We've already mentioned Gigantoraptor this series so let's get down to the other end of the etymological scale and look at Microraptor . This little dromaeosaur was one of the first fully feathered dinosaurs to be found and is famous for its 'four wings' with long flight feathers on the legs and the arms. There's loads of good specimens of this animal so it is perhaps no surprise that there has been lots of research on it and, by extension, lots of arguments about its lifestyle, evolution and es...
Mar 02, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 4
At various times in previous episodes we have talked about what various dinosaurs ate and bits of data about diet, but this time we're going to take a more systematic look at how palaeontologists work out the diet of ancient animals. We go through the obvious ones like sharp teeth and finding bits of stuff inside them to microscopic traces of damage on the enamel, the structure of teeth and elemental isotopes that linger for a hundred million years. All good clean fun (unless you are the dinosau...
Feb 23, 2022•53 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Back to dinosaurs so you can relax (though the pterosaurs will return next series). This time out, we are going with the oviraptorosaurs - and note the long name, it's not just oviraptors we are covering. As is common, the one famous member of this group tends to hog the limelight and not everyone knows about the others even if these days Gigantoraptor tends to sneak in in the background. These feathered theropods are rather bird like but thanks to them (probably) largely being herbivorous they ...
Feb 16, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Series 6? That can't be right. Surely this is 3 or 4 or something, 5 at the outside. Blimey. Anyway, we are back and we have new episodes though we are cheating already by starting with a pterosaur and talking about the greatly underappreciated Rhamphorhynchus . As the only vaguely well-known long-tailed pterosaur it is shown in the background of every Jurassic dinosaur painting to give scale the sauropods no matter how far inland or on the wrong continent or time it may be. It is though, as usu...
Feb 09, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 1
A slightly silly intro to series 6 of Terrible Lizards, a podcast about dinosaurs which will be starting on Wednesday 9th of February 2022. (The guest on this clip is Dr Steve Cross).
Feb 07, 2022•1 min•Season 6Ep. 1
We talk to Yara Haridy who has just completed her PhD on the histology of dinosaurs and other reptiles. On the podcast we normally just talk about whole bones and skeletons (or at least the bits of them that are preserved) but there is an enormous amount of information that is preserved in the fossilised cellular structures of these. Fossil bones are those that have turned to rock but that means that the original cellular structures are in there and these can reveal and whole host of information...
Dec 08, 2021•41 min•Season 5Ep. 9
Are there dinosaurs on the moon? What are digs in Antarctica like? Dave Hone and iszi Lawrence answer your dinosaur Questions! At the end of each series Iszi and Dave trawl through all the comments and messages from our listeners. We answer questions from Elaine, Michelle, Lee, Hunter, Sabina, Phil, David, Leo & Quantum Robin (Kristjan), Russell, Shuyi, Steve, and Craig! If you want to hear us answer more questions you can also find us on YouTube and you can watch Dave roll his eyes at Iszi'...
Nov 17, 2021•55 min•Season 5Ep. 8
With every big new paper or museum exhibition there will be artwork depicting dinosaurs as actual living animals, as well as all kinds of other representations of these animals be it pop-art or cartoons. Today we have a special with an extended chat to two artists who specialise in dinosaurs and make their living from producing images of these animals. They are Danielle Dufault who works for the Royal Ontario Museum and Natee Himmapaan who is an independent artist in London. We discuss the very ...
Nov 10, 2021•56 min•Season 5Ep. 7
Way back in the mists of time (last year) we did a whole podcast on Triceratops , one of the most famous dinosaurs of all. But is Triceratops not all it seems and is it in fact just part of a growth series which results in the largest and oldest animals becoming another dinosaur entirely in Torosaurus ? The answer is no, but the reasons why this was proposed and why it's not the case are interesting in themselves and so we give over this episode to the ideas of changing dinosaurs and what we kno...
