Episode 212: The River of Giants
b"Thanks to Pranav for his suggestion! Let's find out what the river of giants was and what lived there!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nKing of the River of Giants\\n\\nSpinosaurus was a swimming dinosaur and it swam in the River of Giants:\\n\\n\\n\\nA modern bichir, distant relation to the extinct giants that lived in the River of Giants:\\n\\n\\n\\nNot actually a pancake crocodile:\\n\\n\\n\\nA model of Aegisuchus and some modern humans:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nA while back, Pranav suggested we do an episode about the river of giants in the Sahara. I had no idea what that was, but it sounded interesting and I put it on the list. I noticed it recently and looked it up, and oh my gosh. It\\u2019s amazing! It\\u2019s also from a part of the world where it\\u2019s really hot, as a break for those of us in the northern hemisphere who are sick of all this cold weather. I hope everyone affected by the recent winter storms is warm and safe or can get that way soon.\\n\\nThe Sahara is a desert in northern Africa, famous for its harsh climate. Pictures of the Sahara show its huge sand dunes that stretch to the horizon. This wasn\\u2019t always the case, though. Only about 5,500 years ago, it was a savanna with at least one lake. Lots of animals lived there and some people too. Before that, around 11,000 years ago, it was full of forests, rivers, lakes, and grasslands. Before that, it was desert again. Before that, it was forests and grasslands again. Before that, desert.\\n\\nThe Sahara goes through periodic changes that last around 20,000 years where it\\u2019s sometimes wet, sometimes dry, caused by small differences in the Earth\\u2019s tilt which changes the direction of the yearly monsoon rains. When the rains reach the Sahara, it becomes green and welcoming. When it doesn\\u2019t, it\\u2019s a desert. Don\\u2019t worry, we only have 15,000 more years to wait until it\\u2019s nice to live in again.\\n\\nThis wet-dry-wet pattern has been repeated for somewhere between 7 and 11 million years, possibly longer. Some 100 million years ago, though, the continents were still in the process of breaking up from the supercontinent Gondwana. Africa and South America were still close together, having only separated around 150 million years ago. The northern part of Africa was only a little north of the equator and still mostly attached to what is now Eurasia.\\n\\nNear the border of what is now Morocco and Algeria, a huge river flowed through lush countryside. The river was home to giant animals, including some dinosaurs. Their fossilized remains are preserved in a rock formation called the Kem Kem beds, which run for at least 155 miles, or 250 km. A team of paleontologists led by Nizar Ibrahim have been working for years to recover fossils there despite the intense heat. The temperature can reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit there, or 52 Celsius, and it\\u2019s remote and difficult to navigate.\\n\\nFor a long time researchers were confused that there were so many fossils of large carnivores associated with the river, more than would be present in an ordinary ecosystem. Now they\\u2019ve determined that while it looks like the fossils were deposited at roughly the same time from the same parts of the river, they\\u2019re actually from animals that lived sometimes millions of years apart and in much different habitats. Bones or even fossils from one area were sometimes exposed and washed into the river along with newly dead river animals. This gives the impression that the river was swarming with every kind of huge predator, but it was probably not quite so dramatic most of the time.\\n\\nThen again, there were some really fearsome animals living in and around the river in the late Cretaceous. One of the biggest was spinosaurus, which we talked about in episode 170. Spinosaurus could grow more than 50 feet long, or 15 m, and possibly almost 60 feet long, or 18 m. It\\u2019s the only dinosaur known that was aquatic, and we only know it was aquatic because of the fossils found in the Kem Kem beds..."