Terrible Lizards

A short extract from a live we did back in 2021 about these two new #spinosaur species: Riparovenator and Ceratosuchops.

If you want to find out more about these animals please listen to the free full episode on youtube: https://youtu.be/jO6gyw-onBY?si=qHQ6oJ0wnqxJAaX- or find 'TLS05E01 Riparovenator and Ceratosuchops' on your podcast feed. https://terriblelizards.libsyn.com/tls05e01-riparovenator-and-ceratosuchops

Terrible Lizards a podcast about #dinosaurs with Dr Dave Hone and Iszi Lawrence. It is released on the last wednesday of the month and there is a large back catalogue. 

Thanks to our wonderful Patrons we are planning video as well as audio versions of the podcast from now on! Just as we have for the Bonus Episodes. (N.B. Sometimes video may not be possible but we are hoping it will be! We are still a two-man-with-occasional-help-from-Simon band. )

If you want to watch this podcast rather than just listen head to iszitube: https://youtu.be/5w83FHoFU7Q

We will also be releasing the Bonus Episode on the second Wednesday of the month so that the content is a little more spaced out.

The biggest news in palaeontology this year dropped just in time for us to miss it with last month's episode but we're giving it the full hour this time. The idea that there's a miniature tyrannosaur running around in the Late Cretaceous alongside Tyrannosaurus has long been a contentious one, with most palaeontologists favouring the interpretation that the specimens represented juvenile rexes. But a huge new paper presents a brand-new specimen that shows various unique features and importantly, is an adult animal while still small. Join Dave and Iszi into a deep dive on the history of these ideas...

Dave has *another* book coming out and so of course he wants to talk about it a bit on the pod. Happily for the listeners, this time out he has a coauthor and so we get to have palaeontologist and palaeoartist Mark Witton on as well so that Iszi has some support for once. The new book is on that most controversial of dinosaurs, Spinosaurus and its allies, and what we know, and what we don't, and where the research is taking us. Given its insane media profile and the attention it attracts, as well as the back-and-forth in...

Long time listener and second time guest Darren Naish joins us to talk about marine reptiles. While Darren is best known for his work on dinosaurs and pterosaurs, he has fingers in a huge number of vertebrate pies, and he has a new edition out of his book on all of the Mesozoic monsters that lived in the sea. So, strap in for an incredibly being tour of mosasaurs, mesosaurs, placodonts, ichthyosaurs, plesionsaurs, thalattosaurs, thalattosuchians and we even manage to sneak in a reference to certain allegedly semi-aquatic large theropods.

Support us on www.patreon.c...

Disaster with the recording this episode! Sorry if it is hard to hear in places we were forced to use the emergency back up! Disaster with the recording this episode! Sorry if it is hard to hear in places we were forced to use the emergency back up! 

Listeners may remember that Dave went to Utah a couple of years back to try and help with a sauropod excavation. That trip was with sauropod supremo Matt Wedel who was recently in London, and so we scooped him up to get him onto Terrible Lizards. Unfortunately there were r...

Pterosaur soft tissues

It's a double new paper episode this time as thanks to the magic of almost random review and publication times, Dave has two papers out on the same subject in the same month! So strap in for some absolute minutiae on pterosaur hands, feet, scales, and the oddly overlooked wing membrane that sits between their legs. Pterosaurs in general are not very common fossils and so it should be no surprise that we don't have a great many examples of their soft tissues, from skin, to beaks and claws and other bits. So, having...

June, rather incredibly, marks the fifth anniversary of the launch of series 1, episode 1 of the podcast. As a rather fortuitous bit of timing, we were invited to host a live Terrible Lizards event at Lyme Regis (home of Mary Anning) for their Fossil Festival. We could hardly say 'no', so here is a recording of that hour long session where we fielded a ton of questions from the audience (that was overflowing out of the room!) and even included a few professional palaeontologists in the audience to put a bit more pressure on Dave's answers. A good time was...

Curating Dinosaurs II Curate Harder! On this episode we welcome Jordan Mallon, a long-time collaborator of Dave's and, against the odds, a long-time listener of Terrible Lizards. While we talk about Jordan's research and career in this pod, and his work on dinosaur sizes and ecology, this one also serves as something of a sequel to our previous episode. That's because he is also the curator of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, the national natural history museum of Canada. It's a much more typical collection than the one we talked about last time out, so join us...

We have talked about all manner of fundamentals of research on fossils over the years here on Terrible Lizards, including finding and excavating fossils, writing and publishing papers, reconstructing animals from fragments and more. But we've somehow really glossed over the role of museums that store and protect fossils and make them available for research, as well as carrying out their own work too. In order to correct this oversight, today we welcome ReBecca Hunt-Foster who is the curator on the legendary Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. Here she takes us through her background and research and the challenges...

This time out we are joined by palaeontologist Andre Rowe to talk about his research into the skulls of giant carnivorous dinosaurs and what this means for their biology. This turns into a debate with Dave about how evidence can be interpreted in different ways and trying to piece together the often limited data we have to work out what these animals might have been doing. Though with her media-trained eye, Iszi wants to badge this as a heated fight over just how awesome Tyrannosaurus was (see previous episode for details). Andre takes us through the process of scanning s...

This month's episode is a sort of follow-up to that from the start of the year, looking at some of the more problematic areas of dinosaurs and palaeontology when it comes to online discussions. There is an online fandom of dinosaurs that treats them like monsters or superheroes, and can fixate on what is and isn't the biggest / strongest / fastest dinosaur and who could beat up who. Joining us to discuss this is Dr Mike O'Sullivan, a palaeontologist and self-professed member of several fandoms. We talk about how this community works and what it means for scientists talking about...

