#480 – Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park

The following is a conversation with Dave Hone, a paleontologist, expert on dinosaurs, co-host of the Terrible Lizards podcast, and author of many scientific papers and books on the behavior and ecology of dinosaurs. This was, truly, a fun and fascinating conversation. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfreedman.com, stress sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Lindy for AI agents, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for selling stuff online, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for my daily multi vitamin. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. They're all here in one place. I try to make them interesting, but if you must skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreedman.com.com. Alright, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Lindy, a platform that helps you build multiple AI agents in minutes. They have their new Lindy build tool, which basically goes from prompt to business. You tap in the prompt and generates the full stack, builds the back end database, builds the front end, all the UI components, sets up the staging, deploys it, tests it, really thoroughly tests it, doing all the QA stuff, and then ships it. Plus, it has a large number of integration, I believe with over 1500 tools, it is really well, which matters to me integrated with all the Google products, Gmail, Google Drive, Docs, Calendar, and so on. Anyway, the tricky thing to get right here with the utilization of AI agents is to minimize the number of times you fall over and mess things up and so on. Lindy does a really, really good job of minimizing that even for complex workflows. Sign up at Lindy.ai slash Lex to get two weeks free plus 50% off a pro plan for a year. That's Lindy dot AI slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by better help spelled H E L P help. They figure out what you need and match it with a licensed therapist and under 48 hours over 350 million messages, chat, phone, video sessions over 34,000 licensed therapists and over 4.4 million people that got help through better help. I think about the landscape of suffering that is out there. People feeling alone, heartbroken, afraid, going through a difficult time in their life. Anything that can help alleviate that is something I'm a big supporter of. One of the big positives on that front of better help is that it's just easy to get started. And that's often the hardest thing to do. The first step. Anyway, check them out at better help dot com slash Lex and save in your first month. That's better help dot com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I set one up in minutes at Lex Freeman dot com slash store that sells a couple of shirts I should probably add some more in there. Just have to think about some interesting designs. There's thousands of integrations and third party apps including one of the ones I'm using for on demand printing of t shirts. And as I've said many, many, many, many times it's built on Ruby on Rails and was the thing that showed that Ruby on Rails is a performant beast, not just that Ruby is a beautiful programming language, but the thing can scale and perform when latency is a crucial thing. Beauty and power friends can go hand in hand. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify dot com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify dot com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by element my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. My favorite flavor is of course watermelon salt. I've been training more and more jiu jitsu recently stepping back on the mat doing some hard training sessions now sometimes you know six seven rounds sometimes 10 plus rounds. And of course I'm pretty hard drilling for the class portion. And for whatever reason I don't usually get much water during the class just don't like stepping off the mat. So when I'm done with the class I have a big what is it 28 ounce a bottle with water and a pack of element in it and it's just tastes and feels so good to get water back on my system and feel like I've earned it. Jiu jitsu really is one of the sources of happiness for me. Anyway get a free eight count sample pack with any purchase try to drink element dot com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by a g one and all in one daily drink to support better health and feed performance. It's become a bit of a tradition for me to do a long run along the river especially if it's 10 plus miles in the Texas heat. I just feel so good to get back home make an a g one and then put it in the freezer for like 30 minutes it gets really nice and cold. And then I sit back relax and think about life as I sip on the age you want. I don't know those little habits those little many traditions that you have inside your day especially when I'm at home. It's just the source of little happy moments. I'm grateful for those moments especially when there's a turmoil from the outside world. It is good to find respite brief moments of escape. In the happy habits of life I sound a bit like Bob Ross about the human condition versus painting or here we are. Anyway they'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description or at Lexfreedman.com slash sponsors and consider subscribing commenting and sharing the podcast with folks who might find it interesting. And now dear friends here Dave Hone Let's start with the T-Rex dinosaur possibly the most iconic predator in the history of earth. You have deeply studied and written about their evolution biology ecology and behavior. So let's first maybe put ourselves in the time of the dinosaurs and imagine we're standing in front of a T-Rex. What does it look like? What are the key features of the dinosaur in front of us? It's gigantic. It's almost trite now because everyone knows T-Rex is massive but yes if you actually stand in front of one you would be seriously impressed just how absolutely vast they are. So I've got a copy of a T-Rex skull downstairs from my office and yeah I could fit comfortably through its mouth. So it would be just about capable of swallowing me whole and I'm a pretty big guy. Your body you can fit in it to its mouth. I can fit through it. Wow. And it's not even a particularly big one. It's a copy of the one that's in the Smithsonian and they get bigger than that. You have a two scale copy of one. Yeah it's a cast. It's just a giant mold made and then pull that like the dentist do your teeth but very very big. So yeah they are 12-ish meters long so what's that? 14 yards, four and a half maybe five to the top of the head standing up so another six yards high and then seven-ish metric tons. What's that about? Eight and a half short tons. So a colleague of mine Tom Holtz described them as an orca on land. That's it. It is a killer whale sized animal but on legs on land and those are massive predators. So you're looking at something absolutely colossal and I think that is what will stun you. I think people don't realize how big a lot of animals are which sounds weird but I used to work in a few zoos and something I think you notice is when you go and see things like elephants or giraffes or rhinos everything's built to the scale of the animal. The elephant house is huge. The doors are huge. The bars are huge. The food is huge and so you don't see them in the context of something that you have a good frame of reference for. And I learnt this when I was at London Zoo and was going into the basement of the old elephant and rhino pavilion and a rhino stuck its head out from like this gap in the wall and the head was twice the size I thought it was once you stood next to it and the same with an elephant. I once stood next to an elephant closer than you are to me now and you go oh oh they are so much bigger than I thought and I think it's similar in museums like even when you get up relatively close to a T-Rex skeleton there's a bit of space between you and it and then some bars and then it's usually raised up a little bit and a mount on a little mount to hold the platform and then you stand back from that and you don't actually get to stand like under them and when you do that yeah you realize that yeah the foot finishes at my knee. So is the T-Rex bigger than an elephant that'd be fair to say? Yeah I mean a very large Savannah African elephant is five to six tons and we're looking at seven plus and a biped and a carnivore so yeah you know a big line a big line is 200 kilos so 430 pounds. Yeah well that's what that's why I mean it's widely considered to be probably the most epic predator in the history of earth. Yeah I mean and I think more than that it's I think it's one of the most iconic animals period I mean if you're listing things that the average person has heard of why an elephant giraffe tiger hippo rhino there's a few more but T-Rex is coming somewhere up in that list that's how prominent it is as an animal so yeah it's almost inescapable as a paleontologist and then doubly so for me who works on dinosaurs and doubly so again because I do work on tyrannosaurs that yeah it just dominates conversations. Well some of the other features maybe we can go through yeah big skull big head small hands massive head very kind of boxy it's very robust big forward-facing eyes massive eyes massive I mean tennis ball sized eyes these things had amazing eyesight yeah giant teeth there's a cast of a what tyrannosaurus rex tooth yeah I know so how it looks a bit bigger than it is so this is all root so this would be stuck in the jaw right but that tip part is that's the tube the tip as you call it and yeah you know so that would comfortably go through pretty much any and then you realize just how thick it is so this is a cast of a thing called carcarodontosaurus from Africa you get it down in Niger and a few other places like that and they're very very big not as big as T-Rex but not a million miles away and then if you look at the teeth in profile they're a surprisingly similar shape and not far off in size as well and then you look at them that way on and you realize it's a third of the width so this isn't just massive it's thick and of course being thick it makes it strong and with that giant head with all that extra bone and then all the extra musculature attached to that giant head they've got this uber powerful bite and the ability to just chomp through basically thing it wants to so yeah they are truly unusual in that regard even actually compared to a lot of the other very big tyrannosaurs they're often a kind of step above in their proportions so incredible crushing power in the jaw yeah and then as you say like this really short bull neck because you've got this massive weight of this head up front so you need to hold it up and not tip forwards really quite a massive body again there's two or three other big carnivorous dinosaurs which people argue are maybe they're a little bigger than T-Rex maybe they're a little smaller but it's always in terms of length which is one way of looking at things you know pythons are very long but they're nothing like as massive as yeah lion or a tiger same thing T-Rex is massive it is built so really big kind of barrel shaped chest making the body very very big as well and so that's why yeah there's things like giganotosaurus and mapusaurus from South America maybe they get a bit longer another meter or so in length but in mass we're talking about maybe only two-thirds three-quarters so T-Rex is just massively bigger than basically any other big carnivore we know of and then yeah little arms as you say so this is a not great but it's a cast of a T-Rex arm it's not the biggest animal they do get a bit bigger than this but as I love showing it it's not a million miles off the size of my own and I could do with a diet but I don't weigh seven tons so yeah it really is really pretty small two claws two fingers yeah so two fingers some you'll see sometimes that they say there's a third this is a slight misnomer so you do see this extra little bone here this doesn't turn up in all of them and it's an extra hand bone so it's these the metacarpals but it's not supporting an extra digit so mostly functionality wise it wasn't very functional they're not doing very much at all you know you've this is what's called the deltoid pectoral crust it's really important for basically big arm movements because it's deltoids and pectorals the radius and ulna are really quite thin thinner than ours the fingers are pretty stocky the claws look big and curved and they are but other tyrannosaurs and indeed other carnivores generally much more curved claws and then they have these little things oh where can I say it there you see there's a little mark that's a ligamentous pit and so what you can imagine is if you're trying to hold on to something and something's wriggling you want grip and there's a risk that you just like dislocate your fingers so we have ligaments that hold bone to bone and if you just put it flat to flat surface area there's only so much you can attach whereas if you turn that into a little hemispherical dip you get a lot more surface area for your area that makes sense yeah so if you have a really big ligamentous pit it means there's a really big ligament which means your fingers are really strong and they're really resistant to being wiggled around and pulled as if you know you've grabbed something that doesn't want you to kill it well t-rex has probably the smallest ligamentous pits of any tyrannosaur so that kind of suggests it's not doing very much and again when you look at the claws proportionally they're not that big and they're not that curved so even though it looks like quite a wicked thing to us remember put this on a seven-ton animal whose individual teeth are the size of entire fingers suddenly that arm doesn't look like it's doing very much what about the feet so massive again not surprisingly you're supporting a colossal amount of weight but they have this beautiful adaptation in the foot so the equivalent bones in the foot the metatarsals so for us make up the flat of the feet but these animals walk like birds they've got three toes on the ground and then the metatarsals stick nearly vertically now that overall extends the length of the leg so you can walk a little bit faster you got a slightly bigger stride length don't worry i've got the right bone here nice but they also have yeah there's a good one that one's a great one but they also have this really neat adaptation in the middle bone so you can see it on this one quite well and that this is actually not a tyrannosaur this is an ornithomimosaur so one of the really ostrich-like ones galliumimus from the first Jurassic Park it has the same thing you can see the normal bones would be really quite long and square and then flat at the top and instead this thing shrinks in the middle and turns into this kind of flattened diamond shape and what that means is the bones either side kind of lock it in fact at the top end it actually tends to wiggle a bit so actually goes left and then right and of course what that really does is then help these things lock together and so this is an adaptation to basically lock the foot and make it stable and we see it in a whole bunch of things independently evolved early tyrannosaurs don't have this early ornithomimosaurs don't have this the over at torrosaur the early ones don't have this and the later ones acquire it and a couple of other groups as well and it's about making the foot stable and what that really does is make the foot energy efficient so you can imagine as an animal you know we have some cartilage and we've got some ligaments and tendons joining all the bones together and holding joints stable when you push down that's going to compress them to a little degree and when you lift that weight off they're actually going to spring back you're going to get a tiny little energy return it's the idea of those airsobs they put in all the trainers and stuff in the in the 90s it's that same principle and you will you'll get a little bit of energy return but of course big force particularly for a big heavy animal it's going to take the kind of path of least resistance and so if your bones are all kind of loose in the foot what they're going to do is they're going to tend to splay out and you're actually going to lose that energy but if you lock the feet together the bones can't move and instead that's going to further compress those soft tissue bits and give you a bit more spring and this is all about I mean this is about the mobility about the dynamics of the movement it makes you more efficient it means you're putting less energy into walk because you're just getting a little bit of spring of every single step I should say that I deeply admire people like Russ Tadrick like the boss of dynamics teams like the Tesla Optimus robot teams that look at bipedal and quadrupeds robot movement and they try to make human like movement to you know basically efficient movement and so the question here is how the hell is turex its size bipedal able to move as a predator so weird body shape is it not I mean the big head makes it look more odd but you look at dinosaurs as a whole and over a third probably 40 45 percent is the group called theropods which are all bipeds so turex allosaurus falusuraptus binosaurus many many others that people may have heard of they're all bipeds built in this way there's a whole bunch of ancestral groups which are doing something very similar including various crocodiles or relatives of crocodiles and then the birds are bipeds birds are actually doing it in a much weirder way than theropods are the theropods are basically a lizard on its back legs I'm over simplifying a lot I can hear paleontologists screaming as I've just said it's a lizard standing up it's not a lizard standing up but they're doing a lot of the same stuff in the same way and that is really functionally about where you put muscles because what you really want to do to walk forwards is you want to basically pull the leg back so that you're pushing the body off and the way they do that is the musculature on the tail so we don't have a tail and indeed mammals that even do have a you know elephants and even lions you know it's a piddly little thing there's not a lot of muscle there but if you look at a lizard particularly if you look at something like a crocodile you see this massive massive block of muscle sitting on the first third to half of the tail and that's what dinosaurs are doing it's the same thing as lizards and crocs they have this giant set of muscles on the first half of the tail that's anchoring on the femur so the thigh bone on the back of that and muscles contract that's the one thing they do but now you've got a giant muscle yeah and t-rex this this muscle is like two and a half three meters long it's going to be like this wide in the middle so when that contracts the leg goes back foot stationery on the ground so the animal goes forwards so the tail is integral to movement it's a huge part of the biomechanics of the movement we do with the butt so we're kind of weirdly how we organize our muscles but there's a this is generally probably a better way of doing it because you can get a really long muscle of course the longer the muscle the more contraction you can have the hyperversion of this is kangaroos so kangaroos supposedly get more efficient the faster they move they get so much energy return that when they're moving faster they get more compression from the landing meaning they get more spring so we should be imagining this gigantic thick tail big body oh yeah big head yep and uh biped and how fast does it move so this is one of those things that's gone backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards there was a paper arguing that we'd probably been over estimating various speeds primarily based on footprints um there's been I don't know how many papers trying to do t-rex speed the most recent one that was pretty detailed I think had it clocked at so I think it I think it was 25 miles an hour so 40 kph was the very upper end of the estimate so probably a bit less than that what that means it can move yeah so that's the but that's the thing like big things move quick I've seen rhino and hippo going at full tilt and yeah they're a lot quicker than you'd think and at least part of it is simply stride length when your legs are three-ish meters long it's hard not to cover a lot of ground with a single step and yeah big big theropod t-rex is going to be a power walker it's not going to run in the conventional biomechanical sense where both feet are off the ground at once so it's not running as power walk yeah but when you've got a four or five meter long stride it doesn't really matter whether you're airborne or not power walker so you're never so running there's moments in time when both feet are off the ground and you're saying likely here one foot is always on the ground yeah pretty much has to be for loading oh just because of the mass of the thing yeah yeah yeah okay all right you know that's the origin of cinema what's that weather is where this is uh edward mybridge so the the origin of cinema was a bet as to whether or not whilst running a horse had all four feet off the ground and no one really knew this for sure and a guy called edward mybridge he was british but he was living in the states he was a king photographer and he basically did what people seeing the witch house keys do for the matrix he set up a whole row of cameras and set up a whole bunch of triggers and had a horse run through them so it took loads of photos and lo and behold in one of them the feet were off the ground the guy won his bet but he also realized that we already had things like zoo praxis scopes you know the little thing you spin with a with a slit uh so you see that right so he did that with horses and now you have a moving photograph and that's pretty much the origin of cinema was a bet about biomechanics yeah it's always a good question and a bet and there you go yeah off to the races yeah all right all right so we're standing in front of this thing yes uh how screwed are we you and i we're back in the time of the dinosaurs what's the probability of our survival there's two big things to weigh up which are going to be interesting which is would they even consider us a potential meal because we know that animals that have never encountered animals have to learn stuff and so animals that have never encountered things before are often that they don't have a response because they don't know what their response should be we should say during that time there's not something that looked like primates absolutely nothing we would look very weird we would look weird yeah um so you know that there's lots of really cool records of um particularly you've got down in indonesia and stuff we've got these insane volcanic spires and at least these tiny little valleys and people go in there and they go yeah the animals walk up to us they've never seen a human they don't know what it is so it might look at us and animals are fundamentally cautious it doesn't know if we're a threat so maybe it might just find us weird or in some way start shape or form off-putting and so we may not even be considered on the menu um the other thing is we might be too small um my suspicion is we're not so animals carnivores typically take stuff that is much much smaller than them despite basically every dinosaur documentary movie ever shows t-rex hunting and adult triceratops which is like the same size as it uh and every document you've got lions taking down a wildebeest or even a buffalo like these are weird and rare outcomes these don't usually happen the vast majority of active predation is on stuff much much much smaller than you i totted some of this up for a paper i did on micro raptor this really small gliding dinosaur from china where we actually have a bunch of specimens with very stomach contents in them and we were coming up with numbers of about like five to 20 percent of the mass being typical so prey versus predator and that's actually very similar to what we see with modern carnivores and it's not far off what we've seen even with things like tyrannosaurs where you occasionally find consumed bones from prey so if we put the lower end of that as five percent of the mass of a t-rex we might actually be okay um if it doesn't consider us worth the hassle then assuming you're encountering a big adult and not a half-sized one that's maybe only weighs a ton then we might be all what would be the survival strategy so the there's a thing that you criticize not being true that i i guess in jurassic park uh not moving yeah it's nonsense they can see really well like i said like t-rex has giant eyeballs people don't realize that because like whales and like elephants it looks small compared to the size of the animal but what yours in really important for vision is absolute size not proportional size and absolutely their eyes are gigantic probably the biggest on earth at that time yeah a guy called kent stevens did a paper he's got a really nice graphic of it if you if you just put sd e v e n s t-rex there's the one with the there we go that's the one with the googly eyes that's a baseball or a tennis ball sized eyeball and when you think about the incredible visual acuity of something like an eagle which has eyes not much bigger than ours think about what that's gonna do and we we absolutely know there's been loads of studies on this in mammals and birds and other things as well that basically eyeball size correlates with visual acuity and that can fold in two different ways it can be like general sharpness like how well can you see a long way away so eagles and vultures is really important or it can be good in low light and i now discover that there's a nature was metal oh yeah subreddit yeah yeah for which is gnarly gnarly paleo things yeah i come across it occasionally for dinosaurs let's see what's the top post of all time oh that's a glip to daunted our argentinian farmer recently found it 20 000 years old fossilized so these are these are giant armadillo like animals with club tails interesting wow oh that's black beauty that's it the royal tirl museum so giant eyeballs they can either see very well they can see a very long way in daylight or they can see very well at night and my suspicion is it's the latter i think they're probably primarily not eternal when when they get that size well not moving may be a good strategy because it's cautious because it doesn't understand what these primates are yeah um but i think if it if it starts coming towards you if you're truly in the open then you're in real trouble and i'm not sure what you do i mean the one thing the