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[MUSIC: Hot Club Sandwich, “Swang Thang” on No Pressure, by Dave Grisman, self-published]

Sea Level Risk From Antarctica

This photo, taken during NASA’s Operation IceBridge to describe ice shelf loss, depicts the calving of an ice shelf located in West Antarctica. (Photo: Jefferson Beck, NASA/GSFC, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

DOERING: Antarctica's ice shelves are the gatekeepers between the continent's glaciers and the open ocean.
As the planet warms, these shelves shrink, exposing more and more ice, which just leads to more melting.
This frozen continent rests under a massive ice sheet averaging more than a mile thick.
But a recent study in Science Advances found that Antarctica had 68 ice shelves that shrunk significantly between 1997 and 2021, adding up to about 8.3 trillion tons lost during that time.
Richard Alley is a professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University and he joined Living on Earth Host Steve Curwood to shed light on what all this melting at the south pole could mean for the planet.

ALLEY: Yeah, so it is contributing to raising sea level a little bit. Normally what a nice shelf does is they grow for a while. They grow and grow and grow. And then they break off one of these icebergs, and the icebergs can be huge, you know, you'll see the stories, it's as big as Delaware, or it's as big as the Isle of Man or something. So you expect the most of them to be growing and then occasionally breaking off. What we've been seeing recently is a lot more breaking off than you would ordinarily expect. And that's letting the pile spread faster, and it's contributing a little bit to sea level rise. Sea level is rising, and it's rising, because we're warming the ocean and the water expands. It's rising because we're melting ice in Antarctica a little bit, in Greenland a good bit, and especially in mountain glaciers. And the water that was stored up there runs into the ocean and makes it higher. And then we've got faster flow in Greenland and Antarctica into the ocean, which also raises sea level.

CURWOOD: By the way, that same study that we talked about in Science Advances show that 29 Ice shelves grew. I mean, what does that mean for the climate? Any good news there?

ALLEY: It's what we'd expect. So, the Ross Ice Shelf is a famous one, it sorta kinda ended at the same place for the last 6000 years. And what it'll do is it'll advance, it'll grow until it takes a fairly large chunk of ice past Ross Island, and then that chunk breaks off, and then it'll grow. And then that chunk breaks off. And then it'll grow. And it's been doing this for 6000 years. And so you expect most of the shelves to be growing most of the time, because the growing is fairly slow. And the breaking off is fairly fast to make the iceberg.

CURWOOD: Now, continuing in our geology class for a moment longer here, as I understand it, much of the melting thus, so far has been really chipping away at the West Antarctica ice sheet. What's going on in the East?

Scientists have considered the western portion of Antarctica to be the main area of concern, due to rapid melting from warming waters, but East Antarctica has also been seeing more melting than originally expected by glaciologists. (Photo: NASA, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

ALLEY: So, the East actually is changing a little faster than we expected. The ice shelves love really cold water and really cold air and they tend to show up in the coldest waters that are common in the world ocean. Warmer waters have an easier time getting up towards the West Antarctic than they do getting up towards the east, for various reasons linked to the winds, and the Amundsen Sea Low, and the atmosphere and a lot of things. So we've been worried about the West because it's easier for warm water to flow in there and attack. But there is some warm water sneaking in in places in East Antarctica, that I think surprised a few people. Me, certainly.

CURWOOD: Now, one study that was recently published says that we have passed the point of no return for the West Antarctic ice shelves. What does that mean? And how soon are we going to feel the impacts of that?

