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I'm Robert Hardman. And I'm Professor Kate Williams. We're the historians who love a bit of royal mischief, and our podcast, Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things, is back for another season. We've got murders, scandal and sex. I'm looking forward to our discussion on fabulous jewellery heist.
And whether the royals actually have magical powers. Then there's bad blind dates and royal terror plots. Yes, season two is live now. Follow queens, kings and dastardly things wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. It's The Enchants on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, where we're talking all about dinosaurs once more, and we've got a special guest returning to the podcast. His name is Henry G.
That name might ring a bell because Henry came on the podcast late last year to talk all about the origins of life on Earth, in which we covered millions, no, billions of years of history. It was wonderful to have Henry. back on the podcast for this episode where we go through our top five dinosaurs and we throw in a couple of surprises there too it's always great having henry on the show he's always full of energy full of stories full of anecdotes so without further ado to talk through our
five dinos. Here's Henry. It is great to have you back on the podcast, my friend. It's wonderful to be back, Tristan. Thank you for inviting me again. You're more than welcome. We were talking just before we started recording that you are currently reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. We've had you on the podcast before to talk about the origins of life on Earth. It feels like we're going halfway with this very special pod today with the dinosaur.
Yes, it's good to get this historical continuity. I remember when my son, aged very small, was at school in the kind of nursery section or the infancy. And they were taken to the local town museum to learn about the Victorians. And all the museum people were in Victorian dress and they learned about all sorts of things. So I didn't know this. So after school, I asked my kid. What did you do at school? Did you have a nice day at school? And usually you'd get, oh, I don't know, don't remember.
But then he just launched into this long, long story about how they'd been to the museum and they learned about the Victorians and the toys the Victorian children played with. and what they ate and what they did. And, you know, I just sat back, you know, dinner and a show. And then at the end, he said, Dad, were the Victorians before or after the dinosaurs?
And so after that, it became, you know, everything became sort of relative to Victorians and dinosaurs. So it would be, you know, dinosaurs, Anglo-Saxons, Tudors. dinosaurs, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Victorians, that sort of thing. But then some wag said to me, Actually, the dinosaurs came after the Victorians because Victorians invented the notion of dinosaurs. It was a Victorian scientist.
So I thought that would be a bit confusing to my tot at the time. Well, actually, that is a well actually moment, isn't it? Yeah. Clever clogs, clever clogs indeed. I mean, but, you know, whether it's the Victorians or whether it's us nowadays. Henry, there's just something about dinosaurs that fascinates each and every one of us. Yes, there is. I don't know what it is. I've tried to think a lot about that. The usual glib answer is, well, they're big, fierce and extinct.
So they're great, big, fierce, but they're conveniently extinct, so they're not going to come and eat you. But I remember seeing dinosaurs when I was the same age as my tot coming across Victorians. And it was their hugeness that got me. When age five, I was taken to the Natural History Museum and with not really much of an idea about dinosaurs, they were just so jaw-droppingly big. And that's really what got me. But it's a legitimate question. Why?
dinosaurs rather than any other kind of prehistoric creature excites this kind of fascination in people. There's a very, very good book. called dino mania by a man called borea sax who tries to analyze this and it's done in terms of national consciousness that dinosaurs you know in the victorian times were seen as a kind of
very British thing. They were part of imperial greatness, and so we took dinosaurs to our bosom. And in America, they were discovered just as the West was opening up, so it was seen as... big, grand American manifest destiny pioneer spirit. So it's a good thesis. But why it is that dinosaurs... Excite small children. That's really quite interesting how most small children can name 10 different dinosaurs before they're potty trained rather than any other creature.
I mean, it's a good question. Why is it that they excite so much interest? Well, my friend, don't worry. We're not going to name 10, but we are going to name five or six in today's podcast. We've had a bit of a chat today before recording. We had a bit of a back and forth. about our top five dinosaurs and drawing a list together which we're going to talk about over the next 40 minutes or so and Henry looking through the list
I'm not going to spoil anything, but I think we've got a nice balance between some very well-known, but also a couple of lesser well-known dinos too. Yep, we certainly have. There are a lot of different kinds of dinosaurs. We'll be talking about the good old-fashioned ones that everybody knows about. But, you know, over the past 20, 30 years, quite a lot of new dinosaurs have been, well, new dinosaurs, they were there all the time. Dinosaurs have been discovered.
