S2E01 - Holotype (Paleontology)

#Holotype #BrexwerxGames #CommonDescentPodcast #Dinosaurs #Paleontology #BoardGames #Science

Summary

Break out your pick and hand brush because in this episode we discuss "Holotype" by Brexwerx Games, and are joined by the wonderful Will and David from the Common Descent podcast. This isn't just another game about dinosaurs; it's a game about the people who dig them up, clean them off, hit the library and museum to cross-check them, and finally publish the coveted holotype to ensconce a new dinosaur (or marine reptile or pterosaur) in the annals of science. This was a great game chock full of scientific meat (and bones?), so come with us into the world of paleontology with Holotype.

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 01:26 - Borealopelta
• 03:59 - Dinosaur vomit, poo, and pee
• 07:42 - Game introduction & mechanics
• 14:47 - What is a holotype?
• 19:15 - Gameplay & strategic depth
• 22:27 - Scientific accuracy
• 32:06 - Public & private goals
• 36:07 - Dinosaur (& other) groupings
• 44:06 - Trace fossils
• 48:09 - Nitpick corner
• 53:33 - Final grades

Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net 

Links

• Holotype (Brexwerx Games): https://www.brexwerxgames.com/products/holotype-mesozoic-north-america
• Common Descent Podcast: https://commondescentpodcast.com/
• Dinosaur bromolites study (Nature): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03889-y
• Borealopelta (well-preserved ankylosaur) (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borealopelta

This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Full Transcript

(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )

Jason  0:00  
Brian, hello and

welcome to the Gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Brian  0:11  
Today, we're going to discuss Holotype by Brexwerx Games.

Hey, this is Brian

Jason  0:21  
This is Jason,

Will  0:22  
this is Will.

David  0:23  
This is David

Brian  0:24  
Will, and David, David and will.

David  0:26  
That's us. We're new. 

Brian  0:28  
Where are you guys from?

David  0:29  
We are the hosts of Common Descent, a podcast about paleontology, Earth history, evolution. We are also fellow Dragon Con science track folks, yeah, and we do a lot of science communication and stuff. We are both paleontologists. 

Brian  0:44  
So I asked for the benefit of the listeners, I know who you guys are very well, because I've been a listener of Common Descent, not since the beginning, but for a very long time. Very, very excited to have you here. In fact, when I first saw the game holotype that we're going to be talking about today, it immediately sparked in my mind "I wonder if I can get Will and David to come and guest on our podcast, if I get this game", and it happened, and it's awesome, the stars

Jason  1:10  
The Starshave aligned.

Will  1:11  
Yes.

David  1:12  
we actually played at the at the museum, yeah, which was, which was very fun, 

Will  1:16  
very fitting.

Brian  1:16  
No dinosaurs and gray, of course. 

David  1:18  
No. Well, we have some birds. We've got about a dozen different types of birds.

Brian  1:24  
But anyway, why don't we do our little science banter? At first, is there some interesting bit of science to learn about, or would like to talk about?

Will  1:31  
 Absolutely, the one that's fresh on my mind, which is a study on the specimen of borealopelta, which is a ridiculously well preserved ankylosaur, or nothosaur, specifically armored dinosaur. It's 3d preserved stomach content, skin pigment, one of the, if not the best preserved dinosaur we've ever found. This study was looking at the fact that the keratin, the horny material on the armor, is also preserved, and we've never gotten that before. So they were looking at what is the actual status and state of this keratin on this armored dinosaur. They took the measurements of like the thickness and the coverage and how it interacts with all of the armor plates. And what they were able to do that had never been able to be done before, is actually say, How does this modify the defensive aspects of this armor? Because we knew they had boney armor, and we knew it probably had a keratin covering, but now we actually have the entire armor, both parts, and so we can actually see what forces it can take. And I don't remember the exact numbers, but the rough equivalents that they gave for the force that this armor combination should be able to take is about that of a high speed car crash, which is ridiculous, and as they noted, way more than what would be required to survive like a predator bite for that time, even the big theropod dinosaurs. So most likely this was when borealopeltas fought each other so that they could not, they could survive the damage that was being dealt by another borealopelta.

Jason  3:09  
holy cow evolution does not make things that big just for kicks and giggles, you don't get things that overkill without there being a very good reason.

Will  3:17  
Absolutely. 

David  3:18  
I'll add a smaller science fact onto that, that the bony armor that Ankyl, that armored dinosaurs have is bones that grow in the skin, which are called osteoderms, which are also present in a bunch of other dinosaurs, in a bunch of modern lizards, in alligators and crocodiles, as well as armadillos and ground sloths. Yeah, have osteoderms

Brian  3:40  
ground sloths?

David  3:41  
Not they, most of those could not survive a car crash. Armadillos, very famously, do not survive car crashes. But yeah, ground sloths, they didn't have a full like coat of it, like an armadillo, but they did have like patches of osteoderms,

Will  3:54  
and they look like pebbles. They look like rocks. It's very irregular in shape.

Jason  3:59  
Anyway, I'm glad you guys didn't steal my science fact. I looked one up. It was this study that came out only a week or two ago, studying not the dinosaurs themselves, but what they ate in Poland and so finding all these things. So looking at Dinosaur poop, dinosaur vomit and dinosaur intestine contents.

Brian  4:16  
I'm sorry, what?

Will  4:17  
 Yeah, 

David  4:18  
it's a very cool study.

Will  4:19  
It's awesome.

Brian  4:20  
 Is that a regurgite? So regurgitalites?

Jason  4:23  
I have all the words here. So dinosaur poop is coprolite. Vomit is regurgitalites. Fossilized contents of digestive tracts are colalties. And together, these are classed as bromolites. So all these wonderful names for basically post process dinosaur food

Brian  4:42  
Yes, for mid process, mid process.

Jason  4:46  
But basically, there's apparently a very good climatic record around when the dinosaurs came to power, when they really ascended and became the dominant like land vertebrate. They looked at these over time, and they were able to do a lot of really high resolution scanning and such. And find out, here's beetles and fish and fish scales and all sorts of things. And look at how dinosaur diets changed over time as they came to dominate the landscape. And I believe the take home is that dinosaurs diversified their diet and sort of spread out and just started filling out the niches and essentially just pushing everything else out over time. 

David  5:22  
Yeah, the one of the main takeaways from that paper was actually that it was this complex process that happened over some 30 million years. So there was probably a very a big combination of dinosaurs being better adapted for certain things, but also major environmental changes that left ecosystem spaces open. So it was this, it would have been this combination of them out competing other animals and getting lucky, yeah, and get filling in spaces that had been recently emptied.

Will  5:54  
And it also happened in this, like, interesting step pattern, yes, you know, wasn't a continuous just blob like it was very these things, you know, these shifts happen, and then these shifts happen, and they slowly, much more like a monopoly forming. Slowly they take on different competitors. 

