The Infinite Monkey Cage - Dinosaurs

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

Brian Cox and Robin Ince return for a new series of their multi-award winning science/comedy show. They kick off with arguably any child's first interest in science - dinosaurs! They are joined by comedian Rufus Hound and palaeontologists Susannah Maidment from the Natural History Museum and Steve Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh to find out what the latest research and exciting fossil finds have revealed about these epic creatures. Are we in a new age of dinosaur discovery? What are the big questions that dinosaur hunters are hoping to uncover, and did they go extinct at all? Producer: Alexandra Feachem

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast with me, Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince. And if you'd like to complain about this programme after listening to it, write to the BBC Broadcasting House, London W1A 1AA. Why not complain about it before listening to it? It will save time. I hope you enjoy the podcast. Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Age. I'm Robin Inks. And I'm Brian Cox.

In the 1960s, it was believed that dinosaurs died out because of Raquel Welsh. But since then, science has moved on, and now it's thought highly likely that Raquel Welsh wasn't involved at all. For many of us, dinosaurs are where the love of science started. The how and why book of dinosaurs. Your walls may have been covered with posters of brontosauruses and T-Rexes. It's brontosauruses, isn't it? Is it? Brontosauri? Brontosaur...

You did English, didn't you? Yeah. Is it brontosaurus? A bronte of dinosaurs. That's what it is. It's a bronte of dinosaurs. It's... What was your favourite dinosaur, by the way?

Chaffinch. In today's show, we're asking the big questions about dinosaurs. What made the dinosaurs so successful? How did they evolve and come to dominate the Earth for 170 million years? And what do we know about their extinction, if indeed they really are extinct? Brian, it's behind you. Anyway, so to guide us through these questions, we are joined by a paleo panel of expertise, and they are... Hi, I'm Steve Brussati. I'm a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh.

I wrote a book called The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, and my favorite dinosaur is very cliched. I know it's going to be met with... You've already snorted derision by fellow paleontologists. I know lots of derision here, but T-Rex has got to be T-Rex. It's always been T-Rex. Hello, I'm Susie Maidment, and I'm a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum here in London. And my favourite dinosaur is Stegosaurus. Not for any sort of intellectual reason, really, more just sentimental. I had a blow-up stegosaurus and a stegosaurus money box when I was seven. My name's Rufus Hound, and I don't know what I am either. But the favourite dinosaur I would think is probably, well, giant lizard, extinct monster, Thesaurus. and this is our panel steve before we get so just so why the t-rex then i mean it's interesting because obviously you were thinking maybe there are others that i should like more but that has a tradition about it

yeah it does feel a little cheap i must say saying t-rex but really i do think t-rex is the most fascinating dinosaur for me because there's just nothing alive today that looks like a T-Rex. There's no meat eater that lives today that's anywhere near the size of a T-Rex. Every person around the world, I think, knows a T-Rex when they see it, that enormous head with all those railroad spike teeth. You know, this is an animal that could crush the bones of its prey. But then it had those puny little pathetic arms, which are the size of my arms. And my arms are quite puny and pathetic, for those of you in the audience, you can see. So you put all that together and come on. I mean, that's just an amazing animal that evolution

produced. And what do you think it is? Why dinosaurs, the fascination is certainly not dim with dinosaurs. If anything, it continues to increase. I mean, why do you think it is why dinosaurs that the fascination is certainly not dim with dinosaurs if anything it continues to to increase i mean why do you think it is when human imagination of all the creatures that have existed that do exist that is as we were saying in the introduction it seems to just attract so much curiosity that the whole world of the dinosaur dinosaurs are just amazing animals you you go to a museum you go to the natural history museum here in london you stand underneath a dinosaur skeleton you look at that animal it is something unlike anything you've ever seen it's something that looks like a monster out of a myth or a legend or a fairy tale it's in the realm of a dragon or a sea monster or a unicorn but these things were

real and i think they are more fascinating than anything humans have ever come up with in myths or legends. And I think that has a hold on us. Susie, the subject is changing rapidly, isn't it? It's a very fast-moving research area. And in fact, you made a discovery very recently, a very famous discovery. Yeah, well, yeah, a couple of weeks ago, we just announced that we'd found a new stegosaur from North Africa. And it's the oldest stegosaur in the world. And it's also the first one from North Africa. So it was very exciting for us.

I was a tiny bit surprised about how exciting it was for everybody else as well. But, you know, I think sometimes us as paleontologists are not the best people to judge what everybody else finds interesting, actually. But yeah, no, it's a really, really cool animal. We don't know very much of it, but we hope to go back to Morocco. It's found in the middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco. And I'm hoping to go back. I'm going back in March, hoping to kind of set up and really formalise a collaboration with my Moroccan collaborators there to go back and try and find a bit more of this animal.