that people might be less familiar with, but which are still very exciting. Well, I'll say them out now. We've got Iguanodon, Diplodocus, Triceratops, T-Rex. and Spinosaurus Aegeapticus. Now, Henry, which one would you like to start with? Let's start with Iguanodon. That was on the list, wasn't it? Yes, absolutely. Because Iguanodon was one of the first ones to be discovered. And that was a British discovery. In fact, it was a discovery from quite close to where I grew up in Sussex.
in the wheels of Sussex in the sandstone. It was discovered by the wife of a country doctor, Mrs. Gideon Mantell, and they were clip-clopping along. This is the story in their pony and trap. and Dr Mantell went to visit a patient. Well, Mrs Mantel was just looking around outside and discovered the first remains of what became Iguanodon. And I've got another anecdote actually also related to small children.
A friend of mine, a school teacher from near where I grew up in Sussex, he told a story about going to visit the sandstone quarry. with his small class of children where Iguanodon was found. And to get to this sandstone quarry, they had to go through a path through the woods. and they had to go through an immense five-barred gate, which, if you're five, is really big. And then they got to the quarry, and the quarryman was talking to them about how Iguanodon was found.
And a little boy at the back said, please, sir, how did it get through the gate? So that's another story about an Iguanodon. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a great discovery story, isn't it? You know, Gideon Mantel, but it's his wife, Mary Mantel, who makes the discovery. What exactly is an Iguanodon? Igrond was a moderately sized dinosaur. I don't know, about 30 feet long-ish, I'm not quite sure. It was a vegetarian. It was mostly bipedal, but it could walk on all four legs if it wanted to.
And it belonged to a group of dinosaurs. They were vegetarians and they had immense amounts of teeth in their jaws. They had huge batteries of grinding teeth to grind up the very tough vegetation that lived at the time. and they were pretty much defenceless. except on their thumbs. Their thumbs had this immense spike. which would have been good if they were hitchhiking, but it was evolved before cars.
and they wouldn't have been able to get in anyway. So you could have seen it as a pre-adaptation to hitchhiking. But I suppose if any predatory dinosaur came too close, they could just shove this up its nose. When Iguanodon was first reconstructed, it was reconstructed very much as a four-square quadruped with the horn on the end of its nose. Because the Igimonodon was found in Sussex. you know, in the early Victorian times.
But then much better remains were found in a coal mine in Belgium. Whole skeletons were later found. And then people got a much better idea of the anatomy and that the spike was on its thumb and so on. So it became a fairly well-known dinosaur, particularly after the discovery in Belgium. And of course, people had no idea what dinosaurs were because nobody thought about it.
But this Iguanodon and two other ones, Megalosaurus, which is a predatory dinosaur, is another one called Hydeosaurus, were described by Richard Owen, the great Victorian anatomist. And it was he who came up with the word dinosaur, terrible lizard. They look kind of reptilian, but they were a different kind of reptile. from anything that had ever been seen before and remember this was all before evolution this is all before darwin
But it took the discovery of dinosaurs to make people realise that the world was much older than biblical accounts would suggest. And this was another idea that was very difficult to stomach back then, the idea of extinction. that animals had become extinct. Maybe they perished in Noah's flood. In fact, it was this idea of extinction that actually opened up the American West. You may know that Thomas Jefferson, president, the villain in Hamilton, and celebrity slave owner and proto-scientist.
He commissioned Lewis and Clark to go and explore North America, but he hoped they'd find living woolly mammoth. He was sad that mammoths were not found anymore, and he hoped they'd find some live ones west of the Mississippi. Jefferson had actually described a fossil, megalonyx, which was not a dinosaur but a giant ground sloth. And I've actually seen the fossil that Jefferson described in Philadelphia.
In the American West, later on, people found lots of dinosaurs, but sadly no live mammoths, which is a bit sad, really. So the dinosaurs helped open up the vista of the past, of the ancient, deep ancient past, to people who had no idea that such a thing existed. Before then, people had found dinosaur bones and thought they were the bones of giants.
So the Iguanodon is significant in the fact it's one of those first fossils discovered, as you say, Henry. I mean, this might be a personal bias of mine because I'm...
slightly related to Gideon and Mary Mantell, which I take pride in. Well, even more. You see, I grew up in the Ashdown Forest in there, and you're related to the Mantell. So in our different ways, we are... fans of iguanodon absolutely we are friends of iguanodon and also i said this might be the personal bias coming in but if they existed i'm not an expert in this so if i'm wrong please correct me but if iguanodons exist in the jurassic maybe in the cretaceous too over like large
parts of the planet, they do feel like one of, if not the most successful plant eating dinosaur that the world ever saw. Yes, the kind of body form of the Iguanodon, the kind of medium-sized, mostly bipedal, but sometimes quadrupedal dinosaur, with the jaws absolutely crammed full of grinding teeth. Iguanodon was kind of an early example, but they became very successful as the age of dinosaurs wore on and largely took over the role of herbivorous dinosaurs from the gigantic...
sauropods like Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus. The so-called hadrosaurs, which Iguanodon was one, they became the more predominant. And they lived in immense numbers, huge herds of them. They were very kind of successful creatures. Well, let's move on then. We've got to get through these next four. You mentioned the next one on our list right then. Let's go on to the Diplodocus or Diplodocus. Now, this is a massive, massive creature, isn't it?
Yeah, I can't remember how big it is, but there was one in the Natural History Museum. People remember Dippy, the Diplodocus. in the foyer of the Natural History Museum in London, taking up the whole hall. It wasn't the heaviest of them, but it was very long. It was one of the longest ones with a very long neck and a very long tail. When I was a lad... Dip his tail trailed along the ground.
But when people got to know more about the anatomy of the dinosaurs, people realized that the tail was held quite high above the ground and would whip around and could probably whip some marauding allosaurus around the gob if it got too close. And there have been various ideas about how fast the tail could have gone. Could it have gone, you know, the speed of sound and so on. But I think the real reason why they moved the...
tail bones above the floor was because when the tails were on the floor, the little bones kept being nicked by little boys who used to pinch them. And the actual skeleton in the Natural History Museum was actually a plaster cast of one in America, Diplodocus Carnegie, named after the robber baron and scientific philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.
So it was a plaster cast and they had loads and loads of cast tail bones in a big box in the paleontology department to replace ones that had been pinched by small boys. Just between you and me, that's our little secret. I think that's the real reason they put the tail above the floor. Well, let's dive into the dinosaur itself, Henry, because the age of the sauropods of creatures like Diplodocus... When was that? What do we know about when and how a Diplodocus lived?
The heyday of the sauropods was in the middle of the Jurassic period, which ended between about 200 and 150 million years ago. And a lot of the great sauropods were found in a huge sequence of rocks called the Morrison Formation, not named after the supermarkets, but it's in the American West. And this brings us to another great episode in dinosaur discovery when the American West was opening up.
Pioneers kept finding these huge bones, and two particular scientists on the East Coast were interested in them. There was Othniel Charles Marsh. who was a bit of a dimwit, but he had a very rich uncle called Peabody. Uncle Peabody opened his nephew a museum, which is now the Peabody Museum at Yale. And then there was the extremely bright and ambitious Edward Drinker Cope, who was the Harvard man. And these two people would commission gangs of workmen to go into the American West.
to dig up the bones and send them by pack, mule, rail, head, whatever, back to the East Coast. And searching for fossils and digging up dinosaurs is quite heavy work anyway, but just think. They were far from civilization and they were often slaughtered by the Apaches and they had quite a lot of dangerous adventures.
But the biggest enemy of any dinosaur hunter in the American West was other dinosaur hunters working for either Marsh or Cope or the one you weren't working for. And there's a wonderful memoir by a man called Charles Sternberg. who was one of the dinosaur hunters, I can't remember for which one, and he talks about what it was actually like to go and hunt for dinosaurs on the frontier. It was really quite exciting.
and so how do these dinosaur hunters how do they what do they therefore reveal about the diplodocus about you know how they lived about when they lived and like that kind of environment which these giant creatures were living in Well, of course, now when you look at the American West, it's quite dry and desiccated badlands. But back in the time of the dinosaurs, most of the continents of the Earth were still more or less welded together in one giant continent, Pangaea.
Pangaea came together much earlier than that. In fact, towards the end of the dinosaurs, it was starting to break up. But back in those days, the Earth was one large continent, and a lot of it was very, very hot. There were some very hot deserts, but a lot of the places where the dinosaurs lived were very lush, very watered. There was no polar ice on Earth during the whole realm of the dinosaurs.
The climate was pretty equable from pole to pole. In fact, there were dinosaurs known from Antarctica. Antarctica wasn't over the South Pole then, but it was pretty far south. and there are dinosaurs known from Alaska. Now, even though these polar places... didn't have any ice on and they were quite warm, they still got dark for half the year. So the existence of dinosaurs, particularly in Alaska, suggests that they were much more active creatures than...
you know, lizards and snakes. And it was part of the realization that dinosaurs are more than just reptiles. They were very active, warm-blooded, intelligent creatures, as well as being big and fierce. With the diplodocus, one of the things that we know sauropods were is absolutely huge. And people are interested to know how they got so big. And the reason they got so big is because inside they were made like birds.