Brian  6:16  
That's like a game of Risk, yes, putting it back in Game form, yes. Slowly, something sort of like starts to move out, and they're like, well, we'll just take that Yep, we'll take that niche. Well, we'll take this other niche. Yes,

David  6:27  
yes. Since you two were so delighted by the different -lites that refer to various dinosaur excrements and internal stuff, I will add one more as a bonus fun fact. there is, I think there's at least two examples of this, but I think the original one was in like Colorado, from a fossil deposit with a lot of dinosaur footprints on it that there were these unusual traces in the sediment that research found can be replicated by pouring liquid from a few feet up in the air onto sand, and they describe them as "urolites" or dinosaur pee traces. 

Brian  7:09  
That's absolutely fantastic. Oh man. 

Jason  7:14  
So segue into the game. Of all of those, we do actually have coprolites in the game. You can collect dinosaur poop, not the other ones, those, those will have to wait for an expansion. 

Will  7:23  
Yes, that would be, Oh man, that would be such a great expansion, yeah,

David  7:30  
The what comes out of dinosaurs expansion? You get eggs and you can get regurgitatlites, gastroliths, yes, which are stomach stones, 

Brian  7:39  
yeah, gastroliths are in there already. Okay, I think this is our perfect segue into the game. We should talk about the game, probably, right. Okay, so let's talk about holotype. Holotype is published by Brexwerx games and was designed by Brett Harrison and Lex Terenchin, who are the the namesakes of Brexwerx, Brett and Lex, nice, right? So they not only created the game, but they also formed the company to sell holotype, to produce holotype. They do have a few other games. It's mostly expansions of holotype. So for instance, the game that we played is actually Mesozoic North America. But they also have Mesozoic Europe. They have a mini expansion, which has the pterosaurs which we played. And they have a new expansion, which actually I figured that Will would be excited about because they added a new creature type.

Jason  8:24  
Crurotarsi

Brian  8:25  
yes. So that is stem crocodiles and Crocodylomorphs. Yes, yeah.

David  8:33  
Croc side of the archosaur family tree.

Will  8:36  
Sarcosuchians and stuff like that, including suchians. Yeah, they include a bunch of, what were the big land predators before dinosaurs stepped in in that role. So a bunch of big, not really very Crocky, but like tall crocs, very tall heads and tall bodies. Yeah.

David  8:55  
Oh, that's awesome. I demand a lepidosaurs update.

Brian  9:00  
Well, the funny thing is, is that they have this expansion to add them to North America because they're already in the Mesozoic Europe as a base part of the game. So they had to release, oh, there's this creature type from North America as well. They do have one other game. It is called eight legged peacocks. It is about jumping spiders. It is a card game matching their jumping spider to their mating dance. I haven't played it, but that's pretty much it. That's their entire library of games.

David  9:26  
That sounds great. 

Will  9:27  
Cute! Oh, that's adorable. That's such a good name.

Brian  9:30  
Uh, Brett is the dinosaur nerd. He's been very clear about that. In fact, we I watched an interview that he did where he brought on a dinosaur book, that is, I think, he said his grandfather gave him when he was six from the library that was never returned. He just kept it.

David  9:43  
They had to make and sell this game so that they could pay for the return for

Will  9:47  
those those library fees. 

Brian  9:49  
He actually is a computer scientist, but went to UC Berkeley and took a ton of paleontology electives. So just like always, was a lifelong lover of paleontology, and when he met Lex in Arizona because they basically made friends playing board games, and evidently the name holotype, Brett said, Oh no, we're going to make this game holotype. He had the name before he had the mechanics of the game cool. Both in the interview as well as in the Kickstarter in the description, accuracy, scientific accuracy, was a really important part of this game, but they also wanted it to be balanced and fun to play, and they used a really interesting strategy to do that. In addition to human play testing, they also used board game simulator and a Python program to play the game 10,000 times a minute, to balance the game exactly how they wanted it to be, so that there would always, there was never going to be an imbalance with certain play strategies, which is, 

Will  10:39  
that's really cool.

Jason  10:41  
I contacted Brett, and we're going to be interviewing him for a bonus episode about that play testing process and so that so listeners that will go up as a bonus episode, hopefully probably about two weeks after this episode drops.

Brian  10:53  
This was during COVID, so they were doing all this online testing. What is the game actually itself, right? So there's a little bit of the inspiration and the balancing and all that. So it is a worker placement game. This is one of those classic Euro style board games where you have meeples, you know, little wooden figures that will take your places. You place them on the board at a certain location. Place a worker do, an action, place a worker, do an action, place a worker do an action, but this game, it has dinosaurs in it, but you're not playing as the dinosaurs. You're actually playing as the paleontologists. So you actually have three types of worker. You have your paleontologist, your grad student and your field researcher, or as Jason and I like to call them the PI, the principal investigator, the grad student and the undergraduate. Those three workers on that academic rank like affects their abilities. So the field researcher can't do everything that the paleontologist can do, the graduate student can do almost everything that the paleontologist can do. The paleontologist can still displace them from a position. This is actually a worker displacement game. You could kick out somebody of a lower academic rank than you from wherever they happen to be sitting. Yes, yeah. 

Jason  11:58  
This is very different from a lot of the other ones I have played where you have turns, like we played cytosis, we played wingspan, where you have a certain number of moves per turn, you do all your moves, and then everyone takes their pieces back. This one, there's no turns. You're continually pushing and you're continually kicking each other off of spaces by essentially pulling rank, because the different pieces can only kick off someone of the same rank or lower. So your poor little field assistant undergraduate can only kick off another undergraduate. They can't kick off a the paleontologist professor or a graduate student.

Brian  12:32  
Which you know, it sounds really mean, and when you describe it, it sounds like, oh, that's, that's so that's so mean. But actually, the game kind of requires it to happen. You're actually it's helpful to get booted off from where you are, because now you get to do something different. So I don't know it should feel like you're being mean, but actually, when you're playing the game, it's you're hoping that somebody kicks you off of your spot. Let's see. So in terms of where can you go? So the game has a central mat, and that has all the different locations you can go. You can do your field expedition, your field expeditions are to all of these actual geologic formations in North America that are associated with deposits of different ages. So Triassic, Jurassic Cretaceous, the three different ages in the Mesozoic. It's a deck of cards. You flip it over, and it'll tell you, Oh, this is a Cretaceous site. You can roll this many dice to generate your fossils, and you'll roll them to see how many of the little cubes you get of the same color. And those come back to your mat. They take up physical space. You only have so many spaces you can store them. You have the museum where you can go and you can trade your fossils. It's like, well, I've got these Triassic fossils, but I actually really need some Cretaceous. So there's like, an exchange rate with the Triassic being more valuable. There's the University Library where you collect research cubes. There's the specimen lab where you'll get you'll draw for this deck of I guess I can't call them dinosaur cards, because you also have marine reptiles. There's four different groups in the base game, plus pterosaurs. There's sauropods, theropods, marine reptiles, and then another one called genosaurs, which I want to come back to as well, because I had never heard that term until I played holotype. I guess it was originally ornithopods, and that's where that scientific accuracy, like said that. Well, some of these actually don't count. Sorry, I'm getting in the weeds a little bit.

