 of what we'll be talking about today. So I'll be talking a bit about the science behind this. So this is part of my own personal research backgrounds on Titanobo and the amazing world right after the age of the dinosaurs. Greg is going to give you a full rundown on how he created the snake that you'll see slithering around here. There's another one kind of camped out not too far away. Spent a lot of time putting these things together. And Julia will be rounding up with all the work she did putting into the environment that we're now immersed in. So trying to recreate the world of Titanoboa. Someone doesn't have bones. But hopefully you guys are getting connected in. Okay, next. All right, the science. So, and I apologize if some of you guys might have seen my presentation on Titanoboa before you'll definitely see some stuff from that. But it's been a long time so maybe we could all use a little bit of a refresher anyway. So one of the things I find so fascinating about reptiles in particular and this is really my specialty within paleontology is the ancient life of reptiles. And that is a large part of that is just because they are quote unquote cold-blooded. They're ectothermic meaning that they need a certain amount of their temperature from their surrounding environment to function in a much more fundamental way than you see in warm-blooded animals like mammals. And as a result their evolution gets tied in a lot more intimately with changes in climate. You can see that reflected really well in things like body size. You get really large body sizes in the warmest parts of the earth. And that's really well typified by things like anacondas in northern South America or excuse me shown here, reticulated python in South East Asia and the largest lizards, the Komodo dragon in Indonesia and the warmest parts of the world is where you're going to get the most extremes of body size, or the biggest body size possible. That's because it's just physiologic with the capable of working in a much colder climate. Yeah, I don't know if we've got a ride function on the big snake. I think that'll be a next step. But it's looking really good. He built it from the ground up too, so you'll be all about all the nitty-gritty there. Let me see if I can pull up my slides locally here and see what we're talking about. That's right, it is a constrictor snake. So it is not venomous, but it's definitely incredibly powerful in a little bit of the specifics of that. I'm sorry, I apologize. For me, I'm just seeing a blurry screen. Hopefully you guys are seeing an actual screen in the east. I'm pulling up my own stuff here so I can see where we are in this and get back up the speed. Okay, so we're going to walk back to this time here. We're about 60 million years ago, and this is part of Northern South America that was really unknown from science until we were able to get into the Serpent coal mine. So this is a time when temperatures were much higher than they are today, even with the projected changes that we're looking at in the near future. So when we're getting into this, this is the Serpent coal mine. Basically, it's a larger footprint coal mine, and it's only because of that that we're actually able to see any of this rock layer at all. It would normally be way crowned. So basically as they're excavating out coal, we've been able to go in and see what we can find. And we found pretty early on bones of crocodilians. This actually became my PhD dissertation. So what you're seeing on the left there is a spinal column or part of it of a crocodile. So we've got a few vertebrae and right up there. Then in the bottom right there, this is one of the skulls that I found on one of my longer stints there. This is just awesome to kind of boil down a ton of work into one slide effectively. The diversity for the crocodiloforms was three new species, which I got some name, living in a pretty riverine environment but very, very flooded, which is basically what we're standing in right now. So lots and lots of water, lots and lots of vegetation. And in that, you're not only getting these crocodiloforms that have a variety of sizes, some of which got to be quite big. You're also getting some really big turtles. We do have a couple of fish that have been found from here as well. So you'll see just by the screen here, there's a lungfish. No one's created a lungfish in Second Life yet. So we've got an illustration here that at least kind of came out of it. And you'll see some crocodilians and turtles, Primalans, api, these were all selected because they're at least pretty similar to them, because they were alive at the same time and scaled out to about the right size. One of the things that I find really interesting about the Primalians there is that they have, one of them in particular, in Thracosuchus, had an incredibly powerful bite. And we see lots and lots of tooth marks from this croc along the shells of even the really, really, really big turtles there. Like the one next to the guy there that's Edwin worked on the turtles from the site, he is about probably five foot six, something like that, to give you a little bit of a sense of scale there. And you're getting bite marks all the way in the middle of the shell there, which gives you a sense of not only how big these things were, but how powerful it was because you lose force as you go further away from the back of the jaws. So that means that you have a lot of force if you're leaving mark and solid bone that far into a shell. Now what you're looking at here is actually the first snake vertebrate, as far as I can tell that was recovered from the site. And you get a little bit of a sense of there with the scale, but you'll get a little bit of a better sense after I give you a little bit more context. So if you're not familiar, the largest snakes that are alive today are the Anaconda, specifically the green Anaconda, which lives in North and South America today. That is the biggest en masse, so it is the biggest heaviest snake alive today, but the reticulated python can actually get longer even though it's not as bulky and massive. So it just depends on how you want to classify what's the biggest snake