Terrible Lizards

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 these much under-appreciated animals.

Links:

For extra content go to our Patreon https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

Apiece with Cass about his work on dinosaur brains: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/behind-the-science-cassius-morrison.html

Find Cass on Twitter https://x.com/casscretaceous and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cretaceous.cass/?hl=en-gb

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 worse than even Dave had realised.

Links:

support us on patreon and access extra content:

www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

A link to Melanie's YouTube series which is on long term hiatus but full of cool videos to watch (even if it notably fails to include a certain silver-haired pterosaur and tyrannosaur researcher): https://www.youtube.com/c/GenuineRockstars/videos

Here's a link to Melanie's press stuff for her papers but it includes some videos and graphs of that we talk about https://uppsala.app.box.com/s/ikmlwtb0vui7zn5k74jfokbhysla8ck1

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) in front of people and it made for a pretty compelling exchange, the time simply flew by. An obviously thanks to the organisers for hosting us and especially to all the people who actually trekked there (from Edinburgh! From Germany!) and then spent actual time to just listen to us. It's still all rather confusing and unsettling, but they say it takes all sorts to make a world. Anyway, here it all and happy birthday to us, and thanks for listening.

Links:

Podcast festival link: https://www.saintaudiopodcastfestival.com/

Support us on Patreon for extra content: https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

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. So join us to learn about what is perhaps the last great unexplored area of dinosaurs, the bottom of the world.

Links:

SEE TERRIBLE LIZARDS LIVE! https://oldfirestation.org.uk/whats-on/terrible-lizards-podcast/

Matt's website on the project: https://antarcticdinos.org/

Matt's profile at the Carnegie: https://carnegiemnh.org/research/matthew-lamanna/

A short post of Dave's on the Carnegie sauropods, click through the next few posts if you want to see all of their dinosaurs: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/cargenie-dinosaurs/

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 across mud, literal books made of fossil dinosaur footprints and using X-rays to work out how dinosaurs moved. There's so much in here and you'll never walk across a beach again without looking back at your own tracks.

Links:

COME SEE US LIVE!: https://oldfirestation.org.uk/whats-on/terrible-lizards-podcast/

Pete's website: peterfalkingham.com

An article based on Pete's work with a load of videos of his stuff

https://www.aws.amherst.edu/museums/naturalhistory/dinosaur-tracks

Pete's YouTube channel with loads of videos of his projects

https://www.youtube.com/@PeterFalkingham

Please do support us by giving us a review and you can unlock extra content on patreon https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

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, a bunch of questionable taxonomic decisions and referrals over the decades has left the animal in a bit of a mess. Here to help clear that up is Skye McDavid, scientific illustrator and independent researcher who has put far more time into sorting out the problems of Coelophysis than most would deem wise and joins us to share her wealth of knowledge.

Links:

Skye's hub on her website with links to her art, socials etc. https://www.skyemcdavid.com/links

Please support us on patreon and unlock extra content!

https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

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 down at the conference and looks back on 200 years of dinosaur-ing and forwards to what's coming soon of the back of the meeting.

Thank you for your support: www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

Link to our live show on 25/05/2024 at Oxford's Old Fire Station https://oldfirestation.org.uk/whats-on/terrible-lizards-podcast/

Links:

A shot of the original Megalosaurus jaw and some skull bits: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/more-of-megalosaurus/

And the famous Crystal Palace reconstructions of the first dinosaurs:

https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/crystal-palace-dinosaurs/

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. As Dave explains to Iszi in this episode, he's got a big new paper out with a plethora of authors assessing what was going on in the famous Morrison Formation that was teeming with giant sauropods but had plenty of theropods around too. What were they up to and can we learn more about their biology from a few bites?

Links:

Matt Wedel's blog post about the project: https://svpow.com/2023/11/14/new-paper-theropod-bite-marks-on-morrison-sauropod-bones/

Dave's post about it: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2023/11/14/theropods-bit-sauropods-too/

And the paper itself: https://peerj.com/articles/16327/

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 fair old history with the more traditional media and you can see the fury coming out here too: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/linheraptor-vs-the-international-media/

Some great stuff can come from good documentaries though, check out this interview with the man behind the Walking with Dinosaurs models (and Jabba the Hutt!).

https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/interview-with-jez-gibson-harris/