ALLEY: What we're worried about in West Antarctica. Glaciers that go into the ocean have a tendency to be a little like a traffic jam that is hung up by a closed lane in the interstate. They end at a place which is very narrow. They're backed up behind that, they're trying to dump ice out into the ocean. And so the ice tends to end at a place which is fairly narrow and fairly shallow. If you kick it out of the bottleneck, it tends to retreat and dump the non-floating ice into the ocean until it can find another bottleneck to stabilize on. So when Vancouver discovered the ice in Glacier Bay in Alaska, there was no Glacier Bay. The entire bay where you go on a cruise ship now was full of ice. It was a mile thick in the middle. And then that ice was kicked out of the little narrow place that it ended by a little warming. And then John Muir watched the icebergs breaking off boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and the thing backed up 60 miles, and it thinned by a mile 'til it found some other place to stabilize. What we're worried about in West Antarctica and parts of East Antarctica is that the ice now ends in a bottleneck, a place that is fairly narrow and fairly shallow for dumping icebergs. And if it gets kicked out of there, and retreats, there are these big, deep interior basins. And the next place that can stabilize is the Transantarctic Mountains, and that's about 11 feet of sea level rise. And so we're really worried about West Antarctica because if it does, what we have seen happen in other places, it's so much bigger, that it's a whole lot of sea level rise. And so if we pass a point of no return for West Antarctica, it's a lot of sea level rise.

Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is considered one of the world’s most important glaciers, due to its size and the amount of ice it holds behind it. (Photo: James Yungel, NASA, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

CURWOOD: What are we talking about, a lot of sea level rise, and when the sea level rise?

ALLEY: Right, so it could be fast, and exactly how fast we have a very vigorous discussion going on in the community. Over a small number of hundreds of years, it clearly can happen. Some of our modeling and some that I'm guilty of helping with a little bit, says that once it gets started, it could happen in a century, or even less, and huge uncertainty attached to just how fast it could go. But it could be really scary fast as our work shows.

CURWOOD: Hm. What's scary fast?

ALLEY: So we have one model out of many that implemented what we hope is a better version of how icebergs break off the front of cliffs. And in that one, after warming gets large enough to really trigger the fast changes. It was 100 years to dump three meters of sea level. So something like 11 feet.

CURWOOD: Oh, my. So Professor Alley, let's talk a bit about some solutions here. How do we move forward towards a better outcome for Antarctic's ice?

ALLEY: Antarctic's ice cares about warming, it cares about change. The ice shelves love the coldest water in the world ocean. And that means change is bad for them. Because if you change the winds, you change the currents, you change the temperature, it can't get better. But it can get worse, you can't bring in colder water because there isn't any colder water. So changing things is bad for Antarctic ice if you want to keep ice on Antarctica. And so finding the solutions that limit warming is really the thing that Antarctica wants.

CURWOOD: So if we were to implement the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement to keep warming below one and a half degrees Centigrade, or roughly 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, would that stop this process? Or are we already losing these ice shelves?

ALLEY: It is very clear that wherever we limit warming, we just missed something worse. Even if we were to dump all of West Antarctica, there's a lot more ice in East Antarctica, there's still a lot of ice in Greenland. So whenever we stop the warming, we just missed something worse. And that's maybe the most optimistic view of it is that we can save a lot of ice very clearly. There's this new study out that says there's some chance that we're going to derive some loss from West Antarctica with the warming that we've already caused. But even this new study is actually clear that the most likely future limiting warming limits melt of Antarctica, it limits sea level rise.

A beach in Tuvalu, one of the world’s most vulnerable countries when it comes to rising sea levels. Richard Alley says a few feet of melting ice won’t mean much for Antarctica, but will have major impacts for the world’s coasts. (Photo: UNDP Climate, TuvaluCoastal Adaptation Project, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

CURWOOD: How much sea level is trapped in the ice of Antarctica, by the way?

ALLEY: Almost 200 feet of sea level. Not quite, but pretty close to that.

CURWOOD: So if we melt it all? Noah, would have been right, I guess.

ALLEY: If we melt it all, we don't think we're going to melt at all. That's not on the table. But you can get 10 feet out of Antarctica. And it isn't a huge change for Antarctica. It's just a huge change for the coasts of the world.

CURWOOD: Now over the years, we've seen that science, especially when it's been aggregated in the form of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has tended to be on the conservative side of seeing the rates of change that are happening in the ecosphere. That, back in the earlier days, it was very much behind. It seems that more recent studies have been closer to what's really going on. But what are the chances that we are sort of understating the risk to our society? I know that's not really a fair question. But you know, a lot of people are curious about this.