alive. Now this is two scale. So what we've got in the lower left is an Anaconda vertebrate. This is from a 19-foot female. This is about as big as they get. And that is the vertebrate from this air home, Coleman. This is just one vertebrate. This is actually not even the largest one that we've recovered. This is actually kind of one of the earlier ones that we found that was nice and pretty much like preserved and not squished. So this gives you a little bit of sense of scale. It's really big, right? And as it turns out there's a whole ton of work and math and time that goes into just, it's really big to actually figure out exactly how big that snake was. Again, I'll boil down about a year's worth of work into a single slide here. Basically, using what we call a shape analysis, we were able to take points of all the different vertebrate of the fossil snake that we found, as well as go across the entire vertebral column of a lot of relatives of this snake. Now from the features of the bones, we knew it was in the family with fellas and anacondas that helped narrow the down a lot. But there's still quite a lot of members of the family. And in order to figure out how big it is, you really need to know where in the spinal column those vertebrate came from because that has a huge difference in how big the fossil snake is. So by using the shape analysis, we can connect this point matches, this point matches, this point from the head to the tail of modern snakes, a wide variety of the family boa day. And then with a fancy algorithm, we can then use some predictability to then put those within about a 5% range within the spinal column of the snake. That gives us a sense then of how big it was. So it's a whole big long process thanks to the help of a bunch of co-authors. We're able to figure out that we were, of course, indeed dealing with a very big snake, one that was about the size actually a little bigger than your average school mouse. So we're looking at about 43 feet or 13 meters in length, which is absolutely insane. Much, much bigger than any anaconda live today and much bigger than the tide balance. And as a close relative of the bows in anacondas, we expect a lot of that same kind of muscle mass built up around it. So this is something that would have been so, so incredibly powerful that, you know, to crush through bones would be like, like holding a dry wound through your hand. It takes zero effort whatsoever to, you know, snap a skeleton of pretty much anything. And in terms of like general proportions, it'd be kind of like having the weight of the Brooklyn bridge on top of you. Your body at that point is inconsequential. Yeah, so we're looking at about one and a quarter tons of mass, which is just insane for a snake. And just a monster in every single respect. Every, every reason to think this would have been an apex predator, there's nothing bigger than it in environments, especially in terms of length. And in terms of length, I'm still pretty darn sure it's the largest known animal on earth at the time. Because this is after the age of the dinosaurs, all the marine reptiles have gone extinct. Whales don't exist yet. And there's kind of, we're still after the mass extinction event. So large sharks and fish aren't really a thing at this point that I'm aware of. So in any case, it definitely is the biggest thing in its environment. And crop probably would have been able to eat, unfortunately, for my favorites, the crocodilians. Some of those would have been good food sources as well as some of the fish there. Now, in terms of like the bigger question, though, we wanted to answer just how did this snake get so big, right? Why did this snake exist at this time? And you don't know of any other third giants this big any other time, right? So the idea is, well, our idea was to go back to snake physiology, basics of what makes a reptile a reptile, right? So looking at climate aspects and see if that is in, like we see in the modern record, where we have snakes a bigger size in one place. Now, we're going to close the tropics, right? So we expect it to have been one, but we don't have snakes that big today. So was it significantly hotter at the time? Now, we traditionally do this a lot with plants. And we do have a really good fossil reef record from this site. That's actually how a lot of the great accuracy around the flora that you're standing in right now came from direct fossil evidence. I'll let you get a little bit. So we knew it was pretty hot at the time, even probably hotter than today. But in order to kind of push into new territory, we developed what we sort of informally called the snake paleo thermometer, basically looking at the physiology of snakes, which can actually be boiled down to mathematical relationship that can tell us rough within certain air bars, how hot it would have been just to keep this snake. The short end is somewhere around three, four-ish degrees Celsius, a mean annual temperature warmer than it is today. Now, four degrees might not sound like a lot. You can get more variation than that within a single day. But when we're talking mean annual temperature, that's actually the enormous difference. And just for a frame of reference for a lot of the climate change that we're looking at right now that we're trying very much to stem the tide of the increase here and already very much feeling the effects of climate. Now, we are just trying to keep it to one and a half degree Celsius temperature increase. Going to four degrees is just completely new territory. And this was, especially when we published it, there is this concept that the tropics might actually be relatively buffered from future climate change, like within our human time, and that the effects of climate change would be much more dramatic in other parts of the world. This really helped illustrate very vividly that the tropics has in the past been very hot, even significantly hotter than it is today. And it has every potential to do that again. And it's going to have dramatic impact on the kinds of animals that do well in that environment. I think it's because of this lesson that Titanoboa can actually really contribute to our