[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage your hosts for this evening: Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich!

JAD ABUMRAD: What's up, Seattle!

[applause]

JAD: Okay, so Robert and I have been on tour for the last two months. We went to—-whew!

ROBERT KRULWICH: City after city after city ...

JAD: Something like 21 cities we went to.

ROBERT: Yeah, we were both like, [sniffs].

JAD: Sick. Kicked our asses. But it was so much fun. And the show was called Apocalyptical. It was about ending.

ROBERT: Which is not the most obvious topic to choose. To invite people into a theater and say, "Hey, we're gonna just tell you different stories that end really brilliantly." But these are—this is a series of ending stories. That's what we did that night.

JAD: And we did it with some amazing musicians.

ROBERT: And comedians.

JAD: And video artists who were projecting beautiful images on these massive screens above our head. And also, we had puppets.

ROBERT: Enormous, beautiful, articulate, gorgeous puppets.

JAD: And you can see all this. We are releasing a really nicely-shot video of this entire performance at the same time as this audio podcast. Go to Radiolab.org/live. You can watch the whole thing. You know, some of the best moments of the show were purely visual, so we encourage you to check it out. But what follows is the audio podcast version of that show, which we recorded live at the Paramount in Seattle.

ROBERT: The show actually begins with a radical rethinking of one of the most important ending stories that has ever happened on planet Earth, which is the story about the end of the dinosaurs.

JAD: There's all kinds of dinosaur puppetry, beautiful stuff at the beginning which we're gonna skip over. But again, you can check it out at Radiolab.org/live. We're gonna jump to the part where we hear from scientists who have been forensically probing this moment and have a totally new way of thinking about it.

JAD: Okay, we're going to start you off with a guy. Well, the guy who started it off for us. It's a guy named Jay.

JAY MELOSH: Jay Melosh, professor at Purdue University. And I study impact craters among other things.

JAD: Not only can Jay Melosh create impact craters with his mind, but he and his colleagues have been investigating this moment almost as if it were a crime scene that happened not 60 million years ago, but yesterday. And the story that they've put together, it's more than just interesting, it's frankly—it's frankly terrifying. And weirdly specific, as it happens. Take for example, the seemingly simple question of when? When did it happen?

ROBERT: You don't mean, like, the year. That would be a little too specific.

JAD: No. I don't know if you remember, but Jay got even more specific than that. This was a casual question that I threw out. Listen to his answer.

JAD: By the way, do we know anything about seasons? Was this a warm—a particularly warm ...?

JAY MELOSH: Actually, it was between—well, this is a bit of a stretch, but it was sometime between June and July.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: How can you say that so specifically?

ROBERT: How would you know that?

JAY MELOSH: The reasoning is we—we can, for example ...

JAD: This was the—this was the first surprise. It's kind of a controversial idea, but it basically goes like this. Jay says scientists have found some pollen in rocks which date from that time. Two different kinds of pollen. And based on an analysis of those two kinds of pollen ...

JAY MELOSH: We know that the impact took place between the flowering of the lotus and the flowering of the water lilies.

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: Okay, so that's a lotus you see flowering on the left. That's a water lily flowering on the right.

JAD: You can see this if you look at our video online.

ROBERT: Fossils found at the impact site that had pollen from both of these flowers in the same rock would suggest that the impact did in fact take place ...

JAY MELOSH: Somewhere between June and July. It's one of those things in geology, we get a glimpse of a moment far, far back in time.

JAD: So let's go deeper into that moment. All right, everybody. Let's collectively rewind our minds back in time tens of millions of years into the past. 66 million years ago, to be precise. There they are, majestic beasts hanging out on the plains eating their lotus leaves. Sometime in June. June 17, let's say. And everything on this day ...

JAY MELOSH: Pretty much normal. This particular, fateful day was no different than any of millions and millions of previous days as far as the dinosaurs were concerned. But if there were any astronomers at the time—which there weren't—they might have had some inkling that something was coming, because ...