one advantage humans have over almost anything else on earth there's a handful of exceptions is we have range i can pick up a rock and hurl it with reasonable accuracy most things can't do that and animals probably don't like being hit in the face or hit in the eyes with a rock at a range because again they're not going to know how it's happened or how to respond to this all they know is they're taking damage and that's bad and that that might genuinely be enough to do it i wouldn't want to try but again if i was dumped on a plane or a prairie with nothing else but a t-rex that was interested in me it's worth a shot um if you're in the forest i would try and get behind a tree they they're quite good at turning there's been a couple of nice papers looking at like the the mechanics of the foot and the ankle and how quickly they could like hiv it um but we're much better because we're just so much smaller so it it would be very kind of loony tunes but i think you could go round and round a big tree right but much faster than it could yeah and so it's going to get bored or lack interest sooner or later so let's zoom out what did it eat i mean the you could go for the classic joke of whatever it wanted but the reality is um the relatively big herbivores that around at the time it's probably largely leaving them alive because again just the classic dynamics of predators even like quote super predators like tyrannosaurus they're still real animals if you get injured and you can't hunt that's probably the end of you so you don't want to tackle an adult triceratops that weighs the same as you and has meter meter and a half long horns on its head and it's potentially pretty aggressive um and then even the big uh so the hadrosauce the kind of classic duckbill dinosaurs they're not they're not present with any like obvious defenses they don't have armor they don't have horns or spikes or anything like this but they're simply massive again you know yes t-rex has got the teeth and the bite and even if they're a bit rubbish the claws on the hands but like just grappling another animal which is the same size as it there's a risk you're going to get a foot trodden on that it's going to get off some kind of body slam or whatever and then even if you do bring it down you're never going to eat it like if you bring down an animal that weighs five tons it's nearly your own mass you're not you're not going to eat it before it goes rotten that's a huge amount of kind of not like wasted energy but you've probably put a lot of effort into this and you're not getting that much reward out and again there there are again there are exceptions you've got things like links are the classic one links are not very big cats and yet they'll hunt adult deer way bigger than them lions hunt things like buffalo but they're operating in a group so it's a bit of a cheat so there are some things that do this but fundamentally the vast majority of carnivores tackle stuff that's way way smaller than them and that's what we see every record we have of basically any large carnivorous dinosaur where you have stomach contents where it's like consumed something or healed bite marks we get quite we get a quite a few there's a handful of them where there's an obvious damage to a bone in more than a couple of cases with a tooth broken off in the bone and then the bone has healed over so you know it got away they're they're juveniles they're relatively young animals and that's what they're targeting um it makes ecological sense it's what modern animals do for very good reason juveniles are relatively small and weak they don't have the horns or frills or armor or shields and other stuff they're naive they don't they have you often have to learn what predators are or you have to learn how to avoid them or to check the wind or even physically see them before you know see them kill something else before you know that they're a threat and juveniles forage badly um they're relatively inefficient so actually they need to eat more for their size than an adult does and then on top of that they're not very experienced at foraging in the right areas and even if they can find a good patch the adults will often beat them up and chase them off you're talking about juveniles across various species everything this is just a universal pattern of being a smaller animal versus a larger or a younger animal versus a larger animal so hunting young young things young things is easier yeah because they're dumb right they're dumb but they're inexperienced but they're often they're often feeding in suboptimal areas so this is the place with all the best food the adults will kick you off so now you have to feed somewhere else maybe the food isn't as good in which case you need to eat more of it so it takes longer or maybe it's the one next to the edge of the forest where the t-rex is hide but either way you're stuck there and then you don't really know what you're looking for and you haven't got the armor so guess who's getting eaten like this is again there's lots of exceptions you can't have nature without things like that but this is the absolute rule of thumb for how foraging and growth and predation operate across everything from fish to starfish as fish as predators starfish praying mantis all the way up to things like big cats via stuff like crocodiles it's how it works so it'd be very weird if it didn't also operate for dinosaurs and then as I say we've actually got the direct evidence for this from bite marks and stomach contents they're taking small stuff bite mark give a lot of information yeah that's a powerful signal in paleontology yeah absolutely I've done really quite a lot of work on it and they can tell you an awful lot if you've got the right understanding of the burial conditions because you weird thing that I think a lot of people don't appreciate is you basically can't take fossils at face value particularly when you're trying to get into stuff like behavior and ecology because between the animal dying and the paleontologist digging it up potentially quite a lot has happened and that's where it's really easy to start misinterpreting things because if you just go I had one like this not too long ago where I was an editor on a paper and the authors had done a pretty good job to be fair but it was this discussion of whether or not several animals were together at the time of their death said multiple um theropods together in this quarry and it's like right but there was loads of debris and you had loads of things like fish scales and other small bones and it's like okay but this looks like these animals died potentially died somewhere else and then a flood or a river washed them into this bay or a channel or it then the water level dropped and they ended up together but that doesn't necessarily mean they were together when they died and so just because you've got three animals together what is potentially the story of how they got there so you have to consider multiple explanations and then try to figure out what is the most likely yeah or what can you test with various bits of evidence so there was some uh tyrannosaur inflicted bite marks on a duck bill from mongolia that I worked on years ago the specimens from mongolia it was held in japan in a japanese museum I was working with the japanese on it and I'm I'm not a tephonomist so the study of like decay and the history specimens and I am in no way shape or form a geologist I did zoology for my degree um but the guys I was working with like they were really hot on erosion and damage and they were looking at some of the way the bones had been damaged and they're like okay we're pretty confident that the bite marks are sitting on top of erosion what does that mean so it means that the animal had died and it was found in a it was found in sand covered but in what would have been a river channel so this animal has died washed downstream ended up on a sand bank the sand is whipping past because I've been in a sandstorm in in china and it was not fun and that's starting to etch some of the bones and damage them and after that there's a bite mark after that you're getting bite marks come in it so that can only be scavenging that thing has been dead and sitting out for days possibly weeks before something came along and chewed on it it pretty much can't have happened any other way and you have to take these really subtle signals to reconstruct the story but then you can start piecing some other stuff together so in this case the skeleton is pristine it's one of the best hadrosaur skeletons out there it's certainly the best from mongolia i've ever seen and all the bite marks from one bone the humerus the upper arm bone every mark that we went over the rest of the skeleton nothing and then the humerus is chewed to bits there's bites all over it but when you look there's two really distinctive patterns there's deep circular punches and remember what the shape of this thing looks like yeah at the ends and then along the delta pectoral crest okay it's much much bigger in a hadrosaur but this bit but remember that's where all the big muscles attach there's all of these types of this is from a different bone but different animal but all these types of close parallel scratches and so that looks like selective feeding because it's using its giant crunchy teeth at the ends to get the bone off and this is off a buried skeleton and then it's got these actually t-rex's really small teeth at the front of its mouth right right in the front where our own sizes are they're called incisive form teeth they look like incisors they're a fraction of the size of the big ones um and they've got a really weird flat back and that's what these are it's hidden this with the front of the mouth and pulling and that's mostly for eating yeah and that's why it's just on the delta pectoral crest because that's where all the muscles are so it's I always liken it to getting something like an oreo and you take the top off and you scrape the cream out with the teeth I think most people have done that yeah right but but that's what it's doing so it's got this little row of teeth and everywhere you get lots of muscle you get little rows of teeth together so there's different bite marks for sort of fighting killing and then there's different bite marks for eating yeah so it kills and dismembers with the big teeth up the side and then it feeds with the little front teeth and all of that has evidence yeah in the bones yeah what hunting strategy does it use can we figure that out so that comes down to the to that foot stuff um they're relatively efficient compared to a lot of other things and particularly compared to the herbivores so that means they're probably looking at long distance rather than speed and that makes sense because even though the kind of stuff we're talking about like I said maybe they get into 20 25 miles an hour that's pretty quick but some of the smaller stuff is going to be a lot faster than that and remember that's a real upper estimate they're probably not that quick but yeah they're just jogging after you right but but they've got they've got the distance so yeah so it's much more uh hyena or wolf like strategy than like a cheetah going for hyper speed or a lion going for a relatively quick burst and it either gets you or it doesn't and then you the people kind of owners go well like but that's ridiculous like they're not even that quick and it's like yeah but if you're hunting something big that's not that quick either and so that's a misconception like when i'm talking about juvenile dinosaurs I don't mean just out of the egg and weigh a kilo like a juvenile triceratops because still weigh a ton and be the size of a rhino they're not that fast and again if you get a head start on them because as I said I suspect they're nocturnal so because that's the other thing it's really hard to hide a t-rex even lions and tigers struggle to kind of hide in long grass when you're three and a half four meters tall like you you can't hide maybe in a forest but even then you're probably going to stick out and it's going to be hard to maneuver between the trees and we've got big tyrannosaurs living in what we know to have been relatively open environments maybe there's some stands of trees but it's not like a woodland or a forest or anything like that so they're living in the open and surviving in the open so they've got to have a way of doing this and I think it's either or some combination of being nocturnal so it's you're relatively easy to sneak isn't quite the wrong word but approach things to cut the the distance down for your initial strike and then just running them down because yeah maybe a one-ton triceratops or one tranhidrosaur is rather faster than you but if you've covered the first couple of hundred meters to get up to your top speed before they start running then you're probably much closer to them and then will they exhaust faster than you'll keep going well probably not a hundred percent of the time no predator is that effective but I suspect that's what they're doing and it fits with what we know of their size their vision they've got a very good sense of smell again that makes sense at night makes less sense if you're diurnal and operating primarily in the day and you've got to hide this thing and then we know they're pretty efficient versus relatively fast but not that efficient prey well there's a bit of a debate of scavenger versus hunter they're obviously both a because we've got things like the bite marks I just described which is pretty much definitive scavenging and then we've got the healed bite marks with t-rex teeth buried in bones which is pretty much definitive active predation so we've got evidence of it doing both but can we possibly figure out what was the primary strategy that gets much harder my guess is they're probably still primarily actively carnivorous because if you look at stuff that's reliant on being a scavenger I mean the true scavengers like the vultures and condors and stuff like this you have to be ultra long distance very energy efficient travelers you know they're thawing soaring in thermals they're barely using any energy to fly it's really hard to get very far how far were they spread where did they where did they live so the ones we found you've got them from Alberta down to probably New Mexico there's some I want to say there's some tyrannosaur very close to t-rex teeth that may or may not be t-rex in New Mexico there's similar teeth in Mexico proper down in Cahuila so about halfway down Mexico. Mongolia also or no? So Mongolia you have a thing called Tarbasaurus which is very very close relative of t-rex it's the nearest species or nearest genus that we have but t-rex is probably occupying almost all of western North America so at times the east was kind of split off and and separate. But the entire surface of earth had dinosaurs on it oh yeah most of it yeah we've got them in Antarctica we've got them in Antarctica even close to the mass extinction event just an insane number of dinosaur species all over the earth just the same kind of variety we have in the animal kingdom today you just have in the dinosaur I mean this is this is like how many dinosaur species were I mean I basically wrote an entire book chapter about this because there's so many but this would make the number high but this would make the number low but this would make the number high but this would make the number lower counter versus counter arguments that you can guesstimate almost any number and probably be very accurate or very far out. Yeah but we should say that a large number of dinosaur species are constantly being discovered. Yeah so we've named give or take in the realm of 1500 1600 valid species that is not everyone agrees on every species but most people would be satisfied with that number. But we also name in the realm of 40 to 50 a year and we've been doing that for at least the last 10 12 years. That number is rocketing up shows no signs of slowing down there's loads of like we still never really explored India very much we're starting to find entirely new beds in places like Ecuador Argentina we know has a ton of stuff but we've never excavated there very much Australia we know there's a ton of stuff we haven't excavated there very much so there's lots of places even now to still go through. This is a good moment to take a brief tangent and look at paleontology so how do we find these fossils what's the what's the magic what's the science the art the same way more or less that people did in the 1750s or whenever you first start getting them that there's for dinosaurs in particular but this is true of the vast majority of stuff there's essentially two ways of doing it. The simple one is where you have quarries of particularly things like lithographic limestones so the printing limestones or stuff that's very similar to that sometimes that's often volcanic you get these super super super fine layers of sedimentation and that's where you get these places of exceptional preservation whenever you see like the feathers or almost always whenever you see feather dinosaurs it's like oh we got the skin we got the claws and like the whole skeletons laid out so archaeopteryx being like the first bird in this absolute classic example it's from these beds and there you find them by basically splitting limestone we don't usually dig for them it's because they're aquari workers and people who are already doing this because the stone is useful because there might be one decent fossil for every you know a few hundred tons of rock you shift in which case you could get every paleontologist in the world there for a couple of years and you wouldn't find very much you rely on the fact that there's hundreds of guys doing this constantly and then sooner or later they'll find something and then you've got it that's the super easy way the only slightly more complicated way is you go to somewhere where geologically we know it's the right age and it's the right kind of rock and ideally fossils have been reported from there before and again you know geologists map all the world's geology years ago in quite a lot of detail there's there's gaps there's places where we don't have the details but in general we know and then you go there and then you walk around and you look and that's basically it and you're looking for something that's sticking out of the rock yeah so you always get the so there's this constant and I think you know borderline myth of the idea that dinosaurs and mammoths and lots of other fossil things like entered lots of indigenous cultures because it's impossible that the guys were wandering around say Dakota and the Native Americans didn't come across some dinosaur fossils that I'd agree with it's pretty much impossible they didn't come across some dinosaur fossils did they come across a whole skeleton laid out on the ground no because those don't usually exist because even if they're tougher or it doesn't matter if they're tougher or weaker than the surrounding rock dinosaur bones are you know in some way shape or form they're lithified they they turn to rock and they will absorb some of the minerals from whatever they've been buried in and so even in places like mongolia and northern china where I've been to where actually the the fossil bone is quite a lot tougher than the sandstone that it's embedded in like you can find a bit of bone and pull it out like almost like rub it with your hands and the the sand comes off and there's your bone they will decay pretty quickly you know sandstorms you know sand just etches stuff the tiniest bit of moisture particularly in winter gets into the cracks bones are incredibly porous that freezes that expands that cracks bones just shatter and yeah you find shattered bone on the surface everywhere what you rarely find is a decent bone on the surface let alone a skeleton so there has to be something that's sticking out just a tiny bit so that you can see it but it's still buried right and it and it happens the the the greatest one that I saw or that I didn't see it happened by with a friend of mine when we were in northern china and he went yeah I can see a bit of a claw sticking out of a hill and it was it was like this this much you could see you know less than a centimeter coming out of a hillside and it's like so you know that's the dream right dig a little bit and there's a little bit more dig a little bit there's a little bit more dig a little bit there's a little bit more okay and then the system we were running there is some guys were searchers and some guys were diggers so he and I were searchers we're told okay you guys you guys he found it you found something go and look for something else we'll dig it out and so we come back a couple of days later and check in on the digging team so what is it then oh it's a complete skeleton and it was it was a thing very very close relative of um velociraptor ended up naming it lin her raptor so the raptor from lin her which was the nearest town and it was yeah the legs were a little messed up because water got to them and the end of the tail was missing and that was about it so like 90 plus percent complete skeleton and it had been found with you know five mil a couple of sixteenths of an inch of bone sticking out of a hill and that's what you want because every so often behind that is a whole skeleton if you're looking for skeletons on the surface they're gonna be gone before you get to them and when it's near complete skeleton you you did a show of terrible lizards on uh stan oh yeah t-rex fossil that's sold for 31.8 million dollars sign someone so that that's a nice sort of uh big adult t-rex so looking at a fossil like this yeah so for 31.8 million dollars what's the excavation process for when you have a claw sticking out like you were mentioning and getting that whole thing out without damaging the bones what can you say about that process so it depends where you are it depends who many people you've got it depends on your budget and it really depends on the rock so again like going into China and Mongolia where this little guy's from the bone tends to be relatively strong compared to the sandstone that it's in that also that means that eight it's fairly tough and resistant um but it also means that uh it's really easy to dig like again i've dug stuff by almost like pulling it with my hands or like getting my fingers in getting something like a chisel or a hammer you can just cruise through this rock but like you have to be really careful not to touch the bone i guess so it depends how how strong it is so again so some bone is incredibly strong some isn't because they've all fossilized differently um what we're usually doing is applying glue to it though there's this um wonderful stuff called Paralloid and it's a special glue for fossils and as I said bones super porous so it's really good at sucking up liquids oh so you're basically filling it with glue so like makes it stronger yeah and Paralloid's really great because you can dissolve it with acetone and it basically doesn't react with anything so you can fill your fossil with glue but then if you want to take all that glue out you can pretty much just dissolve the glue back out again very cool um so yeah what you would normally do is for for something say in china where the rock is relatively soft and the bone's relatively tough and um where we don't have any like manpower and shipping problems which is a real issue in other places you basically map out where you think the skeleton's going so um in the same way that you were doing it like you know if you can imagine like a cake or something and someone said I put a toy dinosaur in there and you've you've got to find it without damaging it so like well you stick your finger in the cake and just kind of dig until you hit the edge of it and then you go in somewhere else and go and that's what we're doing we're just going in from kind of all sides and once you've hit three or four bones you kind of know which way it's it's going into the hillside usually sometimes they're very weird and mixed up and then you can just like almost trace the outline of it and then you'll just dig all the way around that which might involve taking the top off a mountain depending on where you are in the desert it tends to be a bit easier but yeah we've had stuff where like the first three days is just 10 people with pickaxe is just digging a hole to get down to the right level but sometimes the excavation requires like large equipment right yeah we use jackhammers and stuff we've used a backhoe we've just literally driven it into the desert and just dug a big hole next to the to the fossil and then the classic thing of covering it in a plaster of paris jacket strips of burlap sacking plaster of paris and some water wooden beams if you want to make something really big and really solid and just basically wrap it all up and then take it out and that's again that's what they were doing 150 200 years ago that that hasn't changed where it gets more complicated is if you've got really hard rock very hard to get through particularly if the bone is fragile then it becomes difficult because if you want to like get a jackhammer in the vibrations means you're going to shatter your bones before you've even cut through the rock so then you might be down to doing it manually and then it was like yep hand hand chipping it out yeah the other the other way you end up with that is like the classic Jurassic Park thing like the the was it the second scene and they're digging in the desert and there's the whole skeleton laid out and five or six guys all all digging digging around it and exposing it and that's actually quite common in the state and the reason is a huge amount to those excavations are being done on government land they're national parks or whatever or or protected land and very often the rules are you're not allowed wheeled vehicles full stop at all to protect the environment you can walk in and walk out but you can't drive and it's like well right when we're in the desert in mongolia in china or china and mongolia and we're allowed to do this literally yeah my my boss drove into town hired a guy with a JCB he drove out picked it up with the bucket drove it back into town and put it on the back of a flatbed and we drove it to Beijing if you're out in a protected area and you can't you've got two choices you can take it out by hand but that means it's got to be light enough that half a dozen people can lift it which if it's a block of stone the size of this desk you know couple of meters by couple of meters by meter high is basically impossible so that means you either got to carve chunks off so take the head off take the arm off and whatever and you can get it out that way but it's not