David  14:13  
For a little spoiler. I actually having reflected on it. I really like that they went with genosaurs. Yeah, I appreciate that choice. We'll come back to why, but that's a little, a little teaser for that discussion. 

Brian  14:25  
All right, cool. And then, of course, in the middle of the board, there is the most important place, the where you publish. There's one spot that you can publish at, and you can publish one of your holotype so you take your dinosaur cards, it's going to have a certain amount of research cube cost, and associated fossil cube costs you pay that you get to publish the holotype. Guys, what is a holotype?

David  14:47  
A holotype is the term that's used for the reference specimen for a species. So this happened that we use these in paleontology. We use these in modern biology when a scientist identifies a new species of whatever dinosaur, plant, whatever it is, the naming of that new species must be associated with a detailed description of what characterizes the species, what features make it different from any other similar species, and you have to designate at least one example that shows those features. Yeah, this fossil, this skeleton of this dinosaur, is the specimen that goes along with the original description. So in the future, if somebody wants to compare to this species, this is the reference specimen

Will  15:37  
You have established that if you need to see what I mean by all these features. This specimen has all of those features. 

David  15:45  
Yes, a lot of dinosaurs are only holotypes. Yes, there's only one specimen that is known. It is the holotype. Other species. There are tons of fossils, and one of them is the holotype.

Will  15:57  
And very often, a lot of those are very, still very, a very partial specimen, like a jaw. Yeah, it's enough to know that no one else has a jaw like this that we've ever found before, but this is what we have. But it's enough to say it's a new species

David  16:11  
Well and like Carnotaurus, the very famous predatory dinosaur with the Bulldog face and the horns above its eyes, is only known from a holotype skeleton. Yeah, there's one skeleton. Never found any more of them

Brian  16:23  
Really?

David  16:24  
it's a very well preserved skeleton, yes, but it's just the one

Jason  16:27  
And I learned while we were there at the museum, so your friend, who is the curator there, back in the specimen lab, was that Sean?

David  16:36  
Sean is the lab manager and head preparer, yep. 

Jason  16:39  
So he was going, he was walking me around the mastodon skull that he is slowly reassembling. That is the holotype for, apparently, a mastodon that is a new species discovered there in Gray. And he was explaining, because it's the holotype, he there can't be any guesswork, like he has to be able to match up the bones precisely. This little postage stamp piece goes exactly next to this little postage stamp piece. And if there's any little part that got wore away where it's like, okay, maybe it's off by like, half a millimeter or a millimeter, he can't just stick it on there and say, this is probably where it went, because it has to be absolutely precise. And so just because it has to be that reference that other people have to come and say, we know this for 100% certain was like this. There's no guesswork involved.

David  17:22  
Yes, yeah. And when you're working with a holotype, it might be the only one you ever get. Yeah, they may never get another Mastodon skull at Gray

Will  17:30  
Like, there are examples where you'll get later specimens that may be better than your holotype. And then you can kind of upgrade. 

David  17:36  
And there's all sorts. There are paratypes and lectotypes and neotypes for all, like, the different ways that you can adjust your collection. 

Will  17:46  
So like, that sometimes happens, but yeah, there's tons of examples where it's like, yeah, we have three. Two of them are enough that we could identify them. And then there's the holotype, and that's all we have

David  17:57  
at the Gray fossil site, for example, the new species of red panda that was discovered there. The holotype is a single tooth. Yes, there are now three nearly complete skeletons, but the original description was a single tooth.

Brian  18:10  
There's a couple things I want to talk about there. First of all is the fact that the Gray fossil site is in Tennessee, and we're talking about red pandas. So that's worth pausing and talking about. Is that there were red pandas in Tennessee, 5 million years ago, 6 million years ago. It's about 5 million years ago, not to mention alligators. So that was really cool. Go to Gray if you have the opportunity. 

Will  18:31  
Yeah, red pandas, gators, rhinos, rhinos, camels, horses, super weird time. 

Brian  18:36  
Snakes, songbirds, tons of snakes, everything. 

Will  18:40  
Well, it's a fun thing, because there's a whole bunch of things there, like the turtles and a lot of the birds, that if you only saw those, when you time traveled back to the fossil site, you wouldn't have known you time traveled except that it was too warm, and then a bunch of the other things that if you only saw those, you would have be very hard to convince someone we did not take them to like Africa or something. They're like

David  19:03  
 those rhinos and elephants and stuff.

Will  19:04  
You can't move me and time travel the same time. That doesn't count. So no, you still are in Tennessee, I promise. Yes.

Brian  19:10  
I also found out that there was native citrus there, which is crazy. Yeah. So again, because we're kind of plant guys, a little bit right, when you publish, you can publish a holotype, sort of declaring a new species or publishing a new species. But that's not the only thing that you can do. You can also publish towards these common goals, basically a synthesis or a research paper or review where you're publishing based on what other people have done. So for that, you have to pay the research cubes if you haven't published all the corresponding holotypes. It's like a public goal. You'll also have a secret, private goal that you're trying to have people not see what it is. But it's usually not that hard to figure out, presumably, if you played the game a couple more times. So like, I'm pretty sure that Jason's going for a bunch of Triassic stuff on purpose, right? That is the basics of the game. I think. Is there anything that I crucially missed all. 

Jason  19:59  
Only thing I can think of is the game tracks how many total holotypes are published, and as you go up, it unlocks various things in the game. So we do a reset of the museum, it unlocks little upgrades. And typical thing, you get four upgrades over the course of the game. There are five or six to choose from, so you never get them all, but they're a way of getting more powerful. And I like it because this, this game caught me off guard with how much strategic depth there is, because there's a lot of decision points you can make that have effects on the game. And possibly due to all the 10,000 games per second play testing, none of them is clearly, oh, this is the the one upgrade to rule them all. This is the one path that's definitely it all seems like there's a good argument for any choice you could make. 

Brian  20:43  
I don't know every one of us chose that extra storage closet for fossils as the first thing. It's so tempting.

Jason  20:49  
 That's just because we're all hoarders

Will  20:52  
So it's so nice to get that, but I want the backpack

David  20:56  
The game also, because there are so many different options, it allows you to do something that I always find myself doing when I play board games, which is role playing a little bit getting a little bit into, like, leaning into a schtick. Yeah, I'm not just trying to win. I am sort of trying to embody a character and follow a certain style. What would I want to publish? How would I want to publish? And I do that partially because it's fun and partially because it's an easy way to get over decision paralysis, yes, which I get a lot in games that have a lot of strategic pieces.

Jason  21:32  
I will say it was really fun watching you guys, because I was here making strategic decisions based off of point values, and just watching you geek out or like, Oh, this is a cool dinosaur, I have to publish this one!