JAD: Had they looked up ...

JAY MELOSH: They would have seen ...

JAD: ... a tiny little ...

JAY MELOSH: ... dot of light in the sky. Whereas planets, the moon, move with respect to the stars, this would have had a constant bearing. And an old seaman could tell you that if you see something constant bearing, that's on a collision course with you.

JAD: And that thing, of course, is our asteroid.

JAY MELOSH: Zeroing in on the earth.

ROBERT: I want to say that we do know quite a bit about this asteroid. From the size of the crater and from the amount of certain minerals found at the impact site, we know that the asteroid was roughly six miles wide. And then again, roughly six miles long, which makes it approximately the size of Manhattan Island ...

DOUG ROBERTSON: Or—or Mount Everest. It's roughly the size of Mount Everest.

ROBERT: That is Doug Robertson, a geologist who knows quite a bit about this asteroid.

DOUG ROBERTSON: And by the way, it has a name. It's—the asteroid's called Baptistina.

ROBERT: Baptistima? Why?

DOUG ROBERTSON: -stina. Baptistina. I don't know. They name asteroids. On another subject, we do know that the Earth's moon was probably produced by a collision with something the size of Mars.

JAD: Whoa!

JAD: I just threw that in because it's cool. It doesn't really relate to our story.

[audience laughs]

ROBERT: We don't have the whole evening here. Let's just stay to it. Okay, the dinosaurs are here on Earth. They're eating their leaves. Meanwhile up in space, our asteroid Baptistina is now hurtling towards the Earth.

JAY MELOSH: 20,000 miles an hour.

ROBERT: Very fast.

JAY MELOSH: 20 times faster than a very fast rifle bullet.

ROBERT: And scientists couldn't be sure what would happen—mathematically, I mean—when a Mount Everest-sized bullet traveling at 20,000 miles an hour hits our atmosphere.

JAY MELOSH: The atmosphere is really just a very, very thin skin over the rest of the Earth.

JAD: So scientists thought, "All right, if we're gonna construct this story, let's just take it piece by piece and first figure out what would happen when this big ball hurtling through space slams into our atmosphere—which is made of gas, of course. So just to approximate, let's fire a bullet through some gas ...

[gun firing effect]

JAD: ... and watch what happens. Now here, we basically showed a super slow-motion video of a gun firing a bullet underwater. You can see it on our website, Radiolab.org. It's very beautiful. You can see the bullet coming out, and freeze it right there at the edge, okay? Basically, what you see is this bullet steaming through the water. And by the way, we used water as an approximation for gas, because in gas you would have the same effect I'm about to describe. Creating a wake behind it, and the wake gets wider and wider as it trails away from the bullet. And if you imagine this shape in three dimensions, really what you're looking at is a kind of a cone, like a funnel shape. And inside the—the walls of the funnel, inside that cone is nothing.

ROBERT: Nothing.

JAD: Nothing.

ROBERT: Because it—because it's in water. So you're saying there's—it's like a hole in the water?

JAD: That's what I'm saying. There's nothing in there. It's a vacuum in there. Because the bullet is shooting through the water, it pushes the water out of the way. And for a beat, the water doesn't have time to come back together. And so all you have is emptiness in there. Right there, this—what you're seeing is a massive hole in the water created by a tiny little bullet. Now imagine that that bullet is six miles wide, and the hole that it's making is right above your head.

ROBERT: What does that mean if you're a dinosaur looking up? What would happen?

JAY MELOSH: Well, if you were in the right place—and this is gonna be the wrong place in a second or two.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAY MELOSH: If you were in the right place to look behind the asteroid as it came in, you'd probably be able to see clearly through to space.

JAD: What? Does that mean you would suddenly be looking at a nighttime hole in a daytime sky?

JAY MELOSH: Right.

ROBERT: Whoa!

