Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History. With a History Hits subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe.
Your customers are scrolling past your social ads, using ad blockers and paying for ad-free streaming. But when they're listening to a podcast, they're hearing Acast ads, which are for... So if you want real attention, start advertising on podcasts with ACAST. Start today at go.acast.com forward slash ads. on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, where we're talking all about dinosaurs again. Dinosaurs. There's just something that we all love.
about them and it's always good on the ancients that once in a while we release an episode about dinosaurs a particular area of the dinosaurs and the millions of years that they inhabited the earth. Today, we're talking about a really exciting, groundbreaking part of the dinosaur story. We're talking all about feathered dinosaurs. To talk all about this, we've got a great dinosaur expert, a paleontologist returning to the podcast, a man who's filled.
with witty stories, with funny, incredible anecdotes, who's just a brilliant storyteller. I am, of course, talking about Henry G. Now, Henry, he was on the podcast quite recently. We sat down together and we talked through our top five dinosaurs. That was a great chat. Naturally, Iguanodon sits right at the top of that list.
Of course. Okay, maybe that is a personal bias of mine. I can see why some might think actually it's quite a boring dinosaur, but not to me. Listen to that episode to find out why. Anyways, feathered dinosaurs, we're talking all about feathered dinosaurs today and why this field of paleontology is developing, why it's been so exciting. over recent decades. And Henry is the perfect guest for it because he has been to the conferences.
As you're going to hear, he has been in the front line of learning about this research over the past decades. There are some really good stories and I've got no doubt you're going to absolutely love this episode. So without further ado, to talk all about feathered dinosaurs, here's Henry.
Henry, it is good to have you on the podcast again, amigo. Hello again, Tristan. You've been on a few times now. We've discussed our top dinosaurs in a fun chat not too long ago. But this is another dino topic, but one which is really... quite close to your heart i think a really really exciting interesting one And this is all about feathered dinosaurs because this field is also still quite a recent revelation in the whole dinosaur field. Yes, it all started in the mid-1990s.
There's been for many, many years, decades, centuries even, there have been suspicions that dinosaurs and birds were closely related. Thomas Henry Huxley, who was Darwin's... mate and champion, wrote that dinosaurs seemed very bird-like. But that idea fell very much out of fashion, and certainly when I was a lad in the mid-60s,
Dinosaurs were seen as very large and lumbering reptilian creatures that wouldn't have been remotely like the alert, chirping, jumping about flying birds. And it was quite not thought. But there was one man, John Ostrom, a paleontologist, who felt that Huxley was absolutely right. And he looked at a lot of very small raptors, the small carnivorous dinosaurs, you know, small dog-sized to bear-sized dinosaurs that were bipedal, looked like they were fast runners, carnivorous.
And he looked at some of the skeletons of raptors and realized they were very close to the skeletons of birds, especially early birds such as Archaeoptery. that lived about 115 million years ago in the Jurassic period. And that was discovered about the same time that Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. And that was a beautiful, beautiful creature preserved in fine-grained limestone in a lake in Bavaria. And that showed a little skeleton surrounded by feathers.
and various specimens of Archaeopteryx have been found, but one that interested Austen was one that didn't have feathers. and it had been labelled as a dinosaur. So he then thought that maybe Huxley had it right all along. He, that is Ostrom, had a student, Bob Backer, who was a kind of swashbuckling cowboy-hatted dinosaur explorer.
who was a very great popularizer and still is, who he and Ostrom came up with the idea that dinosaurs weren't these lumbering, slow-witted creatures, but they were warm-blooded. Just like mammals, they had a high running metabolism and they were much more intelligent and active. The hot-blooded dinosaurs, it was a big debate in the 70s.
