Hi, I'm Lindsay.
And I'm Marshall.
Welcome to Tumble, the show where we explore stories of science discovery.
Today, we're talking about the end of dinosaurs.
You mean we're going to talk about how dinosaurs went extinct?
No, we're going to talk about the rear ends of dinosaurs.
I'm talking dinosaur butts.
We're going to find out how scientists stumbled upon the first ever known dinosaur butt fossil.
And then we're going to take a look inside.
Today's question comes from Tumble listener Ernie.
It's a little bit silly.
My name is Ernie.
My age is seven.
And my question is, do dinosaurs sniff each other's butts?
That's a great question.
So were dinosaurs sniffing each other's rear ends just like dogs at the dog park?
Did they also circle three times before they lay down?
My question is, how would scientists figure it out?
And Ernie had one idea.
I think they use sniff prints.
A sniff print?
Is that like when maybe they sniff each other's butts in a bit of mud and it gets preserved?
Like a dinosaur footprint?
Maybe.
We did a whole episode on that.
I'm not sure what a sniff print would be, but let's ask our listeners if they have any ideas.
So first, do you think dinosaurs sniffed each other's butts?
And how would scientists find out?
Think about it, because we'll be back with one of the world's top Dinobot experts.
So to answer Ernie's question, I started by looking up the scientists who studied the special one-of-a-kind dino butt fossil.
And it blew my mind to figure out that one of them lives literally right down the road from us.
What?
So we live near an animal butt scientist?
Yep.
Her name is Diane Kelly, and she's a biologist.
And she's also a great hostess who invited me over to her house.
Well, I have to say it smells like cookies in your place.
Do you do a lot of baking?
I do do a lot of baking.
Do you want a cookie?
You know, sometimes I do get jealous of what you get to do.
It's not every day that I am offered cookies inside the home of an animal butt expert.
Like one of the foremost butt experts in the world.
Exactly.
And she's great at making tea, too.
Thank yous.
Yeah.
And there is sugar.
And I'll get you some milk.
The cookies and tea were delicious, but I couldn't wait to talk about dinosaur butts.
For the interview, we got set up in Diane's home office.
It was covered in art, awards, and piles of her work.
So in addition to being a scientist, Diane is also a children's science writer and game designer.
She's a game designer?
Yes, she has all the coolest jobs.
No kidding.
And when I talked to her, she was fresh back from a research trip to Australia.
She was excited to show me what she'd been working on there, and she opened up a paper bag.
Silicone molds of Chloe.
Yes, that's the plural of cloaca, which you could say is one kind of butt.
So a cloaca is an all-purpose chamber that holds poop and pee and all the baby-making equipment.
And you find them in most vertebrates.
You know, I happen to know, because I know Latin, that a cloaca is Latin for sewer.
You're just walking around speaking Latin all the time.
Though I have to tell you, I actually know from having lizards as pets.
They sure do.
So cloacas are kind of waste and reproduction combination butts.
And like you said, found in some common animals.
So you find it in snakes and in alligators and in birds and in turtles.
So can you explain why Diane is finding all of these cloacae?
Good question.
It's because she studies the anatomy of, how should we call it, the nether regions.
I've learned a lot about how this region is put together.
Okay, so I know that anatomy is the study of the structures inside the body.
Like, if we look at a chart of the human skeleton and the organs inside our bodies, that's anatomy.
Yeah, exactly.
But not so many people focus in on the butt when it comes to anatomy, which makes Diane pretty special.
And it's why she got a special email one day about a dinosaur butt.
A few years ago, I got a email from a colleague of mine who is a paleontologist.
Diane had known Jacob Vinther for many years, from back when he was just starting to study dinosaur skin.
He uses skin impressions to figure out what colors dinosaurs were.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hold on.
There are dinosaur skin fossils?
Like, rock dinosaur skin?
What?
Where can I see these things?
Well, it's hard for skin to get preserved as a fossil, but sometimes you can find an impression sort of like a print that gets left behind.
Under a microscope, Jacob could examine traces of pigment in the skin, the chemical compounds that gave it color.
Whoa, so you're saying that they're like skin prints, which are not sniff prints, and they have something to do with whether dinosaurs sniffed each other's butts?
