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 Graham, and Melissa!

We do often do live Q&As which you can find on iszitube

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/

Another old blogpost but with photos of the famous Crystal Palace dinosaurs.

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

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 ever had, namely: What would be the best dinosaur to ride?

Links:

A couple of photos showing different dinosaur egg shapes from the near spherical to the greatly elongated https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/dinosaur-egg-musings/

A blogpost by Dave about his paper on telling adults from baby dinosaurs  https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/what-is-an-adult-dinosaur/

A blogpost by Dr Matt Wedel on the same issue but with a particular focus on the complications of growth in giant sauropods https://svpow.com/2016/02/18/dinosaur-life-histories-are-plicomcated/

Alasdair Becket King hosts Loremen Podcast and makes exceptionally funny youtube videos:

http://www.abeckettking.com/

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

Do please support us on Patreon

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/

Do please support us on Patreon

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.

Support us on patreon!

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).