Nov 03, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 6
We've covered one small, unadorned and under-rated herbivorous ornithischian already this series in Psittacosaurus and here's another one in the remarkable little heterodonotosaurs. Another set of animals for which we have some superb skeletons and lots of interesting features that are potentially very revealing about the evolution of dinosaurs in general (and ornithischians in particular) and yet they get very little love. As usual all the attention goes to the biggest dinosaurs, the carnivores...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 5Ep. 5
Iszi is in Dave's house! We have talked many times about the fact that birds are dinosaurs and we've covered some of the modern evidence that links them together, but how did we get to this point? In this edition we look at the historical arguments for the origins of birds and how they went from a groups that had no obvious evolutionary home to some early flirtations with dinosaurs, places around the reptile tree and then eventually settled to their now familiar place. It covers a lot of odd ide...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 4
We have talked before about how large some of the giant sauropods were and how being big can really affect your biology, but just how do palaeontologists weight dinosaurs from incomplete skeletons and how accurate will these methods be? Well happily we have a podcast that will tackle those very questions and delve into the history and mystery of working out how heavy dinosaurs were, how we used to get it very wrong and why even now we are not that right. Joining us as a guest this time is F1 pod...
Oct 13, 2021•58 min•Season 5Ep. 3
It's time to give some love to some dinosaurs that don't get enough and pretty much top of that list needs to be Psittacosaurus . This (mostly) little dinosaur is one of the earlier ceratopsains but lacking the size, horns and frills of their more notable cousins, it's sadly all too easy to see why they get ignored. But that's a shame because as well as having some neat little features of their own (like giant cheek spikes), these animals are among the most common of any dinosaur. We have hundre...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 2
Riparovenator and Ceratosuchops – Chris Barker and Darren Naish Just like the start of series 3, we are kicking off the new series with a special on a new research paper (of which Dave is one of the authors) which is out today! In it, two new, large, predatory dinosaurs from the UK are named and both are part of the spinosaur group! Obviously it's all very exciting, but to avoid things being too Dave-centric we have invited on two other palaeontologists from the paper, Chris Barker and Darren Na...
Sep 29, 2021•58 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Series 5 trailer with Dave Hone, Iszi Lawrence, Jay Foreman, Darren Naish, Suzy Buttress, I know dino, Bec Hill and Spanners! Series 5 starts on 29th September 2021. Links: www.patreon.com/terriblelizards @iszi_lawrence @dave_hone facebook.com/terrriblelizardspodcast...
Sep 27, 2021•1 min•Season 5Ep. 1
An interview about Marine Reptiles with Keirsten Formso @formophology. To get more free bonus content FIRST become a Terrible Lizards Patron on patreon.com/terriblelizards In the third series of Terrible Lizards we finally edged away from dinosaurs to cover pterosaurs, but in the Mesozoic, there were far more reptiles in the sea than in the air so we really need to do them too. Happily to this end we can welcome Kiersten Formoso from the University of Southern California who is working on her Ph...
Aug 18, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 4Ep. 9
It is the final episode this series and as usual we are answering some of your dinosaur questions (as many as we could cram into an hour). A massive thank you to all our patrons on patreon - your support means everything to us. We are planning a series 5! We will be back in the Autumn. There will be a few mid season episodes dropped here and even more content on our patreon. Got to patreon.com/terriblelizards Questions in were asked by: Chris (from Germany), Gildas (age 8), Edward (age 37), João...
Jul 21, 2021•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 8
Dave Hone tells Iszi Lawrence about the early days of paleontology and the very first dinosaur discoveries in the UK. We cover the perpetually unlucky Gideon Mantell and the not especially nice Richard Owen (and Mary Anning pops up though she didn't really do dinosaurs). Dr Kiki Sandford then joins us and asks what clues there are in fossils to tell us how dinosaurs behave... and things get silly. A link to an old blogpost of Dave's including photos of the original Megalosaurus jaw at Oxford htt...
Jul 14, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Season 4Ep. 7
Following on from our last adventure into the realm of the very biggest dinosaurs, we now have a look at the other side of this issue which is that big dinosaurs started off very small. How do you get from a 5 kg hatchling to a 50 ton monster and what does that mean for how they lived and how palaeontologists identify adults and juveniles? Are there hundreds of 'new' dinosaur species that are just misidentified babies and can we tell? Then we are joined by out guest, comedian Alasdair Beckett-Ki...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Perhaps the single most notable feature of dinosaurs is the quite extraordinary sizes that many of them achieved. We have talked before about some of the issues surrounding being big, but before now we have not tackled the most obvious question in all of this: what is the biggest dinosaur? Well as you may expect by now this isn't a simple question to answer and between fragmentary fossil remains, uncertain scaling and growth issues there is no easy answer, but we'll at least try. We are joined t...