So really, it's best not to think of a Diplodocus as a giant reptile, but as a giant, featherless, four-footed, flightless bird. Because inside birds, birds have a unique way of breathing and it's been found in some living reptiles too and also has been seen in the way dinosaur bones are made. When birds breathe in, the air doesn't immediately come out again. It goes into a lot of air sacs that permeate the entire body.
And you can find this now if you pick up a chicken, not a frozen chicken, but an actual feathery chicken. You'd expect from its size to be quite heavy, but it's not. And the reason is it's absolutely full of air. These air sacs permeate the entire body, including even into the bones. I mean, bird bones are hollow, and so are dinosaur bones.
And one of the big air sacs that is important in the body of a bird and a dinosaur is it goes next to the liver. Now the liver is the, I'm sorry about this digression, but it explains why dinosaurs are huge. The liver is the internal organ that generates most of the heat.
Because that's where all the food goes. That's where all the digestion happens. That's the big kind of smokestack industry of the body. It's the big chemical factory. And it produces a lot of heat. And that heat has to go somewhere. Now, in mammals like us, it's carried away by the bloodstream and eventually comes out in your breath.
But in dinosaurs, it was right against one of these big air sacs and it came directly out of the lungs without having to go into the blood and then go through the blood to the lungs and come out of the lungs again. And because of that, dinosaurs could grow very, very large because the thing that limits the size that things can grow is heat exchange. It's all to do with volume and surface area. The larger you get... the more insides you have relative to your outsides.
I mean, if you're a tiny animal the size of a dock, you don't need any special means of shedding heat because there isn't much inside. You're all outsides. But as you get bigger, there's more and more insides, and the insides are further and further from the outside.
So any heat generated inside has to travel a long way. And so if you get more than a certain amount of size, more than the size of a dot, You have to have special mechanisms to move the heat, otherwise you'll boil yourself alive from the inside. So dinosaurs could get as big as they did because they could transfer heat by this efficient system without boiling themselves alive from the inside out. And that's how dinosaurs could grow so immensely big. And, of course, dinosaurs grew big.
especially these large herbivorous dinosaurs, because they were being chased by large carnivorous dinosaurs. And the only defence one of these large sauropods had, they didn't have any armour, they couldn't run fast. The only defence they had was just being enormous. And also, being sociable, they lived in very large herds. They nested in huge rookeries, which would have stretched from horizon to horizon they were so big.
And there's some evidence from trackways that the large dinosaurs, when they're on the move, used to form a ring around the smaller and younger dinosaur inside, so that's how they would move. And so it was just the sheer size. Interesting, how interesting. And as you said earlier, then that size decreases as the time goes on and you get the likes of the hadrosaurs and iguanodon taking over, don't you?
Yes, but when we say they were smaller, they were still very large. And they lived in very large numbers, so safety would have been in numbers. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how Code Breakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetin as he prepares for war with the British.
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Maybe they're in charge of campaign management. Or they work on strategic planning. Or literally anything else. Asana works for you. That's A-S-A-N-A dot com. Hi, it's Guy and Gary here and our podcast, Rock on Tours, is currently being sponsored by Specsafe. Make sure you look after your ears and your hearing and treat yourself to a hearing check. What's that got to do with Spexate?
Did you know that they're hearing experts too, Gary? Well, maybe they should call themselves specs and hearing savers. Yeah, not very snappy, is it? But, you know, they've been hearing experts for over 20 years, too, helping new and existing customers when they need it. Specsavers, looking after your hearing, too. It's so easy to book. Go online or in-store today.
I'm Robert Hardman. And I'm Professor Kate Williams. We're the historians who love a bit of royal mischief, and our podcast, Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things, is back for another season. We've got murders, scandal and sex. I'm looking forward to our discussion on fabulous jewellery heist.
And whether the royals actually have magical powers. Then there's bad blind dates and royal terror plots. Yes, season two is live now. Follow queens, kings and dastardly things wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. All right. Well, let's keep moving on this top five. I said we've only got limited time, but Henry, I want you to take it away. I want you to go wild. You'll have like five or 10 minutes to explain this next dino.
