Arthropods do still attain large sizes, especially in islands with few or no large vertebrates. Not as large as in the Carboniferous, but still impressive for the cenozoic.
I've seen experiments where they raised present-day insects (I think it was cockroaches) in an atmosphere with oxygen levels similar to those in the carboniferous: They grew _way_ bigger than normal.
Amazing as usual! Only a note: actually tree ferns still exist, maybe not as tall, but in New Zealand some species can reach 20 m. Also scorpions are pretty common in tropical rainforest.
Yeah I was wondering about that because I have a 4m tall tree fern right outside my room. They are one of my favorite plants! Also I live in a rainforest environment and I can confirm there are plenty of scorpions...
In Puerto Rico we have tree ferns not very tall maybe like 10 feet tall, very skinny... its just a huge Fern on a stick the leaves are just a bit meattier. Very uncommon as well a pity, but they have strict requirements most of our city's land is nowhere cool/humid enough, in the jungle it would definetly.
Indeed, Cyathea australis regularly reaches (and occasionally exceeds) 20m. (That's an Australian fern if the name didn't give it away) That said, the Carboniferous forests would still be very weird. Plant's whose closest living relatives are club mosses stood over 35m tall Horsetails 15m tall I honestly can't think of carboniferous ferns as tall as modern Australian and New Zealand examples off the top of my head Psaronius and Medullosa both topped out at about 10m if memory serves.
The Carboniferous was overwhelmingly the most popular topic suggested so I hope you enjoy. I accidently referred to cronioscuchus as croniosaurus, and pulmonoscorpius as pulmonoscorpio but seeing as they are spelt correctly on the screen I didn’t think it was worth re uploading the video, so hopefully it isn’t too annoying.
Not entirely, cause the species that the amniotes came from, laid another type of egg. However, it is definitely an animal that came before the eggs, as single celled life evolved into multicelled life, which then evolved the eggs required for easier reproduction. Even we humans use eggs. We just don't lay them.
@@Arterexius Your proving eggs were around long before the creature we call chickens existed. Eggs are in many creatures and chicken is just a chicken. Eggs came first.
@@Samiitriis indeed but in those terms the question is not interesting , if you talk about fish eggs ou whatever , the real point is what came first between the chicken and the chicken's egg , this is a little bit more interesting question , but however the egg still came first xD
Wish this content was available while studying biology at high school. So much easier to get the jist of it, than just reading a textbook. Very well put together, nice flow to in, good balance between detail and big-picture
@@WillJM81280 - do you have evidence or proof of this? For instance, there's no evidence that Socrates did much reading, if any. A lot of intelligent people, particularly centuries ago, were illiterate. So yeah, you can't just say that the most intelligent people in history were voracious readers - it's just not true.
Having a predefined internal skeleton is more of a limit on diversity than a strength. This is proven by the number of vertebrates with vestigial limbs they have no use for. Exoskeletons are not the limits to size, breathing apparatus is. If vertebrates breathed using free flowing tubes we would be at least as small as invertebrates.
@@KermitFrogThe Except that endoskeletons are way more efficient as muscle attachments and their volume doesn't grow as much as exoskeletons do when you scale up the animal. Also backbones have proven time and time again to have the ability to increase an animal's speed and agility by a lot. Aquatic arthropods don't have the oxygen restriction than their land counterparts do, and yet vertebrates kicked them out of the top of the food chain the instant they evolved jaws.
There's something about ferns - they're just so...ancient. I was peeing in a wood once and the wind caught a really tall fern making it move just like a cobra ready to strike. All I could think was "TRIFFID!!!!!!!"
Based on the relationship of most modern scorpions, you could interpret Pulmonoscorpius’ relatively small claws to mean it relied on a more toxic venom.
Yeah, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Scavenging is a good explanation as well.. and we forget the most fearsome weaponry is often directed at our kind; mating or food resource.
What I would give to go back to the beginning of time and live through everything (without going crazy or dying/feeling pain) but mainly to be able to remember everything
i always wished that after we died, there was a complete archive of everything in the universe that had ever happened, that you could spend an eternity investigating . it would be a perfect afterlife
I genuinely appreciate how calm his voice is through the video. I was watching a few while laying down and I got a great nap in, and then I went back to watch the videos cause they were still interesting.
@@Lien6887 Eons is an "Authoritative source" trey has interesting takes but his voice can get annoying, and I have no Idea about the other guys you listed.
Small claws in modern day scorpions is usually indicative of potent venom. The animal is relying on its venom to kill prey instead of its crushing claws. Could a venomous telson have evolved as early as the Carboniferous?
@@sjl197 As a scorpion keeper, I know the small claw+fat tail+strong venom as highly venomous and vice-versa to be a bad generalization. It still depends.
@@carlorielmendez6505 well all scorpions have venom right? thats what the tail is for, what we determine 'potent' venom is usually in comparison to how it affects humans which would be erroneous for the time period, i'd guess the venom they had was very potent for catching their prey in that period
The treelike ferns mentioned in this video can still be found in New Zealand and Australia, but they are unrelated to the Carboniferous tree ferns and are believed to have convergently evolved from regular ferns during the Cretaceous.
I was pondering what it might be like to have giant scorpions wondering through our yards, just to get plucked up and thrown into a boiling pot of water...... Land Lobster for dinner!