David  21:42  
Oh yes. We were both like, repeatedly. I was, Brian was very upset with me, both of us I think, because we kept throwing away valuable cards because we liked the other ones better. I was like, Yeah, but this is Triceratops. I gotta do Triceratops.

Brian  21:57  
I think you had triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Rex. What else did you have? 

David  22:00  
I had, I managed. I was very proud I didn't win, but I was very proud that I got T Rex, dinonicus. I think Triceratops was the one I didn't you almost, almost managed Triceratops. I got a bunch of the classic Stegosaurus I think.

Brian  22:15  
Yeah, you got the ones that come in the sets of plastic dinosaurs toys.

Will  22:18  
Exactly. Yeah, yes,

David  22:20  
yeah. I almost had a full tube.

Unknown Speaker  22:23  
You just need a random Dimetrodon in there. Exactly!

Jason  22:27  
It's like, these dinosaur cards. I mean, they're, they're along the lines of a lot of the good science games. They have random science facts on them that have nothing to do with the game, but that are still really cool. They have a little line of text that explains what the name means. So, Tyrannosaurus Rex, it was like, like, was it tyrant king lizard or something. Gojirosaurus, which is Godzilla lizard. And they also have who first published that particular dinosaur specimen and what year it was in. And some of these are back into the mid 1800s and some of them are just a handful of years ago. So they have a wide spread. 

Brian  23:01  
Some of them must have been contemporary with the publication of the game, right? 2022, can't be anything newer than that. Yeah, yes.

Jason  23:07  
High point of the game is when I published a holotype that yout wo didn't recognize. It was like, Wait, what, What's that thing?

Brian  23:14  
It was fun?

David  23:14  
 They included some, some really recent and well, and I assume that that was part of the necessity of spreading it across time effectively and right. If you, if you need a certain number of Triassic dinosaurs, you're gonna start pulling obscure ones. There's not that many famous Triassic dinosaurs. 

Will  23:32  
you're gonna run out of recognizable ones, because there's like three.

David  23:37  
But of course, this is how they become recognizable. Yes, is that the names get used in popular uses like this, yeah, 

Brian  23:44  
speaking of which, though, there's one thing that I wish the cards did have and they don't, and that's a pronunciation guide 

Will  23:49  
that would be a really nice feature for people seeing them for the first time, especially like, if this is the first time you've ever seen you know, even ones that aren't are not Uber obscure, but like Coelophysis, where, 

Or Deinonychus.

yeah, those pronunciations are not intuitive. If you aren't used to those kinds of names a lot

Brian  24:09  
Yeah, paraceraloloph--  Wait, I screwed it up!

David  24:11  
Yes, if they had included pronunciation so Brian and Jason the whole time we were playing, were commenting on having fun, watching us react to the cards. Yeah, if they had included pronunciations, you also would have watched us go. That's not how I say it!

Will  24:24  
Gross. No, uh-uh! 

David  24:25  
this one's wrong. This one's incorrect. 

Will  24:27  
Yeah, you, that, I have been part of a number of conversations where pronunciation fights break out of, well, I heard it's technically supposed to be said that way, and everyone else goes, Blah! No, I I refuse. 

Brian  24:39  
Wait. Does the holotype not require pronunciation guidance? 

David  24:44  
It does not.

Brian  24:44  
Oh no, 

Jason  24:45  
I'm gonna say, I guess if we get technical, they're all in Latin. Anyways, a dead language, so no one's gonna come argue with it, except other people studying dead Latin things

Brian  24:53  
 and all those dead Romans. 

David  24:54  
To do a little just the littlest of tangents. Taxonomic names are all Latinized versions of roots from various other languages that are then pronunciation modified based on whatever language the person speaking speaks. So not only is there not a correct pronunciation, there also isn't you can't have consistent pronunciation because English speakers are not the only people who talk about dinosaurs and an Italian speaker or a Russian speaker or a Chinese speaker are not going to be expected to pronounce the this list of letters the same way.

Brian  25:30  
I'm starting to think that the omission of pronunciation was not an oversight, but a purposeful choice. 

David  25:36  
Had I been consulted on this game, I would have suggested leaving it out. 

Will  25:39  
Yeah, it definitely simplifies it well, because, yeah, there's a bunch that, like, I've had ones that I've shifted on that came up I was on a friend's podcast, and I said AnKYlosaurus. And they had a moment like, Oh, have I been saying that wrong my whole life? No, I used to say ANKylosaurus. Then I hung out with bunches of paleontologists, and they tend to say anKYlosaurus more often, but it doesn't matter, like we made up the name for this, 

David  26:05  
long as all the letters are accounted for. You're doing okay, yep. 

Brian  26:09  
Do I talk about some of the science in the game? Yeah?

Jason  26:11  
Okay, oh, let's get into there's I. I'm looking forward to this because I think there's some deep dives we can go here.

Brian  26:16  
Yeah. So do we want to start with the general, or do we want to start with the weird ones? 

Jason  26:20  
Let's start with the general

Brian  26:21  
God. I'm trying to think of the right way to say this. How accurate is science in the game? But I'm not really talking about the dinosaurs. I'm talking about the depiction of paleontology, yeah, because this really is a game about being a paleontologist. So, so how is it? I mean, we had our own assumptions, but having not been in an academic paleontology environment, our assumptions may be wrong. 

Will  26:43  
All in all, I liked it. 

David  26:44  
Yeah, I think it was very they did a good job. 

Will  26:47  
Yes, I think it captures a lot of the stuff well, we made a discovery while we were playing that it makes the most sense if you picture that you're all working in the same department, that you're all working at the same museum or same university, and you're having to share space. So that's part. You're not rival universities bumping each other out of spots. You're going, it's my turn in the lab. Get out. I have, I have the, the, you know, electron, the scanning equipment, or the CT machine. Signed this out for this time period, it's my time. Go. Go work on your your paper, like, go work on your writing, which is also a nice way to look at the like. The benefit to getting bumped is the like, listen, you've been in the computer lab for the last five hours. Get out of here. Go do something else.

Brian  27:33  
Are we encouraging people to touch grass? Or deal with their hyper fixations? Yep, 

David  27:39  
I do like that. Obviously, it's a simplified because it has to be, because it's a board game, but I like the way that they translated a bunch of different real world aspects of research to the game that you can go excavating, which is a real thing that we do, you can go utilize museum archives and museum collections to get the specimens that you need for your research, you can go to the library and read up on background and all that stuff. But they did a pretty good job accounting for a bunch of the things that are in real life a part of this process.

Will  28:17  
One of my favorite things they did with that accounting is that they split up getting fossils. So excavating fossils, get you the cubes representing Triassic, Jurassic Cretaceous, but you don't know what those fossils are yet, because they have not been cleaned up and put back together and analyzed. So you don't get a identified dinosaur until you get it from the preparation from the lab that has now cleaned it up and put it back together. So, like, you may have an idea, because that happens all the time, where it's like, yeah, we're, we're, we know it's some kind of sauropod, but we don't know what kind yet, because it's still in the rock and or it's not put together yet, so we haven't confirmed that it's anything that we haven't already seen. So I like this, yeah, you know what age it is, because you know what rock you were digging in, but until it's been worked through, you don't yet know what dinosaur you're dealing with. I thought that was a nice separation. 

