How Did This Animal Survive the Worst Mass Extinction Event Ever?

[@stanleyhyde8529]

I'm a little surprised you guys didn't mention it yourselves but fossilization is not a common event. Unless an animal is buried quickly chances are it won't be fossilized. The fact that there are so many of those little guys found their population must have been mind blowing. You wouldn't be able to go anywhere without having to move around them. Another thing from the deep past that it would be cool to see.

[@reeyees50]

Hear me out, what if this is related to the CO2 levels and temperatures of this geological period. Life on earth almost dissapeared ,but it recovered into what we know as today

[@stanleyhyde8529]

@@reeyees50 I'm assuming you're referring to the idea that volcanic activity let enough gas into the atmosphere and basically choked everything out? It's a possibility. But we'd need to pin down if the animals in the are died at the same time witch I don't think is the case. They would be isolated in a particular area and that doesn't seem to have happened here due to the span of time these fossils are find in and how spread out they are. So much of what is done in this field is speculation. It really hard to say

[@reeyees50]

@@stanleyhyde8529 better yet, we dont need a volcano to be the culprit of the extiction. What if the deoxygenation and anoxia in the oceans was caused by a mass death of ocean algae (they produce 50% to 80% of all oxygen, it not just the trees), this extinction coincides with cyanobacteria mats formation, which form in the absence of algae (btw, cyanobacteria cause the famous algae bloom ). Whatever caused the possible mass death of ocean algae is up for anyone to guess

[@stanleyhyde8529]

@@reeyees50 I think that volcanos are the best starting point for whatever happened. Even if off gassing was nominal. Save for a meteor strike what else could have such a serious effect on the planet in such a short time. If you follow current trends, a mass die off of algae would be a big deal on what would basically be a water world. By this point the tectonic plates are starting to move and that's going to make volcanos go off. Even if the ejecta didn't blot out the sun it would result in acid rain and that would bring the ph of the water up pretty quick I think. The knock down effect would be pretty quick from there.

[@reeyees50]

To me that still leaves unexplained the mass anoxification of the oceans, and also the incredible percentage of exctinct genera (remember theres been other mass extinctions yet no one came even close to this one). It has to have been something more complex, unless our understanding about these massive past extinctions might be wrong. Still a young science

[@persianking44]

Even if all you guys ever found were Lystrosaurus remains, it would still be pretty exciting discoveries imo. Each skeleton is a window that peels back the layers of time and paints a slightly clearer picture of what was going on at the time, and the more answers we get the better our understanding of the Permian-Triassic Extinction event will be.

[@bryanmcleod9346]

Like Our current vp said many, many times. "There is nothing like the Passage of Time"...ugh

[@eVill420]

While they certainly are nice, I'm sure we have thousands of Lystrosaur fossils already

[@carolynallisee2463]

It doesn't matter if Lystrosaurus was the most comman animal aboutat the time or not: the fact you found the skull of one is something you will treasure forever!

[@Godwinpounds4333]

Hello how are you doing?

[@gimmethepinkelephant3685]

That is NOT a skull... That man needs to go back to school.

[@michellebrown4903]

@@gimmethepinkelephant3685 Yeah .... I should listen to you with your Home Schooling degree . These people are highly educated . Are you proud of publicly displaying your ignorance?

[@gimmethepinkelephant3685]

@@michellebrown4903 hey dumbass, I have a masters degree from Rutgers in Anthropology and Geology. So yeah, maybe you should listen to me instead of some fly by night jackass making KZbin videos...lol! I spent 8yrs in college and now work at the Academy Natural Sciences in Philadelphia . And I've worked here for almost 20 years.

[@gimmethepinkelephant3685]

@@michellebrown4903 I'd like to see what happened when that man brought that rock in to have it analyzed by his peers. They probably laughed at him. That is not a skull.

[@John.0z]

What an incredible experience! That boundary has only ever been an entry in a book for me.

[@Svensk7119]

Yes. Your first fossil, like your first buck, doesn't have to be a champion.

[@BardicSp00n]

Thank you so much been dying for some coverage of the Permian synapsids are so under appreciated given their importance to our own evolutionary history, also slick outro

[@blacksoldier430]

I cannot imagine how gratifying has to be founding a fossil, amazing job guys

[@MaoRatto]

Finding*

[@BasiliskArt]

as an amateur who loves field work, you have no idea. it's a fantastic feeling, and I'd never want to feel anything else.