understanding of the world and how we prepare for the future. So things like past temperatures really help a lot actually in refining climate predictions for the future. So the idea is to improve your track record in the past gives you a better chance to kind of project forward. And these kinds of important data points not only give us really good data to then project for the tropics in the future, but also tell us, give us some insight into what kinds of expectations we would have for life in these environments. Now there's of course lots of other factors that go into giant snakes existing. Temperature being an important one, but not the only one. So a lot of people like to bring up the question. I think I just found the chat here. Will we get Titanoboa again? This massive giant snake. I'll say that as the temperature goes up, the bar of possibility also goes up and we can get larger and larger snakes. The biggest other kind of thing that you got to keep in mind is that there has to be a good suitable habitat for those big snakes. And one of the other things we're doing very quickly in addition to raising the temperature, it is destroying a lot of tropical habitats where these things would thrive. So it's not the best circumstances, but it's actually possible. And what we're seeing, what's a really good example of where this could go is the invasive pythons in the Florida Everglades. And if you haven't heard about the trees, they're often in the pet trade. There are reticulated Burmese and rock pythons are all actually invasive in the southern part of Florida. It's really nice and warm and rarely gets very cold there. And what we're starting to see is they're creeping further and further north. And they're not small when they do that. Now I'm not saying they're going to show up like where I am here in Minnesota anytime soon, but they're testing their boundaries and they're getting into places where they weren't before. And that's being made possible in large part because of climate change. And we're starting to see things like Alligator Virginia, like these things just within my lifetime have been changing, which is incredible. So on that very positive future, I think it's exciting in the sense that I love giant reptiles and I would love to see a one and a quarter ton snake slithering around. Most people don't feel the same way, but that's okay. And I think the other big cautionary tale that I like to throw out there is that not only is this going to affect reptiles, but this also affects other things that we often term as quote unquote cold-blooded. And that actually includes insects and arachnids as well. And that means that not only are kind of snakes going to be able to get to places that they couldn't before and get bigger where they were before, things like mosquitoes are also going to do well in different environments. And the diseases that they carry are also going to spread. These are very real consequences of climate change driven by life, driven by how that climate affects the life on earth. And I think the more we can learn about what's happened in the past, the better prepared you can be. That's my soapbox and I will say thank you and I will pass the reins over to Greg who's spent a lot of time making this very lovely model. So thank you very much and I encourage you to cast your attention to Greg and he does have some slides here as well for you guys. So thanks Greg Owls, let's you take over. Thanks Alex. So while we're starting with the caveat when Chantel asked me to do this, I had some experience with 3D modeling. I found some, I had a lot of time on my hands about a year ago and so I got involved in 3D modeling and texturing, but I hadn't done any rigging or animation and so I made a lot of mistakes in this and do any comments, suggestions people have after who might be more experienced or rough on the course. So when I do talk, usually people can take away about 3 things and so I like to point them out in the beginning explicitly and we'll get back to these as we go through the the talk, but it's baking the map, no images and we'll talk a little bit about the default for SL Skeleton. The first two are just just amazed me and what kind of brought me into texturing and 3D modeling and the last is probably the most annoying of the things that I went through to make this happen. We'll kind of go over this workflow, this will be a workflow mostly for what's called game engine or multi-user distributed real-time interactive environments also known as games, but it's a very different workflow than you would find for animation in a motion picture or even an animated short. We'll talk about how to create the mesh and why we need low and high poly versions of the mesh, what user maps are, talk about the creation of the textures and that they're procedural, which is to me one of the most fascinating things about this whole process and rigging and which is basically building a skeleton for the animal or the mesh and then animating it. Here's the workflow that I put together starting off on the left with the idea and again thanks to Chantel for or thinking of me and asking me to do this even though it was definitely a challenge and pushed my skills for the best. I created the mesh originally in Maya which is 3D modeling tool and then created a low poly version and a high poly version in Z brush and I'll explain why you need those as we go along but basically you import the low poly version to the game engine and use the high poly version to create the maps that give you the detail and because you don't want a high poly version in the environment in the engine it consumes too much resource. So the low poly version you get the UV maps and then you go into a tool to bake the maps in this case they're your substance painter create the textures and another tool called substance designer and then back and bring those and the maps and substance painter and create the materials which are the texture and you see on the snake then you rig it back into Maya the low poly version you create skin weights for it which identifies how how the skin moves with which bones or which joints and then you animate those joints. So this