Read the book children of time, large intellegent spiders talk about how creepy rats and mammals are and when they dissect a few dead humans this mistake them for giant rats since they are the only thing similar inside, since in this planet all the arthropods became intellegent while mammals almost all went extinct
@@NeostormXLMAXYour description has piqued my interest...I have an app to read aloud what is on my screen. Since my eyesight is inadequate I wonder how I could get involved in "reading" those books that are mentioned in this comment section. If anyone can suggest the ways to do it I'd be very grateful 😊
The key isn't so much getting the oxygen into "deeper" parts of a larger body. The problem wasn't the distance to the center of the body, but the overall volume. Otherwise, you could have extremely large, flatter insects like centipedes. It is a natural physical and biological law that as you increase the surface area of, say, a sphere, that the volume increases exponentially in comparison to the surface area added. Insects aren't normally spheres, but the law holds true to some degree on any shape that an arthropod can take. At some point, there isn't enough surface area to have enough spiracles to let enough oxygen in for the rate of oxygen intake to supply enough oxygen to all the cells in that body's volume. And that is based on the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere as well. Just wanted to get extremely specific about what the limitation was.
Its called the Square Cubed Law, and it is surprisingly relevant to animals, and to an extent plants. Take a look at large terrestrial mammals and compare them with the really large terrestrial Dinosaurs and you will notice that the structure of the legs is basically the same (very 'pillar' like). This is a direct result of the Square Cubed Law. The Law is also the reason Arthropods literally cannot grow above a certain size threshold, that massive increase in mass requires more muscle to move it, and there is a point at which the animal reaches a size at which the muscles simply do not have the space in the exoskeleton to grow large enough to move the animal. With endoskeletons muscles can be larger in relation to the skeleton than they can with exoskeletons, but even with endoskeletons there is a mass limit beyond which an animal cannot grow. A Blue Whale is probably very close to that upper limit for a Marine Animal.....
@@alganhar1 also this isn’t factoring in the limitations of circulatory systems. For example tall humans face many challenges to their health. It is well known that above 5 feet your height increases your odds of blood clots
@@alganhar1 thank you. Its not exponential relation ship with Area to Volume. Its Area cubed is proportional to Volume Squared, which is where the Squared Cubed law gets its name. Thus if something is 2.56 times the area then its volume is about 4.096 times as much. If Area is quadrupled then Volume increases about 8 fold. If Area increased by 9 times Volume is about 27 times as much. And if Area went up 25 times then its volume is about 125 times as much. If it was Exponential (I'll use base 2) if something doubles then the result is quadrupled. In exponential if the first term is quadrupled the result is 16 times as much. If you take the input multiples by 9 then its 512 times as big a result. And if you take 25 times the input that is 33554432 times the result. While what Ron said is important, Surface Area and Volume are not linear. Its also important to give the correct relationship. Too often I see "they're expontional" when its a fixed power relationship like here its the Squared Cubed law.
Thanks for the interesting conversation guys. So much information out in the world, its nice to read intellegent people discussing complex (to me, a finance specialist) concepts.
@@jamesknapp64 I would also like to add that it is a mathematical relationship based on geometry, not a "physical or biological law" as Ron Ronson said.
This is the first video I’ve seen of yours, but as soon as I saw all of the art properly credited I had to subscribe! As a bonus you’re very interesting and I love learning about this crazy world we live in. Thank you for these fascinating and highly educational videos; They have to be a great deal of work!
What if you could carry a big gun? Maybe it would be a thrill seeking adventure. Hey sure they are scary and could kill you.. but they gotta reach you first!
1:18 it happened even more than that too! Isopods, which are crustaceans, and decapods like say the coconut crab, as well as some other crustacean species, have evolved to live on land independently from one another. Many crustaceans are still tied to the water to reproduce as they can’t lay their eggs on land. Not yet at least lol!
A simple way to imagine this period of time is imagining what the world would look like if you were to shrink to the point that grass would look like trees
Great content. One suggestion: Please add new events to the timeline as the video progresses instead of just starting each timeline shot with an empty timeline.
Let’s be thankful that arthropods don’t have lungs. I wouldn’t like living in a world where I can see every detail on a scorpions face without a stereoscope
A correction: the famous canopy trees of the Carboniferous were not related to ferns. These 'scale trees' like Lepidodendron were lycophytes, a completely different branch of vascular plants than ferns and seed plants. Their closest relatives today are the diminutive club moss, spike moss, and quillworts.
I love your videos. Evolutionary biology is a wonderful collection of 'just so' stories. It has always had such a great power to explain why animals are the way they are. I would take issue with one thing in the video though, and that is the carboniferous forest trees. Fern trees still exist today. I have some in my garden. Also during that time there were other sorts of plant occupying the tree niche, including giant clubmosses and giant horsetails.
The first forests also appeared in the mid devonian with the cladoxylopsid Wattieza and the progymnosperm Archaeopteris. During the carboniferous ferns weren’t the dominant trees, but lycophytes (these are not ferns nor are they that closely related to ferns, this is a common misconception) like Lepidodendrales and Calamites (actually closely related to ferns) were. Tree ferns (not a specific group of ferns but like all trees just a morphological adaptation) appear during the start of the collapsing rainforests and only then slowly become more dominant together with early seed plants, because they were better adapted for the drier conditions.
The small claws on the pulmonoscorpius could also indicate that its venom was very potent, like the modern desert scorpion; it’s subdues prey by stinging rather than a forest scorpion which uses its large claws and has less lethal venom.
Amazing video! I always find it a little bit melancholy to look at pictures of extinct animals even though I know it's just the natural progression of life.
Early life is always so interesting becaue of how different they are, the fact that decomposers hadnt carved out a niche yet causing plant matter to not rot is crazy and just goes to show how strange life organisms are.
You channel is incredible. Watched a few videos, instant sub. Your videos are blowing my mind over and over again. Explaining millions and millions of history.
I can not remember the university involved, but I do remember a documentary where they created an ecosystem in a large sealed tank and increased the oxygen levels which resulted in modern insects becoming much larger - up to 30% over only a few generations.