And by oldest, so what are the timescales? How old is that one? And what's the span of time that stegosaurs were present on the Earth? Well, stegosaurs weren't around for that long. Now, you know, this is a really, really common misconception about dinosaurs, that they were all kind of living together in the same ecosystems. But dinosaurs dominated terrestrial ecosystems for 170 million years. So that, you know, by the time that Steve's t-rex was alive um stegosaurus

was already a fossil and in fact t-rex is closer to an ipad in time than it is to a stegosaurus so we're talking about vast swathes of time um so my my new stegosaur which is called adreticlet which means mountain lizard in berber um that was about is about 165 million years old, 168, something like that. Most stegosaurs are known from the upper Jurassic, which is a little bit later, so about 150 million years ago. So what was the process? How did this discovery occur then? So actually, we at the Natural History Museum acquired the specimen through a commercial fossil dealer. And this is something that in various parts parts of the world, happens quite a bit. And we got hold of this specimen,

basically because one of these commercial dealers put some photographs on Facebook. And actually, it's bizarre, but this is quite often how it happens. Well, the thing was that I don't think the dealer knew what he was selling. So they weren't very expensive. And so I looked at it and went, I don't think that's what he was selling so uh they weren't very expensive um and so i looked at it and went i don't think that's what he thinks it is um so we should try and get our hands on that because it looks like it's something really really interesting and important so we were able to

get it and then and then you know recognize that it had a whole suite of very you know quite subtle features to the untrained eye if you like but that are clearly different from any other stegosaur from anywhere in the world how do you how do you date it is it the rock yeah well because we bought it from a commercial dealer we um we didn't really know where it came from we weren't sure where it came from so i then went to morocco last september and essentially worked my way back up the supply chain which involved sitting in a lot of people's houses drinking very very sweet tea which actually gave me heart palpitations. It was so strong. And curried goat and things like that

to eventually make my way to the actual guy who dug it up. So you need to know what the site, the site where you find the fossil is. Yeah, and then, you know, I'm a geologist by my first degree, so I was able to then go through and log the rocks and understand a bit more about the age. I just also, I just think the fact that I never imagined

there was the equivalent of eBay bargains. He doesn't know. Sometimes you go, I don't think that guy knows how much this space 1999 annual's worth. But this stegosaur... It's actually like that, yeah. Beautiful. Rufus, I know you used to work at the Natural History Museum, didn't you?

No, Brian, I did not. Rufus, can I do the question? Rufus, I know you used to work at the Natural History Museum, didn't you? No, Brian, I did not. Rufus, can I do the question? Rufus, I know you used to work at the Science Museum. A much better museum, Robin, you're right. They're very close to each other. You drive through South Kensington and there's a big kind of Gothic cathedral inspired by Darwin

to hold everything we understood about the natural world. You get in there, what's in there? Dirt and bones. Boring. Go to the science museum, we'll blow something up for you. But did you ever, because I know there is a little corridor, because you must have had a key, did you ever just sneak into the Natural History Museum

and have a go on one of the dinosaurs? You haven't really lived till you've sat on the back of that giant brontosaur in the main hall, which isn't there now, is it? It's on tour. It's on tour. It's on tour, that you can go and see. It's currently in Newcastle. What do you think the enduring fascination is with dinosaurs?

Well, I think scale plays an enormous part of it um like we can look at elephants uh and that's i think about as big as we would actually encounter like you you could go and see then we know that the blue whales and things exist and you can see them on telly but your telly is quite small compared to an actual blue whale whereas you like i mean you do you stand under the bones of a brontosaurus or under the bones of a t-rex or you know watch walking with dinosaurs jurassic park all of those things and the brian cox pitch ultimately is wow look at that and when you do it you're talking about you know red dwarves and, you know, event horizons.

And so your wow exists as a series of ones and zeros that are rolling in your almost human head. But for normal people, we only really get that when we can actually touch it or lick it. And I think that's just the big sharp teeth, the scale of the thing, or the swing of the tail, or the... Is it called a thogamizer? Oh.

Oh. How to upset paleontologists. Three minutes in. Any minute now, I'm going to bring up Ross from Friends. Roll the dice. Can you explain... At least we find out why you don't work in the science museum anymore when you touch it or lick it.

Can you just explain what you think a thogomizer is and why you groaned when he said it? OK, so I think a thogomizer is on the tail of a dinosaur. It's not a stegosaur, it's one of the other... I've seen that picture with the big sort of hammer. Basically, on the end of the tail, there's a big lump with spikes on it. And the story goes that Gary Larson,

who did the Farside cartoons, that were very big, if there are any young people listening to this, when your parents were small. And I think in the cartoon, he says something like, we didn't know what this was called but when he killed thog we now call it the thogamizer and everybody laughed at that cartoon but paleontologists who actually genuinely didn't have a word for that thing then went oh fine yeah that will be a laugh we'll call it that so in this particular episode of Call My Bluff, a thogamiser. So, thogamiser, then, your reaction, Susie?