JAD: And to be fair, Jay did tell us that you would need special kinds of eyeballs to see this night hole in the day sky, and the dinos didn't have that, so—it's science! Still! I mean, just imagine what a last image that would be to see day and night come together in the same moment. But according to Jay ...

JAY MELOSH: You better not blink, because before you could open your eyes again ...

[explosion effect]

JAY MELOSH: ... the asteroid would have hit the surface. And if you were in a position to see that, then you're gonna be engulfed by the violence that is just about to occur.

[audience laughs]

JAD: By the way, the audience was just laughing at a dinos de los muertos graphic that just came on the screens.

ROBERT: So we know it was a big explosion. Fine. And it was violent. Fine. But I think we should be a little bit subtle about this, because obviously if an asteroid is the size of Manhattan and it lands on your head, you're not gonna feel very good about that. But if Manhattan is—is hitting the planet Earth, that's a little bit like a pebble hitting an enormous beach ball.

JAD: Yeah, and I can imagine that the little pebble-sized—relativistically-speaking, the pebble would create some damage in the spot where it landed.

ROBERT: But let's suppose that you are a leaf-eating, mother-of-three hadrosaur living in New Zealand, right? And you're just—at the moment that the asteroid comes in, you're on the—you're antipodal, you're on the other side of the planet. Would you have any idea that this was happening?

JAD: Well, that's the next question that we took to Jay. How much damage would this thing actually do?

JAY MELOSH: Well, we can do experiments. We can produce things, situations like this in small quantities in the laboratories.

LAB OPERATOR: Okay, you're all set in there?

JAD: Which brings us ...

PETER SCHULTZ: Yeah, we're good to here. You good?

JAD: ... to this guy.

PETER SCHULTZ: I'm Peter Schultz. And I like to do impact experiments.

JAD: Pete Schultz basically has every 13-year-old's dream job. He gets to blow shit up for a living. Basically, what Pete does is he works at this place that you're seeing right here on the screen. This is the NASA Ames Laboratory in California. And the thing that they're putting together there in the middle frame? That is a giant, three-story tall cannon.

ROBERT: What Pete does is he takes projectiles. So for example, you're gonna see him take a little glass bullet over there and he's gonna load it into the top of the cannon, and then he's gonna fire it right into a stand-up for planet Earth, which for him will be a sandpit.

JAD: And lucky for us, when we called Pete he was just about to pull the trigger on this thing.

ROBERT: So your—we're calling you on a day in which you are trying to re-experience the day?

PETER SCHULTZ: Actually, yeah. But I think we're gonna survive. That's our plan.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LAB OPERATOR: We're gonna gate it and reset.

PETER SCHULTZ: Okay. Hold on. We gotta—we gotta assume the position. We have to cross your fingers.

LAB OPERATOR: Okay, here we go. We got it.

PETER SCHULTZ: Here we go. Here we go.

LAB OPERATOR: We have all of our ready lights. Here we go. Rolling.

[explosion]

PETER SCHULTZ: That is gorgeous! That—oh, my gosh!

ROBERT: Is that—you have instant playback?

JAD: What just happened?

PETER SCHULTZ: [laughs] Oh, my gosh!

JAD: That is the sound of a man very happy with his explosion.

[audience laughs]

PETER SCHULTZ: You can see every piece of this—of what's happening.

ROBERT: So based on experiments like this, people like Pete can figure out precisely what happened when the asteroid hit the Earth. They can quantify the explosion's power by basically leveraging up experiments like this. So according to Doug, the amount of energy that would have been unleashed when that thing came rushing in onto Earth is roughly this ...

PETER SCHULTZ: It would hit the Earth with an explosion that's a hundred million megatons.

[loud guitar chord]

[audience cheers]

JAD: Sarah Lipstate!

JAD: Sarah, our guitarist, kinda swung her guitar around, had a metal moment.