is the low poly version and it has about 26,000 polygons and that's the tongue sticking out in front there I use that I put it out there just so I could get a better handle on it when I assign the skin weights. This is a close-up of the low poly version you can see that the polygons are fairly good signs but it's still pretty smooth smooth surface and it was some definition but but not very much. Next we'll take a look this is a high poly version I created in zebras and here we have 12 million polygons most of which are are in the in the head scales and the teeth because that's that's where I needed the definition and at one point in the process I had created the procedural scales which I'll show you in a minute and those were all over the head and now I pointed out that the head scales were slightly different so I had to figure out how to create head scales and and doing that procedurally was pretty difficult and it didn't see a way through so I went back into the high poly mesh and created each of the individual head scales and the individual teeth one by one in zebras on the high poly version of this snake. So the UV maps uh UV stands doesn't stand for ultraviolet when I first started this I kept thinking that that's that's what it was but it turns out it's not and it's it's the it's the two axes in in this two-dimensional plane here D being up vertical and and U being horizontal and they use UV because x y and z were taken for a three-dimensional W is important for some sort of rotation in 3D and so U and V were left and so you can just think of UV as x y that's all that means and what you do is you you sort of cut the low poly mesh up in a sort of organized fashion and uh lay it out here in two dimensions and this is what tells the engine how to take a two-dimensional texture that you create and wrap it around the three-dimensional object. This is uh also known as a projection and if you can think of some of the projections of the earth or of a globe uh some of the different maps we use uh this is the same kind of thing we're trying to represent a 3D object in two dimensions and you can see I've laid this out uh in a pretty regular fashion I I split them but sort of head to tail on the ventral and dorsal line and uh then transversely it turns out that the way that I map this each of these tiles these are called UV tiles each one of them it turns out that they're about they cover about one meter square uh in in second life when you look at the snake and of course that's a million square millimeters which will be important later when when we talk about the resolution that I wanted to achieve uh on on the snake you can see that the oh this is let me see if I can get a little closer here but this is the mouth these are the eyes right here and this is the tongue of course this is the left and right sides of the head pretty obvious what the what the head is okay baking the maps so again uh we need to we need to have a high poly version to get the detail like those head scales on the T but there's no way that we could bring 12 of an object that's 12 million polygons into second life I mean it can't even upload something that size but we want that detail and so the maps are a way of sort of telling the rendering engine uh what to do with each pixel uh when it renders it how to how to make it look and so there's a lot of information coded in the maps uh with in and basically in either color or grayscale versions and there are typically six characteristics that we look at and so you create these maps in substance painter with six characteristics for each uv tile again there's two purposes there's the illusion of height in the final texture but also provides guidance for creating the materials in in substance painter so we'll take a look at each one of these how they look uh the normal is uh the normal map is really important it basically says for every pixel what is its normal relative to the normal to the surface of the low poly version at that point and then it does uh that product of those vectors then turns that into a color and that's what you see on the on the texture world space normal is pretty straightforward it's a color gradient from top to bottom ambient occlusion is is how the parts sort of shadow one another and it's very important for in the texturing process to uh to create shadows where they where they should be curvature and thickness are are pretty straightforward uh their grayscale and they they the curvature shows areas of high and low curvature and the thickness uh differentiates between thick and thin position is like world space but front to back so it's uh color gradient from front to back of the object so here's the normal map uh you can see that that's typically the color you see so you can clearly see the head scales outlined and you can see if I can get this major point right to where you can see like right up here maybe I'm not standing close enough there we go you can see right up in there that that's that's definitely a different color because that's almost vertical uh with respect to the normal of the surface of the low poly version at that point uh back over here you see the head scale the um body scales which is a procedural one if you have the world space uh normal which is just again the color gradient from top to bottom ambient occlusion clearly you know between the scales there's going to be shadows because it's a small area and we use this to create uh dust and things in between in the crevices curvature areas of high curvature are darker and low curvature are lighter thickness darker areas are thick uh lighter areas are thinner and I use this uh quite a bit in in creating masks to to just apply color and uh variations to the head scales and not to the the rest of the body and this is position just the color gradient from front to back world space normal you use if you want to create drips or leaks or things that follow the gravity vector and here you can do variations from the front to back uh in a smooth way by following the gradient okay this is the the second thing that I thought uh was was really interesting is that there's no images uh used today uh for for texture in these