So people were beginning to wonder whether dinosaurs and birds were closely related. But of course, and they showed various features of the bones and the anatomy that looked very bird-like. But of course the iconic thing about what birds have is... feathers so you know i would remember chatting with paleontologists do you think we'll ever find any feathered dinosaurs and people wouldn't say no but you know we couldn't imagine them ever being found
Well, before we go to the big, yeah, and then we will get to 1995. I'd like you to explain us a bit more about... some of these creatures which people knew of before 1995 and you mentioned the very well-known archaeopteryx because it would be great to explain what archaeopteryx is if it's the the first known bird so we can kind of get an idea when we're talking and then go from there but for a long time
The fossils of birds are very, very, very scarce because birds are fragile. They have hollow bones and they don't preserve very well in the fossil record. They just get smashed to bits. You cast your mind back to our last dinosaur podcast. We were talking about the great rush for dinosaurs in the American West. Well, it wasn't just dinosaurs they found. There were birds as well. There was a great ocean that actually bisected.
north america from north to south the niobrara seaway and is what is now kansas was basically ocean and one of these birds from the cretaceous was called ichthyonis that looked like a seagull with teeth So we knew they were birds. But much earlier, Archaeopteryx, was found, as I say, in limestone in Bavaria. Its full name is Archaeopteryx lithographica.
because it was found in limestone so fine that it was used for lithographic printing. So it takes a special kind of very delicate sedimentation to preserve a bird. And so for a long time, Archaeopteryx was the only decently complete fossil bird that was found for many decades. And so, you know, finding fossil birds was very rare. So dinosaurs with feathers.
was bird-like in many ways. Yeah, it had feathers, but in many other ways it was very reptilian. It didn't have a beak, it had jaws full of little teeth, rather than the kind of parson's nose that birds have as a tail with a fan of feathers. It had a long bony tail with feathers coming out of each side. It had fully formed wings, but the consensus is that it could fly, but probably not very far or very fast.
It could actually fly rather than just glide, but you wouldn't have seen it doing long-distance migrations. But for a long time, it was just a sort of strange outlier in the end of the Jurassic, this one fossil bird. There had to be more. There had to be more. But nobody had found them until.
Until, indeed, until. So let's go into that now. Well, I was thinking about this as you were talking. I think we need to clarify this as well, because perhaps the most iconic flying, I'm not going to say dinosaur. Creature we know of from the time of the dinosaurs is like the pterodactyl.
But a pterodactyl, so this is neither a dinosaur nor a bird. No, the pterodactyls or pterosaurs, to give them their proper name now, they were a group of flying animals. They were close cousins to the dinosaurs. Nobody knows exactly how they evolved. They're believed to have been related to small dinosaur-like creatures that lived back in the Triassic period. But already in the mid-Triassic, they were fully flying with wings. They were, they started off small kind of bat size.
but their wing membranes weren't stretched between fingers. They were stretched along one very, very elongated fourth finger. and the membrane might have extended to the side of the body. It might have extended to the back legs and the tail. There's a great deal of controversy about the extent to which the wing membrane happened. The earlier pterosaurs were quite small. They had very toothy jaws.
The late Cretaceous pterosaurs, they tend to have very small tails and toothless beaks and absolutely huge wingspans. I mean, some of the last pterosaurs were as big as small aeroplanes. In fact, some of the very last pterosaurs kind of gave up flight. more or less. They just walked around on the ground on their knuckles with their wings sticking up like very large mobile marquees and they would have been able to look eye to eye with a giraffe.
And these things could probably still have flown. And they became extinct with the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period. But they were not birds. Their bodies were covered with... fur with some kind of hair, at least the smaller ones were, but they weren't birds. They were relatives of birds, but birds came directly from dinosaurs. They weren't just cousins, which the pterosaurs were.
Glad we cleared that one up. People were wondering about birds and dinosaurs and whether there were any more fossil birds than Archaeopteryx. And it was an open question until. Until what, Henry? Until what? Well, one day in 1995, I was a delegate. at an annual meeting, the Society of Vertebraic Paleontology, which is an annual conference of paleontologists, quite a lot of dinosaur urologists, but a lot of other paleontologists.
