65: No Such Thing As A Chickenosaurus

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chaczynski.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with Andy

my fact is that fish who work as cleaners can cheat their bosses and their bosses can punish them

so this is incredible there are there are fish as I'm sure you know who clean other fish as in they eat parasites from the skin right so you get cleaner fish and client fish is what they're technically known as and there have been lots of studies of this especially by this amazing sounding ecologist called Reduan Basheri I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, who has studied these guys so much.

And basically, the trade is for food versus clean skin, yeah?

But the cleaner fish they sometimes cheat because they actually like eating the thick mucus that covers the client fish as a protective layer, and they often have a cheeky bite of it instead of eating a a parasite, and that makes the client fish jump, I guess in pain.

So that's them cheating it, and then their bosses, the client fish, punish them by chasing them around.

And the cleaner fish which have been chased around then behave better in future.

They stop misbehaving as much when they've been chased about.

What are they threatening to do when they chase them around?

Because in the end, they want to be making contact with.

It's like being chased around by someone you really fancy.

Isn't it?

You don't run that fast.

It's like being chased by your boss.

You know, because they're often bigger fish, or they're often predatory.

Like when you're being chased by your boss.

Secrets of QI expose.

So, yeah, if there are lots of client fish, then the cleaners have the upper hand because they're more in demand.

And so they try and take more bites of mucus because they know that they've got a captive market.

Right.

Yeah.

Because the client fish have to get cleaned somewhere.

Yeah.

Genius.

So they propagate the problem in order that they can solve it, which is kind of exactly what a lot of human industry does, right?

I guess so, yeah.

How do they propagate the problem?

Aren't they

making it worse?

They're tricking their Not really, no, because they're not lowering the number of client fish available.

But client fish act no, actually, they sort of are because client fish remove their custom if they get bad service.

And they kind of keep going back to the same species or the same fish that they really like and have good service from, don't they?

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay, that's really cool.

And they sent up.

Do they have

huge service stations?

Yeah.

There are hundreds of them or something.

Yeah, they have all over the ocean, especially on reefs.

That's where you get them.

Just a big welcome break of cleaners' fish.

Basically, shell.

Yeah.

Yeah, a single cleaner fish inspects more than

2,300 fish a day.

Wow.

And it eats about 1,200 parasites.

That's an impressive rate of work.

And some client fish have themselves cleaned every five minutes.

Every five minutes.

So vain, celebrity client fish.

So this is quite a recent discovery, right?

Yeah, yeah.

This was a scuba diver who was...

Yeah.

Which is really cool because it just makes me wonder, what are the mysteries of fish?

You know,

there's so many things that we don't like I was reading as well, there's a I can't remember what the fish is called now, but it's a fish that basically sunbathes.

It goes to the surface of the water and it just lays there for half the day.

They've had no idea why it does that until recently.

They just put a camera on it and worked out that it was going really deep and it was finding all these other little things to eat and the coldness meant that it needed to get up there to get the heat back down like just to regulate their body temperature.

But they didn't know that up until recently.

So we've just had floating sunbathing fish up until a year or so ago.

Well, so they're just warming themselves up so that they can conserve heat to go back down to the cold water.

I think they're called sunfish.

Yes, sunfish.

Yes.

Here's a cool thing.

They get cleaned themselves by albatrosses.

No.

That doesn't sound like cleaning.

That sounds like the albatross is trying to eat them.

No, it couldn't quite get to it.

No, because they're huge as well.

The biggest ever found weighed 2.3 tons.

They're massive.

And when they get infested with these parasites, which obviously they suck their blood and they're horrible, albatrosses land nearby as they sunbathe and pick the parasites off them.

Wow.

Wow.

Isn't that incredible?

Yeah, that's really cool.

That reminds me of, for some reason, it reminds me of humpback whales get parasites on them, don't they?

They get lice on them.

And that's when you see a whale breaching and then jumping out of the water and then splashing back down again.