Well, it's more thagamiser than thogamiser, but I did groan, because the idea that we didn't have a word for this, it is actually on the tail of a stegosaurus, it's the spikes on the tail of a stegosaurus. The idea that we didn't have a name for spikes is not the case, because we had the word spike. I just don't think it's necessary for us to generate more jargon in a field with jargon in it you know and people kind of slightly annoying it's a great cartoon it's very funny but they have started to use it annoyingly regularly in

descriptions of things which always leads to a groan ste Steve, can you sketch out the history of the dinosaurs, when they appeared all the way through to when they disappeared? OK, so the very oldest dinosaurs lived in a time called the Triassic period, and that started about 250 million years ago. And this was right in the aftermath of the worst mass extinction that's ever happened. This period of time where enormous volcanoes were erupting in what is now Siberia, covering a whole huge swath of Asia in lava. But it wasn't just the lava, it was all the methane and the carbon dioxide and all those poisonous gases that came out,

caused global warming, caused a mass extinction. 95% of species died out, give or take. But there were survivors. There's always survivors. And some of those plucky survivors were these small little reptiles that in the ensuing Triassic period, they started to evolve into the dinosaurs. Now, these things were very humble. They were just about the size of your house cat. You could have held them in your arms. They walked around on all fours. They had these stilty little legs. They could run really fast. They could grow really fast. Those things gave them an advantage in that new world. And so they continued to diversify as the earth healed from that extinction. But there were many other things diversifying alongside those first

dinosaurs, the first turtles, the first mammals, the first crocodiles. And there were amphibians back then, salamanders that were the size of cars. And so all of those animals were basically competing with each other in the Triassic period. So over the course of many tens of millions of years of the Triassic, the dinosaurs, they were diversifying, but they weren't really the preeminent animals. They were not dominant yet. There were no T-Rexes or Brontosauruses or even Stegosauruses yet. That would come in the next period of time, which is called the Jurassic period. Hooray! Yes, so we're finally in the Jurassic.

It's the one we've heard of. And there's a reason we've heard of it. There's a reason they called it Jurassic Park and not Triassic Park, because the Jurassic is the time that dinosaurs properly spread around the world. They started to grow to enormous sizes. Some of the long-necked dinosaurs became larger than jet airplanes. And so this all happened after a second big extinction. There was a supercontinent back then.

All of the land was connected together. So those first dinosaurs, they could wander pretty much all over the place. But then that supercontinent began to break apart. And as it did so, as the land started to crack, that's why we have separate continents now with oceans in between them. But before the water came in, you had volcanoes erupting through those cracks. So you had another period of these intense eruptions spewing all those toxic gases into the atmosphere, more global warming, a lot more species died out. A lot of those first competitors to dinosaurs couldn't make it.

But the dinosaurs were the great survivors of that extinction. I don't know why. I wish I knew why. It's one of those biggest mysteries about dinosaurs that's still out there. But the fact of the matter is that period of intense climate change killed off a lot of species. It spared the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs had a brave new world afterwards. And then in the Jurassic period, they started to thrive. And then the Jurassic gave way to the Cretaceous, and you had your T-Rexes and your Triceratopses, and eventually it kind of all ended. But that's something I think we'll get to a bit later. Can I ask you, because I didn't know about the species that came before the dinosaurs,

and I'm not, I can't remember the names, but I know one has Gorgonophosidae. There's a couple, there's two. In fact, you mentioned them in your book. And I had no sense of what they were. What were those creatures that dominated before that mass extinction, the first of those mass extinctions? So this is the world of the Permian period, just to introduce another geological term. So there's periods of time throughout prehistory that have names, just like during human history. And so before the dinosaurs was the Permian period. This was the time when that supercontinent came together, when you had this one giant landmass.

And there were a lot of plants and animals that were very well adapted to that world, to living on a single landmass, which was a very hot, dry, and pretty nasty place, actually. There were no ice caps. There were big deserts throughout much of that supercontinent. And the sorts of animals that were well adapted to that world were things like the Gorgonopsians. And these were relatives of ours. These were some very distant forebearers of mammals.

And they kind of looked a little bit like furry reptiles, I guess you could think of them as. And there were lots of other creatures like that, too, a lot of mammal relatives. So if that extinction didn't happen with those big volcanoes in Siberia, maybe the whole history of mammals would have turned out differently. But as it happened, a lot of those animals, and there were tons of them, there were ones with saber teeth like the Gorgonopsians. There were these big, bulky things that looked kind of like, you know, really gnarly rugby players with all kinds of nasty injuries. There were these amphibians also, these things that were the size of cars, these slimy, brutish monsters that ruled the rivers and the lakes back then. And that whole world was thrown into chaos by that extinction. And so if that extinction didn't happen, dinosaurs would have never had their opportunity.