See Patreon for Youtube video.

Series 11, eh? We don't think we, or anyone else reading this, expected that.

Nor did we expect issues with Dave's microphone (apologies)… Still, here we are and with more dinosaur goodness coming. We say 'coming' because this episode is far less about dinosaurs and pterosaurs than usual, but more about the mechanisms of science. In this case it's really about Dave's experiences as a science communicator and how things like this are increasingly important for science, but in the UK at least, this can be monitored and measured and so having ways to do that becomes important. An...

Thanks to Kyle, Tom, Ashley, Aurous, Wayne, Paleo Pete, Tyler, Will, Israel, Charles, James and Edward

Support us on patreon.com/terriblelizards and be rewarded with extra content!

We are planning on going live on isztube at 16:00 GMT on Friday 26th December. (Time may change)

Skiphosoura – the pterosaur of the gaps

So last week Dave had a new paper out and this time it's a new pterosaur, named Skiphosoura bavarica (the sword tail of Bavaria) and it is both really interesting and really important for pterosaur research. It tells us a lot about the key transition of pterosaurs from the early forms through to the derived pterodactyloids, which has been a major subject of research for the last 15 years. Skiphosaura also shows us that the Scottish Dearc (that we covered a couple of years back) is much more important than previously thought an...

Dave has a new book out next week and it's the culmination of several years work. Longtime listeners will know the major themes already from the episode title – a lot of stuff in the literature on dinosaur behaviour is badly framed, overstated, contradictory or contains major over extrapolations. Happily, you can listen to all of this again as Dave goes into all of this and more, what's in the book, who it's aimed at and what he's trying to achieve with it. It's not out till next week, so this is a bit a of a sneak preview, even if...

Last month we mentioned that legendary palaeontologist Mike Benton had announced his retirement, but with a few quick emails, Dave was able to grab him for this month's episode. So, join Dave and Iszi as we have celebration of Mike's career and take him through his early interest in palaeontology, how he got his PhD, the death of Al Romer, rhynchosaurs, the rise of dinosaurs, mass extinctions, fieldwork in Russia, endless books, and his work on the colours of dinosaurs. It's a whirlwind dash through an entire so strap in for the deluge of facts and fables and enjoy. A...

We've made plenty of jokes over the years about the general lack of sauropod skulls and the frustrations of trying to work out what these animals were doing when it came to things like feeding when the most important bit is missing. Happily, this week we are joined by David Button who has done a ton of work in this area and is happy to chat to Dave and Iszi about how their heads and teeth were built and what this can (and can't) tell us about their diets and habits. While we have him trapped, we also quiz...

The spinosaurs get all the love (OK, mostly hate) and attention when it comes to the megalosauroids, but they are but one weird branch of this group of theropods. Sadly they have a similar problem to the spinosaurs in that there are annoyingly few fossils of them, and there's very few people working on these animals. Happily, today Iszi and Dave are joined by one of them, Cass Morrison who is doing his PhD on these unusual animals and is here to give us the lowdown on their evolution, diversity, biogeography and ecology and generally fill us in on...

We have touched on the extinction that killed the dinosaurs plenty of times before over the various seasons of TL, but we have never really tackled it fully before. Finally, we are joined by a real expert on this subject, Melanie During who is in the process of finishing her PhD on this very subject. So prepare for not actually really any dinosaurs, but quite a lot of geology and geochemistry to learn how the impact was so utterly devastating and how we know. It turns out that they never stood a chance and that the damage was even...

Live edited recording at The Oxford Fire Station on 25/05/2024.

Live Anniversary Q&A for the Oxford Podcast Festival

It's the 4th (!) anniversary of the launch of Terrible Lizards and this came at a perfect time as Iszi and Dave got invited to do the recent podcast festival in Oxford. So, while we have our usual end of series Q&QA episode in a few months, here we have an early one with questions from out live audience. We thought that was more appropriate then for us to just rabbit on (or dinosaur on...

We all know about how common dinosaurs can be in places like Europe, Argentina, the US, China and Mongolia, but they have turned up in dozens and dozens of countries and on every continent, including Antarctica. Unsurprisingly, it's a very tough place to work, it costs a ton of money, and there are not that many dinosaurs to be found, but they are there. Today we are joined by Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum who has spent multiple field seasons on the chilly continent and he tells us about lush forests, tiny dinosaurs, ancient birds and modern penguins...

Dinosaur footprints with Peter Falkingham

Footprints and trackways are an amazing source of data on how dinosaurs moved and what they did. But interpreting these can be a real nightmare since it's hard to work out the interactions between a moving foot and the actual surface, or work out which species might have made which tracks. At the forefront of solving some of these issues and working out what we can and can't meaningfully day about dinosaur tracks is Professor Peter Falkingham at Liverpool John Moores University. So today he joins us to talk about chasing birds...

We don't often delve into the Triassic since Dave is not well versed in that time and the animals that were around then, but there were some very important animals that we've unduly overlooked across the last 9 series. Happily, today we can redress a large part of that with this episode on Coelophysis. Known from hundreds of skeletons, it's one of the best represented dinosaurs in the fossil record and yet it remains criminally understudied despite the available data. As one of the earliest theropods, it is perhaps archetypal of the lineages came later, but as so often happens...