I'll save you time it was the decline in atmospheric oxygen concentration. The bugs had passive respiratory systems meaning required high oxygen concentrations to support a large body. Love the video by the way I'll be checking out your others your very hip to the ancient jive :p
That's not the whole story. Not only a decline in oxygen level but a thinner atmosphere overall, and both due to an expanding Earth, the mechanism of which is also related to increasing gravity. Thinner atmosphere/less oxygen/higher gravity is also what got the dinosaurs, not the asteroid fantasy.
@@maclarenschell8855 The living earth is in a breathe in cycle that why it was expanding we are now in a breathe out cycle so the earth will be shrinking. This makes the atmosphere more thicker explaining global warming. The increase and decrease in gravity is caused by the change in density of the earths core from the breathe in and breathe out cycle of the earth.
Marvelous. Still not weaned from mores escoteric ideas, which are more/less fungible than your inductive presentations of geological vs climactic sequences. But you're still the most artistic & articulate presenters. GBU. Amniotes approve you.
Good video as always. I have a suggestion for a video. What made these 'trees' go extinct? Also, how did vertebrades come to be? What were the intermediate states?
As far as I know those primitive trees, like giant ferns, horsetails and Lycophytes, didn't have the ability to pump water all the way up their trunk such as modern trees do, or at least they weren't really good at it and also didn't have any deep reaching roots, this is why they required a lot of water, like a swamplike environment, to thrive. When the climate got more arid they could not survive and got replaced by the newly evolved conifers, that were much better adapted to drier climates, eventually replacing them as the dominant terrestrial flora.
@@NeP516 it's the great extinction event which we can clearly see represented in the sedimentary fossil table, this entire video is answered by the truth of the global flood We can see a similar event in China today on a limited scale
Great video. Just wanted to add that some insects do autoventilate their bodies in addition to diffusion. Notably locusts, which pump airsacs in the thorax via wingbeats and abdominal pumping in grasshoppers.
Prevailed is a matter of perspective. Insects are the most successful creatures to have evolved. They remained virtually the same for millions of years, they existed before the dinosaurs, before the synapsids and before all of human history. And when we die out, they will still be around. If survival is what makes a creature prevail, then nothing will ever beat the insects. Well, except for bacteria, sure.
I believe you mean virtually the same in their basic general form. They actually have changed a lot since their beginning, diversifying into such a myriad of forms and adapting to nearly every econiche that exists.
The longest insect living today found so far is Phobaeticus chani, measuring 57centimetres across. The giant dragonfly Meganeuropsis permiana from the eaarly Perm period (less than 290mya) had wings measuring almost 75centimetres, being a relative to mentioned Meganeura Monyi, which got 73centimetres tall/long . Aegirocassis benmoulae was an almost two metres long Arthropode. A "sea scorpoin" with the name Jaekelopterus rhenaniae was two and a half metres long. Today there is a scorpion that can weave. The biggest trilobite of a length of more than 70centimetres was/is Isotelus rex
I would argue that Biomechanics is just, if not more important. Biomechanics essentially limits the maximum size attainable by animals and to a lesser extent plants within an environment. This maximum size is basically determined through the Suare Cube Law. An arthropods could feasibly evolve a lung analogue, but it CANNOT get around the Square Cube Law. To put it as simply as possible, if you take any animal and increase its size in all dimensions by 10, its mass actually increases by 1000. While this does put additional stress on cardiovascular and respiratory systems, it also puts stresses on skeletal and muscular systems. This is why when you compare the skeleton of a very large terrestrial mammal, say an elephant, with that of a very small one, say a mouse, you see some very important differences. The most obvious being the large, heavily boned, pillar like legs. This is termed Allometric Scaling, and shows that there are specific skeletal responses to such increased size. The problem Arthropods have, is that as they get larger, while their volume does increase greatly, their exoskeleton also has to increase in size and thickness to support the new mass, and this eats into that internal volume. There is a point at which the animal is such a size, requiring so much volume to be taken up with its exoskeleton, that there is not enough room for muscles large enough to move the animal. This is less of an issue with animals with endoskeletons such as mammals because an endoskeleton allows for far more muscular cross section in comparison to the skeleton. As a result animals with endoskeletons, such as mammals, can grow far, far larger than those with exoskeletons simply because they can have a far larger proportion of muscle compared to skeletal structure. Even so, there is an upper limit, it is just higher. Blue Whales are probably close to the upper limit possible in an Earth like Gravity and Atmospheric pressure, at least when it comes to marine or aquatic organisms, as the support offered by water does to a certain extent counteract the issues raised by the square cube law. However, it does NOT remove them entirely.... It simply increases that size threshold still further. The upper threshold for terrestrial endoskeletal animals is probably approached by the larger Suaropods. It would not surprise me to find that some of those large Arthropods are actually fairly close to the maximum potential size their skeleton would actually allow....
I remember having a dream as a kid of being in the backyard of my kindergarten class on recess and seeing a large dragonfly (3x larger than a crow) on the concrete floor in front of a door) also, I feel like I definitely prefer your channel to Eons, your voice is so beautiful and calming and the visuals are AMAZING, keep it up, you’ll get tons more subs for sure
They did a study where they mimicked oxygen levels in the carboniferous perod and raised some dragonflies in these environments and they actually did get bigger.
The exoskeleton is likely a bigger problem than supposed inability of arthropods to breath at large sizes without high oxygen (again, dragonflies can breath in 5% O2).
Liked the bit about coal, and the geological "extinction" of coal. Plants (even those from that long ago time) have tannins in their structures. Tannins are phenolic types of chemicals. It was tannins that were somewhat resistant to destruction by bacteria and the like. (Some sorts of cotton --- the fibers and hence the fabric made from these fibers --- found in archaeological sites in parts of South America and were found to be used by those long ago native peoples as wound bandages.) So in a multistep way that's why we now nave coal --- I think that you can extract chemically tannins and other phenolic chemical compounds from coal. The change came when 'white fungus' came along that to well, eat, these tannins and all else is geological history.