Brian  29:13  
And even if you have the fossils, even if you have the specimen, you still have to go do the research. Is this new? So you need the research cubes too. 

Will  29:19  
Yep, you have to confirm it

David  29:21  
And that's a huge part, is because people will often ask, Well, how do you know it's a new species? And the answer is, you do a lot of reading. Yep, you do a lot of reading, and you do a lot of comparisons to cover as many all of the bases that you can. And then you have to write that all down to prove it Yes, so that when another scientist goes, how did they know this was a new species? All of the, you've shown your work, yes,

Brian  29:45  
one of the weird things in the game is that there's only the one spot to publish. And I don't understand why only one person in the department can publish at a time. We thought maybe there's a copy editor, or something

Will  29:56  
I was gonna say, that's the biggest reason, for me, it makes sense for it to be one department. It that it's like, listen, we're we announce the papers 

David  30:03  
Yeah, when the press release. We don't want our press releases to be competing with each other.

Will  30:08  
That's the only way that one really makes sense.

David  30:10  
I also the arrangement of what fossil sites and dinosaurs and other creatures were available. I was really impressed. Yeah, I really like that. They used real life fossil deposits, like, these were places you'd pick up a card and we would go, Oh, cool. I've heard of this. Or sometimes you'd be like, Oh, the Morrison formation, yeah, this is a famous one. This is very cool. And the same thing with the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs, we were using the pterosaur expansion, the marine reptiles. I like that it isn't just shortcut generic dinosaur fossil site. It isn't just shortcut generic predatory dinosaur. And it also isn't just all the famous ones. They did a nice spread of different types of animals, different ages of fossil deposits, which I thought was really nice, because that, you know, when you're a kid, this is how you learn about new dinosaurs and different locations where you find fossils is you see them in books or you see them in games and stuff. Yeah, there are. There are absolutely fossil sites that I learned about as a kid because they were in, like, the Magic School Bus computer game. Yes. 

Brian  31:20  
Oh, really?

David  31:21  
Yeah, the magic school bus to the time of the dinosaurs computer game was maybe my most played computer game when I was a kid. That was super fun.

Brian  31:28  
So holotype does, and we didn't mess with this. It has a stripped down, they call it the basal version, where simplified rules to play with kids. Oh, that's great, nice to kind of help deal with that sort of strategic difficulty, because a very deep tactical game. Well, I mean, I say that; I've played games with Jason's daughters, they would easily kick my butt, so I think a lot of it is how early you get them started, and

Will  31:53  
that that was something I liked from the gameplay side of it is that there's no rocket launcher. That's the if, if you get this, you're you might as well we could call the game here sort of thing, 

David  32:04  
you don't win if you get T Rex.

Will  32:06  
Yeah, and I like that, because it also meant that you can be kind of competitive. But also, if I want to just focus on my pet project, or focus on, like, I got really into the group the common goals, because I not, A, I liked that concept. But also that's a fun thing to add, that every now and then you're doing research that's not on a new species, it's on predatory dinosaurs or like the bromolites study of we're looking at coprolites and regurgitalites and this category of things, not specifically one I found. I like that it meant that you can, you can kind of be strategic on your own, even if you're not, like, I didn't have a full grasp of the game because it was my first time, but I could go, Oh, that's interesting. So I'm gonna focus my efforts this way. And it wasn't the only option to be focusing on. It. So I liked that part of the gameplay,

David  33:02  
and to piggyback off of what you were talking about a little bit, because you brought up the community goals, sort of the Global Goals, which I thought was a really fun part, as Brian you mentioned before, that is a relatively common thing in board games like this, and I think it's so fitting in a science themed game, because science is, by its very nature, a community effort. Yes, I think that if you know to segue a little bit into ways that this game is maybe not as good a representation of real life science, the game is competitive, because that's the kind of game that it is. And I think that, you know, science can be competitive. For sure, there's lots of competitive aspects in science, but that's not the part that we like, celebrate and encourage a whole lot in science. Like ideally, we want to all be working together and cooperative. And I like that this game isn't just a competitive board game, that there is this acknowledgement of the research you're doing is contributing to global understanding of these topics. I think that's a really nice, you know, it's, it's not, not quite a footnote, but it's sort of an aside on top of all of the competitive research stuff in the game, but I like that they included it in there. 

Will  34:23  
Yes, absolutely. 

Brian  34:24  
Yeah, it's a nice balance. The competitive is the cooperative, but you're doing the same thing. But even if this person wins the game, look at all the cool science we learned anyway, right? Yes,

Will  34:35  
well, and unlike on the note of it being competitive, and like the fact that it can be, but that's not the way, you know, it should be, quote, unquote, but there is an argument to be made of well, if we're trying to simulate it, then there should be some. One of the notes that I think falls into that category that I found very charming is your personal goal. Because, yeah, it's like, there's absolutely scientists where it's like, what do you study? You know, crocs, and it's like, why? Because they're neat! Because that's my favorite, because I want to study them, because they're the best, and that like, I'm gonna use any excuse I can to get to go see more crocs. Like, yeah, you have that happens all the time, where researchers have their little personal projects, and it's like, is this what needs to be studied? It's what I want to study. 

David  35:19  
That a personal goal. I mentioned before, that sort of role playing aspect. For me, the personal goals were like, info on my character sheet where I was like, Oh, I'm a marine reptile researcher. Yes, that's what this personal goal tells me, is that I love marine reptiles. And so I was like, Yeah, I'm gonna scoop up all the marine reptiles. That's right. 

Brian  35:37  
So we haven't talked about this, but the three different meeples for the three different things. I mean, they're personified, like the paleontologist is a little taller. They're basically, you could tell them apart based on their hats. Yes, yes,

David  35:50  
the grad student had their graduation cap on.

Will  35:52  
Yeah. I thought that was very cute, 

Brian  35:54  
which they used the whole time. And I remember will, when you were doing yours, you were giving them names. Said your grad student was Ian Malcolm, so you had him sitting on his side like he was injured in Jurassic Park, hilarious. But I did want to make sure we come back to this idea of the different groups. So the different cards, I don't just want to call them dinosaurs. What is the proper I guess reptiles? What's the proper term I should use that is encompassing of both marine reptiles and the dinosaurs and the pterosaurs.