ideal there's always the risk of breaking you're losing some information and if you want to make a really spectacular display you don't want to join through every big bit of bone you want to show the public one one piece so the alternative is to get rid of every bit of rock you possibly can to make it light enough to helicopter it out and so normally so in china if we hit us yeah if we hit that bit of bone going in we're just like going in around the sides until we've hit it take the top off take the bottom off and just take it so the skeleton is completely encased in rock and it's as safe and secure as it can be and then we'll do the preparation work back at the lab that's heavy though that's real if you're going to have to lift it with a helicopter and they've got a weight limit of only a couple of tons or if it's not then you need to pay twice as much for a much more expensive helicopter then you take off every gram of rock that you think you can to get the weight down so you can ship it so it so it varies massively yeah and something the size of stan that's that's months of work you're probably doing that across three or four years with a team of half a dozen people so can we uh just talk through because just using stan as a case study stan was first discovered in the spring of 1987 by amateur paleontologist stan uh sekensen in the hell creek formation near buffalo south to gree yeah but it was the larson brothers from the black hills institute who dug it up and so they're a commercial outfit so they dig stuff up to sell it um but they also make cast and sell them um this oh i brought my others i do have a cast a cast of one of stan's teeth um so like you can buy cast of stan's teeth you could buy cast of the head um you could buy the whole skeleton it's a famous skeleton you see stan in a whole bunch of different places there's there's a stan just up the road from here at oxford oxford's got a cast of stan oh um i was just at lime regis uh the famous fossil locality in south of the uk a couple weeks ago one of the fossil stores has a skull stan in the window so stan stan turns up again and again and again so the process is written here involved removing the overlying rock using heavy equipment like a bobcat yes we'd call that the overburden the extra stuff that's all the rock that's sitting above the layer with our fossil in and when you're lucky that's a foot of sandstone and you shovel it out in an hour and i've seen guys in south america that was a team in argentina i think it was my old boss olly rawhurt showed me this and they took like 20 30 feet off the top of a hill to get down to this fossil you know so something you know was it probably half an acre in size 20 30 feet of rock i want it's incredible yeah i wonder if you can speak to some of these other components carefully extracting each fossil bone by hand with picks and brushes plotting and diagramming the bones using a grid system at the dig site wrapping the bones and burlap and plaster for safe transport to the bh i lab some of the stuff you've spoken to what's what's with the diagramming what's with the plotting so yeah so you may well have seen something like this for archaeology shows or something like that um nowadays again tech's getting better people are using drones and stuff for this or taking hundreds of photos and then building photogrammetry models you just got a 3d model in the computer we're just kind of modeling what we're looking at here yeah but but where you found everything so it goes back to that stuff we were saying about the process of fossilization or the or the process of what's happened to that animal from death to discovery is okay it right a classic thing is bones being in a line so you can imagine if you know bones are lots of weird shapes but mostly only certainly lots of bones ribs arms and legs things like this they're quite long bones so if they're in a current they will tend to spin in the axis so that they are facing the current so if you're finding all the bones are in a line that probably tells you that this thing has had quite a lot of water washing over it you're then probably going to be missing most of the small bones because the big heavy bones won't be shifted by that current but maybe the small ones will oh so you actually model where the bone where you're likely to find the bones the big bones small bones so it might it might tell you where to go and dig further down the hill quite literally but it can also just tell you okay this thing there's no way this thing died here it absolutely got moved so we need to factor that in when we're trying to interpret it or we've got this one weird bone and we can't work out what on earth it is well maybe it's from something else because if we know a whole bunch of stuff washed together maybe that's a random bone from a different animal yeah maybe that was eaten or there might be a different story if it was washed like you like you were describing any of that kind of thing so that's where you want to have as much information as possible it says here once at the lab the bones underwent more than 30 000 hours of cleaning preservation and documentation and uh Stan Skelton is notable for his high degree of completeness about 70% by bulk 63% by bone count and the exceptional preservation of its skull which has become a scientific standard for the species yeah so there's this unbelievably beautiful skeleton Borreo pelter this is a helicopter lift absolutely phenomenal preservation from word from northern Alberta what is this thing it's full name is Borreo pelter Mark Mitchell I and it's called Mark Mitchell I named after Mark Mitchell the preparator who basically spent I think Mark spent the thick end of two years on this like this was his job and he did other stuff as well he's doing some other prep he's doing some field work but Mark basically went in every day nine to five cleaning the rock because the rock was hard and the bone was soft and it's extraordinarily well preserved Borreo lapelta is a genus of plant eating armor dinosaur sure as hell looks armor this is an incredible preserved specimen uh from the early Cretaceous period about 112 million years ago found in what is now Alberta Canada amazing yeah look at this so Borreo pelter is one of the ones where we've even got some of the evidence of patterning and it suggests that it's darker on top and lighter underneath so this illustration I think that's yeah as Julius Giotoni did that is a Canadian paleo artist and so that color pattern is roughly accurate oh wow so this is true to color yeah so we can figure out colors give give or take some very large um uncertainties it's gonna be something like this that's so awesome so these guys are that's hard to eat that near enough armored pine cones yeah though it's very much the adult condition uh the juveniles seem to be far less if not unarmed we're back to the juveniles right so right so so but that's why we that armor is absolutely going to be effective as anti predator but it's probably evolved primarily for a combat and display between members of the species because otherwise if this stopped you being eaten the babies would have it this fossil is considered one of the best preserved dinosaur specimens ever found with armor skin character and sheaths and even stomach contents all intact incredible yeah and so for that he really did the work and also found miles and miles and miles out to sea or the the paleo sea so this is from a site which normally gives us big marine reptiles so predatory plesiosaurus and ichthyosaurs and then uh uh mosasaurus and stuff like that and then it turned up a mankylosaur well notosaur in this case yeah wow this is incredible yeah so okay let's complete the journey of stan to the museum to like you get you get to the process of cleaning everything stitching it all together yeah like mark and like that suggested you know this this can be even or an animal that so periopelta is in a four or five meters long we've only gone to go up the front two thirds of it yeah this this can be like needle level stuff that's how you get to the 30 000 hours yeah exactly that if it's that quality and you want to get everything open and then something like stan actually really complicated skull the skulls full of lots of little bones the bones are really fragile so that just adds to the time i mean at least the ankylosaur the skull is just this giant solid block of bone which makes life a little bit easier so yeah they're going to put those hours in and that's really going to help them sell the animal which is ultimately what happened i mean stan sat in the black hills institute for decades i mean 87 and they sold it in like 2020 so they had it for 30 years sitting in their kind of little museum and then my understanding was basically the brothers broke the company up and that's why they sold it yeah but it was still incredibly surprising that it was sold for 31 million yeah i mean far more than i think anyone thought it was going to i mean i i like and you know if you're not buying like teeth or an ammonite in some small fossil shop you know when you're buying talking about things like whole dinosaurs and whole tyrannosaurs i think it's a bit like the art market in it's worth what people will pay for it and so you know plenty of t-rexes had sold for a few million dollars and therefore everyone thought it would might be five you know ten would be an absurd sum of money and then yeah it went for 30 and it's like okay well i was going to say someone wanted it that bad but clearly not two people wanted it that bad because if only one guy is prepared to bid 30 then it goes for you know a million more than the next highest bidder but presumably two people if not three bid it to get that high yeah it was uh anonymous at the time but now it's uh abadabi's department of culture and tourism came out that they would want and uh and then that record has been since beaten apparently by uh apex the the stegosaurus which i still haven't seen though a friend of mine has sent me some photos of this thing is it impressive to you this thing yeah not especially that's why i can't imagine that it's sold for that much it's a really nice stegosaurus it's pretty big stegosaurus well preserved i've seen other very good stegosaurus and i don't understand why that's worth that much more than something like stan but it shows you the market so so we're here in london there's a stegosaurus called sophie and the natural history museum in london sophie is a young animal so she's not very big i mean it's a sizable specimen i'd say five fish six meters off the top of my head total length but sophie's like truly exceptional like there's a couple of plates missing a handful of ribs a couple of bones in the tail i think a couple of toe bones like this is by far the most complete stegosaurus out there that sold for i think 250 000 pounds so maybe 400 000 dollars about a decade ago so this has now gone up like a hundred fold for an animal which is quite a bit bigger but is way less complete so for me those two things kind of balance out because size is always impressive and that's what the public likes but also a complete one is better than a half a one or two thirds of one so yeah so how has the price gone up a hundred or from yeah 400 000 to 40 million in 10 years but roughly the same thing a t-rex is a little bit more epic than a stegosaurus has a massive premium on it because it's yeah stegosaurus is one of those top tier you know it's you can virtually do the less you know t-rex triceratops diplodocus brontosaurus stegosaurus it's in that first six or seven okay these days velociraptor thanks for Jurassic Park but it's like it right but you know there's that's the list of like seven or eight things that any random human who doesn't care about dinosaurs and doesn't know anything about dinosaurs but they've probably heard of them you know stegosaurus is in that list i'm gonna have an idea of what it looks like oh yeah it's got like the big stuff stuck along the back you know you get that answer from almost any you know 99% of people on the street but yeah it's it's not a t-rex so how it's worth yeah 50% more and it's not even a particularly complete skeleton apex to my understanding like i i don't i don't get it actually um since we're on the top of the money if i gave you let's say 10 billion dollars how would you spend it you were forced out i forced you to spend it on dinosaur related things how would you spend it um i mean i'd probably drop half a billion or so on the best museum you'd ever seen so put together a museum you're like one of the great communicators one of the great scientists and so like you would want to push forward the the whole field and one of the ways to do that's a great museum yeah but you wanted so it is twofold because yeah there's the communication and the education part of it which is something i'm i'm massive on and i think research is pointless if you don't communicate it at summer level not saying everyone needs to communicate everything if you're working on the nuances of a calculation of the volume of a black hole or something yeah probably doesn't need a press release or a new museum exhibition but fundamentally we should be talking about our work um but also you've got to store this stuff um many fossils are fragile they need to be kept not necessarily in climate control but at least you want a basement that is much more even than you know just sticking it in a box in a warehouse somewhere so you've got to be able to store this stuff to be able to study it or it's kind of pointless um but with the rest of that money i'd buy a tunnel and like the the you know quarries that gave us archaeopteryx in in bavaria and have given us a ton of other stuff i've worked on a load of pterosaurs the flying reptiles from there these these stuff are mostly commercially run or just straight up privately owned and not being commercially run someone's just inherited it it's just sitting on this stuff so if somebody's building stuff on land is does that threaten like the damage of of the possibility of discovering something on it it's it's more that they're not necessarily exploiting it with fossils in mind presumably you have to balance the search efforts and then the land buy yeah but you know one billion on its own would go a very very long way almost infinitely if you're just creaming off the interest and then funding excavations and supporting scientists who already embedded in other museums or other universities or other research institutes so the rest is for buying up land so that those people can do yeah you you look at somewhere like you know brazil and there's i can never remember the name of it but there's again one of these zones of exceptional preservation where superlative pterosaurs fish we've had a handful of dinosaurs and a whole bunch of other stuff has come out and it's just a giant commercial mining operation and yeah when they hit a fossil when they think they're close to it yeah they stop and pull it out and they'll send it to a museum and more often they'll sell it to a museum and museums only have so much money whereas what if i owned that quarry and then i made sure everyone who worked there was trained and got a bonus every time they found anything and then i just handed everything they dug up straight into a museum so there would be some element of a crowd source paleontology yeah but it's it's more that like no researcher ever needs to spend money to access that no museum no needs to go and find a new donor to give them half a million to go and buy this one specimen knowing that it might still go yeah to some silicon valley billionaires foyer or whatever it's like well i own the land so it's mine so problem solved like that that's what's in my head it just would be wonderful to scale up the effort to where we can map out the whole sort of story of this time because it's such a fascinating time in in the history of earth i've jokingly written a couple of times about how all science funding in the world should go to paleontology and the idea being that like yeah if you want to investigate black holes or neutrinos or chemical crystallography or pandagenetics or whatever it is you can do that any time you want like that that's not going to change a million years from now as it will from tomorrow but fossils are in places that erode and if we don't dig them up they're gone so we should dig all the fossils up now and then we've got forever to study them but if we don't dig them up now who knows you know maybe there was something twice the size of t-rex and it sat on a hillside for six months and then the wind got to it and it's gone and that was the only one that ever preserved well we'll never know now to be clear this is a joke i'm not suggesting we should stop doing cancer research and physics and other things but but it is we're in a fundamentally different field where our science is literally disappearing yeah i mean there's a i know it's a joke but there's some truth to it and uh on the flip side one of the things one of the hopes is that technologists somehow ease the search and discovery process but as you said so far most yeah i mean so far yeah you know Jurassic Park 93 you've got that little scene where they've got the like thumper or something they call it and it it hits the ground and seismic and then they go look look here's the whole skeleton yeah they've tried it it doesn't really work um we've tried looking for stuff with drones that helps you getting into some inaccessible areas but until the resolution's probably better you've still got that problem of like looking you know with human eyes which are binocular and being able to you know just tilt your head completely changes how you see something in a way that flying over just just won't um i know they've tried looking so because the bones are porous they tend to suck things up so actually dinosaur bones can be really radioactive if they're in areas where there are things like uranium so yeah there are draws which have led boxes around them and stuff like this for dinosaur bones or just sign saying do not handle they're very low level radioactive like you'd have to like stick it in your pocket for six months to to run any real risk but they're radioactive much more so than the background so can we do that turns out not really um so again may maybe tech will advance but for now right and quite incredible yeah we are but also paleo's kind of at the bottom of the pile you know there's not many of us we don't have a lot of funding it takes real money to adapt stuff so you know like we're scanning stuff with MRIs and things like that in hospitals but it mostly doesn't work very well because the problem you've got is like i said the bones take on some of the properties of the minerals in which they're embedded which means their density is really similar and things like MRIs or seismic activities basically looking for differences in density well if it's the same density as the you know it's like i put some green plasticine in some blue plasticine there's going to be a bit of a join and they're going to be very very slightly different but ultimately you're not going to be able to detect that through most means if you're looking for density or mass or anything like that well i personally think uh that there's few things as important to understand as the history of life on earth there's like books right there's like a or maybe you could think of as chapters and then one of the chapters is the time of the dinosaurs and then there's a great extinction i mean that's not a million miles off to i think darwin had an analogy like that of we've we've we've got a few words on a few pages spread out but between them you get an idea of what the story is and where it's going i think what humans don't quite realize is we may end up being just a chapter in a book it might be our extinction event self-created perhaps nuclear war perhaps robots take over perhaps we don't know well or or dumb luck i mean the dinosaurs are doing absolutely fine until a dirty great rock hit them and you you can't you know ben afleck and bruce willis movies aside there's only so much you can do without that you take that back there's nothing they can do wrong all right uh quick pause bethan break yeah yeah yeah we've taken a few tanges but let's uh continue on the thread of t-rex yeah go go to the skull yeah so uh the skull of t-rex is iconic you describe it as being incredibly robust and overbuilt yeah there's a lot of bone on there uh so we mentioned a couple of other things like giganotosaurus so this you know giant carnivore if you put giganotosaurus t-rex in that's the one so that's the house on my old blog it's not my image um what are we looking at on the left on the right you got t-rex on the left in orange and giganotosaurus on the right and red as i said they're pretty similarly sized but just look at the robusticity like the front of the snout of t-rex is all bone and yet the major opening this is thinking of the antorbital finestra the opening in front of the orbit is absolutely massive in giganotosaurus it's like half the skull the opening at the back of the skull is much bigger the opening in the lower jaw is much bigger and actually the jaw what you can't see side to side is much thinner so the heads are the same size and as animals they are about the same linear dimensions but you can just see there's just way more bone in the t-rex it's incredible so this is like it's not overbuilt it's obviously it's evolved that this is the right amount of bone for the stresses and strains for what it's doing and how it's acting but you compare it to anything that's not a very large tyrannosaur and suddenly you see just how much bone has gone into it it is a very large it's an absolutely large head but it's a very heavy head with a lot of bone and a lot of that bone is there to resist all the forces of all the muscles because it has this giant super powerful bite which again you can see in the teeth so the bone and the muscles kind of evolve together yeah yeah bigger and bigger and bigger so you need this kind of structure for the power that yeah crush has so one of the big things tyrannosaurs have and this goes all the way down to the the earliest tyrannosaurs were like our size like little ditty things like two three meters long be a meter and a half tall but they have fused nasals so the pair of bones that in us there's not a lot there but obviously in something like a dog or something like a baboon with a long nose it's like the whole top of the snout and there's two one each side in tyrannosaurs they fuse together so they forms a solid bit of bone so the whole top of the nose is solid and then that makes the skull just fundamentally more rigid and able to take more power through it the very early ones weren't super biters I suspect but they do but they do have the little flat teeth at the front so I strongly suspect the fused nasals at least originally is for resisting that because again if you've got a long nose and you're pulling with quite a lot of force at the very tip that's going to bend your snout so strengthen that can you speak to the evolution from the smaller to the bigger of the turex well what were some of the evolutionary pressures what like what what's the story of the tyrannosaurs go back to the middle Jurassic so tyrannosaurs around for 100 million years so from about 160ish 165ish million years till the extinction 66.5 I think it's the current dating on that so yeah you've got 100 million years of them and the middle Jurassic annoyingly is probably the bit of the mesozoic so the whole dinosaur period that we know the least of just by chance we just don't have many rocks exposed of the right age that are fossil bearing but we got two or three tyrannosaurs from that time and yeah they're they're really quite diddy yeah they'd be chest high to us two or three meters long including the tail probably more like three a lot of them little heads long arms they look like every other carnivore going there's there's not a lot special to them at this point they've only just separated from their nearest groups which is actually something like the ancestors of giganodosaurus actually they do have the fused nasals early on they do have these special little teeth at the front of the jaw very early on they're feathered early on definitively we have skeletons with feathers on them that are early tyrannosaurs at least until the early Cretaceous but yeah they're knocking around as relatively small animals in Europe and Asia we have a couple from the UK we have a whole bunch from China there's stuff from like Kreegastan and places like this I think there's one a relatively early one from Russia and then when they get into the early Cretaceous they start getting quite a bit bigger so something like uteranus if you want to there you go so uteranus is fuzzy we have three specimens definitively feathered it gets to six seven meters long there's something funny looking about the sexy smaller earlier version of the T-Rex but but again this is seven eight meters maybe weighs half a ton or a ton like we are very much on the menu for an animal that size at it's massive and dangerous quite what triggered them there's general patterns in evolution of size change and one famous one called Cope's rule I've worked on a fair bit which is the idea that over time things tend to get bigger and they do for various different reasons one of which is just pure almost like diffusion if you start small and you evolve well you can't get much smaller but you can always get bigger so you're naturally kind of diffuse away whereas if you're a blue whale you probably can't get much bigger and its descendants will probably end up being smaller but there are reasons that bigger things do better you can hunt more stuff you're more energy efficient you can move more efficiently you're dominant in contests particularly with conspecifics if you're trying to win a territory or win mating rights bigger things usually beat up smaller things so there's going to be selection favouring them but then big things don't usually do well in extinction events so that tends to reset the clock by killing off the big stuff and then smaller stuff does better again so mostly there's evolution advantages but but a fairly big one so yeah it's the it's the classic thing of there's a day-to-day advantage of being bigger and that might last for a few million years right up to the point that suddenly there's the biggest drought the earth is encountered in five million years and then all the big stuff just gets nailed also we should probably say is this accurate to say that the bigger you get the fewer of you there are yeah there's just less fundamental space you know there's more mice than there are