Terrible Lizards

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...

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 ste...

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, Mamenchi...

This is an area we have definitely covered before but it's one of perennial interest and keeps coming round with new studies, how can we tell what ancient animals were doing with weird features. More specifically, how do claims that this feather, or sail, or frill, or claw were used as a display feature stack up? Can we really work out what dinosaurs are doing with features like this and how can w...

Dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals have been a hit in the media for about as long as palaeontologists have been digging them up. But even in the modern age of digital communication, there is almost always an intermediate (and often several) between a palaeontologist and their audience when it comes to communicating about these animals. Whether it's journalists, reporters, documentaries and pr...

We are into series 9 now and still going, though starting with this episode, in a bid to be more consistent and less panicked about completing series and the gaps between, we're moving to being a monthly podcast. So no end in sight yet for all you dinosaur (and sometimes pterosaur) lovers.   Anyway, we're kicking off by talking about arguably the most common way that people encounter dinosaurs and...

The end of the series is our favourite - we answer your questions!  A massive thank you to our patrons who contributed the questions. Go to patreon.com/terriblelizardds for a bonus episode out next week. Do keep in touch #terriblelizards @iszi_lawrence @dave_hone Buy Dave's Book - How fast did T.Rex Run/The future of Dinosaurs. Look out for iszi's childrens books: Blackbeard's Treasure is out in J...

Dinosaur jaws and feeding with Ali Nabavizadeh We started with theropod feeding but what about the herbivores? This week we're joined by Ali Nabavizadeh who specialises in the jaws and teeth of the ornithischian dinosaurs and how these work and how this plays into their feeding ecology. This gives Dave ample opportunity to ask vexing questions about their jaws and elicit the same response he gives...

Although we looked at some biomechanical work earlier this series, this time we get into the real depths of how dinosaurs moved. John Hutchinson joins us with tales of galloping crocodiles and white dots on elephants in an effort to understand how these animals move as part of his work on dinosaur locomotion. We talk about how Jurassic Park cheated to make the T. rex look faster and just how you c...

Some dinosaurs haven't had enough love on here (though some get what they deserve, I mean, who even likes Stegosaurus ?) and chief among them are the sauropodomorphs. However, this week we make a belated and desperate attempt to correct that by talking to Paul Upchurch for an hour. One of the world's leading experts on these herbivorous giants, he takes us through a whole bunch of his research his...

Crystal Palace Dinosaurs with Mark Witton We have covered palaeoart here from time to time and the process of producing images of dinosaurs and other prehistoric life (as both technical illustrations and more creative life reconstructions) but one of the most important of these gets far too little attention. In the 1800s life size replicas of dozens of ancient animals were put up in a park in sout...

British iguanodontids with Joe Bonsor We have touched on Iguanodon before as one of the earliest named dinosaurs and an animal with some interesting relatives and famously spiky thumbs but they never really got the attention that they should have done (from us at least). Enter Joe Bonsor who is finishing off his PhD on these very animals and trying to sort out the utter mess that is the taxonomy o...

Following up on the previous series where pterosaurs dominated, we had to sneak in a bit more of them here. Dave has always had an aversion to the toothy ornithocheirids as while so many of them turn up in 3D (unlike pretty much all other pterosaurs) they also have a horrific taxonomic history and they are a nightmare to deal with. Happily, Taissa Rodrigues is here to talk all about them and she h...

Theropod jaw biomechanics with Manabu Sakamoto We are still going! We are back and like last series, we're taking a bit of a different tack to the previous ones and here we are having experts on every episode in a desperate attempt to make up for Dave's quite profound lack of knowledge in numerous areas of dinosaur biology. With that in mind, we start off with Manabu Sakamoto who works primarily o...

The new series will start on the 12th of October! If you would like to support us and get our bonus episodes sooner - please consider becoming a patron on patreon.com/terriblelizards. Pterosaurs living during the Jurassic period were thought to have been relatively small, but a stunning new skeleton shows otherwise. Natalia Jagielska has helped describe the new find in Scotland which has changed o...

If you could give the paleontology field NASA's budget what would you do with it? Ever used laser-stimulated fluorescence? How do pterosaurs sleep? Was was Irritator challengeri? When did birds wiggle their hips? How can you tell if species shared an environment? Is there any evidence for intra-specific fighting amongst Pterosaurs? PLUS MORE! We've gotten a plethora of questions this series - Dr D...

How science works In another in the increasingly long line of topics we probably should have covered quite a few series ago, this week we are addressing some of the fundamentals of what science actually IS. How does it all work really, and what is the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, and how confident can we be about dinosaur research when so much is unknown and difficult to put to th...

This is perhaps the question that gets asked the most and so it's time to address it properly (well, we are 7 seasons in, we were going to get to it sooner or later). So this week we are talking about routes into palaeontology and all that involves, from 'classic' academic roles as a researcher at a university or museum, though to science writers, fossil preparators, illustrators and photographers...

Perhaps the best known, and most often misrepresented, pterosaur is Pteranodon . It has become the archetypal pterosaur and is always in the background of every Mesozoic scene (especially with T. rex ) to let you know that the pterosaurs are out there. But aside from being quite big and having a funky headcrest (like all the best pterosaurs do) it's an animal that is constantly overlooked even tho...

From the very biggest to the smallest, anurognathids were the little fuzz balls of pterosaurs that barely reached 1m wingspan as adults. They were bat-like hawkers, catching insects on the wing with their giant gapes and tiny teeth. Although rare, like the azhdarchids we have recently had a flurry of finds and accompanying research on them which means that they have gone from one of the least to o...

If most people know one thing about pterosaurs (well one correct thing rather than them being flying dinosaurs or bird ancestors) it's that they got really big. At the top end they hit over 10 m in wingspan and probably over 250 kg, massively bigger than the largest flying birds (living or extinct). And all the real giants belonged to one group – the azhdarchids. These long-necked monsters were a...

It's hopefully not a surprise at this point that pterosaurs were fully powered and capable fliers and that they were not passive gliders or could only get airbourne through jumping off of cliffs. While we do talk about flight here, it's not like that is all pterosaurs could do so we cover their abilities on the ground (and in trees) and take-off, and then whether or not they could dive, swim and h...

We've run out of dinosaurs (stega what now?) and so thanks to popular demand (well, Dave's demand) we're doing (almost) an entire series on pterosaurs! Everyone's favourite Mesozoic flying reptiles (well, Dave's favourite) are getting a series to spread their wings. We start with the namesake of the clade, Pterodactylus itself and something of the early history of pterosaur discoveries and researc...

This is a bonus episode previously released to our patrons on Patreon. If you want to support us, and get more content please visit patreon.com/terriblelizards .  Terrible Lizards is, at least in theory, there for dinosaur lovers of all ages and backgrounds, but podcasting is just one way to communicate with the public about dinosaurs and it's probably not the first one you would think of. Joining...

The Questions episode! Untapped fossils, bad evolution, therapod bites, spaniel ears, courtship dances and MORE! Big thanks to everyone who sent in their questions. Martin, Glen, Mathew, Sam, Kim ( https://kimralls.co.uk/ ), Gutza, Robbie, John, Marlon aaaand John. We will be back in the summer - please do support us on Patreon, where we will be adding some extra content. Also BUY DAVE'S BOOK - Th...