ALLEY: Yeah. So it's a very fair question. I worked a good bit with the UN, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I'm deeply impressed by what they do. It's a huge number of volunteers who are spending their nights and weekends trying to give the public the best they can do. But on sea level, it's clear that there has been a tendency to be on the conservative side, on the low side. And I think that's because of the nature of the uncertainties that you make your best estimate. And those best estimates leave most of the ice on Antarctica, they leave most of the ice on Greenland. And so you can't be much better than that. But you can be worse. And so I think that we're finding out that there's an uncertainty in your estimate. That usually means that you end up on the high side, not the low side for how much sea level rises.

Richard Alley is a geoscientist and Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. (Photo: The Royal Society, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

CURWOOD: Before you go, Professor. You've been at this a while. How has your perspective changed?

ALLEY: When I started In this field, the idea that we were going to limit warming was important. We know that there was huge value in doing so. And I don't think we had much of a clue how we could do that. And I think we were very much afraid that it was going to be very, very expensive to do that. The amount of technological improvement that's happened since, what we've learned. Solar cells, when I was a student, they put them on satellites. You probably had a hand calculator with a solar cell, and they weren't good for much else. And now, you know, the experts have looked at this and said that they are making the cheapest electricity in human history, the cheapest electricity in human history from utility scale solar, from the International Energy Agency saying this, and I really do think now that we know how to fix it. We know how to fix it technically, we know how to fix it economically. I have served on committees with really brilliant and highly awarded economists, whose work shows that we help the economy as well as the environment if we get busy on this.

CURWOOD: Haven't figured out how to do it politically yet though, have we?

ALLEY: Well, you have a lot of listeners.

DOERING: That’s Penn State geologist Richard Alley speaking with Living on Earth Host Steve Curwood.

Related links:
- The Associated Press | “Scientists Count Huge Melts in Many Protective Antarctic Ice Shelves. Trillions of Tons of Ice Lost.”
- Dr. Richard Alley’s website at PennState

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[MUSIC: Philip Boulding, “Margaret’s Arrival” on Musings: Celtic Harp Originals, by Philip Boulding, Magic Hill Music]

O’NEILL: If you enjoy the stories you hear on Living on Earth, please consider signing up for our newsletter. You’ll never miss a show, and you’ll have special access to show highlights, notes from our staff, and advanced information about upcoming live events. The Living on Earth newsletter is sent to your inbox weekly. Don’t miss out! Subscribe at the Living on Earth website, loe [dot] org. That's loe [dot] org and by the way you’ll also find photos, links to more information and full transcript of evey single show there. We’d love to hear from you, you can write to us at any time at comments@loe.org, that’s comments @ loe dot org.

Just ahead, a dino fossil gathering dust in a museum finally brings a scientific breakthrough to help uncover a murky past.

Keep listening to Living on Earth.

[MUSIC: Philip Boulding, “Margaret’s Arrival” on Musings: Celtic Harp Originals, by Philip Boulding, Magic Hill Music]

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Helping Bats Survive Klamath Dam Removal

The Klamath River stretches 257 miles across Oregon and California and is home to many types of wildlife, and acts as a water resource to nearby communities. The dam removal process is intended to encourage ecological restoration. (Photo: Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

O’NEILL: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Aynsley O’Neill
DOERING: And I’m Jenni Doering. The first of four Klamath River dams along the California-Oregon border has now been removed, with the rest to follow next year. Letting the Klamath flow free once again is expected to give salmon vital access to their spawning grounds upriver. It’s also giving a boost to research on some other native species, including bats. Oregon Public Broadcasting reporter Kristian Foden-Vencil has this story.

FODEN-VENCIL: At the bottom of the J.C. Boyle Dam, just outside Klamath Falls, stands an old shed. It's unremarkable in just about every way, except that it's home to a colony of bats.

ADKINS: There's just a data gap on a lot of these species and really on bats in the Pacific Northwest as the whole.

FODEN-VENCIL: Kaly Adkins is a conservation biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. She manages non-game species like pygmy rabbits, Sierra Nevada red foxes, and of course, bats. Stooping to fit in the old 1950s shed, she says it's unique in a couple of bat-friendly ways. First, it's tiny. Bats love to hide away. Second, it has a corrugated metal roof so it gets nice and warm in the summer, perfect for rearing bat pups. But most importantly of all, the shed stands right above the dam spillway. So there's a constant flow of water underneath it.

ADKINS: We can assume that it gets pretty warm up at the top, but then there's almost like an air conditioning factor of the cool water running underneath it.

This is an example of a Bat Box, similar to that described by Kaly Adkins. (Photo: MarkBuckawicki, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

FODEN-VENCIL: There are holes in the floor, so cool, moist air can flow in and the bats can swoop out into the bug-laden evening. There are no bats here today. Adkins thinks the shed's being used as a nursery, and all the pups have grown and flown. The shed's purpose is to house machines that lift and lower water gates so that if the dam turbines need to be fixed, water can be diverted around the dam and out the spillway. Next year, it's scheduled to be knocked down along with the rest of the dam. Bats are a protected species. So when they need to be moved from a dam or someone's house, the state advises bat boxes be set up nearby to provide alternative habitat. As a state biologist, Adkins says she's constantly being asked, what's the best kind of bat box, where should it be placed? And how big should it be?

ADKINS: I went to the literature to try to understand and give a scientific explanation behind what I was recommending. And there just wasn't a whole lot of information available.

FODEN-VENCIL: Now she's using the dam removal as an experiment to figure out what kind of replacement bat boxes bats actually prefer, and where's the best place to locate them. The first step involves tracking the bats, so she put up nets outside the shed to catch and tag them, she injected a microchip under their skin, just like vets do with dogs.

ADKINS: We captured and tagged over 100 bats.

The J.C. Boyle dam is scheduled to be removed along with three other dams along the Klamath river. (Photo: Bob J Galindo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

FODEN-VENCIL: Then, she put up a series of different bat boxes in different locations. The first is just 100 yards from the old shed. The second is about a mile and a half away next to a lake. At each site she installed several large bat boxes, which she calls bat condos. They're about the size of a carry on suitcase and can hold the whole colony of 100 bats. She's also installed several smaller cylindrical bat boxes, which mimic the shape of a dead tree, their natural habitat. The boxes are on poles 10 feet off the ground to protect them from predators like skunks and raccoons. And they're in spots that Adkins thinks offer the right temperature and humidity.

ADKINS: So we're looking for good morning sunlight, but then not a whole lot of midday or afternoon sunlight because we want it to warm up quickly in the morning, but not bake.

FODEN-VENCIL: While some people are scared of bats, they're actually beneficial in a number of ways. They help keep insect populations under control, like mosquitoes and pine bark beetles, and in some areas that even pollinate plants, but not in the Pacific Northwest. There's a note of urgency to the bat box study too because of a fungal disease known as white nose syndrome. It can cause mass bat die offs. Bronwyn Hogan, who coordinates the US Fish and Wildlife response to the disease, says it's gradually spreading west from the Eastern US, and has been found in Washington and Idaho.

HOGAN: So far they fungus has not been detected in Oregon. In California, the fungus has been detected at very low levels.

FODEN-VENCIL: The fungus grows on the noses of bats and wakes them out of hibernation. They then spend scarce energy searching for insects that aren't around. Bat numbers are also declining because of habitat loss, the spread of wind farms, and a lack of insects. Back at J.C. Boyle Dam, the shed isn't likely to be demolished until next fall. So now Adkins waits in the knowledge that the colony could ignore her bat boxes altogether and disappear into the surrounding forest. But then that's the nature of scientific experiment. For Living on Earth, I'm Kristian Foden-Vencil.