It's often to try and dislodge the parasites.

Is that the equivalent of a dog dragging itself along the ground?

It's slightly more romantic than that.

Yeah.

Because you don't get couples going on special holidays to watch dogs dragging themselves along the ground.

I don't know if I've seen that.

Do you have a sick dog?

No,

the little buck.

The butt,

oh, why think it's gone like that?

All right.

I mean, I've never seen it in real life, but I've seen it in cartoons and stuff.

Tom and Jerry's changed, isn't it?

So, this is another parasite.

So, oxpeckers have a similar relationship to things like rhinos and buffaloes.

Oxpecker.

It's a kind of bird.

So an oxpecker.

It does peck oxes.

It sure does.

It pecks oxen and zebras and rhinos.

It's a fitting name.

And so it sits on them and it eats ticks and parasites that live on them.

But they also trick their hosts because they obviously they've got a vested interest in getting more ticks and parasites to come and land on these animals.

And so they exacerbate their wounds or if they've got a bit of bloodied wound exposed, then the oxpeckers will come and peck it and make it a bit worse to make sure that more parasites come and then they can eat the parasites.

So that is kind of harsh.

It's not more than that, is it?

It's like a cleaner who makes your house more dirty.

Just so more cleaners come.

I think I'm going to need to hire another cleaner.

Before you know it, you've just got hundreds of cleaners

and a dirty, dirty, dirty house.

Yeah.

So

there are really cool photos on the mail of there's a 13-year-old who went snorkeling in Indonesia and he persuaded a shrimp to clean his teeth.

Wow.

You say persuade his gun.

Come on.

Yeah.

Come on.

I'm not going to tell anyone.

He's probably going to enjoy it.

He snorkeled down to whether it, because he found a cleaning station, one of these garages, basically, where they, and there it's not fish, it's shrimp.

It just happens to be owned and operated by shrimp.

And

he opened his mouth and it went into his mouth and it removed bits of food from between his teeth.

Wow.

Yeah, I've seen that.

It's pretty gross.

Unbelievably cool.

I'll put up pictures of it on Twitter.

If you'd just been eating shrimp, though, that wouldn't be very nice.

Oh, my God.

That's true.

Such a good point.

Jeff?

That's like having a car made of mechanics.

Quite an expensive dental treatment, I think, flying to Bali every time that you have to clean your teeth.

Toothpick, you'll do the job.

But there are also mimic fish.

So cleaner fish have a bright blue stripe along them often, or they're really brightly covered to kind of to advertise themselves and say, Hey, look, I'm here, I'm bright, and I'm I'm happy to clean your teeth or eat the parasites or whatever.

But there are mimic fish which have evolved the same kind of stripe, hang around near cleaner fish and just go around taking chunks out of just eating the mucus only.

Yeah, eating the mucus only, exactly.

And that damages trade because it makes fish at the station more nervy.

And these stations, they're like,

what's a good?

They're like neutral territory in the ocean.

So you get even sharks turning up to have the parasites cleaned up, and they don't eat fish that they would normally be hunting and killing and eating because it's kind of safe.

It's a safe zone for all fish.

Okay, so if you fall out of of a boat in the middle of the ocean,

what you need to do is find one of these areas, and then no sharks will eat you because you're safe and you're in the neutral zone.

Exactly, yeah.

And you get a good floss.

My favourite mutualism, like mutualistic relationship underwater is actually shrimp-based.

It's the relationship between shrimps and goby fish.

Have you seen this?

So shrimps and goby fish have this really sweet relationship where the goby fish gets the shrimp to build its so the goby fish lives in um little dugouts in the sand at the bottom of the ocean and it get employs the shrimp to build its little dugout

and then it keeps the shrimp on as a permanent cleaner to clean its house so they both live together in this house and the goby shrimp is employing the goby fish is employing the shrimp to clean his house and to build it

and in exchange the because the shrimp doesn't have very good eyesight so can't really spot when predators are coming so the goby fish sits at the top of the burrow and looks out for predators and they're always in contact so the goby fish always has a little fin touching the shrimp.

