Lucas:
00:00:00
Here's your extinction story
for the week:
00:00:01
dragon bones piled by
for the week:
00:00:04
the hundreds in caves all over Europe.
for the week:
00:00:16
Hello and welcome to Making a Monster:
for the week:
00:00:18
Extinction, the stories of extinct animals
for the week:
00:00:21
retold as Dungeons and dragons monsters.
for the week:
00:00:24
I'm Lucas Zellers I'm your host.
for the week:
00:00:26
And I'm gathering these stories into a
for the week:
00:00:28
bestiary called Book of Extinction coming
for the week:
00:00:31
to Kickstarter in November of 2020.
for the week:
00:00:33
This episode might be a little bit
for the week:
00:00:35
different than what you're used to.
for the week:
00:00:36
Making a Monster is the surprising
for the week:
00:00:38
history behind monsters written for
for the week:
00:00:41
Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:42
Extinction
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:45
was meant to show you how I'm going
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:47
through the process of mythologizing,
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:49
extinct animals for Dungeons and Dragons.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:51
My goal is highly-produced, highly-edited
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:54
interviews with experts on the
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:55
particular animals I'm working with.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:57
And I still plan to do episodes like that.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:59
I'm working on episodes for the
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:00
aurochs and the Carolina parakeet,
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:02
but if I want Book of Extinction to be
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:04
everything it can be, occasionally the
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:07
expert I'll be consulting is just me.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:10
In at least the case of the Florida
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:11
fairy shrimp, Book of Extinction may
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:13
contain the largest body of extant
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:15
literature on a given species.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:17
So I'm willing to claim that
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:18
title, at least in so far
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:20
as the podcast requires it.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:22
And as an expert, I believe I have
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:23
a unique point to make about the
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:25
intersection of conservation in D
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:27
and D and digging up dragon bones.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:30
The monster manual has a hierarchy
of bears:
00:01:32
black bear brown
of bears:
00:01:34
bear, polar bear and cave bear.
of bears:
00:01:36
The last is just the polar bear,
of bears:
00:01:38
but with dark vision, but in
of bears:
00:01:40
true "Making a Monster" style,
of bears:
00:01:41
there's way more to it than that.
of bears:
00:01:44
Over the last month I've been working
of bears:
00:01:45
on Pleistocene megafauna, giant animals
of bears:
00:01:48
gone extinct in the geological epic
of bears:
00:01:50
previous to the one in which we live.
of bears:
00:01:52
These are the original dire creatures
of bears:
00:01:54
like dire wolves and yes, cave bears,
of bears:
00:01:57
the oversized animals who lived
of bears:
00:01:59
before the current geological era.
of bears:
00:02:02
And at first I thought doing this
of bears:
00:02:04
work would detract from my point,
of bears:
00:02:07
which is the urgent and tragic
of bears:
00:02:09
loss of a mind-boggling amount of
of bears:
00:02:12
biodiversity within your lifetime.
of bears:
00:02:14
And time does create a psychological
of bears:
00:02:16
distance from the problem, so that the
of bears:
00:02:18
extinction of the giant ground sloths
of bears:
00:02:20
or wooly mammoth, it doesn't cause
of bears:
00:02:21
nearly the level of emotional turmoil
of bears:
00:02:24
as that of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
of bears:
00:02:26
But I think there's another point to
of bears:
00:02:27
be made by embracing that timescale.
of bears:
00:02:30
We don't get good fantasy literature
of bears:
00:02:33
without a world packed with biodiversity,
of bears:
00:02:36
and I can use dragon bones to prove it.
of bears:
00:02:38
From Cyclops to Godzilla, to
of bears:
00:02:40
jaws, giant creatures form the
of bears:
00:02:42
backbone of the monster ecosystem.
of bears:
00:02:44
In fact, one of the many meanings of
of bears:
00:02:45
the word monster is "huge" because at
of bears:
00:02:48
a certain point, sheer size is enough
of bears:
00:02:50
to recontextualize a human's perceived
of bears:
00:02:53
place in the food chain from predator.
of bears:
00:02:56
Or perhaps to paramecium, a creature
of bears:
00:02:59
so comparatively small, it has beneath
of bears:
00:03:02
the notice of the food chain entirely.
