Updates on the Origins of Dinosaurs

This episode is brought to you by the Colorado Northwestern Community College. Join them for two weeks digging up fossils like dinosaur bones in northwest Colorado this summer. For details, go to cncc.edu slash paleo26. It's that time of year where you can get an exclusive patch from us, but only if you're a dino-it-all in our Patreon community. For the first time ever, we're doing a sauropod this year, Bajotosaurus, and it turned out great. If you want to see it, head over to patreon.com slash inodino, and if you want to get it, make sure you join at our Triceratops tier or above by February 28th. Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 556th episode, we're learning more about the origins of dinosaurs, which seems fitting because this is our first episode of the new year. Happy new year. Origins of 2026 and origins of dinosaurs. Yeah. Like where might they have started? The dinosaurs, not 2026. There's also two new dinosaurs that help with this question. We've got the early theropod, Antiavis, and the early sauropodomorph, Huaricursor. Plus, we've got recaps and reviews of the dinosaur shows and books from 2025 last year. Walking with Dinosaurs, Jurassic Games Extinction, The White Death, and The Real Story of Dinosaurs and Dragons. We also have dinosaur of the day, Ornithopsis, a sauropod with a mixed-up history. And our fun fact, which is, there's a growing field of paleo-inspired robotics. I like that. It reminds me of, what was it? It was like a T-Rex simulating bite force. I saw it on the Discovery Channel at one point, but it was a robot. And it was like, oh, what can it bite through? And they're throwing all sorts of stuff in it. That's pretty cool. I could see how ornithopsis too would be a mixed up history for a sauropod. Because ornithop, the bird starting of the name, doesn't sound like what you would usually name a sauropod. It's what happens for the early named dinosaurs. Yeah. but before we get into all that as always we'd like to thank some of our patrons for keeping our podcast running we are recording this episode before the holidays yes we are trying our best to take a break yeah so we can spend some time with the family for a week or two so as a result we don't have new patrons to thank this week if you joined recently thank you very much you will be thanked in the next episode, assuming that there are 10 or fewer. Otherwise, it'll be some in the following episode. But this week, we'd like to thank Clip Clop Nene, Romy, Iraptersaurus, Mickey Soar, Ben at Jurassic Site B, Albertosaurus, John Heck, Shane Kylosaurus, David and Abby Saralifus. Love all these names. Thank you so much for being part of our community, being a dino-it-all. We hope you're enjoying all of the perks that you get with being a patron, like bonus content and our Discord server, which is always fantastic if you feel like talking about dinosaurs. And we made some announcements to our patrons of things that are coming up, some upcoming rewards, too. Yes. So if you want to join and get all that and more, head over to patreon.com slash I know dino. So jumping into our news, what do we know about the origins of dinosaurs? Well, not too much yet. But there are two recent papers that looked at that question. I'll start with the one by Joel Heath in Current Biology. And I should mention it's Joel Heath and a team. So there's a team of them, which talks about how we've not yet found the earliest dinosaur fossils, but they may be in the Amazon and areas by the equator in South America and Africa. I can't think of a worse place to look for fossils than the Amazon. That's part of the problem. So the oldest known unequivocal or for sure dinosaur fossils are from the Santa Maria and Ischigualasto formations. One's in Brazil, one's in Argentina. There's also the Peble Arcos formation of Zimbabwe and the Maleri formation of India. That's from about 230 million years ago. There's a lot of variety or differences in these fossils, which may mean that dinosaurs were already evolving for a while. And if that's true, that would mean that dinosaurs originated millions of years earlier. But where? So it turns out they likely originated around the equator. They would have started near the equator in what was then Gondwana and then moved outwards to southern Gondwana and then north to Laurasia. Laurasia split into what's now Europe, Asia, and North America. And this is supported by the fact that Laurasia is the midpoint between where the earliest dinosaurs have been found in southern Gondwana and where the fossils of many close relatives have been found to the north in Laurasia. So they looked at fossils, evolutionary trees of dinosaurs, and their close reptile relatives, and they looked at their geography of the world, the fossils of the late Triassic. They also accounted for gaps in the fossil record by treating areas of the world where no fossils have been found yet as missing information instead of assuming that it's an area where there's just no fossils. That is a better assumption, yeah. Yeah. And there are a lot of gaps in the fossil record. We talk about that all the time on this show. Not many fossils have been found at what would have been the equator in the Mesozoic, which is what's now the Amazon, Congo Basin, Sahara Desert. If dinosaurs did originate around the equator, also known as Western Low Latitude Gondwana, back then it was hotter and drier than we previously thought, it turns out, with desert and savanna-like areas. So early dinosaurs may have been well adapted to hot, dry environments. And then we've got the sauropods, which we've also talked about before, how they seem to have stayed in the warm climate, keeping closer to the equator. And another interesting note of this paper is that the authors consider silosaurs to be early diverging Ornithischians, which it seems like more and more scientists are leaning that way. Well, we've talked about it on the show. And based on their model, if you assume that silosaurs are Ornithischian dinosaurs, then it's the most likely thing that dinosaurs originated around the equator. And there are a lot of fossils just not yet found from that area. It's heavily undersampled. Because a lot of silosaurs are from around the equator. The team also found that archosaurs were around the equator in Gondwana after the N. Permian extinction, before they dispersed across Pangaea during the late Triassic. And that's after they accounted for some sampling bias in the fossil record. That seems like a better piece of evidence to me. Because if you know the ancestors that were going to evolve into dinosaurs were in that area, and then they didn't spread out until after dinosaurs were around, it seems like a pretty good point in the favor of them evolving near the equator. Yeah, and here a lot of tracks have been found, but not body fossils. So the reason for that could be the conditions weren't good for preserving the body fossils, or maybe we just haven't found them yet because of the present day harsh environmental conditions. Like you're saying, it would be hard to dig for fossils in the Amazon. Yeah. I mean, ideally you want rock outcrops. The badlands. Yeah, places where there's basically little to no vegetation, and you can walk along and see rocks just sticking out of what little dirt there is. And the dirt, it tends to be kind of sandy or not super soily. But in the Amazon, it couldn't be more different. Not only is there a lot of soil on top of the ground, there's also tons of plants and animals and water, things that really obscure your ability to look for fossils. Yeah. But it makes sense that if they evolved in a hot, dry environment, that there also wouldn't be that much fossil preservation because for fossilization you do need some moisture and when things die they get dried out and brittle yeah there's nothing to bury them quickly if you're not near like a silty area you could have like some of the mongolian fossils where they get presumably buried by like a little bit of like a sand dune collapse situation But if these are smaller animals and it's also 100 plus million years earlier and it might even be drier, then it's not too surprising that you would get less fossilization. It was interesting, though, because one of the places you named the Sahara Desert is a good place to find fossils. But from what I've seen, we mostly have Cretaceous and Jurassic outcrops in that area, which means the Triassic is still buried underneath a bunch of more recent rock. So maybe in like millions of years or tens or hundreds of millions of years, when all that Cretaceous and Jurassic rock has eroded away, we'll be finding lots of dinosaur fossils from the Triassic in that area. That's a long time to wait. It is. And who knows if it'll even be desert by then. It could be that that's a new rainforest and then we can't get to it anymore. Assuming humans are still around. Yeah. I didn't want to get that bleak, but yeah. Happy New Year. So the next paper took a slightly different approach. This was published in Gondwana Research by Salagna Sun and others. And the gist is that dinosaurs may have originated in South America, which is something that a lot of papers talk about. Yeah, that's where a lot of our oldest dinosaur fossils are. And then moved simultaneously to the east and the north. So for this paper, they took a quantitative approach with phylogeny. that's the evolutionary history and relationships, of 63 taxa, 63 dinosaurs. And then they