Extinction: Rethinking the dodo's demise, and could a supervolcano threaten humanity's future?

Around 8 million years ago, an underwater volcano just to the east of Madagascar formed the island of Mauritius. Pigeons on nearby islands set flight and settled on that island. There they continued to evolve, and the dodo bird eventually emerged as its own species: Raphus cucullatus. And tiny Mauritius, with an area of just 720 square miles, was the only place in the entire world where the dodo lived. And it lived a good life, among bats and tortoises and other birds, safe from the predators its ancestors left back on land millions of years before. But in 1598, when sailors from the Netherlands arrived, the dodo’s luck ran out.

On today's Tiny Matters we dive into the history of the bird that everyone loves to make fun of: the dodo. And we’re going to explore some of the work investigating why this bird went extinct and what it was like when it was alive. Then we’ll shift gears and talk about what some people worry will cause a massive extinction in the future — one that might include us: supervolcanoes. These are volcanoes capable of eruptions thousands of times larger than the volcanic eruptions we are most familiar with today. The recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland or the deadly Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980 pale in comparison. These are volcanoes bigger than anything we've experienced as human beings in our recorded history. So are we ready if one comes our way?

Transcript of this Episode

Leon Claessens: Certainly the dodo has got a bad reputation, right? It's been maligned in history. “It was a stupid animal, not smart, basically it was his own fault that it got eaten and went extinct.”

Sam Jones: That’s Leon Claessens, professor of vertebrate paleontology and evolution at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. And he wants you to know that dodos were not … dodos.

Around 40 million years ago, pigeons from Southeast Asia flew across the Indian Ocean, settling on remote islands near Madagascar. Then, around 8 million years ago, an underwater volcano formed another small island in the region. Some of the birds set flight and settled on that island, today named Mauritius. And there they continued to evolve, with the dodo eventually emerging as its own species: Raphus cucullatus. And tiny Mauritius, with an area of just 720 square miles — about the size of the state of Rhode Island — was the only place in the entire world where the dodo lived.

And it lived the good life, among bats and tortoises and other birds, safe from the predators its ancestors left back on land millions of years before. But in 1598, the dodo’s luck ran out.

Welcome to Tiny Matters, I’m Sam Jones and today I’m joined by science writer and video producer Kerri Jansen, who I am so psyched is guest hosting with me for this episode.

Kerri Jansen: Hello Sam, very happy to be here. I love dodos, and I’m so excited to be bringing the dodo some of the respect it deserves.

So, today on the show we’re going to talk about the bird that everyone loves to make fun of: the dodo. And we’re going to explore some of the work investigating why this bird went extinct and what it was like when it was alive. And I bet you’ll leave this episode finding this bird a whole lot more impressive than popular culture has led you to believe. Then we’ll shift gears and talk about what some people worry will cause a massive extinction in the future — one that might include us — and that’s supervolcanoes.

Alright, back to our friend the dodo. Remember, for millions of years the dodo didn’t have predators. Over time its ancestor’s wings and flight muscles shrank in size — why waste the energy flying if you didn’t need to? Right? But then, in 1598, sailors from the Netherlands arrived on Mauritius. They called the dodo a bunch of names, but Leon told us “dodo” likely came from one of the names seen in early Dutch writing: “dodaersen,” which loosely translates to “fat behind.” The sailors were intrigued by this flightless 3-foot-tall bird; it likely weighed around 40 pounds and it had a large skull that we now know contained a brain similar in proportion to its bird relatives. So, regular-sized brain for its body size, which was substantial.

Leon Claessens: They thought it was rather peculiar because there’s nothing really that looks like it. So the dodo was considered special from the moment that we have the first records of people laying eyes on them. And it was ecologically naive. So it wasn't afraid of humans or any other predators because it didn't know any predators. And so they were also reported as easy to catch. So somewhere between the 1680s, 1690s, it went extinct. So in less than a century after this bird’s discovery, it has disappeared as a living organism from this planet.

Sam with Leon: So you just mentioned they were easy to catch, which of course then my mind goes in certain directions, but what do we know about how these birds went extinct?

Leon Claessens: So one of my standard jokes, being Dutch myself, is that I have taken up this line of research so that I can kind of atone for what my forefathers did as they stuck dodos in the cooking pot. But that's too simplistic of an image. So dodos were certainly eaten. The very first report on them got this reputation of actually not being very tasty, even though there's many more reports of them actually being consumed. So I don't think they tasted that bad.