of bears:
00:03:04
And it's no coincidence that the fiction
of bears:
00:03:06
in Appendix N, the works that inspired
of bears:
00:03:08
Dungeons and Dragons, was largely written
of bears:
00:03:11
against the backdrop of the natural
of bears:
00:03:13
history boom of the late 18 hundreds when
of bears:
00:03:16
natural historians, fossil collectors,
of bears:
00:03:18
and archeologists inspired the"gentleman
of bears:
00:03:20
explorer" archetype that would later
of bears:
00:03:22
be personified in Indiana Jones.
of bears:
00:03:25
In a lot of cases, these
of bears:
00:03:26
gentlemen explorers were looking
of bears:
00:03:28
at the fossils of megafauna.
of bears:
00:03:31
We've talked about Cyclops skulls in Crete
of bears:
00:03:33
and Griffin bones in the Gobi desert.
of bears:
00:03:35
And although I have heard of objections
of bears:
00:03:37
to those examples, they do illustrate
of bears:
00:03:39
the turn of natural history from fantasy
of bears:
00:03:41
to fact to extinction, and dragon bones
of bears:
00:03:44
are the fulcrum on which it happened.
of bears:
00:03:48
In the 16 and 17 hundreds, the bones
of bears:
00:03:50
of cave bears were discovered in
of bears:
00:03:51
droves, in caves all over Europe.
of bears:
00:03:54
The scientific discourse of the
of bears:
00:03:55
day argued over whether they
of bears:
00:03:56
belonged to apes, candids fields,
of bears:
00:03:58
or even dragons or unicorns.
of bears:
00:04:01
And as they were drawn in the historical
of bears:
00:04:02
journals at the time, they were often
of bears:
00:04:04
called, in all seriousness, dragon bones.
of bears:
00:04:08
Some examples are “De draconum
of bears:
00:04:09
Carpathicorum cavernis” by P.J.
of bears:
00:04:12
Hain from 1672 and “Antra
of bears:
00:04:15
draconum Liptovensis” by F.
of bears:
00:04:17
Brückmann from 1739.
of bears:
00:04:19
It wasn't until 1794 that German anatomist
of bears:
00:04:22
Johann Christian Rosenmüller became the
of bears:
00:04:25
first to publish a description of the
of bears:
00:04:26
creature under the name Ursus spelaeus,
of bears:
00:04:29
or cave bear, from a skull found in
of bears:
00:04:31
the Gaillenreuth caves in Bavaria.
of bears:
00:04:34
Large deposits of cave bear bones are
of bears:
00:04:36
typically found together leading to
of bears:
00:04:38
speculation as to whether they lodged
of bears:
00:04:39
in the caves year round, lived and
of bears:
00:04:41
died in family groups, or simply found
of bears:
00:04:43
themselves dying in the same places
of bears:
00:04:45
over tens of thousands of years.
of bears:
00:04:47
Rosenmüller, however, still ascribed a
of bears:
00:04:49
certain myth of quality to the species.
He wrote:
00:04:51
If a hundred thousand dog
He wrote:
00:04:54
skulls found in an Egyptian cave proved
He wrote:
00:04:56
that these animals were considered
He wrote:
00:04:57
sacred, I see nothing implausible in the
He wrote:
00:05:00
idea that our bear bones were similarly
He wrote:
00:05:03
brought into the caves by human hands
He wrote:
00:05:05
and that they should be considered the
He wrote:
00:05:06
remnants or proof of a pagan reverence."
He wrote:
00:05:09
With Rosenmüller and others
He wrote:
00:05:11
like him, "dragon" fell away
He wrote:
00:05:13
to be replaced by "bear."
He wrote:
00:05:16
Wooly mammoths followed
He wrote:
00:05:17
a similar trajectory.
He wrote:
00:05:18
The first Mastodon bones to be discovered,
He wrote:
00:05:20
or at least the first to be subjected
He wrote:
00:05:22
to modern scientific scrutiny were
He wrote:
00:05:25
discovered along the Ohio river in 1739.
He wrote:
00:05:28
George QVA created his idea of espèces
He wrote:
00:05:31
perdues, or lost species in 1796, largely
He wrote:
00:05:36
as a result of decades of struggled by
He wrote:
00:05:37
the scientific community in Europe to
He wrote:
00:05:39
resolve those bones with living species.