[@JamesHawkeYouTube]

fossils are not the same thing as "dinosaurs".

[@BasiliskArt]

@@JamesHawkeKZbin I think that's largely irrelevant. Most people think of non-avian dinosaurs when they say the word dinosaur, and they associate those with fossils. Also a fossil doesn't have to be of a dinosaur to be cool.

[@thetruthexperiment]

Well, if you’ve ever lived in an ancient shallow sea bed like the state of Tennessee or Florida in the US, fossils are almost everywhere but it’s still really fun because sometimes you find something rare. Or sometimes you find a particularly intact specimen of something common. Either way it’s amazing. The fact that there is anything that remains of the ancient ancient past is almost too much.

[@bruceswinford4901]

What's crazy is, today we have animals that sort of resemble therapsids, the monotremes and they look odd to us, but their posture and egg laying would've been the norm at a point in earth's history

[@shafqatishan437]

Therapsids didn't lay egg, they gave birth

[@LarryLeeMoniz]

How fantastic. You made me feel as if I went right along with you! I so enjoy coming along on these adventures!

[@grimbomenace8715]

LYSTROSAUR NUMBER 1 FAAAAAAN!!!!!!!

[@martingil1190]

A worthy cause

[@syntheticsoda]

LYSTROSAUR SWEEP ‼️‼️

[@rugops6549]

Lystrosaur

[@itsjustalf7747]

Lystro supremacy

[@timlewis7218]

Gorgon

[@dannya1854]

Doug looking like an absolute Giga-Chad in this video. Proof that paleontology is humanity's magnum opus.

[@enderdragondoesgaming]

I’ve always wanted to be apart of a dig like this, I’m in college pursuing paleontology rn. This job has been my dream since I was able to say the word dinosaur and I’ve been able to find fossils myself off the shores of lake Huron. Doing something like this though would seriously light up my entire life

[@The.Nasty.]

The Great Dying is such a tragic event that so many people don’t know about… It almost brings a tear to my eye to think of the scale of suffering those creatures experienced.

[@UnwrittenSpade]

What’s crazy is it it had not happened we almost certainly would not exist

[@adventure3214]

Whenever speculative armageddons bring me to tears, i feel that i may be very fragile and in need of looking after. Look after youself, the extinct animals are no longer suffering.

[@The.Nasty.]

@@adventure3214 I promise I’m doing fine… I think you have “bring a tear to my eye” confused with “bring me to tears” as the two saying express different levels of emotion. You might need looking after only because your reading comprehension isn’t the best… and you’re very presumptive. Not a great combo. But I don’t expect logic and common sense from a 1 year old sock account.

[@adventure3214]

Thats good , its good that the long goneaint wreckin your present. Ive def been in better places mentally, and i often miss the point . I feel more comfortable talking to strangers than the people i know and on saturday i dropped my car keys down that gap in the floor when u get into a lift and shopping centre management wont get them out till something else goes wrong with the lift. So, yknow, things could be better, but also much worse. Not planning any extinctions. Thanks for checkin me, hava goodone.

[@adventure3214]

Ummm... am i a one year old sock account or are you? And what is a oneyear old sock account anyway?

[@fgialcgorge7392]

I always appreciated these little guys but this honestly gave me a whole new respect for them. Lil champs! Great job guys. I hope you at least get a cast or 3d model of what you found. That humerus and skull would have me over the moon. That humerus looked like a dog bone that came out of a mold, absolutely perfect. That skull while maybe not perfect was to me amazing. That animal was walking around over 250mya and you it was there in your hands.

[@lindaarrington9397]

Exactly I just found this channel And I would have been hopping around like a small school kid. I was happy 4 them

[@TimeRIP]

"The site of the worst mass extinction event that ever happened in the history of life on Earth, right here, underneath our feet." *Happy music starts playing*

[@portillamail]

It's so cute seeing Ben so in love that can't stop filming Doug! You guys are an amazing couple!