Jun 30, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 5
This time out it is a group of dinosaurs very few people will have heard of or know very much about but they are a fascinating group of small, feathered theropods who have only been on the scene for around 20 years making them very much newcomers. The tongue-twistedly-named scansoriopterygidae are a bunch of fragmentary and bizarre animals from China and include some of the strangest dinosaurs known and absolutely deserve more attention. Moving on, our guest this week is biologist and author Dr ...
Jun 23, 2021•58 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Just how reliable are research papers and what goes on to get them published and accepted in the scientific literature and, critically, are they reliable? We have talked many times on the pod about scientific papers but without ever discussing what these actually are and how they get published. It's an important aspect of science and especially with palaeontology given the huge mix of information available through museums, the media, and well, podcasts, so it's an area really worth discussing. T...
Jun 16, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 4Ep. 3
There's numerous illustrations and documentaries showing great herds of dinosaurs together and it is very common to come across the idea that various species (or entire groups like the hadrosaurs, ceratopsians and dromaeosaurs) fundamentally lived in groups. As usual though, this really oversimplifies a huge mess of extrapolations from limited fossil data and the complexities of social behaviour in living species. The perfect problem to solve in half an hour of a podcast. This time out we are jo...
Jun 09, 2021•58 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Harking back to Series 1 episode 1 (a whole year ago!) we return to the tyrannosaurs, but having devoted a whole hour to T. rex then it seemed appropriate that we should try and cover the other 30ish tyrannosaur species at some point. Rexy might be the first and foremost of all dinosaurs but has dozens of relatives that are plenty interesting too and help chart the 100 million year rise of this group from small, long armed, and little headed predators to the giant monster that people are most fa...
Jun 02, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Series 4 will be starting on Wednesday June 2nd. You can also catch us going live on our 1 year anniversary at 8PM GMT on Iszitube on youtube and our facebook page (facebook.com/terriblelizardspodcast) and on Twitter. Thank you to our patrons on Patreon who made this possible. Please go to patreon.com/terriblelizards...
May 31, 2021•1 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Many groups of Mesozoic plants are still around today so the landscapes in which the dinosaurs lived would have looked at least vaguely familiar to anyone who might be (un)lucky enough to travel back in time 150 million years. Still, plants are typically rather squishier than dinosaur bones and so their fossils are often rare. In this episode we welcome Dr Susannah Lydon to the pod to tackle the subject of plants at the time of the dinosaurs. Susie is an expert in fossil plants from the Mesozoic...
Apr 07, 2021•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 9
How stiff were dinosaur tails? If you could find a complete skeleton of any dinosaur species, which would it be? Why are were dinosaurs so big if big sizes are evolutionary dead ends? It is the final episode of our third series and we put together just a few of the questions sent in from our Patreons and listeners. We plan on doing a live show answering more of your questions which you can watch on iszitube . We will let you know exact timings on Patreon and on Facebook . Big thank you to ALL ou...
Mar 17, 2021•56 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Following on from last week's look at how dinosaurs get named, in this (Patreon picked) episode Iszi and Dave turn to the issue of dinosaur relationships. How do palaeontologists put together family trees and work out which species or group is related to which other one? And how easy and reliable is it when most dinosaurs are known from only fragments of skeletons rather than complete fossils? For our final normal episode of series 3 (have we really come this far already?) we are joined by Profe...
Mar 10, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 3Ep. 7
In this episode we take a look at the actual identification of dinosaurs. What makes a species a species and how does this apply to fossils that are a hundred million years old? From there we look to how dinosaurs get their names where things can go wrong when it comes to correctly identifying them. Our special guest this time out is Professor Chris Jackson, geologist and science communicator par excellence, who wants to ask Dave a very pertinent question about how dinosaurs are actually defined...
Mar 03, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 3Ep. 6
This week we have an extended interview and discussion with David Krentz on the public perception of dinosaurs and especially in film. David is a palaeoartist, but also works as a storyboard artist and character designer for Hollywood productions like the Marvel movies and has also produced and directed dinosaur documentaries so has seen things from all sides. So he's the perfect person to bring in to chat about the creative processes and trade-offs between accuracy and realism and dramatic lice...
Feb 24, 2021•54 min•Season 3Ep. 5