But of course, humans don't come alone. And one of these things that they did quite early on these islands that they used stop over locations for ship replenishments was that they actually put other animals, organisms as well as seedlings of things that they liked to eat. So even in those earliest reports, they're putting chickens on the island, one or two years later you have goats, you have pigs, you have macaques. These organisms, they of course make their way through that island very quickly. They have this capacity to do so, and then what they encounter is a bird that can't fly, therefore undoubtedly nested on the ground, and therefore is an easy meal and is probably this series of introduced species that very, very rapidly for the dodo meant that the population collapsed because of predation and probably predation of eggs and juveniles especially.

Kerri: My family is also Dutch, so, I guess I am also atoning for my ancestors through my participation in this podcast episode. Keep in mind, this was a time when people weren’t thinking about large-scale ecological disasters like the danger of invasive species taking over a new environment and forcing others out. In fact, most people weren’t even aware that animals could go extinct!

Sam: The concept of extinction is credited to French naturalist Georges Cuvier who, in 1796 — almost 200 years after the Dutch arrived on Mauritius — proposed that mastodon and mammoth skulls that had been discovered were not just massive elephant skulls, but a different species altogether that had gone extinct. Still, it took a couple more decades for people to get on board with the whole “extinction hypothesis,” and so there was plenty of chatter that the dodo never existed in the first place.

Leon Claessens: You can read about it in these voyages from the 16th, 17th century. But I can read about mermaids and sea dragons and other things in there too. So in the 1820s, there's a tiny little paper that's written that says, no, no, no. We got these dodo remains here in Oxford. Another beautiful monograph comes out in the late 1840s, and then by that time, Mauritius is a British colony, and so these British scientists are telling some of the people that are there, well, hey, can you maybe find some of these dodo remains still? For many decades, no success. And then in 1865, you strike dodo gold, so to say.

Sam: In 1865, dodo bones were found in a swamp on the island.

Leon Claessens: So when a rail line for one of the sugarcane plantations was being built, one of the engineers noticed that the laborers were getting bones out of a local marsh. The bones looked kind of peculiar. He took him to the headmaster of the school. That person went, hey, yes, that's a dodo and fantastic. That news went all over the world. And of course, all these British scientists clamber to be the one to get to describe that.

Sam: Ultimately British paleontologist Sir Richard Owen won out. Owen is probably best known for coining the term dinosaur a couple decades earlier.

Kerri: Owen wrote a book called Memoir of the Dodo. And you can actually read a scan of it online at Biodiversity Heritage Library. There are pictures!

But for the next 140 years the swamp where the bones were found remained untouched, until 2005, when its rediscovery yielded mainly extinct giant tortoise bones but also a significant number of dodo bones and miscellaneous other bones. But all of these bones of course were churned up together and Leon told us that most of the dodo bones were actually hind limbs and other sturdy bones, not fragile ones that you’d find in the skull or even vertebrae.

Only one complete dodo skeleton, with all the bones belonging to the same individual, has ever been found, and it wasn’t on any recent digs. It was discovered in 1904 by an amateur naturalist named Louis Etienne Thirioux, who also happened to be a big time hairdresser in the Mauritius capital, as his day job. That one complete dodo skeleton is essential for Leon’s work. He’s an anatomist, focused on functional morphology — so studying how an organism’s anatomy dictates its movement. A full skeleton from one bird allows him to model what its muscles may have looked like, and things like how quickly the dodo may have been able to run.

Leon Claessens: If I go to a graveyard and we take person A’s lower leg and person B’s upper leg, and we kinda average that together into something that looks like a human, and it will look quite good, but it's not quite the same because maybe really long lower legs belong with really short upper legs or the other way round. So having that one unique specimen here that was found by that hairdresser more than a century ago is a fantastic thing.

Sam: As we chat, Leon actually has a 3D printed version of that complete dodo skeleton towering behind him.

Leon Claessens: So one of the things that we noticed is that the relative proportions of the limbs when you compare that with pigeons is not all that different. They're not doing something fundamentally different by lengthening or shortening an upper leg bone or lower leg, the middle foot bones or anything like that, the bones are fairly sturdy.

A dodo would be quite capable of running at a decent pace. At the same time, it's not a roadrunner, it's not a cursorial bird that's built for speed. In fact, I would argue that it's probably built for navigating this really complex terrain with a lot of undergrowth, with big boulders and so forth, and that it had the hind limbs that allowed it to do that really well with proper offsetting of muscles to have optimal leverage.