The year 2024 is the 200th anniversary of the naming of the first dinosaur, Megalosaurus. While 'Dinosauria' wouldn't be coined till 1842 (so we have a fair wait before that anniversary kicks in, and doubtless will be marked with another major celebration) it is a great time to take stock of where we are in dinosaur palaeontology. So obviously a good idea is this, that the Natural History Museum in London organised a major international meeting for this, and Dave went along. So in this episode of our (yes, really) 12th series, Dave reports back to Iszi on what was going...

Stegosaurus with Dr Susie Maidment

THE TIME HAS COME. For ages Dave, for very Dave reasons refused to cover one dinosaur. Now, we find out all about it with an expert in the field. 

Last year's mystery xmas present to all of you who support us now for everyone. Patrons will get an video bonus episode.

You can follow Susie Maidment https://twitter.com/Tweetisaurus.

Longtime listeners will be familiar with the fact that Dave has spent a lot of time looking at and working on various bites marks on dinosaur bones left by the carnivorous theropods. These can tell us an enormous amount about who was doing what to whom and what it can mean for the ecology and behaviour of both the herbivores that were bitten and the carnivores that bit them. However, to date work on this for dinosaurs has almost exclusively focused on the tyrannosaurs with their tendency to bite on bones. But they weren't the only ones doing this...

Dinosaur documentaries are booming again so it's time to blow the lid on some insider secrets of how these get made. (Alternative description: Dave complains for an hour about being messed around by TV companies and ignored by the very producers and directors who hired him for his advice on the models and scrip they are working on). Dave and Iszi share their stories from behind and in front of the camera and the steps that go into getting a dinosaur doc made and what goes on behind the scenes.

Links:

Dave has a...

Odd ideas in palaeontology

Palaeontology as a scientific field is beyond popular in the media and with the public but that also means it draws a lot of attention from those with, let's call them, questionable ideas. And no group gets more of this stuff than the dinosaurs and the animals of the Mesozoic. This time out, Iszi and Dave discuss the world of paleo cranks, people with outlandish and non-scientific ideas who present them as fully formed research. Rarely does any of this make it into the mainstream, but on occasion it leaks in and this...

It is the mega questions episode! Due to Dave etch-a-sketching everything in his life, making things like access to the internet an unusual hurdle, we decided to do answer as many questions we could in an hour. We didn't manage to run out of questions. Big thanks to Trisha, Sophia, Matt, Roy, Harris, Marcus, Noah, Jay, Aurous Azhdarchid, Rachel, Richard and David. 

The mystery of allosaurus arms is still unanswered. It is sad. 

Do check out Dave's blog and books: https://www.davehone.co.uk/outreach/books/

Also check out all that Iszi do...

Petrodactyle and Pterosaur Growth

Dave has had a productive year for pterosaur papers and now two are out in quick succession(!) so get ready for a double-whammy podcast of him rolling his eyes when Iszi mentions flappy-flaps and he's trying to be serious. Anyway, first up is a new large pterosaur from southern Germany with a massive bony crest on its head. The specimen is owned by the Lauer Foundation and Dave talks about them and their work with palaeontologists to bring some new fossils to science. From there we move onto a new paper on pterosaur...

This week a 'what I did on my holidays' from Dave, though it wasn't a holiday and he dug a hole in Utah and looked at a ton of museums and quarries. The Morrison Formation is a legendary slice of dinosaur history with a huge number of famous sites, important fossils, and features animals like Diplodocus, Allosaurus and Stegosaurus. After far too many years, Dave finally made it out to some of the best known and most important sites and in this episode reports back to Iszi on what he saw and learned and talks about digging a large...

Pterosaurs flew! No big shock there, but obviously flight places major constraints and selective pressures on the skeleton. This should mean all pterosaurs have standard, not-that-varied flight anatomy (in the same way most walking animals have similar leg anatomy).  It turns out an absolutely critical part of the pterosaur is both basically all but unstudied and wildly variable, yes, it's the sternum.

Dr Dave Hone (hello!) has just published a huge paper cataloguing and describing basically every sternum for every pterosaur out there and Iszi (hello!) gets to the bottom of why this is important for science a...

Sauropods in general don't get the love they should on Terrible Lizards because, well, Dave doesn't know that much about them (and everyone knows theropods are best anyways). However, there's more than a couple that are both well-known enough in general and Dave know a bit about them that we can talk for a decent amount of time. Step forward the long-neckiest of the long-necked sauropods, Mamenchisaurus. This odd (even by sauropod standards) animal is found in a number of different sites from the Middle Jurassic of China but has not had all the research attention that it should...

This is an area we have definitely covered before but it's one of perennial interest and keeps coming round with new studies, how can we tell what ancient animals were doing with weird features. More specifically, how do claims that this feather, or sail, or frill, or claw were used as a display feature stack up? Can we really work out what dinosaurs are doing with features like this and how can we test such ideas with such limited data when they've been gone for 65 million years? Well happily Dave is going to talk through some more of it...

Dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals have been a hit in the media for about as long as palaeontologists have been digging them up. But even in the modern age of digital communication, there is almost always an intermediate (and often several) between a palaeontologist and their audience when it comes to communicating about these animals. Whether it's journalists, reporters, documentaries and print, radio or TV, what you say, suggest, demand, advise or write as a palaeontologist often goes through editors, subeditors, producers, directors, animators and whole panels of discussion and you have very little control over it. That means...

We are into series 9 now and still going, though starting with this episode, in a bid to be more consistent and less panicked about completing series and the gaps between, we're moving to being a monthly podcast. So no end in sight yet for all you dinosaur (and sometimes pterosaur) lovers. 

Anyway, we're kicking off by talking about arguably the most common way that people encounter dinosaurs and that's museum displays and exhibits. Dave and Iszi talk through how these things get set up, the constraints and compromises necessary and how to try and cater for all. U...