And that's a recurring theme in the history of life, just like it is in human history. There are events that happen sometimes, sudden events, unexpected events, catastrophic events that completely reroute history. Susie, I suppose when we say dinosaur, people, as Steve said, tend to think about these huge animals, the largest land animals that have ever lived. What do we know about why

they got so big? Yeah, that's a good question, and it's a really difficult one to answer, actually. There's lots of different theories about why they might have got so big. I think probably the one that at least I'm in favour of is kind of it was an evolutionary arms race to stay alive. So if you're a small animal and you're probably not a very fast runner, most of the plant-eating dinosaurs probably couldn't really run at all, then one way to stop yourself getting eaten all the time is to get a bit bigger. So if you think today you have elephants and herds that there aren't too many predators that are able to take down a fully grown elephant um and so if you get bigger then you're kind of protecting yourself

um and then the predators got bigger um and then you know the prey got bigger um to protect themselves and then the predators got bigger and so i think that probably the best explanation is kind of this evolutionary arms race but it's not something that we we're really sure of the answer of and you you reach a limit ultimately which is the things like the brontosaurus which just you can't physically go any bigger it's physics i suppose isn't it that stops it in the end gravity and so on yeah there's got to be a point where you know we are reaching some of the largest animals that it is possible to have. So I think, is it Patega Titan is currently thought to be

one of the biggest or Argentinosaurus? Yeah, these are fighting words among paleontologists. Which scrap of bone is from the dinosaur that's probably slightly bigger than the other one? And how do you even measure that? Are we talking length? Are we talking hip height? Are we talking body mass? There's loads of different ways that we could argue

about what the biggest dinosaur is. What do you say it's called? Patega Titan? Are we talking hip height? Are we talking body mass? You know, there's loads of different ways that we could argue about what the biggest dinosaur is. What do you say it was called? Patagotitan? Patagotitan. Yeah, so it's an Argentinian sauropod. And how big do we think that was? Oh, now you're putting us on the spot. How tall? Boeing 737 size. That's always the comparison I give. As far as weight, yes. Yes, as far as weight, actually. And I had to look this up when I was writing my book, by the way, to make sure I got the facts right. And it is. Some of these things like Pataga Titan or Argentinosaurus,

or there's one called Dreadnoughtus. They all have fantastic names, by the way. They're all kind of in that realm of probably somewhere between 50 and 80 tons. They were really big. And I can't remember a Boeing 737 to get on the spot, but somewhere, I think, in the kind of 30-ish, 40-ish ton range. So, you know, when you're on an EasyJet flight or Orion Air flight, I mean, just think about that dinosaur weighing more than that plane you're on.

And I think that's all we really need to know about the scale of these things. Rufus, because you had a fascination with science, I know you still do, was there ever, when you were growing up, a sense that you might have gone in that adventure as opposed to going to the arts world that you've gone into? No, no, never. No, not once.

It just never came up. All the way through school, hated science. I think the thing with art is that every blank sheet of paper invites any one of a number of things that could be on it but in science that blank sheet of paper means well if you start here you will always end up at the at the same point you know like if you're trying to work something out it's the thing ricky gervais has said about um if you took all of the religious books and burned them 10 000 years from, there would be more religious books, but none of them would be like the ones we've got at the moment.

People would just have come up with their own mythos. But if you took all the science books and burned them, 10,000 years from now, the exact same books would be back on the shelves because that's how science works. And that's brilliant, and as a grown-up, I love it. But as a kid, it was the exact opposite of what I liked about anything. up i love it but as a kid it was the exact opposite of what i liked about anything because science insists on being found to be true you know like you you can't well this is this is a nightmare of working with scientists so when i went to the science museum you would say

to a scientist okay so then we're gonna blow up a hydrogen balloon and we can say that balloon exploded and they would say well technically it doesn't actually explode it's just a very rapid burn oh yeah that'll inspire the next generation won't it but they're right and if you if you think that a hydrogen balloon explode i mean it does i mean that's a terrible example but but but it's it there's a specificity to it and a truth to it and I the older I get the more I respect the ability of brains to chip away at the truth the the whole tree of life thing is well if these three things are true then we can we can with reasonable certainty say a fourth thing is true and then somebody else comes along and says well let's see whether that fourth thing is true,

and test it and test it and test it, and eventually you get to a point where there is an actual fact that we can all cling on to. What's bizarre in the world that we live in is that we have now understood what the scientific method is, and we can apply it to all so many things, and yet, actually, when push comes to shove, most people are quite happy to ignore what that result is in favor of what they feel to be true now if only there was

a way of understanding that and there is it's science like we're so flawed and the world is so unflawed because there is no notional perfection to which it holds itself it's not conscious we instill the universe with our own need and desire for any kind of perfection or truth like the universe doesn't care about any of that science is the way of making ourselves more like the universe of which we are a part. We are the consciousness of the universe. So it's up to us as this little part of a thing that

was born from an explosion to be able to tell that explosion that created us something about itself and therefore ourselves. Wasn't an explosion the Big Bang? Yeah. about itself and therefore ourselves. Wasn't an explosion the Big Bang? LAUGHTER APPLAUSE That was a long set-up to a joke. And now I've been trying all the way through that,