Sam: In addition to ongoing functional morphology work, scientists have been able to study the proteins and DNA in dodo bones, allowing them to hypothesize that they likely munched on nuts, seeds, fruits, and roots and that they were in fact, as Leon put it, “robust upscaled pigeons.”

In 2022, researchers fully sequenced the dodo’s genome for the first time and found that it is remarkably similar to the Nicobar pigeon, a brightly colored pigeon with purple, orange, and grayish blue feathers as opposed to the grayscale rock pigeon most of us are used to seeing. The Nicobar pigeon still lives on islands through the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. But although genetically there’s a ton of overlap, morphologically there are stark differences.

Leon Claessens: When you look at the skull in the beginning, people thought it must be related to birds of prey. They actually thought a dodo was more like a vulture with this massive hooked beak that it had. That of course is not the case. But then the question, of course, how does it feed on some of these seeds? Well, those are great questions that we're grappling with in some way. Of course, now that we have some of these dodo skulls digitized, you can actually do finite element analysis and other types of reconstructions to get an idea of forces and things that are possible and maybe are not possible.

But you basically just have a large ground dwelling seed-eating organism that is large in rotund, so it can store a lot of food, and that also means that it makes it very, very sturdy and very resilient to climatic fluctuations.

Sam: When Leon says resilient, he means it. Mauritius isn’t an easy environment to survive in. During the summer months it’s known for its cyclones that bring heavy rain and winds that can damage the vegetation the dodos ate. Actually, looking at cross sections of dodo bones, you can see tiny lines called growth arrest lines that look somewhat like rings on a tree. They’re lines of increased bone density caused by bone growth stopping. The dodo bones showed repeated lines of arrested growth, and researchers believe they’re due to harsh summer months when the birds would starve. But once winter came around, they’d once again be able to haul in the nutrition they needed and their bones would continue to grow.

Kerri: Dealing with annual cyclones that knock out your food sources is already pretty rough, and on top of that there’s now compelling evidence that around 4,200 years ago there was a mega drought on Mauritius that lasted for about 60 years, leading to mass mortalities on the island. But, in the end, the dodo was still standing. So Dodo’s weren’t unfit for survival at all. In fact, they were great at it. They were doing fine. They just weren’t ready for us humans. And where have we heard that before?

Sam with Leon: In the things that you've learned about the dodo, do you see anything like the dodo story replaying in real time with other species today?

Leon Claessens: To some extent, yes. Certainly as a scientist, I'm really worried about all the environmental ecological disruptions, loss of habitat, over consumption, overfishing, over hunting. I think the dodo especially is, and this is along the lines of research that we're very actively engaged with now, that the dodo is a fantastic model system. It's confined in a very small island. When you put that in the context of modern biodiversity crises, and we think about forest and rainforest being fragmented more and more, ultimately becoming little islands, then I think, well, it'd be good to know more about the dodo and the case history of the island of Mauritius so that we can see what does or doesn't apply to some of these modern biodiversity crises, and if you can get some predictive value from that also.

Sam: So have you changed your mind about the dodo yet? At the very least, we hope what you learned will inspire you to remove “dodo” from your insult vocabulary. Because truly, I’d be proud to be as resilient as the dodo.

Kerri: And now we know that “dodo” just means you have a fluffy bottom, and who doesn’t love that?

Sam: Great point.

We’re going to really take a hard turn and talk not about a past extinction but the potential of a future one. And we’re going to do that with Bryan Walsh, an editorial director at Vox.com, overseeing a section called Future Perfect. Before that he was a foreign correspondent and climate change correspondent for Time Magazine.

Kerri: Bryan has covered climate change, emerging infectious diseases like the original SARS, risk of nuclear war, concerns about an artificial intelligence takeover… and as he was doing all of this, he discovered that there was a growing field of work around the study of existential risks — things that could possibly end human civilization or alter it dramatically. And that inspired him to write the book End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World, which came out in 2019.

Bryan Walsh: And it was a really fascinating reporting experience to go through both big natural risks like your asteroids, your supervolcanoes, as well as your new technological risks, things human beings could do to themselves, whether that was one that already existed like nuclear weapons or whether it was new ones on the horizon like AI or even new forms of biotechnology that could create germs way worse than anything we could get out of nature.