Yes, it's the first clue that's fit to print.
And it's why Jacob got Diane involved.
He emailed me saying, we have this one fossil. which has this amazing skin impression.
The fossil belonged to a dinosaur called Psittacosaurus.
So what's a Psittacosaurus?
I'll say we're getting into the dino deep cuts here.
This isn't exactly a T-Rex situation.
Well, Psittacosaurus was a ceratopsian dinosaur, which means it's a relative of Triceratops.
Psittacosaurus had horns sticking out of each cheek.
It stood on two legs and it had short little arms.
And this specimen was small, about the size of a dog, like a Labrador retriever.
I'm kind of imagining like a dog standing up with horns on its cheeks.
And that would be harder to pet, probably.
Owie.
So anyhow, Jacob had spent a lot of time studying this fossil, and he'd found something unusual.
He found that the area around the bottom, the area where the vent would be your dinosaur butt region, was really well preserved and was better preserved than anything we'd ever seen before.
Wow.
So Jacob was like, guess what?
Dinosaur butt.
That is what I would have said or written.
But even though Jacob was able to recognize the general dinosaur butt region, the fossil didn't really look like a butt.
What do you mean?
It was totally flat.
You know, think of your own butt.
It's kind of round and it sticks out in multiple directions.
But then imagine that Lots of weight of rock, and mud and then rock on top of it.
Eventually, over lots and lots of time squished, the whole thing really, really flat.
Oh my gosh, so the Psittacosaurus had a pancake butt.
Well, not like a literal pancake, but it had been kind of pancaked.
Yes, I guess that's what I meant.
So to know what it had looked like during its life...
Jacob knew that he had to reconstruct it.
And to do that, he needed a butt expert.
We even said it was like, who do I know who knows a lot about butts?
I was like, Diane knows a lot about butts.
And Diane does know a lot about butts.
Enough to know that not much is known about what a dinosaur butt might have looked like.
And so she wrote back to Jacob, there's nothing.
There's basically nothing.
So we're going to have to do it.
But there's nothing known about butts?
What is Diane saying that they have to do?
We're going to find out when we come back from this quick break.
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We're back.
When we left off, a paleontologist had discovered the first ever known dinosaur butt fossil and had asked Diane, a baker and a butt expert.
I like how you did baker first.
She wanted to know what it looked like.
So how did she go about doing that?
Well, there were a couple of steps.
And here's the first.
So we had to reverse squish it.
Wait, reverse squish?
I think this is a new way that you can torment your little brother.
So here's how you reverse squish something, if you're a scientist.
You use some digital imaging tools that can kind of virtually blow the butt back up.
Okay.
And that revealed something interesting inside of the fossil.
So one of the things we could see in the fossil was this lighter white mass of kind of mineralized material.
Mineralized material, meaning something has been turned into a mineral.
Yes.
And for Diane, it was easy to tell what that mineral had once been.
It's fossilized poop.
So it died and fossilized with poop still on its butt?
Yeah, well, poop in its butt.
So when anything dies, anything that's inside of it is still inside of it.
That's a surprise.
So the poop was still there.
But that let us know that we were looking at the right area of the body.
We've got a scent.
Yeah.
Lindsay, we can always count on that this is where things will end up.
With poop, with you.
I guess there's a lot of poop science out there.
Well, anyway, what was this next step that they went to?
So they had to figure out how the butt worked.
Like, how the dinosaur would have used it.
I think they would have shaken it.
Anyway, how do you figure out how a butt works if the butt is long extinct?
Good one, Marshall.
Anyhow, that is a good question.
So a lot of biology is about comparing structures among different animals.
Anatomists like Diane look at lots of different animals to compare body parts, often using living animals, to understand how extinct animals would have used their bodies.
But when you have one...
You have one random Psittacosaurus that has its rear end preserved.
How do you then compare it?
How do you say anything reasonable about it and compare it to other animals of its type?
You can't.
Well, I'm assuming there aren't any Psittacosaurus wandering around in Australia with the echidnas.
Nope.
So Jacob wanted Diane's help to get creative.
He asked me if I had any ideas and I was like well, let me go and photograph a whole lot of animal butts.
