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•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Let’s be honest, we’ve done quite well to have held off until half way through the third series before tackling this one, but there’s been a Brachiosaurus in the room since the start of Terrible Lizards and it is very much Jurassic Park-shaped. There’s no point dissecting all the details about the film and its depiction of dinosaurs (though we look at a few) but we focus on its appearance at the time and the effect it had on shaping the public’s perceptions of dinosaurs (for better and worse) an...
Feb 17, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Finally, a normal episode that both has a guest an is actually on dinosaurs. This time out we are on to the second dinosaur ever named – Iguanodon . Despite being one of the absolute originals and being known from numerous good specimens, Iguanodon (and its relatives) really doesn’t get much of a look in when it comes to artworks and documentaries and even books – it’s not a carnivore, not huge like sauropods, and doesn’t rock the funky headgear of so many other ornithischians. But it’s an impor...
Feb 10, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast No dinosaurs this week! Shock, horror! It was always going to happen sooner or later as Dave does a lot of work on pterosaurs as well as on dinosaurs and we’ve had some specific requests for a pterosaur episode so here we go (and they’ll return again soon we’re sure). These flying reptiles are too often just window dressing in the background of pictures of dinosaurs but they are their own distinct evolutionary group with a fascinating array of weird features and produced the largest flying anima...
Feb 03, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast No guest this week, just a lot of Dave talking. We’ve obviously mentioned his research at various times but never really focused on it before, but now a new and big paper has just come out on the famous giant fish-eating Spinosaurus so it was a great opportunity to kick off the new series with a special on it. Many people will know Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park III and it has become (in)famous for various interpretations of its biology which has been hampered by the fact that the fossils are so...
Jan 27, 2021•59 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast The new series of Terrible Lizards - a Podcast about Dinosaurs with Dr Dave Hone and Iszi Lawrence is starting on January 27th 2021. Guests include Emma Kennedy, Adam Rutherford, David Krentz, Andy Riley, Sophie Scott and Chris Jackson. Thank you to everyone for spreading the word and supporting on Patreon . Visit www.terriblelizards.co.uk @iszi_lawrence @dave_hone...
Jan 20, 2021•1 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast This is a between-series BONUS that was previous released to Patrons on Patreon. In it a palaeontologist makes up for Dave’s inadequacies when dealing with the ornithischians. So welcome Dr Victoria Arbour of the Royal BC Museum of Victoria, Canada to talk with Dave and Iszi about the armoured dinosaurs, the ankylosaurs. She is a world expert on this amazing and unfairly overlooked group and joins us to talk through their origins, evolution and weird features – not just the famous armour and tai...
Nov 25, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast It the end of series questions episode. This time Iszi and Dave... well Dave mainly answer Patrons' Dinosaur questions. Including How would dinosaur evolution panned out if the asteroid had missed? Could sauropods swim? Is the Blue Whale REALLY larger than dinosaurs? Were there dinosaur KT extinction survivors in Antarctica? The 'Friends' question... Velociraptor toe functionality... Bird Brains... How do we differentiate species? And if we know anything about how social dinosaurs were? With mas...
Nov 04, 2020•57 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs has actually been around for a century now, though it has perhaps only become relatively common knowledge with the general public in the last couple of decades. Even so, while many people now know this, quite why we know the two groups are linked (aside from the plethora of feathered dinosaurs) is often not understood. There’s only so much we can cover in one podcast, but this week we go through some of the features of birds that are seen in dinosaur fo...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast There are a few animals that are basically motionless for part or even most of their lives (like barnacles) but the average animal is one that moves. Dinosaurs obviously did so, but things inevitably get complicated quickly when trying to work out exactly how well they could run, jump and climb, how fast they were and what they could and couldn’t do to get around. This time out we tackle these issues and the information we have to work from, especially footprints. We are then joined by Dr Esther...
Oct 21, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast It’s commonly known that Tyrannosaurus carnivorous, but this is perhaps as far as most people would be prepared to go. Other than the most obvious points (the ones in its mouth for starters) though, what do we actually know about dinosaur diets and how do we know it? In this episode Dave and Iszi dive into the guts of dinosaurs and look at their teeth, jaws, stomachs and yes, coprolites are back again. From microscopic scratches on the enamel of their teeth through to the last meals that they at...
Oct 14, 2020•1 hr•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast If there's one thing that everyone knows about dinosaurs it is that they are extinct. And of course this is to a degree quite wrong since birds are dinosaurs and are very much alive. Still, that Tyrannosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus and the rest are long gone is well known but the scientific (and often very unscientific) arguments about exactly what killed them off have been a source of discussion for over a century. Here we have a quick stroll through some of those ideas and deal with the prim...
Oct 07, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we finally fulfil a promise from before and talk more about the physiology dinosaurs – how ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ they were and what that might mean for their levels of activity, growth, behaviour and even where they could live given local climates. It’s a horribly complex subject and so come and listen to us grossly oversimplify things and not make things as clear as we’d like. Also on this show we end up at the end of the digestive system as our guest, the Skep-Chick herself, Rebecca ...
Sep 30, 2020•53 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast This week we tackle a small dinosaur that should be much better known, a classic contemporary of Velociraptor and the other half of the fighting dinosaurs, Protoceratops . While nothing like as famous as its (much) larger cousin Triceratops, Protoceratops is an interesting and important dinosaur. Thanks to a multitude of fossils, including animals of all different ages, we have a fantastic set of data to work from and as a result a lot of research has been done on this fascinating frilled dinosa...
Sep 23, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 