elephants there are more elephants than there are whales like there is only so much biomass that an ecosystem can support and bigger things are just worse at repopulating in extinction events for example right so that so they're less likely to survive because they need more fuel you know what would feed a mouse for a year won't feed an elephant for a week so if and and of course the mice are going to have an easier time finding a few little seeds then elephants are going to find tons of food and then they've got less genetic diversity there might be 5 000 mice there might be 200 elephants so who's likely to have more genes or who's likely to have selection acting on those genes to produce a survivor well the one with five or ten or a thousand times the population and then yeah on top of that you've then got the very slow reproductive cycle which then again gives evolution not a lot to work with if as an elephant you're breeding once every five years and as a mouse you're doing it once every eight weeks what can we say about the the evolution of just the the massive bone crushing power so so that starts kicking in seriously kind of you tyrannosize and up so that's when you start getting they're not just bigger animals that are getting to a comparable size to the other big dinosaur carnivores of the time you start getting those bigger heads but even then relatively late in tyrannosaur evolution so getting into kind of the middle part of the late Cretaceous you you see a split and we have a group called the Aelioramines which have really really long thin skulls and they look much more like a kind of there's a velociraptor they look much more like a giant velociraptor ish than a tyrannosaur still relatively small arms but it's a very long snout and so this is a fast biting animal with a relatively light bite so it's probably taking really quite small stuff proportionally and then the other side you've got the tyrannosaur irons which are the really big headed ones and so that is few ancestral things like albertosaurus and gorgosaurus um from out both from alberta um but then daspletosaurus a thing i named called juqing tyrannosaurus in china and then tarbasaurus and tyrannosaurus and you've really only got three or four of these ultra giants which are all kind of 10 meters plus in size and then have the really broad skull the real kind of excessive bite force but even things like albertosaurus which is i mean a big animal seven seven eight meters a ton or so they're not quite t-rex but they're definitely more robust than the other contemporaneous carnivores so there is this progression of getting bigger getting a bigger head the teeth get bigger but there's fewer of them building up the bone biting and the and the power um but with some interesting evolutionary off branches in the way that yeah cats are largely much of a muchness but then you get things like like bob cats and lynx which are actually quite bulky stocky little cats that don't have the long tail and are doing something quite different can you just speak almost more generally because um t-rex is sort of one of the great apex predators of history of earth how does the apex predator evolve like what why did t-rex win why why isn't everybody why isn't there like a vicious race at the top and i have a i have a problem with the term apex predator because um ecologically apex predators are generally defined as things that eat other predators so a great white shark is because it's eating stuff like tuna and sea lions which are themselves predators so it's a predator of predators whereas people people love saying lines are apex predators and they love saying t-rex is an apex predator they're eating herbivores this is not some this is not some weird unusual thing they're the largest predator in their ecosystem and they are a giant one my friend dianna natures moved to using the word arch predator so it's like some kind of massive thing but avoiding the term apex because i think that leads into a it it it's a subtle terminology thing but uh an important one i just learned something today so i didn't understand i thought i was i was using the word apex predators but that's because everyone keeps using it when i don't think they should and and now you're getting into linguistics it's like well if everyone uses it to mean that does it now mean that rather than what it should mean and then i'm probably losing that argument because actually you'll probably find way more stuff calling it an apex predator than you will an arch predator but but here we are arch predator beautiful i learned something today but that would that you're saying t-rex didn't eat other predators well it's it's probably not going to so we can get into though i'd prefer not to because it's tedious the argument of whether or not there's these small things which some people have said is a different group called nanotaranus or different species called nanotaranus but fundamentally t-rex is definitely weird even compared to all the other giant tyrannosaurs that are very closely related to it because it is by far ludicrously by far the largest carnivore in its ecosystem so so it doesn't really have competition actually i mean so so this is a velocireptus skull there are there are there are some carnivores that are a bit bigger than this yeah but not enormously so um which we're knocking around is t-rex that the skulls the same time tooth crap right but but like you think about that and that's like going go that's like going to africa and going okay there are lions what's the next biggest predator and it's like well there's a weasel about this big yeah like it it's that kind of size difference and you don't get that normally in the ecosystem so it didn't have some of the other big dinosaurs around it not carnivores there's huge herbivores but there's no huge carnivore around it would it would eat those the juvenile of the herbivores but not yeah it's going to be eating triceratops nedmontosaurus and paracoral opus there's even a couple of giant sauropods knocking around in some places it's it's going to be hoovering them up but like how often is it going to eat again velocirept isn't there but how often is it going to eat something the size of an adult velociraptor i mean they're a fraction of our size and we're probably too small that this is like lions hunting mice like you're just not going to but unless one like virtually runs into your mouth you're not going to go and try and eat it so the question still stands about arch predators then like how does it how do you win yeah evolution i mean so i mean that there's there's no real winners there's just you know turnover because ultimately the birds you know it it's it's still lost out when when things went wrong and as we were just talking about you know things do tend to lose out when they're big they're just so much more vulnerable to extinction um but clearly dinosaurian ecosystems had much bigger herbivores and therefore by extent much bigger carnivores than any system we've seen before or after um even in relatively sparse ones like spits of the lake triassic so when the dinosaurs are really just getting going or the very early Jurassic but you've still got some like multi ton herbivores and then you've got some multiple hundred kilo predators so about as big as elephants and lions get today and then once you're in the Jurassic and Cretaceous it is entirely normal to have multiple species that are 10 20 30 tons plus as herbivores and anything up to five tons as a carnivore i mean t-rex is probably the biggest of them but carnivores that exceed fully terrestrial carnivores that exceed a ton there's dozens of species of dinosaurs is it interesting to you that no other carnivore predator was able to develop in that environment over millions of years i mean they probably just ecologically dominant in the way that mammals are now you know crocs get bigger than lions and tigers but they're fundamentally tied to the water but you don't see crocs roaming in serengeti or anything like that um but yeah big i mean the really big crocs even now get to over a ton so those are very serious animals and i think big polar bears are in the like 500 kilo range though again they hunt a lot of stuff in water and then things like grizzlies are at least partially herbivorous or omnivorous so there was a very large marine reptile mussel sorus did t-rex ever come across that in theory at least the really giant mosasaurs are much bigger in the same way that unsurprisingly wales are much bigger than terrestrial carnivores now um jurassic park unsurprisingly has rather exaggerated it so the one from the jurassic world it's like twice the size it should be but some of these things were still like you know 15 20 meters but yeah some of them are absolutely giant we had one dug up in the uk just a couple of years ago and i got to see the skull of it or a cast of the skull and yeah it's about the same size as a t-rex skull if we take a ridiculous detour before we get back to science what creature in the history of earth would challenge a t-rex in a fight would you say on land on land i mean nothing reasonably like the the really big ones are gonna be the only other thing you can really add is the i said this might be a very british add the adage of it's not the size of the dog in the fight it's the size of the fight in the dog so yeah maybe there's something a bit smaller which is just hyper aggressive and that would be enough to win like the the classic honey badgers chasing off lions it's not that a honey badger would win in a fight but if the honey badger is prepared to put up that much of a fight and the lion really doesn't want to get hurt then then he kind of technically wins you can't imagine like like any of the cats can't like tigers i know that can do i mean the size difference the power of the jaw all that kind of stuff yeah but going to t-rex like what could reasonably challenge it there's a couple of other giant tyrannosaurs there's a couple of giant carcara don't source from south america that i say are comparable in linear measurements but are probably rather smaller and rather lighter in which case your money's gonna be on the bigger guy with the bigger bite and that simply is t-rex and the bite is important yeah i think it is because yeah these these guys the carcara don't source they're they're much more cutting and they're really killing stuff probably by grappling with the arms because they do have big muscular arms with big claws and then slashing away at stuff so i think they're probably doing something more like almost like wolves or hyena or hunting dog where they're harrying stuff and slashing at it and you're basically bleeding them out and wearing them down so what about that strategy so maybe you could speak to biting strategy so t-rex is a i guess a relatively slow bite extremely powerful what about animals that have very fast bites so it's very simple mechanics you know if you have a very long jaw you're going to close faster but with less power at the tip than if you have a really short one that's deep and so that really is it but yeah let's say there's there's things like yaya aramines and then there's things like yeah velociraptor and a lot of its relatives really very and not just small but you know narrow it is narrow snouted there's not going to be a lot of fundamental strength here the teeth very numerous very small so they're much more about grabbing something tiny you know velociraptor's eating rat-sized stuff that's going to be probably its primary diet or so i wonder if there's a bunch of smaller fast biting things that could just bleed a t-rex to death they're gonna struggle though i remember doing some work for one documentary and they yeah they literally wanted velociraptor fighting a t-rex and i was like you do know this is like we're gonna shoot some meerkats killing a lion and it's like well you can film it but no one would believe it because you know these ankle high things trying to like savage a shin bone yeah i'm sure they'll make some holes and it'll lose some blood and it may not be very happy but i don't think they're gonna win the size of uh velociraptor was uh exaggerated by a jurassic bar enormously i mean they get a bit bigger than this in terms of the skull but yeah they're kind of thigh high to me like a meter or so to the top of the head two meters long whereas in the movies they're like standing taller than guys who are six foot so it's just massively massively scaled up and then these kind of big kind of domey heads then they're not the really long narrow snout maybe we could take that tangent what does jurassic park and jurassic world franchise get right and wrong i mean get wrong a hell of a lot what what are some of like really definitive things to you that are interesting that it gets wrong and also what are the things it gets pretty close to right um i mean i just want to press up my answer because i always i always get asked about this understandably and it's like i i get that it's a movie but if someone's gonna ask me what does it get wrong i'm gonna give them an answer but i give people like are you just nipping are you know it's fiction are you know it's made up yeah i do know but someone asked the question so here's the answer i should say that some of the things i've heard you describe i feel like it's the responsibility of those folks to get it right i i think there's there's something that um i really deeply admire there's a show called your noble it's like they don't need to be that accurate but they really it's like the detail of the the kitchenware yeah in a room like just to get the tiniest detail right who's that for i don't know who's that for but that's for the that's great art that's for the that's the spirit of the thing and like that if you focus on getting those tiny details right there's some magical thing happens about the bigger story yeah if you don't care about the details the story gets corrupted so i just want to say that some of the things you described like how many fingers yeah it's like that's important to get that right because if you do some magical stuff can really emerge and it could become a legendary film as opposed to just uh yeah i mean that's my take again i you know i've i've worked on documentaries where they're claiming that accuracy is absolutely critical and 100 important and they won't put anything on screen that i haven't told them to and then many of those things turn out not to be quite as true as advertised once you get round to it so i'm i'm aware that when even documentaries will take massive liberties you can't be too harsh on what is popular fiction um on the other hand i am also aware that it is by far by a ludicrous degree the most popular bit of any kind of media that includes my work as it were or something that i'm actively engaged in and know about and so whether or not it should have that influence for whether or not the filmmakers should have responsibility it does it does have that knock on um so i mean it's simple as stuff is tear it's can't see if you can't move yeah it could i don't know where that came from as far as i can tell cry and just dreamed it up he in in the lost world his sequel book he hints that there's a research paper that says it and that's kind of where he got it from um there's a second paleontologist character who's advising dodson the evil in gen guy and he says oh no that's from such and such his research and like i try looking up as far as i can tell it doesn't exist and never did um so i think it's just straight fiction and it's like it works for the it works for the book and it works for the movie but it's as far as i can tell it's straight fiction and cry just made it up if it's buried in some bit of literature he's done better finding it than i have and i've had a really good look and i know how to look and i've never come across anyone who's found it either um but it does it just like warps the perception you know velociraptor cheetah speed pack hunters super intelligent giant sized animals and okay 1993 it's a bit more forgivable but even then we were pretty confident they had feathers is any of that true wait so uh probably not the the the pack hunter aspect um so that's something i've written quite a lot about um the evidence for pack hunting in any dinosaur at all is almost non-existent um it it basically doesn't exist and that's going exactly back to again that stuff we're talking about bite marks and tofonomy and like the history of specimens and how you interpret so what kind of evidence would show like maybe bite marks from multiple sources so it's really really tough so the the main one which was put forward is there's this famous um association in montana of dynonicus which is often confused with velociraptor including in the books and foofy um basically a bigger version of this that's rather older from the um early cretaceous and i think called tenontosaurus which is kind of iguanodontin so guanodontin the spiky thumbs basically otherwise a fairly run-of-the-mill herbivore and there are two sites i believe for this but there's one that's much more important where you have uh tenontosaurus carcass with dynonicus carcasses and so the interpretation of this is well this is a group that brought down the herbivore and of course the immediate kind of counter argument to that is well why do they all die there like when you know when lions kill a wildebeest they eat it they don't all just die next to it yeah or even if they did kill it and start eating it and then like if they got into a fight and killed each other well lions as a species are not going to hang around for very long if every time they kill something they get into a mortal fight and kill half the pride um there's nothing obvious that killed them um but it's at least possible that this was something like a predator trap so predator traps are really neat so labreotarpits is a classic example the idea is a herbivore stumbles into something like tar you've got your deer or wildebeest or mammoth or whatever it is waste deep in tar and go i'm dying i'm dying i'm making horrible noises and you know smelodon walks over and goes great and wades out after it and he's now stuck and then the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one and then lo and behold you now have something like labrea where they've got like the the numbers are something absurd like i think they've got like three mammoths and one ground sloth and then it's like a hundred direwolves and forty smelodon because it's just sucking the carnivores in wow and you get these really distorted ratios i don't think that's the case of the dynonicus tonontosaurus stuff because there's ways that you can probably rule that out but there are probably places like this where it's happened again the other one is um the toxin one who's yeah cleveland loyge so she's coming up on your screen that's another one uh with loads of dinosaurs that's allosaurus um but we've definitely seen it with i think it i think this has come up with something like lions or wolves like they found loads of them dead by a lake and it turned out or this pond and this pond had got some really sort of nasty algal bloom toxin in it and the interpretation was the same kind of thing is that like a couple of deer were drinking this stuff toxic and kills you within minutes kills over dyes wolf smells dead meat comes over starts eating it has a drink kills over and dies and the next so it's not going you're just dying from the toxicity rather than being like physically sucked in and trapped but the same effect can happen and so you just end up with a pile of dead bodies so i'm pulling up some stuff here first of all shout out to perplexity super awesome there it'd be great if you fact check some of this stuff so fossil discoveries including parallel trackways and bone beds containing multiple tyrannosaurus suggest these large predators sometimes moved and possibly hunted in groups you as a person who wrote a book about the behavior of yep let me deconstruct that like almost instantly so it's it's really easy because this this is my book on dinosaur behavior this is just the kind of thing i'm talking about so the the tyrannosaur trackways of a group of tyrannosaurs is i think four or five tracks total so it's like two from one animal two from a second animal and one from a third animal that's not the end of the world that's somehow how trackways formed like you know the rocks broken up they stood on mud and then they didn't whatever just to go for a trackways means footprints of multiple maybe steps yeah one of them has got a left and right and the other two don't it's it's very fragmentary but i haven't that's not a problem with the interpretation the problem is this is interpreted as a group of them moving together well why because they're going in roughly the same direction okay and they're roughly equal sizes okay but like i've seen solitary animals moving in groups a guy i know quite well in south africa i got a south africa regulates for my teaching actually and he's one of the big guys at south africa national parks and he gives me the skinny on all kinds of weird stuff and he's telling me a few years ago that one of his park rangers had observed leopards hunting together in a group now leopards are basically not just solitary they're like anti-social like they beat the hell out of each other if they come near each other but i've also seen you know you you get game trails are a thing paths that single animals take if a female is in heat like males will track her down and follow her so you'll get one set of footprints and then a couple of hours later a male will come past and a couple of hours later another male will come past and now you've got three sets of footprints all traveling in the same direction on the same bit of path but they live on their own let alone hunting together which is a massive step above this and then the one i've talked about quite a bit in my book is spotted hyena krakuta krakuta which is the one there's a whole bunch of hyenas but this is the one everyone knows they're the big laughing hyena and can see plenty of antenborough type documentaries of them seven or eight of them or even ten or twelve of them going into a herd and ripping apart wildebeestle zebra whatever it is but actually if you read the scientific literature this is really rare they mostly hunt on their own now they do live in these social clans with hierarchies and complex social interactions they are very social animals but they mostly hunt on their own so even if you find loads of trackways of the moving together or as again there's one if not two for tyrannosaurs we've got multiple tyrannosaurs together and that's been argued for pack hunting at best that argues they might have lived together but it doesn't tell you whether or not they hunted together so how can we make a decision on one way or the other so i i mean i i tend to be ultra conservative in this context and i think we should probably avoid saying things that we're not quite confident about i i don't want to ever go down the we must have really definitive 100 convincing evidence because this is paleo we don't have that kind of data but just as i talked about with things like the predator prey size ratio stuff there is data we can start to use on living species about what tends to trigger hunting in groups or living in groups and what data there might be from stuff like brain sizes or other trackways or again we do have bite marks indicating prey size if you start finding repeated attacks on big prey from relatively small predators that would be quite convincing as you said maybe we had bite marks of multiple different sizes now that on its own it comes hard because obviously scavenging you know tyrannosaurs are an exception most dinosaurs most carnivorous dinosaurs have pretty similarly shaped teeth so how easy is it to tell an adult from a juvenile from an adult from a different species that's just a bit smaller probably pretty tricky i mean for me i think the the kind of gold standard which i don't think we're ever going to find but you never know like you could in theory get a trackway of something like a herbivore with a whole bunch of carnivore tracks coming by we do have a couple like this but they don't have what i'd really want to see which is if you trace the footprints of the individual carnivores and if a's in early on a's footprint go on top of b's but later on b's go on top of a's they must have been there at the same time because there's no way they could have been even minutes or hours apart so if you had that then those two must be together or at least within sight of each other and one's not turning around and roaring or having a fight if you can do that with seven or eight all converging on one herbivore and then everything goes manic well that's really pretty convincing it is so fascinating and awesome but like the Sherlock Holmes aspect of paleontology like figuring out because you have very little signal yeah and you have to figure out the puzzle of it from that and like that's it's such a brilliant you're giving so many brilliant examples of like yeah if a steps on top of b and then b steps on top of a that's a strong signal that they were walking together i am a bit of a Sherlock Holmes fan and he references cuvier so cuvier is his legendary french anatomist baron cuvier he was the first guy to posit that things went extinct working on mammoths he said well there's nothing like this alive today so extinction happens which before that we didn't really know and holmes has a line about just as cuvier can restore an animal from the smallest bone so i can restore the events from the smallest detail or i'm paraphrasing but i'm not far off yeah there's you to that you have used an analogy that conan d'or specifically used for holmes going back to paleontology i mean it's obvious it's clear it's right there yeah that's how on the nose you are with that one so okay so basically you clarified and showed all the things Jurassic we got off topic before we even got onto Jurassic Park i'm just for the surrupter you said that you know the size the pack hunting all of that the pack hunting just to round off on that it's like i don't know maybe there's actually been some more recent stuff on dynonicus looking at things like isotopes in the teeth and feeding traces and some other stuff that's hinting that maybe there is more going on there which is great i'm not ante the idea that this exists but you you absolutely get this build up of the idea that velociraptors are pack hunter comes from dynonicus and i think the evidence from dynonicus is really weak in exactly the way that okay lions are group hunters we know they are does that mean that leopards are and tigers and puma no so why on earth