I was trying to find one little peg to, like, hang the next question on, and there was no peg. So the next question I'm going to ask is not related to, and there was no peg. So the next question I'm going to ask is not related to anything that you said in there. But can I suggest that you go on the moral maze? Because that answer would save us a lot of crap. That would literally be the end of the

moral maze. Well, that brings us to the final episode. We've realised all notions of reality are frankly fabricated. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. Now, Fawf, that is a lot of what I just said is your fault. Yeah, I know. I listen to this show and I have a national treasure like Brian Cox tell me that chances are

we are genuinely all part of a simulation and my brain just... This is what we see ourselves as. Professor Higgins to your Eliza Doolittle. On dinosaurs, which we were talking about sometime earlier. There's so many things that I've... One of them is, when you were talking about discovery of dinosaurs, again, I had not realised how many...

Like, you were talking about discovering a new species. this is something that's very regular isn't it this is is it approximately one species a week on average it is and last week was suzy's week with the stegosaur and this week i don't know who it'll be but but it is it's about 50 new species a year hang on let me just look under this desk no it's not my son nicholas parsons um so 50 new species a year 50 new species yeah it's incredible and that's been going on for about a decade so that's not just a blip you know so in the the time that suzy and i have roughly been in the field that means i don't know there's been 700 some new dinosaurs that have been found which is just which is insane and um this is to do with the the new territory that have been found, which is just, which is insane. And is this to do with

the new territory that's being explored, essentially? Yeah, I think it's a combination of lots of things. I think it's a combination. First of all, you know, our field is getting bigger. It's diversifying. It used to be a very niche field. And, you know, let's face it, like a lot of fields of obscure science, there was a couple of posh guys at some of the posh universities that did it, and that was about it, and that has changed now. And Susie and I and our colleagues, we spend a lot of time traveling around the world working with paleontologists from all over the place. There's a new generation in China, in Brazil, in Argentina, in Morocco,

young scientists that are being trained, that are going out and finding their own dinosaurs. And a lot of it, and it might sound like I'm trying to, you know, be too cute or too glib, but I really do think a lot of it comes from Jurassic Park. That was a little over 25 years ago. I remember watching that in the cinema so vividly, and it didn't make me want to become a paleontologist right away, but there were so many people of our general vintage that went into paleontology because of that film. And that's not just in the US, where I'm from, it's not just in Britain here, where Susie's from,

but it's people all over the world. So I do think Jurassic Park is one of the best things that's ever happened to our science. Isn't that fascinating, the difference between you and me? That you watched Jurassic Park and absolutely loved it and came out of there and thought, I want to be a paleontologist. And I watched Jurassic Park and absolutely loved it and walked out of there and thought, I want to be Samuel L. Jackson. Yeah, you got the hat. I see.

Yeah, you just need the dangling cigarette to hold on to your butts. I don't remember asking you got the hat. I see. Yeah, you just need the dingling cigarette to hold on to your butts. I don't remember asking you a goddamn thing. Susie, how are the modern scientific techniques changing the field? Because we think, I mean, you described fossils, finding bones and so on, which is, I suppose, the old-fashioned picture

of how you do research in this area but how are modern techniques changing there's a whole range of techniques now that we're able to apply that are really allowing us to move beyond the bones and move beyond seeing dinosaurs simply as just you know a collection of bones that we stick together and try and figure out how they go together to actually understanding more about the organisms and more about you know looking at dinosaurs how we might look at living animals today. Things like CT scanning have helped us do things like look inside the brains of dinosaurs, reconstruct the brains and understand a little bit more about senses and things like that.

So that's a fossil that you scan through and get detail of the inside, the interior. Absolutely. And people were always fascinated by dinosaur brains. You know, it was one of the earliest, I think, facts about Stegosaurus was it had a brain the size of a walnut or something like that. And, you know, these dinosaurs are these very small brains. How are they able to live? But in order to do that, before CT scanning, what you had to do was take the brain case of the dinosaur,

because dinosaurs have a kind of separate, or reptiles have a kind of separate bony structure that encases the brain and and saw it in half and then fill it with resin and then peel out that resin to produce a copy of the brain and and weirdly enough curators of museum dinosaur collections aren't actually super thrilled about you sawing up their dinosaur specimens so you know that it was done for some but but not for lots whereas now i mean it's completely standard you just bung it in a c some, but not for lots. Whereas now, I mean, it's completely standard. You just bung it in a CT scanner. I mean, to the extent that now, actually, in the museum, if we have some new relatively small specimens that come in,