Kerri: There’s obviously a lot that we could have discussed with Bryan, but today the focus is supervolcanoes.

Bryan Walsh: The very term, supervolcano, it's not really a scientific term as I discovered. It came out of, I think a documentary actually, and a sort of amateur scientist who put the name out there and it got picked up, and actual volcanologists I don't think really like the term supervolcano because it sounds like something that should be… it sounds like the Sharknado of science almost.

Sam with Bryan: I was just going to say, it feels very Sharknado when you say it, yeah.

Bryan Walsh: Exactly. So there's a real sense that it's hard to take it seriously. It seems so outlandish, and it's really often the subject of your kind of more questionably scientifically accurate documentaries and things like that.

Kerri: We’re gonna use the colloquial term “supervolcano” throughout the episode, but you should know that some volcanologists prefer to just use the term “supereruption”, which is defined as a magnitude of greater than 8 on the volcanic explosivity index, which is a real thing, and that means more than 1,000 cubic kilometers or 240 cubic miles of volcanic rock, including ash, is spewed into the air.

Bryan Walsh: And that's thousands and thousands of times larger than the volcanic eruptions that we know about. This is not Mount Saint Helens back in 1980. It's not like Pinatubo in the Philippines in the 1990s. It's not the kind of thing you see in Iceland for instance. These are volcanoes bigger than anything we've experienced as human beings in our recorded history.

Kerri: Supervolcanoes are kind of hard to wrap your brain around, but we’re going to try, through the lens of Mount Toba, which was located in what’s now the Indonesian island Sumatra. Seventy-four thousand years ago, Mount Toba exploded.

Bryan Walsh: And to give you a sense of when we say explosion, when we say a super volcano explosion, the estimation is that the eruption ejected something like 2,800 cubic kilometers of volcanic material, of ash, of rock, of silicate. And just to put that in perspective, that would be enough to cover the entire state of Texas in nearly 30 feet of ash.

Sam: So of course the area in close proximity to a supereruption would almost immediately be obliterated, but these eruptions affect the rest of the world as well, because they shoot out thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide. That sulfur dioxide is converted to sulfuric acid, which then condenses to form sulfate aerosols that float around in our stratosphere and do a number of things. They can reflect sunlight, leading to cooler temperatures and altered weather patterns. They can take part in chemical reactions that deplete the ozone, and can cause serious respiratory damage for organisms breathing them in.

Kerri: There are scientists who believe that the Mount Toba eruption may have been about as close as human beings have ever gotten to actual extinction — and that a global volcanic winter may have nearly wiped out humanity and led to such reduced populations that we experienced a genetic bottleneck and our species only really genetically differentiated over the last 74,000 years. But more recently, that argument has been increasingly debated based on new climate models that question how dramatic the global cooling and decreased rainfall may have been, arguing that some parts of the world could have seen little change.

In March of this year, a study of an archaeological site in northwest Ethiopia suggested that early humans there were able to adapt to arid conditions brought on by the volcanic eruption, altering their diets and possibly even changing how they hunted. And that may have changed how the population traveled and spread as well. Scientists are still working to understand all of the impacts.

Sam with Bryan: Much, much, much more recently, in 1815, there was another big eruption. Not as big as Mount Toba, but still very significant. And that was Mount Tambora in Indonesia, and that led to the year without a summer. And that's actually something, before I read your book, that I had heard of, I think, because that phrase is so, it really sticks with you. There's something very eerie about the concept of a year without a summer.

Bryan Walsh: Absolutely. So 1815 is Mount Tambora, also in Indonesia. There's sort of a pattern you might be seeing here. A lot of volcanoes are located in and around Indonesia. It's part of that Pacific ring of fire. So the eruption there was the most powerful we have in recorded history. The eruption ejected about 150 cubic kilometers of material. The entire top of the mountain collapsed into this large hole we call a caldera. And the immediate eruption killed tens of thousands of people in and around the area in Indonesia. But thousands more died from the effect of ash falling, the effect of disease caused by the simple destruction of crops and infrastructure.

Kerri: Although Tambora was not considered a supervolcano, it came in at a 7 on the volcanic explosivity index. Remember, Toba was likely an 8. So temperatures dropped and the sky changed, particularly in North America and Asia.