used algorithms to deduce where dinosaurs originated and what pathways they took, their dispersal routes. And then they analyzed the distribution of species across geography of sauropods, theropods, and hererosaurus. There's a few interesting proposals here. One is that dinosaurs probably originated in South America in the late Triassic, which again, that's not new. and that there were two dispersals or movements to the north in Laurasia and to eastern Gondwana that happened at the same time, specifically with the hererosaurs and the sauropodomorphs. And then they proposed that the late Triassic theropods likely went north by the early Norian, so that's about 227 to 205 million years ago in the Triassic, and then ended up worldwide. They had a cosmopolitan distribution. They're just everywhere. There's a strong connection between late Triassic dinosaurs of what's now India and South America. So in India, the Maleri formation has al-Wakaria, a sore-skinned dinosaur, as well as sauropodomorphs like Nambalia and hererosaurs and dinosaur forms. There's also the Darmaran formation where there's several sauropodomorphs and a neotheropod as well as some possible hererosaurs. And then over in South America, in Brazil, you've got the Santa Maria formation with psilosaurs, hererosaurs, and sauropodomorphs like Saturnalia. I feel like the Santa Maria formation is the one we're usually talking about with these early dinosaurs. I think it's the Ischigualasto formation in Argentina. Oh yeah, that too. Yeah. You got theropods like Eodromeus and sauropodomorphs like Eoraptor, as well as hererosaurus, Sanjansaurus, and psilosaurs. the authors also found a closer relationship an intercontinental faunal exchange and paleo migration in other words animals moving between different continents yes a long time ago between the dinosaurs in what's now south africa and europe especially in the later stages of sauropodomorph evolution that's a long way to go it is not as far back then yeah slightly closer Yeah. So yeah, those two papers are kind of looking at what we know of the origin of dinosaurs and what we can infer about them. But speaking of early dinosaurs, this is where we get into our new dinosaurs. There's a new early theropod dinosaur. And by new, I mean, this was published last year, but we didn't quite get to it. Also, it works with our theme of origin of dinosaurs. Antiavis cruralongus. This was published by Ricardo Martinez and others in Nature, Ecology, and Evolution. And it's one of the oldest, most basal-known dinosaurs so far. The fossils were found back in 2014. We're back in the Ischigolasto formation of Argentina. So it lived in the late Triassic about 231 to 226 million years ago. There's a partial skeleton and skull that have been found, and the skull includes parts of the upper and lower jaws. The skeleton includes four neck bones, 10 back bones, six tail bones, part of the hips, parts of the arms and legs, and hands and feet. And based on histology, we think that it was at least a young adult. It was almost skeletally mature. It was almost done growing. And it's estimated to be at least 12 years old. In terms of size, it's estimated to be about four feet or 1.2 meters long and weigh over 17 to almost 20 pounds or eight to nine kilograms. Again, we're in the late Triassic here, so dinosaurs tended to be on the smaller side. It walked on two legs and it had shorter arms. It had a long head, a somewhat long neck, and a long tail. And it had a compact, strong hip structure that was good for supporting muscular legs. It lived in a warm, arid savanna. Just like we were talking about with the early dinosaurs. The genus name Antiavis means before birds. That is a fair assessment. Well, who knows anymore. It refers to this dinosaur being an ancestor to birds, which are the only living theropods. I guess it's definitely before the things that look the most like birds today. Yeah. But I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't put it past dinosaurs to evolve some flying animal in the Triassic. We've already gotten pretty far back in the Jurassic. That's true. Well, the species name Curilongus means long leg, and that refers to its long lower legs and foot, or metatarsis. Its femur is 80% of the tibial length and metatarsal 3, that foot bone, is 63% of the tibial length. That means a large majority of the leg is the lower leg and foot. Yes. Long leg. Long foot. Long foot. But the name means long leg. Yeah. So, Antiavis is outside neotherapoda when you're classifying it, but it has features that in the past were thought to be exclusive to neotherapoda. Neotherapoda means new theropods. They include most theropods. They're known for having fewer foot bones and leaving those three-toed footprints, the tridactyl feet. Although, technically, their first toe or digit is just really small and in general doesn't touch the ground. Yeah, so they usually have four. Yeah, but you see the three toes. They also have wishbones. There's some features that are seen in both neotheropods and antiavis. For example, four sacral vertebrae. All other known dinosaurs from the carnian in the Triassic there have two or three sacral vertebrae. There's also details in the hips that are the same. So this discovery helps show that dinosaurs diversified a lot early on, and there were a lot of different types of small to medium-sized dinosaurs during that late carnian of the Triassic, 237 to 226 million years ago. Kind of the middle of the Triassic. Middle of the late Triassic? Well, it's the middle of the Triassic overall, but it's not the mid-Triassic just because of weird naming conventions. Right. This team also mentioned that there's thousands of vertebrate fossils they've collected from the Ischegolasto formation over the past 40 years. So they took a sample of over 2,400 specimens and found that dinosaurs were 5.2% of the total of the specimens. However, if you take a slightly different approach, dinosaurs, the sauropodomorphs, and theropods were 76% of small-bodied animals, animals that were under 66 pounds or 30 kilograms. That is a surprisingly large number. Yeah. You could say there's a little bit of sampling bias there because if you see something that looks like a dinosaur bone, you might be more likely to collect it. But in the Triassic, everything's kind of interesting. So I don't know how much that would be a factor. Any vertebrate might be collected. It does seem to point to there being a lot of small and medium-sized dinosaurs. So at the time, the climate had shifted to be more dry, semi-arid. And I thought it was interesting. They said, quote, dinosaurs are generally thought to have originated in southern Pangea during the middle Triassic. And they're citing that Heath sampling paper, the first paper we talked about with the dinosaurs originating. originating. So that's cool that they were able to incorporate that. Cite something that was published at like the same time. Yeah. Or just a few months before. I'd have to look at the exact dates. But the thinking is that dinosaurs gradually replaced other animals over about 20 million years, starting around 233 million years ago with the Carnian pluvial episode. That's when it rained for about 2 million years. Yeah. That's so crazy. and obviously the climate changed it it got more humid and during that time there's a gap in the dinosaur fossil record and then by the middle to late norian the norian was about 227 to 205 million years ago it's part of the late triassic dinosaurs were 60 of specimens and more than 40 percent of genera of their ecosystems so they were the dominant ones and the climate got drier and warmer again. So there's that thinking of they like the dry heat. So at that point, there were more types of dinosaur species and more dinosaurs in general, but they also tended to be larger than before. Still, the author said, you know, we need more fossils and data to kind of confirm these hypotheses. Yeah, because just like with Nanotyrannus, it all gets turned on its head if we find a clear dinosaur ancestor that is in North America or Asia or Africa from like 250 million years ago, which could happen. We just don't know. We don't know what we don't know. Yeah. And like with Tyrannosaurus, where it went from North America to Asia, back to North America, saying where the first one is, especially when you have Pangea going on and it's so easy to move around, relatively speaking. Who knows where the first one was? Because there could always be an earlier one somewhere else that then wandered over into the new place. So I wouldn't be surprised if this continues to change over time. Yeah, but it's interesting to talk about now. Yeah, we definitely seem to have the best fossil record of early dinosaurs from South America between the Santa Maria Formation and the Isquigualasto in Argentina and Brazil. Yep, but like we were saying, there's also early dinosaurs in India and Zimbabwe Yep And maybe in the Amazon Well they just haven been found yet Yeah who knows So then we also got our new early sauropodomorph Weyra cursor hogwayensis, which I realized I pronounced that differently at the beginning of the episode, but we're going with Weyra cursor. This was published in Nature by E. Martin Heckenleitner and others. It was an early diverging sauropodomorph. It lived about 230 million years ago, in the late Triassic and what is now La Rioja province in Argentina, in the Santo Domingo Formation in the Andes Mountains. We got a different formation in Argentina