before we even get them prepared, we might just chuck them in the CT scanner to see what's in the rock, to see whether it's worth preparing or not. It's such a routine technology now, and it's so easy to do. So that's really helped us move beyond the sort of old fashioned paleo and it also is a bit more quantitative we can actually directly measure things we also 3d scanning in general so being able to produce surface scans that's helped with all sorts of computational modeling if you're interested in in the way that dinosaurs walk

which is something i've done a little bit of work on if you're interested in feeding then being able to produce a 3d model and then analyse it computationally using engineering techniques can really, really help you understand things in a very much quantitative way. And how did we decide, because it's quite a relatively recent discovery, it's about the colours of dinosaurs. And then there was a whole idea about the feathers on dinosaurs. So how do we go about inferring the colour of a dinosaur? You know if you'd asked me about 12 years ago, 10 or 12 years ago, will we ever know the colour of dinosaurs? I would be just

no, we will never know what colour dinosaurs were and then there was this amazing discovery. So in bird feathers there are cells that hold the pigment melanin called melanosomes and melanosomes the shape of the melanosomes in bird feathers codes for color so not all colors this is just sort of reds browns blacks iridescents grays those sorts of colors and the different shape of the melanosome tells you what color that feather is going to be and when all these beautiful dino birds were discovered in china and these are these beautiful small dinosaurs preserved in lake deposits, and the feathers are actually preserved in microscopic detail, so they're incredibly beautiful specimens,

people started to look under scanning electron microscopes at these feathers, and they saw melanosomes in those feathers as well. Now, of course, because birds are dinosaurs, we can directly infer what is more or less true in a bird is probably going to be, there's a very good chance that's going to be true in a dinosaur as well. So people were able to start to see these melanosomes and the shapes of these melanosomes in feathers

and start to colour up dinosaurs. So Steve, T-Rex, everybody knows T-Rex. So do we know what colour the T-Rex is? Did it have feathers even? Do we know that? I wish I could tell you the colour of a T-Rex. I wish I knew it. I predict somebody will figure it out one day. We don't know at the moment, though. What we do know is this about T-Rex. T-Rex probably did have feathers. Now, we don't know that for sure. Nobody has ever found a fossil skeleton of a T. rex covered in feathers. But that's because T. rex fossils are found in environments that don't normally preserve the soft bits like feathers.

So they're often found in environments, ancient rivers, ancient lakes, where there's flooding and animals are getting buried. You know, that's good for preserving bone and shells and teeth, but not feathers. But in China, there is this amazing place where about 125 million years ago, an entire ecosystem of not only dinosaurs, but all the animals they were living with, that ecosystem had the great misfortune to be buried by volcanic eruptions, kind of like Pompeii. Not exactly like Pompeii, but similar to that. So you had all these dinosaurs that were just killed and buried, going about their everyday lives. So in Pompeii, you see these people that were buried,

cooking breakfast or walking the dog or just going about their everyday business. We see that with these dinosaurs. And that means that there's fine preservation of their bodies and that includes feathers and so it was only about 25 years ago that these were found people are finding new ones all the time it's actually farmers in this part of China that find these dinosaurs covered in feathers what we see is that it's not just a few dinosaurs that have feathers it's basically every meat-eating dinosaur from the small ones you can fit in your hands all the way up to things that were almost the size of a bus. And some of the plant-eating

dinosaurs had feathers too. And two of those animals from China that had feathers are tyrannosaurs. They're members of the T. rex family. So that tells us that T. rex evolved from ancestors with feathers. Not with wings, not that could fly, but with simple little filaments sticking out of its body, the precursors of bird feathers. And I think that's amazing. So the Jurassic Park T-Rex, that classic lizard-looking thing.

Wrong, yeah, sorry. It's not like that. I'm going to ask a really naive question. This must be a naive question, but I tend to think of feathers, we tend to think of them as things that have something to do with flight. But essentially what you're saying is the evolutionary history looks like they came first as a coat, I suppose, and then became useful, well, moved into something that was useful for flight. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a fascinating

story. And this is what makes studying evolution so much fun. Because you look at the world today and you see all kinds of plants and animals adapted to different ecosystems, adapted to different lifestyles. And you look at something like a bird, which has feathers. Nothing else has feathers. We don't have feathers. Frogs don't have feathers. Birds have feathers. What do birds do? Birds fly. How do they fly? They have wings made out of feathers. So therefore, feathers must have evolved for flight. But no, fossils of the ancestors of birds tell us that's not the case. The fossils tell us that a huge variety of dinosaurs all across the family tree had feathers, simple feathers. These little feathers that looked like hair, that's how feathers started out.

That's what most dinosaurs had. And you can't fly with hair. None of us can looked like hair. That's how feathers started out. That's what most dinosaurs had. And you can't fly with hair. None of us can fly with hair. I certainly can't fly with what's ever left of my hair. I don't know how well you can see it from this stage. But no, we can't fly with that. So a T-Rex, if it had those kind of feathers, it couldn't fly. But the feathers of modern birds evolved from those simple feathers.