The end of the series is our favourite - we answer your questions! 

A massive thank you to our patrons who contributed the questions. Go to patreon.com/terriblelizardds for a bonus episode out next week.

Do keep in touch #terriblelizards @iszi_lawrence @dave_hone

Buy Dave's Book - How fast did T.Rex Run/The future of Dinosaurs.

Look out for iszi's childrens books: Blackbeard's Treasure is out in January with Bloomsbury.

RAWR!

Dinosaur jaws and feeding with Ali Nabavizadeh

We started with theropod feeding but what about the herbivores? This week we're joined by Ali Nabavizadeh who specialises in the jaws and teeth of the ornithischian dinosaurs and how these work and how this plays into their feeding ecology. This gives Dave ample opportunity to ask vexing questions about their jaws and elicit the same response he gives whenever asked about T. rex being a scavenger, but it does mean that Ali talks about how the hadrosaur dental battery works, how similar they are to ceratopsians and whether or...

Although we looked at some biomechanical work earlier this series, this time we get into the real depths of how dinosaurs moved. John Hutchinson joins us with tales of galloping crocodiles and white dots on elephants in an effort to understand how these animals move as part of his work on dinosaur locomotion. We talk about how Jurassic Park cheated to make the T. rex look faster and just how you can build a model of such huge animals from their bones and how reliable such an exercise really is. We also return to the subject of disability in...

Some dinosaurs haven't had enough love on here (though some get what they deserve, I mean, who even likes Stegosaurus?) and chief among them are the sauropodomorphs. However, this week we make a belated and desperate attempt to correct that by talking to Paul Upchurch for an hour. One of the world's leading experts on these herbivorous giants, he takes us through a whole bunch of his research history from obscure British sauropods to the long necked mamenchisaurs and other oddities. We also talk about disability in science as Paul has a severe visual impairment and he talks about...

Crystal Palace Dinosaurs with Mark Witton

We have covered palaeoart here from time to time and the process of producing images of dinosaurs and other prehistoric life (as both technical illustrations and more creative life reconstructions) but one of the most important of these gets far too little attention. In the 1800s life size replicas of dozens of ancient animals were put up in a park in south London and are still there today. Palaeontologist and palaeoartist Mark Witton joins us to talk about this history, their importance, why they are falling apart and the efforts to...

British iguanodontids with Joe Bonsor

We have touched on Iguanodon before as one of the earliest named dinosaurs and an animal with some interesting relatives and famously spiky thumbs but they never really got the attention that they should have done (from us at least). Enter Joe Bonsor who is finishing off his PhD on these very animals and trying to sort out the utter mess that is the taxonomy of the iguanodontians in the UK. We dive into this with some surprising conclusions and interesting news about what Joe has found (no spoilers, you'll have to...

Following up on the previous series where pterosaurs dominated, we had to sneak in a bit more of them here. Dave has always had an aversion to the toothy ornithocheirids as while so many of them turn up in 3D (unlike pretty much all other pterosaurs) they also have a horrific taxonomic history and they are a nightmare to deal with. Happily, Taissa Rodrigues is here to talk all about them and she has done more than anyone else to sort out these species and their relationships in recent years as well as working on their biology and that...

Theropod jaw biomechanics with Manabu Sakamoto

We are still going! We are back and like last series, we're taking a bit of a different tack to the previous ones and here we are having experts on every episode in a desperate attempt to make up for Dave's quite profound lack of knowledge in numerous areas of dinosaur biology. With that in mind, we start off with Manabu Sakamoto who works primarily on the biomechanics of theropods jaws – what they could and couldn't bite and how hard and what this means. This is obviously of huge importance for fi...

The new series will start on the 12th of October! If you would like to support us and get our bonus episodes sooner - please consider becoming a patron on patreon.com/terriblelizards.

Pterosaurs living during the Jurassic period were thought to have been relatively small, but a stunning new skeleton shows otherwise. Natalia Jagielska has helped describe the new find in Scotland which has changed our understanding of Flappy Flaps. 

Natalia Jagielska is a PhD in Palaeontology at University of Edinburgh Studying Jurassic Pterosaurs and a Illustrator Dino Consultant for @paleopines

(Spoilers) T...

If you could give the paleontology field NASA's budget what would you do with it? Ever used laser-stimulated fluorescence? How do pterosaurs sleep? Was was Irritator challengeri? When did birds wiggle their hips? How can you tell if species shared an environment? Is there any evidence for intra-specific fighting amongst Pterosaurs?

PLUS MORE!

We've gotten a plethora of questions this series - Dr David Hone tries to get through them all - with a little help from Iszi Lawrence.

Thank you to our Patrons! Join them patreon.com/terriblelizards

Dave's Book...

How science works

In another in the increasingly long line of topics we probably should have covered quite a few series ago, this week we are addressing some of the fundamentals of what science actually IS. How does it all work really, and what is the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, and how confident can we be about dinosaur research when so much is unknown and difficult to put to the test? All this and some other bits (that I can't really remember because we recorded this 2 months ago and I've not listened to the...

This is perhaps the question that gets asked the most and so it's time to address it properly (well, we are 7 seasons in, we were going to get to it sooner or later). So this week we are talking about routes into palaeontology and all that involves, from 'classic' academic roles as a researcher at a university or museum, though to science writers, fossil preparators, illustrators and photographers and all manner of other palaeontologically related jobs and careers. As well as all that, we'll talk about those people who are actively engaged in research and publications without holding jobs...