here. They found a nearly complete skeleton, including parts of the skull, and it was found articulated. It includes the neck, most of the back, some of the tail, the arms, some ribs, legs, parts of the hips. It's estimated to be over 4.9 feet or one and a half meters long and weigh almost 40 pounds or 18 kilograms, which is a decent size for the late Triassic. Yeah. It walked on two legs. It had a small head, a longish neck and long tail. And what's cool about Weigh Recursor is that it shows the first hints of sauropods long necks. So it's one of the oldest known larger, longer necked sauropodomars. Its neck bones, the cervical vertebrae are longer. We do see this in animals like Eoraptor and Buriolestes, which lived around the same time. But with Weiracursor, the ratio of the neck bones are longer. And previously, the thinking was that sauropodomorphs were small and they had the shorter necks, and then there was a gradual transition to the long necks for sauropods. But Weiracursor had a long neck. It also had a small skull compared to other sauropodomorphs that lived around the same time, and it had robust legs, slender hips, and short arms with large hands. Anyway, it shows that from the beginning, the long-necked dinosaurs were large, or could be large, and that their necks were lengthening. So this discovery suggests that sauropods didn't separately evolve to get bigger and then separately have a longer neck, but that those things were linked by these earlier dinosaurs doing that because Weyercursor was both large and had a long neck for its time. And a small head. Yes. So the genus name Weyerkurser means windrunner, and that species name, Hagueensis, refers to the Hague village in La Rioja, Argentina. Yeah, to me, it almost looks weird. The proportions of it are very strange. And like you said, it has some pretty sturdy legs already. It wouldn't surprise me in the future if it was like, oh, this is a combination of multiple different animals. that it's a chimera, you know, because that's what it looks like. Being in the Triassic, there's a good chance that it isn't. And obviously these researchers found the bones in such a way that they don't think they are. And we got to take their word for it, but it's just such strange proportions having these like big bulky legs on something that only weighs 40 pounds and then a little tiny head. And then it's got long neck and it's, it still only has like halfway in between bipedal and quadrupedal arms sort of going on. They just look like awkward length. Like they're not long enough to really do much, but they're not short enough to save that much in terms of, you know, you're not using them so they can be vestigial. It's just weird looking animal as we like in our Triassic dinosaurs. And all dinosaurs. Yeah. What we've come to expect in the Triassic. Yeah. But you're right. It kind of messes up our simplified example of how sauropods evolved. So yeah, that's what we know about origins of dinosaurs and some of the newer early dinosaurs. We will get into our movie show book recaps and reviews in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. This is probably the last time you'll hear us mention that we're mailing out our Bahatosaurus patch very soon to all of our patrons at the Triceratops level and above. So if you haven't already joined and you want a really cool Bahatosaurus first ever sauropod patch, even cooler than a Margosaurus, then make sure you sign up at the Triceratops tier or above by February 28th, 2026. Because again, on February 28th, we're just going to download all the names, all the addresses, and start the work of packaging them all up and sending them all over the world because we'll mail them anywhere in the world. So if you want to get your patch and you're already a patron, make sure your address is up to date so that it gets to you where you are and not to where you used to be. And if you're not yet a patron, but you want a super cool Bajadasaurus patch that you can't get anywhere else, then head over to patreon.com slash I know Dino and sign up at the Triceratops tier or above by February 28th. Again, that's patreon.com slash I Know Dino. This episode is brought to you by the Colorado Northwestern Community College, CNCC. They have field geology, field paleontology, and lab paleontology programs this summer. We've talked before about the field paleontology quite a bit. That's what a lot of people think of when you're considering what paleontology looks like out in the world. Might think hunting for dinosaurs or hunting for other prehistoric animals. Yeah, fossil hunting. But really, a lot of the paleontology, maybe most of the paleontology, is done indoors. In the lab. Yes, because after you dig out these big chunks of rock and bone out in the field and transport them to a museum, you've got to spend hundreds or even thousands of hours meticulously scraping away pieces of rock to get to that beautiful fossil bone inside the matrix. It's a bit of an art, too. It is. If you are in the lab and you're digging a bone out of it, you get to be the first person in tens of millions of years, the first person ever really, to see that bone in real life. In our newsletter and on our website, there's a picture of some lab techniques in action. And they're actually excavating Walter in that picture, which is CNCC's flagship dinosaur specimen. It's a really well-preserved hadrosaur. Mm-hmm. So if you would like to join them and work on some amazing dinosaur and other fossils in the lab. And using air scribes, little jackhammers, and other tools. Yeah. There are two sessions to do the lab techniques. They're at the same time as the field paleontology sessions. One from July 5th to July 18th and one from July 21st to August 3rd. And if you'd like to sign up, you can go to cncc.edu slash paleo26. Yes, again, that's cncc.edu slash paleo26. And hurry up so you don't miss out. Before we get into some reviews of dinosaur movies, books, and TV shows, we have a quick announcement about a movie we're featured in. You've probably heard of them if you've listened to us for more than a couple of months, and that's why dinosaurs. They were actually a sponsor of our podcast way back when they were first getting started and doing their crowdfunding. Well, the crowdfunding was a success. And for the past several years, they've been interviewing paleontologists and other dinosaur enthusiasts as well as creators like us. And their project is now available on YouTube. First, they had their Hollywood premiere and then it was on PBS we mentioned recently. But now everyone can watch it because it's on YouTube. As of this recording, it has been posted for just five days, but it already has over 190,000 views. And I wouldn't be surprised if by the time this was edited, it was over 200,000 views. It's a really great documentary. We really enjoyed it. And that's not just because we're featured in it. But we loved seeing James's trajectory from high school student dinosaur enthusiast all the way to graduating from Berkeley as a bona fide paleontologist now doing real research. it's so cool and also it just includes such a wide array of different paleontologists and dinosaur enthusiasts from around the world a lot of them we've interviewed on our show too so if you want to see what they look like and see some of their research in video form is a great place to do that as well so yeah check out why dinosaurs on youtube you can just search for why dinosaurs and it will pop up because i'm sure it's the top video with those words in it right now and again congratulations to Tony and James for finishing their project. All right. And now to bring in the new year, we're going to talk about stuff we watched and read last year. We had so many new dinosaurs and studies to talk about. It just never felt like a good time to cover these. Yeah. So since we're pre-recording this, it's a good time to sort of catch up on some of these things. Yes. And we're going to start with walking with dinosaurs, which it did also take us a while to watch these things because new baby. We can use the new baby card. Yeah, we're running out of runway on that excuse. Well, so Walking with Dinosaurs by BBC, I would say that there were a lot of nice moments. I think we did prefer Prehistoric Planet. Yeah, for me, it's not even really close. Honestly, I think I might have even enjoyed watching season three of Prehistoric Planet, which didn't have any non-avian dinosaurs, more than the latest Walking with Dinosaurs, which is probably sacrilege just saying that. Well, I did like that each episode of Walking with Dinosaurs had a protagonist and that it was usually based on a real fossil specimen. Yes, that was a very nice idea. Yeah. And clearly there was a lot of effort to make this show. The dinosaurs do look really cool. There's a lot going on in each episode, though. And then there's a lot of recreations with the paleontologists where they're kind of recreating moments if they found something or they're talking about a specific fossil. Yes. Which I think slowed the pacing down a little bit. It did. Because you'd be watching the dinosaur and it'd be like, uh-oh, is it going to make it? And then it'd be like cutting back to the paleontologist and it'd be like them slowly walking through the woods to get to a dig site. And it's like, why? Okay. I get that you're trying to extend the sense of drama, but when it's cutting to such a completely different environment and everything, it doesn't, I don't