"They put more backbone into it."
You sir are funny. :)
PUNS! quips! Jokes!
They put more backbone into evolving lungs that don’t suck.
Plus a fair bit of elbow grease.
Genius
Once again, the visuals used in these videos really add to what we hear, making it all as pleasant as it is informative.
Not to mention the soothing and barely audible music which also adds to what we hear without intruding.
Requiredfields2 good catch
@@Requiredfields2 I have my volume low, I didn't even notice 😰
I especialy enjoyed the weird tree illustration, I didn't notice the difference in the illustrations of this periode that I had seen before
as an artist, i really appreciate that he credits who made them also
Arthropods do still attain large sizes, especially in islands with few or no large vertebrates. Not as large as in the Carboniferous, but still impressive for the cenozoic.
Gotta love coconut crabs
Deep-sea gigantism is also very prevalent in invertebrates. The japanese spider crab puts even carboniferous invertebrates to shame.
@@epicbastard1 is it deep sea gigantism, or is it shallow sea diminuism? 😉
I've seen experiments where they raised present-day insects (I think it was cockroaches) in an atmosphere with oxygen levels similar to those in the carboniferous: They grew _way_ bigger than normal.
@@davidschaftenaar6530 I would like to see that, do you have any links?
Amazing as usual! Only a note: actually tree ferns still exist, maybe not as tall, but in New Zealand some species can reach 20 m. Also scorpions are pretty common in tropical rainforest.
Yeah I was wondering about that because I have a 4m tall tree fern right outside my room.
They are one of my favorite plants!
Also I live in a rainforest environment and I can confirm there are plenty of scorpions...
@@bookerrobinson5679 how many?
In Puerto Rico we have tree ferns not very tall maybe like 10 feet tall, very skinny... its just a huge Fern on a stick the leaves are just a bit meattier. Very uncommon as well a pity, but they have strict requirements most of our city's land is nowhere cool/humid enough, in the jungle it would definetly.
Yeah, I was also wondering why he did not mention or show the tree ferns of New Zealand. It would have been a much better illustration.
Indeed, Cyathea australis regularly reaches (and occasionally exceeds) 20m. (That's an Australian fern if the name didn't give it away)
That said, the Carboniferous forests would still be very weird.
Plant's whose closest living relatives are club mosses stood over 35m tall
Horsetails 15m tall
I honestly can't think of carboniferous ferns as tall as modern Australian and New Zealand examples off the top of my head Psaronius and Medullosa both topped out at about 10m if memory serves.
To whoever joined your patreon as "Ken Ham", I salute you.
Hopefully someone else will ask to be called Kent hovind
lmfao.
That or it happens to be another person with the same name.
I nearly choked on my sandwich when I saw that name! Lol!
I just scrolled down to the comments for this same reason.
The Carboniferous was overwhelmingly the most popular topic suggested so I hope you enjoy.
I accidently referred to cronioscuchus as croniosaurus, and pulmonoscorpius as pulmonoscorpio but seeing as they are spelt correctly on the screen I didn’t think it was worth re uploading the video, so hopefully it isn’t too annoying.
Awesome video but There were very less arthropods you mentioned I though you would add megarachne and Hibbertopterus too
Thanks!
Doraemon Universe I'm most likely going to do a video eurypterids in the future wheee I'll talk about megarachne
Enjoyed the video, now I have a hypothetical question. Imagine if the Arthropods had developed lungs early in the Carboniferous.
@@thefurrybstard1964 if that happened, we might not have a neck right now. 🤣🤣🤣
"What came first? The chicken or the egg?" Well, now that I've learned about amniotes I can confidently say egg.
Not entirely, cause the species that the amniotes came from, laid another type of egg. However, it is definitely an animal that came before the eggs, as single celled life evolved into multicelled life, which then evolved the eggs required for easier reproduction. Even we humans use eggs. We just don't lay them.
@@Arterexius Your proving eggs were around long before the creature we call chickens existed. Eggs are in many creatures and chicken is just a chicken. Eggs came first.
@@Samiitriis indeed but in those terms the question is not interesting , if you talk about fish eggs ou whatever , the real point is what came first between the chicken and the chicken's egg , this is a little bit more interesting question , but however the egg still came first xD
@@Samiitriis that doesn't prove anything.
The omlette, I think.
It gives purpose to the egg and the chicken.
Wish this content was available while studying biology at high school. So much easier to get the jist of it, than just reading a textbook. Very well put together, nice flow to in, good balance between detail and big-picture
And yet the most intelligent people in history were voracious readers. Suck it up and read the books.
@@WillJM81280 - do you have evidence or proof of this?
For instance, there's no evidence that Socrates did much reading, if any.
A lot of intelligent people, particularly centuries ago, were illiterate.
So yeah, you can't just say that the most intelligent people in history were voracious readers - it's just not true.
@@squodge do you have evidence or proof that it’s not true ?
@@WillJM81280 and only idiots shit on people for finding new ways to learn. Learning is learning.
@@WillJM81280 because the technology didn't exist back then
Vertebrates: exoskeletons are nice but ya'll ever herd of bONES
*Ｈａｌｌｏ， ｗｅ ａｒｅ Ｂｏｎｅｙ Ｂｏｉｓ*
Broke: beating bugs because of your bones
Woke: beating bugs because of your camera eyes
Bespoke: beating bugs because you have lungs.
Having a predefined internal skeleton is more of a limit on diversity than a strength. This is proven by the number of vertebrates with vestigial limbs they have no use for. Exoskeletons are not the limits to size, breathing apparatus is. If vertebrates breathed using free flowing tubes we would be at least as small as invertebrates.
@@KermitFrogThe Except that endoskeletons are way more efficient as muscle attachments and their volume doesn't grow as much as exoskeletons do when you scale up the animal. Also backbones have proven time and time again to have the ability to increase an animal's speed and agility by a lot.