DOERING: That story comes to us from OPB, Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Related links:
- Find this story and more from Oregon Public Broadcasting
- More information on the JC Boyle dam
- More information on bats in Oregon.
- Oregon Fish and Wildlife | “Bat House Plan Modifications for the Pacific Northwest”
- Learn more about Kaly Adkins' research

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[MUSIC: The Wailin’ Jennys et al, “Trick Rider” on Down By the Sea Hotel, by Gord Downie, The Secret Mountain]

A New Dinosaur

Igai semkhu was an herbivore. Its name translates to “forgotten lord of the oasis” in ancient Egyptian. (Image Credit for this Artist’s Rendering: Andrew McAfee & Talia Mastalski)

O’NEILL: Paleontologists have discovered a new dinosaur, but the discovery has been almost fifty years in the making.In 1977, German geologists dug up a dinosaur fossil in Egypt’s Kharga Oasis. Over time, parts of that fossil went missing, and the specimen itself went largely forgotten apart from a master’s thesis written in the 90s.Decades more went by until an American scientist came across that paper and decided to delve a little deeper.And finally, in 2023, American, German, and Egyptian paleontologists came together to identify, describe, and name a new species of dinosaur, Igai semkhu.From some leg bones and a few vertebrae, scientists learned that igai semkhu was a long-neck dinosaur from a group known as “titanosaurs”.

The scientists involved in the discovery say it sheds new light on Africa’s dinosaurs during the Late Cretaceous, a period which has previously been somewhat of a mystery for paleontologists on the continent. I spoke with the lead author of the 2023 paper that officially named Igai semkhu a new dinosaur. Dr.Eric Gorscak is an Assistant Professor at Midwestern University and he told me that complicated discoveries like these aren’t uncommon in the paleontology world.

GORSCAK: You know, when we think about new dinosaurs, these new scientific discoveries, there's usually two stories. There's the scientific story, like the importance of that discovery in terms of our scientific understanding. And then there's also the human story that the tracking of discovery and how this fossil came to be and the people behind it. I always like to think of those two stories as intertwined with one another.

O'NEILL: Well, let's talk a little bit about what we can gather about the dinosaur itself. So what did Igai look like and what did it eat? How much of that are you able to figure out?

Dr. Gorscak studies one of the Igai semkhu fossils. Only a few fossils have ever been found, and some of those have gone missing over the decades. (Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Eric Gorscak)

GORSCAK: Yeah, that's a great question. It's challenging because the specimen itself, and this is true for paleontology, especially dinosaur paleontology, or any kind of vertebrate paleontology, is that it's rare to find complete skeletons. It is not the opening scene in Jurassic Park 99.9% of the time. So the specimen is really about like 12 bones from the middle part of the animals. We have a couple bones from the shoulder and arm, the backbones, a little bit of the hips and hind limbs, so we're missing a lot of the neck, the head, and the tail of this animal. But we are able to find certain traits or characteristics of these bones to understand what group of dinosaur it belongs to. And from there, we can compare it to more complete specimens to understand what it looked like. And Sauropods typically have a very general body plan, long necks, small head at the very end, large bodies, super long tail, kind of like Brontosaurus and Brachiosaurus. So it belongs to that group of dinosaurs. Now it wasn't that big of a dinosaur in terms of Titanosaurs relatively. One thing about titanosaurs is that they also included some of the largest land animals who have ever lived. So there's a reason why "titan" is in the name Titanosaur. But also the other cool thing about this group is that it also includes some of the smallest sauropod dinosaurs, something about maybe the size of a horse, which still pretty big, but for this group, kind of small. So I like to say you have titanosaurs and then you have "titiny-saurs" in this group. And everything in between, which is actually pretty wild. It's a really awesome group of dinosaurs. Quite the range, right? But Igai is somewhere in the middle, kind of what we call a medium sized titanosaur, but still a big animal, probably about like 30 to 45 feet in length for a Sauropod, which is actually kind of cool because there's another dinosaur from the same age rocks and areas that our team and Egyptian colleagues worked on a couple of years ago called Mansourasaurus, which is roughly the same size as Igai. But the difference is Igai has a little bit more slender limb bones than Mansourasaurus. Mansourasaurus is a little bit stockier, a little bit more stout in its appearance. So at least we have the two different kinds of Sauropods, smaller end within Late Cretaceous of Egypt, which is kind of cool. And definitely plant eaters, so don't be afraid to pet it if it was alive.