know, it didn't quite feel like an A and a B story. It felt like completely separate stories to me. Yeah, although they were related. And I did like that each episode is around a real fossil site. Yes. Which is, that's how in many cases it ends up the story being about a specific specimen. Yeah, I remember you telling me that they had like hundreds of paleontologists they talked to for this episode. They reached out, not the episode, the show. Oh, yeah. They reached out to over 200 paleontologists. Yeah. And you were saying too that like they wanted to find these active dig sites so that they could, they wouldn't be like faking it and being like, oh, look at this bone that we just pulled out or, you know, like that Jurassic Park scene where they're brushing the sand off this fully articulated like concrete specimen that's just laid perfectly in the ground. but I think it was almost a problem in my opinion that they did that because it sort of made them want to make that too big a part of the show because in prehistoric planet the way they did it was they would the whole show the whole main part of the show is in the past and is going through the story arc and then if it's going to do a cutaway it's cutting away to a different animal in the past and it kind of feels cohesive in that way but what they did in walking with dinosaurs is they would cut to the present and they almost made it like they were real time solving a mystery. It's like, it felt to me like that was the story they were going with. So it would be like, they found a dinosaur and they'd be like, oh no, this dinosaur, it died. How did it die? And then they would like go a little bit farther and they'd be like, oh, there's a, there's a tooth from a predator. So it must've been attacked by a predator. And then they would go a little farther and they'd be like, oh, there's a footprint over here. Maybe it was this type of predator. But we know that that footprint over there could have been laid down tens of thousands or millions of years away from when this dinosaur actually died. So you can't put together a story like that. It just doesn't make sense in a paleontological setting to pull these pieces of evidence from completely different sites the way that they did for the show. So it really took me out of it. Maybe that was the problem that I knew too much about it. If I was willing to suspend disbelief and it was like, oh, you know, they're real time figuring out that this animal is struggling and then they're going to figure out whether it survived or not based on these tracks somewhere else. But like, that's just not how it works. And it kind of ruined it for me a little bit. I still enjoyed it and I got invested in the dinosaur storylines. I did too. Some more than others, but yeah, I really did enjoy the recreations and the past part. I just wish that they split it. I wish that they did it the way prehistoric planet does it, where it's just give me the whole story. And then at the end, have the scientist explain what we know and why we know it and where the pieces of evidence are, which they did anyway. That was the weird thing. At the end, they still did a behind the scenes where the paleontologists were speaking in normal voices and explaining things. But throughout the show, you could tell that they were getting like scripted and like they would pull out like a 3D printed thing and be like, maybe it was like this when they were supposed to have like just found the thing in the ground. And it was just like, just felt weird. But yeah. And there was one article I found by University of Alberta because it featured one of the episodes featured grad students from there. And it talked about how the film crew did make it a little harder to excavate. They did have to go to the same spots to get the perfect shot sometimes. and then reenact discoveries if they happened off camera. And then they had to stay in the same area instead of spreading out when they're digging. But they did say by the end of the field season, they all felt like members of the crew. And there are genuine moments too, not just reenactments. Yes, and I really like that. And we've watched documentaries which are purely based on people in the field finding stuff. And there are those moments where you can tell it's been like recreated a little bit. And I love those because it's showing the paleontological process. It just feels weird when it's like, we're going to solve what happened to this dinosaur and we're going to show how the paleontologists figure that out in the field, totally skipping over the preparation side of it and the hypothesis testing side of it. They made it look like you dig out a bone and you just immediately figure out what it is. I don't know. Well, so going episode by episode, there's six episodes. The first episode might be my favorite. Oh, really? Well, it was very cute. It was about Clover, a juvenile triceratops who was cute. And it's being restored by Nikki Simon and studied by Eric Lund at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, which that museum is doing all kinds of cool stuff right now. Yeah. They found about 50 bones, 25% of the skeleton. Some of those fossils are on display at the Dino Lab at the museum. They're being prepped and researched. And poor Clover goes through a lot. Actually, Clover ends up being kind of a witness also to a lot of things in the episode. it's almost like a narrator yeah but poor clover has to fend for itself and evade t-rex and also comes across and in montesaurus herd and just gets really lucky in a lot of situations as you would have to be as a baby dinosaur you got to be very lucky to make it through the day yeah Yeah. Although in the end, well, Clover often ends up alone after these incidents. There was one scene in there that was really interesting. We got an adult Triceratops fighting T-Rex and then the Triceratops flushes its frill to make it look like it has these big eye spots. Oh, I did like that. That was cool. And it almost glows in the dark. It's really pretty. And then that bull ends up saving Clover and, spoiler, kills the T-Rex, stabs it with its horns. Yeah. So T-Rex doesn't always win. Yeah. I feel like while watching the show, I was a little frustrated with some of the pacing and the moments with the paleontologist that didn't feel like real paleontologist to me. But they did have a lot of great moments. So I feel like looking back at it, there's a lot of things I really enjoy about it. And I think I'll forget about some of my little quibbles with it. Because yeah, that triceratops frill lighting up and having like dark spots that made it look like big eyes in a way was the first time I've ever seen that. Maybe it's been depicted elsewhere, but seeing it like that, where it like you see it change color and the reaction of the dinosaur, it just, I don't know. It was cool. It was. So then the second episode is about the river dinosaur, Spinosaurus. And of course we got Nizar Ibrahim, who's the featured paleontologist. I liked it showing Spinosaurus napping on land. So Sobek is the specimen. Sobek's about 36 feet long and is on display at the Field Museum in Chicago, which that museum had a two-week public vote on the name. And Sobek is the name of an ancient Egyptian god with the head of a crocodile. Oh, that sounds familiar now that you mention it. Yeah. And Sobek has to take care of four baby Spinosaurus. Sobek's the dad. And is taking care of all the babies. And of course, they portray Spinosaurus as a swimmer. Because you got Nizar Ibrahim as the lead paleontologist here. That's right. He's the one that said it was a pursuit predator in the water column. Yeah. I was actually a little bit surprised to see depictions of Sobek on land. Yeah. Well, I mean, we know it walked around too because you got footprints and stuff. That's true. Plus some of its relatives caught pterosaurs. Which, did they have a catch of pterosaurs? There was a lot of pterosaur catching happening in the series. Yeah. But I don't remember a spinosaur specifically caught one. They had a pterosaur going after a bird, and it's also kind of stalking the spinosaurus family, the baby, and pecking at one of the babies, which was almost horror movie-like, the way they depicted it. And it was so tall it could hide in the trees. Yeah. Or between the trees, maybe. Yeah, I like that. It did end up eating one of the babies. Yeah, but I don't think Sobek got it. No. I think it got away with the baby. Yeah. but then Sobek and the rest of the babies did make it to a spot with a lot of water and food and they show Sobek hunting in the water and getting a fish and bringing it to the babies but then he gets bit in the neck he dies so that's sad they showed at the end of that episode some behind the scenes of how they created Spinosaurus and filmed all this stuff and they filmed real backgrounds they said they made a scale replica of a spinal head, which was the same color as a blue screen so it could be replaced by the visual effects later. And they needed to get it to sink so that it could be in the water. So they ended up pushing it through the lake to show it like creating the splashes and the ripples when Spinosaurus is kind of swimming with its head above water because it was just too hard to do purely CGI So that pretty cool Yeah that is cool A little bit of practical effect mixed in with the CGI. And they also had Carcharodontosaurus in the mix briefly. Oh, yeah. Makes sense. That's always a favorite. His big head and