do you think that just because even if dynonicus is that doesn't really tell you anything about velociraptor group hunting has all kinds of more complicated dynamics going on it than just close relatives tend to do it you can flip that around you know african hunting dog wolves things like bush dogs there's various canids that all hunt in groups but then you've got things like main wolves which are effectively solitary um the hyenas spotted hyena ah yeah these super social animals but the brown hyena the striped hyena and the odd wolf are solitary so you you just can't do group versus solitary off close relatives or anything like that i am very sure a ton of dinosaurs were aggregate lived lived in groups to some degree and i'm very sure some of them were social with complex lives and hierarchies and even pack hunting which ones i have very little idea because i think the data is so sparse that we can't really say it with any confidence for anything in my opinion i think that can be got at i think we need to start getting at it with the sort of stuff i'm talking about like get a better understanding of what drives sociality in lions versus tigers versus lapids you know relatively close relatives who overlap don't forget in india leopards and tigers overlap with lions the asian attic line is still there um so you can talk about ecosystem structure and prey size and prey type and all this stuff we can maybe maybe we can start piecing that together a bit better and then apply that to stuff like the trackways and the isotopes and all the rest of it um bite marks and these mass mortality sites so i think it can be done but personally like what were pack hunters no idea i don't think i don't think any of them were in the sense that i don't think we've got good evidence for any of them but there probably exists on earth definitive evidence one way or the other yeah probably for some of them i mean i think it's well within their scope one of the papers writing about this ironically arguing against pack hunting in dynonicus um said that well it's probably not the case because you don't really see pack hunting in birds and so if you don't see it in birds then dinosaurs being their ancestor if birds can't evolve it then maybe dinosaurs couldn't have evolved it which i'm not sure is a great logical argument because of the complexities of social behavior anyway but then there are a couple of birds which actively hunt in groups uh things like the giant ground hornbills um ethiopra and south africa are a really great example of that so so that point is incorrect and then we see if not true sociality we see cooperation in crocodilians and we're seeing degrees of social behavior in things like iguanas so the idea that like well birds are super advanced and dinosaurs can't do it because the stupid reptiles are too stupid and therefore dinosaurs are more like them which isn't quite what they're saying but it's sort of the unwritten idea well we have social behavior and cooperation behavior in crocs and in lizards so that really gives you the impression that dinosaurs theoretically at least are perfectly capable of that so there's pack hunting but there's also sociality which is such an interesting idea is how did they live and this is something you look at that paleontology doesn't often touch is like the lives yeah because you know animals are doing complicated things so you know in the case of lions a large part of this is down to territoriality in the the males ultimately are defending the territory and that's effectively protecting the females but of course what they're mostly protecting them from is other males so there's a ludicrous bit of self-interest um but that's effectively how it's operating as a system but it could just be predatory type cheetahs and my go-to example for this so cheetahs are the weird ones compared to the other cats because females are solitary but males are social so brothers will when when you know if the female has five or six cubs the brothers will stay together in a group and then the girls will go off on their own and if you're a if you're the only brother or the only survivor you were usually hung up hook up with a gang of other males so cheetahs are pack hunters if you're male and a solitary hunter if you're female so it's not about territory defense or occupation for them it's about prey type is it possible to know the sex of a t-rex or any of the other dinosaurs like what what can paleontology show us so in theory yes in practice it's way more complicated so unless you get very lucky we have a handful of specimens that still have eggs inside them instant giveaway um but that's like two or three um what you can look for is both reptiles and birds have a thing called medullary bone and when you're laying eggs and you need a lot of calcium very quickly because the egg shell goes on basically like kind of like the last minute during egg development so you need a lot of calcium very quickly so during the laying season these animals grow this really weird kind of bone texture on big things like the femur and the humerus like really big bones in the body and that's it's got a weird texture because it's full of blood vessels and it's full of blood vessels so that you can basically apply a lot of blood supply to it quickly suck up some of the calcium from that bone take it through the system put it on the eggs lay your eggs we can find that so if you have a dinosaur bone and it's the right kind of thing so you can't do it on like a finger or claw or a bit of rib but nice big bone you could cut a chunk of that out grind it down to the point that it's virtually transparent fraction a millimeter thick put it under a microscope and have a look and if you see the right bone texture that's there there's some exceptions but that's very probably medullary bone and you have yourself a female so the instant assumption is okay so you can tell female from male no we can tell laying female from everything else so males won't have medullary bone young females won't have them females outside of the breeding season won't have it females inside the breeding season but maybe they've been really sick this year don't have it or they laid their eggs early and now they don't need it anymore won't have it so occasionally if you cut up a bone which of course we try not do that much you can get the signal of medullary bone and infer that you have a female in the breeding season but there's no like large bone structure differences well maybe there is but we haven't seen it you look at things like um kudu odd um black buck and all kinds of antelope or even most deer and the males have horns or antlers and the females don't and then you look at something like triceratops and all the seratopsians it's a big clade of uh must be 40 species by now and every single one of them has the frill and has some kind of horn somewhere you don't have the hornless ones or the frillless ones in the way that we do with a lot of these i'm trying to figure out is there how many of the species is it obvious that there's uh like like pelvis differences all that so pelvis differences works on like humans and apes and maybe a couple of other mammals but it's mostly not very good because we it's because we give birth to such a gigantic baby with a gigantic head compared to our sizes that women have different palvases to men and then there's size differences like the skull is not as reliable as the pelvis and then again you just need to look at you know humans are always slightly dodgy with this because of you know our evolutionary and cultural history but like you know there's population differences you know you you there are there are main female lions in places there are main lust male lions in places um reindeer female reindeer have antlers in winter so Rudolph was a girl because every illustration of Santron is reindeer ever had they all have antlers and that's that's a female reindeer not a male if it's winter so basically we don't know much about the dating and the sex lives of the two exorcises well not much but you can make some inferences so for example um all tyrannosaurs uh have at least some kind of crest on the head the early ones have like this midline cre it really doesn't work on a human they have like a midline crest running along the top of the nose that sticks up the later ones largely don't but they do have this weird armored structure along those fused nasals and then they have little horns over the eyes those as far as we can tell don't really have any kind of obvious mechanical function and loads like outside of the feathered dinosaurs the vast majority of dinosaurs of carnivorous dinosaurs have some kind of crest or display feature on the head when you say display feature meaning for sex appeal to attract mates or something like that so I I've always favored the term socio-sexual selection to cover both sexual display and sexual dominance and communication um but also social ones because those two things are hard to tell apart female lions find males with dark amines sexier but male lions find males with darker mains more intimidating so one of them is sex but one of them is social nice I mean I guess it goes hand in hand sure yeah it can but then you get things like the other one I go for is uh black swans these beautiful Australian birds they have these really weird curly feathers on their wings and males and females both have them and males prefer females with curlier feathers and females prefer males with curlier feathers as an obvious sexual blink but then females fight too females fight over the best nesting spots and the females with the curliest feathers tend to win those fights what does that make sense this gets into classic sexual selection theory it's it's what's called an honest signal you couldn't have those curly feathers if you weren't able to support them oh because they're their primary feathers on the wings and what it actually does is it makes it harder to fly so you're basically going look how tough I am I've grown this big and I can fly and carry on with my giant curly feathers because I'm really tough and I'm in good shape and it's the same with the lion the reason you get pale lions in the south is because it's or close to the equator because it's too hot so there's the trade-off because if you have a really black mane yeah all the males know you're rock and all the females know you're super sexy but you just die of overheating the trade-off is if the heat's gonna kill you you're probably better off being a bit paler and surviving in order to reproduce than you are being jet black but just dying instantly as soon as it gets hot so there's trade-offs there okay yeah and that's probably what's happening with the theropods the all the little crests and horns seratosaurus dilophosaurus tyrannosaurs allosaurs have big crests over the eyes and all kinds of others my I've written about this I think this is the trade-off you're going for the sexiest look and the sexiest look is the biggest horns or the biggest spikes and whatever is on the head probably also then with the brightest colors and the most display patterns but also this this gives you a way to your prey if you're trying to hide or you're trying to sneak up on something being brightly colored or having stripes or all this extra stuff on your head you you you get spotted but then that's the trade-off is if I'm this big and my horns are my horns are this big and this red and yellow and I can still whoop I can still run those guys down and hunt them and kill them and eat them yeah then look how great I must be whereas that little guy he's only got weedy little crests and they're and they're really dark because he's so bad at catching stuff he doesn't have the extra energy to grow big crests and so and that's why but when you're a herbivore you don't have that pressure particularly something like this is protoceratops but something like triceratops and these guys they're living in big groups you can't hide from a predator when you're a group of 20 animals that are 10 tons each so who cares you just grow the biggest signal you can possibly grow and lo and behold they have giant frills and giant horns what can you say about beauty in evolution so something that's maybe you can educate me but something that's not quite an auto signal that's just pure beauty like peacock feathers so there are things which we think operate closer to that so there are these are the two kind of classic ideas of sexual selection and both are probably true to certain degrees in various different species one is the honest signal of it's the kind of a handicap hypothesis because you're holding yourself back whilst proving you can still do it I run the marathon you know carrying a couple of weights you're obviously stronger than the guy who ran the marathon without and so that's why it's an honest signal and it's why it's a handicap but the other one is what's called the sexy sun's hypothesis and the idea is a female might just find a male attractive for no other reason than random there is some component of her brain or whatever it may be that that just looks cool and you can actually sort of get this as a human like forget human beauty you can look at a bottle and go that bottle's kind of nice and that bottle's kind of ugly where do you put like like birds are interesting with this well what do you put peacock feathers so they're they're probably more handicap hypothesis because the colors that go into them and the sheer size and shape and these things basically can't fly they're really vulnerable to predators can that handicap hypothesis explain just how beautiful peacock feathers get because they go extreme probably not entirely there's there's almost certainly randomness going on in there as well and then the eye spots we know the eye spots are attractive are probably encoded in some way but yeah so going back to the sexy suns the idea is females prefer something different for whatever reason and there might actually be some reasons females prefer things that are different different usually means separate and outside and that usually comes with it variation like inherently also variation is evolutionary to turn on yeah basically wouldn't that man you're rolling a dice though aren't you yeah well you wrote so so you've you've got to remember again it's really easy to look at that sort of thing with a human perspective where a maximum reproductive output I think the the record there's there's some obscure record it's something like 66 children which is probably apocryphal for a russian woman who had loads of triplets and quads but like humans don't have many offspring but most animals lay dozens of eggs or hundreds of eggs or thousands of eggs at a time so actually so diversity appears off more there so diversity can pay off we we think that's probably a major part of the reason that sex evolved in the first place is it gives you resistance to changing environment and it gives you resistance to parasites and diseases which often reproduce way faster than you do you know bacteria can divide in a few hours we reproduce every 20 years that's quite a difference if we were all asexual clones and you're vulnerable to some disease you're probably going to get wiped out look at the you know irish potato famine something like that so different maybe appealing simply because it is different it's giving you variation and there's at least some evidence for that there's sword tails so anyone who keeps little fish uh if anyone's who's a tropical fish uh keeper sword tails are really quite common little tropical fish that you can get in all kinds of aquarium shops and they're a very boring fish shape but the lower lobe of their tail has a big spike on it and that's the name and they're really close relatives of a group called the mollies which basically don't have that and in the wild there's these are amazonian fish they don't usually encounter each other but even if you go and get not even the domesticated form because these things have been bred for you know decades at this point you can go and get some wild mollies and give them a wild male sword tail and they think he's so much better than all the male mollies they will go for that one and they will preferentially mate with that one we don't know the exact mechanism but it appears to be he looks similar enough that i recognize it as a potential mate but different enough that this is exciting and then this is where the sexy sons kick in because the females are now assuming those animals are successful and they can hybridize or maybe it's just a male who just happens to be a little bit blue or a little bit red or whatever it may be um well the female offspring the daughters are probably going to inherit mother's preference i really like red and the males are probably going to have red in them because their dad had more red so guess what the next generation does it's more red and the females like more red and you don't have to come back much further and suddenly all the males are bright red and that's closer to beauty than i think almost anything else would be with still a naturalistic explanation we kind of start talking about beauty from how much uh social life yeah a t-rex might have a t-rex might have so uh i just to kind of take that to a place of what we know and what we don't know so can we kind of know something about their uh their social life where they lived how they lived so the very fact that they have these apparently socio sexually selected signals the little crest and stuff in the head so there's a branch of sexual selection called mutual sexual selection and the the black swans are an advanced example of this the the classic sexual selection is yeah your peacocks and your lions and things like this males are bigger and more flamboyant and whatever it is and they're doing all the competing but you have mutual sexual selection and this is really common in a whole bunch of things that people are familiar with but don't know loads of seabirds um starlings the common starling that we have european has been introduced into the u.s parrots various other things where basically males and females invest similarly in rearing the offspring and so the idea generally both with handicap and sexy son but particularly with handicap is the idea is the males are proving their worth they're basically saying i'm the biggest strongest healthiest i've got the best genes i should be the father of your offspring they go around showing off and then mate with as many females as possible while the females then do all the work and make the nest and look after the chicks and yeah or rear them or give birth or whatever it may be yadda yadda yadda and so the idea with mutual sexual selection is well what if there's not much food around things like puffins or you know penguins in the arctic you know where the male sits with the egg and the female totals off gets food and then comes back two months later or whatever it is um on their own they can't rear the offspring they have to have a male investment well now suddenly the male's now putting loads of effort in so the male's now in the same position that a female would be in under the normal conditions you don't want to be the sexiest toughest biggest male and you can only mate once all right there's there's various cheats but we won't get into that just yet you're only going to mate once and you're going to put all your effort into helping rearing offspring rather than chasing down as many girls as possible are you going to go for the biggest fittest female as well or are you going to go for the small weedy one that doesn't look very well you go for the best one well how do you know that well because she's got a crest as well and so suddenly you now get mutual ornamentation just like the black swans where the males are checking out the curliest females and the females are checking out the curliest males and you'll see they mutually pair up this is what we see with things like starlings males like the brightest females females like the brightest males they tend to form pairs the darkest and least bright ones are obviously kind of left with each other at the bottom of the pile they tend to pair up but it means that when you get signals in both males and females like every triceratops or every tyrannosaurus it at least hints that they're going down this route and that they might cooperate for reproduction wow another like weak signal that tells a part of the story yeah and the problem is it's compromised by lots of things so that goes back to your earlier question about telling males and females apart the vast majority of dinosaur species like 90 plus percent are known from a single specimen and a specimen is not necessarily very complete at all it might be a couple of bones it might be one bone it might be a tooth in a couple of cases the actual number where we've got a decent number of real whole skeletons that we can actually compare to each other less than 10 probably more like five or six can I ask you a weird question if you were to uh let's say all humans died right now press the button gone how much of human civilization would you be able to reconstruct from just the skeletons that are in the ground like you just started collecting skeletons there's a lot of them yeah there's billions of them would you be able to start telling a story like urban centers yeah probably you could probably construct a lot if nothing else just the you know superlative brain cavity will tell you quite a lot you know yeah the intelligence must must have been very very smart with the brain that big you can probably reconstruct some of the behavior a lot of the behavior social behavior a lot of the and you're going to see stuff like you know it's the famous one of I think it was a neanderthal there was a famous question of like you know at what point do you think society exists and it may have been one of the leakies but the answer was basically that this skeleton because it was someone with a really like a properly busted leg and then it fully healed and it's like if that person was on their own just dead someone had to look after them for months to get that level of healing you only do that to someone you're really devoted to and probably a group of people because even one person can't look after one other person in right so that's your society and yeah you think about the the pathology of skeletons in the human race how you know how many of us have broken a bone most most adults have probably broken a couple of bones even if it's just a finger or or a nose or something but then you think about what medicine has done and you would be able to see treatments of complete compound fractures of guys who survived horrific car crashes and treatments of cancer bone cancers and stuff like that you would see that well how's that happening either they're magic or they've got some kind of in which case they'd probably cure it instantly or there's some kind of technology in society supporting that change that just hints at the fact that the evidence collection and the reasoning mechanism that paleontology and archaeology uses is really powerful so it could be very effective even just with a small amount of data but it's the right amount of data that's the thing we can we can find dozens of skeletons that we can't do very much with and then the right one that you know things like stomach contents you know that's a super or bite most it's a super powerful bit of data but it doesn't turn up that often so it's not like you can get it off every skeleton and that's the thing it's the it's the pool of data and I think that's what people miss we we as paleontologists we get caught up on single superlative specimens and then try and teach them as a like a silver bullet almost so my corrector I mentioned this before little flying dinosaur crows eye or gliding dinosaur crow size thing from china we've got at least a dozen good specimens of it by now and multiple ones with stomach contents there's one I've described with a little mammal foot inside it there's one with a bird inside it there's one with a lizard inside it and there's one with a fish inside it on their own and this happened for at least two of the papers describing these things it's like it ate fish these are fish eating animals no that one ate one fish once that one ate one bird once that one ate one mammal once and that one ate one lizard once so what have we actually got here I suspect we've got a group of generalists and we just happened to have found them eating different things at different times but equally it's also possible at least that yeah this is one of these things and it had learnt to eat fish when the others hadn't and actually this was most of the fish eaters and the others ate whatever they could get maybe one caught a bird up a tree in a nest maybe one found it dead on the ground you don't really know what one of these things on its own is fascinating but potentially misleading with the way you're describing it now it seems like yes it's potentially misleading but there's in your whole way of being and the way you've been talking about this stuff I can see that it's not just the direct evidence you're mentioning it's like it's a bunch of intuitions you build up it's like you're stitching together a bunch of little things it's the Sherlock Holmes things it's not just the clearly this one piece of evidence it's like okay what do I know about the general other dinosaurs around the area what the different animals how animals usually behave about this period about the environment and all of that comes together and then yeah and that's so one thing I've definitely written about is yeah the the independent lines of evidence can you get stuff that is as far as possible truly independent from the other data and does it give you the same answer and then when it does that's incredibly powerful so Spinosaurus or the the Spinosaurus as a whole is my go-to example for this so the guys the famous big sail back in the weird crocodile like head though some of them look rather different to that and if you look across all the species and specimens that we have incredibly fragmentary and very badly known but they're all basically associated with um when you look at the Gestalt you see a whole bunch of stuff for these things so they do have a surprisingly crocodile like head and crocodile like teeth compared to every other carnivorous dinosaur and when you do the mechanical analysis you see they function in a very similar way and indeed teeth here's a Spinosaurus teeth with very nearly circular cross section really distinctive similar to crocodiles similar to dolphins similar to fish eating fish so points to fish crocodile like head points to fish crocs eat other stuff too but still they usually found in or