Terrible Lizards

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 dinosaur families (eventually, there's yet more taxonomy talk first).

Links:

An old Guardian article by Dave about they then announced largest dinosaur ever : https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2014/may/19/have-we-reached-peak-dinosaur

The first of a series of articles on the great SV-POW blog about various giants in North America and the problems of working out how big they are: https://svpow.com/2019/06/13/supersaurus-ultrasaurus-and-dystylosaurus-in-2019-part-1-what-we-know-now/

Laura has a podcast called treasures pod lauralexx.co.uk

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 know she wants to ask about the gaseous emissions of dinosaurs. You know which end.

Links:

An old guest post on Dave's blog about the lovely little Epidexipteryx:

https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/guest-post-the-vampire-peacock-of-daohugou/

Dave's report for The Guardian on the discovery of Yi qi: https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2015/apr/29/bird-yi-qi-the-dinosaur-evolution-flight-feather-nature

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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 dinosaurs and the public's changing perception of this in relation to what the palaeontologists think.

Links:

A (very old) blogpost of Dave's on the same general subject of how to write and get a scientific paper published: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/how-to-write-a-paper-and-get-it-published/

A piece by Dave on the problems of peer review and reporting of non-reviewed material: https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2012/dec/01/dinosaurs-fossils

A link to Darren Naish's piece on his All yesterday's book that gets a brief mention: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/all-yesterdays-book-and-launch-event/

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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 question about the future of dinosaur evolution and things spiral from there.

Do please support us on Patreon and give us a follow @iszi_lawrence and @dave_hone

Links:

A piece by Dave in The Guardian about his work on groups in Protoceratops: https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2014/nov/26/dinosaurs-formed-groups-throughout-their-lives-protoceratops

A blogpost on one of the older versions of Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology blog that covers some of the same areas as George's question: http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/11/dinosauroids-revisited.html

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 @soozuk who wants to know why Tyrannosaurus gets all the love when animals like Allosaurus are every bit as interesting.

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Links:

A link to one of Dave's old blog posts discussing the issue of tyrannosaur names: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/tyrannosaurus-is-a-tyrannosaur-but-not-all-tyrannosaurs-are-tyrannosaurus/

A the first of a set of Dave's blog posts about his tyrannosaur Zhuchengtyrannus: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/zhuchengtyrannus-is-here/

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 colossal gap in Dave's knowledge of plant life from this Era. Although we have talked about dinosaur diets and feeding strategies before, we really haven't looked at the plants themselves in any detail. So this time out we'll be talking ferns, horsetails, mosses, ginkoes and the origins of flowers and with very little on dinosaurs, but all of it relevant to understanding how these animals lived and evolved.

Once again there was a slight glitch with Dave's sound about 45 mins in so if he sounds weirder than usual that is why. Iszi has done her best to edit around it. ALSO: we do mention public lice but do not mention what they are exactly. So, if kids listen, you may get an awkward question. We do NOT explain how they are spread or anything other than they are lice and are endangered.

You can find Susie on Twitter: @susieoftraken and she has a range of posts available on her old blog here (https://susieoftraken.wordpress.com) and from her stint as on the Guardian's science bloggers here (https://www.theguardian.com/profile/susannah-lydon).

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.

Big thank you to ALL our listeners and in particular our patrons who motivate us to keep going. In particular these wonderful people who inspired us with their questions.

Glenn, Matt Potter, David Bax, Kath Bremer, Eleanor, James Psacoe, Konstantin Rybakov, David Lowe, João Barbosa, Howard Wiseman, Stephen Gatehouse and Gutza 1.

Keep an ear to the ground for bonus episodes and you can hear these first, by signing up to Patreon. - as well as get extended interviews.

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.

Links:

Prof Sophie Scott CBE is Director of UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. RI Xmas Lecturer 2017 - listen to her podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-neuromantics/id1455641494

Here's a link to a discussion between researchers about the vexed idea of the Ornithoscleida https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/a-discussion-not-a-war-two-opposing-experts-talk-dinosaur-family-trees

And here's a link to an article about dinosaur origins and the question over the origins of the ornithischians https://news.mit.edu/2020/study-timing-dinosaurs-evolution-0729

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:

An old blog post of Dave's about why scientific names are important and using them correctly: https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2013/jun/19/dinosaurs-fossils

Another old blog post of Dave's about the problem of variation in species and how different is different? https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/intraspecific-variation-and-taxonomy/