Why Allosaurus had a surprisingly weak bite, with Emily Rayfield

T. rex’s arms are the joke everyone makes, but each one was about a metre long, thick and muscular, and by some estimates could lift around 200 kilograms. They only shrank compared with the head, which grew long, wide and strong enough to do the catching and the killing on its own. Other dinosaurs …

Dinosaurs had bones in their eyes, with Stephan Lautenschlager

Dinosaurs had bones in their eyes. You don’t, and nor does any other mammal, from dogs to whales to elephants. We’re the odd ones out. Birds, lizards, turtles and fish all have a ring of thin bony plates sitting in the white of the eye, holding a big eyeball steady so it can focus. Because it’s bon…

Why you can’t hide from a T. rex, with Jared Voris

The most important part of your nose is inside your brain. Your nose catches the smell, but it’s a lump at the front of your brain that works out what it is: sweet, horrible, or dangerous, like gas in the kitchen. Humans tend to put smell near the bottom of their list of senses. For most animals it…

Dinosaur chicken nuggets with Jingmai O’Connor

Loads of dinosaurs had wings, but not many of them could fly. There’s a dinosaur in your garden right now, probably the one that keeps stealing your chips, because a seagull is a dinosaur, and so is every robin, pigeon and chicken. Feathers turn up again and again across the dinosaur family tree, a…

Why dinosaurs never dragged their tails with Pasha van Bijlert

A dinosaur’s tail could be a third of the whole animal, about as heavy to lug around as a concrete block, and for well over a century people drew dinosaurs dragging theirs along the ground. They didn’t. Palaeontologists have found thousands of dinosaur footprints and almost no tail marks, so a heal…

Life in a super greenhouse with Kirsty Edgar

The dinosaurs had around 160 million years on Earth, so there was never just one dinosaur climate. There were deserts, volcanoes and jungles, and there were forests at the North and South Poles, because for most of that time there was no permanent ice anywhere on the planet. Britain was subtropical…

What the thagomizer?! with ReBecca Hunt-Foster

If something wants to eat you, you have three options: get so big that knocking you over is not worth the trouble, get fast enough to leave, or make yourself so expensive to attack that nobody bothers. Plenty of dinosaurs took the third one, and they did it by growing bone inside their own skin. No…

Dinosaurs never needed a dentist with Emma Nicholls

Nigersaurus grew around 500 teeth and replaced the whole lot roughly every two weeks. It never brushed them, never had to be careful with them and never once saw a dentist, because there was always another tooth coming up behind. The word for that is polyphyodont, and it is this week’s word. Human…

Dinosaurs with necks full of air with Mike Taylor

The longest neck any animal has ever grown belonged to Mamenchisaurus, and the neck on its own was more than 15 metres, longer than a school bus before you even get to the rest of the dinosaur. Which raises the obvious question: how do you hold something like that up? The answer is that mostly you …

The dinosaurs that ran faster than Usain Bolt with John Hutchinson

Dinosaurs ruled for 160 million years, and the thing that made them a runaway success was where their legs went. Not out to the side like a crocodile, but straight down underneath them, a stance that costs less energy and frees the arms up for other work. So how fast could they actually go? Footpr…