They would meet in October, November, usually in the city in North America. although it's been in other countries as well. And, you know, to have a conference about the latest findings, it would usually come after people had come back from the summer fieldwork, so there was quite a lot of new things.
And also the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, SVP, like all conferences, you go also for the parties. So they had a kind of cocktail party in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which is where it's been. held in the hall of the Pacific Northwest. There we were eating peanuts and drinking beer and wine surrounded by totem poles in the hall of the American Northwest. And along comes this Chinese researcher who nobody knew called Professor Chen Peiji.
And Professor Chen, nobody knew him because he didn't work on dinosaurs. He worked on little fossil crustaceans. But he had this very well-thumbed photographic print. of what was a dinosaur with feathers. As he didn't know what to do with this because he's not a dinosaur paleontologist, he came, of course, to the American Museum of Natural History. And everyone, I was there. I was there when John Ostrom, the person who suspected that dinosaurs and birds were related.
He was there. He was very old at the time. And he looked at this and gasped and sat down on a bench. And I looked at it and I just talked to him and said, you know, this is what we've all been waiting for, wasn't it? And he just nodded. He was completely, his breath was taken away. It was like all his dreams had come true. Another dinosaur paleontologist who I know well called Martin Larell said, hey, I'm on the first flight to Beijing. And this dinosaur was called Sinosauropterus.
Well, naturally, being a young editor at Nature, I wanted to snaffle this great discovery from my journal. But it's at times like this when you realise you have forgotten your business card. It always happens at this. So I found a piece of beer mat, you know, cheap fibre beer mat, and I tore a bit off and I wrote my details.
and I handed it through the crowd to Professor Chen, and in due course of time, the paper of Cinosaurocterics arrived at the Desk of Nature, and other feathered dinosaurs followed. They all came from an area of northeastern China in the province of Liaoning, which is basically a day's drive northeast of Beijing. I know because in a later year, I actually went there. And in the middle of the Cretaceous period,
It was a series of lakes with volcanoes around them. This is absolutely brilliant for preserving fossils because all sorts of creatures fall into the lake. They go to the bottom. The volcanoes spew out loads of ash. they cover the bodies before they can be moved around, and you get almost perfect preservation, almost like mummification, including the soft part. And if you go to Liaoning and you dig down a few feet, you will almost certainly find feathered dinosaurs, birds.
These were the birds. We talked about the rarity of fossil birds. In from the liowning beds there are so many fossil birds you can't give them away. There's so many and they're preserved beautifully with their feathers. Big birds, little birds, birds with teeth, birds without teeth. It showed that Archaeopteryx was just one tiny part of an immense evolutionary explosion of birds during the era of the dinosaurs.
Also, there were tiny mammals. Now, before Liaoning came along, you were lucky to get a tooth of a mammal or maybe a jaw, but these were the whole mammals, including their furry coats and the last meals they just had. And it started with the feathered dinosaurs. So we got several more feathered dinosaurs. They were usually small, you know, sparrow-sized to turkey-sized. bipedal predatory dinosaurs related to the small raptors, Velociraptor dinomicus.
and they were feathery. And I'm going to bring in a story about my son, who we remember last time talking about the Victorians. I remember... going to see the first specimens because I'd only seen photographs. I'd seen Chen's photograph and I'd seen the photographs that came onto my desk. But I hadn't actually seen the fossils. And then a small exhibition, touring exhibition, feathered dinosaurs from China, came to the Natural History Museum.
So me and the kid, aged four, dropped the even smaller kid, aged two and a half, at the childminder, one half term, and got on the tube to the Natural History Museum. Now, as you know if you've been to the Natural History Museum, the main dinosaur exhibit is absolutely rammed. I mean, it's absolutely full all the time. But this exhibit was in a small side room and also you had to pay extra to get in. So, you know, naturally that put off large crowds. So we went in and it was quite a small room.
And it was very moodily lit. There were only nine fossils of feathered dinosaurs. And I think by that time... I had the honour of publishing all of them except one, I think. So, you know, I kind of knew these, but I'd never, never seen the actual fossils. And there was one, a big turkey-sized creature called Chordypteryx, that was on a tabletop slab. A lot of them were mounted on the wall like works of art, but Chordypteryx was on a big slab.
And I'd forgotten about the kid who was whizzing around like a stray asteroid, amusing himself while all the other people were looking in, you know, beard-stroking contemplation at these fossils. So I was lost in thought looking at chordipteryx. And this little face popped up. on the other side of his tabletop and said dad did you punish this in nature
And I thought, yeah, that's what happens. People, scientists send us their papers and we punish them. So, and it was only much later that I got to go to China. I kept trying to get to China and various things were stopping me. And then at a later meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, I was sitting in the bar with my friend Zhu Zhonghe. who I've known since he was a graduate student, but, you know, by then he was the head of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology.
in Beijing, which is like now my spiritual home. I mean, I love it. And Zhang He said, Henry, we've really got to get you to China. And we were by the end of this jug of beer, we'd all kind of agreed and it was all going to happen. So I actually went to China. And I had, this was in 2010 and I had a fantastic time. And I actually got to go to Liaoning with Zheng He. And I went to other cities. And another city I went to was Nanjing. where they have an institute of geology and paleontology.
Now, Nanjing is a very beautiful city. It's very hilly and it's got very pretty lakes and parks. It's just what you'd imagine a Chinese city should look like with willows and bridges. And the campus of the Institute of Geology is very hilly. And the director had taken me to the strong room where their great treasures were stored. And I saw Sinoceropteryx, the actual specimen. that the Chen Meiji had photographed he'd brought the picture to New York.
So I actually saw the specimen. It's nothing like seeing the real thing, whether it's dinosaurs or artifacts, you've got to see the real thing. So anyway, after looking at this, we were standing in the campus at the top of the hill. and there was a little old man at the bottom of the hill toiling up this hill. And the director said, oh, look, it's Professor Chen Peiji. who I'd forgotten, worked at this institute.
So this was 15 years later, and he'd aged. I think he'd aged quite a lot. And he got to the top of the hill, and we did all the introductions. Professor Chen got out his wallet and from his wallet he drew this little piece of cardboard. on which I'd written my number and my address all those years ago in New York and gave it to him. He'd had it as a kind of talisman all those years. So it kind of gets you, really. So that's my personal involvement with feathered dinosaurs.
We try to bring you cold, hard facts on Gone Medieval, but January is all about mysteries. Impossible riddles from medieval history that defy efforts to solve them. How did the presence of a mysterious saviour from the East turn into... What secrets does a book written in an unknown code hide? Did kings and princes really die when history has assumed they did? I'm Matt Lewis and in January we'll see how close we can get to answering the unanswerable.
how these mysteries might be solved in the future. Do you remember the brand that popped up while you were scrolling your social feed? No? But I bet you remember who sponsors your favourite podcast. That's because 74% of listeners recall the brands they hear when listening to podcasts. If you want your business to be top of mind, podcast advertising with Acast is the way to go. Book your campaign today by visiting go.acast.com.
And sinus roctorix, you know, it wasn't too long ago that you're in China looking at that. But I mean, since then, more discoveries have been made, more lines have been shown on feathered dinosaurs, particularly from this area of the world, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, it seems that... dinosaurs in general were more feathered than not, especially the smaller ones.