Bryan Walsh: There was a scientist in Britain who just made it a daily habit of his to record what does the weather look like? What does the sky look like outside? In 1816, the year following the eruption, he didn't see a single sunny day in Britain and like Britain, not the most sunny country to begin with, but that's still a lot of days without sunlight. And what you saw was just widespread crop failures all through Europe, North America, you had food shortages, economic disruption. This would go in Asia as well. You had summers that had frosts that year, you had snow in July, you had droughts that made those farming crises worse.

All that humanity could do was try to endure it until over the next couple of years, eventually the cloud that is sort of blocking the sunlight begins to dissipate and temperatures get back to normal. But that gave us just a small taste of what this experience would've been like if it were on a supervolcano scale, which this wasn't to be sure.

Kerri: Right now, despite some clickbait headlines you may have seen, there are not any super volcanoes that we know of. But could there be one in our future?

Bryan Walsh: We know that they could happen in the future, but it's incredibly hard to know, will they happen? When will they happen? What are the signs and even how to prepare for them? Volcanoes and supervolcanoes are very different than, say, asteroids, where in that case we have a tracking system where we know where asteroids are coming from.

We've actually gotten quite good at mapping and charting and predicting all the ones that we may face over the next century, so we can feel pretty clear that that's not going to be something that's going to happen to us in anything like the conceivable future. Geology, volcanology — much more unknown. We know much less about the inner workings of the earth beneath our feet than we do about the movement of the heavens above us. And that does make us vulnerable. Also, we haven't put anywhere near the kind of money or attention into preparing for it as we have for some other risks.

Sam with Bryan: Is there anything other than really becoming a lot better at predicting what is an indicator of a supervolcano or a massive volcanic event?

Bryan Walsh: I mean, Yellowstone is a good example of what can be done really at this point. So Yellowstone is probably one of the most monitored volcanic systems out there. USGS has an actual team that is doing this all the time, and what you are looking for is seismic activity. That would be the thing that would occur before an eruption. Whether you're talking about a supervolcano or a smaller volcano, you're looking for a sort of increase in frequency strength of the kind of earthquakes that are always happening to a degree in a place like that, you're looking for some indication of like, is there an increase in volcanic gasses? Anything like that? Could you use satellites to look for ground uplift, any change in the Earth surface that may indicate some kind of magma movement underneath the volcano? And a lot of this also goes into looking at historical data.

Kerri: So the more we understand about past super volcanic eruptions, the better we’ll be able to assess our risk today. And if we humans want to survive a future supereruption, Bryan says right now we should be thinking about what we’d need. Where would we live? What would we eat? One option might be mushrooms and other fungi. Unlike plants, they don’t rely on sunlight to grow. They feed on organic matter. In fact, following the massive extinction 66 million years ago that killed off non-avian dinosaurs, fungi thrived even though more than half of plant species died off.

Bryan Walsh: There's an old saying that human civilization only exists as long as geology consents, and that can be changed any time. And so this is one where it's both incredibly unlikely, and yet it's the one we're almost powerless to stop at the end of the day. We should definitely be doing more about more ordinary, more common volcanoes in terms of risk awareness, in terms of predicting such that we can get people out of the way in the immediate aftermath.

But the last thing about this, I think, is that it also did make me realize how insignificant I am as an individual against both the sweep of billions and billions of years, and also the sheer force of this planet and how random so many things are really, you know?

Sam: So yeah it would be hard to fully, fully prep for a supereruption, at least with what we know right now, but why not start by being more prepared for smaller but still devastating eruptions which, like Bryan mentioned, we’re actually not very prepared for. And then we can consider a future where we’re all successful at cultivating fungi.

Kerri: I like mushrooms so that’s fine with me.

Sam: Same.

All right, Kerri, are you ready? First tiny show and tell.

Kerri: I'm very ready.

Sam: Do you want to go first or do you want me to go first?

Kerri: You go first.

Sam: I can do that. In the episode, when Leon told us about how in 1865, there was a rail line for one of the sugar cane plantations that was being built, and then one of the engineers noticed that laborers were getting a bunch of bones out of the marsh, it reminded me of two things.

The first was that we have a Tiny Show and Tell Us episode, and it came out just a couple of months ago in July where we talked about how the late 1700s through the early 1900s was this time of industrialized grave robbing. There will be battlefields in Europe that should have no fewer than 10,000 skeletons buried, and archeologists would go in to excavate and maybe find a few. The question was where did they go? It appears to have led back to the beet sugar industry, which was booming-

Kerri: What?

Sam: Yes, in the 19th century. I'm going to leave a link to the episode description if you're intrigued to check it out.