JAD: Don't look at her wrong or she'll do that to you. Okay, so here's essentially how Doug broke that down for us. Two tons of TNT. We're talking tons here, not megatons. Two tons of TNT will essentially do this.

[footage of building collapsing]

JAD: On one of the three screens, you see a 10-story building imploding. Two tons of TNT will take down a building. Now 15,000 tons of TNT? That is what the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. On a second screen, we see archival footage of the atomic bomb. That chaos is 15,000 tons of TNT. Now these days, according to Doug Robertson, a hydrogen bomb ...

DOUG ROBERTSON: Current hydrogen bombs are typically of the order of one million tons of TNT equivalent.

JAD: Now one million tons of TNT equivalent, that's what we call a megaton. And if you remember, Doug said that the asteroid impact was equivalent of 100 million megatons. So really what he's saying in concrete terms, is that that impact was the equivalent of 100 million of those bombs going off all at once in the same spot.

ROBERT: Which is a lot.

[audience laughs]

JAD: That is true. That is true. However, it means—it really depends on what you mean by "a lot," because I was doing a little Googling and I was surprised to learn that 110-million megatons is not nearly enough to destroy the planet. To destroy the entire planet, you would need—you ready for this?—110-quadrillion megatons of TNT, which is a hundred million times 110 million megatons of TNT. So going back to your hadrosaur situation, mother-of-three in New Zealand? If the thing came in antipodal to her, maybe she would feel the ground shake a little bit, but after a minute she'd be like, "Whatever," and she'd go back to eating leaves. She probably wouldn't notice it.

ROBERT: Well, no, no. because that's not what we were taught in homeroom by Mrs. LeGrew, or whoever your teacher was. Here's the classic explanation: there was an impact of course, and it kicked up an enormous amount of dust. You'll remember this. The dust then kind of covers the planet. It blankets the Earth, makes the Earth very cold, makes the Earth very nasty. All the big plants die. The little plants get sick. The dinosaurs get hungry. The dinosaurs get sick. And then gradually, you know, they get dead. Deader and deader and deader from different things. 10,000 years, 30,000 years, 40—until you get, like, oh, like, 900,000 years later and you've got a shivering, last dinosaur sitting there in the cold going, [sneezing sound]. And that's the end. That's the story we were told in school.

JAD: Is a long, slow, wintry collapse.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: No!

[buzzer sounds]

JAD: No! Why would we tell these good people that tired old story from Mrs.—what is it, Mrs. McGruder's?

ROBERT: I made her McGruder tonight.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Let us offer up a completely different take.

ROBERT: It's Scottish night tonight.

JAD: Scottish. All right, we'll go with that. Let's actually flip the understanding completely.

ROBERT: I think we should.

JAD: Based on new science. So all right, here's what we're gonna do. Keith, pull up that ballistics video that we showed earlier with the red sand. Can you sort of pull that up and blow it up to the three screens? And then yeah, rewind it back.

[video rewinding]

JAD: Thank you. No, back just a bit more. All the way to the beginning. Okay, so this is a 6,000-frame-a-second video that you're seeing here. This is from Pete's lab. At this point on the screen, all you're seeing is a pit of red sand. Now what you see in the first few frames is you see the laser hitting right there, red sand flying in the air, super slo-mo. And then the next frame forward? Right there. You see some fire. You see a little bulb of fire erupt near the impact site. Right where the laser hits the sand, there's this little clump of flame and we freeze on that spot. Now scientists can now measure the temperatures in that spot right there.

ROBERT: Oh, there it is.

JAD: Yeah, right there. And just to state the obvious, we know from those measurements that that spot right there would have gotten very, very, very, very, very hot.

JAY MELOSH: You know, way beyond the temperature of the sun. I mean, we're talking temperatures, maybe 20,000 degrees.

ROBERT: Whoa!

JAY MELOSH: The sun's temperature's about 5,000 degrees.

