‘THE REAL ROSS’ – Steve Brusatte
Simone Angel meets Jurassic Park’s dinosaur consultant
Want to know the secrets behind Dinosaur Pompeii and T-Rex CAT scans? In the first episode of Cosmic Chats from the Jungle, MTV icon Simone Angel parleys with leading paleontologist Steve Brusatte about why dinosaurs matter
The Earth has gone through so much but will endure for a long time. The question is will we?
Steve Brusatte
Welcome to the very first episode in TOPIA’s new series of Cosmic Chats from the Jungle. We really are coming to you from the jungle – Belize, Central America – hence you’ll get to enjoy a howler monkey interruption that sounds like a Stegosaurus. But isn’t, obviously.
As this season’s theme of TOPIA is The Egg, and we are trying to crack life’s mysteries, where better to start this series than roughly 66 million years ago? Specifically, when an asteroid hit the Earth, contributing to the devastating global extinction of the dinosaurs that ruled over the Earth, leaving birds as their only living descendants.
Our first guest is Steve Brusatte, who tells awe-inspiring stories of evolution. As a teenager growing up in the cornfields of the Midwest, he was inspired by Steven Spielberg’s iconic 1993 movie, Jurassic Park. Now the American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist is a consultant on the franchise, as well as the BBC series’ Walking with Dinosaurs, BBC Earth and Prehistoric Planet. He also enlivens science at Edinburgh University and is a New York Times bestseller, thanks to his pop science books, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Rise and Reign of the Mammals.
So, did dinosaurs go out with a bang or a whimper? What can we learn about resilience from the world’s deadliest mass extinction? And what really did come first – the chicken or the egg? Watch Simone Angel get eggs-istential with Steve Brusatte.
COSMIC CHATS FROM THE JUNGLE
Episode 01: THE REAL ROSS
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Want more from Season 02 of TOPIA?
It’s inspired by The Egg – and a cracking good read
You might also like: The female of the species is more deadly than the male
What’s so good about this?
Dinosaurs are long-lasting champions of resilience and key to studying the future of climate change. Their fossil records illustrate the history of the planet as it dealt with huge environmental tipping points. While we often tend to focus on their demise, they reigned unchallenged on the land for nearly 170 million years.
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Meet Simone Angel
Remember recording MTV in the 90s on VHS? As its longest running (and youngest) VJ, you would have been watching Simone Angel. An authentic European icon, Simone helped shape the broadcast-style that made the channel so revolutionary in its heyday. Today the Dutch VJ co-hosts the nostalgic podcast and YouTube channel, Party Zone Revisited, reconnecting with DJs and club culture legends to chat about dance music, fame, drugs and mental health. She has lived in mainland Belize since 2001 and now hosts TOPIA’s Cosmic Chats from the Jungle – a sort of Party Zone for sapiosexuals that asks the big Q that would have fried brains in the ’90s. Subscribe to the TOPIA YouTube channel.