his little arms. Yeah. I mean, not as small as Carnotaurus, but I think my favorite part of that one might have been the Pterosaur. the way that they depicted it. I think they had a shot of it too, sort of looking at it head on. There's a subreddit that I'm on called Birds Facing Forward that it reminded me of where it's just like kind of terrifying because there's this huge beak, you know, between you and the eyeballs and it just looks like it's staring into your soul. So I could imagine being in that environment and looking up and seeing this just like terrifying huge beak. Right. Not fun. well so episode three would have been my guess as your to be your favorite episode although i don't i'm not sure if that's true that one is tied for my favorite okay because it's gastonia george the gastonia the armored dinosaur yeah that one is my favorite but not really just because of the gastonia what else because that's the utah raptor one oh yeah and i also just really like jim Kirkland. So seeing him in his element, they didn't capture the essence of Jim Kirkland the way that I think they could have because he's just such a happy, enthusiastic guy. Every time I've seen him, he's laughing like every other sentence. So I don't think I heard his laugh. You could hear it sort of in the background, I think, one time a little bit, but that big booming laugh wasn't really in the show. But yeah, Gastonia was pretty cool. They have George being a gang, a bunch of juvenile Gastonia. Yeah, that was interesting and how like they sort of became friends by like pushing heads on each other. I was thinking when they first started pushing heads, I was like, oh, that's an interesting take because with Zool and some of these dinosaurs, these other ankylosaurs, it's like they were probably hitting tails against each other. But then they said like, oh, well, they're pushing heads against each other, but they're not actually angry at each other. It's sort of like a welcoming or maybe like testing the strength a little bit of this person before they join your group. Kind of like a hard handshake, I guess, or something. And yeah, that was a fun little piece to it. Yeah. And then the Utah Raptors, they're really colorful. They make them move like a bird, especially the head movements. The super bird-like head movements were really fun to see on the Utah Raptor. They are a little bit big, so I'm not sure if Utah Raptor would have been quite that twitchy, but I really enjoyed it. I think that was a great touch. And it's kind of like this group of Utah Raptors keeps going after George and his gang over time, and they start off, they're smaller, so they have to hide a little bit more. But then as they get bigger, they can be bolder. Yeah. The Gastonia, I mean. Yeah, I think they did a good job with the cuts back to the paleontologists in this episode, especially because they had more moments that felt like real paleontology where one of the paleontologists digs out a bone and then he goes over to Jim and is like, is this what I think it is? And he doesn't give him a hypothesis because he doesn't want to taint his view on it. And he's like, oh yeah, that looks like that's probably a metacarpal, like a hand bone. And then he goes back to the other paleontologists. He's like, yeah, I was right. It was probably a metacarpal. I was like, yeah, that feels like real paleontology to me. Not look at this bone. This dinosaur must have won a fight against this other one based on this thing over here kind of detail. But I really like that. And then they got a really close up look at the Utah raptor block. And we're talking about just how dense it is with all the different animals. and I didn't realize they said that above the Utah raptor in the block, there were some smaller animals that they sort of got out of the way first and then they got to this huge pile of Utah raptor in it. Yeah. So, I mean, we knew about the Utah raptor block, so we knew how it was going to end for them. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of how almost all the stories, right, ended with the animal dying because it's a fossil. So, that's how it's going to end. And that, to me, that also kind of spoiled it, right? Because it's like, if you start with the paleontologist looking at this animal, you know, like, oh, we have a baby fossil of the ceratopsian in the first episode. It's not going to make it past being a baby. Yeah. So where's the drama? And when it's like, they try to build up the suspense and it's like, oh, is it going to make it through this? Let's cut back to the paleontologist looking at its dead body. Like, there's no drama in that cut like you're just showing what's gonna happen so anyway enough rambling about that so episode four we've got albertosaurus rose the albertosaurus who's eight feet tall and as they say has the weight and power of a full-grown rhinoceros yeah that's crazy to think of a predator the size of a rhino yeah and this one was found in morin in alberta and they depict Albertosaurus as social and living and hunting together. I like that they gave him some color around their horns and snout, the purple and green. Yeah. Yeah. The colors are always cool to see. Oh, and then you get that one pterosaur that's eating a giant ammonite. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was, oh, that was the one that got eaten, right? They managed to sneak up on it and snag it. Oh, did they? I mostly remember the pterosaur eating. Yeah. There were two of them eating, I think, and then one of the Albertosaurus got over to it and bit it. And then when they get back to the other Albertosaurus, it gets bit on the face because it shouldn't be sneaking off and hunting on its own, I think was the idea behind that. That was how they were establishing their hierarchy. Oh, I see. Which makes there's some support for some sort of quote-unquote pecking order because there's so much face-biting seen on the bones of these Tyrannosaurs. They said something like 65% of Albertosaurus in the area have teeth marks from other Albertosaurus. Yeah. And I think that was on the face specifically, which is crazy. Yes. They're biting each other so much. This is the episode that was University of Alberta and it was led by grad students. So that's pretty cool. And they found a baby Albertosaurus jawbone. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that was like the Pipestone Creek bone bed, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, no. That's the next episode. Oh, okay. Because this is more in Alberta. Yeah, a lot of Edmontosaurus showing up in these episodes. A lot of latest Cretaceous, I guess. So yeah, we can talk about the next episode. Episode five is Albie the Pachyrhinosaurus. It's a baby dinosaur with a herd. That one's found in the Pipestone Creek bone bed in Alberta, Canada. There are so many Pachyrhinosaurus fossils found there. A lot of juveniles too. And it's near the Philip J. Curry Museum, which is way up north in Alberta, Grand Prairie. And we went there many years ago. So from what I could tell, there's no specimen named Albie, but they did find a baby vertebra. So maybe they're basing it on that. Basically, all they needed for their story was the fact that there was a baby Pachyrhinosaurus in the huge group of Pachyrhinosaurus. So yeah, I guess you could nickname a single bone if you want. It's just a nickname. It doesn't really matter. There is a big Sam. That's a large pachyrhinosaurus skull that was found in 2023 and 2024 that's being prepared at the museum. So they do have specimens and nicknames. And the team from the museum has collected so many fossils from that bone bed, almost 700 fossils in the 2024 field season alone. Yeah. The thing I thought was the craziest was when they were talking about how big the bone bed was, because it's basically it's called the Pipestone Creek bone bed because there's the Pipestone Creek. And then right next to it, sort of eroding out of the hill is where these fossils were discovered. But they estimate that this bone bed extends back where it isn't eroding out of the hill into the landscape. Like, I think they said kilometers. So they were saying there must be over 10,000 or something like that individuals in this bone bed. Yeah, it's amazing. I think is an optimistic extrapolation. But even if it's just hundreds or a thousand, that's like one of the most or the most potentially dinosaurs of the same species we've ever found in a spot, which is just really interesting. And it could show a lot of information about the individual variation of that animal, which they got into a little bit in the episode. And I really enjoyed that. They were talking about all the frills are a little bit different. Yeah. And they show like some of them are like twisted one way. Some are twisted the other way. Some are like missing a horn or, you know, have an extra large horn or something and that they're identifying each other by these frill ornamentation, which is something we almost never talk about. Right. But they were talking about how they did brain scans. They found that Pachyrhinosaurus was good at identifying each other based on the frills as well as they're also good for fighting each other because they got the eye stabilization and they can track movements around them and they have good balance. They weren't using the term you wanted, though, the flocculus. Yeah, they said like the vestibular region of the brain or something. And I was like, you could have just said the flocculus. It's