Terrible Lizards – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Last month we mentioned that legendary palaeontologist Mike Benton had announced his retirement, but with a few quick emails, Dave was able to grab him for this month’s episode. So, join Dave and Iszi as we have celebration of Mike’s career and take him through his early interest in palaeontology, how he got his PhD, the death of Al Romer, rhynchosaurs, the rise of dinosaurs, mass extinctions, fieldwork in Russia, endless books, and his work on the colours of dinosaurs. It’s a whirlwind dash through an entire so strap in for the deluge of facts and fables and enjoy. And congratulations to Mike!

Links:

patreon.com/terriblelizards

Mike’s webpage at Bristol which covers his career and achievements:

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/people/person/Mike-Benton-e41eaef1-135d-40db-9b7f-e81f7d290f72/

A link to the Amazon page of (most of) Mike’s books:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Michael-Benton/s?rh=n%3A266239%2Cp_27%3AMichael+Benton

We’ve made plenty of jokes over the years about the general lack of sauropod skulls and the frustrations of trying to work out what these animals were doing when it came to things like feeding when the most important bit is missing. Happily, this week we are joined by David Button who has done a ton of work in this area and is happy to chat to Dave and Iszi about how their heads and teeth were built and what this can (and can’t) tell us about their diets and habits. While we have him trapped, we also quiz him on his recent work on the behaviour of the thescelosaurs, an odd branch of dinosaurs we’ve taken till series 10 to even mention!

Links:

Extra content on patreon: www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

And old post of Dave’s on the sauropod skeletons in Berlin, that really show off the issue of different feeding heights in these animals: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/berlin-sauropods/

David’s webpage at the University of Bristol: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/david-j-button

Longtime listeners will be familiar with the fact that Dave has spent a lot of time looking at and working on various bites marks on dinosaur bones left by the carnivorous theropods. These can tell us an enormous amount about who was doing what to whom and what it can mean for the ecology and behaviour of both the herbivores that were bitten and the carnivores that bit them. However, to date work on this for dinosaurs has almost exclusively focused on the tyrannosaurs with their tendency to bite on bones. But they weren’t the only ones doing this. As Dave explains to Iszi in this episode, he’s got a big new paper out with a plethora of authors assessing what was going on in the famous Morrison Formation that was teeming with giant sauropods but had plenty of theropods around too. What were they up to and can we learn more about their biology from a few bites?

Links:

Matt Wedel’s blog post about the project: https://svpow.com/2023/11/14/new-paper-theropod-bite-marks-on-morrison-sauropod-bones/

Dave’s post about it: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2023/11/14/theropods-bit-sauropods-too/

And the paper itself: https://peerj.com/articles/16327/

Dinosaur documentaries are booming again so it’s time to blow the lid on some insider secrets of how these get made. (Alternative description: Dave complains for an hour about being messed around by TV companies and ignored by the very producers and directors who hired him for his advice on the models and scrip they are working on). Dave and Iszi share their stories from behind and in front of the camera and the steps that go into getting a dinosaur doc made and what goes on behind the scenes.

Links:

Dave has a fair old history with the more traditional media and you can see the fury coming out here too: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/linheraptor-vs-the-international-media/

Some great stuff can come from good documentaries though, check out this interview with the man behind the Walking with Dinosaurs models (and Jabba the Hutt!).

https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/interview-with-jez-gibson-harris/

Odd ideas in palaeontology

Palaeontology as a scientific field is beyond popular in the media and with the public but that also means it draws a lot of attention from those with, let’s call them, questionable ideas. And no group gets more of this stuff than the dinosaurs and the animals of the Mesozoic. This time out, Iszi and Dave discuss the world of paleo cranks, people with outlandish and non-scientific ideas who present them as fully formed research. Rarely does any of this make it into the mainstream, but on occasion it leaks in and this can only cause confusion. So sit back and enjoy, or grind your teeth in quiet and cold fury, as we go over some of the issues that come with unscientific ideas trying to make their way into the mainstream.

Links:

It’s not just palaeontology that gets these people, here’s a neat blog on a physics crank, but the central themes are identical: https://www.skepticblog.org/2012/01/09/cranks-and-physics/

A nice article by Mark Witton on how to spot crankery in palaeontology: http://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-to-spot-palaeontological-crankery.html

Please do support the show on patreon.com/terriblelizards for extra content.

It is the mega questions episode! Due to Dave etch-a-sketching everything in his life, making things like access to the internet an unusual hurdle, we decided to do answer as many questions we could in an hour. We didn’t manage to run out of questions. Big thanks to Trisha, Sophia, Matt, Roy, Harris, Marcus, Noah, Jay, Aurous Azhdarchid, Rachel, Richard and David. 