David  36:22  
You can call them reptiles. If you want to be scientific, you could call them taxa, yeah, as they are all individually named species and such. And so they're taxa,

Brian  36:35  
right? Well, the the taxa, then that we have, they're based on a couple different things, the age right, Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous, the diet. So omnivore, carnivore or herbivore, that was pretty much it. And then they have these sort of phylogenetic groupings. So we've got our sauropods, our long necked dinosaurs, our theropods, mostly your T Rex, you're like meat-eating two legged there were a couple, I'm thinking therizinosaur, yes, which was, you know, I think the one herbivore, maybe not the only, but the only one I can think of. And then we had a marine reptiles, which is not one group, right? Yeah, that, I know three are there four?

Will  37:17  
There's a bunch. There's three big ones, yeah, the three big, famous ones of plesiosaurs and pliosaurs, which are grouped together, the mosasaurs, and then the ichthyosaurs, which are the like dolphin, Shark shaped ones. 

David  37:32  
But there was at least one, I don't know if it was like a nothasaur, yes. In the game, there are other smaller groups of marine reptiles, okay,

Brian  37:40  
and then there's the genosaurs, and I had never heard that term before. So what is that?

David  37:46  
Dinosaurs are cladistically, right? The way that we classify them? There are three major groups of dinosaurs. There are sauropods, the long neck dinosaurs which you mentioned, theropods, the two legged, mostly meat eating dinosaurs which you mentioned. And then there's ornithischians, which is all the rest, mostly herbivores, mostly quadrupeds, that includes your Triceratops and your Stegosaurus and your Ankylosaurus and your parasaurolophus and all of those. Genisauria is a subset of ornithischian dinosaurs, but it's a subset that includes basically all of them. I think the only thing that is an ornithischian, but not within genisauria, are some really basal groups like heterodontosaurids might fall out of it. So genosaur basically is the same thing as ornithischian. It's just that other, third major branch of dinosaurs. And I was thinking, because when we when it came up on the cards, I was like, I don't know what genisauria is. Off the top of my head, that's that's not a very commonly used term. It's a very smooth solution to the problem that the word ornithischia is a really weird word to read and to try to say if you're not familiar with it, and genosaur is an actual taxonomic term that isn't used very much, but basically means the same thing as ornithischian

Will  39:10  
well. And it's, it's like, I'm familiar with ornithischian, so there's definitely a part of me that's like, genosaur What? But I know that if you if I was introduced to both cold, I would go with genosaur. Genosaurs a better word, that's more fun to say

David  39:22  
It's much more accessible. I do want to mention one more thing about the because I think this is an important thing. When you mentioned the meeples on the note of the the meeples the characters that you have, one thing that did stand out to me about when we were playing the game, it was really the one thing of the game that I went a little bit like, oh, I don't love this representation, which is that your three characters are the paleontologist, the grad student and the field assistant, and there is a very clear hierarchy of who gets to do what, and who's more important than the other ones. The field assistant doesn't get to publish. the paleontologist gets to kick the other two off of any spots. And I think that that does reflect, you know, some real life hierarchical systems in places like universities. But I do think that it also a little bit reinforces these, this caste system, almost power dynamic that, like no field field assistants absolutely can publish stuff. They're usually working alongside other people. I also this is much more of a personal semantics thing, but separating paleontologist from grad student makes me the hackles are up a little bit because I'm like, Well, if you're a grad student, if you if you published a dinosaur, and you're out doing field work and you're doing the research, yeah, you're a paleontologist, yeah? So, for the sake of the game, I think that that, like hierarchy system mechanically, works very well. I think that it's really an engaging way to play, but it it reflects upon real world paleontology in a way that I think is a little bit overly stereotypical, yeah, and it's a little icky too, but it's a little icky. And, you know, I think that, you know, not to as a slight against the people who made the game. I think they did a great job, but that is a kind of real world aspect of paleontology that is a little bit icky in its gamified form. Yeah, yeah.

Jason  41:18  
I've got other questions, though, about the science here. One is about the like, the places we get the fossils from. So you get three types of fossils. Your Triassic, your Jurassic, your Cretaceous, and they're different. The older ones are more valuable. But what are these things like? The game is Mesozoic, North America. So all three of these periods are inside the Mesozoic. Like, what is the Mesozoic. What are these little three subdivisions? How do people draw boundaries between them? I assume an asteroid was involved in the last one, but I don't know about any of the other so, like, what? What defines these three periods? What defines the three periods?

Will  41:54  
Absolutely So, yeah, the Mesozoic is often what we call the age of dinosaurs, and

David  41:59  
from roughly 250 million to 66 million years ago. Yes,

Will  42:04  
and like all period, you know, all phases of Earth history, we break it up into subsection like the Triassic Jurassic Cretaceous also have subdivisions that we can that you get into when you're you research is zooming in even further or looking at a very particular time frame. There are names for those. These typically are associated with rock layers and deposits and sediment layers. You will find ages like there are the ancient mammal ages, the large mammal ages, land mammal ages. Had to get my term right in North America that is based off of what fossils are present. But typically we're basing it off of using geologic sediments to distinguish and the borders are often at major shifts, 

David  42:56  
environmental changes, ecological changes the asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous is not so much. There is a geological layer that you can see. Yeah, that's asteroid dust. But the shift from Cretaceous to what comes next is an ecological shift, because there was a mass extinction, yep, yep. 

Will  43:14  
And mass extinctions are very commonly the book ends 

David  43:17  
It's great way to distinguish between before and after, yep, and

Will  43:22  
so, yeah, we can identify these either based on sediment types that there are certain things that you know, we can age and you know, well, it has to be this, because the, you know, radioactive elements that are in this rock date it to that time period. And then, very often, the fossils that we find of this group is only a Triassic group. They were, they were in the middle of the Triassic. So there's not even a way they could be scooting over the line. So for sure, we're definitely in the Triassic. And so there are fossil sites that are already well known for what age they are. Anything you find here is going to be that age. You just might be finding some new thing from that age that you haven't seen before.

Jason  44:06  
So I like that there is a part of this game that is the different trace fossils, yeah, and I'd like to actually talk a bit about those. So they have a few different kinds. They've got the eggs, they've got coprolites, so poop, also dinosaur tracks, bugs and Amber, I think, or something like that. I don't remember how many are in the base game and how many are in the expansion. How important are these to paleontology, like what we've already talked about, some of the ones. But what other types of trace fossils are there? What role do they play in terms of paleontology and figuring things out? And the ultimate question is, like, How long until we can actually get DNA out of the fossil mosquito and makeJurassic freaking Park?