a more fun word. Vestibular is pretty fun. It is a fun word too. That's true. I like that they also had Gorgosaurus in this episode. Another Tyrannosaur. Yeah. And they gave it some fuzz and it's colorful and it's reddish on the body and got a light blue face. Yep. yep and then it ended the way that we know it ends with a big old flood burying all of them because how else could you possibly bury 10 000 of the species especially a species that's like the size of an elephant yes yes but yeah that was a cool episode that one was one where they did a little bit of like there's a footprint over here oh no they said there's a way far away there are some baby bones. So maybe they were on their way there and some of them made it. And I was like, you're acting like these bone beds are from the same year. We don't even know if they're within a thousand years. So that was interesting. They're trying to keep it lighter. They're making a story. But I wish they were a little bit more clear about what was complete conjecture versus what was supported. So safe to say that wasn't your other favorite episode. No. Was it the last one? It was. Okay, so that's Lucititan, Old Grande. That was my second favorite for sure, after the Ankylosaur and Utahraptor. So Lucititan lived in the late Jurassic and what's now Portugal, and they depict it as large and blue, at least Old Grande is. There's also some tans and reds, and they based it on colors of cassowaries and reptiles. Yeah, I thought what they were doing was giving it like a silverback, like a silverback gorilla, because the other male wasn't as bluish on the top. But the cassowary connection makes sense too. Yeah, I like that they gave it these inflatable sacs in the nasal regions. There's no skull that's been found with luciditans. It's really hard to say that it had this. Also, soft tissues. Yeah, but I mean, with the number of sauropod genera out there, there had to be some interesting display structures on some of them. Which ones and what those display structures were is like anybody's guess. But it's fun now that this is the third dinosaur documentary we've seen where they've put interesting display structures, specifically inflating display structures on sauropods. Well, they're saying it's like modern birds like frigates. Yeah, because what we had in the one of the not the third prehistoric planet, one of the other ones we had was a dreadnoughtus with like the bubbles that like popped out and like came back in. It was a sauropod. Yeah. What was the other one? I only remembered the two. Okay, maybe there's only two. I might be thinking of Jurassic World Rebirth with like the frills sticking up. With the titanosaur. With the titanosaurus in air quotes. but yeah there's definitely a lot of room for interpretation with sauropod soft tissues and i'm glad that they took a swing on that one so old grande's story is kind of getting knocked down and getting back up again to find his mate because he's old and this might be his last chance there's some interesting stuff that came up in this episode like how lucid titan eats bones like modern day giraffes that supplements its diet by breaking apart and swallowing skeleton and it shows old grande smashing it because it needs the minerals yep that's or pot smashing and eating bones sounds on brand oh well it was doing it to help it repair itself after it got knocked down and broke a leg that's true there weren't any turtles available so it had to work with what it had what anyway the animal was already dead it was just bones yeah they're also talking about i think lucid titan was great at communicating perhaps like elephants where it could maybe stop to send seismic waves to the earth and then potential mates could get that message through some specialized nerve endings in their feet yeah that's another one of those which would seem completely insane except for that elephants do that so i don't think that there's an old grande specimen at least i couldn't find it it sounds like we only know lucitin from some incomplete remains like no skull we got some vertebrae some rib fragments parts of the arms and legs parts of the tail but it's estimated to be 69 feet or 21 meters long which is pretty big yeah and it's more like brachiosaur proportions so it seems more impressive than like a 70 foot long diplodocoid would be yeah and it's i mean it's so big they also have torosaurus in this episode they give torosaurus lips i noticed and when old grande is hurt the torosaurus just kind of sits and watches yeah can get get some fresh meat if the sauropod is is weak enough i was surprised it didn't like try to get in a position where it could bite it without lucid titan doing something yeah you know like around to one side of the neck or the back it was interesting yeah it could be too that it's just not the way it it's not in a hurry right it's not worth the risk yeah that's a lot of meat so this episode did have a happy ending because you got ol grande gets up after resting resting his leg and he ends up fighting the other male again because that that's what happened the first time he lost the fight and then that other male walked away with the female but now old grande is back and they brano smash basically they do the neck fighting like giraffes a little bit yeah but they also bite each other and then the rival rears up to pin old grande and then old grande manages to push the rival down and it's unclear if the rival's dead now he sure looked dead he didn't look nearly as not dead as old grande did when he fell down and then old grande puffs up his nasals to seal the deal and then there's a batch of giant eggs So it all worked out for that lucid titan. Yeah. And maybe that's why old Grande isn't a real fossil potentially because it survived. So there's nothing to be discovered or it could just be that it isn't published. Right. It could be that they talked to these paleontologists and they learned about some things that they've found but haven't. Or it could be I just wasn't able to find the information. Yeah. It could be in Portuguese. Yeah. That's walking with dinosaurs 2025. There were some good moments. And the dinosaurs looked really good. Yeah. I guess the way it was structured pulled me out of it a little bit. But thinking about the specific details that they included and why they included them, I appreciate a lot of it. Yeah, and there's a lot of great details. But there were no puppets. Well, can't always have puppets. And we love puppets. And the first Walking with Dinosaurs had such good puppets. I know it's not the way of dinosaur media now to use puppets, but I just love them. So then we have another movie we wanted to mention, which is Jurassic Games Extinction. This also came out in 2025. And this is a completely fictional movie. It's in the exact opposite realm from Walking with Dinosaurs. It's like a cross between Hunger Games and Jurassic Park. it's this the games are for murderers to play if you die in the game you die in real life but if you survive you can get pardoned yeah it's like a last man standing battle royale situation i literally think they took jurassic park and hunger games and like dropped the park off of jurassic park and the hunger off of hunger games and we're like jurassic games yeah well it was well produced And then what's interesting is that the people fight as dinosaurs. I mean, you're all in a VR. So you get like power-ups that turn you into a dinosaur. Sometimes you can choose what dinosaur it is. Other times you just got to find it. Sometimes you get a power-up that puts a big mech pack of weaponry on your back and stuff. But I think it's interesting. This was clearly not as much our cup of tea as walking with dinosaurs. But I enjoyed it more. And I think it's because I had such high expectations of walking with dinosaurs that when it wasn't perfect, I was like, I don't like it that much because it wasn't perfect. Whereas with Jurassic Games Extinction. Didn't know what to expect. I had very low expectations based on the trailer and, you know, just how a lot of dinosaur movies where it's like dinosaurs fighting end up. But this was different and I enjoyed it. It had like different twists and turns going on. And then yeah, there were three stages. You had, there was a racing game, a game where you fight to save your princess and then a maze slash capture the flag kind of thing where they had 10 raptors hunting them in the maze. And I think the routers had lasers on top of their heads and they had a, a good variety of dinosaurs. You played as brontosaurus. There was a lot of T-Rex, stegosaurus. I saw a comsignathus, a fluffy one. That was cool. Yeah. There was like one of them had to like sneak somewhere and they, one of them was kind of like a hacker in a way and turned them into a conflict. So it was like, oh, you can just sneak away. Yeah. And it seems like they set themselves up for a sequel. So maybe there'll be another one. There might be. I'd watch it for sure. It's fun to watch. So moving on to the books, there's just a couple of books to call out, starting with The White Death by Billy Reed, where in this one, a lab has resurrected 40 dinosaurs. Those dinosaurs however spread disease and they mutate some humans into cross species of humans and dinosaurs And now the full dinosaurs and full humans have to work together against these cross species, but not all the dinosaurs are friendly like allosaurus, Utah raptor, tyrannosaurus, the ones you might expect. So it's a really