Tell me why Triceratops is the next one on our list. Triceratops, actually, I suggested this. Triceratops is my wife's favourite dinosaur. Penny, this is your favourite dinosaur. Triceratops was a member of another group of dinosaurs, the Keratopsians. I'm pronouncing my C in a classically approved way there. They were distinguished by a lot of armour on the head. They had a big neck frill extended from the back of the skull to protect the neck. They had various horns on their faces.
They were herbivorous dinosaurs. They had a lot of teeth, quite hadrosaur-like, but they also had a very long, horny beak, which they would crop the vegetation with. They started off quite small and bipedal, which in fact a lot of dinosaurs started out, but quite soon they became very big and very quadrupedal. The Triceratops we're all familiar with. There were several different sorts and they lived in Western North America. in the very end of the period of the dinosaurs, in the late Cretaceous.
from 90 million years to when they died out 65 million years ago. They're mostly known from Western North America, but they're also known from Eastern Asia. which was joined up at the time. But there are also little bits of them everywhere. There's one that turned up in Hungary, of all places. But the Triceratops we all know about lived in the wild, wild west. lived in the Wild West indeed and it has some defining features all around its horns, isn't it?
Yeah, there was a triceratops. There was... Pentaceratops, they were all kinds, and they were all various different species. And the reason why they had all these horns, it could have been so the species could tell each other apart. They might have been to do with sexual dimorphism, like birds display with their feathers. There's some amazing artist reconstructions that the frills were decorated with all kinds of patterns that could either be worn in coloration or to display.
But like all dinosaurs, they live busy social lives, and Triceratops would have been no exception to that. And so what do we know there for? Are there any other key things you'd like to highlight about the Triceratops, about this particular species? For instance, in how it lived, its great enemies, do we know anything about?
movements of these creatures, how they interacted with the wider dinosaur late Cretaceous world. Well, you've given me the perfect segue to coming to everyone's favourite dinosaur. Triceratops' big enemy was Tyrannosaurus rex, the king of the tyrant lizards, which was the acme of carnivorous dinosaurs. This creature weighed five tons. and it could be 40 feet long. And it only had these tiny arms, but it had these immense muscular pillars of back leg. counterweighted with a long tail.
And the counterweight was important because a lot of the mass was in its chest and its huge, huge head, which was full of teeth, absolutely full of teeth, each one the size and shape of a banana. but with the consistency of carbon steel. and powered by huge muscles. and the bite of a T-Rex was probably unequaled by any animal, certainly land animal, before or since.
It could crush bone. It would take huge chunks out of anything it ate and swallow them whole. And we know this because people have found... T-Rex poo. It fossilises because it's mostly bone. And the bone is Triceratops and other armored dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus. But there are also known fossils of Triceratops with puncture marks. in its frill that absolutely fit T-Rex teeth. So T-Rex and Triceratops had this arms race. T-Rex could literally crush bone as it bit.
And Triceratops had all this bone that could be crushed and still walk away without damage. And of course, there are quite a lot of famous and rather dramatic artistic reconstructions. The horns of a Triceratops could puncture the soft underbelly of a T-Rex, so they would give as good as they got. But, of course, it's very romantic to imagine battles between T-Rex and Triceratops.
but not inconceivable. When you see T-Rex battling with a stegosaurus, no, no, no, no, no. The stegosaurus had died out hundreds of millions of years before. But T-Rex and Triceratops were found in the same places, the same ages in Western North America. I remember I once saw a cartoon called The Adolescent Almighty. And in this cartoon, it's single panel, this panoramic view, it was under a lowering sky, a T-Rex and a Triceratops were giving battle.
and this little speech balloon comes from the sky saying, Cool! I mean... It's so fascinating. I love how you mentioned that arms race, almost in the evolution of these two creatures, and how they were almost the predator versus the prey, but the prey also had the ability to fight back.
And I think on a slight tangent, let's also talk about that other key animal, reptile, dinosaur, which you mentioned there alongside Triceratops, which was sometimes on the opposite end of a Tyrannosaurus rex, which is these Ankylosauruses. Yes, the Ankylosauruses were kind of the end point of another group of dinosaurs, these armored dinosaurs. Their relatives, the Stegosauruses, started it in the Jurassic.
These were slow-moving, four-footed vegetarians, and the stegosauruses had these huge bony plates sticking up in a double row out of its back. and spikes at the end of its tail. And there are various kinds of stegosaurus. The archetypal one is, again, from the Morrison Formation in Western North America. But they've been found in Africa. They've been found in China. They are a very successful group.
but cousins of theirs developed into a much heavier armoured... creature with flat plates all over it more like a giant armadillo flat plates all over the body the legs the head with a big club at the end of the tail And I suspect what they could do if they were attacked was basically hunker down on the ground like a kind of armoured pillbox.
and just wait till the predator had got bored of trying to get in, and then they would go away. But they were covered, absolutely covered in thick armour plates. And they lived at the time of T-Rex and its relatives, the kind of acme of predatory creatures. to focus on that club a bit more, because it's interesting what you mentioned, your theories of this cycle.
well-armed medieval knights, you know, almost impenetrable if it was tucked down, you know, for a Tyrannosaurus, even with its jaws, with its teeth to dig its teeth into. But that club, that offensive part of an ankylosaurus's anatomy, it is really extraordinary, isn't it, when you see visual depictions of this weapon that was at the end of a tale of an ankylosaurus.
Yes. Now, of course, one reason it could have been used as a defense against predation. But another idea was that it was used in sexual display. I mean, I've got no evidence for or against. But I would suspect that that would have been of use for them in the same way that you see stag.
attacking each other with their antlers giraffes walloping their necks against each other I think males would basically wallop each other with their clubs and see if they could do damage to each other until one of them wandered off So I think a lot of these offensive structures could have been used in display between ankylosauruses. There was an early relative, actually it's not an early relative, it lived at about the same time, Pachycephalosaurus, the boneheaded dinosaurs. These were bipeds.
but they had very, very thick skulls. It looked like they were wearing cycle helmets, and they were many inches thick. And the idea is that the males would run at each other and back each other in the head and then see which one fell over first. And these were relations of Triceratops, another theme on the armoured dinosaur riff, as it were. The cycle helmet dinosaurs, right? Yeah. Pachycephalosaurus.
Okay, well, let's go back to dinosaurus rex just quickly. One more question on that, Henry. The acme of the predator that's perhaps the most famous dinosaur we know of today. We've mentioned other dinosaurs, Triceratops, Diplodocus and Iguanodon, they're living in herds in big groups. Is it very different with T-Rexes? Yes, it would have been because carnivores are the top of the food chain. and the ecology. only supports a certain amount of carnivores.
It's the whole big, fierce animals, rare thing because herbivores eat lots of plants and they convert only a certain amount of plant material into herbivore. And so carnivores eat the herbivores. but it takes quite a lot of herbivores to support a carnivore. So T-rex, like many carnivores, wouldn't have lived in enormous herds. It might have lived in family groups like prides of lions.
or similar things, or have been solitary. Nobody knows, but we do know that all the dinosaurs we know about that lived in large herds were the big herbivores.
The hadrosaurs, the sauropods, they lived in big groups. They nested together and they moved together. And it would have been very much like documentaries of the Serengeti. You'd have enormous groups of... dinosaurs, maybe several different species moving in herds with large carnivores snapping away at the outside and maybe smaller carnivores, the kind of little raptors nipping away as well.
But the carnivores would have been much rarer. Having said that, there have been quite a lot of these skeletons found. T-Rex seems to be quite popular. I don't know how many have been found. Certainly not hundreds, but quite a few now. Hi, it's Guy and Gary here, and our podcast, Rock on Tours, is currently being sponsored by Specsavers. Make sure you look after your ears and your hearing, and treat yourself to a hearing check. What's that got to do with Specsavers?
Did you know that they're hearing experts too, Gary? Well, maybe they should call themselves specs and hearing savers. Yeah, not very snappy, is it? But, you know, they've been hearing experts for over 20 years, too, helping new and existing customers when they need it. Specsavers, looking after your hearing, too. It's so easy to book. Go online or in-store today.
I'm Robert Hardman. And I'm Professor Kate Williams. We're the historians who love a bit of royal mischief, and our podcast, Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things, is back for another season. We've got murders, scandal and sex. I'm looking forward to our discussion on fabulous jewellery heist.
And whether the royals actually have magical powers. Then there's bad blind dates and royal terror plots. Yes, season two is live now. Follow queens, kings and dastardly things wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.
Well, one last question, because we've got quite a lot of evidence for the T-Rex, therefore, from the fossils and so on. Do we have any idea, and if we don't, absolutely no problem, do we have any idea whether the females were bigger than the males? Do we have any idea around that? There probably is, but I'm not conversant with it immediately. I don't have that to hand. But I do know that there's a lot of evidence, and it's from T. rex, to show that dinosaurs reproduce like birds.
in the sense that you can tell the sex of a T-Rex from the insides of its bones, because the females would strip the insides of their bones of calcium to make eggshells with. And this is something that birds do now. And I think it's likely the females would have been bigger than the males. This is generally true of creatures like this. But it's another bird-like thing. Dinosaurs laid eggs. All dinosaurs laid eggs. There's no dinosaur that we know about gave birth to live young.
So even the biggest dinosaurs laid eggs, and T-Rex would have laid eggs, and the female dinosaurs would have used calcium from inside their own bones to reprocess into eggshells. Right. How interesting. Well, I love that you mentioned that potential idea there, which we will go back to in due course in our second podcast about feathered dinosaurs and the like, because that seems a little hint there, doesn't it, Henry?
We talked about the Ankylosaurus, but that was a special extra dino to our list because we got one more. And I know that this is a personal favorite of yours. And this is a... more unusual one, but it is a very interesting one. I want you to take it away, Henry, and correct me if I say this wrong, Spinosaurus Egiaptica.
Well, you're the classicist, Egyptiacus. Anyway, in Egypt, before the Second World War and probably before the First World War, I can't quite remember, this remarkable giant carnivorous dinosaur, Spinosaurus, was found. It was very, very poorly known. It was probably taller and longer than T-Rex. Probably not as massive. I mean, T-Rex was a bit of a thick boy, a bit of a chunk T-Rex.
But the thing about Spinos was it had these long, long, long jaws, like these long crocodile-like jaws, which is the sort of jaws you'd see in a fish eater. All the animals you see that are specialised as fish eaters tend to have very long, long jaws with teeth in them. And Spinosaurus was one of them. Another thing Spinosaurus had was it had big claws on its hind feet.
But Spinosaurus was kind of shadowy because the original remains were destroyed in the war. I can't remember if it was the first war. I think it was the Second World War. and later on other ones were discovered. Now, one of the close relatives of Spinosaurus is a creature called Baryonyx that was discovered in England by a dog walker called Mr. Walker. who discovered this immense claw.
So it's called Baryonyx walkerei, named after Mr. Walker and his dog, who found it while walking the dog. So, you know, if you keep your eyes open while walking your dog, who knows what you can find. But this creature, Baryonyx, was a big... slender, tall, rangy creature with long jaws full of teeth and other ones have been found of this general pattern. And later on in Egypt, there's some new research done by Egyptian researchers that have unearthed more spinosaurus remains.
Now, Spinosaurus is, at the moment, one of the most controversial dinosaurs because there's a great deal of debate about how it lived. It's thought that Spinosaurus and its relatives were fish eaters and there's kind of good evidence for this. There's fish hanging around and they lived on the coastline and, you know, animals with this kind of jaw tend to eat fish. It's a kind of trope.
But the general view of Spinosaurus was that it had these long hind legs and fairly small front legs like carnivorous dinosaurs tend to. But there was a reconstruction. of Spinosaurus in which the legs were of much more equal sizes and it would have been reconstructed as a swimming animal doing a kind of doggy paddle.
And that caused an absolute furore. People couldn't believe this. There was a great deal of resistance to the idea that Spinosaurus or any kind of dinosaur was very much of a swimmer.
in the sense that it did any more than paddling, because the sea at the time was absolutely full of gigantic, ferocious... marine reptiles there was no scope for any more I mean there were the mosasaurs these giant lizards there were the ichthyosaurs these giant reptiles that looked like dolphins and then there were the plesiosaurs and elasmosaurs and goodness knows how many others the world was full of sea serpents it was just crammed full of them
There would have been no room in the sea for dinosaurs, which were a land living group, to have invaded. So this reconstruction of Spinosaurus as this kind of four-legged dog paddler caused a great deal of furore. And then these Egyptian researchers discovered something that hadn't been found.
or at least not in any detail, they found the tail of one, long, long, long tail, which is very deep from top to bottom, incredibly deep, which suggests it would move from side to side like a swimming animal. And then some other researchers, maybe some of the same ones, they got together and they looked at the bone density of Spinosaurus. Now, a good clue... for a land animal that's adapted to water is having very dense bones that help contract the buoyancy.
Because, of course, dinosaurs are full of air. They would keep bobbing to the surface. It was no point in them holding their breath because they were full of air. They would have been lousy. They would have just kept popping up like cork. I mean, even people, and we're much less full of air than dinosaurs, you know, we're less dense than water and it's difficult to stay underwater.
