn into dogs. It's kind of weird, but they do sometimes. Like the children of the night. I am one with the children of the night. But yeah, it's mostly bats.
Riley: [00:53:36] And the cats are kind of...
Annalee: [00:53:37] Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I guess girl vampires turn into cats. This is like getting into it.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:42] Okay. Have you seen the Doctor Who episode Survival?
Riley: [00:53:46] I don't think I have seen that one.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:47] Oh, you have to watch it and tell me what you think. It's the last ever episode of classic Doctor Who. And basically they go to the planet of the Cheetah people. And like, if you engage in violence on the planet of the Cheetah people, you will turn into a Cheetah person. So everybody starts turning into Cheetahs. And I watched like a behind the scenes thing about the episode. And apparently they had a company lined up that could do really amazing, like beautiful, realistic looking Cheetah person outfits. But then at the last minute, the producer found somebody who could do it cheaper. And so, the Cheetah people are just like, it's not convincing at all. But like the Doctor is trying to keep his companion from turning into a Cheetah person. And she's kind of slowly becoming more of a Cheetah. And like, they're all, they're basically just riding around on horses in like little Cheetah costumes.
Riley: [00:54:34] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:54:34] Are they anthropomorphic Cheetahs?
Charlie Jane: [00:54:36] They are. We're going to watch it. No, I think that's tonight. You should watch it.
Riley: [00:54:41] Well, while you're still on video, I know this doesn't help your listeners per se, but I did bring the fursuit hat.
Annalee: [00:54:47] That is so beautiful. It's just like your online icon.
Riley: [00:54:52] Yeah,
Charlie Jane: [00:54:53] it's gorgeous.
Annalee: [00:54:54] We'll include a link in our show notes with a picture, but it's a beautiful velvety black, like jaguar head with like sparkly blue spots and a beautiful blue mane. Lovely. That must be custom.
Riley: [00:55:09] Yes, it is. Yes. The whole suit was I went to a particular maker and it's got all kinds of like vents and a little fan in the head.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:14] Wow.
Annalee: [00:55:16] Oh, a fan in the head.
Riley: [00:55:17] You get to make a duct tape dummy. So basically, you hold onto two broomsticks while your friends cover you in duct tape and cut you out of it. And you send that to the maker so they can make the suit to your exact specification.
Annalee: [00:55:27] Amazing. That is so cool. All right. Well, thank you so much for spending all this time talking to us about your science side and your fur side, which are not in contradiction. That's like all a continuum. It's part of one human being. And so where can people find your work online or elsewhere?
Riley: [00:55:44] So I'm primarily on Bluesky and social media at restingdinoface.bluesky.social. I update my website more frequently now about upcoming books and things like that: rileyblack.net. In fact, I have a new book coming out in February called When the Earth was Green about paleobotany and all those wonderful plants we're talking about. So between those three things, I think you'll get the most of it.
Annalee: [00:56:06] Awesome. Great. And then in all of her books, of course, are available anywhere. Books are sold and you should definitely buy all of them. They are so good. So thanks again for joining us and thanks for listening.
[00:56:18] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:56:20] Thanks so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just somehow found us somewhere, you can subscribe. You can subscribe anywhere that they let you subscribe to podcasts, like at the bank, at the gym, anywhere you want.
Annalee: [00:56:33] On the corner, in the mud pond.
Charlie Jane: [00:56:34] In the mud pond. That's where most of our followers are, is in the mud pond.
Annalee: [00:56:37] We're like actually the number one podcast in your local mud pond.
Charlie Jane: [00:56:41] We rule the mud pond.
Annalee: [00:56:42] We do.
Charlie Jane: [00:56:42] We are like the mud...
Annalee: [00:56:44] Mud kings.
Charlie Jane: [00:56:44] Monarchs. I don't know.
Annalee: [00:56:46] Sorry, mud monarchs.
Charlie Jane: [00:56:46] We're the mud kings and queens. And if you like us, please leave a review. It helps a lot. It really makes a huge frickin' difference. And you can find us on various social media platforms. We're on Mastodon, Patreon, Instagram, Bluesky, at Patreon, we’re patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:57:03] Thanks so much to our incredible, just brilliant producer and audio engineer, Naya Harmon. Thanks a ton to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for our great music. And thanks again to you for listening. If you're a patron, we'll see you in Discord. We'll be back next week with a little extra mini episode. Otherwise, we'll see you in two weeks. And stay safe out there.
Annalee: [00:57:24] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:57:24] Bye!