interesting premise. The cross species are called cross bees. They're half human, half dino. Cross bees. Yeah. And they attack people and they're, they're made because of that disease. that are made from a Theros virus. There's also the XEs are the dinosaurs and the other prehistoric animals that got resurrected. There's a lot of fun speculations on the dinosaurs. They talk about how when you bring them back to life, you learn about what we wouldn't know from the fossils alone. So Kentrosaurus, for example, in this book is bioluminescent and can create light with the plate and spikes on its back and glows in iridescent green. And Allosaurus is blue with a deep purple stripe. And then it's interesting because there's a lot of encounters with the dinosaurs while the characters in the story were growing up. And there's a lot of Easter eggs too with the characters and place names. So you've got one of the teacher's names is Mr. Anning. The kids in the beginning go to Richard Owen Elementary. And I say kids, it's like a, I think the prologue is the kids, but then the story itself is they're all grown up. And especially the story centers around one girl in particular, Mara, who has albinism and is sensitive to light and doesn't have great vision, but it turns out there's a major twist with Mara there that I don't want to spoil too much. But Mara ends up forming a pack with a T-Rex named Apex eventually. So that's interesting. You got that T-Rex lives in packs in this book, the pack theory. And there's just a lot of twists and turns and corruption and stuff and battles with dinosaurs, but also a lot of tender moments. And it shows that Tyrannosaurus especially, it shows it not as a monster, but as an animal. So it's a fun read. Definitely goes by fast. And then we've got The Real Story of Dinosaurs and Dragons by Dr. Philip Senter, who I'm pretty sure we've talked about some of his papers on our show over the years. And this was an interesting book. It talks about, well, dinosaurs and dragons. So in ancient Greece, dragons had no legs and snakes and dragons, the words were interchangeable. By the 5th century, there were rumors that dragons could fly. And by the 8th century, meteors were thought to be fiery flying dragons. And European dragons and Chinese dragons were very different. In the Renaissance, that's the time when the dragon became, as you put it, too ridiculous to be anything but a myth. And then in the 1800s, these fossil finds drew a lot of attention, although fossils had been found long before. That's where we got the marine reptiles and pterosaurs specifically. Thomas Hawkins wrote the book of the great sea dragons, a fossil collector that was published in 1840, and that attempts to connect fossil finds with biblical theology and he calls them dragons. So it sounds like it's an anthropology sort of look at dinosaurs and dragons, although so far we've been talking about dragons. Yeah, it's kind of looking at like, did dinosaurs inspire dragons? And it doesn't seem like it seems like dragons were their own thing. Yeah. Cause you were talking about like, oh, there's meteors and there's snakes and a lot of other things that were inspirations for dragons. Snakes seem like a more obvious one, especially when you're talking about like the Chinese style dragons and some of the older ones in Greece, where it's more of like a long serpent. Yeah. It doesn't look anything like a dinosaur would look. Yeah. So the main takeaway of the book is that dragons are not dinosaurs and there's a whole bunch of interesting history in there. So if that's something you're into, it could be a good one to check out. And we will get to our dinosaur of the day, Ornithopsis, in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is a website platform where you can find and claim your domain, showcase what you have to share with the world, and grow your brand as well as get paid all on their single platform. That all sounds great. It does. One of the ways you can grow is with email campaigns, which is really great that it's all included with Squarespace because there are a lot of options out there, but it can be overwhelming. So with Squarespace, they have all the tools you need to engage people, promote your services, grow your business, and you can set up automated emails and schedule them out so that they come out at just the right time. Yeah, it's really nice that that's integrated. Back when we started our website, it was not. And Sabrina had to do a lot of work to figure out how to do this. It's nice that it's integrated in one place now. We have a domain with Squarespace that we have been using for quite a few years, and it has been worry-free. We haven't had any issues with it going down or losing anything at all. It just has been working tirelessly for years without any input from us, which is exactly what you want when you have a website up online. So check out squarespace.com slash ikd for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use our offer code ikd to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Again, that's squarespace.com slash ikd. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is a platform where you can scale your business, or if you're just starting out, you can claim your domain. And like we did when we started inodino.com, pick a name for your company where you can also get the domain. It does make things easier. And then once you have the domain, you can use their cutting edge design tools. They have a library of professionally designed and award-winning website templates for every use, every category. I'm seeing as I scroll through, if you want to show off your portfolio, they've got that. If you are selling things online, they've got that. They've got a whole category for media and podcasts. Nice. Yeah, both Sabrina and I did some web design decades ago. Maybe one decade ago. Well, I did some in the early 2000s. And back then it was like, set up your table, tediously pick the amount of padding and the number of pixels of width and try to put it everywhere and then check it on a bunch of screen sizes and watch it break and then redo it and just keep doing that over and over again until you get something that looks decent. Yep. But now if you use something like Squarespace, they've got intuitive drag and drop editing and a whole bunch of styling options. What we used to call WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. Don't have to be us a decade or I guess more ago. Yes. So when you're ready, head over to squarespace.com slash IKD for a free trial. Use that code when you're ready to launch IKD and you'll save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Again, that's squarespace.com slash IKD. And now on to our dinosaur of the day, Ornithopsis, which was a request from Amatotitan via our Patreon and Discord, so thanks! It was a titanosaur, sauropod, that lived in the early Cretaceous in what's now England, and possibly also Germany. As a titanosaur, it was large, it walked on all fours, it had a long neck that it kept upright, a small head, and a long tail. It's been compared to Giraffa Titan, and then based on that, it's estimated to be between 52 to 59 feet or 16 to 18 meters long. And I say all this because we only know it from a vertebra. A vertebra? Yes. Well, it's got, like I said, a mixed up history here. So the vertebra has large cavities for the air sacs, and it's narrow and tall with a ridge on the underside. The type and only species is Ornithopsis holkei. It was named by Harry Seeley back in 1870, and that genus name, Ornithopsis, means bird-likeness. Okay, because you said that it has air sacs. Exactly. And then the species name is in honor of Seeley's colleague, John Whitaker-Hulk. So there's a lot of history with the fossils that were considered to belong to Ornithopsis, and then often later considered to belong to other species. It started with Gideon Mantel describing fossils found in the Tilgate Forest from the early Cretaceous Wielden Formation in 1833, which included a bone that he thought came from the skull of Iguanodon. Because he's the guy that named two of the first three dinosaurs. Yes. And then Richard Owen in 1854 agreed about this bone, but also said it could be part of a skull bone from the theropod Streptospondylus or the sauropod Cediosaurs. Oh, good old Cediosaurs. Yes. That specimen number is R2239. It's now got a much longer name because it's at the Natural History Museum in London because it was purchased by the museum shortly after being described. And I'm just going to refer to this as Mentel's bone or maybe Mentel's vertebra from now on because that's easier to say than R2239. It's also a little more descriptive. Yes. So in 1870, Harry Seeley described another specimen, NHMUKPVR28632, if you want to know. That was a similar bone to the one that Gideon Mantell had described. This one, however, was found on the Isle of Wight and Mantell had purchased it for the British Museum, which is now the Natural History Museum in 1853. So now we've got two vertebrae. That includes the one Mantell described and then the one Seeley described. And Seeley noticed that they had air sacs, similar to what's in pterosaur and modern bird bones. He wrote in 1870, quote, the two vertebrae to which I would hear call attention are in the British Museum. Other remains allied to them were shown to me with much more courtesy by the Reverend Mr. Fox of Brixton. From these materials, I am led to infer the existence of a new order of animals, end