He wrote:
00:05:42
This was the first example of
He wrote:
00:05:44
extinction as a scientific idea,
He wrote:
00:05:46
and the beginning of paleontology.
He wrote:
00:05:49
Barely a generation later, Darwin
He wrote:
00:05:51
discovered the bones of megafauna like
He wrote:
00:05:53
Macrauchenia or the so-called long
He wrote:
00:05:55
llama - look it up, it's ridiculous
He wrote:
00:05:57
- during the voyage of the Beagle in 1834.
He wrote:
00:06:00
Alfred Russell Wallace wrote in 1837
He wrote:
00:06:02
that " we live in a zoologically
He wrote:
00:06:04
impoverished world from which all of
He wrote:
00:06:07
the hugest and fiercest and strangest
He wrote:
00:06:09
forms of life have recently disappeared."
He wrote:
00:06:12
And this is the backdrop
He wrote:
00:06:14
against which the fantasy we're
He wrote:
00:06:15
enjoying in D and D was created.
He wrote:
00:06:17
HP Lovecraft's invention of cosmic horror
He wrote:
00:06:20
started with his short story "Dagon"
He wrote:
00:06:22
in 1910, when the concept of time on a
He wrote:
00:06:25
geological scale made mankind feel smaller
He wrote:
00:06:28
and more insignificant than he ever had.
He wrote:
00:06:31
J R R Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings
He wrote:
00:06:33
in 1937 in the wake of World War II,
He wrote:
00:06:37
when much of Europe had been grounded
He wrote:
00:06:38
to mud under tank treads and his fantasy
He wrote:
00:06:41
picture to spiraling descent to a less
He wrote:
00:06:43
awesome, less cool, less magical world.
He wrote:
00:06:47
Middle Earth, he supposed, was
He wrote:
00:06:49
our earth, but already ancient and
He wrote:
00:06:51
forgotten before the founding of Rome
He wrote:
00:06:53
and Middle Earth itself was a palid
He wrote:
00:06:55
echo of far more magical ages past.
He wrote:
00:06:58
This was a genre suffused with nostalgia
He wrote:
00:07:01
and starting in 1974 D and D coded the
He wrote:
00:07:04
work of these fantasy authors into its
He wrote:
00:07:06
game mechanics, filling ancient caves,
He wrote:
00:07:09
and tombs and ruins with dinosaurs,
He wrote:
00:07:11
cave, bears, dire wolves, and dragons,
He wrote:
00:07:14
the echoes of an older Wilder world.
He wrote:
00:07:18
In other words, extinction
He wrote:
00:07:20
is part of the DNA of DND.
He wrote:
00:07:25
And if we're living through the sixth mass
He wrote:
00:07:27
extinction as author Elizabeth Kolbert
He wrote:
00:07:30
and others have posited, then what kind
He wrote:
00:07:33
of fantasy are we setting up to tell?
He wrote:
00:07:36
Is this Middle Earth?
He wrote:
00:07:36
Are we the elves passing
He wrote:
00:07:38
away into the west?
He wrote:
00:07:40
And what kind of world
He wrote:
00:07:40
are we leaving behind?
He wrote:
00:07:42
Those are the central questions
He wrote:
00:07:43
behind Book of Extinction.
He wrote:
00:07:53
So thank you for listening to
He wrote:
00:07:54
Making a Monster Extinction.
He wrote:
00:07:56
All of the stories I've told are
He wrote:
00:07:57
being added to book of extinction,
He wrote:
00:07:59
which is coming to Kickstarter
He wrote:
00:08:00
in November of this year.
He wrote:
00:08:01
We're up to 65 pages and it's starting
He wrote:
00:08:04
to look like a real book now, but
He wrote:
00:08:06
if you want to get your hands on the
He wrote:
00:08:07
first three monsters, the thylacine
He wrote:
00:08:09
the great auk and the passenger pigeon,
He wrote:
00:08:11
you can get them right now by going
He wrote:
00:08:13
to scintilla.studio slash extinction.
He wrote:
00:08:16
That's S C I N T I L
He wrote:
00:08:18
L a.studio/extinction.
He wrote:
00:08:21
There, you can download a PDF
He wrote:
00:08:23
preview including those first three
He wrote:
00:08:24
monsters, and here's the cool part.