So if you look at a lot of animals that are secondarily aquatic, that means they're land animals but have been evolved to be aquatic. Things like dugongs and manatees, they have very dense bones that would have allowed them to contract their neutral buoyancy and actually go deep underwater. And though and behold, Spinosaurus has kind of dense bones, just like you'd expect for a land living animal that spent more time in the water than you would normally expect.
So it seems that Spinosaurus... was, at least some of the time, a much more aquatic dinosaur, something that has never been seen in the whole of the amazing panoply of dinosaur wonderfulness. It's these aquatic fish-eating carnivorous dinosaurs. How interesting. This almost feels, therefore, Henry, that potentially they might find more dinosaurs like this in the future if this new unique function of a Spinosaurus continues to be validated in the years ahead.
Well, you'd think so, given that fossils tend to happen underwater and most fossilisation tends to happen in lakes or near the sea. But who knows, there are still lots more amazing dinosaurs being discovered. I mean, we've talked about the first ones being found in England and the great heyday of dinosaur discovery in North America.
But now there are dinosaurs being discovered everywhere. There's huge deposits in China, especially China, Argentina, Madagascar. There's some dinosaurs that have been published recently in Zimbabwe. So basically, they're pretty much everywhere you look. Oh, Mongolia. Oh my goodness, Mongolia. Yeah, locked in there. So I wouldn't be surprised to find even more eye-poppingly amazing dinosaurs to turn up any day.
Well, Henry, this has been great. Last thing, very quickly, any other special mention dinosaurs you'd like to say before we wrap up this episode? Oh, gosh, I don't know. There are just so many. I think all my other favourite ones are feathered dinosaurs, but we're not going to talk about those now, are we, Tristan? We're not going to talk about feathered dinosaurs. I'm going to give a shout out to the Brachiosaurus because that's such a cool, iconic one, isn't it? Yeah, Brachiosaurus.
or now it's called Giraffo Titan, apparently. Is it? Yeah, they apparently changed its name. I hope they asked it first. Yeah, that was one of the Brachiosaurus arm lizards because its front legs were longer than its back legs, so it could get its head even further above the ground. It was certainly the tallest dinosaur, a Brachiosaurus.
oh argentinosaurus the very biggest dinosaur ever known 70 tons of dinosaur, 100 feet long, lived in the early Cretaceous in South America, and it was preyed by gigantic... carnivorous dinosaurs, carcharodontosaurus and land shark, possibly even bigger and fiercer than the T-Rex. So that's all fairly recently found in South America, another whole ecosystem of gigantic predator, gigantic prey, each one evolving to be bigger.
Well, I mean, that's the thing, because normally we think of the T-Rex as like the Titan, the big, big one, but there are others like Carnotaurus and the one you've just mentioned there, which I'm not going to try and repeat the name of. There are other incredibly huge meat-eating dinosaurs too. It's just the T-Rex is the one we always think of.
Well, yes, but I think the T-Rex will always be special because I think it wasn't just the size, it was its build and its bone-crutting force. I mean, it would have been utterly terrifying. People have wondered whether it could run fast, but I don't think that really matters because with the stride length it had, it would have easily caught up with you even if it was running slowly.
it's a terrifying thought henry to leave this episode on this has been great last but certainly not least your book which covers this and so much more is called It's called A Very Short History of Life on Earth, Tristan, and it is in the proverbial All Good Bookshops, and now in paperback, believe it or not. So if you are a beginning zoology student, it will do half your homework for you, so you should buy two.
And a friend of mine, Mrs. K.P. of Jersey, said, that's Christmas sorted out then, so remember that rectangular gifts are easier to wrap. so there you are absolutely and if you want some Tyrannosaurus Rex inspiration for Halloween you also know where to go to oh yes and it's out now folks Out now, indeed. Well, Henry, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. You're very welcome. I've enjoyed it as ever.
Well, there you go. There was Henry G talking through our top dinosaur choices. I hope you enjoyed this slightly different, very, very conversational, very relaxed episode. Now, last things from me, we have a special offer currently ongoing at History Hit. History Hit is our online on-demand history channel. We got documentaries from the 20th century all the way back.
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I'm Robert Hardman. And I'm Professor Kate Williams. We're the historians who love a bit of royal mischief, and our podcast, Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things, is back for another season. We've got murders, scandal and sex. I'm looking forward to our discussion on fabulous jewellery height.
And whether the royals actually have magical powers. Then there's bad blind dates and royal terror plots. Yes, season two is live now. Follow queens, kings and dastardly things wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.