Why does she want to photograph animal butts?
Remember Diane said that nothing had been written scientifically about different kinds of animal butts.
So she decided to create categories of Chloe Gay.
She started at her university.
So I went to the vertebra collection.
I pulled out a whole lot of specimens and I took a lot of pictures of rear ends.
Lots of pictures of rear ends.
That's an unusual photography assignment.
Indeed it is.
And after photographing the fossils, Diane got hands-on.
And I did some dissections.
Ooh, dissections.
That was my least favorite part of seventh grade.
Probably not Diane's.
Probably not.
Because she dissected or cut apart specimens of snakes, turtles and small birds to look at their muscles and understand how they were shaped.
And then she looks at live chickens, since they were the closest living relative to dinosaurs that she could get her hands on.
How did she do that?
Well, she called up a scientist friend who lived nearby who happened to keep chickens.
And she said, Here is the project.
Can I take pictures of your chicken's butts?
Sounds like a weird request, but what did the chicken owner say?
Come on over.
I'll make tea.
I guess this is the kind of thing that happens when you're friends with a scientist.
They ask weird things and are like, don't worry about why.
Yeah.
I mean, in this case, Diane did tell her friend and she was like, yeah, sounds normal.
So anyhow, now she's got all the photographs and Diane built the world's first ever butt inventory or list of different types of cloacas.
The butt inventory that other researchers can use.
Wait, so it's online and anyone can use her butt inventory?
Kind of.
It's a place where scientists who might have questions like Jacob's can now go and get information about the different types of cloacae.
So I wanted to know how she felt about this monumental achievement.
This is your contribution to science.
How do you feel about that?
Oh, I'm so glad that there is a butt database.
We're laughing about this now.
Like during the time, was it, were you like, oh, I can't believe this.
My life has led me.
No, my life is always like this.
Okay, okay, okay.
So Diane created a butt database, but where does that bring us with the kids' question about whether dinosaurs sniff their butts, and then my question about whether they turned around three times before they lay down?
All right.
Well, now that Diane understood all the types of butts, she could finally compare the Psittacosaurus cloaca to other animals.
So first, they looked at the skin impression that had impressed Jacob to begin with.
Their vent opening was darker colored, so it was like a little bullseye.
They could conceivably have flashed their butts at one another.
They flashed their butts at one another.
This is just her life, I guess.
What does that mean?
What do you think it means?
Doing little waggly dances.
Yeah, they were signaling something with their butts.
So like white-tailed deer?
White-tailed deer get their name from how they flip their white tails above their butts to signal alarm to the rest of the herd.
Maybe this is something similar.
It's like you've got a spot, if they flash it, maybe there's some sort of communication function.
Oh, so it's not just about how the butt looks, but how it's used.
Yeah, and Jacob and Diane noticed something else, too.
The two mounds on either side of the vent area were in about the same position that we see these really big scent glands in crocodiles.
Crocodiles have big scent glands?
What do scent glands do?
They can squish out this kind of really smelly material into the water.
Crocodiles and alligators use this smelly stuff to share and get information about other members of their species through the water.
So it's like a smell language.
They can learn things about one another by the way their butt juice smells.
That's crazy.
You're like, what do you want to know about me?
Here's my butt juice.
Here's my butt juice.
But as far as I know, Cytacosaurus wasn't in the water, right?
So if they had these scent glands, how would they be using them?
Well, they'll just release the smells into the air, and another dinosaur would smell them.
So they're smelling each other's farts, and that's how they're talking?
No, they're just, like, sniffing butts.
There's your answer.
Diane actually had a picture on her wall from the paleo artist or dinosaur drawer that she and Jacob worked with, named Robert Nichols.
It shows one animal flipping its tail up to show its colored butt and another dinosaur kind of checking it out.
It kind of looks a scene you might see at the dog park.
Yeah, it is very much like a dog sniffing each other's rear ends.
Oh, so they really could have sniffed each other's butts.
That's amazing.
Yep, it turns out these dog-sized dinos could have acted a lot like dogs.
Well, that's really cool.
So did all dinosaurs sniff each other's butts?
I guess that gives Ernie a more definitive answer than I would have expected.