So the first simple feathers probably evolved for similar reasons to mammal hair, to keep these dinosaurs warm. And then later on, some dinosaurs modified those feathers. Those feathers got bigger, they got longer, they started to branch out, they started to line up on the arms, and they created a wing. But now, what Susie was talking about with the colors, we can tell the colors of some of these first wings on dinosaurs were really flamboyant. And we can also tell these wings are small, far too small to keep these dinosaurs in the air. So it looks like even wings did not evolve for flight. They might have evolved as something kind of like an advertising billboard, you know, sticking out of the arms of

these animals to attract mates or intimidate rivals, or do any number of things animals do for display. So really, the theme here is that so many things in evolution evolve for other reasons, and only later do they come together and allow new behaviors. And the analogy I like to use is, whoever invented the wheel, whoever that was, whoever invented the engine, the propeller, those people would have never known the Wright brothers would have put those things together to make a plane. And it was the same with evolution. Feathers and wings and all those things were pieced together,

not evolved for the purpose of flight. So the T-Rex, Rufus, was a giant flightless bird thing. I'll be honest, I'm sat here absolutely agog that it's taken paleontologists this long to work this out because you only need look at a t-rex and his little tiny arms and if that isn't a creature that's evolved for the birdie song dance i don't know what is we're beginning also i think to to find suzy um soft tissue um which is fascinating to me i suppose that's the first step perhaps to find dna which then leads to jurassic park which we haven't

done yet i believe but um can you comment on on that and how important those discoveries are yeah there's really probably for about the last years, there's been an increasing body of evidence to suggest that soft tissues do preserve on geologic timescales. And this work was really pioneered by an American paleontologist called Mary Schweitzer, who has been claiming for a long time that she is seeing not only fossilized soft tissues, but the actual chemical breakdown products of certain proteins. So able to actually extract actual protein. And this has come against a huge amount of resistance in the community. People just did not believe that you could preserve soft tissues for this sort of length of time. And I read an interview with her where she said you know she faced reviewers for her papers who said things like it doesn't matter how much evidence you present me with I will never believe you which sort of completely goes against everything that we understand to be the scientific

method yeah but now maybe over the last sort of five to ten years more and more people are coming forward and saying no no look we've we've found the same evidence too and I was part of a team in 2015 who we believe that we have discovered dinosaur blood cells so we actually were looking at a dinosaur bone from the Natural History Museum collection under a scanning electron microscope for completely different reasons and I was working with a material scientist and he came I came into work one day and I had increasingly frantic series of social media and various other messages that went, I need to speak to you, I need to speak to you right now, I need to speak to you right, right now, has anybody ever found dinosaur blood before? And I just thought

this guy's a crackpot, he's just nuts. So I spent like the next sort of six months trying to demonstrate that what these things that he had seen under his microscope were not blood cells, but in the end we came back to it, we compared it geochemically with ostrich blood. We were able to cut open these structures and image them in three dimensions at the cellular level. And they are, that's what they are. So we've got this kind of lots of evidence that what we're seeing are the breakdown products.

We're not seeing haemoglobin, but we're seeing the breakdown products of haemoglobin. However, now red blood cells in reptiles actually have nuclei, and of course, nuclei is where the DNA is held. So the first thing that we obviously did when we got these cells was to stain them for DNA. There's no DNA in them. So the eldest DNA in the fossil

record at the moment is about 1 million years old. So that's 66 million years too young for the dinosaurs. So at the moment, there is no Jurassic Park. But you would say that, wouldn't you? So in terms of the... We're nearly run out of time,

but we were saying we're going to talk about extinction. And this is such an interesting thing where it's so recent. The annuals that Brian and I grew up with were still uncertain about why dinosaurs died out, and there was that lovely theory that the plants that contained fibre had gone extinct, and dinosaurs died

of constipation, and the kind of, you know, poor T-Rex there, and I thought the biggest problem was going to be the fact I can't wipe, and now I wish there was, you know, this whole kind of thing. And now it seems, is it still true that the idea of the cataclysmic

act was that the Earth was struck? Is that still seen as a meteor strike being there? Yeah, I think it all comes down to astrophysics. And this is a fun thing to be sitting up here talking on a panel with Brian about. You know, it does look like, at least to my mind, there's still debate. There's always going to be debate because this is such a fascinating question. Why aren't there T-Rexes anymore? And the evidence we have is naturally limited because we're dealing with fossils that are 66 million years old.