O'NEILL: Well, depending on the size, I might still be afraid of getting stomped on, you know?

GORSCAK: Yeah, there's that to just be gentle. no sudden movements.

Parts of Igai semkhu’s skeleton were found near the Kharga Oasis back in the 1970’s. Only now have scientists gotten the chance to study and name the species. (Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Eric Gorscak et al.)

O'NEILL: Okay. Well, so, when I think of dinosaurs, I think Brachiosaurus, Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, maybe you get Iguanodon in there. But none of those names quite sounded like Igai semkhu. Where did your team come up with the name for that? And what does it mean?

GORSCAK: There's like over 1000 species of dinosaurs, but of course with like Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, all the ones you just named, they've been around is more or less the very beginning of paleontology, when dinosaur paleontology really got hot. So they were the stars. They got that premacy for being described first and capturing the public attention and just living on, but we have so many new dinosaur species being discovered, especially in the past 20 years. But Igai semkhu is uh actually ancient Egyptian. And this is great because Dr. Lammanna, co author, works at the Carnegie Museum, and they have an Egypt department that he knows the people of. We got in contact with them. And we were just kind of spitballing ideas of just like the name of this dinosaur. We want to honor kind of the area where it came from and just Egypt and its rich history. And so with Lisa Haney, the Egypt department at the Carnegie, she kind of spitballed some like ancient deities, some ancient gods and like lore from the area of the Western desert where the specimen came from. So it was an ancient deity that this cult in the western desert worshipped. So basically translates to the Lord of the Oasis, and Titanosaurs are generally large animals. So just kind of seem fitting that the Lord of the Oasis was for this a giant Sauropod. And then Semkhu means forgotten from ancient Egyptian. So this is the Forgotten Lord of the oasis. Now I kind of like the name because it kind of alludes to the story of the specimen that was discovered in the 70s changed spots in different universities through time, people working on it and coming and going. So just kind of became this kind of like forgotten specimen, but also just kind of goes into the science story to where we have ancient Egypt and ancient Africa during the time of the dinosaurs. We don't know much about the fossil record compared to other landmasses — South American North America really good fossil records Europe and Asia as well. Africa seems to have this kind of... we don't have a full understanding of what was happening during the Age of Dinosaurs. So in a way it kind of alludes to that as well. This forgotten Lord of the Oasis, this forgotten dinosaur.

The co-author of the paper regarding Igai semkhu works out of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The Carnegie, and museums like it around the world, store thousands of specimens for decades so that scientist can study them with newer technologies. (Photo: Wally Gobetz, Flickr, BY-NC-ND 2.0)

O'NEILL: What's going on there that means that Africa's fossil record isn't as well known as the other continents?

GORSCAK: That's a good question. And it's not to say like it has a bad fossil record. It all depends on your question and the age of the deposits of these rocks. Unfortunately, for like the Cretaceous of Africa, it's a bit more spottier than other continents, but part of that is that a lot of the continent is covered in grasslands, rain forests, and vegetation, that access to those rocks is hard to get to. When you think about like out west in the desert, you have a lot of erosion happening like here in the United States, to expose all that rock. And you don't have too much of that when you go south of the Sahara. And with the Sahara, you have a lot of exposed rock, but also a lot of sand in the way. But those age rocks and those kind of depositional environments are not the ones conducive for what's happening on like the terrestrial land, like for land animals that were interested with dinosaurs. So really awesome marine deposits, but not so much land deposits. So it's already spotty as is with the exposed rock in these kind of questions and kind of dinosaurs that we're interested in, especially at the very end of the Cretaceous period, that last act of the age of dinosaurs. The story is being told, but the geological writings are not preserved or never had the chance to preserve because of these ancient environments. So it's always been a challenge. But thankfully, we're able to find some stuff. And we're getting a better picture in the recent couple of decades.

O'NEILL: What is this dinosaur able to tell you about ancient Africa, Ancient Egypt, sort of the Paleo history of this?