Yeah.
Well, we don't know about all dinosaurs, but certainly this one did, and it could have been common in other types of dinosaurs.
So we asked Ernie to tell us what he learned from this episode.
The dinosaurs, they had stem glands.
That's how they sniffed their butt.
And they kind of behaved just like dogs.
And also I learned that Diane is a game designer.
Well, Ernie's right.
Diane is a game designer and dinosaurs had scent glands like dogs, which leads us to the conclusion that they did sniff each other's butts.
Exactly.
And also, you can design games, bake cookies, and study dinosaurs.
It's a lesson that Diane has spent her whole life learning.
I loved dinosaurs when I was a kid.
I never grew out of dinosaurs.
Now I am the person who knows about dinosaur butts.
What a dream job.
Seriously.
It is.
It is.
And when you add cookies to the mix, even better.
So now that you've learned how Diane studied today's animals to learn about the anatomy of dinosaurs, think about how the shape and function of other body parts are tied to behavior.
Think about our hands, for example, compared to your pet's paws, or even our gluteus maximus compared to a bird's behind.
What does our anatomy tell us about the different ways we live our lives?
For an activity, make up your own animal with different body parts from different animals.
How would they live their lives?
Like if you had the head of a cheetah and the butt of a snake, what would that even be like?
So draw a picture, make a collage from magazines, or maybe design something on your computer with the help of an adult.
There's lots of ways to make your animal.
Then send it to us at tumblepodcast at gmail.com.
We'd love to see it.
Thanks today to Dr. Diane Kelly, lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
You can learn more about Diane and find a transcript of this episode on the blog on our website, sciencepodcastforkidscom.
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Do you want to listen to our show in Spanish?
¿En español quieres?
Check out Tumble en Español.
Adapted and hosted by our friends Nuria and Alvaro, and occasionally with guest appearances by me.
Find it at tumbleinespañol.com or search for Tumble en Español wherever you get your podcasts.
Rebecca Cunningham is our assistant producer.
Sarah Robertson-Lentz is our managing editor and created the episode art.
Mixing and Mastering is by Gary Calhoun James.
I'm Lindsay Patterson.
I'm the executive producer of this show, and I wrote this episode.
And I'm Marshall Escamilla, and I make all the music and sound design for this episode.
Tumble Science is a production of Tumble Media.
Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for more stories of science discovery.
All right, everybody here.
We are at the end of the episode, and that means it's time for Patreon shoutouts, so let's just get that music up and running.
And here we go.
But first, before we do our birthday shoutouts, I want to give some shoutouts to our new patrons, Christopher and Anissa.
Thank you guys so much for your support.
And also I wanted to give a shoutout to Magnolia, Ray, and Julian, who are Patreon supporters and who came out to see me and Lindsay when we performed in Essex, Connecticut just a couple weeks ago.
It was such a blast to meet you guys.
It's always super fun to meet Patreon supporters and fans in general.
I just love it.
So anyway, we're gonna go ahead and move on to the birthdays.
A happy ninth birthday on october 20th to johnson.
Daddy bear and mummy bear are roaring with pride.
You've worked so hard this year and they love you more than a mountain of pizzas and ice cream combined to eli.
Your mimsy loves listening to tumble with you and hope you have a good time together on your birthday on october 22nd.
A very happy birthday on october 23rd to josie, And I hope you have many more opportunities to combine them.
To Dana, a happy birthday on October 23rd.
Mom and dad love you.
A happy 12th birthday to Elizabeth on October 25th.
It's fun to watch your love of science grow every year.
Keep working hard and you too can work in science.
To be honest, if I can do it, anyone can.
Mom and dad love you and are so proud of you.
Happy 15th birthday to Felicity on October 30th.
You're one of our longest-running patrons, so I hope you get to hear this.
Thanks so much for all of the support.
Thanks so much to all of you and to everyone who supports Tumble on Patreon.
We appreciate it so, so much, and I hope you all know that we couldn't keep making episodes of Tumble without the support of our subscribers on Patreon.
If you want to join these fine folks and get a birthday shout out of your own, go ahead and support Tumble on Patreon at the 5 level or higher by going to patreoncom.
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