objects a lot of a lot of things you see in Second Life are done that way uh they've used photoshop and create images and apply those to the UV maps and that's that's perfectly fine and it's a very low resource uh has a very low resource demand but here uh because we're we're doing this functionally we can change things and modify them and use them in different ways so a lot of the work that I uh we did or I have done on this can be used for other other objects as well and so you start with something like a circle equation of a circle and then you apply transforms until you get a snake steal uh in the end and uh so so just another caveat you know I did not create this whole graph myself but I downloaded this from one of the sharing websites that did modify it quite a bit uh would help from Alex to produce the shape and the orientation and the size of the scale that he said would probably have been on Potenobora so you start at the left with a circle and then you apply various transforms and get a different shape and here you can see down in the lower right you can see a gradient left to right gradient and then the top to bottom gradient here applied and you end up with something it's hard to see but on the bottom you can see that what the result is uh there's a oval shape and you get a grayscale gradient top to bottom which shows it to be sort of rounded in that direction and you can also use it for height information so the right hand side is a little bit lower or farther away from the camera than the left hand side the output from from substance designer in this particular case are four maps this is a normal map for those body scales uh the we've talked about that the ambient occlusion we talked about height gives you a little bit more gives the normal map a little bit more information on uh how high or how far away from the low poly version of particular artifact might be and the roughness is very important the roughness is uh is on a scale from zero to one and zero roughness means extremely shiny and and one of course means uh something that's very rough and and doesn't reflect lights uh at all except in a reduced way and i use this quite a bit to get there get the shine on on this neck okay so this i just brought up because this is completely done in substance designer there's no mesh it's all procedural there's no image and uh this sort of technique is being used for product advertisements today so a lot of the advertisements you see for artifacts people want to advertise are just created in this in this sort of mathematical way rather than it's a lot in the end it's a lot easier and less expensive than uh trying to photograph something in real life and get the lighting ready okay then we're back into substance painter and we want to create the materials and so here you see how the head of course looks uh with with nothing but the normal map sort of applies to the head scale and uh down on the right you can see that this is a normal map from the baking then i used the the thickness to create a mask to apply this color only to these scales and pretty much did the same and applied some sort of dunk to the edges and this is done by a function called the generator that sort of looks at the curvature map and the thickness map and tries to create random noisy images around the edges of whatever it is whatever object they're trying to make and there's there's many different kinds of generators that you can use uh to create different patterns and according to to the maps and then i added uh use the sort of the inverse of that mask to put a different color in the spaces between the head scales and then finally use that the roughness map to add some shininess in the right places uh for what we thought would be the shininess of the snake so output from substance painter are three texture files for each tile and these are the only three that the Second Life has available uh to be applied to a face of a crimp on the left is the color there's the normal and the shininess so 28 tiles i had um 13 for each half we're about a meter long and then so totally there's 84 1k by 1k texture files that make up the texture of of forests and those are about 173 megabytes in size altogether 1k by 1k is all that is the map that Second Life allows and we're back to this slide and you can see now that uh since we have a 1k by 1k uh texture and the texture is laid on one of these tiles we're getting about one pixel per square millimeter of surface so as you look at at Boris here about every square millimeter has its own set of information from those three maps telling the rendering engine how to how to display that pixel rigging is uh is the process of creating a skeleton for the the object and the only thing the only object really there is it are the joints and then the bones still between the joints when you create a hierarchical relationship between them then you create what's called the inverse kinematics for the set of joints to make it easy to pose and then some controllers and then you do the skin weighting which is probably one of the most important things in getting smooth motion and that's each vertex of the mesh is influenced by in Second Life up to four joints and the influence says as this joint moves where should I move this vertex and every time that every 30 times a second your viewer has to you know do that computation for every vertex in every object on your screen so when I first animated I built a skeleton of 60 60 joints from head to tail and animated and it looked great I thought wow this is easy and then I learned that every animus and ab in Second Life has to have this default skeleton you can't have a custom skeleton so this is sort of a pretty annoying thing there's a lot of discussion about it on the forums the joints have to have the same name and the orientation has to be the same and the hierarchy has to be the same but you can translate the joints in three space and except that no joint is it's allowed to be more than some number of meters away from its assumed position in the default skeleton so I ended up with modifying that default skeleton to look like this and you can see that the circles are the joints