He wrote:
00:08:26
You can pay what you want for it,
He wrote:
00:08:28
and everything that we earn from this
He wrote:
00:08:30
preview will go to support the Center
He wrote:
00:08:31
for Biological Diversity, a legal and
He wrote:
00:08:34
media advocacy organization, working
He wrote:
00:08:36
on behalf of endangered species and
He wrote:
00:08:38
wild places in America and worldwide.
He wrote:
00:08:41
Extinction can be a tragic and
He wrote:
00:08:42
maudlin topic, but I believe that the
He wrote:
00:08:44
best antidote to despair is action.
He wrote:
00:08:48
And I wanted to give you a way to do that.
He wrote:
00:08:50
The conservationists and advocates at
He wrote:
00:08:52
the center are real life, solar punks,
He wrote:
00:08:55
and they're very inspiring to me.
He wrote:
00:08:56
And you might hear their voices on future
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:08:58
Extinction.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:01
So follow this podcast wherever you
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:02
happen to be listening and do me a
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:04
favor, write and review the podcast.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:06
If you've got a second or two.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:09
It seems like a small thing, but it
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:10
really does help new listeners discover
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:12
the show, helps this project grow
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:14
and gives it the momentum to bring
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:16
more of these stories into your ears.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:18
Every week.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:19
If you've listened this far,
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:20
then you can hit that little
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:21
heart icon on the Spotify player.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:23
It's a real gift to me and the
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:24
creators I do intend to feature.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:27
I'll be back next week with
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:28
a new extinction story.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:29
And as soon as I can, I'll be
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:30
bringing you a full episode on the
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:32
aurochs and the Carolina parakeet.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:34
So look forward to those and
00:00:00
Here's your extinction story
for the week:
00:00:01
dragon bones piled by
for the week:
00:00:04
the hundreds in caves all over Europe.
for the week:
00:00:16
Hello and welcome to Making a Monster:
for the week:
00:00:18
Extinction, the stories of extinct animals
for the week:
00:00:21
retold as Dungeons and dragons monsters.
for the week:
00:00:24
I'm Lucas Zellers I'm your host.
for the week:
00:00:26
And I'm gathering these stories into a
for the week:
00:00:28
bestiary called Book of Extinction coming
for the week:
00:00:31
to Kickstarter in November of 2020.
for the week:
00:00:33
This episode might be a little bit
for the week:
00:00:35
different than what you're used to.
for the week:
00:00:36
Making a Monster is the surprising
for the week:
00:00:38
history behind monsters written for
for the week:
00:00:41
Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:42
Extinction
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:45
was meant to show you how I'm going
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:47
through the process of mythologizing,
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:49
extinct animals for Dungeons and Dragons.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:51
My goal is highly-produced, highly-edited
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:54
interviews with experts on the
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:55
particular animals I'm working with.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:57
And I still plan to do episodes like that.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:00:59
I'm working on episodes for the
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:00
aurochs and the Carolina parakeet,
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:02
but if I want Book of Extinction to be
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:04
everything it can be, occasionally the
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:07
expert I'll be consulting is just me.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:10
In at least the case of the Florida
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:11
fairy shrimp, Book of Extinction may
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:13
contain the largest body of extant
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:15
literature on a given species.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:17
So I'm willing to claim that
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:18
title, at least in so far
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:20
as the podcast requires it.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:22
And as an expert, I believe I have
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:23
a unique point to make about the
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:25
intersection of conservation in D
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:27
and D and digging up dragon bones.
RPGs, and Making a Monster:
00:01:30
The monster manual has a hierarchy
of bears:
00:01:32
black bear brown
of bears:
00:01:34
bear, polar bear and cave bear.
of bears:
00:01:36
The last is just the polar bear,
of bears:
00:01:38
but with dark vision, but in
of bears:
00:01:40
true "Making a Monster" style,
of bears:
00:01:41
there's way more to it than that.
of bears:
00:01:44
Over the last month I've been working
of bears:
00:01:45
on Pleistocene megafauna, giant animals
of bears:
00:01:48
gone extinct in the geological epic
of bears:
00:01:50
previous to the one in which we live.
of bears:
00:01:52
These are the original dire creatures
of bears:
00:01:54
like dire wolves and yes, cave bears,
of bears:
00:01:57
the oversized animals who lived
of bears:
00:01:59
before the current geological era.