Perhaps the best known, and most often misrepresented, pterosaur is Pteranodon. It has become the archetypal pterosaur and is always in the background of every Mesozoic scene (especially with T. rex) to let you know that the pterosaurs are out there. But aside from being quite big and having a funky headcrest (like all the best pterosaurs do) it's an animal that is constantly overlooked even though we have more than a thousand specimens of it to work from. That's an odd combination so it's time that Pteranodon got some love and we took a look at one of...

From the very biggest to the smallest, anurognathids were the little fuzz balls of pterosaurs that barely reached 1m wingspan as adults. They were bat-like hawkers, catching insects on the wing with their giant gapes and tiny teeth. Although rare, like the azhdarchids we have recently had a flurry of finds and accompanying research on them which means that they have gone from one of the least to one of the best understood pterosaurs in short order. Better yet, they include several specimens with incredible preservation of the wings and pycnofibers (?feathers?) so they tell us a lot about...

If most people know one thing about pterosaurs (well one correct thing rather than them being flying dinosaurs or bird ancestors) it's that they got really big. At the top end they hit over 10 m in wingspan and probably over 250 kg, massively bigger than the largest flying birds (living or extinct). And all the real giants belonged to one group – the azhdarchids. These long-necked monsters were a real mystery for decades but a flurry of discoveries and research in recent years means we now have an excellent understanding of their ecology and weird proportions.

Links:

It's hopefully not a surprise at this point that pterosaurs were fully powered and capable fliers and that they were not passive gliders or could only get airbourne through jumping off of cliffs. While we do talk about flight here, it's not like that is all pterosaurs could do so we cover their abilities on the ground (and in trees) and take-off, and then whether or not they could dive, swim and how they floated in the water. It's a whole cornucopia of pterosaur locomotion through three states of matter (no known plasma locomotion yet) so listen in and...

We've run out of dinosaurs (stega what now?) and so thanks to popular demand (well, Dave's demand) we're doing (almost) an entire series on pterosaurs!

Everyone's favourite Mesozoic flying reptiles (well, Dave's favourite) are getting a series to spread their wings. We start with the namesake of the clade, Pterodactylus itself and something of the early history of pterosaur discoveries and research and the unusual interpretations that were floated for these incredibly strange (then and now) animals. 

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Links:

The original episode we d...

This is a bonus episode previously released to our patrons on Patreon. If you want to support us, and get more content please visit patreon.com/terriblelizards. 

Terrible Lizards is, at least in theory, there for dinosaur lovers of all ages and backgrounds, but podcasting is just one way to communicate with the public about dinosaurs and it's probably not the first one you would think of. Joining us this time out is Ashley Hall, a science communicator and outreach officer at the famous Museum of the Rockies and someone who specialises in talking to the public a...

The Questions episode!

Untapped fossils, bad evolution, therapod bites, spaniel ears, courtship dances and MORE!

Big thanks to everyone who sent in their questions.

Martin, Glen, Mathew, Sam, Kim (https://kimralls.co.uk/), Gutza, Robbie, John, Marlon aaaand John.

We will be back in the summer - please do support us on Patreon, where we will be adding some extra content. Also BUY DAVE'S BOOK - The Future of Dinosaurs or in the USA: How fast does a T-rex run? Aaaand it is available as an AUDIOBOOK on audible, so no...

The Future of Dinosaurs

No guest this week as Dave manages to ramble on for an entire hour on his own again (well, Ok, Iszi helps him ramble). To be fair, he's got a new book out and since its 80 000 words of dinosaur ideas we thought we should cover it and it was never easily going to fit into 40 minutes. What's this amazing [citation needed] new book on? Well it's all about what we don't know about dinosaurs and the gaps in our knowledge – what we might work out soon (or at least one day in the fu...

Alvarezsaurs

From a micro dinosaur to the very smallest, this time out we're looking at the little alvarezsaurs which include the smallest of the non-avian dinosaurs and with several species that were the tiniest yet found in the Mesozoic. Dr Steve Cross joins us to analyse a popular work of dinosaur fiction.

Dr Steve Cross is a an incredible consultant and STEM communicator. Find him, follow him, employ him. http://www.scienceshowoff.org/

Links:

A blogpost about Linhenykus: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/linhenykus-the-very-model-of-modern-mongol-errr-alverasaur/

And one on the (p...

Evolution

In one way it's more than a bit late to only talk about evolution when we are 6 and a bit series into Terrible Lizards and this should arguably have been episode 1 in series 1 but here we are. Evolution is the foundation for modern biology and the understanding that species and lineages change over time and also how that happens allows us to interpret those changes patterns. While we barely mention dinosaurs this episode and while we also soon go off the rails and end up talking about some odd bits of evolution and even (shudder) genetics...

We've already mentioned Gigantoraptor this series so let's get down to the other end of the etymological scale and look at Microraptor. This little dromaeosaur was one of the first fully feathered dinosaurs to be found and is famous for its 'four wings' with long flight feathers on the legs and the arms. There's loads of good specimens of this animal so it is perhaps no surprise that there has been lots of research on it and, by extension, lots of arguments about its lifestyle, evolution and especially, how well it could fly. 

This week we are j...

At various times in previous episodes we have talked about what various dinosaurs ate and bits of data about diet, but this time we're going to take a more systematic look at how palaeontologists work out the diet of ancient animals. We go through the obvious ones like sharp teeth and finding bits of stuff inside them to microscopic traces of damage on the enamel, the structure of teeth and elemental isotopes that linger for a hundred million years. All good clean fun (unless you are the dinosaur being shredded by a hungry carcharodontosaur). 

We don't have a...