and the triangles are the bones and they point parents to child on the left where you see the on the left in the bottom which is just a blow up of the central skeletons it's the pelvis and that's sort of the pelvis is the root of everything so I just laid all these out straight and over on the right hand side you can see a couple joints that I used to open and close the mouth and then the three and greener for the tongue but you can't animate this because of the parent child relationship everything's messed up and so there's no way to make a smooth motion so I had to build a control skeleton on top of it which had parent child relationship in the top of the bottom and then I could animate that pretty easily so this is what the skin weights look like representation of the influence of each of those 60 joints on the vertices around the mesh of the snake and you can see the upper part of the head is all one color it's the lower part of the head because they they go in in one they move in one with one joint okay the last slide is the animation and so basically you take that control skeleton with the mesh with the weights and you position the joints in some sort of location you can rotate them and translate them and then then you bind that to a particular time on a timeline you change the pose in some way and then you bind that to a time on the timeline and the engine interpolates between those two and so the smooth motion between these two is done by the engine and you have a lot of control over this you can actually look at the graph of these individual joints and how they change from key to key and you can you can modify that graph you can have a you know have a spline coming from one key currently gently into the next gear you can have linear you can do all kinds of things with with that interpolation between the two keys the undulations you see in the snake are just from attaching a sine wave to that animation skeleton and then keying the offset so the sine wave is basically moving through the snake one of the limitations in SL is is that you can't animate a joint farther than 10 meters from its initial position and I understand why and we can talk about that later maybe at the fireside chat so for Boris the motion over the ground is is is done by another server side calls to move the position and so you have to sort of coordinate those two motions so next that's my last slide and uh Celia is going to talk about the sort of amazing job she's done okay thank you but I am just so impressed with what you have done great just it's amazing absolutely amazing and I followed the whole process and I am still just blown away so uh been an honor to be part of this and I gotta say this has been one of the more interesting projects and habitat builds I have done in Second Life and I've done a lot of them and so Greg was talking about signs um I had to work with an entirely different set of signs and signals it was really like being a detective so the habitats that I have done previously in Second Life are modeled on actual habitats in real life so you can look those things up and find some other things but here that isn't the case what we have here is fossils so the challenge was to go from rocks the ecosystem so where did it start started wondering where are we what world are we on so we we're going to change the earth but boy we time travel and take a minute and look at this this is uh an estimation of a few million years later in history than the time that we have the fossils of barris so whether we still had the barris around it was not sure likely take a look at it and what do you see what do you notice um that's different here than um a projected map of today really I'm gonna ask a lot of questions here because this really was a detecting project is there anything you notice here that sticks out particularly um that is different than today's planet yeah India isn't attached to the rest of what would become Asia yeah sooner that continents are close together yes much closer so that that's a key sign a key thing here that we've got to remember so it wasn't that long ago in terms of geologic time that what is now South America and what is now after pulled away from each other what else do you notice in the the general northern South American area yeah Australia has this time just recently pulled away from Antarctica yeah so we we actually don't know whether the rotation was not as good today not the same then so in this world here is where we are this platform is representing that little tiny area on the northern part of what is now South America and that little peninsula the Sarang Mai is in an entrance in here and it happens to be one of the largest open air commons in the world it is not at the site it's Tituminous so that came from the big night to Titumin that's another key piece here but look also at the the oceans and the sea there where's Panama yeah the sea is higher at this time the estimate is about 40 meters higher than today and there's no ice another key piece here no ice anywhere on the globe so we we do not have the connection here there is no Panama the Andes are not fully formed so the Andes they they're having trouble getting a really good fix on the the age and sequence of the uprisings of the Andes but roughly 90 million years of time so starting back in the Cretaceous and they're going forward here but they're not fully formed yet for another oh 20 million years or so beyond the time that we're working with so the Mounties are going to affect the weather as well so Alex mentioned that they think it's going it was probably four degrees average nearly average temperature higher how is that playing out because the the weather is a key part here you can't have a rain forest jungle habitat without paying attention to what the weather was so if you have an area that is a coastal plain and it at various times was riverine or just a coastal plain they think that in this area you're going to have no mountains and no this makes a Panama to catch some of the weather coming from the west so you're going to have a very very different weather pattern and if you have a much higher temperature and you're in a water