of bears:
00:02:02
And at first I thought doing this
of bears:
00:02:04
work would detract from my point,
of bears:
00:02:07
which is the urgent and tragic
of bears:
00:02:09
loss of a mind-boggling amount of
of bears:
00:02:12
biodiversity within your lifetime.
of bears:
00:02:14
And time does create a psychological
of bears:
00:02:16
distance from the problem, so that the
of bears:
00:02:18
extinction of the giant ground sloths
of bears:
00:02:20
or wooly mammoth, it doesn't cause
of bears:
00:02:21
nearly the level of emotional turmoil
of bears:
00:02:24
as that of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
of bears:
00:02:26
But I think there's another point to
of bears:
00:02:27
be made by embracing that timescale.
of bears:
00:02:30
We don't get good fantasy literature
of bears:
00:02:33
without a world packed with biodiversity,
of bears:
00:02:36
and I can use dragon bones to prove it.
of bears:
00:02:38
From Cyclops to Godzilla, to
of bears:
00:02:40
jaws, giant creatures form the
of bears:
00:02:42
backbone of the monster ecosystem.
of bears:
00:02:44
In fact, one of the many meanings of
of bears:
00:02:45
the word monster is "huge" because at
of bears:
00:02:48
a certain point, sheer size is enough
of bears:
00:02:50
to recontextualize a human's perceived
of bears:
00:02:53
place in the food chain from predator.
of bears:
00:02:56
Or perhaps to paramecium, a creature
of bears:
00:02:59
so comparatively small, it has beneath
of bears:
00:03:02
the notice of the food chain entirely.
of bears:
00:03:04
And it's no coincidence that the fiction
of bears:
00:03:06
in Appendix N, the works that inspired
of bears:
00:03:08
Dungeons and Dragons, was largely written
of bears:
00:03:11
against the backdrop of the natural
of bears:
00:03:13
history boom of the late 18 hundreds when
of bears:
00:03:16
natural historians, fossil collectors,
of bears:
00:03:18
and archeologists inspired the"gentleman
of bears:
00:03:20
explorer" archetype that would later
of bears:
00:03:22
be personified in Indiana Jones.
of bears:
00:03:25
In a lot of cases, these
of bears:
00:03:26
gentlemen explorers were looking
of bears:
00:03:28
at the fossils of megafauna.
of bears:
00:03:31
We've talked about Cyclops skulls in Crete
of bears:
00:03:33
and Griffin bones in the Gobi desert.
of bears:
00:03:35
And although I have heard of objections
of bears:
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to those examples, they do illustrate
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the turn of natural history from fantasy
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to fact to extinction, and dragon bones
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are the fulcrum on which it happened.
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In the 16 and 17 hundreds, the bones
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of cave bears were discovered in
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droves, in caves all over Europe.
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The scientific discourse of the
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day argued over whether they
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belonged to apes, candids fields,
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or even dragons or unicorns.
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And as they were drawn in the historical
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journals at the time, they were often
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called, in all seriousness, dragon bones.
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Some examples are “De draconum
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Carpathicorum cavernis” by P.J.
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Hain from 1672 and “Antra
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draconum Liptovensis” by F.
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Brückmann from 1739.
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It wasn't until 1794 that German anatomist
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Johann Christian Rosenmüller became the
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first to publish a description of the
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creature under the name Ursus spelaeus,
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or cave bear, from a skull found in
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the Gaillenreuth caves in Bavaria.
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Large deposits of cave bear bones are
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typically found together leading to
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speculation as to whether they lodged
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in the caves year round, lived and
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died in family groups, or simply found
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themselves dying in the same places
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over tens of thousands of years.
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Rosenmüller, however, still ascribed a
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certain myth of quality to the species.
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If a hundred thousand dog
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skulls found in an Egyptian cave proved
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that these animals were considered
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sacred, I see nothing implausible in the
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idea that our bear bones were similarly
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brought into the caves by human hands
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and that they should be considered the
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remnants or proof of a pagan reverence."
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With Rosenmüller and others
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like him, "dragon" fell away
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to be replaced by "bear."
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Wooly mammoths followed
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a similar trajectory.
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The first Mastodon bones to be discovered,
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or at least the first to be subjected
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to modern scientific scrutiny were
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discovered along the Ohio river in 1739.