And if there's a predator, he'll wave his fin at the shrimp and be like, right back in the hole.

Sounds like a great sitcom, doesn't it?

Yeah.

But also,

the other shark or fish or whatever must know that the goby is hiding.

You got any shrimp at home today?

Oh, no.

No, I fired him.

He wasn't doing a good job.

What are you holding on to down there?

No, nothing.

Show me your fin, the other one.

So, some of these cleaner fish, if they eat too much, if you're a female cleaner fish, if you eat too much, you turn into a male.

So, you get bigger and bigger and you turn into a male.

Right?

I don't quite know how that works, but it does work.

And apparently, there's some very new research that says that male cleaner fish will aggressively nudge their mates to watch their diet.

So, if they're eating too much bucus, they're like, stop it, you'll turn into a mum.

That is so good.

Okay, time for fact number two.

My fact this week is that Al-Qaeda's job application form includes a question asking who should be contacted in the event that the applicant becomes a martyr.

Now, I have a lot of questions about that.

Where is the job application form available?

Okay, so they found this as a part of basically when they raided Bin Laden's house and when Bin Laden was taken down, they took all the stuff from his room.

He was applying for a job.

So now all you have to do is go to Bin Laden's house and then pick up a form there.

It's very easy.

But so

they found a lot of books, they found a lot of papers, obviously, and the government haven't released it for a long time and it's just been released.

And part of the papers that were found in his house was the al-Qaeda job applicant form.

There are lots of questions like what objectives would you like to accomplish on your jihad path?

Which I think is such a nice thing.

I guess they don't ask where will you be in the next five years.

And hobbies?

They want to know hobbies.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Hobbies and pastimes is another question.

Do you know that Bin Laden was a really good volleyball player?

No, did he?

Is he?

Yeah, he was.

Whenever they used to have um volleyball competitions in al-Qaeda, um he and Mohammed Atef had to be on different teams'cause they were both by far the best players.

Wow.

He was really tall, wasn't he?

Yeah, he was.

But was he really good in the way that we've often said Kim Jong-un is great at golf?

You know, like were people just letting him win every shot kind of thing?

Maybe.

I wonder.

I thought he was on dialysis.

This might have been earlier, before the dialysis.

Okay, because a lot of the best volleyball players are not on dialysis.

It's true.

That's a good fact.

It's possibly Nintendo Wii that he was on volleyball on as well.

I suppose if you have to stay indoors all the time.

Exactly.

Was he found with some kind of games console?

Oh, no, he had loads of DVDs.

Loads of DVDs, lots of pornography.

Lots of pornography.

Yeah, they've not released the titles of it, but they said they had a bigger search, have they?

Yeah, yeah.

Because

they've said that he had a lot of books and they've released the titles of the books that he had, which included Noam Chomsky books and really oddly, conspiracy theory books about 9-11, which is really interesting.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

He had a lot of them and a huge stash of pornography.

They've not told us what they are.

One thing that's said, though, is that apparently extremists often have pornography as a way of communicating, so they'll have coded messages within a...

That is true.

Steganography, it's called, which is when you put messages in pictures.

And terrorists usually use pornography.

What, so they set up a porn chute in order that they can plant a message into the scene somewhere?

I think they use existing photos.

That is the most convoluted excuse for seeing naked women I've ever met.

Looking for a message!

I have to look really closely at this one, I'm afraid.

Probably for hours.

I probably want to take it with me, actually, guys.

I'd like to thank you for this fact, Dan, because now, in the course of researching application forms for terrorism, I have in my Google record the phrase apply to join ISIS

and I am as I speak on the UN terror watch list

you probably are that's weird to think that that will have alerted some time

five minutes ago and now that's never leaving me isn't there um a like a removals company in the UK called ISIS or used to be called ISIS and then they had to change their name or is a building company or something there are lots of there are lots of firms actually so there's um and summers they were bringing out a a line called ISIS.