We're dealing with rocks from that time that don't record what happened minute by minute, much less even century by century. So there's always going to be uncertainty. But to me, the strongest evidence, very strong, is that this asteroid did it. We know an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago. We know that this was not any normal asteroid. And correct me, Brian, if I'm wrong about any of the stats, but what the geologists and astronomers say is this asteroid was about six miles wide, one of the biggest asteroids that hit the earth over the last half a billion years. And this thing was traveling faster than a speeding

bullet, literally, through the cosmos. And it slammed into the earth with the force of over a billion nuclear bombs worth of energy, and it punched a hole in the crust that is over a hundred miles wide. That hole is in Mexico now as a crater. And from that moment onwards, we don't have any dinosaur fossils at all, not a single bone, not a single tooth, not a single footprint, except, of course, for the birds that survived. And really, only a few birds survived, and today's birds blossom from those survivors. So to me, that's very, very strong evidence that this one-in-a-billion, cataclysmic, you-could-never-predict-it sort of event

wiped out the dinosaurs. And if that's true, I think that's a really sobering story because the dinosaurs were around for a long time. They were around for well over 150 million years. They reached sizes unseen before or since. They were dominant in the most utterly fantastic way. They lived all over the world, all sorts of niches, all sorts of lifestyles. And then very quickly, that came to an end. And so we, of course, have been the ones that have replaced the dinosaurs, really, as the dominant animals on top of the food chain.

So, well, we've been around for about 200,000 years, only a small fraction of what the dinosaurs had. And we'll see what happens. And what are we now? The final question, really, is what are the big discoveries that you are hoping may well be within the reach in terms of through technology, in terms of possible... What are the bits of the pitch you think there's a gap there and we think we may be able to find something that fits into it? Go ahead, Sue. I'll throw me in at the defense.

It's a really difficult question to answer. There's no shortage of questions to answer about dinosaurs. You know, dinosaurs were around for 170 million years. For most of that time, every organism on Earth or on land larger than a metre in size was a dinosaur. So there's tonnes of more dinosaurs to be discovered. There's loads of questions we could ask about how they lived. One of the things that I think is really interesting,

and we talked about it a little bit at the beginning, was where did dinosaurs come from why did they get this opportunity to to radiate and become these dominant organisms and where did they originate and what were the first dinosaurs like rufus has this showing go on no no i was gonna say i would have thought the holy grail in in really understanding dinosaurs is why god put all of those fossils in the ground to test our faith. Don't applaud that. Rufus has been...

Rufus on for the purposes of balance. Ballast. Has this made you now now having heard this, being part of this programme, does it make you any more positive towards the Natural History Museum or do you still see it as a gothic temple of Mill in the Dead? It was always fun working at the Science Museum, having a rivalry with the Natural History Museum

because the Natural History Museum will always win. And the reason it will always win is because they're the ones with the dinosaurs. So, yeah, being on here i feel like i can't represent my old gang without at least trying to you know prick the bubble that says they're so special when what we're doing is steam engines and you know pistons and spaceships and things but sure that was their primary mistake as carl sagan famously said not inventing spaceships was the end of the dinosaurs. It was their big mistake.

Yeah. And they had those little hands. They couldn't... Anyway. Well, they did invent them. That's how they actually... They didn't go extinct. They just left.

They went, we see who's going to be in charge next. Let's go now. I mean... We asked the audience a question as well and uh today we asked the audience if you could bring one dinosaur back to life which would it be and why brian what have you got uh stegosaurus given that this is the dumbest dinosaur is that true it would probably have done a better brexit than we have seen what have you got richard it's not my fault um spinosaurus because parliament needs extra

backbone at the moment it does seem there's an issue in everybody's head although i quite like amy turner who simply wrote Bruce Forsyth. Is this true from Daniel? Microraptor because it had wings on its legs. It is the dinosaur equivalent of having shoes on your hands. Is that true? It is true, yeah. The Bryannosaurus Rex because it would have spent so much

time looking at the stars it may have seen the asteroid coming. And the Brontosaurus. Anything that makes them rewrite that dino A to Z for a third time would be hilarious. Because they do, they go in and out the brontosaurus. There was that period of time where that one's out for the time being, they go, no, it's come back in.

It's a beautiful narrative. It keeps us in business as dinosaur book authors. It does. Let's reboot the brontosaurus again. Thank you to our panel, Steve Brissett and Susanna Maidman and Rufus Hound. Next week we'll be discussing animal intelligence and asking, is Bigfoot really smarter than a crow?

You don't want Bigfoot on the next week's show, do you? But I'm not ringing up and cancelling him, just because you don't believe in him. So thank you very much for listening and bye-bye. in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite

monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite

monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite

monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite

monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite

monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite

monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite

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monkey cage monkey cage monkey Cage monkey Cage Monkey Cage Monkey Cage Monkey Cage Monkey Cage Monkey Cage Monkey Cage Monkey Cage Monkey and you'd like to listen to something else, it wasn't your taste, you're not interested in science and logic and rational thought, then you can find many other podcasts on BBC Sounds. You can download those and live in your dream world. Not enjoy them either. You sound miserable.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. you