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George QVA created his idea of espèces
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perdues, or lost species in 1796, largely
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as a result of decades of struggled by
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the scientific community in Europe to
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resolve those bones with living species.
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This was the first example of
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extinction as a scientific idea,
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and the beginning of paleontology.
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Barely a generation later, Darwin
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discovered the bones of megafauna like
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Macrauchenia or the so-called long
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llama - look it up, it's ridiculous
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- during the voyage of the Beagle in 1834.
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Alfred Russell Wallace wrote in 1837
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that " we live in a zoologically
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impoverished world from which all of
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the hugest and fiercest and strangest
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forms of life have recently disappeared."
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And this is the backdrop
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against which the fantasy we're
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enjoying in D and D was created.
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HP Lovecraft's invention of cosmic horror
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started with his short story "Dagon"
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in 1910, when the concept of time on a
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geological scale made mankind feel smaller
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and more insignificant than he ever had.
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J R R Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings
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in 1937 in the wake of World War II,
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when much of Europe had been grounded
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to mud under tank treads and his fantasy
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picture to spiraling descent to a less
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awesome, less cool, less magical world.
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Middle Earth, he supposed, was
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our earth, but already ancient and
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forgotten before the founding of Rome
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and Middle Earth itself was a palid
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echo of far more magical ages past.
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This was a genre suffused with nostalgia
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and starting in 1974 D and D coded the
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work of these fantasy authors into its
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game mechanics, filling ancient caves,
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and tombs and ruins with dinosaurs,
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cave, bears, dire wolves, and dragons,
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the echoes of an older Wilder world.
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In other words, extinction
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is part of the DNA of DND.
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And if we're living through the sixth mass
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extinction as author Elizabeth Kolbert
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and others have posited, then what kind
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of fantasy are we setting up to tell?
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Is this Middle Earth?
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Are we the elves passing
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away into the west?
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And what kind of world
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are we leaving behind?
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Those are the central questions
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behind Book of Extinction.
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So thank you for listening to
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00:07:54
Making a Monster Extinction.
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00:07:56
All of the stories I've told are
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00:07:57
being added to book of extinction,
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which is coming to Kickstarter
He wrote:
00:08:00
in November of this year.
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We're up to 65 pages and it's starting
He wrote:
00:08:04
to look like a real book now, but
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00:08:06
if you want to get your hands on the
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00:08:07
first three monsters, the thylacine
He wrote:
00:08:09
the great auk and the passenger pigeon,
He wrote:
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you can get them right now by going
He wrote:
00:08:13
to scintilla.studio slash extinction.
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00:08:16
That's S C I N T I L
He wrote:
00:08:18
L a.studio/extinction.
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There, you can download a PDF
He wrote:
00:08:23
preview including those first three
He wrote:
00:08:24
monsters, and here's the cool part.
He wrote:
00:08:26
You can pay what you want for it,
He wrote:
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and everything that we earn from this
He wrote:
00:08:30
preview will go to support the Center
He wrote:
00:08:31
for Biological Diversity, a legal and
He wrote:
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media advocacy organization, working
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00:08:36
on behalf of endangered species and
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wild places in America and worldwide.
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Extinction can be a tragic and
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maudlin topic, but I believe that the
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best antidote to despair is action.
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00:08:48
And I wanted to give you a way to do that.
He wrote:
00:08:50
The conservationists and advocates at
He wrote:
00:08:52
the center are real life, solar punks,
He wrote:
00:08:55
and they're very inspiring to me.
He wrote:
00:08:56
And you might hear their voices on future
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:08:58
Extinction.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:01
So follow this podcast wherever you
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:02
happen to be listening and do me a
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:04
favor, write and review the podcast.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:06
If you've got a second or two.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:09
It seems like a small thing, but it
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:10
really does help new listeners discover
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:12
the show, helps this project grow
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:14
and gives it the momentum to bring
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:16
more of these stories into your ears.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:18
Every week.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:19
If you've listened this far,
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:20
then you can hit that little
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:21
heart icon on the Spotify player.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:23
It's a real gift to me and the
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:24
creators I do intend to feature.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:27
I'll be back next week with
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:28
a new extinction story.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:29
And as soon as I can, I'll be
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:30
bringing you a full episode on the
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:32
aurochs and the Carolina parakeet.
episodes of Making a Monster:
00:09:34
So look forward to those and