near aquatic systems now fossils in general tend to turn into aquatic systems because you've got to be buried to become a fossil so water association is common but even so that's true they turn up in places where lots of other dinosaurs don't tend to turn up including carnivores which suggests they're eating something else if you look at the isotopic signature of the teeth often it correlates with crocodiles fish turtles and stuff that lives in water and doesn't correlate well with other land living dinosaurs that lived in the same time in same place so you put all of that together and it's really hard to argue oh in addition to the tiny detail of barionics the British one was found with fish scales inside its chest cavity so you put all of that together and yeah i'm not saying it only ate fish i'm sure it ate big shrimp and turtles and we know they were predating on terrestrial dinosaurs and pterosaurs because again stomach contents and teeth and stuff but fundamentally this is an animal or a group of animals doing something different to the other carnivorous dinosaurs and it's probably linked to water and it's probably linked to fish as a predominant way of living we should mention that you're working on a book out in early 2026 um so in the uk it'll be out in november in north america january or february 2026 it's it's called spongebob tails the biology and ecology of the spongebob and uh with mark witton who did that picture it's a beautiful creature which i think is in there he marks done a ton of new artwork he helped write the book but he's also the the artist i mean can you describe a little bit more about this creature there's a there's a bunch of stuff like what you just mentioned there's some debate weird is it is it hump to what degrees is it aquatic so what would not vary is my take so does it live in the water does it step in the water yeah so i think it's basically a big wader it's a poor analogy but it's a very weird giant stork oh god heron was giant um yeah so potentially bigger than t-rex linearly not in mass again really quite narrow chest versus that t-rex barrel but potentially 15 meters long so bigger than any t-rex we found at least in terms of length can you describe what it looks like though i mean there's some iconic features to it right yeah so this really quite long head um with a kind of wavy jawline like like animals have you know most carnivores have straight jaws this one has a kind of um somewhat wiggly jawline it really narrows at the front and then opens up again into a like a little it's called a rosette so you got like a little semi circle and then a dip and then the jaws go back and then the teeth line waves up and down these really conical teeth which doesn't sound very exciting but it makes them different to every other carnivorous dinosaur like no other thing has a conical tooth which is a classic fish thing or at least biting hold of something that wriggles um the nostrils are not at the tip of the nose they're pushed back at least somewhat it has a bunch of crests on the head it's got quite a long neck spinosaurus and at least a couple of the other closest relatives to it think called ichthyovenita from uh chombrophys tiland or laus i think it's laus has this giant elongated bit to the top of the vertebrae and so it gives it this giant sail along the back spinosaurus at least possibly ichthyovenita probably not any of the others then has this weird like thin like mute like expanse to the top of the tail giving it kind of like a giant oar paddle appearance mostly they have very large arms with giant claws on the hands um and spinosaurus at least appears to have really quite short legs but the others don't but again so there's those spinosaurus is like totally iconic but if you look at something like barionics from the uk or um sucomymus from niger it's still got the same head it's still got the same neck it's still got the same arms but it doesn't have this sail and it doesn't have this tail and it probably doesn't have short legs so spinosaurus is super weird and exaggerated version of what he was already a kind of super weird group of theropods so spinosaurus is properly strange and then as you kind of hinted at like super controversial as well because various papers have claimed it's a diver or a really good swimmer and i think the evidence for that is very weak at best so your book is going to be you're going to start some shit with your book is going to be i think i already have to be honest like i've written i've written three major papers and one in particular with my colleague tob holt where we frankly savaged the idea that it's a good swimmer and then other people have since including actually some of the authors who were on the original paper claiming it did swim well have now effectively reversed their position and said it didn't so the Jurassic park three fight between the two yeah famous uh in real life encounter who wins so probably still t-rex i mean the the Jurassic park spinosaurus was pretty good for its time because some of the stuff that i've just talked about particularly the short legs were suggested way back in 1910 1912 but it was really uncertain now it appears to be more likely the case than not the tail was unknown at this point so it was just a very generic tail but the crocodile like head is pretty good the neck's a bit short the sail is a bit too like it's almost just like a semi circle stuck on the back and it's a bit more complicated than that um but personally i'm quite a big fan of the Jurassic park three spinosaurus i think for its era it's really quite good um it is massive so there is this um they're from i gotta say morocco because spinosaurus is found throughout north africa morocco algeria egypt there's a massive pair of jaws or snout that's in a collection in milan that's absolutely outsized just like an absolute giant and that points to a truly monumentally sized spinosaurus which is one of these upper estimates of 15 plus meters come from it's just this one set of jaws but yeah it it's about right but it's just a bit too muscly and a bit too bulky um but in gross appearance it's pretty good does it have a chance against a t-rex no because it's got this unbelievably long thin jaw which was much stronger than something like barionics is fundamentally not that strong the the jaws are very long and thin and then the teeth are yeah they're big but they're not big big um you know the the the whole like it grabs the t-rex neck and then like snaps it well spinosaurus actually its neck is really strong going up and down and he's very weak rotating or going side to side so it's got the weakest kind of possible neck to like rotate and snap the t-rex and then t-rex has got like the strongest neck of anything so you've got like the weakest jaw with the weakest spin versus the strongest neck so no i don't buy it so that brings it back to the topic we touched on a little bit what are you've mentioned a bunch of the stuff that the Jurassic Park series gets wrong maybe you can speak to more things but also what does it get right so a lot of like very in some level generic but quite important things it gets right t-rex is about the right size and shape and is massive and you don't actually see it run you see it power walk if you watch the jeep chase again you'll see it only ever has one foot on the ground the weird thing for me is how much some of them vary so like i'm a big terra sore guy i do lots of work on terra soles the flying reptiles the tyrannodons in Jurassic Park two the lost world you see them very very briefly in one of the last shots and they're okay but they're not great but it's clearly a bit of a throwaway shot the ones in Jurassic Park three i think are mostly excellent really really good and then the ones in Jurassic World are terrible like a massive regression there's loads and loads of details that are right in JP3 that are completely wrong in Jurassic World and you're like why did you take a really good model and make it much much worse and less accurate i don't understand um and i again it's fiction at one level who cares but like as as you said like i i don't think the the weird thing for me is i don't think it would affect how they're perceived by the public i some things i get like for example in Jurassic World the tyrannodons pick people up with their feet and fly off with them tyrannodons feet don't work like that it would never be able to do that and it would never have the lift but i get for dramatic purposes you might want to show that okay fine you know this is your big sequence you need that but for the rest of the animal it's weirdly inaccurate and i don't think the public would know and they might well care if it was much more accurate and i don't think it would be any harder to make it accurate than to make it inaccurate um i spoke to a colleague of mine who i won't name just in case i get into trouble um who's a big dinosaur nerd but also a big creature creator and designer and has done a whole bunch of proper hollywood a-list movie stuff and i asked him about this and i went okay but like is it just easier to take the model that you've got and mess around with it than to if i came in and said you need to fix that you need to fix this you need to fix this you need to fix that and he basically went no it's about the same amount of effort it's not like we don't have the director or the producer or the lead designer going no i want that arm a bit longer i want that tail a bit brighter can you add a few more bits there i don't like those scales so he said we're doing that constantly anyway so doing it to one set of design specs versus another set of design specs is no more hassle in other words he said it's no harder to make it accurate than to make it inaccurate and it's like if that's truly the case then just make it right and then you can claim a level of accuracy and engagement that you can i mean it's interesting there's there's a thing called the Jurassic Foundation after the first Jurassic Park made an absolute fortune spiel i think it was Spielberg directly maybe through Universal but anyway they set up the Jurassic Foundation and it's a small fund of money for research on dinosaurs and related animals and academics can apply for it my ph one of my phd students got some money from the Jurassic Foundation like that's great he didn't have to do that he went paleontology's help give me this i'm gonna give back a bit and after what must be 30 years now it's probably funded an awful lot of research and help young researchers get started so there's a level of engagement there that i think hasn't been in subsequent films which you can kind of see for once it goes from being a one off to being a franchise and it's changed hands i mean how many different directors as it had now you know Spielberg did the first two and then done about the next five must be two if not another three more people you know and 30 years later it's it's all changing yeah but that's the path of creating a legendary film yeah that depth of accuracy and it's not that difficult to work but it's also it does something to the to the whole artistic creation if you create a culture for the details really really matter yeah and and again there's there's some oddities so like gallium imus i mentioned it earlier so one of the ornithomimosaurs the model for gallium imus in Jurassic world is nearly identical to that from Jurassic park one of the differences which you can barely see on film but i know this is true because i found it in like Jurassic World kids book because i flexed through when it came out it's a close up of the head with an arrow to the teeth gallium imus doesn't have teeth it's got a beak so someone has taken the original model and actively spent time adding teeth to an animal that didn't have them i would understand it i'm not saying i agree with it i'd understand if it was a rule of cool and like yeah but it looked so much better with all these gnarly big teeth and whatever and it's like you can't even see it in the final thing they've got tiny little heads in the film all they do is like run past the camera briefly it's not like they're a big carnivore and they're engaged in like one of the big battle like why why it's not like you can't even barely see them uh well yeah again just to linger on it there is a lot of value to authenticity in all walks of life and one of them is accuracy when you're talking about dinosaurs it's so valuable and so worthy and it's respectable for the long life of a film to be accurate i just wish i hope they do that there's certain directors that really dogmatically push out alex garland comes to mind you know he he did whenever he integrates like quantum computing or ai into a film no land with the black hole in interstellar they ended up publishing a paper on the calculation to visualize i mean that's legendary that's great exactly and like you think that has nothing to do with the story the narrative of the film but it does it like permeates everything if you get that black hole right that everybody else steps up their game and really really tells a story in this way that reverberates through time and it like really moves people so yeah i i mean as i say i i i wish it was better i mean the only thing i'd flip it around it's a joke i've made more than once but like just just don't take it as a documentary no one wants watches james bondon goes that's how international espionage works you know he's got the laser watch and the exploding car and it's like maybe treat it a bit as fiction i i i've heard from a friend of mine who worked at the roteiro museum which i've mentioned before in in alberta which is an absolute phenomenal place um and she said after the first one genuinely like it was not common but more than once people were annoyed that they didn't have the real dinosaurs out back because they'd seen them and they knew that the real ones were out there which is a testament to industrial light and magic and stan winston but also slightly horrifying that anyone watched Jurassic park and literally thought that me also why would you go to a museum you go to the zoo if it's alive there you will also meet what is it kinkong and god yeah yeah uh okay i don't think it would quite touch on this i really want to ask you about uh intelligence what we know about the intelligence of let's say t-rex we talked about his big head what do we know about not much so there's there's a t-rex brain or at least a very rough cast of part of one that's the actual look of yeah that this is so dinosaurs in fact most reptiles i wonder if you can see it on the velociraptor not really unfortunately um elongated yeah but it's more that they have we are weird in that we have a brain that basically fills the inside of our skull what most animals have is actually a little kind of sub skull inside the main skull which is called the endocast or endocrinium and the brain is in that um and that even then it's not like full of brain because we've packed an awful lot of brain into our limited space and they then have quite a lot of goo and fat and other stuff around it um but it means for dinosaurs and then deep reptiles and birds in general in the old days you could basically cut one open but now we'll see teeth scan through them you can take an internal mold of the endocrinium the brain case and then whatever filled that would have been the brain and its surrounding tissues and that's how you get something like this that in this case someone literally cracked open an old skull and basically took an internal mold in the same way that you do an external mold for the for the skulls and that tells you quite a lot about certain things um so for example you've got a bulb at the front which is the olfactory bulb so brains are very stereotyped again ours are super weird so you have your factory bulb at the front and if you find that you have the optic bulb or the optic lobe so roughly how big they are will tell you roughly how much of the brain is devoted to for example sight and smell so if it's a lot it's pretty good if there's not much it's not very good that goes quite a long way already um one thing we've done in the last few years is you can also get into the it's not shown here i wouldn't be part of this uh but the inner ear we can CT scan into the structure of the bony inner ear and from that you can actually get an idea of what frequency of sounds the inner ear was structured to be pitched to which is doesn't actually tell you very much but it's phenomenally cool that you can do it we should say you also have quite a bit of a background in biology so you try to reconstruct biology from go from paleontology to biology yeah i my my go to one liner is i'm a zoologist but i work on dead stuff my degree was zoology my official job title now is reader of zoology i teach zoology i don't teach paleo um so yeah living animals was always actually my primary interest and i kind of fell into paleo but then i wanted to drag that with me because i'd been trained in behavior and ecology and as well as most interested in so then applying that knowledge and understanding to these animals so to some degree it is possible to reach towards the biology absolutely yeah so with the ear that's interesting the brain yeah you can know something about the brain yeah but then but then when you get into intelligence is when it gets really awkward because working out exactly which bits of this are probably linked to like the main fundamental processing and what you link to actual intelligence is tough um on top of that we don't really know what's been the big challenge of the last couple of years this question was t-rex and other dinosaurs super intelligent of like neurone density how many basically nerve cells can you pack in per bit or volume because birds have some weird tricks which means they get a lot more brain per volume um just how much of the brain case was brain and how much was like goop around it we know varies so you get in kind of fairly big upper and lower band and then the other big thing we always have to do is factor in size big animals need bigger brains to operate them so whales have really big brains but whales weigh tens of tons they're not smarter than us so you have the the classic thing is I think well the um encephalization quotient which is at a very simple level it is the volume of brain scaled against the size of the animal so we have huge brains compared to how big we are so we're massively up the chart and then you do have a few things with like worms I should probably stick to vertebrates because it's some stupid stuff which has a surprisingly small brain for its size most things that aren't primates and things like crows and parrots sit very neatly on a couple of different curves there's a curve for reptiles a curve for birds a curve for mammals and things like this um and basically that's it but also actually our understanding with mass estimates for dinosaurs is good but not great and so you could easily be out by you could easily be out by like 20 or 30 percent on the volume of the brain inside the brain case and then you could be out by 20 or 30 percent on your mass estimate well now suddenly it's very easy to make the brain too big and the animal too light and it's super smart or make the brain too small and the animal too heavy and it's super dumb so um that's awkward unfortunately so apparently there's some controversial paper that suggests that T-Rex has primate level intelligence yeah and then that was shot down within a few months by a team of paleontologists and a couple of other neurologists who really went to town on it just counting the number of trust me the number of neurons yeah it was the neuron density thing and yeah I I've unsurprisingly support the revised one which was done by a whole bunch yeah the CASPA paper um I've spoken to CASPA about it a couple of the other authors so they uh scaled down the number of neurons from three billion down to 250 million to 1.7 billion which is similar to crocodile is not yeah which is kind of what you'd expect I mean a couple of other people's at various times have suggested they're really smart and again you know birds have this thing of they have this weird thing of neuron folding and they can basically pack in a lot more than you'd expect you know that's why crows are that smart despite having tiny brains relatively even compared to their overall size um but I'm being obviously overly facetious but if ultimately part of your scaling is how big is the animal versus how big is its brain that's most of a T-Rex brain it's a fraction of the size of a chimp brain and chimps don't weigh seven tons so you you know it's a kind of hitchhens like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but like you just look at it and go that's about the proportion we'd expect for a croc now crocs are smarter than people think but they're sure as hell not monkeys um you're gonna have to really come up with something much more convincing than oh if you just pack them and she scale them this way uh a bit of a ridiculous question but is it possible to find evidence of tool use I mean in theory it depends how you quite how you define a tool so bird's building nests is arguably tool used to a certain degree I'm aware of I suspect it turned out not to be the case I was I was shown a very rough not very well prepared fossil 20 years ago now no 15 years ago now where someone said we think this might be a early bird nest and therefore potentially even a dinosaur nest and nothing's ever been published so my guess is once they excavated it and had a good look at it they went nah that's nothing really I mean I guess the question is how would you know yeah it would be difficult to notice it's obvious widespread primary like yeah but even then like you know sapiens like you know chimps make loads of tools but it's mostly made of wood and they're mostly just breaking stuff and then that's the odds of that preserving are very low you do get things like chimps and otters see otters they have their favorite anvil and hammer stones to break stuff open but again the reason they picked that stone is because it's really heavy and good at breaking oysters or breaking nuts it's not going to leave or probably not going to leave stereotypical points on the rock and even then you could just go well maybe it you know just got bashed up in a river or something so in your book on covering dinosaur behavior you uh you kind of conclude that there's a lot we might not know what's the particular lost behavior that we don't know about that you think might be out there something like midden use it's a whole bunch of animals and birds who basically crap in the same spot they hit they have the spot and that's where they go so rabbits do this sloths do this um odd Vox even things like wildebeest and zebra not where the zebra in parlor would tend to go back to the same place every day but the fossil record of psychoprolites fossilized feces and fossilized waste from dinosaurs it exists but it's extremely rough because of course this is the stuff that's already been digested and broken down it's already kind of gooey and broken up and doesn't have a lot going for it um if they do it in water it's going to dissipate instantly if it rains it's probably going to fall apart things like dung beetles and flies will break it down even if it gets covered by sand or whatever from a sandstorm it's probably still going to compress and separate so are you ever going to find it maybe going back to our trackway stuff but even if you do what species left that we know a big herb before did this but was it triceratops or was it an ankylosaur those animals are very different things doing very different things and it would tell you different things about their behavior if we know yeah so one one piece of behavior I forgot to ask you about yeah so t-rex engaging cannibalism yeah almost certainly well certainly I think we've got um there's a t-rex bone with a t-rex embedded tooth in it overgrowth yeah there's I think it I want to say it's an alberta saw rather than t-rex but there is a there is a tyrannosaur jaw in alberta with a t-rex tooth stuck in it and you can pull the little tooth out um and then there's a t-rex foot bone with these distinctive feeding traces on them and this actually goes back to that early point about t-rex being weird being the only big carnivore it's an environment because if this was even mongolia at that time but anywhere else there's three or four or five big carnivores and so you find a bone and it's chewed up by a big carnivore we don't know who did it but when you see a big bone chewed up in a t-rex ecosystem well you know if it's anything bigger than this you know it was t-rex and so when it's a t-rex bone with t-rex bite marks yep it's pretty obvious yeah so it must have been that's fascinating isn't it that they would attack themselves there are all species cannibalism turns up in a whole bunch of stuff but it's not it's very rare as like a fairly habitual behavior so but there's several reasons you might be engaging or rather teeth marks might tell various stories so it could be just fighting for dominance right it could but it's unlikely and in this case so again we see there are loads of facial injuries in tyrannosaurs in carnivorous dinosaur's genere but particularly tyrannosaurs they have really beaten up heads like half or even two-thirds of adults have scarring and facial injuries but you see healing on it whereas this foot does not show healing and it's got multiple different bites the idea that you bite a foot whilst fighting someone and then go back and bite that one foot again that's pretty not impossible but pretty unlikely so it looks like it's eating not fighting yeah and they're more like the feeding scrape traces than they are the big puncture wound so again not impossible but very weird so fascinating as a fight so yeah they're fighting they're fighting probably quite a lot but whether or not you actually eat something that you've killed or that you stumble across as a body it's definitely happens occasionally otherwise we wouldn't have the record of that but there's a reason carnivores often don't eat carnivores and particularly don't eat their own species which is parasitism you know carnivores in general are loaded with parasites because they spend their whole lives eating food which has parasites and stuff in it and so they tend to accumulate a lot of them what's the one thing that's going definitely going to have the most parasites in it that can infect you as for example a lion it's another lion that eats the exact same stuff that you do so whilst it is food and particularly if you just want a big fight you might want to eat in general cannibalism is pretty rare because it's generally not a good idea if