John: Hello! Uh, welcome to the livestream. Not the hardest clue this week, but I thought it would be a little bit funny at least. Thank you for the lovely greeting.

Um, so, this is gonna be a little bit different. (There's no pattern for these, so it's not going to be different because they're all different.) It's going to be a little bit different in that I'm gonna try to read-- [laughter] I'm reading through the section of the book that I think of as the, uh--"the animal section," because it's all about animals.

And I want to do two things here: one is to read these three things out loud and make sure that they sound okay and see if they seem okay together. And then the other is to include a couple of, um--to include a couple, uh, examples of how I actually research and write this stuff.

So, uh, one of the essays is about Canada geese. I have these two books about Canada geese - the two most important books, as far as I can tell, about Canada geese. Both written in the 1960's. "The World of the Canada Goose" by Joe Van Warmer, which I found, to be honest, of limited utility. I hope that Joe Van Warmer is not listening.

It's a beautifully written book, but it's full of, like, um--it's full of things that, uh, [laughter] I don't find important, and also I don't agree with. But, uh, I--so, I'm gonna--anyway, I'm gonna--I've marked some pages, uh, in this book that I found helpful and that I might be able to use for the book.

And so I'm gonna try to, like, model how I do research, and--with the Canada goose one especially, because there's a couple things I wanna add.

And then I also have this book, which is called, "The Giant Canada Goose." And is, uh, incredibly interesting, because it was written not too long after the Canada goose--the giant Canada goose (which had long been believed extinct) was, um, established to have never died out. And, in fact, now is the dominant subspecies of Canada geese in the world today.

And there's a couple things that I think are interesting that may or may not end up in that essay. So it's gonna be a little different, cause it's gonna be a lot of time where I'm quiet, because I'm trying to, like, figure out where to put in the Canada goose stuff.

But we're gonna start with this velociraptors one, see how that works, um, and see if this transition among these three essays that (right now in the book, anyway) are consecutive, and are all about animals--make sure that they work.

Okay. This is about velociraptors.

"Until 1990 when Michael Crichton's novel, 'Jurassic Park', was published, velociraptors were not particularly well-known dinosaurs. The book, about a theme park containing dinosaurs created from cloned dna samples, became a runaway bestseller. And three years later, Steven Spielberg's film adaptation brought the novel's dinosaurs to awe-inspiring life with computer generated animations the likes of which movie-goers had never seen before.

"Even 25 years later, 'Jurassic Park's' dinosaurs still look astonishingly lifelike, including the velociraptors, which are portrayed as scaly creatures, about six feet in height, from present-day Montana. In the film franchise, they are not just vicious, but also terrifyingly intelligent. In 'Jurassic Park 3' one scientist character claims that velociraptors are, quote, "smarter than dolphins. Smarter than primates."

"In the movies they figure out how to open a door. In fact, the first time I remember hearing my brother, Hank, curse came when we were--"

"--came when we were watching Jurassic Park for the first time. When the velociraptors--" That's a lot of "when's." [sighs] [scatting]

"As we were watching." Yeah. Yeah, that's better anyway.

"In fact, the first time I remember--"

"In the movies they figure out how to open a door. In fact, the first time I remember hearing my brother, Hank, curse came as we were watching Jurassic Park for the first--"

Oh, it's the repitition of "first time" that's bothersome. It wasn't actually the "when."

"In fact, the first time I remember hearing my brother, Hank, curse came as we were watching Jurassic Park. When the velociraptors turned the door handle, I heard my little brother mutter, 'oh. Shit.' Crichton's velociraptors are the kind of scary, intimidating animals you might want to name, say, a professional sports franchise after. And indeed, when the National Basketball Association expanded into Canada in 1995, Toronto chose, 'The Raptors' as it's team nickname.

"Today, the velociraptor stands alongside t-rex and stegasaurous as among the best-known dinosaurs, even though the actual creatures that lived in the late Cretaceous Period some 70 million years ago have almost nothing in common with the velociraptors of our contemporary imagination. For starters, velociraptors did not live in what is now Montana. They lived in what is now Mongolia and China, hence their scientific name, 'velociraptor mongoliensis.'

"While they were smart for dinosaurs, they were not smarter than dolphins--" Isn't it "dolphins or apes?" "Dolphins or primates."

"They were probably closer to chickens or possums. Also, they were not six feet tall. They were about the size of a contemporary turkey, but with a very long tail that could stretch for over three feet. They're estimated to have weighed less that 15 kilograms, so it's hard to imagine one killing a human.

"In fact, they were probably mostly scanevgers, eating meat from already-dead carcasses."

I'm not gonna say "also" there, because I feel like I've "also-ed" out this whole concept.

"Furthermore, velociraptors were not scaly, but feathered. We know this because researchers found quill knobs on a velociraptor's forearm in 2007. But even in Crichton's day most paleontologists thought velociraptors and other members of the dromaeosaurid family were feathered.

"Although velociraptors were not believed to have flown, their ancestors probably did. Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History put it this way, 'The more we learn about these animals the more we find out that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors, like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.' Indeed, as a guide recently pointed out to me at the Houston Museum of Natural History, pictures of birds without feathers look a lot like pictures of dinosaurs.

"Now velociraptors did probably, at least sometimes, hunt. A famous fossil discovered in 1971 in Mongolia preserved a velociraptor locked in battle with a pig-sized dinosaur called 'protoceratops'. The velociraptor appears to have had one of it's sickle-shaped claws embedded in the neck of the protoceratops, which was biting down on the velociraptor's arm, when they were both suddenly burried in sand, perhaps due to a collapsing sand dune. But we don't know how often velociraptors hunted or how successfully or whether they hunted in packs.

"Crichton based his velociraptors on a different dinosaur, the deinonychus, which did live in present day Montana, and was the approximate size and shape of Jurassic Park's velociraptors. Crichton took the name 'velociraptor' because he thought it was 'more dramatic', which is presumably also why the-