[@wayneparker4855]

It's my head-canon that Lystrosaurus was being farmed by the species who's industrial revolution caused the Permian-Triassic extinction. The later Lystrosaurus were smaller because they were domesticated. They died out because they could not survive in the wild after the species farming them went extinct.

[@dr.floridaman4805]

You are so brainwashed that you think humans change the climate. The power is in the sun, not you. Indoctrinated

[@keithfaulkner6319]

Keep thinking that. There's a sci-fi book in your future.

[@BNWOCHUD]

holy shit we need to make this a story

[@mikearmstrong8483]

You could write a bible out of that paragraph.

[@dkindig]

@@mikearmstrong8483 LOL! I see what you did there... (and I agree with you)

[@Titus-as-the-Roman]

The way i understand it the Siberian Flood Basalt's burnt it's way through a massive coal bed, together raising the Global temperature 5/6 degrees, which was enough to cause all the Continental shelf Methane Hydrates to gasify adding millions of tons of methane to the atmosphere raising the temperature another 5/6 degrees, life literally baked on land and boiled in water.

[@dr.floridaman4805]

It was a micronova blast from the sun. Plasma discharged through the atmosphere. You have zero proof of your claims. While the sun show proof.

[@tiedeman39]

@@dr.floridaman4805 So do you have any evidence supporting your claim? Any scholarly work on it?

[@nicollekyostia6764]

I'll never forget fossil hunting with my father and grandfather. Our most successful places were in the Black Hills and Badlands of South Dakota and near the Grand Canyon of Arizona. We have many. Mostly ancient shell and sea creatures. My dad found a few whole fossilized clams. Really big and super heavy. We think they were fossilized live as they aren't open shells, but closed and completely turned into stone. I don't know what is cooler- thinking about these high, dry environments as oceans, or how these ancient items are still so detailed. You can still see every ridge and groove, millions of years later. Such a cool summer and wonderful memories! Thank you Dad and Grandfather.🙏😁😘

[@Scrinwaipwr]

It survived by the power of its cuteness.

[@alphashaitan65]

My father was a proterosuchus and thought they were both cute and tasty.

[@tsaageotrimm]

That is so cool, a trip like that and finding some fossils!

[@huntercool2232]

Imagine being Lystrosaurus and suddenly emerging from underground after the Permian Extinction and being like *”what the heck happened here?”*

[@heliosdelsol]

@ 5:00- Wow! You really gotta have an eye and educational training to find those kind of fossils! I could walk right up to that fossil, look directly at it, and never have known I was looking at a 250,000,000 year old fossil!

[@tonydagostino6158]

I loved the view across the P/Tr boundary. I suspect the geology team has geochemical data such as isotopic and organic carbon that display big changes across that gray/purple line

[@tylowren2005]

Great video, it’s really nice to see some Permian and Triassic fossils from South Africa. I think it would be good if you did a video on the Triassic formations of Britain. Most notably the sandstone Triassic formation (I can’t think the name of) at Sidmouth.

[@robocook01]

Hey guys, just stumbled across your channel. Great content and presentation, espescially how you trade off on the narration. Gonna rabbit hole your channel, but first, gotta get snacks. Keep up the good work!! Subbed!!

[@LDrosophila]

I am really enjoying these videos

[@Godwinpounds4333]

Hello 👋 how are you doing?

[@jeffersonwagner6706]

My thought about Lystrosaurus: They probably survived also due to their beaks and pig-like life style. Only generalists capable of feeding on the toughest and hard to extract from the soil fonts of proteins survive great extinctions, see the birds on the Cretaceous event. I wOnder if Lystrosaurus were found associated with gastroliths. They should have an exceptional capacity of digesting anything to explain their survival despite of their relative large size (compared to the birds and mammals that survived the Cretaceous extinction).

[@JohnyG29]

wonder*

[@WildFyreful]

I think we know that at least some Dycynodonts (apologies if I misspelled that) *did not* use Gastroliths, but it's entirely possible others might have. PBS Eons talked about these guys briefly in one of their episodes.

[@Reddishty]

How does nobody watch you? i love these buddies, i used to tame 50 of them in ark, and also nice vid.

[@thelaughinghyenas8465]

It really would have been nice to hear why that one creature, Lystrosaurus, became the big winner after the Permian-Triassic extinction event. We saw that there were lots of them. We saw that they got smaller, but not why they survived. It also would have been nice to know what finally got them just a few million years later.