there's other food available but yeah if you're starving to death or you know the other guy ripped your leg half off and you're gonna walk for six weeks not the thing but you know what I mean like and now and now there's a body in front of you there's two tons of meat well maybe you should tuck in this is so fascinating like once again figuring out this puzzle and like what does cannibalism tell you you're piecing together the story of t-rex their their life their hunting life their social life from their evolution to their biology to their behavior it's so fascinating yeah we try to but the thing is it's it's it's always getting better which is so that's what I try to finish on in my book on behavior is I felt I'd written a couple of hundred pages of we keep screwing this up we've overstated this I think people have misunderstood this this you know the trackway stuff and it's like this is not as confident as we think you need to look at these alternate explanations this behavior shows that that behavior probably doesn't correlate the way you said it does yada yada yada and it's like I don't feel like I've just written a book trashing my entire field and all my colleagues or at least many of my colleagues and then then you you flip it on its head and going we've got techniques that were undreamed of 10 years ago we've got data streams that were undreamed of 10 years ago and we've actually got a much better understanding of living species and then on top of that we're just constantly finding new animals you know we have not just new species which are often I think are much less important but just new specimens of ones we know because again it's building up that database you know we drifted off to an outsexual selection but like yeah you if you want to know growth one or two animals doesn't tell you how an animal a species grows 50 or 100 does and then that reveals a hell of a lot more about things like sexual dimorphism and growth rate and how vulnerable juveniles are and population structure may be how they're reproducing so I'd like to think I knocked down I think I knocked down a few towers that probably a few people were fond of but I think we have the raw materials to build much better stronger edifice of behavior but as you say it's it's always going to be based around often very piecemeal evidence and like possibilities and probabilities rather than uncertainties. Let's talk about a sad topic extinction. Yep. How did the dinosaurs go extinct? Mostly probably pretty quickly but it really is the answer that I think most people are now probably familiar with which is it's an asteroid impact or some kind of extraterrestrial body hit just off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico about 66 million years ago that basically atomized the asteroid but also importantly the bit of the ground it hit or below the seabed that it hit was basically the worst kind of rock and so it put up this enormous ash cloud and basically you have a nearly instantaneous nuclear winter. I mean immediate devastation you know anything immediately next to it is obviously just like vaporized but you know this is the sort of thing that it's like hot enough to set fire to the atmosphere. I think the one I read was it's something like a piece of rock about the size of Mount Everest traveling at something like 10 times the speed of sound so just the momentum between that speed and mass thing is just you know beyond extraordinary. But I think what does a lot of damage is the change in the climate. Yeah and so every there are five recognized mass extinctions in the history of life on earth and all of them are ultimately some form of climate change whether it's volcanic eruptions or hyper oxygenation or an ice age or whatever it's climate changing too quickly for things to adapt to and that starts you know just cripples entire populations and entire species and then if you do enough damage to enough things you start getting ecosystem collapse you know that this moth has died out well it turns out that moth is the primary pollinator of this tree. Well that tree produced nuts and that was the entire winter survival store for this squirrel. Well that squirrel was the main food of this cat and now suddenly the moth going has killed four other things and everything that's attached to that so that's really what did for them. And sadly the big things well everything dies but the big things have a lot of trouble recovering. Yeah so I mean this is you know a classic example so oh well you know what is paleontology good for well one actually really is extinction which is very relevant right now in that we have a very good handle on when you have extreme climate stress what tends to suffer more and what tends to suffer less. And as we say big things fundamentally do they require more resources they require more area of land you need to roam further which means you know if you're a mouse and you happen to have a little bit of land and that bit doesn't get hit you're fine whereas if you're an elephant and you need all of this land and even a chunk of it goes wrong well that's probably not enough for you to survive anymore so yeah big things suffer disproportionately badly from these things and mostly as well we think terrestrial things generally do worse than things in water because water's a great equilibrating medium you know it takes ages to heat up it takes ages to cool down yes if you live in specific coastal conditions or something maybe you can't travel that easily but you know whales can go from pole to pole quite happily and plenty of other fish do too so if it's too hot or too cold or too nasty here you can just swim somewhere else whereas if you're an animal and you hit a desert or you hit a mountain range or you hit a river you stop moving and you're trapped and and then you die so dinosaurs well yeah the the worst possible combination they were mostly big and they were mostly on land and yeah it's not really surprising they did very badly out of it and then some species did survive I guess I think you've said that it's it's very possible that some dinosaurs even survived for a time that we might be able to discover dine line I'd be amazed if they didn't I mean there's been various reports over the decades of the kpg or kt extinction the cretaceous paleo genome cretaceous tertiary extinction of dinosaurs surviving and none of them have held up it's usually been um bioturbation so literally things like prairie dogs digging and of course they'll dig a tooth up and then move it through the layers or things like this or plant roots can can move stuff um or just soils can get churned up but I would be shocked if they didn't not not like oh yeah the dinosaur survived and the lock next monster and stuff like that but but like yes it was a global devastation yes it's what ultimately killed the dinosaurs but I'd be amazed if there wasn't some equivalent of hawaii or new zealand or some other tucked away island or valley where actually dinosaurs were fine for anything from a few hundred thousand to a couple of million years but on a global scale it's a dot on a map and the odds that will ever uncover any rocks fossiliferous rocks of that age that we then have access to that we then find a dinosaur in that we can then date properly I think is almost non-existent but it would just be weird if they didn't survive somewhere for a bit or even quite a few of them in places so small local population we see it all the time you know the lemurs in madig ask uh all the stuff in New Zealand there's tons of weird archaic stuff hanging around in hawaii you know Galapagos finches and tortoises that you don't see anywhere else in Australia with the marsupials they're almost and then the monotremes are almost unknown outsider there this this is pretty normal bit of biology for animals that were so dominant globally we know there were patches that were largely unchanged otherwise we wouldn't have had the mammal surviving and the crocodile surviving and the bird surviving and ever and mutes and frogs and everything that did survive I'm sure a few of those patches had some dinosaurs in them but it is ultimately what killed them what do you think is the chance that they would have survived so you take some local populations and they flourish it's happened look at Australia um you know the marsupials have done pretty well there um for a very long time you can imagine if the next mass extinction you know flattens a large chunk of indonesia for example kangaroos could island hop pretty easily make it to mainland Asia but then I mean to then lead you take the dinosaurs a small fraction survives and then they eventually repopulate the earth again I mean that's extraordinarily unlikely because once your population's been crashed like that you do have the problems of things like inbreeding or maybe you're a great specialist to a certain area or you're surviving because you're isolated you're in a you're in a valley or you're on an island and then dispersing again becomes really or breaking out into those areas becomes much much harder so like the great predator is like a even though the t-rex is such a great predator that doesn't that doesn't give you yeah because because you've still had the extinction event and the environment is no longer what it was that you evolved into um and once those systems start to recover those other animals are going to adapt much better to them how does that make you feel that that um this stupid asteroid from nowhere I mean at one level I probably wouldn't be here if it hadn't so I mean that's that's an interesting question I mean do you think there's several ways of asking that question but if dinosaurs didn't go extinct do you think humans would still be able to evolve I mean my guess is probably not I don't I don't think I don't think it's quite the um what was it Simon Conway Morris had that book was it a never-tability of man that like even if you rewound it everything would come back I'm not I don't think it's that far I certainly don't think it's um anything like quite like the butterfly effect of you know if one mammal had been trodden on by one t-rex then humans would never have evolved either we should say that the uh ancestor of the primates or the closest is a lot to be around this uh it's a kind of tiny creature purgatorious that was our ancestor yeah so this is us this is what we evolved from yes uh Scandinavia I think it's the group basically a rodent yeah I mean there were probably primates around in the Cretaceous some of the molecular clock stuff suggest that primates were around alongside the dinosaurs that we've never found um any osteological evidence of that but yeah there's there's been a backwards and forwards amount where dinosaurs already on their way out or were they a bit limited by the very end Cretaceous I think the more recent analyses are showing that's probably not the case so in other words they were basically doing fine um right up to the extinction event and so yeah if the asteroid hadn't hit there's no reason to think that they were on some kind of terminal decline something else may have hit there may have been um you know some other environmental disaster or something may have happened or maybe they're more vulnerable to stuff um than we know of but there's no I don't think there's any really good reason to think they wouldn't have carried on relatively well I mean even post-noinster extinction you had a window where the mammals and the birds were pretty competing there's a lot of big birds getting going and various big carnivorous terrestrial kind of hyper predatory ostrich like things like the forceray kids um so there's no guarantee that mammals would have even taken over post the dinosaur extinction um since initially they were in a bit of a a fair bit of competition so this is just going to based on current scientific understanding human evolution would be highly improbable if dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct 66 million years ago because dinosaur dominated ecological niches for everything basically what I mean that's the thing you look through yeah the mesozoic the late triassic dinosaurs are there alongside a whole bunch of other big and unusual and interesting reptiles and and some other early pre-mammal like things that closer to mammals than than the reptiles but once you've gone into the Jurassic you've now got a solid like 120 130 million years where almost anywhere on earth if you saw an animal bigger than like a raccoon it was probably a dinosaur that's how incredibly dominant that you know as dominant if not more dominant than modern mammals but is it fair to say that they were mostly dumb I don't think so because I think I think that comes down to a that bit of kind of classic almost Victorian speciesisms and you get these insane hypotheses like dinosaurs as a species or as a lineage became senile so they forgot to breed that was literally a suggested idea uh you know the mammals ate their eggs and all of this kind of stuff you know dinosaurs only lived alongside mammals for 100 million years be weird if they all went extinct at the same time because suddenly egg eating evolved you know you've got problems like this but also again that that general speciesism which you know even goes back to the flight Linnaeus and here's taxonomic ranks and even could be stuff like Aristotle you've got like you know humans are superior in some way and we're superior to the other mammals and of course mammals are closest to us so they must be quite good and then they've got to be better than lizards and then lizards have to be better than frogs and frogs have to be better than fish so that that gets you into the world reptiles must be stupid and and then not I wonder if a human intelligence level organism could have evolved from the dinosaurs I mean it's that's been hypothesized plenty of times Dale Russell Canadian paleontologist the famous guy came up with this human like true ad haunted that was done for a tv documentary I think the one that Christopher Reeve narrated that I think is a remake but I've seen the original that Dale had made for his tv show and it's still it's sitting in the collections of the National Museum of Nature in Ottawa for Canada it's really really cool it's like this five foot dinosauroid that was it there on the screen model of the hypothetical dinosaurid and displayed the dinosaur museum in Dorothe oh daughter says in England yeah I knew there was a couple of copies Trudon always comes back as like the most intelligent dinosaur because it has really quite a big brain for its size it does have a high encephalization quotient so it's always been like tagged as like a very good candidate for being the smartest dinosaur and basically he just got hybridized that with the human but of course why would these things end up as like plantar grade quadrupeds and why would they go back to five fingers and I actually think he's only got three to be fair but he's got very human like feet why has it got no tail what why would those things suddenly disappear there's no real reason other than just kind of human exceptionalism but like I mean you could argue some parrots some crows are phenomenally intelligent and show extremely clever behaviors on a par with apes so at some level some dinosaurs were extremely intelligent I mean yeah this is a whole another conversation but all the tiny details that lead to the explosion that is in the our evolutionary tree that is homo sapiens like what is it the possible thumbs right is it the invention of fire and the meat eating is it yeah some light and sociality and so many predation pressure and then the changing changing environment I mean the shrinking of the forest pushing apes out of the trees into the environment or into the open environment and probably the same kind of story could be told about the dinosaurs or about about anything really yeah I mean you I mean if you have 160 million years and a global domination but I mean this is the thing you talked about like lost behaviors but like the lost lineages I wrote about this in one of my books and like you want to fight you want a weird animal you go to a volcanic island like you go to New Zealand you go to Hawaii you go to the Galapagos and yet those are the places that basically don't really form fossils so you think the dinosaurs we know about are strange what was the stuff knocking around there we're never gonna know sadly but for everything you think weird you know you think birds are cool think about penguins compared to your average bird they live on an ice shelf for six months of the year and can't fly and massively modified skeletons and you know you're compared to your average bird penguins are unbelievably weird so yeah take an average dinosaur and take it to like penguin level ostrich level evil hummingbird level evolution there's gonna be weirder stuff out there than we found much weirder if you travel back in time you're probably your mind will be probably blown by the weirdness yeah because those things are almost always in small isolated places that don't preserve fossils very well and so the odds of us ever coming across them I mean you you see it to a degree so you've got the stuff that comes out of uh like what is modern trans or wasm at transylvania uh hat seg that that's that was a series of islands in the Mediterranean at the end of the Cretaceous and some of the weirdest dinosaurs are from that chain of islands and that's not very isolated compared to again something like hawaii or new but it's fitting the exact pattern you you get dinosaurs on islands they turn weird we see that so again dinosaurs were real animals like again sounds sounds really painfully obvious but they they weren't monsters they followed the same rules might be pushing certain like guidelines like ecology operates in certain ways if you're bigger you need more food but you're more efficient you just are that's pretty much just physics and scaling so big dinosaurs are going to follow the rules of bigger animals and small dinosaurs are going to follow the rules of smaller animals they just will quite how they violate it in certain ways by having unusually long necks or unusual physiology or eating an unusual diet or because there was a weird plant that was alive then that isn't now or whatever it may be that there's obviously a huge amount of variation and uncertainty but fundamentally we know what makes animals and ecosystems work and dinosaurs were animals in ecosystems they're not that strange at some level and therefore reconstructing their actual biology is challenging but far from impossible strange question so as everybody knows dragons are obviously real i've been asked that on live tv only not with the sarcastic tone so you dare disagree with this notion yes i i i do they don't and and again i they're real to me so that's fine but again you know we kind of touched on it but i i think there's probably very little of any kind of paleontological law that ended up in things like chinese culture with the chinese dragons and all of that stuff you know that one comes up repeatedly the only one i do know of again from alberta is buffalo stones that then apparently some of the native americans had which are actually bits of ammonites so ammonites the curly spiral shelled cephalopod so related to octopus and squid so they have all these little segments to the shells and the right species and when they break open they have like two little pairs of legs and then a bulge and then a little bulge and it looks very roughly like a bison and apparently these were thought to be like somehow miniature bison they're very rare because ironically although the dinosaur bones are extremely common it was very swampy and so you didn't actually have a lot of sea coming in so you didn't tend to get things like ammonites and ocean going animals and then the shell would have to break in the right way but apparently for the local tribes like saddock i don't remember who it is in that bit of canada but yeah these were these were quite valued if you got a buffalo stone and i've seen a couple of them and yeah you have to squint a bit but as a little buffalo it's not far off but yeah but that whole like were they finding mammoth legs and were they finding t-rexes and was this inspiration for this animal or this mystical animal i don't think they were because you just don't tend to find them like so where do you think like you know because dragon's chop and a bunch of different myths well right but that's the thing they turn up in british mythology and we barely got any dinosaurs here at all you already you already find them when you start digging for coal mines which we weren't doing in is it basically dramatization of like uh of snakes and lizards and yeah and just general exaggeration and welding stuff together i mean that that's one thing you could i guess potentially argue is that you know yeah we find tyrannosaurs in north america and in east asia in fact there's a whole bunch of stuff in the end cretaceous which is often very common because it's a relatively recent in the grand scheme of things in the history of the world the fauna of east asia china mongolia eastern russia is very similar to what you get in candor and the usa and down in mexico and so you find the same rough stuff they're not exactly the same but you get serotopsians you get tyrannosaurs you get the big-ass darky terrasaur you get an chylosaur the armored ones guess that and the other so if these were influencing all those different cultures why don't chinese dragons look like mexican dragons or equivalent of thunderbirds or whatever well because it probably wasn't influencing them they were all seeing the same skeleton they'd probably all produce the same kind of mythical animals they would produce different ones you have to understand paleontology is not perfect so they were just misinterpreting that misinterpreting yeah um i mean uh dragons aside i'm sure like we said with weirdness there would be creatures that would be remarkable right you look at it you might as well be seeing a dragon it could be yeah i mean there's creatures alive in the sea today yeah i mean if you if you if you dredged up a colossal squid i think you'd have yeah you know or even just dugongs and manatees i mean they're really quite strange and if you allow yourself to marvel at the small things on earth like i was in the amazon jungle like the insects they're just like what is happening there there's so many things going on and there's oh they're like hairy and colorful and and probably poisonous and they have teeth and what in there and they're all and all the little weird eyes i've i've several times i've pitched a book to publishers where i want to write a book that basically makes the point that there is almost nothing i mean you can always dream up something totally ludicrous there is basically nothing in science fiction that doesn't already exist on earth in some way shape or form yeah that is why i often think about alien civilizations and aliens out there and i'm very certain very certain that there's aliens everywhere throughout the observable universe it's very strange we haven't seen them but it's it's fun to marvel at what they possibly look like because there's a huge variety of organisms and species here on earth and you just expand that out yeah to like more and more earths and you can just imagine there's a lot of weird well that's the thing i think most people you know understandably i'm a biologist and i particularly pried myself on finding out about particularly weird animals but yeah i think people would be stunned about some of the weird stuff that's out there um that they just wouldn't realize a real you know things like velvet worms um yeah you know it's just blow your mind you know cecelians and stuff like this and they're reproductive behavior it's just jaw drop it i mean i love teaching about them i do a class on diversity of life and i do i was about eight weeks of vertebrate diversity and i love just dropping things in and the students are like what do you what do you mean that exists what do you mean something like that's normal for this group yeah yeah they do that what from that like that class but everything you've studied with the dinosaurs what have you learned about the evolution of life on earth that mechanism it's it's really good it sounds obvious but it's i think the bit that still fries my brain is just like the raw numbers because i think we're very bad at considering like i regularly talk about oh this is 70 million years old but this is 78 and this is 104 and people are just like oh my god how on earth do you deal with those numbers and i don't they're just numbers because i can't conceive of it really any better than you can that they are astronomical yeah last thursday was quite a long time ago 66 million years is mind boggling like i i i can't fathom it um but that's it i think the evolution thing is a my suspicion is quite a lot of it happens it's not quite steven gould punctuated equilibrium but i think stressful events probably prompt a lot more than less stressful events you know you know population crashes and all these things that then odd things survive and then that's changing a genetic component or the rest of it but you've you've just got to remember that it's just it's almost a numbers game you know it's that bad analogy of like oh the evolution is just rolling dice and hoping you get all sixes and it's like no a friend of mine said no it's rolling dice but it gets to keep the sixes i mean then suddenly getting a handful of sixes isn't that hard but also you're in the context of even rare species you know ultra i'm sure of stuff that like we've nearly killed off but like very rare species have populations in the thousands or hundreds of thousands and or probably around four hundreds of thousands of years and very few you know other than a few things like whales and apes and elephants mostly have dozens or thousands of offspring at a time so a few thousand animals that have a few thousand offspring at a line for a few hundred thousand yeah it's billions and billions and billions of them and that's the rare stuff you look at molar molar the ocean sunfish though i think i think molar has just been split up into like five species it's one of the weirdest looking animals is love it love it love it love it i mean what a what a fish that is swims with the giant dorsal and i think it's a giant anal fin and then they flap alternately does there yeah yeah yeah a little one at the front eight jellyfish super open oceanic and they get really big you see that one with the diver but i think these are the record breeders for animals and they have something like a hundred million eggs at a time whoa don't quote me on that but it is