The mystery of allosaurus arms is still unanswered. It is sad. 

Do check out Dave’s blog and books: https://www.davehone.co.uk/outreach/books/

Also check out all that Iszi does including her books: https://iszi.com/ and her very irregular TikTok is here: https://www.tiktok.com/@iszi_lawrence

If you don’t already please do consider supporting the show on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

Or get yourself merch here: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/54175858

Petrodactyle and Pterosaur Growth

Dave has had a productive year for pterosaur papers and now two are out in quick succession(!) so get ready for a double-whammy podcast of him rolling his eyes when Iszi mentions flappy-flaps and he’s trying to be serious. Anyway, first up is a new large pterosaur from southern Germany with a massive bony crest on its head. The specimen is owned by the Lauer Foundation and Dave talks about them and their work with palaeontologists to bring some new fossils to science. From there we move onto a new paper on pterosaur growth. We have covered this before with the idea that at least some pterosaurs grew very evenly and were independent pretty much on hatching. But this is a wider study with more species and suggests that the bigger pterosaurs were engaging in parental care with adults looking after their offspring for some time and shows there was more variation than previously thought. 

Links:

Here’s a link to the Lauer Foundation where you can check out their work: https://www.lauerfoundationpse.org and here’s their Facebook page with loads of photos of Petrodactyle: https://www.facebook.com/lauerfoundation 

A post of Dave’s from a couple of years back on his last big foray into pterosaur growth: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2020/07/08/how-to-grow-your-dragon-pterosaur-onotgeny/ 

A link to I Know Dino which we mentioned at the top of the episode: https://iknowdino.com/

Please support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

Artwork Credit: Lauer Foundation

This week a ‘what I did on my holidays’ from Dave, though it wasn’t a holiday and he dug a hole in Utah and looked at a ton of museums and quarries. The Morrison Formation is a legendary slice of dinosaur history with a huge number of famous sites, important fossils, and features animals like Diplodocus, Allosaurus and Stegosaurus. After far too many years, Dave finally made it out to some of the best known and most important sites and in this episode reports back to Iszi on what he saw and learned and talks about digging a large hole with no dinosaurs in it while looking for a brachiosaur. It’s all very palaeontological, but that seems to suit our audience so here we are.

Dave’s new books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=dave+Hone+Smith+Wayland+dinosaur+book&crid=9EJAFZAAPNJV&sprefix=dave+hone+smith+wayland+dinosaur+book%2Caps%2C86&ref=nb_sb_noss

Dave’s not got his act together yet for photos of the trip but here’s some classic Morrison sauropods from the Morrison: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/a-pair-of-giants/

Please do support us on Patreon and unlock extra content: https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

Pterosaurs flew! No big shock there, but obviously flight places major constraints and selective pressures on the skeleton. This should mean all pterosaurs have standard, not-that-varied flight anatomy (in the same way most walking animals have similar leg anatomy).  It turns out an absolutely critical part of the pterosaur is both basically all but unstudied and wildly variable, yes, it’s the sternum.

Dr Dave Hone (hello!) has just published a huge paper cataloguing and describing basically every sternum for every pterosaur out there and Iszi (hello!) gets to the bottom of why this is important for science and bad for Dave's mental health. 

Here is a link to Dave's blog: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2023/04/20/everything-you-didnt-think-to-ask-about-the-pterosaur-sternum-and-were-afraid-to-ask/?fbclid=IwAR3roJ1M-PgFO-53NZlPEXv--jkTo2xLTbh1okSC03QkeFY4nFnjZ_TELVw

As always do consider supporting us on Patreon and unlock extra content: https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

Sauropods in general don’t get the love they should on Terrible Lizards because, well, Dave doesn’t know that much about them (and everyone knows theropods are best anyways). However, there’s more than a couple that are both well-known enough in general and Dave know a bit about them that we can talk for a decent amount of time. Step forward the long-neckiest of the long-necked sauropods, Mamenchisaurus. This odd (even by sauropod standards) animal is found in a number of different sites from the Middle Jurassic of China but has not had all the research attention that it should for a such an interesting animal that’s known from a good amount of material and a time where dinosaur remains are generally sparse. Happily, a major new study is out on these animals which adds some nice new information and potentially resolves some longstanding issues with this awesome genus so buckle up for some important tales of neck elongation in the Mesozoic. 

Links:

A very short blogpost by Dave with a photo of the mounted Bellusaurs skeleton:  https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/bellusaurus/

And a post on the insanely long Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum cervical rib: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2008/06/27/biggest-bones/