quote. Ooh, a new order. Yeah. And he wrote, he considered them to be from the same animal. They were similar in size, and he didn't know of any other animals from the area. One vertebra was from the lower part of the neck and the other from the lower part of the back. So based on that, he estimated the animal was at least 10 to 12 feet long with a neck 4 to 5 feet long, and it was presumed to have seven cervical vertebrae, seven neck bones. That's a very mammal-like assumption. Yes, because there's seven neck bones and a giraffe. And a human. And a human. So he considered the dinosaur to be between pterosaurs and birds. well, he considered the animal to be between pterosaurs and birds and maybe a dinosaur. He wrote, quote, both vertebrae agree in being constructed after the lightest and airiest plan, such as is only seen in pterodactyls and birds. And he ended his description with, quote, I have made this note not as a sufficient description of the specimens to which it relates, but in the hope that other parts of this and allied animals may be made available for scientific description by those collectors who possess them and that they will so make known a group of animals as marvelous in size and organization as any which have enriched the records of paleontology. With the fossil, I would associate the name of my friend, Dr. Hulk, chronicling the species as Ornithopsis hulkei. I see. So it's one of those, I know the holotype isn't very good, but I'm going to draw attention to it if I give it a name, and then hopefully more people will come forward and help us out. And in 1875, Richard Owen re-examined the fossils when he described multiple species of his now dubious genus, Botryospondylus, which is a possible sauropod from the late Jurassic in what's now England. He considered Gideon Mantell's vertebra to be closer to Botryospondylus than any flying animal, as Sealy had thought. And he ended up renaming Mantell's specimen Botryospondylus elongatus. For Sealy's vertebra, Owen named it Botryospondylus magnus. He didn't think those two vertebra that Sealy had described were from the same taxon, the same animal. He also disagreed with Seeley that the vertebrae were open and light and showed a relationship to birds and pterosaurs and suggested that his new Bothriospaundilus name should have priority over ornithopsis. Because my name's better. Yeah, well, so the next year in 1876, Owen reassigned Bothriospaundus magnus to a different one, Chondrosteosaurus, which is a sauropod that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now England from the Wessex formation. but then in 1879 Hulk described more sauropod fossils from the Weildon and re-examined what Owen and Seeley had suggested and Hulk said that Seeley's vertebra was the type specimen of Ornithopsis holkii which made Botryospondylus magnus and Chondrosteosaurus magnus junior objective synonyms so it's like never mind Richard Owen yeah Ornithopsis had dibs because it was named first he also mentioned that Owen saying the name Ornithopsis was misleading was false because the vertebrae were lightly constructed whether or not it showed a relationship to pterosaurs and birds. Yeah, because it wasn't saying that it was like an ancestor of pterosaurs and birds. It was just saying it looks like it. Yeah. Hogue also referred some other dinosaurs to ornithopsis as junior synonyms, including Eucamaretus, which is a sauropod he had named. In 1995, William Blose found that most of the sauropod fossils from the were dubious or indeterminate, but said that the type vertebra of ornithopsis was unique and that it was valid based on this compression and ridge on it. There was a fragmentary dorsal vertebra. It's a backbone. Backbone, yeah, that was found in Germany in 2023 and referred to ornithopsis species, question mark, but it's only tentatively referred. It's not preserved well enough for us to know. There were a number of additional ornithopsis species named over the years, but they've been reassigned or considered to be indeterminate. One is now Amansia, which was named in 2020, and we covered that one as a news item back in episode 279 titled Traces of DNA in Dinosaur Cartilage. So ornithopsis as a name is not considered dubious, even though it's just based on one vertebra. Yes. Because it's still unique. That's interesting and unusual for a single vertebra named in the 1800s. Yes. And now for our fun fact, which is that there's a growing field of paleo-inspired robotics. There's a paper by Michael Ishida and others in Science Robotics. And the idea is that engineers have created robots to mimic living animals and for features of extinct animals. The hope though is to create the entire body of extinct animals, not just say a leg. Bio-inspired robotics help with muscle contraction, dynamic legged locomotion, like how an octopus moves, and swimming. And we can bring fossils to life to see how animals moved, how fast they were, and how much energy they used. So the idea is you can build the paleo-inspired robots, get data, and use that to compare to extinct and living species, and that can help fill in some gaps. And you can use that to hypothesize about past and future animals. And it can help us to learn more about the origin of dinosaurs too, probably. Bringing it back to the theme here. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of the study where they stuck a plunger on the butt of a chicken to see how having a tail affected the way a chicken moved. But that's obviously not a very precise way to do an experiment. It has the advantage of an actual animal trying to figure it out and sort of manipulate itself rather than it just being pure programming. But it would be cool to instead have like a scale version of a dinosaur with a tail articulated in the way that we think it was and see how that affects the locomotion instead. Yeah. So the questions that paleo-inspired robotics can help answer, it's not just about dinosaurs, are things like the transition from water to land or the progression from walking on all fours to walking on two legs and multimodal locomotion like flight. Oh, flight. Yeah. Flying robots. That sounds very difficult. It does. As an example, there was a robot version of the two legged over-rapped resora Cotopteryx that found its wings couldn't take off, but it did help with the flush pursuit hunting. So it flapped its wings to startle insects that are hiding and then chased after them. And I remember we talked about it when that paper first came out. So fun hypothesis. So you can place robots in real life environments compared to computer simulations. And that can be easier in say sand or sticky mud. And it can also help us learn how flight evolved, like I mentioned, and how some animals went from walking four legs to two. And it can help test hypotheses about the history of life. So the authors wrote, quote, we envision a future where paleontologists, biologists, and roboticists work closely to study the link between form and function across the evolutionary history of groups of organisms from different angles, end quote. I like a good robot. Me too. They're like a puppet. Kind of, yeah. You just want more puppets, huh? Puppets of robots, yeah. Well, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you so much for listening. Stay tuned. Our next episode, which comes out in a couple weeks, will feature an interview with Bob Nichols about his coin designs, his historical reconstructions, illustrations, and so much more. Yeah, he's a very prolific paleo artist. Yes, and very good. In the meantime, if you want your dino fix, Dino Download 9 will be out and we'll be talking about dinosaur eggs. On our Patreon. Yes. Patreon.com slash I Know Dino. Exactly, if you want to join. So thank you so much and until next time. Before you go, a quick reminder that we are sending out our Bahadosaurus exclusive patches to all of our Dinoadols at the Triceratops tier and above in March. So if you would like to get yours, make sure to join our Patreon at patreon.com slash I know Dino before February 28th. And if you want to see the patch, you can also see it on Patreon. I think it looks great, personally. Sabrina did most of the work, but I put on some finishing touches. And then, of course, somebody else printed it for us. Sewed it, maybe I should say. It's got really nice relief of the spines of the Hadasaurus. But of course, now we think it had a sail around it. So that is also depicted. So check it out. Patreon.com slash I Know Dino. As a listener of I Know Dino, you probably already know science shapes every part of our lives, but so much of its influence is overlooked or buried in the past. Tiny Matters is an award-winning science podcast about tiny things from molecules to microbes that have a big and often surprising impact on society. And we've been enjoying listening to their episodes very much. from deadly diseases to forensic toxicology to the search for extraterrestrial life, hosts and former scientists Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti embrace the awe and messiness of science and its place in history and today and how it could impact our world's future. They tackle questions like, can we de-extinct a species and should we? How was IVF invented? Why did the dodo bird really go extinct? And does life exist beyond Earth? Some of those topics sound pretty familiar. They do. A lot of good overlap here. New episodes of Tiny Matters are released every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.