[@N0sf3r4tuR1s3n]

I assume they were rather generalist and opportunistic herbivores, so they would have been suited to eat any kind of plant matter still thriving after the extinction event. Extinction events usually hit specialist niches hardest.

[@thelaughinghyenas8465]

@@N0sf3r4tuR1s3n , That is all quite reasonable, but why did THIS generalist browser become like a quarter of all land animals? What enabled this one? Surely there were other opportunistic herbivores.

[@grassfish01]

Another reason why the Lystrosauruses were so common, the fact that at their time Earth’s major landmass was just Pangea. This meant that once the big generalist herbivores niche opened up in the Triassic, Lystrosaurus was able to capitalize quickly and walk its way across the world (no ocean to cross). In fact, Lystrosaurus was so common it wasone of the pieces of evidence that proved continential drift.

[@ANWRocketMan]

I live close to the Gariep dam in Somerset East. You came just too late... Over December to April the dam was massively overflowing with water in a way we haven't seen in years! It was spectacular

[@idoalittletrolling4867]

Those skull fossils are actually cool as hell, wow.

[@kuitaranheatmorus9932]

The incredible story of how this animal survived the Triassic extinction,really shows the wonder yet tragedy give or take of Nature,but yeah amazing video Hope everyone is having a great day

[@hollish196]

Amazing and so very interesting. Love the split in timeline! This evidence of change over time is wonderful and so helpful to understanding the past of the world. It allows for extrapolation of future needs.

[@TheAnimalKingdom-tq3sz]

Prehistoric Creatures: "Do you die?" Lystrosaurus: "Sadly Yes... But I live!" Proterosuchus: "I beg to differ."

[@theAAtiger]

Meanwhile the whole "medusozoa" family : "Uhmmm, the water taste funky"

[@IAmStrad4]

thrinaxodon:

[@fenrirgg]

That place was a warm swamp for millions or years or what? It's amazing how those fossils got there and are there among dust instead being in the rock.

[@PabloSanchez-qu6ib]

The dust is eroded rock.

[@kR-qj7rw]

Wrll fossils need to be bones buried fast in sediment so maybe

[@roxyamused]

At the time, there was a large bay which is now the Karoo basin. At the time it wasn't what we would think of as temperate, but it was probably one of the more hospitable places on earth at the time. The period was actually really, really dry. Many Lystrosaurus are found with legs splayed like they just collapsed, and paleontologists think many just died of dehydration because of the massive droughts. They found a Lystrosaurus in the Karoo basin in 2022 that still had skin because it had mummified probably because it remained dry for so long. Such droughts can also mean that flash floods are more likely. So, a Lystrosaurus dies of dehydration, the little guy gets slowly covered in dust, and a massive flash flood sweeps through and causes fossilization. Or, at least that's what I've read.

[@SolofAvaldor]

Great stuff, thanks for sharing

[@StephiSensei26]

Learned something today. Thanks!

[@Godwinpounds4333]

Hello 👋 how are you doing?

[@teawrecks1243]

Lystrosaurus basically did what every comic book supervillain could only dream of: TAKE OVER THE WOOOOOORLD

[@williamchamberlain2263]

A whole world of Pinkies and Brains

[@maxplanck9055]

Great to hear about this trip, I had almost forgotten about it as it was a while ago, nice to see the results of a great field trip✌️❤️🇬🇧

[@airstar8799]

Of all the episodes I love this one great field work guys

[@aranjackson259]

Thank you so very I much for the time and effort you put into your videos. You help us feel part of these amazing discoveries.

[@Bramble451]

Why does Doug look grumpy in EVERY SINGLE SHOT over this series?

[@sdrtcacgnrjrc]

I think he might be very reserved EDIT// I'm often very reserved and people think I'm grumpy when I'm like that :-)

[@dragonfox2.058]

ya but he smiled more this time 🙂

[@MKRex]

He's a hottie. Smiling is unnecessary. I have the very same condition.