If they weren't, sinusoropteryx wasn't really feathered. It had kind of hair that was kind of proto-feathers or primitive feathers. And some had these kind of hair-like extrusions and proper feathers. I mean, cordypteryx, the one that my son asked if I'd punished. had a kind of little feathery wings and a switch of feathers at the end of the tail. Some of them...
were very richly feathered. There's one called Microraptor that I saw much later when I visited Beijing again in 2017. That was quite a small creature, you know, about the size of a blackbird, maybe a bit longer, maybe more like a crow. And that had four wing feathers on its arms and also on its legs.
so it was a kind of biplane and there were lots of other creatures like that and what's been found since is there have been all sorts of feathered dinosaurs that have been found and it just shows that archaeopteryx was just of a whole group of feathered dinosaurs just turning into birds and it's actually the deep ancestry of birds is actually very very hard to pinpoint in fact it's still very controversial
that they'll all be feathered dinosaurs that are experimenting with different kinds of feathering and different kinds of flight. And just one of them, Archaeopteryx was a sort of offshoot somewhere, and from somewhere amid all this feathery flock, the birds evolved. So this is the origin story of birds in one way too? Yes, it is. It is. So the feathered dinosaurs were close to the ancestry of birds and it's actually, some of them, it's very hard to pinpoint where dinosaurs stop.
and birds begin it's kind of arbitrary interesting how interesting because henry keeping on that because i've got also in my notes a bit of a tangent but i think it's still relevant how Does it seem like quite a few dinosaurs may well therefore have had feathers when they were young, but these feathers were shed as they got older? Yes. Cast your mind back to our last thing when we were talking about how dinosaurs got big and they had to lose heat.
Well, if dinosaurs were warm-blooded, losing heat would have been a real difficulty. But if you were very small, keeping heat... would be a difficulty insulation You don't want to lose all that expensive heat. You freeze to death. So a lot of the smaller dinosaurs would have had feathers or some kind of hairy covering. Pterosaurs had them. And some of those smaller, particularly carnivorous dinosaurs. I think there's a view that baby T-Rexes would have been like fluffy chicks.
and might have shed their fluff when they got older. Oh, how cute. Mum, can I keep it? I'll look after it myself, really. And some of the herbivorous dinosaurs might have had little bits of feathery covering. There's one small quadrupedal dinosaur called Psittacosaurus. that had feathery quills on its tail.
And that was a very distant relative of the carnivorous dinosaurs where feathering seems to have been more the thing. And of course, some of these dinosaurs had feathers, even though they were quite big. There was a group of... these feathered carnivorous dinosaurs called therizinosaurus, and I'm having a hard time pronouncing that because I'm losing all my teeth.
These therizinosaurus with a theta, therizinosaurus, they were secondarily evolved to be herbivores. They were about as aerodynamic as a sack of spanners. They had these great big hind legs and huge bellies. And on their front legs, these huge, huge claws, the longest claws that any animal has ever had, you know, a metre long claws and tiny, tiny heads. I mean, they're really weird.
And some of them had feathers as well. I mean, you know, did they really want to look ridiculous? But they had feathers too. So feathers seem to have been evolved a lot long before flight evolved. That's the main thing. So that kind of leads us to the next question. I think you've kind of answered it already there, which is like the function of these early feathers.
As you've highlighted, I think it's just a key point to stress, isn't it, Henry? It's not what we might initially think. It's not to do with flight at all. Well, feathers are extremely good and very helpful for flight, but the earliest dinosaurs with feathers were not flying. What were they for? Who knows? Taking Boy Scouts out of horses' hooves.
Insulation would have been an important function, but also maybe display. As dinosaurs were very sociable, there was no reason to think that dinosaurs were any less sociable than birds are now. It's now known by looking at the chemical chemistry of the feathers that they were coloured. They were colourful. They had patterns. They had bars and stripes and spots.
And they would have been colourful, just like bird feathers. And so dinosaurs would have displayed to each other. You know, they would have... faced off mates female dinosaurs would have chosen the most gaudy males just as birds do now and we know from their anatomy that they had wishbones that they made nests that they folded their arms just like birds fold their wings that they laid eggs but it was only the smaller ones that became flyers, more or less by accident, really.
And the interesting thing is some of the smaller ones that became flyers were actually geologically older than some of the larger relatives, which suggests... that some of these early bird-stroke feathered dinosaurs evolved flight and then lost it. Interesting. So some of these feathered dinosaurs really were the dragons that fell to earth.
Well, my mind instantly thinks, and it might be wrong, but I think something like the dodo, you know, examples, therefore, from the dinosaur period of larger, feathered, flightless, dinosaurs, and a number of those seem to be getting more information about as the years progress. Well, flight is great, but it's a very, very, very expensive It uses an incredible amount of energy. So when birds learn to fly, a lot of them used every opportunity they could to lose the habit of flight.
Now, you mentioned the dodo. The dodo was basically a giant pigeon. that its ancestors got marooned on an island, and because there were no predators, it could live without flight and get bigger. I talked a little earlier about a Cretaceous bird called Ichthyornis that looked like a seagull with teeth.
that was found in the ocean that is now Kansas in the Cretaceous. Well, it had a friend called Hesperonis that was a much bigger bird, but that was a diving bird. Not only was it flightless, it had almost no wings at all. It was more like a kind of penguin. These were early birds. They still had teeth. So birds have evolved to be flightless on many occasions. Some of the birds evolved to be flightless even before they were birds, if you see what I mean, while they were still dinosaurs.
It's absolutely fascinating. I love how this is quite a recent development. Now we're learning so much more about it, Henry. And your personal story in it too. It's lovely to get you on to talk about it. I've been so privileged to have been in the front row of all this development as it happened. There is one other name I've got on my list, and you mentioned it quite a few emails ago between us, but you said it's quite mysterious.
dinosaur and I hope that I'm right in thinking that it does fit into this category that we're talking now. The ye. The mysterious ye. Henry, talk to us about the mysterious ye and how this fits into the equation. Well, the mysterious ye, well... Some Chinese dinosaurs, they continue to be amazing and provide, you know, myths and interest. There were a couple of tiny dinosaurs, one called Epidendrosaurus. Your customers are scrolling past your social ads.
using ad blockers and paying for ad-free streaming. But when they're listening to a podcast, they're hearing Acast ads, which are 4.4 times more engaging than with display ads. So if you want real attention, start advertising on podcast. Start today at go.acast.com forward slash ads. and another one called Epidexipteryx. and as if paleontologists were doing it to punish us.
They were all grouped under a group called the Scansoriopterygids. These were tiny dinosaurs. They would have fitted in the palm of your hand. and they had wings, and they, well, actually, these two Scansioriopterygids, I've mentioned, Epidepsipteryx and the other bloke, they were seen as like small little monkey-like. you know, feathered dinosaurs. With long fingers, the lemur that still lives, the aye-aye, uses to wheedle beetles out of holes in trees.
And then another one was found in China, and it was found by a friend of mine called Xu Xing, who is the most prolific namer of new dinosaurs the world has ever seen. He's outclassed. Charles Marx, he's gone way beyond Edward Drinker Cope. And he didn't want to be a paleontologist. He came out of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and they said to Xu, you're going to be a paleontologist. And he said, what? I can't even spell paleontologist. He said, yes, but we want you to be a paleontologist.
Well, luckily, he turned out to be extremely good at it. And he and his team found another of these scansoriopterygids. Now, Xu Xing thought it was high time that these tiny creatures didn't have such long names, so he called it Yi. or its full name Yi-Chi and it is a scansoriopteriduit but They found another bone that shouldn't have been there.
and it looked like exactly the kind of bone that some flying mammals have to hold up a wing membrane. And another relative of Yi has been found, and people have been looking at the other scansoriopterygids. And it seems these were feathered dinosaurs, but they were feathered everywhere except their wings. Their wings were skin flaps, leathery wings, like bat wings.
And so this small group of mainly Jurassic dinosaurs were a tiny experiment in which dinosaurs tried to invent bat before bats evolved and they died out. So Yi was this tiny bat-like flying dinosaur. It was a feathered dinosaur but didn't have feathers on its wings, if you can get that. And they lived in trees and so on. They were probably competing with the first bird.