I think we've mentioned this on the podcast before.

And

they said, well, it's too late to change it now.

We've been working on this for six months.

The best one was about that is the people who had a 21st birthday party.

Do you remember that?

No.

So it was a 21st birthday party.

They had two balloons that said 21st, so a two and a one.

But from the other side of the room, it looked like IS.

So from outside, it looked like IS.

And people called the police and said, we think there's a, you know,

an ISIS birthday party.

Yeah, exactly.

As if they'd advertise where they were with you.

I don't know if they have ISIS balloons.

They don't seem like the kind of party balloon sort of guys.

I was in Oxford a few weeks ago, and there was an NHS sort of small building that was called ISIS out on the front of it as well.

And right next to the sign ISIS, there was another sign that they put outside in paper that said, please do not lean your bicycle against our wall.

And you're like, that I am definitely not going to lean your brain on.

There are no bicycles on that wall.

I just thought that's fantastic.

You know the questions that you get asked on forms.

So the U.S.

visa form has some very, very weird questions.

Like, are you coming to the U.S.

to engage in prostitution?

Do you belong to a clan or tribe?

And have you ever been responsible for, quotes, particularly severe violations of religious freedom?

So presumably

trivial violations of religious freedom are okay.

But do you know the reason they do this?

You have to answer all these.

Is it because then if you answer it and you you lie, then they can kick you out because you've lied on a font?

Yes.

So that they have a reason to say

you've obtained a visa by fraud or misrepresentation, and that in itself is enough of a reason to ask you to leave the country.

So that's why they do it.

Did you see the Mexican visa application one?

No, no.

So this is one of the questions on it.

Since been taken off.

Describe your mustache/slash beard.

That cannot be true, Dan.

That's a number of people have written.

This was

in either The Independent or The Telegraph.

This This was in The Telegraph.

They did a survey of questions you've been asked on a visa form.

I want to check the date on that, because that does sound very much.

I was suspect.

It was one respondent, and he said the options were scant, bushy, or clipped.

I have to say, I wasn't going to read this out either.

I thought it was too much of a risk.

Hey, one guy claimed it.

I believe it.

Did you see that job application in the Isles of Scilly, which was for an air traffic controller, and it was in Braille?

Oh, really?

And they were like, Well, all of our job applications have to come in all the different, you know, in Braille as well as in

writing.

So scary stuff,

though, isn't it?

Yeah.

In Russia, to get your dry cleaning done, you have to sign your signature five times and fill in a large number of forms.

There's a really good essay on the Guardian website about bureaucracy in Russia

and

how lots of Soviet bureaucracy has basically survived.

That doesn't sound like it would be true in all

dry cleaners.

Maybe it's an especially bureaucratic dry cleaning service.

Is it just one form and there's five signature lines at the bottom?

Sounds like dry cleaners is a euphemism for something like cleaning the streets of London of treacherous

size.

I was at a hotel once, and the person at reception asked me for my two signatures, and I said, I've only got one.

And I think it's the funniest thing I've ever said in my life.

She didn't.

Have you heard anything funnier?

Okay, time for fact number three and that is

James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the single biggest expense in the computer game Lego universe was to hire human moderators to make sure that people weren't making Lego penises.

So penis monitoring.

What it was, it's one of those games like Minecraft where you can build and whatever.

And a lot of people, of course, when you can build anything you want, if you can draw anything you want, a lot of people draw penises.

And they wanted to come up with a way of stopping people from doing this because they wanted other people to go into your world.

And they didn't want children like stumbling into the world of someone who built a penis.

And so they tried to get a computer to be able to work out when there were penises around, but the computer couldn't do it.

They just, it was impossible to come up with a program that would definitely recognize a Lego penis above anything else.

Like sometimes they'd say something was a penis, and actually it was a building, and sometimes they would miss one or whatever.