[@sdrtcacgnrjrc]

@@MKRex thanks for making me smile (It'll compensate for me not being a hottie ;-)

[@MKRex]

@@sdrtcacgnrjrc bet you’re a hottie too. 😘😘😘

[@sableminer8133]

Fascinating finds! I luv the way u guys clown around, very much like I did w/my bestie. Also, good idea to video your days and the time lapse shots! That u guys found some interesting ones was fantastic. This area of Africa looks just like out here in W. Texas where I've been many times growing up. We used to look for stuff as kids in the '70s and goof off (always minding for snakes! In the '90s went back to Big Bend and you see some amazing rocks and habitats. Was just looking at those pics recently. It's sort of comforting to know how resilient life can be and how mankind's effect will be a distant memory some day!

[@reeyees50]

The CO2 levels of this era where extremely high. Whatever was going on, it was insane

[@dr.floridaman4805]

Human climate change Lmao

[@reeyees50]

@@dr.floridaman4805 anything living thing can cause climate change. In the past or in the present. We even got a word to describe the equilibrium between living things and climate, biosphere

[@KateeAngel]

@@dr.floridaman4805 human climate change of today is much faster. back then 8 degrees increase in global temperature happened in hundreds of thousands of years, now we have more than a degree already in only 200 years.

[@cheeto8960]

Massive Volcanoes in Siberia were releasing CO2

[@reeyees50]

@@cheeto8960 thats the most popular theory, but that is just giving a George Cuvier Catasthrophism spin to the explanation. Biology and geology are full of surprises.

[@Stampoable]

What an adventure! i can't wait to support you on your next dig! please continue

[@williamgwirtz4318]

Love these types of videos! Educational and it feels so human!

[@ukaszzawadka2678]

Great episode! Natural History of South Africa is full of amazing treasures that shape our knowledge of history of life on Earth. Karoo Supergroup rocks contain fossils of many fascinating organisms from southern Pangea. Dinocephalians, Taphinocephalians, Dicynodonts... Permian period had an impressive fauna. Just imagine what could happen if they managed to survive to the Triassic. I wish we had more synapsids in the Mesozoic.

[@sassa82]

I love this video. Ive always wondered about this.

[@ChrundleTGreat]

This is SUCH a good video!! The Triassic-Permian Boundary and the great dying amazing stuff to study

[@fredkelly6953]

I had to laugh at the 4.45 mark with the guy saying the rock he had found was a skull... the first thought that came to mind was - see that cloud up there, it's a dragon and the one next to it is a cat jumping.

[@dukecity7688]

you guys are the best. I can't wait until the next video. I appreciate you. information and humor.

[@GeorgeTheDinoGuy]

Aardvarks are my spirit animal, they start a project and abandon it, I start a projects and abandon it. Great video!

[@schlumpkin]

Wow!!! Last summer I went out to South Dakota’s share of Hell Creek for my 16th birthday. It was incredible, and watching this just makes me itch to get back out onto the field again… still waiting for word on the status of my trike/edmonto leg bone

[@WAMTAT]

Amazing work guys

[@kade-qt1zu]

Inostrancevia: Why won't you die? Lystrosaurus: Adaptability son. It allows me to survive mass extinctions.

[@oleandreasjensen5263]

Great videlo documentary. Maybe your next trip can go to Greenland or Svalbard, the arctic island of Norway but watch up for big ice bears

[@awenladyfae]

Thank you very much for your interesting videos. I was surprise (but elated) to see Mr Benoit in your video but whose work, Entracte Science, is always sure to teach me things with talent. Thanks again for making us all discover more about the past!

[@spurguvitunhuora9119]

Dougs face kept reminding me of Karl Pilkington when he reached Machu Picchu.

[@poonoi1968]

I couldn't quite put my finger on it but you nailed it 😂😂

[@arthurmachabee3606]

Lystrosaurus: the little pudge-pudge that thrived 😄

[@Dr.Cosmar]

16:25 if you pause at the right time, you can see a woman who's serious about her drink threaten someone's life with a full bottle. lol

[@studioMYTH]

You guys are awesome! Keep it up, thanks for the content

[@thefisherking78]

I truly enjoyed this! Love the scenery and the discoveries.

[@likemy]

great content. It's really something that a couple of college students put out better content than you find on most television channels.

[@osmosisjones4912]

The number of species I hear about in Permian are less then the dinosaurs

[@TheFoshaMan]

12:45 Lilliput effect

[@thorium222]

So cool to see Ben and Doug boning together!