Back to dinosaurs so you can relax (though the pterosaurs will return next series). This time out, we are going with the oviraptorosaurs - and note the long name, it's not just oviraptors we are covering. As is common, the one famous member of this group tends to hog the limelight and not everyone knows about the others even if these days Gigantoraptor tends to sneak in in the background. These feathered theropods are rather bird like but thanks to them (probably) largely being herbivorous they tend to get overlooked with the more exciting dromaeosaurs taking the spotlight away...

Series 6? That can't be right. Surely this is 3 or 4 or something, 5 at the outside. Blimey. Anyway, we are back and we have new episodes though we are cheating already by starting with a pterosaur and talking about the greatly underappreciated Rhamphorhynchus. As the only vaguely well-known long-tailed pterosaur it is shown in the background of every Jurassic dinosaur painting to give scale the sauropods no matter how far inland or on the wrong continent or time it may be. It is though, as usual, much more interesting than people give it credit for and it's very well studied and...

A slightly silly intro to series 6 of Terrible Lizards, a podcast about dinosaurs which will be starting on Wednesday 9th of February 2022. (The guest on this clip is Dr Steve Cross).

We talk to Yara Haridy who has just completed her PhD on the histology of dinosaurs and other reptiles.

On the podcast we normally just talk about whole bones and skeletons (or at least the bits of them that are preserved) but there is an enormous amount of information that is preserved in the fossilised cellular structures of these. Fossil bones are those that have turned to rock but that means that the original cellular structures are in there and these can reveal and whole host of information about the growth and physiology of ancient animals. Yara...

Are there dinosaurs on the moon? What are digs in Antarctica like? Dave Hone and iszi Lawrence answer your dinosaur Questions! At the end of each series Iszi and Dave trawl through all the comments and messages from our listeners. We answer questions from Elaine, Michelle, Lee, Hunter, Sabina, Phil, David,  Leo & Quantum Robin (Kristjan), Russell, Shuyi, Steve, and Craig! 

If you want to hear us answer more questions you can also find us on YouTube and you can watch Dave roll his eyes at Iszi's brilliant ideas.  https://www.youtube.com/c/iszitube

Find more...

With every big new paper or museum exhibition there will be artwork depicting dinosaurs as actual living animals, as well as all kinds of other representations of these animals be it pop-art or cartoons. Today we have a special with an extended chat to two artists who specialise in dinosaurs and make their living from producing images of these animals. They are Danielle Dufault who works for the Royal Ontario Museum and Natee Himmapaan who is an independent artist in London. We discuss the very concept of palaeoart and the roles of artists in communicating science to the public...

Way back in the mists of time (last year) we did a whole podcast on Triceratops, one of the most famous dinosaurs of all. But is Triceratops not all it seems and is it in fact just part of a growth series which results in the largest and oldest animals becoming another dinosaur entirely in Torosaurus? The answer is no, but the reasons why this was proposed and why it's not the case are interesting in themselves and so we give over this episode to the ideas of changing dinosaurs and what we know about this. Then we get...

We've covered one small, unadorned and under-rated herbivorous ornithischian already this series in Psittacosaurus and here's another one in the remarkable little heterodonotosaurs. Another set of animals for which we have some superb skeletons and lots of interesting features that are potentially very revealing about the evolution of dinosaurs in general (and ornithischians in particular) and yet they get very little love. As usual all the attention goes to the biggest dinosaurs, the carnivores and the showiest ones with big crests, but we here at Terrible Lizards want to stand up for the little fun dinos too, so here's...

Iszi is in Dave's house! We have talked many times about the fact that birds are dinosaurs and we've covered some of the modern evidence that links them together, but how did we get to this point? In this edition we look at the historical arguments for the origins of birds and how they went from a groups that had no obvious evolutionary home to some early flirtations with dinosaurs, places around the reptile tree and then eventually settled to their now familiar place. It covers a lot of odd ideas and the problems of limited data and Charles...

We have talked before about how large some of the giant sauropods were and how being big can really affect your biology, but just how do palaeontologists weight dinosaurs from incomplete skeletons and how accurate will these methods be? Well happily we have a podcast that will tackle those very questions and delve into the history and mystery of working out how heavy dinosaurs were, how we used to get it very wrong and why even now we are not that right. Joining us as a guest this time is F1 podcaster Spanners who, it turns out, is a...

It's time to give some love to some dinosaurs that don't get enough and pretty much top of that list needs to be Psittacosaurus. This (mostly) little dinosaur is one of the earlier ceratopsains but lacking the size, horns and frills of their more notable cousins, it's sadly all too easy to see why they get ignored. But that's a shame because as well as having some neat little features of their own (like giant cheek spikes), these animals are among the most common of any dinosaur. We have hundreds and hundreds of specimens in museums and in addition...

Riparovenator and Ceratosuchops – Chris Barker and Darren Naish

Just like the start of series 3, we are kicking off the new series with a special on a new research paper (of which Dave is one of the authors) which is out today! In it, two new, large, predatory dinosaurs from the UK are named and both are part of the spinosaur group! Obviously it's all very exciting, but to avoid things being too Dave-centric we have invited on two other palaeontologists from the paper, Chris Barker and Darren Naish. As a perfect example of the research process and sc...

Series 5 trailer with Dave Hone, Iszi Lawrence, Jay Foreman, Darren Naish, Suzy Buttress, I know dino, Bec Hill and Spanners! Series 5 starts on 29th September 2021.