Aquatic arthropods don't have the oxygen restriction than their land counterparts do, and yet vertebrates kicked them out of the top of the food chain the instant they evolved jaws.
MarvAlice *Wheezes whilst beating bugs on table*
A scorpion as big as a cat couldn't hide in your shoe when you go camping
They hide in the sleeping bag
Imagine trying to give your pet scorpion a bath…
@@hititmanify nightmare fuel
I would commit suicide immediately if i got time traveled back and saw that
That is not very reassuring, though, to time-travellers.
I believe it was fungi, not bacteria that ended the Carboniferous by evolving the ability to break down wood.
Sir you are correct. Fungi are known for their capability to break down polymers.
@@Motofanable thoo several varieties of bacteria also famously break down wood. Like the ones in termites that are known to allow it to ‘digest’ wood
@@GelloWello but how old are termites compared to fungi?
I guess it's myriad of organism since there are insects and many animals that can break down wood
@@badoem5353 It's not the termites, it's the bacteria which would be older than the termites.
There's something about ferns - they're just so...ancient. I was peeing in a wood once and the wind caught a really tall fern making it move just like a cobra ready to strike. All I could think was "TRIFFID!!!!!!!"
"please don't bite it, anything but that"
yeah that would be terrifying
Based on the relationship of most modern scorpions, you could interpret Pulmonoscorpius’ relatively small claws to mean it relied on a more toxic venom.
That's an interesting hypothesis.
My thoughts too
Smaller claws may also suggest scavenging.
Or a less immune prey species
Yeah, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Scavenging is a good explanation as well.. and we forget the most fearsome weaponry is often directed at our kind; mating or food resource.
What I would give to go back to the beginning of time and live through everything (without going crazy or dying/feeling pain) but mainly to be able to remember everything
i always wished that after we died, there was a complete archive of everything in the universe that had ever happened, that you could spend an eternity investigating . it would be a perfect afterlife
@@ebinmenes1698 “let’s see..where’s my crushes house.”
@@ebinmenes1698 that would be better than paradise
@@ebinmenes1698 Neeeerd! But no, seriously, I would like something like that too.
I hope so. @@ebinmenes1698
I genuinely appreciate how calm his voice is through the video. I was watching a few while laying down and I got a great nap in, and then I went back to watch the videos cause they were still interesting.
Someone has sleep deprivation problems
@@Sohelanthropus Or, he just had a nap. People do that sometimes
@@ruinaderoma no they have sleep deprivation problems
Moth Light Media is giving PBS Eons a run for their money. I love it!
In my opinion, this is much better than PBS eons, more on par with Trey the explainer, Ben Thomas and Henry the Paleoguy.
Håvard L I like those channels too, but I think that Eons is better than those three.
@@GerardWay4President yeah that's fair, different strokes for different folks haha
Håvard L XD
@@Lien6887
Eons is an "Authoritative source" trey has interesting takes but his voice can get annoying, and I have no Idea about the other guys you listed.
Small claws in modern day scorpions is usually indicative of potent venom. The animal is relying on its venom to kill prey instead of its crushing claws.
Could a venomous telson have evolved as early as the Carboniferous?
Small claws isn’t clearly linked to venom potency. Also, potent against what, the effects of any venom varies by target
@@sjl197 As a scorpion keeper, I know the small claw+fat tail+strong venom as highly venomous and vice-versa to be a bad generalization. It still depends.
@@sjl197 Not deterministically linked but it's a rather reliable rule of thumb.
@Steven Baal "It's" for "it is."
@@carlorielmendez6505 well all scorpions have venom right? thats what the tail is for, what we determine 'potent' venom is usually in comparison to how it affects humans which would be erroneous for the time period, i'd guess the venom they had was very potent for catching their prey in that period
The treelike ferns mentioned in this video can still be found in New Zealand and Australia, but they are unrelated to the Carboniferous tree ferns and are believed to have convergently evolved from regular ferns during the Cretaceous.
Thank you. I was going to point that out but you already did.
Philippines has those tree ferns too.
Imagine a world full of large intelligent beetles that thought squirrels and pigeons were creepy
I was pondering what it might be like to have giant scorpions wondering through our yards, just to get plucked up and thrown into a boiling pot of water...... Land Lobster for dinner!
Read the book children of time, large intellegent spiders talk about how creepy rats and mammals are and when they dissect a few dead humans this mistake them for giant rats since they are the only thing similar inside, since in this planet all the arthropods became intellegent while mammals almost all went extinct
@@NeostormXLMAX seconded on Children of Time and Children of Ruin, great books!
@@NeostormXLMAXYour description has piqued my interest...I have an app to read aloud what is on my screen. Since my eyesight is inadequate I wonder how I could get involved in "reading" those books that are mentioned in this comment section. If anyone can suggest the ways to do it I'd be very grateful 😊
@@rudyschwab7709 Just as inmoral as real lobster.
Arthropods: doing good
Oxygen levels: *So anyway, i started to fall*
Pathetic attempt at humor.
David Ross welp humor is subjective so you may not find it humorous but to me, it was hilarious.
David Ross I agree, maybe decline instead of fall
@@DavidRDavidRoss toxic attempt at a comment
@@DavidRDavidRoss I mean I laughed, why do you have to be such an asshole? 😠
The key isn't so much getting the oxygen into "deeper" parts of a larger body. The problem wasn't the distance to the center of the body, but the overall volume. Otherwise, you could have extremely large, flatter insects like centipedes.
It is a natural physical and biological law that as you increase the surface area of, say, a sphere, that the volume increases exponentially in comparison to the surface area added. Insects aren't normally spheres, but the law holds true to some degree on any shape that an arthropod can take. At some point, there isn't enough surface area to have enough spiracles to let enough oxygen in for the rate of oxygen intake to supply enough oxygen to all the cells in that body's volume. And that is based on the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere as well. Just wanted to get extremely specific about what the limitation was.