habitat you're going to have a lot of evaporation so one of the things here that you'll notice that we have here is a lot of mist because we have a lot of evaporation so keep all of these things in mind and look at the fossils for a minute so if you look at a lot of fossils over time you'll see that the rocks that they're embedded in don't all look the same these rocks are relatively smooth so what else does that tell you about here the habitat here at the time so if you have the the um salt stone the mud you don't have very turbulent water or you wouldn't have things laid down in this way so there's another clue then of the kind of habitat bills here yeah that uh that that there are um the conjunction of a handful of plates there you have the nasca plate you have the um bianna plate um yes you have a number of plates that converge right there so there are lots and lots of plant fossils but they are leaves and they are ponds so taking a look at those we're able to discern the kinds of plants the kinds of families of plants that um existed that comprise this particular habitat so from the fossils there were a number of coconut palms there was some salvia so then you have the the duckweeds and the water furs and the water moss um you have some bean family the flamboyant tree is a bean family the mimosa is a bean family there were probably uh various vines that look similar to vetch um you have a whole range of other palms you still have ferns some magnolias were beginning and the alligator apple and the magnolia are related then you also have the bananas coming forth and banana and red ginger are related the conifer fossils are are hard to tell exactly what it was so i took a guess and uh put in cypress because most of the conifers today don't live in this kind of a very hot environment that the cypress does. Moonsies were all over the place everywhere now moonsies are poisonous for humans but they are not poisonous for a lot of animals and they are prevalent in the fossils here you have amaryllis you have some flowers coming you have the bean family flowers you have the amaryllis you have malo flowers so i decided to put hibiscus because that is the other another thing that would live in this kind of environment that is in the malo family and then the beginning of mangoes you know there's something else here that you see in the fossils that um you might not notice right away in the leaves and uh there are holes there are holes that have been chewed so although there aren't insect fossils there's evidence signs of insects having lived here and chewed the holes in the leaves so but they are from the the sign shape of condition of the holes it's estimated that these are generalist insect eaters not um not specific not ones that have specialized in particular plants well to try it out since there aren't insect fossils here we don't know we can guess that there were bigger insects now um because they lived in this kind of environment and there are fossil records from other places i put out dragonflies because it's likely there were dragonflies were there mosquitoes oh dragonflies eat mosquitoes today um maybe there were mosquitoes but we don't know that um my daughter who has spent time in the amazon says that in the um peruvian amazon there are enormous for racist mosquitoes but um in the mouth of the amazon she said she didn't she wasn't really bothered by mosquitoes so was it the same then who knows we just have to guess um but we know that there would have been the beginnings of these kinds of insects because we have the the chew marks left so if that's what we have for the fossil record what's missing what do we need to fill in here and we have the some of the animal bone record so we have the uh the snakes the crocodiles the turtles and as alex said the lungfish and also tarpon we don't have either of those as representing the representation in second life so because we know they were here i put ghost lungfish and ghost tarpon yeah dolly that that's an interesting uh thing too from what i have read and uh words may have more information than i do about this there was a higher content of the co2 and this was a because of the andy's um fits and starts there certainly would have been volcanic activity um and so the guess is that there was more more of the co2 but we um and we don't know the o2 but what we can also guess here from the fact that you have the lungfish and you have the the tarpon here is that there was probably the water was probably low oxygen and why do i say that because both of those species um can rise to the surface and um take oxygen from the air and so if you have a murky water that is slow moving because you don't have the turbulence in the rocks um you have the muddy rocks and you have yeah so the water would tend to be somewhat stagnant most likely and you have the lungfish that can come out of the the water and breathe air and you have the um the tarpon that also can rise to the surface and fill their their air bladders with oxygen from the air it's likely that this was yeah a um a swamp of that kind yes so if you look around um what else is missing here that you would find in today's swamp no no no mushrooms no no lichen or moss possums yes i i don't know if there are possums there but um to go back to what vick was asking and talking about earlier uh there's almost no grass grass is just so that you have um general insects you have families of plants that are coming along that have replaced some of the uh swamp plants of the the previous era no birds no fossil birds that's like no fossil birds so um you have back to the grass for a minute that you would have grasses along the sides today in this kind of environment no grass almost no grass and they since the insects were the evidence for insects were generalized they're assuming that the plants and the beginning flowers were not pollinated by insects or birds but they were probably being pollinated so that gives you another clue to the environment so all of this is putting together an entire system from these little clues we know we have to have prey because we have predators and if you have predators it's going to take at least three to one