something in those kinds of numbers so yeah that's if you don't need a very large population of sunfish to start having an awful lot of numbers he's gonna google it and see if you can find it number of eggs or something yeah 300 million oh i undercut it a single female can release up to 300 million eggs at one time during a spawning event boy these eggs are incredibly small measuring about 1.3 millimeter in diameter that's still a lot of eggs though when you think about it it's not that small yeah right 300 million of one mil it's still quite a bit uh fertilization is external females release their eggs into the water where males then fertilize them wow man there's a lot of different ways to have sex i guess this is yeah but but but but that's that's the bit of evolution that i think i understand why people don't get it we are mostly talking about millions in population times millions of years times thousands of offspring yeah and it's kind of a numbers game well how could this evolve well the right selective pressure and when you've got 100 billion offspring probably a few of them have and when you focus in on a single species and trace its history you can see how effective evolution is natural selection is and then you just have to like go across species yeah but but it's also a massive compromise which is the bit that people always miss you know it's Darwin's line it's dissent with modification yes over time you can end up with extraordinarily weird things but mostly what's happening is you're changing something fairly simple you're making edits to the existing plan um which is why you don't have animals with tentacles they they have legs which have joints which have fingers and they all have one bone then two bones then a bunch of little blocky bones and then a few more and then the little ones that make up the digits for hands and feet and basically everything has that because you're modifying that pattern and occasionally you get something weird like most of the modern lung fish have basically reduced those down to well they they had a more simple plan to begin with but reduce it down to a stump and then they've got something like a flaly tentacle but yeah you know what snakes have got rid of them or the various legless lizards and things like that and again sasselians and um all the rest but yeah it you're subtly changing certain things in certain ways is mostly what's going on and then those builds up over time but also against that compromise of there's things that do and don't work there's things that are interlinked and so you can't modify a without modifying b modifying a will kill you therefore b never modifies because the two are genetically linked in some way or yeah like the compromise of the lion's mane making it darker makes you sexier but more likely to kill you you I think people think evolution is like perfecting things in some way and they're not they're they're bodge jobs you know that's why we have a blind spot in our eye but things like squid don't but that process nevertheless does have inventions in it you have tiktalic you have a fish that learns to breathe that calls out but it already had a swim bladder that it was probably processing a minimal amount of oxygen through and the swim bladder evolved for a certainly different function yeah but that's one of the powerful things about uh uh pollution is switches the function yeah it develops it for one function but once you once you get there you're like okay this could be used for another function that that leads to something that we in retrospect can see as a major invention which is yeah that's able to crawl and then all sudden we have we have uh cities and rockets and uh yeah tiktalic specifically like there's something really like mind boggling about a fish that crawls out of the sea and you're just the image of that yeah but again you've got stuff that's not a million miles away from that you have things like frogfish which are fully marine but kind of clamber through seaweed and stuff and they've got pseudo functional limbs so again because it's that tiktalic is not weirdly derived frogfish but it's not like it's a fish that suddenly came on land or a fish that suddenly evolved legs there was already that selective pressure that was pushing it into a new opportunity which gave it and and then on and on and on and that's what keeps going but it also brings up another thing going back to dinosaurs um and the behavior stuff which again I think has been a problem is um the functionality thing and how there's always been I think this big perception of single traits having single functions which isn't how a huge amount of biology works for some yeah like eyes are used for seeing they don't really do anything else um but I think there's a lot of again it comes down to a lot of sexual selection stuff but things like horns on triceratops that's probably quite good for fighting off predators but it's also quite good for fighting other triceratops and then things like elephants dig with their tusks as well as fight other elephants as well as fight lions as well as stripping the bark off trees so you've got to be very careful about how you think of functionality in two different ways one way is what possible things could that thing do and what possible things could have been the main selective pressure before so you think about elephant tusks as I say they do all these different things but when an elephant's just got the tiniest little nubs like the first elephant whose teeth are growing the wrong way and have pushed out of its jaw and now it's got a couple of little spikes it can't really dig a hole with them it's certainly not digging for water they're probably not great against a predator because you basically have to get on your knees to try and lean over and try and stab it a bit but you can show off to the girls and you can immediately fight another elephant who's head to head the same height as you and you've got a massive advantage so evolutionarily they probably started as some kind of sexually selected feature but now functionally they are probably compromised by the fact that having the best fighting tusks but also having the tusks that are best at digging up water to keep you alive during a drought is putting selective pressure on and those are those selections sexual selection appears in both ends those are two different things digging for water is critical but it's probably not what started it and I think that's where we get trapped with things like say the paddle tail of spinosaurus or stuff like or you know or t-rex arms it's like well why are t-rex arms like that well maybe we need to consider what a slightly longer arm is like or what it was being functioned for and its ancestors or how it works in other species or what else it might do rather than every paper is like did it do this or did it do this or did it do this it's like you know it could be all of them that's a very different question to try and answer but people don't tend to think of it and it ends up being very binary and again biology is not like that because it's a compromise and it may be wiser to then look at the evolutionary origins how it first sprung up yeah if you yeah you know what what does a miniaturized version of this look like and what might that function for or how does it function in ancestral forms you know a really good example of that is giraffe necks which have been argued about you know forever and a day it was giraffe necks are to help them feed up high and then in the late 90s early 2000s a couple of papers coming out going actually maybe it's sexual selection and competition and then that drove down into arguments about well what does a short neck look like in the acarpi it's nearest relative and what are short legs look like and how do they work and plus a whole bunch of other studies and ultimately it came out that we were right the first time this is all about feeding but it's a really interesting way of thinking about it and looking at it gotta ask you the ridiculous question uh we do have dinosaurs here on earth today they're birds yep um 10 and a half 11 000 species of dinosaur are birds dinosaurs yes yeah this is not it's it's it's just a yes yeah it's how many people know this by the way so there's there's an interesting one i did a radio show oh it's probably seven or eight years ago now with a couple of you know drive time afternoon nothing serious nothing science or anything like that and i mentioned something like this and one presenter was oh my god what do you mean birds are dinosaurs and the other one is what do you mean you don't know birds are dinosaurs so it's hitting that tipping point of common knowledge i think where no does does everyone know but no but i think an awful lot of people know and are now kind of used to it as an idea so what's evolutionary the connection between birds and dinosaurs i mean they literally are in the same way that we are apes and mammals birds are dinosaurs the direct if you trace back the evolution of all the birds so humming birds and albatross and ostrich and kiwi and parrots and pelicans and penguins and whatever else and take them down to their ancestral point and then go back quite a few more million years their nearest relics to them is a dinosaur it is actually something very close to velociraptor um or it's a small version of velociraptor so they birds have literally descended from dinosaurs therefore they are dinosaurs we have literally descended from other apes we are apes it is it is that form of evolutionary connection throughout that whole process did they have feathers or did feathers come and go so feathers are in tyrannosaurs so feathers go back at least so ironically because the fossil record is very incomplete um most of the things that are closest to birds we know from the early and late cretaceous so the last kind of 50 million years of dinosaur evolution up to the extinction and actually birds almost certainly go back another 50 million years so birds did not appear as a result of the dinosaurs going extinct birds lived alongside the dinosaurs for a hundred million years this was this is the birds were not new on the scene and it's like oh the dinosaurs died and from the ashes rose but no they've been knocking around forever they're just survivors they're small in a very large part yeah that's that's almost certainly what really helped them but birds took a kicking in the kate extinction so did mammals loads of bird lineages went extinct and only a handful got over the line but they did but yeah we have feathers in as I said we've got middle Jurassic tyrannosaurs that are 165 million years old so 100 million years before the extinction don't have feathers simple feathers they'd be like those you get on most baby chicks so they're not with the big kind of classic pickup of feather in you know in the street or on a field of the big vein up the middle and then the kind of paired flat pieces this would be much more like a hair but we have them we've got something which is very close to a bird but might not quite be a bird with modern but with modern feathers in the middle Jurassic we've got definitive stuff like archaeopteryx in the late Jurassic and then into the early cretaceous we have a series of fossil beds in China which are just heaving with them so yeah and there's tyrannosaurs have feathers, flosaratch from the dromium sores had feathers, truodontids had feathers, or if the mimosaurs we've mentioned they had feathers and so did a whole bunch of other groups as well there's about eight or nine kind of major groups kind of the size of something like yeah literally like carnivores or deers you know some massive groups about eight or nine of them were fully feathered as far as we can tell so feathers massively predate bird origins but it was a major part of their evolution. Do I understand why feathers evolved with the function the the the sexual selection of the signal? Yeah it's probably a fundamental two-fold one which is feathers insulate you they keep you warm and most dinosaurs were it's an archaic term it's what most people know warm-blooded so they were much more like us and birds they had a stable high body temperature regardless of the environmental conditions and so if you're burning a lot of calories to stay warm you want to kind of keep that heat feathers really help you do that and then the other thing is yeah the obvious thing is sexual selection and communication feathers do stuff that scales can't you can shed them in winter and change color and come back as another one that's quite a handy trick you can change them between juveniles and adults so baby birds have one type of feather adults have a different one we know of dinosaurs that do that well we've got adults and juveniles with different feather type types preserved in the fossils um yeah you can produce all kinds of weird colors and displays you can you can erect feathers you can hold them up and fan them out like a peacock or a pheasant whereas scales you can't really do that a bit or you need a huge amount of bone like produce aerotops so there's two good reasons that they would probably evolve and exactly pulling them apart or which is more important and again they're probably bifunctional as soon as you start making feathers and making them more colorful where you're staying warmer so that's an advantage or as soon as you start making feathers to make them warmer it probably won't be long until someone evolves them to be a bit brighter red and then we're back to oh my god red right but but that's what's happening and then they're gonna they're probably gonna push each other potentially I mean it is true that the birds weren't real crazy with the feather and the colors and the prettiness and all that they absolutely do I mean maybe there's something about feathers that allows for that efficient sort of uh diversification of fashion I think yeah I think it gives them opportunities that scales and solid structures simply don't I mean the solubility I mean I say like you know peacocks and pheasants they are a massive disadvantage to the males and they've got these extra plumes on because they're so big and heavy peacocks can barely fly but the fact is you can still kind of fold them up into a fairly neat package and kind of hide if you really wanted to whereas if you're something like triceratops that billboard on the stock of you on the top of your head is not only enormous but also bone it's massive it's heavy and you've got a lot around the whole year whereas peacocks at least can go well all the girls have settled down on their nests now I'm just going to get rid of all this extra weight and dump it just looking at the entire history of earth what has studying hundreds of millions of years of evolution studying this epic age of the dinosaurs what has that done for your appreciation of what makes earth beautiful do you ever just like sit back and like holy shit this is incredible this whole thing yeah yeah I I do um but I guess maybe not much more so than I would anyway as in I already because again I don't really think of myself as a paleontologist in a lot of ways um I just not that I don't love my work but it's I'm a biologist and this is what I'm looking at but I'm fascinating and amazed by lungfish and flying frogs and caterpillars and on a coffer and butterflies in a million and one other hagfish and things that I think are cool and interesting and fascinating and I could happily read about them or watch them in a zoo or a documentary or whatever it may be almost every bit as much as I would with dinosaurs I probably appreciate the dinosaurs and pterosaurs in a very different way because I have such a greater intimate knowledge of the science in a way that I try and read the line literature because I'm really interested in predation dynamics but I can't keep up with it whilst doing all the other stuff as well predation dynamics well right so like the difference of like what prey are they taking why at what percentage what what influences how are they competing with leopards and where there's a literature body literature on this yeah all right yeah people are studying lines and what they hunt and what they eat and where they do it there's a there's a whole bunch of stuff on particularly the the african carnivores because there's so many of them they're so big and their populations aren't terrible compared to like South America or North America or or a lot of Asia for example um but yeah going back to your question yeah I like I could appreciate all of it it's all cool some of it is definitely more awesome than others I work on some of the giant pterosaurs the ones with 10 meter wingspans yeah and it's it's hard like uh my partner's family's from Uganda and we're in Uganda last year I was watching um Maribyr Stork Circle overhead and you're like wow these things are huge and amazing and then I'm like the wingspan's about a fifth of the stuff I work on actually these are quite piddly in the grand you know this thing like an airline are going overhead and when you think about it in that context yeah I mean because that's it with the you know I know people tend to be obsessed with size and you kind of get it like blue whales are fundamentally cooler than smaller humpback whales even if humpback whales are cool like it's hard not to be impressed by Patago Titan or Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops or Ketsalquass or any of these like ultimate giants there's a reason we love great white sharks there's a reason we love giant squid there's a reason we love lions and grizzly bears and stuff but the dinosaurs do kind of do it better than anyone else or you know and the you know marine reptiles and the flying reptiles because it's just so insane yeah both size and diversity yeah and longevity as well I mean you you look at you know elephants have come and gone and you know the whales okay the whales have reached superlative sizes but they're relatively new on the scene could easily have gone extinct in the last century but yeah you know there's truly titanic dinosaurs for at least a hundred million years it's a long time hard sometimes as you said it's very hard to load in just how long that is they really dominated earth for a very long time yeah and almost absolutely everywhere there's a handful of places that we found where appears that dinosaurs didn't really get in something else kind of took over you know like us a bit like Australia with the marsupials versus the the other euthereans um but yeah fundamentally it was a dinosaur planet for after the the Triassic less so at the end of the Triassic when they first get in going but yeah Jurassic and Cretaceous yeah it's 140-ish million years of yeah just absolute dominance I think it's hilarious and just perfect that there's a giant dinosaur head next to you and you didn't mention it once during this conversation yeah so yeah I thought we'd get in I mean giant he's an absolute diddy one um yeah so this is proto seratops Andrew's eye and I've done loads of work on proto seratops it's from Mongolia this is a latest size juvenile so I've got a big head and the big head's kind of like this but I really couldn't fit it in the bag so this is two scale this is a cast so this is not this is not a this is not original but someone has molded and copied it so it's not even it's not carved it's a it's a cast and a mold taken so this is 100 accurate to the original specimen at least extraordinarily accurate to the original specimen young guy yeah um but yeah I mean at full size it's going to be like pig or sheep size so big but not massive um but I've got it partly because it's affordable because I can't afford to buy the big skeletons and skulls um but I've done a huge amount of work on it and in part it goes back to those earlier conversations about populations if you really want to understand animals you need an understanding of what a real population and a growth of what these animals looks like and proto seratops is I would argue probably the only dinosaur where we can really do that or at least as close as possible as you could get to any modern animal as an analogue we've got well over a hundred good skeletons though not probably only about 70 or 80 in really accessible museums but still a hell of a lot we have everything from here's a tiny baby on this is a really not cheap and nasty 3d print I had made um but that's a hatchling sized one or not much bigger than a hatchling sized one all the way up to the big adults we've now got embryos as well which we didn't have um until about 10 years ago so we've got embryonic animals all the way up to big adults they're all pretty much from one place in um Mongolia and they are far as we can tell from a relatively narrow window in time only about 100 000 years which in the grand scheme of things is very close so you've got one population from one place from one time with 100 animals from embryos up to big adults so now if you want to look at as I do something like sexual selection and when does growth of the signal kick in and at what size and what evidence for dimorphism well suddenly you've got a population you've got something you can work with and that's why proto serotonin is so important and I think way more important than even a lot of my fellow paleontologists realize and I genuinely think we should be pouring a lot more research into them because they can tell us stuff that pretty much no other dinosaur can because they have the population data so you can you can ask and we can treat it as a population so going way way back to a conversation about telling males and females apart and I said big problem is population data or at least the number of specimens that you have will mostly have only got one two or three I did a big study on this a few years ago and gary os the really long-snouted crocodilians from Nepal and India and Pakistan with a giant bulge on the end of the nose and even though the males are all bigger than the females and the males all have this weird nose growth though that's mostly soft tissue but they have a weird depression in the jaw in the in the end of the snout where the nostrils sit we got a sample size of something like about 110 animals so these are very very rare animals so we had to ransack every museum worldwide I was sending my students sending emails to huge numbers of people have you got one sitting in your collection lost can you get it for us can you take these photos or these measurements we can measure it we put the data set together and then we found that actually apart from the very biggest males it's really hard to tell males and females apart and this actually really closely matched some modeling data that are done with a colleague Jordan Mallon in Ottawa looking at this for alligators and and trying to compare it to dinosaurs because though we talked about mutual sexual selection before mutual sexual selection in particular you tend to get things that are extremely similar males and females are very hard to tell apart but there's also it there's a gradient you know all the way up to things like peacocks all the way down to you can't tell them apart like parrots and for some features when they take time to get growing or because dinosaurs grow over a very long window and are sexually mature over a very long window you run into the problem that a big female will look like a small male and we can't sex them and lo and behold this is what you get with the garyls the really big males are obvious because they're so much bigger and they've got this big depression in the in the snout but medium sized and big females look like medium sized or smaller males and very small males and so yeah that's basically what we have with dinosaurs even with protoceratops where we've got a data set of like a hundred papers have come out saying there's very mild sexual dimorphism or there isn't sexual dimorphism sexual dimorphism could be very strong in protoceratops but we can't find it because we can't tell the males from the females because we haven't ID'd enough through something like medullary bow and so you're in this horrible situation where because going back to the t-rex thing is like well maybe it's mutual sexual selection and therefore they're cooperating and that would be cool but also maybe males are much bigger but we can't tell because our data sets too small in which case they're not under mutual sexual selection and we've got it all wrong. Ah it's maddening because it's so if these were living animals you'd just watch them or you just genotype them or you sex them and you just know and and we just don't but on the other hand we do have the mechanism to do it there are a handful of places where you get a bunch of protoceratops together where it's a mass mortality site. Well let's go and drill every bone because if that's the breeding season we might find seven or eight females and then the others are pretty much by default males if we know it's the middle of the breeding season because all the others have medullary bone and now you know where your male-female split is now let's analyze those two data sets and then maybe we'll see a difference and maybe we won't. Yeah I love how that the frustration is sort of a catalyst for figuring out you're like searching for a place a piece of evidence that just shows you clearly. There are ways in. Yeah there's ways in. This is the thing. Yeah there are ways in and maybe we've got to get lucky because maybe it's not the breeding season or maybe that's just happened to be a group of all males and therefore we're not going to get the signal we're looking for but there's enough of them and they're common enough and yet still digging in Mongolia we keep finding new species we keep finding new cooler stuff but I'm like can we dig up some more proto-serotops because actually however cool these new things are genuinely if you want to know what dinosaurs are and how they worked another hundred proto-serotops will actually probably tell us a lot more than 50 new species however cool 50 new species might be. Paleontology is an incredible discipline it really is Sherlock Holmes territory so this was an incredible conversation really great for all the work you write that you put out there the the podcast is incredible I just thank you thank you for being you and thank you for talking today. Well thank you very much for having me I hope I haven't worn out my welcome with dinosaur stories. We're talking for many more hours thank you brother thank you Dave thank you. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Dave Hone to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel and now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan extinction is the rule survival is the exception thank you for listening I hope to see you next time oh