JAD: And if we're talking temperatures four times hotter than the sun, well anything that's that hot is gonna instantly, instantly turn to ...

ROBERT: Gas.

JAY MELOSH: A very, very high-temperature, high-pressure gas. It's actually rock vapor, rock steam.

JAD: So imagine this thing comes barreling in, this asteroid. It doesn't just bounce off the Earth, it plows into the Earth. It goes into the surface. Two miles in, five miles in, seven miles in, 10 miles in, 20 miles into the Earth it goes. All the rock that it's plowing into is turning into a liquid, and then into a gas. And now watch what happens next? This is a basic physics experiment we're gonna show you.

JAD: On the screen, you see a very lovely video actually, of a hand dropping a metal ball into some sand.

JAD: This is just a dude dropping a ball in some sand. Watch this right here. Ball goes in, and like a millisecond after it makes impact, disappears into the sand, a little spear of sand goes shooting back in the opposite direction. Sort of a bounce-back effect.

ROBERT: Does—does this always happen? This—whatever this is?

JAD: It's like Newton's Law of Something.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Newton's Law of Sand, let's say. No, but what you see is you see this fine plume of sand go shooting back in the opposite direction as a sort of rebound, right? Now imagine that that ball is an asteroid, and that sand over there? That's the planet Earth. So Keith, play that one more time.

JAD: We play the video again, but this time as the ball drops, it gradually morphs into an asteroid.

[Robert makes explosion sounds]

JAD: Thank you for those sounds. So—but you would get the same effect. You would get the ...

[audience applauds]

JAD: The simple point is ...

ROBERT: It's just something we do.

JAD: You wonder where we get all of our sound design? It's out of that man's mouth, that's where. So you would get that same bounce-back effect of a fine plume shooting back in the opposite direction. But we know—we just heard Doug describe that it would not be—it would not be sand in this case. It would be rock gas.

JAY MELOSH: This plume of hot gas expands upward and pushes right on through the atmosphere up into space.

DOUG ROBERTSON: Some fraction hit the moon.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: No kidding!

DOUG ROBERTSON: Some fraction of that hit Mars.

JAD: Okay, so now you got this sneeze of rock vapor, it's out in space. Basic physics says that as it travels out farther away from the Earth what's gonna happen is it's gonna start to cool down a bit. And when it cools ...

DOUG ROBERTSON: It re-condenses into little droplets of that basically form glass very quickly. Little droplets of glass about the size of sand.

JAD: Now if you look at one of these little droplets of glass under a microscope, this is what it looks like right there. On the screen, you see what looks kind of like a translucent snowball.

JAD: That is actually a magnified image of one of these bits of glass that fell from space that day. Most of them didn't land on the ground—I'll talk about that in a second. But there it is. I don't know about you, but I find that totally terrifying. Because that's—it looks like a little Baptistina, right? Tiny little asteroid. Except now imagine trillions of these things in a cloud, in a cloud of shrapnel, going out, out, out, away from the Earth. And what's gonna happen next is that it's gonna start to lose momentum, that cloud. And when it does, the Earth's gravity is gonna grab back hold of it and say, "Come on back."

DOUG ROBERTSON: And 90 percent of them come back to the Earth.

ROBERT: Well, does falling glass do harm?

DOUG ROBERTSON: Yes. Because what happens is that the—the glass out in space starts to spread out, like north and south and east and west. And eventually, it will appear in the sky over New Zealand.

JAD: It's now a global phenomenon. And, you know, it's really hard to imagine what the hadrosaur would have seen, but the thing to keep in mind is that these things as they're coming in, these bits of glass, 90-some odd percent are burning up in the atmosphere. So very few of them are hitting the ground. So from her point of view, probably would have looked like the greatest meteor shower anyone has ever seen. With one significant bummer, which is this: when these little bits of glass come in, each one that burns up is depositing a little bit of heat into the sky. And collectively, there's such a massive rain of these things coming in ...