How interesting. And it's still so mysterious, aren't they? I just love the fact that the dinosaur name is a Yi rather than a really complex long word, as you said earlier. But it also seems like one that we're going to be learning more about in the future too. Well, yes, and there are other ones that have been found. There were feathered dinosaurs whose wings have basically atrophied and have become runners. There was another one called Mononychus.
which was found in Mongolia. Now, the history of Mongolian dinosaurs is great. Now... Back in the early 20th century, the head of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Olsbourne, was convinced that clues to human evolution would be found in the Gobi Desert. I don't know why he was convinced about this. He probably had a good reason, but he sent an expedition in the 1920s to Mongolia.
You can see them with their old cars chugging through the Gobi Desert. And they were headed by a fellow called Roy Chapman Andrews, who everyone believes is the model for Indiana Jones. He had the hat and everything. They found a lot of dinosaurs in Mongolia. They found lots of dinosaurs. They didn't find any humans, but they found some dinosaurs. And then Mongolia became under the sway of the Soviet sphere of influence, and so the Americans didn't excavate there anymore.
During the interval, there were some amazing Polish paleontologists who worked there. But then when Glasnost and Perestroika thawed things, the first... country to break loose from the Soviet Union sphere was Mongolia. So as early as 1991, a delegation of Mongolian scientists appeared in New York and asked the American Museum, can we pick up Roy Chapman Andrews' expeditions from where we left off in 1925, please? And so ever since then, there's been...
quite a fruitful collaboration between Mongolian and American and Canadian scientists, I think, in Mongolia, finding the most amazing dinosaurs. Well, one of them was this creature called Mononychus. And that was a little bird-like thing with tiny feathery wings, but very long legs. It looked like Roadrunner. And on its... Although the wings were tiny, it had a huge claw on these tiny wings and this Roadrunner, and it's been reconstructed as a kind of specialist, flightless, bird-like thing.
specialising in breaking open anthills and termite mounds with these big claws. And they're related to other creatures that were found before, but people didn't know what they were, called alvarez saurids, you know, which come from Argentina. Another group of these feathered dinosaurs. They had wings but they were tiny and they were flightless and they ran around on these long legs and broke into termite mounds. I mean, the diversity of these feathered dinosaurs is incredible.
We have Yi and its friends were tree-living feathered dinosaurs which had wings with no feathers on. And we had alvarosaurids which had wings with feathers on but they were too small. And then they had these... Therizina stories that was about as aerodynamic as an outside lavatory and they had feathers on as well and then they had baby T-Rexes with feathers that grew up and didn't have feathers and then they had all these things.
that were kind of birds and kind of not birds and from which birds emerged. So just in the past... 30 years, the whole view of how birds and dinosaurs evolved has completely changed. And I absolutely love that. You've kind of really summed it up there, but I was literally going to say, pre-1995, we had the likes of Archaeopteryx and...
Those little snippets. But since then, in those, as you say, 25, almost 30 years down to the present day, we've learned, we've found, weren't we, but these incredible paleontologists have found and discovered. all these feathered dinosaurs that I shed so much more light on.
Well, on feathered dinosaurs, but also incredibly significantly on the origins of birds themselves. Henry, it's a fascinating field. And I can only imagine how much more information we're going to find out in the next 10 years or so. Well, who knows? I mean, it all depends on where you find things and where things turn up.
China continues to be a major source of these things because China is huge and geologically rich and also full of people who have this habit of digging holes in the ground, you know, farmers, that's where it's usually found. but increasingly in various parts of the world, strange new dinosaurs are found.
But I think to sum up what the whole feathered dinosaur revolution has done for me is to change my outlook and probably everyone else's outlook to think of dinosaurs not as big lumbering reptiles but kind of birds in the making. all dinosaurs the way dinosaurs were constructed and we've learned so much about their social lives we've learned about their biology we've learned about their metabolism and basically
They were birds in all but name, and they originated way, way back in the Triassic period. The Triassic. So we are literally saying the Triassic. So really, actually... Well, dinosaurs originated in the Triassic. I mean, they weren't the bird-like ones. Oh, sorry, sorry, I must have missed it. I thought you meant that birds originated in the Triassic. I got very, very excited there.
