Terrible Lizards

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 i...

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 gr...

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  

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 s...

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 o...

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...

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...

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 i...

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 t...

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 li...

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...

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 fo...

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

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...

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.....

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...

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 iss...

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...

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 discussio...

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 t...

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...

It is appropriate to kick off the second series of Terrible Lizards with an animal famous for its dangerous feet. Few people had heard of Velociraptor before Jurassic Park, but it is now an A-lister alongside Tyrannosaurus as one of the few dinosaurs almost anyone can name. With fame though has come huge misconceptions about its size, appearance, capabilities and behaviour. The large, scaly, super...

The new series will be starting on Wednesday 16th September 2020. We have a plethora of guests and interesting dinosaur subjects to explore! Guest this series include Penn Jillette, Phil Plait, Robin Ince, Rebecca Watson, Esther Odekunde, Faith Child and Lucy Eckersley. Keep an eye out for our bonus content on Patreon and announcements on Twitter and Facebook. www.patreon.com/terriblelizards www.f...

In this last episode of the first season we try to bring a few things up to date. There's more mistakes and miss-speaks from Dave to repair and correct, and a few things that have come up since shows were recorded or broadcast we want to give updates on. Mostly though, we are answering questions from our Patreons and other commenters that people have sent in. There's a lot of ground to cover quick...

In this episode, we take a look at the actual process of finding, excavating, preparing and then exhibiting dinosaur fossils. How do palaeontologists know where to find fossils, what do they look for, how do they get them out of the ground? From there we move onto safely transporting fossils out of the field and into the museum and discuss the process of preparing the bones free of the entombing r...