biomass and sometimes more than that to to support a predator um there's more than one snake there's more than one turtle but there are a lot of snakes and turtles and uh uh fossils of various sizes here so there got to be somewhere uh fish and other small animals that are inhabiting this area as well even though we don't have the the solid evidence for them so bringing it all together um was little by little it was putting things from this all of the things that I've said plus a whole lot more and to figure out what are the systemic properties of this habitat so that if you have the beginnings of the mangoes for instance you're going to have um the water plants caught in in the roots of the mangoes you're going to have um to be a lot of because the the coal mine is so big and there's so much mass of material there you in order to get that there had to be a lot of plant material as well so um you're going to have the dying plants caught in some of the coastal the edge areas in particularly in some of the mango roots and you're going that's what's going to build the land here so you're going to have the process that slow process of building land and slowing down the the river slowing down the water when you have that and you have this built up little by little you have muck like we're standing in so you have slime and muck and algae and uh all of that sort of thing the the alligator apple is also going to be building some of the land um there are fossils of the coconut the actual coconut so we have coconuts falling from the trees here and settling on on the bottom of the river but take a minute now and walk around and look at everything look at how these are pulled together um and why think about why they might have been done in this way uh they could have been done differently but to make an entire ecosystem out of fossil rocks do take your landmark this is a jungle area you could get caught in the the the vines the mucky surface um but do walk around and then report back here tell us what you're finding we have this um we have the voice enabled and the chat enabled throughout now so even if you're further away you're going to be able to talk with us yeah we're all going to see if anyone's missing yeah yeah we don't know uh that there were no birds we just know that there aren't any bird fossils um so some people are guessing that there might have been birds like mouse birds that are found in this kind of environment other places in the world and there are um mouse bird fossils found um in other locations uh glad barris has eaten recently and i would have been in big trouble there no pigeons no no pigeons one of the more other interesting things is that although it wasn't found here even for birds there was at that time a tropical penguin that might have been in this area it's possible and another critter that i put in you might see is a um a catfish because although there's no catfish fossil here within this same watershed area and within the same time frame there were catfish that looked very with the rounded head very much like the ones that you'll see here so yeah yeah the catfish fossil yeah just a little further south that's why i put that Alex that's why i put catfish in here yeah that's what i found when you're doing the the research there yeah so it's likely you would have had that as well yeah many of snacks on the crocodile it certainly would have snacks um a lungfish but you think about a snake this large how many lungfish and how often would you would they have to and how many lungfish would have to be in this area to support a snake um so i can jump in on this one um so pretty low cabalos this is part of how they're able to be so successful so something like a titanibua get like a really good meal in it like a really really big lungfish or like a decent size crocodile um couldn't have even been good for like an entire year um so it's not like you actually need a huge um you know food source in order to sustain these things um they can actually get by on on much much less than a warm-blooded animal oh that's good yes yes thank you yes so one more little piece here uh as you're walking along because you can walk some of the places you can walk underwater you can walk on the edges of the the uh rivers here um you're gonna find that there is rain in in the hills because you're going to have that kind of evaporation and that kind of um with the cooling off at night you're going to have some rain so and oh they are estimating that the annual rainfall was probably in the vicinity of 140 maybe as high as 160 inches a year now in amazon today the uh annual rain is 108 inches so it was a lot more raining than than it is now yeah so as you're looking around and one of the ways that things are grouped here if they're saying that the the pollination was likely by wind that's going to be produce a different kind of uh clumping of of plants than if it were pollinated by insects and particularly are pollinated by birds we have a lot more dispersal than than you would if you have it by winds and oh i didn't get back to what you were saying about the uh species divergence um i started on that but so this uh as a for instance uh in the previous epics there were this kind of area would have uh cycads there are no cycads here they're gone and the there's more of the amount of some of these than there is the diversity of say the the bean family so you don't have a lot of diversity yet it's just beginning to diversify little by little so you have a handful of species but not a lot of diversity within those species at this period of time so far as they have found so far comments questions for any of us times here bring your students here yeah i'm sure that any of all of us would be more than pleased to come and join you and answer questions at any time we really did need all three of us to do this no one of us could have done this alone yeah explore bring your questions to the fireside chat on monday and anything else that you think of along the way it really was an exciting project to work on and we could also talk more on monday about what we can learn from this regarding um future climate change like uh alex was mentioned