Episode description

Warning: Our guest Richard Herring (53 mins 50 secs) uses colloquialisms for dinosaur male bits - poss best check before letting kids listen.

Reproduction is a fundamental of life but it’s an area of dinosaur biology rarely discussed at any length though this week we will tackle that area of ignorance. Part of the problem is inevitably the lack of data palaeontologists have of, ahem, certain dinosaur parts. However, it’s not an area that has gone unstudied and thanks to the evidence of numerous fossils and in particular various nests and eggs, we do know quite a bit more about their reproductive biology than you may imagine. There’s good evidence in various linages for parents looking after their young and for some complex nest structures, and in the right circumstances we can tell males from females. Our guest this week is the comedian Richard Herring who lends his unique approach to biology (OK, he says some faintly rude words about male dinosaur bits that you might not want the littlest ones to hear) and has an appropriately (for him) suitable question for Dave about dinosaurs.

An old blogpost of Dave’s on dinosaur eggs in a dedicated museum for them in China: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/xixia-museum-of-dinosaur-fossil-eggs-of-china/

And a post on the famous brooding dinosaur on a nest known as ‘big mama’ https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/big-mama-%e2%80%93-nesting-dinosaurs/

An article by palaeontologist Elsa Panciroli on sexing animals in the fossil record https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/24/cloacae-sex-arms-and-penis-bones-the-tricky-art-of-fossil-sexing

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