And so the only way to get around it was to get a moderation team who would check every single erection to check that it wasn't a penis.

Oh my god.

And it cost them a fortune and that was probably why it went off.

And this was tweeted by a lady called Megan Fox who was a developer who worked on the project and it was picked up by a website called fusion.net who wrote an article about it last week.

See, I didn't know know that Megan Fox had been branching out.

Yeah.

Good for you.

Just for the sake of it, you can actually reach her on at GlassBottomMeg.

That's her actual Twitter handle.

So if anyone has any questions following this podcast.

Yeah, don't ask me.

Go straight to Megan.

Wow.

Penises stop the Lego universe game.

That's such a shame.

It's such a victory for, you know,

it's not a victory for innocence and joyfulness and play.

Yeah.

It's a victory for people building enormous penises.

Yeah.

But can't they, like on most websites, you have the ability to have a parent lock.

Couldn't they just do a kind of parent lock?

And stop children from playing the Lego computer game.

Maybe if

you

explicit penises only.

Maybe as an adult, if you register your penis in it, like you say,

I have built a penis in my universe.

I think it's a very good thing.

And then they go...

Well, the point is, it's people, like, they're not worried about the people who are going to register it.

It's the people who nefariously build these penises.

And their computers can't stop them because penises look a lot like other stuff, don't they?

Yeah, they look like buildings, snakes,

other penises,

other penises.

Should we ban this?

It could be a penis, but also it could just be another penis, in which case we should leave it.

I was reading today, just on Lego, that Cambridge is thinking of creating a new post for a professor, the professor of Lego.

Not just thinking, I think they are doing that.

Is he he going to be made of Lego?

With loads of Lego undergraduates as well.

That'd be really cool.

They basically,

Lego have provided them, supposedly, with 2.5 mil to create the post.

And it's going to be about play in education and stuff like that.

But yeah, there might be a professor of Lego now.

Okay, so things that computers can't do, maybe.

So the US is spending a lot of money to try and get facial recognition on people when they're going through airports to kind of see if they look like a terrorist.

And supposedly, there might be some little micro-expressions that people give off, like if they're worried by the fact that they have to go through security.

But apparently, the face of a man about to detonate a suicide belt has the same expression as a man who realizes he has left the stove on.

Oh, wow.

That's why they can't tell.

No, and I left the suicide belt in the stove.

This is a disaster.

There's not a because that's what the human face is.

There's not a specific expression for a specific situation.

It's an emotion.

Did you see that Play-Doh a couple of years ago had to withdraw this

had to withdraw this product that it was releasing called the icing extruder

after

complaints from parents that it looked like a penis.

It was extruding icing as well.

It was extruding icing.

It was to help them make cake, so I think it was like a shaping tool.

But if you look at it, it is a penis and testicles.

And yeah, I think the news report said, unfortunately, it looks more like a sex toy, albeit albeit a three-incher, than a child's toy.

Which is true, it does.

I think that's surely that's all in the mind of the parents.

It's not looking up.

Andy's just showing us the Playdale picture on his computer now.

I know.

Oh, yeah.

I'm amazed that Safe Search is letting it through, to be honest.

But that's fine when you see it actually

on your own laptop.

Of course.

Every day, Andy's mum gives him his pack lunch, puts the parent log on his computer, sends him off to work.

Have you heard about the oldest penis ever discovered?

Is it not microbrachia sticky?

Yes, sorry, that is the very, very oldest penis.

This is the oldest man-made representation of a penis.

Oh, okay.

Which is a physical object, not just a drawing.

So

it's 28,000 years old, which is amazing.

And it was found at the Hoele Fells cave in Switzerland, which is a cave where they found lots and lots of really ancient stuff.

And

I just love this sentence about it.

It might have been used either as a sex toy or to do flint napping, where you sharpen flints to use as tools.

And the BBC report said: the two bigger team working holophiles already had 13 fractured parts of the phallus in storage, but it was only with the discovery of a 14th fragment last year that the team was able finally to put the jigsaw together.