Its called the Square Cubed Law, and it is surprisingly relevant to animals, and to an extent plants. Take a look at large terrestrial mammals and compare them with the really large terrestrial Dinosaurs and you will notice that the structure of the legs is basically the same (very 'pillar' like). This is a direct result of the Square Cubed Law. The Law is also the reason Arthropods literally cannot grow above a certain size threshold, that massive increase in mass requires more muscle to move it, and there is a point at which the animal reaches a size at which the muscles simply do not have the space in the exoskeleton to grow large enough to move the animal. With endoskeletons muscles can be larger in relation to the skeleton than they can with exoskeletons, but even with endoskeletons there is a mass limit beyond which an animal cannot grow. A Blue Whale is probably very close to that upper limit for a Marine Animal.....
@@alganhar1 also this isn’t factoring in the limitations of circulatory systems. For example tall humans face many challenges to their health. It is well known that above 5 feet your height increases your odds of blood clots
@@alganhar1 thank you. Its not exponential relation ship with Area to Volume. Its Area cubed is proportional to Volume Squared, which is where the Squared Cubed law gets its name.
Thus if something is 2.56 times the area then its volume is about 4.096 times as much. If Area is quadrupled then Volume increases about 8 fold. If Area increased by 9 times Volume is about 27 times as much. And if Area went up 25 times then its volume is about 125 times as much.
If it was Exponential (I'll use base 2) if something doubles then the result is quadrupled. In exponential if the first term is quadrupled the result is 16 times as much. If you take the input multiples by 9 then its 512 times as big a result. And if you take 25 times the input that is 33554432 times the result.
While what Ron said is important, Surface Area and Volume are not linear. Its also important to give the correct relationship. Too often I see "they're expontional" when its a fixed power relationship like here its the Squared Cubed law.
Thanks for the interesting conversation guys. So much information out in the world, its nice to read intellegent people discussing complex (to me, a finance specialist) concepts.
@@jamesknapp64 I would also like to add that it is a mathematical relationship based on geometry, not a "physical or biological law" as Ron Ronson said.
Pure conten, no clickbait, no commercials. Thank you, please stay awesome.
This is the first video I’ve seen of yours, but as soon as I saw all of the art properly credited I had to subscribe! As a bonus you’re very interesting and I love learning about this crazy world we live in. Thank you for these fascinating and highly educational videos; They have to be a great deal of work!
“Scorpions, larger than cats” well that’s a time period I never want to visit
What if you could carry a big gun?
Maybe it would be a thrill seeking adventure.
Hey sure they are scary and could kill you.. but they gotta reach you first!
Don worry you won't
Oh, I would. It's not a bug, it's a feature. Well okay, it's a bug and a feature.
1:18 it happened even more than that too! Isopods, which are crustaceans, and decapods like say the coconut crab, as well as some other crustacean species, have evolved to live on land independently from one another. Many crustaceans are still tied to the water to reproduce as they can’t lay their eggs on land. Not yet at least lol!
A simple way to imagine this period of time is imagining what the world would look like if you were to shrink to the point that grass would look like trees
EL MeoN Bamboo is grass too.
@@AkaiKA4K it is?
@@gadielgonzalez2755 very hard grass, they have structure closer to grass than wood even though they're hard
@@geradosolusyon511 that's what happens when you _THICCEN_
@@gadielgonzalez2755 thicc grass ma dude
Good video. A small visualization of the time period, like a timeline, would have been a good addition.
It feels like an Eons video! great job I liked it :) first video of yours that I watch
You are a very underrated channel. Remember me when you get to the top!
Thank you
I had the shivers throughout the entirety of this video
Great content. One suggestion: Please add new events to the timeline as the video progresses instead of just starting each timeline shot with an empty timeline.
Awesome job with this video. You have a better channel than most big channels.
this would quite depressing to watch as a scorpion, considering all of their genetic development in last 450 million years or so...
it. just. works.
Good thing we're on the top of the foodchain
Well they got smaller at least
@@AcolyteOfLucifer i think we're out of the food chain
@@dinonuggetzzz5357 nah we’re def on top. no predators because we formed nature to our will
That arthroplura would make a nice runner/shag style!
small claws also mean they hunt primarily with venom at least in modern scorpions
i just wanted to say that this channel deserves so much more subs!!!
0:08 I like how all the coastlines are simplified but the UK's which has every nook and cranny showed
Your patron Ken Ham is a very cheeky fellow. Love the name choice.
Yeah I always chuckle about it too :D
Thank you for creating this video, it was very enjoyable and insightful
You're welcome
Girls with time travel: Omg I want to meet my great grandmother
Boys with time travel: Time to go back in time to domesticate human sized millipedes
Moe Syzlak: time to get some caveman hookers
Let’s be thankful that arthropods don’t have lungs. I wouldn’t like living in a world where I can see every detail on a scorpions face without a stereoscope
If they had lungs you probably wouldn't exist. Most likely no mammals would.
@@abyssstrider2547 First statement is correct, second not so much.
@@Motofanable if a rock was moved 2 centimeters to the left we might not exist....
Very nicely done, sir! Keep up the good work! 😊
A correction: the famous canopy trees of the Carboniferous were not related to ferns. These 'scale trees' like Lepidodendron were lycophytes, a completely different branch of vascular plants than ferns and seed plants. Their closest relatives today are the diminutive club moss, spike moss, and quillworts.
But some were tree ferns, which are not true ferns. They bore seeds whereas ferns reproduce by spores, including the modern tree-sized ones.
🤓
Thanks for everyone who takes time to add these type of correction comments. I'm surprised how many errors there were in a short video!
