Terrible Lizards Iszi Lawrence and David Hone

Dinosaur footprints with Peter Falkingham
Footprints and trackways are an amazing source of data on how dinosaurs moved and what they did. But interpreting these can be a real nightmare since it’s hard to work out the interactions between a moving foot and the actual surface, or work out which species might have made which tracks. At the forefront of solving some of these issues and working out what we can and can’t meaningfully day about dinosaur tracks is Professor Peter Falkingham at Liverpool John Moores University. So today he joins us to talk about chasing birds across mud, literal books made of fossil dinosaur footprints and using X-rays to work out how dinosaurs moved. There’s so much in here and you’ll never walk across a beach again without looking back at your own tracks.
Links:
COME SEE US LIVE!: https://oldfirestation.org.uk/whats-on/terrible-lizards-podcast/
Pete’s website: peterfalkingham.com
 
An article based on Pete’s work with a load of videos of his stuff
https://www.aws.amherst.edu/museums/naturalhistory/dinosaur-tracks
 
Pete’s YouTube channel with loads of videos of his projects
https://www.youtube.com/@PeterFalkingham
 
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We don’t often delve into the Triassic since Dave is not well versed in that time and the animals that were around then, but there were some very important animals that we’ve unduly overlooked across the last 9 series. Happily, today we can redress a large part of that with this episode on Coelophysis. Known from hundreds of skeletons, it’s one of the best represented dinosaurs in the fossil record and yet it remains criminally understudied despite the available data. As one of the earliest theropods, it is perhaps archetypal of the lineages came later, but as so often happens, a bunch of questionable taxonomic decisions and referrals over the decades has left the animal in a bit of a mess. Here to help clear that up is Skye McDavid, scientific illustrator and independent researcher who has put far more time into sorting out the problems of Coelophysis than most would deem wise and joins us to share her wealth of knowledge.
 
Links:
Skye’s hub on her website with links to her art, socials etc. https://www.skyemcdavid.com/links
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https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

The year 2024 is the 200th anniversary of the naming of the first dinosaur, Megalosaurus. While ‘Dinosauria’ wouldn’t be coined till 1842 (so we have a fair wait before that anniversary kicks in, and doubtless will be marked with another major celebration) it is a great time to take stock of where we are in dinosaur palaeontology. So obviously a good idea is this, that the Natural History Museum in London organised a major international meeting for this, and Dave went along. So in this episode of our (yes, really) 12th series, Dave reports back to Iszi on what was going down at the conference and looks back on 200 years of dinosaur-ing and forwards to what’s coming soon of the back of the meeting.
Thank you for your support:  www.patreon.com/terriblelizards
Link to our live show on 25/05/2024 at Oxford's Old Fire Station https://oldfirestation.org.uk/whats-on/terrible-lizards-podcast/
Links:
A shot of the original Megalosaurus jaw and some skull bits: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/more-of-megalosaurus/
 
And the famous Crystal Palace reconstructions of the first dinosaurs:
https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/crystal-palace-dinosaurs/
 

Stegosaurus with Dr Susie Maidment
THE TIME HAS COME. For ages Dave, for very Dave reasons refused to cover one dinosaur. Now, we find out all about it with an expert in the field. 
Last year's mystery xmas present to all of you who support us now for everyone. Patrons will get an video bonus episode.
You can follow Susie Maidment https://twitter.com/Tweetisaurus.

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/