Links:

www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

@iszi_lawrence

@dave_hone

facebook.com/terrriblelizardspodcast

An interview about Marine Reptiles with Keirsten Formso @formophology. To get more free bonus content FIRST become a Terrible Lizards Patron on patreon.com/terriblelizards

In the third series of Terrible Lizards we finally edged away from dinosaurs to cover pterosaurs, but in the Mesozoic, there were far more reptiles in the sea than in the air so we really need to do them too. Happily to this end we can welcome Kiersten Formoso from the University of Southern California who is working on her PhD about the transition back to the water by various reptiles from...

It is the final episode this series and as usual we are answering some of your dinosaur questions (as many as we could cram into an hour). A massive thank you to all our patrons on patreon - your support means everything to us. We are planning a series 5! We will be back in the Autumn. There will be a few mid season episodes dropped here and even more content on our patreon. Got to patreon.com/terriblelizards

Questions in were asked by: Chris (from Germany), Gildas (age 8), Edward (age 37), João Barbosa, Stephen Gatehouse, Gareth, Sarah G...

Dave Hone tells Iszi Lawrence about the early days of paleontology and the very first dinosaur discoveries in the UK. We cover the perpetually unlucky Gideon Mantell and the not especially nice Richard Owen (and Mary Anning pops up though she didn't really do dinosaurs). Dr Kiki Sandford then joins us and asks what clues there are in fossils to tell us how dinosaurs behave... and things get silly.

A link to an old blogpost of Dave's including photos of the original Megalosaurus jaw at Oxford

https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/more-of-megalosaurus/

A...

Following on from our last adventure into the realm of the very biggest dinosaurs, we now have a look at the other side of this issue which is that big dinosaurs started off very small. How do you get from a 5 kg hatchling to a 50 ton monster and what does that mean for how they lived and how palaeontologists identify adults and juveniles? Are there hundreds of 'new' dinosaur species that are just misidentified babies and can we tell? Then we are joined by out guest, comedian Alasdair Beckett-King who wants to ask perhaps the most pertinent question we've...

Perhaps the single most notable feature of dinosaurs is the quite extraordinary sizes that many of them achieved. We have talked before about some of the issues surrounding being big, but before now we have not tackled the most obvious question in all of this: what is the biggest dinosaur? Well as you may expect by now this isn't a simple question to answer and between fragmentary fossil remains, uncertain scaling and growth issues there is no easy answer, but we'll at least try. We are joined this time out by comedian Laura Lexx who has a question about...

This time out it is a group of dinosaurs very few people will have heard of or know very much about but they are a fascinating group of small, feathered theropods who have only been on the scene for around 20 years making them very much newcomers. The tongue-twistedly-named scansoriopterygidae are a bunch of fragmentary and bizarre animals from China and include some of the strangest dinosaurs known and absolutely deserve more attention. Moving on, our guest this week is biologist and author Dr Dani Rabaiotti and if you know anything about her work you may not be surprised to...

Just how reliable are research papers and what goes on to get them published and accepted in the scientific literature and, critically, are they reliable? We have talked many times on the pod about scientific papers but without ever discussing what these actually are and how they get published. It's an important aspect of science and especially with palaeontology given the huge mix of information available through museums, the media, and well, podcasts, so it's an area really worth discussing.

This week our guest is biologist and science communicator Simon Watt, who talks about the appearances of...

There's numerous illustrations and documentaries showing great herds of dinosaurs together and it is very common to come across the idea that various species (or entire groups like the hadrosaurs, ceratopsians and dromaeosaurs) fundamentally lived in groups. As usual though, this really oversimplifies a huge mess of extrapolations from limited fossil data and the complexities of social behaviour in living species. The perfect problem to solve in half an hour of a podcast. This time out we are joined by podcaster and science communicator George Hrab and general all-round science enthusiast. He wants to ask Dave a very speculative...

Harking back to Series 1 episode 1 (a whole year ago!) we return to the tyrannosaurs, but having devoted a whole hour to T. rex then it seemed appropriate that we should try and cover the other 30ish tyrannosaur species at some point. Rexy might be the first and foremost of all dinosaurs but has dozens of relatives that are plenty interesting too and help chart the 100 million year rise of this group from small, long armed, and little headed predators to the giant monster that people are most familiar with. Joining us for the new series if comedian Sooz Kempner...

Series 4 will be starting on Wednesday June 2nd.

You can also catch us going live on our 1 year anniversary at 8PM GMT on Iszitube on youtube and our facebook page (facebook.com/terriblelizardspodcast) and on Twitter.

Thank you to our patrons on Patreon who made this possible. Please go to patreon.com/terriblelizards 

Many groups of Mesozoic plants are still around today so the landscapes in which the dinosaurs lived would have looked at least vaguely familiar to anyone who might be (un)lucky enough to travel back in time 150 million years. Still, plants are typically rather squishier than dinosaur bones and so their fossils are often rare. In this episode we welcome Dr Susannah Lydon to the pod to tackle the subject of plants at the time of the dinosaurs. Susie is an expert in fossil plants from the Mesozoic and so is a perfect guest to fill in the frankly...

How stiff were dinosaur tails?

If you could find a complete skeleton of any dinosaur species, which would it be?

Why are were dinosaurs so big if big sizes are evolutionary dead ends?

It is the final episode of our third series and we put together just a few of the questions sent in from our Patreons and listeners.

We plan on doing a live show answering more of your questions which you can watch on iszitube. We will let you know exact timings on Patreon and on Facebook. 

B...