There have been rumours of Jurassic birds, but they're all false trails. Dinosaurs originated in the Jurassic, but the bird-like ones appeared in the middle to the late Jurassic. And Archaeopteryx is actually quite a late comer to the party. So there were all these bird-like dinosaurs that lived before Archaeopteryx.
But that is interesting because if you mentioned there, I'm just kind of rambling on now. We're going to start wrapping up very soon. But if you say, so they start in the mid-Jurassic.
Then from there, I'm guessing the dating of them, we see them in the Cretaceous too. Do any therefore, surely, if we do therefore get modern birds today, surely some... version there is some way that some at least survive the great extinction event at the end of the cretation Yeah, well, when birds became established as birds so that you'd recognize them and say, oh, that's a bird.
They were well established in the Cretaceous. So, you know, you can imagine these wonderful, I can imagine wonderful images with aerial perspective of huge dinosaurs. flocks of birds around you know perhaps they would nest on the nose of a t-rex pecking lice and between its scales and you can imagine the birds would have been part of the ecology
In the Cretaceous, there was a group of flying birds called enantiornithines that looked just like modern birds. I mean, they did have, I think, claws on their wings and they had some anatomical. differences from the modern birds, but they became extinct at the end of the, with the dinosaurs, the enantiornithines. But just before the great dinosaur extinction, modern birds, birds relative to creatures alive today, originated some of the most antique, well, it's hard to say.
One of the most venerable lineages of birds are ducks and chickens and geese. They're water birds, basically. Chickens aren't water birds, but they belong to the same group. The earliest relations of what we would now call ducks and geese already existed as kind of shorebirds before the dinosaurs became extinct. Now, there is still a huge amount of controversy about... how the Great End Cretaceous extinction affected the origins of birds or the evolution of birds.
You know, were there already the modern kinds of birds in existence before the Cretaceous, or were they spurred on by the extinction of the dinosaurs? Well, there's still a lot of questions to be answered there, but certainly birds of modern aspect, as it were, were already there.
before the dinosaurs died out right okay well thanks for clarifying that henry so because we talked about basically that pre birds we would recognize immediately period really in most of today's podcast but as I said by the end you do see birds which look like birds so oh yeah they were definitely and there were probably quite a lot of them too they were already quite successful
Well, there you go. Well, Henry, this has been absolutely great. I'm delighted that we've had you on the podcast to talk about this evidently This seems to be someone you're very passionate about talking about feathered dinosaurs. It's been a joy to... give you the light to talk thank you then the latest research and so on and where it's going in the future I'm sure you must mention these in your most recent book, which is out now, it is called.
I do indeed, Tristan. I'm so glad you mentioned that. My book is called A Very Short History of Life on Earth and it's out in paperback and it's available in all good bookshops and it's very, very readable, though they tell me. Well, Henry, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. Well, thank you, Tristan. As always, a great pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Henry G. returning to the ancients in style.
talking you through the amazing stories of feathered dinosaurs. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And Henry, of course, he's released a book very recently. It's been very, very popular. A short history of life on Earth. Henry's book, it's like his interview style. It's fun, it's witty, it's relaxed, but it's also really educational, really informative. So go and buy the book if you haven't already. I can guarantee you'll absolutely love it.
Moving on, you know what I'm going to say, last but certainly not least. If you've been enjoying these episodes and you want to help us as we continue our infinite mission to continue sharing these incredible stories from our ancient history, from prehistory with you, that includes once in a while dinosaur episodes like this. Well, you know what you can do. It's simple. It's easy. You've got to go and do it.
You just leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. As mentioned, it's simple, it's easy, but it really helps us as we continue to Spread these amazing stories with as many people as possible. And also give experts like Henry the spotlight that they deserve to tell these awesome stories that I know you're all loving. And long may that continue. But that's enough from me. and I will see you in the next episode.