JAY MELOSH: Well, the heat would build up. The sky would turn red. It would be getting hotter and hotter.

JAD: And at a certain point, Jay wondered, "Well, how hot exactly would it have gotten?" Like, how much heat exactly would have built up there in the sky and then started to radiate down?

JAY MELOSH: We calculated the amount of heat that would come down. A number. 10 kilowatts per square meter. And yeah okay, well, we get this number. Well, what does that mean? Well, I went home and I hooked up a—a current meter and tried to measure the amount of heat produced in my oven for different amounts of power. And I could get about seven kilowatts per square meter in my oven on broil. And ...

JAD: Like, 500 degrees broil, you mean?

JAY MELOSH: Yeah. But that wasn't quite enough.

JAD: Not nearly. So Jay started measuring other kinds of ovens.

JAY MELOSH: And I finally found out that the heat would be, in fact, like being in a pizza oven. A pizza oven is about right.

JAD: Which means that if you were a terrestrial dinosaur anywhere above the ground on the Earth on that day, you would have experienced some heat that is almost unimaginable. Maybe it started at a hundred degrees, because it was June, it was summer. But within minutes, it would have been 300 degrees. 500 degrees. 700 degrees. 900 degrees. Estimates are on that day, temperatures topped out at something like 1,200 degrees. At that temperature, nothing can protect you. Your scales, your fur, whatever you got, it's not gonna do any good. Your blood will literally start to boil inside your body, and you will die.

JAD: So essentially, according to this theory, the dinosaurs and everything else on Earth that day would have been incinerated. And Doug thinks that's what did them in—not so much the impact, but all that ejecta that went up into the sky, came down as glass rain and created that heat. That's what did them in. And he would argue it didn't just do some of them in, or even many of them in. He would say it did all of them in, all at once.

DOUG ROBERTSON: There is zero evidence that any dinosaur made it through.

JAD: And the crazy part of this theory is that Jay and Doug think that the whole process, from the impact of the glass rain to the incineration of all of these species on the planet?

DOUG ROBERTSON: It would have taken a few hours.

ROBERT: His best guess? He thinks maybe two hours.

JAD: I mean, that's less time than a—a business lunch.

ROBERT: Yeah. You try getting east, northwest, anywhere on Mercer Street at rush hour in two hours? You can't do that.

JAD: I mean, if you think about it, that is less time than you will spend in this theater tonight.

ROBERT: That means that you're saying that an animal that had been supreme on the planet for 200 million years disappears in a few hours completely?

DOUG ROBERTSON: Yes.

JAY MELOSH: Yep. That's what the evidence suggests. That's right.

ROBERT: Well, you can consider the evidence, but also you can consider common sense. I mean, we've got a world filled with terrestrial dinosaurs. They were on every continent, they were even in Antarctica. And to say that they all disappeared in two hours? I mean, all? That would—that suggests that there's none of them in—out of harm's way. None of them in a cave somewhere, none of them in a grotto, none of them in a—in a protected forest of any kind. I mean, the word "all" in that connection is just too much. I just don't buy it.

JAD: Well, yeah. I mean, the truth is that the science is never gonna be so exact as to say yeah, all of them disappeared, or it happened on a single day, or on an afternoon. I mean, no—no tool that we have is that precise. But what Jay is saying is that it happened fast, very fast. Nothing made it through. What I find interesting is that ultimately, you don't need the ballistics or anything we've shown you so far to know that something major and sudden happened, because you can see evidence of it literally etched into the Earth.

KIRK JOHNSON: So here's the spot where we first found the K-T boundary.

JAD: You can see it really well out in Colorado, actually. We sent one of our producers Molly Webster out there to meet a paleontologist named Kirk Johnson. They hiked over a couple of hills. They found this one specific spot.

MOLLY WEBSTER: I'm, like, ready for a dinosaur to come around the corner.

JAD: And ...

MOLLY: Give me a minute.

JAD: ... they started to dig.

MOLLY: So we're digging down, like, a foot at this point, from where we were?

KIRK JOHNSON: Turns out for every three feet, you go down 10,000 years in time.

JAD: See, the Earth has layers. Kind of like a tree has rings. And every three feet down you go, you're going back in time about 10,000 years. And when you go all the way down, all the way back to 66.09 million years, you will find this one little skinny strip of rock.

KIRK JOHNSON: That's the K-T boundary.

MOLLY: That.

JAD: This one skinny gray line.

KIRK JOHNSON: This—this gray, crappy ...

MOLLY: Oh, that!

KIRK JOHNSON: This.

JAD: Now in a very real way, that line that you're seeing, that represents the day the asteroid hit. The day. Just above that line?

ROBERT: That's a little bit after the day.

JAD: Just below that line?

ROBERT: Is a little bit before the day.

JAD: And the line is called the K-T boundary, and what's cool is you can actually touch it. You can touch evidence of that moment. And in fact Kirk, what he did that day was he took his finger and he dug a piece out and he handed it to Molly.

MOLLY: This. We're holding—I'm holding the K-T ...

KIRK JOHNSON: You're holding the K-T boundary.

MOLLY: It's like—it's almost like chunks of coal.

KIRK JOHNSON: Yeah, but it's not. What you're holding is a dark, gray mudstone. It's a carbon-rich mudstone.

JAD: And in that mudstone, you'll find all kinds of things. I mean, you'll find very rare minerals like iridium that probably came in on the asteroid and got smushed into that line. Those little glass balls I was talking about? Those little hell balls? Well, if you get out a microscope and you look at that rock, you will see them in there.

[audience laughs]

JAD: We put up a funny cartoon of the little hell balls.

JAD: They're all in that line.

MOLLY: How thick do you think that line is?

KIRK JOHNSON: It's about an inch.

MOLLY: Is, like, hidden in there, is sort of the story of that day?

KIRK JOHNSON: Absolutely.

ROBERT: And here's the crazy thing. If this is the line right here, this little strip here.

JAD: Robert traces a picture of the K-T boundary with his finger.

ROBERT: And then you dig just below the line, you are gonna find over and over again dinosaurs everywhere. I mean, they're not gonna be alive, of course.

JAD: He starts putting some toy dinosaurs onto the line and making them move.

ROBERT: I'm giving them a certain amount of energy, which I shouldn't. But they're fossils. And you will find dinosaur fossils from Europe and Idaho and Montana. This one says it was made in China.

[audience laughs]

ROBERT: But maybe just go above the line, you don't find any dinosaurs. So below the line—scientists have looked everywhere above the line, and they haven't—well, everywhere they have looked anyway, they found nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

KIRK JOHNSON: It's a different world. That's the amazing thing. It's a different world. And it's pretty rare to go, "This is one world, and that's another world."

MOLLY: So you're literally just pointing pinkie to pointer finger spread.

KIRK JOHNSON: Yeah.

JAD: This is another moment where I would urge you at some point—not now, keep listening, but at some point, watch the video of this performance, because what Sarah, Darin, Glenn and Keith do in this moment visually, it's pretty amazing.

ANNOUNCER: Apolcalypse brought to you by Sarah Lipstate, Glenn Kotche and Darin Gray!

JAD: Before we go to break, I just want to give a very special thanks to the people who shared the stage with us. Sarah Lipstate from Noveller, Darin Gray on the bass, And Glenn Kotche on the drums. They're both from the band On Fillmore. We were so lucky to share the stage with those guys, along with video maestro Keith Skretch, who was doing the live video.

ROBERT: And our brilliant puppeteer Miron Gusso.

JAD: Oh, my God. That guy, so good. Check out all of them at Radiolab.org/live. You can see them doing what they do visually. It's pretty—it's pretty worth watching. Anyhow, we'll be back in a second.

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