Following on from last week's look at how dinosaurs get named, in this (Patreon picked) episode Iszi and Dave turn to the issue of dinosaur relationships. How do palaeontologists put together family trees and work out which species or group is related to which other one? And how easy and reliable is it when most dinosaurs are known from only fragments of skeletons rather than complete fossils? For our final normal episode of series 3 (have we really come this far already?) we are joined by Professor Sophie Scott who has a question about the sounds dinosaurs might have made.<...

In this episode we take a look at the actual identification of dinosaurs. What makes a species a species and how does this apply to fossils that are a hundred million years old? From there we look to how dinosaurs get their names where things can go wrong when it comes to correctly identifying them. Our special guest this time out is Professor Chris Jackson, geologist and science communicator par excellence, who wants to ask Dave a very pertinent question about how dinosaurs are actually defined and so what is, and isn't, a dinosaur. 

Links:

A...

This week we have an extended interview and discussion with David Krentz on the public perception of dinosaurs and especially in film. David is a palaeoartist, but also works as a storyboard artist and character designer for Hollywood productions like the Marvel movies and has also produced and directed dinosaur documentaries so has seen things from all sides. So he's the perfect person to bring in to chat about the creative processes and trade-offs between accuracy and realism and dramatic license, storytelling and spectacle.

Links:

An interview with David Krentz about his dinosaurian a...

Let's be honest, we've done quite well to have held off until half way through the third series before tackling this one, but there's been a Brachiosaurus in the room since the start of Terrible Lizards and it is very much Jurassic Park-shaped.

There's no point dissecting all the details about the film and its depiction of dinosaurs (though we look at a few) but we focus on its appearance at the time and the effect it had on shaping the public's perceptions of dinosaurs (for better and worse) and what that means for science educators. We...

Finally, a normal episode that both has a guest an is actually on dinosaurs. This time out we are on to the second dinosaur ever named – Iguanodon. Despite being one of the absolute originals and being known from numerous good specimens, Iguanodon (and its relatives) really doesn't get much of a look in when it comes to artworks and documentaries and even books – it's not a carnivore, not huge like sauropods, and doesn't rock the funky headgear of so many other ornithischians. But it's an important animal, both historically and now and also (inevitably) has a complicated history that mean...

No dinosaurs this week! Shock, horror! It was always going to happen sooner or later as Dave does a lot of work on pterosaurs as well as on dinosaurs and we've had some specific requests for a pterosaur episode so here we go (and they'll return again soon we're sure). These flying reptiles are too often just window dressing in the background of pictures of dinosaurs but they are their own distinct evolutionary group with a fascinating array of weird features and produced the largest flying animals of all time with wingspans over 10 m. The week we make a...

No guest this week, just a lot of Dave talking. We've obviously mentioned his research at various times but never really focused on it before, but now a new and big paper has just come out on the famous giant fish-eating Spinosaurus so it was a great opportunity to kick off the new series with a special on it. Many people will know Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park III and it has become (in)famous for various interpretations of its biology which has been hampered by the fact that the fossils are so fragmentary and researchers disagree over the taxonomy...

The new series of Terrible Lizards - a Podcast about Dinosaurs with Dr Dave Hone and Iszi Lawrence is starting on January 27th 2021. Guests include Emma Kennedy, Adam Rutherford, David Krentz, Andy Riley, Sophie Scott and Chris Jackson.

Thank you to everyone for spreading the word and supporting on Patreon. Visit www.terriblelizards.co.uk @iszi_lawrence @dave_hone

This is a between-series BONUS that was previous released to Patrons on Patreon. In it a palaeontologist makes up for Dave's inadequacies when dealing with the ornithischians. So welcome Dr Victoria Arbour of the Royal BC Museum of Victoria, Canada to talk with Dave and Iszi about the armoured dinosaurs, the ankylosaurs. She is a world expert on this amazing and unfairly overlooked group and joins us to talk through their origins, evolution and weird features – not just the famous armour and tail clubs, but also their convoluted noses too. Victoria has published numerous papers on these animals including na...

It the end of series questions episode. This time Iszi and Dave... well Dave mainly answer Patrons' Dinosaur questions. Including

How would dinosaur evolution panned out if the asteroid had missed?

Could sauropods swim?

Is the Blue Whale REALLY larger than dinosaurs?

Were there dinosaur KT extinction survivors in Antarctica?

The 'Friends' question...

Velociraptor toe functionality...

Bird Brains...

How do we differentiate species?

And if we know anything about how social dinosaurs were?

With massive thanks to all out...

The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs has actually been around for a century now, though it has perhaps only become relatively common knowledge with the general public in the last couple of decades. Even so, while many people now know this, quite why we know the two groups are linked (aside from the plethora of feathered dinosaurs) is often not understood. There's only so much we can cover in one podcast, but this week we go through some of the features of birds that are seen in dinosaur fossils and so help show the evolutionary links between the...

There are a few animals that are basically motionless for part or even most of their lives (like barnacles) but the average animal is one that moves. Dinosaurs obviously did so, but things inevitably get complicated quickly when trying to work out exactly how well they could run, jump and climb, how fast they were and what they could and couldn't do to get around. This time out we tackle these issues and the information we have to work from, especially footprints. We are then joined by Dr Esther Odekunle who has a very pertinent question about dinosaurs in...

It's commonly known that Tyrannosaurus carnivorous, but this is perhaps as far as most people would be prepared to go. Other than the most obvious points (the ones in its mouth for starters) though, what do we actually know about dinosaur diets and how do we know it? In this episode Dave and Iszi dive into the guts of dinosaurs and look at their teeth, jaws, stomachs and yes, coprolites are back again. From microscopic scratches on the enamel of their teeth through to the last meals that they ate, dinosaur fossils provide a surprising range of information on wh...