What do they think?

Were they making up some shapes with it before that?

Is it an elephant?

Is it an aeroplane?

Is it another penis?

Well, so that's the oldest man-made penis, but the oldest graffiti penis, cock and balls, that someone sketched out, the oldest known one, was discovered last year.

It's 2,500 years old, and it's in this Aegean island called Astipalaia or Astipalaea.

And it was discovered when a Princeton professor was taking a bunch of archaeology students there to show them the wonders of the island, the island's archaeology, and they uncovered just hundreds of obscene pictures and obscene graffiti.

So things like Nicositimos was here mounting Timiona and various bits of abuse against people.

And yeah, the first picture of a cock on balls, a very clear penis and two testicles.

And the Princeton professor said, Dr.

Vlakopoulos, who found it, said, what we have found is evidence that even then people were using a coded language of symbols and imagery that was quite sophisticated.

I mean, it's not the Da Vinci code.

Shall we crack on?

Yeah, can I just mention this one last thing?

I think this has been said on QI before, but I just really like it, which is the small penis rule.

And I'd never heard of it before.

And it's the idea that if you are in a novel trying to base a character off someone in real life, they can usually make an argument that you've used them as the inspiration, they can sue you.

So Michael Crichton did this thing where he totally took down someone in real life in his book, but then he added this little extra detail, which was the character has a small penis.

And the guy wasn't able to sue him because he had to admit that he has a small penis if it was him.

I would just do that and I'd say, okay, fine, whatever you want,

you can say he has added, he has drawn a malicious portrait of me, and then he has given him another characteristic.

Yeah, I mean, you would think, but it turns out it worked, and it's now known as the small penis rule, which is something that gets you out of being libelous.

Yeah, because you could say that, couldn't you?

But it's whether or not people are going to believe it once they've seen the word small penis near a representation of you.

I mean, no one's going to not say that that was a lie.

I think also the idea is not that it will get thrown out of court, it's that you won't bring it too complex.

You won't bring it too much.

Because then there'll be a whole cross-examination on the length of your

like the Barbara Streising effect, which we discovered, which we discussed last time.

That's where

you just don't want to draw attention to this because then it'll probably get into the papers and it'll be very amusing for everyone, and you'll feel I read the other day about characters.

This is a bit off topic, but you know, Goldfinger.

Yeah.

This was named after Erno Goldfinger, who's an architect who did Trellic Tower and a few other things, Elephant and Castle and stuff.

And he apparently was furious that Alexander Fleming, no, that Ian Fleming.

That Alexander Fleming had invented penicillin,

which really made the plot more difficult.

Do you expect me to talk?

No, Mr.

Bond.

I expect you to recover.

Anyway,

no, so yeah, he was apparently furious that, let's just call him Fleming.

He was furious that Fleming had used his name and threatened to sue.

And the publishers sort of like paid him off and also said that they were going to put a thing at the start of the book saying it's not based on anyone and it's just a coincidence.

And they all agreed to that.

But Fleming wasn't very happy with that at all.

And he was so unhappy that he went to his publishers and told them that he wanted to rename Goldfinger Goldprick.

Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is Jasinski.

My fact is that the man who inspired the main character in Jurassic Park is now building a chickenosaurus.

Which character in Jurassic Park is the main character?

The T-Rex.

I would have said the T-Rex.

He wants a friend.

No, this is Jack Horner, who is the paleontologist on whom Sam Neal's character is based, kind of what he's called in the film.

But yeah, he's a really famous paleontologist, and he is now building what he calls either a chickenosaurus, a chickensaurus, or a dino chicken, which gives a general idea of what it is.

How far has he got if he's still on name points right there?

He's been wrangling with that for a good decade or so, but no, he's got quite a long way.

So it's about genetically back-engineering a chicken into being a dinosaur or into giving it dinosaur characteristics.

And the three main things you need to change are the tail.