David  44:44  
right, right. So trace fossil, fossils are categorized broadly into two categories, body fossils, which are the remains of the body parts, bones, teeth, leaves, anything that was part of the body of the organism. Trace fossils are indirect evidence of the organism. Footprints are trace fossils, burrows, poop, regurgitalites, colalights, all the things that we were talking about before Amber is technic, is is sort of a plant trace fossil, because Amber is produced by plants. Eggs are a trace fossil. Trace fossils are extraordinarily important, because they can not only tell you what sort of things might have been around if you don't have body fossils, but they also reveal behaviors and lifestyles. You know, footprints tell you how an animal was moving around its environment. Nests with eggs tell you a lot about reproduction. Coprolites, poop. Tell you about diet. You cut open a coprolite, and there's what this animal ate. So you get a lot of really fascinating information that you often can't get, from bones and teeth. to Jason's question about amber in mosquitoes and DNA, I have an answer to that that is a short story The earliest reports of DNA coming out of bugs and Amber was from the early 90s, around the time that Jurassic Park came out. And then throughout the 90s, there were a bunch more reports of DNA from Amber. And then as more and more time went on, those studies were revised as we got better and better at recognizing DNA contamination in our specimens, like what we were talking about before and after a decade or so, general consensus became that those were all accidents, that those were all errors, that there was not DNA in those bugs in amber. More recent research after that tried to estimate how long DNA could potentially last in the environment, and estimated that DNA could not probably last more than a couple million years, which is not nearly enough to get to dinosaurs. And then my favorite this was a 2013 study that sought to see, okay, what does DNA breakdown actually look like in amber. And they tested with all the updated methods, two pieces of Amber from museum specimens, one of which was, I think, 10,000 years old or so, and they found no evidence of preserved DNA in the bug in the amber, and another piece of pre Amber that was about 50 or 60 years old, and they found no evidence of preserved DNA in that bug in amber. Yeah, 50 years old. It seems that DNA is actually extra bad at preserving in amber. The amber is actually an awful place to try to preserve DNA.

Will  47:37  
It's one of the worst ones you could pick if you were trying to save some DNA. Aside, 

David  47:42  
Amber does a great job. I know, protecting like tissues and stuff from scavengers and decomposers, but it does a very bad job protecting DNA from heat and moisture, which is what breaks down DNA. So to answer your question, never I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, Jason, bummer.

Brian  48:09  
So I think we have a little bit of time for nitpicks, and then we should probably wrap up with our with our grades, if that's okay. 

David  48:16  
I've got a nitpick to come right off of that coprolite discussion. There is a stipulation within this game that the trace fossils, coprolites, cannot be used for marine reptiles, that you can only attach a coprolite, poop, to the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and such. And when we were playing the game, I think it was Brian who, who asked, Do you Do you not get coprolites from marine fossils? And I said, Yeah, you do. You absolutely could get coprolites from marine fossils. 

Will  48:48  
There's a famous one that has a whole bunch of shark bites on it. 

David  48:50  
Yeah? It's a, it's a croc poop with shark bite marks in it.

Brian  48:55  
Oh, lovely, .

David  48:56  
Yeah, absolutely you can get fossil poops from ocean animals.

Brian  49:01  
I'm sorry. I'm just, okay. So it pooped, a bunch of sharks nibbled on it, and then it got buried. 

David  49:06  
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, that is exactly what happened. 

Brian  49:08  
Paleontology is weird, 

David  49:09  
yeah, coprolites in the in the water are so fun because you'll see like a shark or a croc coprolite, and you can see the shape of the copper light has a flat surface where it landed, yeah, you can see this is the side that it landed on, yeah, and it got squished into that shape. Oh, man. A lot of fish coprolites are spiral shaped, yeah, because of the shape of their sphincter.

Brian  49:33  
Like goldfish.

Will  49:34  
Yeah. Like it's when you watch it happen in an aquarium. It looks like that when it fossilizes, yep. 

David  49:40  
A lot of coprolites have like, a pinched off end. Yeah, it looks like poop. And that's what it is. It's poop.

Brian  49:45  
Are there? Are there left handed and right handed fish coprolites then?

David  49:49  
That is great question. I don't know, off the top my head, but probably, 

Brian  49:54  
I don't know what would cause a spiral, but I mean, something's making a twist. Yeah?

Will  49:59  
Yeah, this is a very nitpicky nit pick. Is also with the trace fossils, that the way you get points off of trace fossils is by adding them to a publication when you publish a holotype. Which I get the concept of you're applying of, we, you know, we, I am publishing Triceratops. And here are some Triceratops footprints. But that's not actually how we publish trace fossils. When we publish a trace fossil, we publish a ichnotaxon, which is a taxonomic name for that trace fossil. Because the reality is that usually you cannot match a trace fossil to its owner. You can get close a lot of time, like you almost certainly could go these are ceratopsian feet, because we have the feet of many ceratopsians.

David  50:45  
Right, and there's a triceratops skeleton, yeah, 30 meters away, 

Will  50:49  
but we don't have the fleshy pad of that foot, so there's a lot of information in this track that is missing from the bones. Like you know, if you looked at a duck's foot versus a duck's foot bones. That's a lot of webbing and material that you don't actually have, and you may not actually be able to confirm on the bone, like you may be able to say, Yeah, this is definitely a web foot. But how webbed? Did it go all the way to the end of the toes? Did it stop halfway down? And so finding a trace fossil is not actually something you can typically, unless you have a overabundance of evidence attach to a known species. So it gets its own name and suspected, and its own holotype--and its own holotype--trace fossils get their own holotypes. And the one that stands out the most for that is that amber, like amber typically you're describing, like the bugs and stuff that got trapped in that amber, and that's its own fossil. So the amber itself is kind of a trace fossil, but whatever's in it, that's just a fossil. Yeah. And so those you really should be publishing on their own, yes,

Brian  51:52  
okay, so trace fossils are not bonus points tht get tacked into other fossils.

Will  51:57  
Yeah, they're, they're their own study, their own separate study, they'll be in association, but you would have had to already publish that holotype, typically, to then be able to connect them. 

David  52:08  
I think that's a great nitpick. I hadn't thought about but that. But that's a really good point.

Brian  52:12  
I mean, I would love to nitpick as well that my only nitpick, if this even counts, is that these these people, apparently never have to write grants or teach classes. Yeah,

Jason  52:21  
that's a great that's not other. It's like, I'm I'm not sad that's missing. Like, I like teaching classes. But if I could ditch the grant writing I would.

David  52:29  
It would be so cool if you could, if one of the places on the mat was, like, scientific conference, yeah, and you could like, exchange, research cubes, or it

Will  52:37  
That could be an expansion, adds a little bit to the board, and you go, meet.

Brian  52:41  
It's like a sidetrack for publication, right? Yes, yes, yeah. You can, like,

Will  52:45  
you can get almost to publication, but it's not quite publication.

David  52:49  
You go to the conference and it like, ups all of your resources, and it just, it's just motivation, yes, or you get, like, new personal goals. Yeah, you could acquire a new personal goal,

Brian  53:00  
We need more opportunities for collaborations. We need joint goals. Public goals, exactly, private goals, between two people. That's making it way too complicated. 

David  53:09  
Expand the global goals,

Brian  53:12  
Yeah, that's not a bad idea.

Will  53:13  
That actually would be pretty cool. Like, switch one out, yeah, yeah,

David  53:16  
oh, switching one out would be mean. That's like, I don't like that on. 

Brian  53:21  
It's like, nah we don't want to do this one. This one. This one's not important anymore. No one's funding it.