[@ltlbuddha]

That piano is a fitting one on which to play the theme for the last season of GoT

[@mathewritchie]

Spreading glue the same way we used to sprinkle vinager on chips.

[@caspermcgonagle1532]

I love the tour guides sound effects while explaining the skull

[@TheFoshaMan]

Man... the Lystrosaurus surely were the toughest of the tough, it's a shame they didn't make it to our days...

[@mattsmith5421]

I'm not a fan of pets but I would definitely have a lystro to pat on the head so it rears up slightly and says prrrap

[@daswasich1147]

@@mattsmith5421 i mean, a lot of endearment towards extinct species comes from the fact they are so alien to us, since almost nothing even resembling them is still around. So if you try to just see more "common" pets with the same eyes you look at these guys with, this might help :3

[@maximaldinotrap]

Imagine if the survived unchanged out of pure spite for anything else

[@EminencePhront]

This is like storming the beaches at Normandy, surviving, and then stepping on a landmine while taking a piss.

[@timsmith6675]

How incredible you got to go there!

[@haywardjeblomey6505]

"It's a skull" "Yeah, it's a skull" "It's a skull" "It looks like a skuhhhhhhhh"

[@erictaylor5462]

A smaller animals needs less food, but they are also less able to retain body heat. The climate likely cooled during this event, so how do you keep from freezing to death?

[@adnannaemaz1989]

Underground or even tree burrowing.

[@jonwashburn7999]

Thanks for this ben

[@paulbags123]

Brilliant video guys!!😃🤙

[@al145]

I wonder what kinds of animals might have existed but never fossilized and are forever lost to time.

[@thedoruk6324]

Literally the only *chad* Synapsid

[@dropkick4440]

Another awesome 😎 Jurassic Park sci-fi doco keep up the great work

[@patriciatoomingtheplantpar2558]

I don't understand why there are so many packed together in such a small range, did they show up like a attending a concert waiting for the event to happen?

[@daswasich1147]

that just means at this particular place the conditions for a corpse to become a fossil were just right for many generations of this animal.

[@b.a.erlebacher1139]

Sometimes this sort of site is due to a herd of animals caught in a flash flood, landslide or similar event.

[@thorium222]

Wow, so many amazing fossils that the guy even trash talked your super cool skull because it wasn't better preserved. Would not have imagined that after such a looooong time you could find them like they died yesterday. Mind-blowing.

[@herwew7476]

Excellent Video!

[@AlphaKnight-hg2jq]

Some say it was the worst mass extinction but personally i think it was the best

[@daswasich1147]

this has "you should've been there" vibes and i love it XD

[@Czar_B]

6 min in I am like what is this did the subject change?

[@turkoositerapsidi]

A Lystrosaurus episode. This is absolytely perfect.

[@DeathPetalArt]

Those are Pokémon, & you cannot convince me otherwise.

[@Chris.Davies]

10/10 finding a skull! Wow!

[@bunnygirl2448]

What kind of glue are you using? I would like to reinforce some of my own, more fragile, specimens.

[@lindamclean8809]

Wonderful video.....more please 👍👍👍👍

[@steakfou5042]

Thanks for sharing

[@Pipkiablo]

New bucket list entry: I want to go here so I can stand with one foot in the Permian and another foot in the Triassic.

[@adventureswithdan84]

Life is very tough and always seems to find a way to survive and go against all odds despite the worst of circumstances.

[@flightlesslord2688]

Lystrosaurus as the world burns and suffocates around it: 'Oh no! Anyway'

[@tolbaszy8067]

Finally, Doug's true identity is revealed as "The Entertainer"!

[@fleetskipper1810]

Wow wow wow-what a great program to encourage fieldwork.

[@patagonianthylacine6306]

I have been trying to recall this from the clue the most common animal, common herbivore, most common land creature, etc for 2 months. Lystrosaurus! The ear worm of Synapsids

[@Dell-ol6hb]

It's really cool to see this field work

[@DogWalkerBill]

Nice scary music for Halloween!

[@HebaruSan]

Too bad animatronics are usually used for dinosaurs rather than these other equally interesting creatures

[@chrisrus1965]

Good video. You just told us about the topic.