So you've got to give the chicken a tail, because at the moment, chickens have this thing called a pidger style, which is the thing that makes their tail feathers move, but it's not a tail.

So give them a tail, give them claws like a dinosaur instead of wings, and give them a snout, not a beak.

They make them a hundred times bigger.

And you just blow into them for that with a straw.

Okay.

And yeah, they've done the beak, I think.

So the tail's the hardest, apparently, getting a tail on the thing.

I've seen a picture of what the beak would look like.

It's pretty dinosaur-like.

The snout is very small.

Like the snout rather than the beak, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, that's interesting, because birds had snouts for 50 million years.

So the beak is a relatively recent innovation.

And is it better?

I think beaks are better in lots of ways.

Yeah, yeah.

It must be more suited to whatever environment.

Because if it feels like maybe it's getting into small holes and stuff,

a woodpecker would be rubbish with a snout.

You just bruise his nose constantly.

It seems with dinosaurs, so they're now saying that they had feathers.

That's a theory coming up.

I read one the other day that the diplodocus, we all have this impression that the long necks is that they go out on a sort of 45-degree angle.

But actually, they were right up.

That's the new theory.

Yeah, the new theory is that they go right vertically up.

Like a giraffe.

Yeah, it was.

So they thought they were supposed to balance each other because it was like the tail going out one way and the neck going out the other way.

I think the tail goes right up as well.

That's just why it's trying to get through a really tight little cat.

Or be goalposts for

American football.

Do we know what kind of dinosaurs would have had feathers, or is the prevailing theory that all of them had feathers?

Well, I think T-Rexes, they're saying.

T-Rexes had feathers.

Yeah, and they may not have had penises.

Any of them.

To take it back to penises.

I think that's something that we're confident about, isn't it?

Well, no, no, I mean, we don't know that any dinosaurs had penises.

And actually, we're not sure with a lot of them how mechanically they had sex.

One of the things in looking to this, because Jack Horners has a number of dinosaurs named after him.

Polynosaurus.

Yeah, maybe.

I don't know.

Actually, do you have the names on you by any chance?

Pterojactyl.

Yeah.

Oh!

Pterojactyl.

I thought I knew all the dinosaurs.

I thought they were like the classic.

I thought I knew them all.

Well, no, it's just like when you thought you knew all the Roman numerals.

No, it turns out there's like there's so many dinosaurs out there that like celebrities have dinosaurs named after them.

That's how many there are.

Like Attenborough has a dinosaur named after him.

Attenborosaurus.

Nice.

There's also Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits.

The reason it's named after him is that when they were digging this quarry, they seemed to find this new species any time Dire Straits was pumping out over the sound system.

So they were just like, get Dire Straits back on, and they kept finding more.

So they gave that species to him.

And there's also an Elvis one called the Elvisaurus.

And it was the first dinosaur to be discovered in Antarctica.

Which Elvis loved.

You know,

where Elvis spent a lot of time as a boy.

Where Elvis now lives.

I found out a really cool thing about chickens this week, which is that we have just found a new state of matter in the eyeball of a chicken.

How cool is that?

I thought I knew all the states of matter.

Not anymore, James.

Yeah, no, you've fallen into my trap there.

Yeah, so there are a few states of matter aside from the standard four, and this one is called disordered hyper-uniformity, which is kind of cool.

And it's an arrangement of molecules which is really chaotic if you look at it close up.

And then over large spaces, it's got a kind of uniformity.

And it apparently acts somewhere between a liquid and a crystal, I think.

But yeah, it just rocked up in the eye of a chicken as they were studying it.

That's cool.

That's like when there was, you know, we have phylums.

So every animal fits into a phylum.

And they found a whole new phylum.

And it was on a lobster's lip.

And it was just this total new type of life that they'd not seen before.

How do they notice that?

I don't know.

How did they notice the chicken eye?

Oh, this doesn't look like a state of matter I've seen in anyone's eye before.

Yeah, like how would you even begin to do that?