Kerri: Oh, my goodness. No, I am so intrigued. When you say industrial grave robbing, that suggests to me quite a large scale, which is both worrying and fascinating.

Sam: Yep, it is. That comes through in the episode as well.

Kerri: Okay, well I can't wait.

Sam: The second thing that I thought of was a finding from August of this year of the smallest humerus, upper arm bone, ever found from an adult hominin. Researchers think it belonged to the tiny Homo floresiensis. I always say that wrong. I always want to say florensis, but I think it's floresiensis species, which are sometimes nicknamed hobbits.

Bones and teeth from the species were first discovered 20 years ago inside a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. They were somewhere between 100,000 and 60,000 years old, and the researchers predicted that the being they belonged to would've been somewhere around three and a half feet tall. Of course you might think, how could you tell if it was a child or if it was an adult? The main way to assess that is if the bones had stopped growing, and in this case, they had, and then they also ruled out growth disorders as well.

Another batch of those fossils turned up in 2016 and they dated back to around 700,000 years ago. Now you have this recent discovery, which is unique because this humerus is the smallest of any adult hominin ever found, and they're predicting that the homo floresiensis individual would've been less than three feet, four inches tall as an adult, which is very small.

Kerri: Wow. How long does that make the humerus then? Because I'm looking at my upper arm right now, I'm guessing it's about a foot long.

Sam: The thing was that they actually found a fragment of it, a significant portion of it. In the image... We always link to everything we discuss in the tiny show and tell us in the episode description, but it's fitting in a researcher's hand.

Kerri: I see. Wow, okay. Yeah, that's fascinating.

Sam: You could go on a deep dive about this early human species, and there's a lot of debate about if actually this was a species that evolved from homo erectus that showed up on this island and then for whatever reason, adapted pretty quickly to be much, much smaller.

Kerri: Yeah, it's always interesting when we think we have something figured out and then we find something new and it's like oh wait. But I guess that's science, isn't it? That's science.

Sam: All right. Kerri, are you ready?

Kerri: Yes. Is it my turn?

Sam: It's your turn.

Kerri: Okay. All right, Sam, as you know, I make a video series called Headline Science. These are short videos about interesting chemistry research. You might see them in your YouTube shorts feed or on social media, they're on the ACS website as well. I want to share a recent video that we made that I think is pretty cool. It's about space ice, ice in space. I now realize that makes cool a pun, and I'm sorry.

Anyways, in this video we can see a lab where scientists replicate the kinds of ice particles that are found in deep space, which is wild to me. They're interested in that because scientists think space ice is where prebiotic molecules formed. These are the basic chemicals required for life, so they actually make this kind of ice, and then they bombard it with high energy electrons and photons to see what happens.

That's actually what happens in space. These cosmic rays are zooming around, plowing into ice particles. In the video, we actually get a peek inside their lab and you can see the scientists and some of the equipment they use to do this. My colleague, Vangie Koontz, worked with them to get this footage. I'll just show you a little piece of it here.

Sam: Yeah, it's really cool.

Kerri: We love highlighting cool chemistry research. We want it to be as accessible as possible, but still be able to showcase real science in a satisfying way. We've got a bunch of other videos out on the website too and on YouTube. A whole variety of things. There's shape-shifting crystals, little slime shooting creatures, micromachines, lots of good stuff.

Sam: Headline Science has a bunch of longer, and by longer I mean three-minute videos, as well as these shorts. We'll link to both so you can just check out what's out there.

Kerri: By the way, Tiny Matters listeners, we love it when researchers send us their videos so if any of you are doing science that looks really cool or weird, please tell us about it. I would love that. Our email is acs_video@acs.org.

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of Tiny Matters, a production of the American Chemical Society. This week’s script was written by Sam, who is also our executive producer, and was edited by me, Kerri Jansen, and by Michael David. It was fact-checked by Michelle Boucher. The Tiny Matters theme and episode sound design is by Michael Simonelli and the Charts & Leisure team.

Sam: Thanks so much to Leon Claessens and Bryan Walsh for joining us. A reminder that we have a newsletter. Sign up for updates on new Tiny Matters episodes, videos from interviews, science stories we can’t stop thinking about, and other content we think you’ll really like. I’ve put a link in this episode’s description. See ya next time!

References:

Extinction: Rethinking the dodo's demise, and could a supervolcano threaten humanity's future?

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