Will  53:24  
That makes people go, no!

Brian  53:27  
that actually would be funny. You go to a conference and you have to chuck one, then you pull it a new one. Anyway, anyway. Let's do our letter grades. Let's start with the fun. How fun is holotype to play? We do typically kind of use a little bit of grade inflation. We often startat a B, you guys don't have to do this if you don't want to. 

Jason  53:50  
My understanding is that you very specifically chose not to be in academia.

David  53:55  
I haven't graded a paper in years. I mean, for fun, I would give it an A, yeah, I had a ton of fun playing. No, I really enjoyed it. I named my meeples, yeah, I had Ellie, Rhonda and Darcy, yep, which I was very happy with. They were great. They were kicking butt.

Will  54:12  
Yeah, no. I mean, at the worst, if you like, like, low A, but yeah, no, I think it's, it's up there. That was a very fun game. 

Brian  54:21  
So A, A-minus then? yeah, yeah, okay,

Jason  54:24  
yeah, I'd give this a solid A venturing into A-plus. I mean, I think of the of the games we have played it as part of this podcast, this is one of the most fun. This is, this is right up there with the dreaded Wingspan that we can't get away with mentioning. But I say it's valuable on this one, because, darn it, bird are dinosaurs.

Brian  54:41  
Yes, that's a very good point. Our top scorers have all had some kind of dinosaurs or dinosaur like thing in them. I guess cytosis didn't. But you know, those dinosaurs had cells, so it's fine. I'm biased because I had a fantastic time playing the game with you guys. It was so much fun doing it. I'm not gonna let that influence me, though, because I don't have to, because it's an A because for me, it's how likely am I to grab it and bring it with us. And, I mean, I took it with us when we went home for Thanksgiving to play with my family, like 

Jason  55:11  
you took it in a 14 hour car ride. Like that's that's dedication

Brian  55:15  
so on the science side, why don't I go ahead and start i It's interesting, because the science in terms of the dinosaurs, the formations, all of that clearly accurate. But this really isn't about that. It's about paleontology itself. Now there's always some simplification there has to be, because it's a game. It's not going to be 100% accurate, but I think this deserves an A too. I think there was a clear intention, intentionality in the design of the metaphor of the game to do a good job of representing what it was trying to represent. 

Will  55:43  
Yeah, no, I think I agree, because like that, you know, there are nitpicks. There are definitely categories that and for our specific field of expertise stand out, but, but none of those were like distracting me, you know, aggressively or anything. So, yeah, I think it's...B feels too low for any of those. So A still feels fitting because it's it was satisfying in the the scientific regard, right? 

Brian  56:15  
You can go in between. You could give it a B plus or an A minus, if you want.

David  56:20  
That's true. That's true. I was gonna say I would give it an A minus at the lowest, yes, A maybe an A minus if I'm feeling, you know, critical, if I'm grouchy that day. But I think because of what you guys just said, that there's clearly a great intent here. I think that also I'm grading in comparison to other games. And it is very rare that you see a game put in this level of effort to be accurate, not only to be accurate, but to be thorough, to include a wide range of real life science stuff. There are a couple things in there that made me go, I don't love the implication of you know, you've sort of translated this thing over from the real world, and it's a little bit Ick. But the other thing that I think gets at the A is that stepping aside, stepping back from the hyper specifics of the science, I think this is exactly the kind of game that would make somebody excited about science. Yeah, I think getting to play through the process of it using a lot of the real pieces of science, I don't think that the inaccuracies or the weird sort of parts of it would be enough to counter the fact that this is an extremely fun scientific interaction like this is the kind of game that I could see a future paleontologist saying when I was a kid, I played holotype, yeah, and that's how I got excited about dinosaurs. Yeah.

Brian  57:50  
I hope that happens. I hope that happens. That's gonna happen sometime, right? It's got to 

Jason  57:56  
I'm also going to give this a solid A for these same reasons. It's a good representation. It has a lot of details about paleontology and the dinosaurs and the dig sites, everything that don't have to be there. But they made the effort of doing it. They made the effort to get a lot of stuff there and to, I think you said about our other dinosaur game [Wingspan], Brian, you can't play this game without learning something about dinosaurs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I actually think I really like the representation of paleontology, because I think a lot of people, like your sort of casual, like child paleontologists, think that people are all out in the field digging up dinosaurs all the time. And isn't it great, like that scene in Jurassic Park, it's like, well, that's part of it, but this actually shows you have to do a lot of book research, you have to go back to the lab, you have to go to museums. Most of your work is actually not at the field site. And I think that's actually a good way of portraying what the real job is like.

Will  58:55  
Yeah, no, I agree, because it is so often portrayed as it's digging up a bone and going Aha, Eureka, right? I have found a new species. 

David  59:04  
I think that one of the nicest things that I can say about this game is that it feels great for one of the main reasons that Jurassic Park the movie feels great, yeah, which is that it is not just about dinosaurs, it is about paleontology. Yes. And that really sets it apart. And that really makes it entrenched in the science--Yeah--behind this field.

Brian  59:28  
Well, we should probably call it there. Oh, sure, we could keep talking and talking. I would love to do so, but, but I do have to edit this at some point.

Will  59:38  
I know the feeling.

Brian  59:41  
Where would you like our listeners, this very small number of people who listen to our podcast

Jason  59:48  
Hey hey hey, be optimistic! We could have people from five years in the future of our millions and millions of subscribers who are coming back to listen to Holotype.

Will  59:55  
Yes, absolutely. There you go,

Brian  59:58  
I'm sorry, dear listeners. I apologize. We're happy to have you here, but really go listen to Common Descent. Okay, I'm going to tell you where to find them. Go listen, join their discord. It's a great community. And come to Dragon Con and see them in person. 

David  1:00:13  
Absolutely you can find common descent wherever you get your podcasts. We have a discord. We're on some of the social medias. We have a website, commondescentpodcast.com, we release episodes about various topics in paleontology, and at various parts of the year, we also do deep dives into science of movies, and we do speculative evolution projects in October for Halloween. And we do all sorts of fun evolution paleontology type stuff, yeah?

Brian  1:00:42  
Well, hopefully we have the opportunity to get together again. I mean, this is the Dino, the paleontology game, so I we may have to stretch at some point to make that happen, but 

David  1:00:52  
we got that nature ecologies, yeah? Game sent to us, and I went through, and I like, looked through all the cards, and I, like, played a little, you know, around with myself, and it's pretty cool, actually, that might be fun to play. 

Brian  1:01:06  
I'm not kidding. I'll get in the car. I'll be there. Absolutely, come on, absolutely. Well, I think we're just gonna have to call it there. So thanks so much Will, David for taking the time. And now we always come to the part that happens every time, where I never know how to end the episode. So I'm gonna let Jason do it. 

Jason  1:01:21  
Well thank you Will and David for being here. Thank you everyone for listening, and have a great month and happy gaming.

Brian  1:01:26  
Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we've talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.