So, the industrial farming of chickens was kind of a mistake the way it started.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Explain.

Well, before 1923, when hens were raised for meat, they were more or less a byproduct of egg-laying birds.

At the end of an egg-laying bird's life,

it would be killed uh for meat, uh but there wasn't quite the same tradition of raising lots and lots and lots of birds.

So traditional farming favoured birds which were good for eggs and for meat, basically.

And then in 1923 a woman from Delaware uh called Mrs.

Cecile Steele, just pleasing um she accidentally ordered far too many birds.

She meant to order fifty and she got five hundred.

Was it like when you're doing your online shopping and she accidentally bought a thousand and so on?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Um and so she she sold them and then the next year she produced a thousand and her neighbours started catching on, thinking, oh, wait, this is really good, and there's more of a market for this than we thought there was.

So people like chicken.

Yeah, in 1925, Delaware farmers made 50,000 birds.

They grew 50,000 birds.

In 1929, it was 3 million.

Wow.

Yeah, and at that election, Herbert Hoover, he promised a chicken in every pot.

And that was the kind of start of this incredible expansion of battery farming.

When people used to cook chickens, they used to make want to make them sing for some reason, like it or when it's just come out of the oven, they used to want to make it sing.

And what they used used to do is put mercury inside the chicken and then kind of sew it up, and then that would kind of expand and make air inside the chicken, and then they make a tiny hole, I think, and then it would kind of tweet.

Wow, wow,

so clever,

it's clever apart from the fact that it's highly poisonous.

It's worth it, though, for that.

So it's like taking it out on the chicken going, ta-da!

Not everyone is happy with the Chickenosaurus idea of making a Chickenosaurus.

So one of the colleagues of Doctor Horner has said this, it was in a BBC report.

Has he said get back in your corner, Jack?

No, he hasn't.

He should have done.

He should have.

Can't say he gets that a lot.

He said, technically, you're going to have a messed up chicken.

It's not a dinosaur.

It's never going to be a dinosaur.

It's just going to be a really awful monstrosity.

I would agree with that, actually.

I think what you're making is not a dinosaur.

You're making a chicken with dinosaur characteristics, right?

But if all the genes survive somewhere, I find that really interesting.

So the idea is that chickens somewhere will have DNA that was inside dinosaurs, right?

And some of it will be inactive, or some of it will have been thrown away or just evolved away over time.

What is true is that the chicken that you had for dinner yesterday, its parents were a chicken.

That chicken's parents were a chicken, and they were a chicken, and they were a chicken, and they were a chicken.

And then if you go far enough, their parents would have been a dinosaur.

I think that's so cool.

I think one of the main things is, say, for instance, the tail.

A chicken embryo has a tail, but then it kind of gets reabsorbed back into the embryo.

And there's a gene that does that.

If you can turn that gene off, then the tail will continue to grow, and then you'll have a chicken with a tail.

And actually, human embryos also have tails.

So

yeah, we reabsorb them as well.

Theoretically, if you could find the gene in humans and turn that off, then you could have humans with tails.

Would it be a hairy tail, like a monkey's tail?

Sure, and I would say it must be.

I know, because it wouldn't be, but then again, because it hasn't evolved with the rest of us to be non-hairy.

Humans aren't hairy all over like that.

Well, I am.

They think getting the tail reabsorption gene to stop turning off is something they think they might have cracked because they've worked out how to turn on a gecko's tail reabsorption.

So scientists have learned how to make a gecko embryo reabsorb its own tail.

This is so exciting.

Yeah.

I think in the future, when you're having a baby, you'll be able to tick all the boxes for you know

tail

it be

pushed, clipped,

spraggly.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At eggshaped.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Anna.

You could email podcast at qi.com.

And you can also go to at qi podcast.

You also can go to no such thingasafish.com.

We got 60-something episodes up there you can listen to.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

And I'll hold on to you.

So it's time to get together.

Show what we can do.

You hold on to me.

I'll hold on to you.