Dr. Gorscak photographs a vertebra from Igai semkhu. (Photo: Dr. Matthew Lamanna)

GORSCAK: The Cretaceous, like I said, this last act of the age of dinosaurs, we have a pretty good fossil record in North America, South America, Europe and Asia, most definitely. And by the end of the Cretaceous, Madagascar and India, we have all this, kind of a good idea of what's happening on these continents at the very end. But Africa is still kind of this question mark. And the cool thing with Igai, and Mansourasaurus I mentioned earlier, is that there's filling in this gap towards the very end of the Age of Dinosaurs for Africa. And so what we can see with the relationships based on the anatomy that is shared with Mansourasaurus and Igai with surrounding landmasses and their Titanosaurs, is that we see that Igai, Mansourasaurus, has features that are closely related to those from Europe and Asia, more so than those from like Southern Africa or even Gondwana with like South America and Madagascar. So we're getting an idea of how these faunas are, who the members are, what they're related to, and what they can tell us with that evolutionary history. There's still a lot more work to go. But this is really an exciting, like peek into that time period that we only can speculate it before. But now we had the fossils actually show that this was the case. I'm really excited to see how that develops. And of course, inspiring a new generation of paleontologist all over the world when they see like, yeah, there's dinosaurs everywhere. And there's natural wonder everywhere and trying to get that international collaboration going and inspiration.

O'NEILL: Dr. Eric Gorscak is assistant professor at Midwestern University. Dr. Gorscak, thank you so much for taking the time with us today.

GORSCAK: Of course, thank you so much for having me.

O'NEILL: For more on this dino, including specs for you to make your own 3d printed model, stomp on over to our website, loe.org.

Related links:
- Read the full study and download the 3D models
- Explore the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
- Learn about the Cretaceous period

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[MUSIC: Soweto String Quartet, “Writing On the Wall” on Renaissance, by Geissman/Coll, RCA Victor]

DOERING: Next week on Living on Earth, join us for a Thanksgiving feast with Chef Steven Looney as he shares recipes from his Chickasaw heritage.
LOONEY: So one of the most amazing things about the Three Sisters is the corn, we have something called the pashofa. A pashofa is a white pearl hominy, that's been dried. So with that, I like to take the pashofa, slow cook it for about 16 hours with pork, usually pork butt. And then usually within the last hour and a half of the cooking process, I'll add black beans and generally yellow squash, but I really like to add butternut squash to it because it holds up a lot better. So you have this really intense corn flavor, balanced with the the fattiness and the saltiness of the pork. And then you have the sweetness of the butternut squash in there. And then you get these nice little hits of earthiness from the beans and it's a very complex, in-depth of a dish for you know something that's just you know, corn, beans and squash.

DOERING: Tune in to Living on Earth next week to hear that and much more.

[MUSIC: Soweto String Quartet, “Writing On the Wall” on Renaissance, by Geissman/Coll, RCA Victor]

O’NEILL: Living on Earth is produced by the World Media Foundation.
Our crew includes Naomi Arenberg, Paloma Beltran, Josh Croom, Swayam Gagneja, Madison Goldberg, Mark Kausch, Mark Seth Lender, Don Lyman, Sarah Mahaney, Aynsley O’Neill, Sophia Pandelidis, Clare Shanahan, Jake Rego, El Wilson, and Jolanda Omari.

DOERING: Tom Tiger engineered our show. Alison Lirish Dean composed our themes. You can hear us anytime at loe [dot] org, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts, and like us, please, on our Facebook page - Living on Earth. We tweet from @livingonearth. And find us on Instagram @livingonearthradio. And you can also write to us at comments [at] loe [dot] org. I’m Jenni Doering.

Steve Curwood is our Executive Producer.

O’NEILL: And I’m Aynsley O’Neill. Thanks for listening!

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Living on Earth comes from you, our listeners, and from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in association with its School for the Environment, developing the next generation of environmental leaders. And from the Grantham Foundation for the protection of the environment, supporting strategic communications and collaboration in solving the world’s most pressing environmental problems.

ANNOUNCER 2: PRX.