Very well-produced videos! Thanks for linking sources! I absolutely love all of this content.
I love your videos. Evolutionary biology is a wonderful collection of 'just so' stories. It has always had such a great power to explain why animals are the way they are. I would take issue with one thing in the video though, and that is the carboniferous forest trees. Fern trees still exist today. I have some in my garden. Also during that time there were other sorts of plant occupying the tree niche, including giant clubmosses and giant horsetails.
The first forests also appeared in the mid devonian with the cladoxylopsid Wattieza and the progymnosperm Archaeopteris. During the carboniferous ferns weren’t the dominant trees, but lycophytes (these are not ferns nor are they that closely related to ferns, this is a common misconception) like Lepidodendrales and Calamites (actually closely related to ferns) were. Tree ferns (not a specific group of ferns but like all trees just a morphological adaptation) appear during the start of the collapsing rainforests and only then slowly become more dominant together with early seed plants, because they were better adapted for the drier conditions.
The small claws on the pulmonoscorpius could also indicate that its venom was very potent, like the modern desert scorpion; it’s subdues prey by stinging rather than a forest scorpion which uses its large claws and has less lethal venom.
Stumbled onto this channel, have been loving the videos. Thanks!
Great video as always dude ✌🏻
Thank you
Loved the video can't wait to explore your channel
Just found this channel... omg amazing content
What a fascinating and informative video. I think this has become my favourite channel on UA-cam.
Amazing video!
I always find it a little bit melancholy to look at pictures of extinct animals even though I know it's just the natural progression of life.
Great work!
Your editing and narration are getting better each time!
Thank you
Early life is always so interesting becaue of how different they are, the fact that decomposers hadnt carved out a niche yet causing plant matter to not rot is crazy and just goes to show how strange life organisms are.
You channel is incredible. Watched a few videos, instant sub. Your videos are blowing my mind over and over again. Explaining millions and millions of history.
All hail the gaint insects ❤️
I for one welcome our new ant overlords
Their time is done... long live the synapsids!
No.
@@googleisretarded7618 then be careful 😂
@@camel7624 ever heard about Ants 😂
Makes quarantine ever so slightly less boring!
Let's not rule out that the crow-sized dragonflies may have also preyed on small vertebrates, then! Great video
holy....
on first glance i red "cow sized dragonfly" 🥺 thats terrifying, a helicopter sized aerial vertebrate hunter🙈
You're a one-man-PBSEons, Moth Light Media. I hope your channel keeps on growing, you deserve it.
So basically vertebrates won out because they have lungs.
Also where can I get one of them house cat sized scorpions as a pet?
You still need? I know a guy
Just another great video! Just found your channel and now I‘ve got plenty to binge.
I can not remember the university involved, but I do remember a documentary where they created an ecosystem in a large sealed tank and increased the oxygen levels which resulted in modern insects becoming much larger - up to 30% over only a few generations.
Do you remember the name of the study or documentary? I'd love to check this out
Which isn't much, only half an inch of growth in reality, but interesting nonetheless.
This is briefly mentioned in a PBS Eons episode:
ua-cam.com/video/-wQLKMUWANg/v-deo.html
Thank you. As fascinating and beautiful to watch as ever.
10:00 lol arthur wasley got so deep into human study he became a biologist
awesome, i can avoid ignorance in spite of a lacking formal education because of content like yours, thank you
Interesting. Thanks for some ancient history.👍🦂🦂🦂👍
Thank you glad you enjoyed it
What a fascinating story. Thanks for sharing it
I'll save you time it was the decline in atmospheric oxygen concentration. The bugs had passive respiratory systems meaning required high oxygen concentrations to support a large body. Love the video by the way I'll be checking out your others your very hip to the ancient jive :p
That's not the whole story. Not only a decline in oxygen level but a thinner atmosphere overall, and both due to an expanding Earth, the mechanism of which is also related to increasing gravity. Thinner atmosphere/less oxygen/higher gravity is also what got the dinosaurs, not the asteroid fantasy.
@@forbesmag1271 expanding earth and higher gravity? Proof pls, this sounds like some weird conspiracy theory
@@maclarenschell8855 The living earth is in a breathe in cycle that why it was expanding we are now in a breathe out cycle so the earth will be shrinking. This makes the atmosphere more thicker explaining global warming. The increase and decrease in gravity is caused by the change in density of the earths core from the breathe in and breathe out cycle of the earth.
@@2DarkHorizon Prove it.
Great video :-)
I love how this informal channel is getting more and more views^^
9:55 I see that Ron’s dad has moved on from his interest in muggle artifacts!
Marvelous. Still not weaned from mores escoteric ideas, which are more/less fungible than your inductive presentations of geological vs climactic sequences. But you're still the most artistic & articulate presenters. GBU. Amniotes approve you.
esoteric
"escoteric"? Be careful with those big words.
Good video as always. I have a suggestion for a video.
What made these 'trees' go extinct? Also, how did vertebrades come to be? What were the intermediate states?
They're good suggestions. I have an idea for a video that will include why most of ancient ferns went extinct
As far as I know those primitive trees, like giant ferns, horsetails and Lycophytes, didn't have the ability to pump water all the way up their trunk such as modern trees do, or at least they weren't really good at it and also didn't have any deep reaching roots, this is why they required a lot of water, like a swamplike environment, to thrive. When the climate got more arid they could not survive and got replaced by the newly evolved conifers, that were much better adapted to drier climates, eventually replacing them as the dominant terrestrial flora.
Global flood.
@@ch3rok33jo3 Please elaborate
@@NeP516 it's the great extinction event which we can clearly see represented in the sedimentary fossil table, this entire video is answered by the truth of the global flood
We can see a similar event in China today on a limited scale
Well done--you fit in a lot of info addressing the topic. Life is spectacular!
Scorpions the size of cats?
