#1 Paleontologist: Egypt's Lost Creatures & DEBUNKING "Dinosaurs Didn't Exist" | Ken Lacovara • 327
Julian Dorey · 8 Aug 2025 · 3h 4m
Guest: Ken Lacovara · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
Paleontologist Ken Lacovara discusses building the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum in Mantua, New Jersey, a site sitting atop a marl quarry that preserves the final moments before the asteroid impact that ended the dinosaurs. He walks through the minute-by-minute physics of that impact, from the initial earthquake to the heat pulse, tsunami, and the years-long darkness that followed, and explains how southern New Jersey turns out to be historically central to dinosaur science, home to the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton ever found. He recounts his own path into science, from a working-class upbringing and a career as a professional drummer to a doctorate in geology, and describes fieldwork in Egypt searching for dinosaur species destroyed in WWII bombing, and later in Patagonia, where he lived in a tent for over a year and eventually excavated and named Dreadnoughtus, one of the largest land animals ever discovered. Along the way he explains how paleontologists date fossils, define species, and argue with each other as a normal part of science, and pushes back on claims that dinosaurs weren't real. The conversation moves into his advisory role with the de-extinction company Colossal, his skepticism that dinosaur DNA could ever be recovered, and a broader discussion of mass extinction, current biodiversity loss, and why he says climate science has become unnecessarily politicized while insisting he still chooses hope.
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Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Discovering the Edelman Fossil Park site
- Building the museum and dig program
- How the asteroid impact unfolded
- Dinosaur classification and species definitions
- Falsifiability and how science self-corrects
- Mass extinctions through Earth history
- Modern biodiversity collapse
- Searching for the lost dinosaurs of Egypt
- Living in a tent in Patagonia
- Childhood, drumming career, and path to paleontology
- Working with Colossal on de-extinction
- Origins of life and meaning
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“By the end of it, we have 145 bones of this giant creature. This thing is 10 times heavier than a Boeing 737.”
“Since 1970, 72% of wildlife has disappeared on the planet.”
“Unlikely things are likely to happen when happening happens a lot.”
“I don't have empirical hope. What I do have is the choice of hope. And I choose every day to wake up and be a hopeful person.”