Jul 14, 2021

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...

Jul 7, 2021

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...

Jun 23, 2021

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...

Jun 16, 2021

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...

Jun 9, 2021

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...