Thanks for giving me nightmares...
I just discovered this channel and it is amazing. I love the narration and story telling using historical images. These videos are wonderful : )
I, for one, welcome our historic insect overlords... (In Kent Brockman voice)
Great video. Just wanted to add that some insects do autoventilate their bodies in addition to diffusion. Notably locusts, which pump airsacs in the thorax via wingbeats and abdominal pumping in grasshoppers.
He says insects have tracheae. They don't; they have tracheoles, which mammals don't have. We have bronchioles.
They have tracheae as well, the branch into smaller tracheoles
Thank you for this. It's always fascinating to learn just how different this planet we think of ours has been over the epochs.
Prevailed is a matter of perspective.
Insects are the most successful creatures to have evolved. They remained virtually the same for millions of years, they existed before the dinosaurs, before the synapsids and before all of human history. And when we die out, they will still be around. If survival is what makes a creature prevail, then nothing will ever beat the insects.
Well, except for bacteria, sure.
I think you’re making the error of comparing insects to humans, rather than correctly comparing insects to mammals.
I believe you mean virtually the same in their basic general form. They actually have changed a lot since their beginning, diversifying into such a myriad of forms and adapting to nearly every econiche that exists.
@@pbase36 Insects may outlast even mammals.
This is a really cool channel. I regret not watching the discovery channel more as a child
The longest insect living today found so far is Phobaeticus chani, measuring 57centimetres across. The giant dragonfly Meganeuropsis permiana from the eaarly Perm period (less than 290mya) had wings measuring almost 75centimetres, being a relative to mentioned Meganeura Monyi, which got 73centimetres tall/long . Aegirocassis benmoulae was an almost two metres long Arthropode. A "sea scorpoin" with the name Jaekelopterus rhenaniae was two and a half metres long. Today there is a scorpion that can weave.
The biggest trilobite of a length of more than 70centimetres was/is Isotelus rex
Just subscribed. Love your clear and calm explanations, as well as the visuals that underpin the points you are making.
Makes me wonder if some caves were actually a giant arachnid’s nest at some point in time…
I've seen a video of a cave that is an arachnid (plural) nest, just not a GIANT arachnid's nest
I would argue that Biomechanics is just, if not more important. Biomechanics essentially limits the maximum size attainable by animals and to a lesser extent plants within an environment. This maximum size is basically determined through the Suare Cube Law. An arthropods could feasibly evolve a lung analogue, but it CANNOT get around the Square Cube Law.
To put it as simply as possible, if you take any animal and increase its size in all dimensions by 10, its mass actually increases by 1000. While this does put additional stress on cardiovascular and respiratory systems, it also puts stresses on skeletal and muscular systems. This is why when you compare the skeleton of a very large terrestrial mammal, say an elephant, with that of a very small one, say a mouse, you see some very important differences. The most obvious being the large, heavily boned, pillar like legs. This is termed Allometric Scaling, and shows that there are specific skeletal responses to such increased size.
The problem Arthropods have, is that as they get larger, while their volume does increase greatly, their exoskeleton also has to increase in size and thickness to support the new mass, and this eats into that internal volume. There is a point at which the animal is such a size, requiring so much volume to be taken up with its exoskeleton, that there is not enough room for muscles large enough to move the animal.
This is less of an issue with animals with endoskeletons such as mammals because an endoskeleton allows for far more muscular cross section in comparison to the skeleton. As a result animals with endoskeletons, such as mammals, can grow far, far larger than those with exoskeletons simply because they can have a far larger proportion of muscle compared to skeletal structure. Even so, there is an upper limit, it is just higher.
Blue Whales are probably close to the upper limit possible in an Earth like Gravity and Atmospheric pressure, at least when it comes to marine or aquatic organisms, as the support offered by water does to a certain extent counteract the issues raised by the square cube law. However, it does NOT remove them entirely.... It simply increases that size threshold still further. The upper threshold for terrestrial endoskeletal animals is probably approached by the larger Suaropods. It would not surprise me to find that some of those large Arthropods are actually fairly close to the maximum potential size their skeleton would actually allow....
3:55
Scorpions larger then cats are badass and frightening
These videos have gotten so good from when you started
1:10 So incects are more closely related to crustaceans than arachnids? Mind-blowing 🤯
I remember having a dream as a kid of being in the backyard of my kindergarten class on recess and seeing a large dragonfly (3x larger than a crow) on the concrete floor in front of a door) also, I feel like I definitely prefer your channel to Eons, your voice is so beautiful and calming and the visuals are AMAZING, keep it up, you’ll get tons more subs for sure
Ken Ham as a Patreon, love it! 😁
5 seconds in I decided to subscribe to your channel great stuff man
At 6:50 it looks like the goat is narrating the video. Lol
They did a study where they mimicked oxygen levels in the carboniferous perod and raised some dragonflies in these environments and they actually did get bigger.
The exoskeleton is likely a bigger problem than supposed inability of arthropods to breath at large sizes without high oxygen (again, dragonflies can breath in 5% O2).
You are really good and make amazing videos and I hope you get more attention
The idea that there were giant scorpions in Scotland with giant eyes is terrifying
5:57 holy shit the man that drew this picture must be a mastermind
Liked the bit about coal, and the geological "extinction" of coal. Plants (even those from that long ago time) have tannins in their structures. Tannins are phenolic types of chemicals. It was tannins that were somewhat resistant to destruction by bacteria and the like. (Some sorts of cotton --- the fibers and hence the fabric made from these fibers --- found in archaeological sites in parts of South America and were found to be used by those long ago native peoples as wound bandages.) So in a multistep way that's why we now nave coal --- I think that you can extract chemically tannins and other phenolic chemical compounds from coal. The change came when 'white fungus' came along that to well, eat, these tannins and all else is geological history.
Lignin.
Great work as always
Thank you