The spinosaurs get all the love (OK, mostly hate) and attention when it comes to the megalosauroids, but they are but one weird branch of this group of theropods. Sadly they have a similar problem to the spinosaurs in that there are annoyingly few fossils of them, and there’s very few people working on these animals. Happily, today Iszi and Dave are joined by one of them, Cass Morrison who is doing his PhD on these unusual animals and is here to give us the lowdown on their evolution, diversity, biogeography and ecology and generally fill us in on these much under-appreciated animals.

Links:

For extra content go to our Patreon https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

Apiece with Cass about his work on dinosaur brains: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/behind-the-science-cassius-morrison.html

Find Cass on Twitter https://x.com/casscretaceous and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cretaceous.cass/?hl=en-gb

We have touched on the extinction that killed the dinosaurs plenty of times before over the various seasons of TL, but we have never really tackled it fully before. Finally, we are joined by a real expert on this subject, Melanie During who is in the process of finishing her PhD on this very subject. So prepare for not actually really any dinosaurs, but quite a lot of geology and geochemistry to learn how the impact was so utterly devastating and how we know. It turns out that they never stood a chance and that the damage was even worse than even Dave had realised.

Links:

support us on patreon and access extra content:

www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

A link to Melanie’s YouTube series which is on long term hiatus but full of cool videos to watch (even if it notably fails to include a certain silver-haired pterosaur and tyrannosaur researcher): https://www.youtube.com/c/GenuineRockstars/videos

Here’s a link to Melanie’s press stuff for her papers but it includes some videos and graphs of that we talk about https://uppsala.app.box.com/s/ikmlwtb0vui7zn5k74jfokbhysla8ck1

Live edited recording at The Oxford Fire Station on 25/05/2024.

Live Anniversary Q&A for the Oxford Podcast Festival

It’s the 4th (!) anniversary of the launch of Terrible Lizards and this came at a perfect time as Iszi and Dave got invited to do the recent podcast festival in Oxford. So, while we have our usual end of series Q&QA episode in a few months, here we have an early one with questions from out live audience. We thought that was more appropriate then for us to just rabbit on (or dinosaur on) in front of people and it made for a pretty compelling exchange, the time simply flew by. An obviously thanks to the organisers for hosting us and especially to all the people who actually trekked there (from Edinburgh! From Germany!) and then spent actual time to just listen to us. It’s still all rather confusing and unsettling, but they say it takes all sorts to make a world. Anyway, here it all and happy birthday to us, and thanks for listening.

Links:

Podcast festival link: https://www.saintaudiopodcastfestival.com/

Support us on Patreon for extra content: https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards