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 went the opposite way. Megaraptorans had huge arms with claws so big that the first one found was thought to belong on a foot.

This week’s word is palaeobiology. Professor Emily Rayfield, who has clearly been asked at a lot of parties, calls it “the biology of long dead extinct animals”. It’s the difference between what an animal was and what it was like: what it ate, how fast it could run, whether it got enough food.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Emily, Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol. She took finite element analysis, the engineering maths used to test bridges, planes and hip replacements, and used it to work out how hard extinct animals could bite. The first dinosaur she tested was Allosaurus. Its skull is about 80 centimetres long but only about 25 wide, with no room for big jaw muscles, and its lower jaw turned out to be quite weak. T. rex’s skull is well over a metre long and massively wide at the back, with teeth like bananas to match. Even so, Allosaurus could still bite three or four times harder than you can. Emily also explains why the answer is always a range rather than a single number, and how her student Sydney tested whether the little alvarezsauroids could use their arms to dig into termite mounds.

Fresh from the Dig links that study back to last week’s owl dinosaur, Shuvuuia, which turns out to be an alvarezsauroid too. Then Deinocheirus, the “terrible hand”: a pair of arms two and a half metres long, found in Mongolia in 1965, that had people imagining a giant killer for nearly fifty years. When the rest turned up in 2014, it was a duck-faced, humpbacked dinosaur with no proper teeth that ate plants and fish. In the Dino-Mite Question, Callum, seven, from Newcastle, asks why T. rex had such tiny arms. There are three good answers and no winner yet: the head took over, the arms were short, strong hooks for holding on, or they shrank so other T. rexes couldn’t bite them off at a shared meal.

Then it’s Build a Dino Lab. Week ten is the arms, and Emily says heads and arms sit at opposite ends of a scale: a T. rex-style crushing head with stumpy arms, or a tiny head with long digging arms. The first is ruled out by episode three, when our dinosaur got thin, slicing steak-knife teeth. Those are the Allosaurus kind, and they come with a narrow skull and a modest bite. So for the first time Lauren picks neither: short, thick, seriously strong arms with a big shoulder blade and three curved claws, to pin prey down while the teeth do the slicing, and a bite about three or four times a human’s. Cassius points out that arms like that are also good for moving a lot of soil. Next week, footprints, and a 166-million-year-old motorway in Oxfordshire.

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 went the opposite way. Megaraptorans had huge arms with claws so big that the first one found was thought to belong on a foot.
This week’s word is palaeobiology. Professor Emily Rayfield, who has clearly been asked at a lot of parties, calls it “the biology of long dead extinct animals”. It’s the difference between what an animal was and what it was like: what it ate, how fast it could run, whether it got enough food.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Emily, Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol. She took finite element analysis, the engineering maths used to test bridges, planes and hip replacements, and used it to work out how hard extinct animals could bite. The first dinosaur she tested was Allosaurus. Its skull is about 80 centimetres long but only about 25 wide, with no room for big jaw muscles, and its lower jaw turned out to be quite weak. T. rex’s skull is well over a metre long and massively wide at the back, with teeth like bananas to match. Even so, Allosaurus could still bite three or four times harder than you can. Emily also explains why the answer is always a range rather than a single number, and how her student Sydney tested whether the little alvarezsauroids could use their arms to dig into termite mounds.
Fresh from the Dig links that study back to last week’s owl dinosaur, Shuvuuia, which turns out to be an alvarezsauroid too. Then Deinocheirus, the “terrible hand”: a pair of arms two and a half metres long, found in Mongolia in 1965, that had people imagining a giant killer for nearly fifty years. When the rest turned up in 2014, it was a duck-faced, humpbacked dinosaur with no proper teeth that ate plants and fish. In the Dino-Mite Question, Callum, seven, from Newcastle, asks why T. rex had such tiny arms. There are three good answers and no winner yet: the head took over, the arms were short, strong hooks for holding on, or they shrank so other T. rexes couldn’t bite them off at a shared meal.
Then it’s Build a Dino Lab. Week ten is the arms, and Emily says heads and arms sit at opposite ends of a scale: a T. rex-style crushing head with stumpy arms, or a tiny head with long digging arms. The first is ruled out by episode three, when our dinosaur got thin, slicing steak-knife teeth. Those are the Allosaurus kind, and they come with a narrow skull and a modest bite. So for the first time Lauren picks neither: short, thick, seriously strong arms with a big shoulder blade and three curved claws, to pin prey down while the teeth do the slicing, and a bite about three or four times a human’s. Cassius points out that arms like that are also good for moving a lot of soil. Next week, footprints, and a 166-million-year-old motorway in Oxfordshire.

Why Allosaurus had a surprisingly weak bite, with Emily Rayfield

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 bone, it sometimes fossilises, and that matters, because the age of the dinosaurs lasted around 160 million years and roughly half of it happened in the dark.

This week’s word is sclerotic ring. Sclerotic comes from a Greek word meaning hard, and the ring is usually made of 10 to 15 overlapping plates, arranged like the stones in an archway. Measure the hole in the middle, like the hole in a Polo mint, and compare it with living animals. A big hole lets in lots of light, which suits an animal that was up at night. A small hole means a daytime animal. It works just like a camera.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Dr Stephan Lautenschlager, a palaeontologist at the University of Birmingham who uses computer models to work out how dinosaurs looked, lived and behaved. Bigger eyes mean bigger lenses and room for more light-sensing cells, so bigger eyes see better. The middle of a Jurassic night was probably busy, with some dinosaurs out in the day, some at night and some at dawn and dusk, which may have been ideal hunting conditions for meat-eaters. He explains why owls hear so well (one ear sits higher than the other), what the optic lobes in a dinosaur’s brain tell us, and admits that nobody knows how dinosaurs slept or what colour their eyes were.

Fresh from the Dig names the owl dinosaur: Shuvuuia, a chicken-sized dinosaur from the Mongolian desert with huge eyes and an inner ear to match a barn owl’s. Then a study that compared the eye rings of dozens of fossil animals with living ones: small meat-eaters were mostly out at night, big plant-eaters snacked around the clock, and big predators came out at dawn and dusk. And birds can see ultraviolet light that humans can’t, so dinosaurs may have been far more patterned than any picture shows. In the Dino-Mite Question, Noor, nine, from Birmingham, asks whether dinosaurs slept standing up or lying down. The best clue is Mei long, the “sleeping dragon”, a duck-sized fossil from China found curled up with its head tucked in, just like a bird.

Then it’s Build a Dino Lab. Week nine is the eyes: small, cheap daytime eyes, or big eyes, a wide sclerotic ring and big optic lobes for working in the dark. Big eyes win, with a twist. Our dinosaur’s reflective skin, chosen back in episode five, would shine like a headlight under the moon and stand out at midday, so it hunts at dawn and dusk, when the night animals are going to bed, the day animals are only just getting up, and everyone is half asleep. Lions and foxes do the same. Next week, arms.

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 bone, it sometimes fossilises, and that matters, because the age of the dinosaurs lasted around 160 million years and roughly half of it happened in the dark.
This week’s word is sclerotic ring. Sclerotic comes from a Greek word meaning hard, and the ring is usually made of 10 to 15 overlapping plates, arranged like the stones in an archway. Measure the hole in the middle, like the hole in a Polo mint, and compare it with living animals. A big hole lets in lots of light, which suits an animal that was up at night. A small hole means a daytime animal. It works just like a camera.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Dr Stephan Lautenschlager, a palaeontologist at the University of Birmingham who uses computer models to work out how dinosaurs looked, lived and behaved. Bigger eyes mean bigger lenses and room for more light-sensing cells, so bigger eyes see better. The middle of a Jurassic night was probably busy, with some dinosaurs out in the day, some at night and some at dawn and dusk, which may have been ideal hunting conditions for meat-eaters. He explains why owls hear so well (one ear sits higher than the other), what the optic lobes in a dinosaur’s brain tell us, and admits that nobody knows how dinosaurs slept or what colour their eyes were.
Fresh from the Dig names the owl dinosaur: Shuvuuia, a chicken-sized dinosaur from the Mongolian desert with huge eyes and an inner ear to match a barn owl’s. Then a study that compared the eye rings of dozens of fossil animals with living ones: small meat-eaters were mostly out at night, big plant-eaters snacked around the clock, and big predators came out at dawn and dusk. And birds can see ultraviolet light that humans can’t, so dinosaurs may have been far more patterned than any picture shows. In the Dino-Mite Question, Noor, nine, from Birmingham, asks whether dinosaurs slept standing up or lying down. The best clue is Mei long, the “sleeping dragon”, a duck-sized fossil from China found curled up with its head tucked in, just like a bird.
Then it’s Build a Dino Lab. Week nine is the eyes: small, cheap daytime eyes, or big eyes, a wide sclerotic ring and big optic lobes for working in the dark. Big eyes win, with a twist. Our dinosaur’s reflective skin, chosen back in episode five, would shine like a headlight under the moon and stand out at midday, so it hunts at dawn and dusk, when the night animals are going to bed, the day animals are only just getting up, and everyone is half asleep. Lions and foxes do the same. Next week, arms.

Dinosaurs had bones in their eyes, with Stephan Lautenschlager

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’s essential, for marking territory, finding each other and sniffing out food.

This week’s word is olfactory bulb. That’s the lump. The bigger it is for your size, the better your nose, and because it takes up room in the skull, it leaves a space scientists can measure. But room in a head is a trade-off. A bigger bulb means a bigger head and a bigger brain, and a bigger brain needs more energy and more food.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Dr Jared Voris, a palaeontologist at the University of Calgary in Canada who studies T. rex and its relatives. When you rebuild a tyrannosaur’s brain, the smell bulbs run almost half its length, so T. rex could probably sniff out prey, a dead animal or anything else nearby, the way a wolf or a bear does today. Nobody has a real dinosaur brain, so long ago the American Museum of Natural History sawed a T. rex braincase in half to look inside. Now scientists put skulls through a CT scanner, a 3D X-ray, and rebuild the shape of the brain on a computer without breaking anything. Plant-eaters had good noses too, perhaps for finding water and telling which plants were safe to eat.

Fresh from the Dig starts with Jared’s own tyrannosaur, Thanatotheristes, the “reaper of death”, which had unusual ridges along its long face. It was found in Alberta by a family who spotted the bones, photographed them and told the museum instead of digging them up themselves. Then ankylosaurs, whose nasal passages loop round and round inside the skull and may have worked like air conditioning under all that armour. And the kiwi, which has its nostrils at the very tip of its beak and sniffs out worms on the forest floor at night. In the Dino-Mite Question, Ada, six, from Bristol, asks whether she could hide from a T. rex. Behind a tree it can’t see you, but it can smell you, and follow the trail you left ten minutes ago. Your best bet is to stand downwind.

Then it’s Build a Dino Lab. Week eight is the nose: huge T. rex-style smell bulbs that need a bigger skull and more food, or small bulbs and a hawk’s sharp eyes. Lauren picks the big bulbs. A hawk’s eyes work because it can fly and look down from above, and this dinosaur lives on the ground among the trees, where you can’t see very far and smell matters most. Next week, the lights go off.

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’s essential, for marking territory, finding each other and sniffing out food.
This week’s word is olfactory bulb. That’s the lump. The bigger it is for your size, the better your nose, and because it takes up room in the skull, it leaves a space scientists can measure. But room in a head is a trade-off. A bigger bulb means a bigger head and a bigger brain, and a bigger brain needs more energy and more food.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Dr Jared Voris, a palaeontologist at the University of Calgary in Canada who studies T. rex and its relatives. When you rebuild a tyrannosaur’s brain, the smell bulbs run almost half its length, so T. rex could probably sniff out prey, a dead animal or anything else nearby, the way a wolf or a bear does today. Nobody has a real dinosaur brain, so long ago the American Museum of Natural History sawed a T. rex braincase in half to look inside. Now scientists put skulls through a CT scanner, a 3D X-ray, and rebuild the shape of the brain on a computer without breaking anything. Plant-eaters had good noses too, perhaps for finding water and telling which plants were safe to eat.
Fresh from the Dig starts with Jared’s own tyrannosaur, Thanatotheristes, the “reaper of death”, which had unusual ridges along its long face. It was found in Alberta by a family who spotted the bones, photographed them and told the museum instead of digging them up themselves. Then ankylosaurs, whose nasal passages loop round and round inside the skull and may have worked like air conditioning under all that armour. And the kiwi, which has its nostrils at the very tip of its beak and sniffs out worms on the forest floor at night. In the Dino-Mite Question, Ada, six, from Bristol, asks whether she could hide from a T. rex. Behind a tree it can’t see you, but it can smell you, and follow the trail you left ten minutes ago. Your best bet is to stand downwind.
Then it’s Build a Dino Lab. Week eight is the nose: huge T. rex-style smell bulbs that need a bigger skull and more food, or small bulbs and a hawk’s sharp eyes. Lauren picks the big bulbs. A hawk’s eyes work because it can fly and look down from above, and this dinosaur lives on the ground among the trees, where you can’t see very far and smell matters most. Next week, the lights go off.

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

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, and most of them had nothing to do with flying. Oviraptors spread their feathered arms over their nests to keep their eggs warm, and some parents have been found still sitting on them. Others used feathers for showing off and for keeping warm in the cool forests of north-east China.

This week’s word is primaries. Hold your arm out: shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand. The primaries are the big, long, stiff feathers that grow from the hand, and they do the hard work of flying. Every bird that flies, from a hummingbird to an albatross, has between nine and eleven of them. So if you find a fossil wing, you can count.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Dr Jingmai O’Connor, Associate Curator of Fossil Reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago. She explains why Microraptor, with feathers on its arms and its legs, probably glided down from the trees like a flying squirrel, and why Anchiornis, with a skeleton almost exactly like Archaeopteryx, has 30 primaries and probably couldn’t fly at all. She also owns up to getting something wrong. She once wrote that Microraptor couldn’t cough up pellets, then looked again at a Microraptor with a whole lizard in its stomach. A skeleton that size can’t go all the way through, so it had to come back up, and she is now writing a paper to say so. As she puts it, saying “I don’t know” is the most powerful thing a scientist can say.

Fresh from the Dig starts with Jingmai’s own brand new dinosaur, Jian changmaensis, a barn-owl-sized, four-winged cousin of Microraptor from about 120 million years ago in the Changma Basin in north-west China. It might finally explain the little bundles of smashed-up early bird bones found there for years. Then Yi qi, whose name means strange wing, a tiny dinosaur with bat-like skin wings that looked a lot like a mini dragon. And how scientists worked out the real colours of a dinosaur: Anchiornis was grey and black with white stripes on its wings and a rusty red crest, a bit like a woodpecker. In the Dino-Mite Question, Jonah, eight, from Glasgow, asks whether a chicken nugget is a dinosaur nugget. It is. And the wishbone in your roast chicken is the same bone you’d find in T. rex.

Then it’s Build a Dino Lab. Week seven is the arms: four wings like Microraptor, or feathered arms only with bare scaly legs underneath. Lauren picks feathered arms with seven primaries and no leg wings. Seven is two short of what you need to fly, and that’s fine, because this dinosaur was built to run, big feathers on its legs would trip it up, and it’s already carrying a heavy tail, plates and a thagomizer. Jingmai would have chosen the same. Next week, our dinosaur gets a nose.

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, and most of them had nothing to do with flying. Oviraptors spread their feathered arms over their nests to keep their eggs warm, and some parents have been found still sitting on them. Others used feathers for showing off and for keeping warm in the cool forests of north-east China.
This week’s word is primaries. Hold your arm out: shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand. The primaries are the big, long, stiff feathers that grow from the hand, and they do the hard work of flying. Every bird that flies, from a hummingbird to an albatross, has between nine and eleven of them. So if you find a fossil wing, you can count.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Dr Jingmai O’Connor, Associate Curator of Fossil Reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago. She explains why Microraptor, with feathers on its arms and its legs, probably glided down from the trees like a flying squirrel, and why Anchiornis, with a skeleton almost exactly like Archaeopteryx, has 30 primaries and probably couldn’t fly at all. She also owns up to getting something wrong. She once wrote that Microraptor couldn’t cough up pellets, then looked again at a Microraptor with a whole lizard in its stomach. A skeleton that size can’t go all the way through, so it had to come back up, and she is now writing a paper to say so. As she puts it, saying “I don’t know” is the most powerful thing a scientist can say.
Fresh from the Dig starts with Jingmai’s own brand new dinosaur, Jian changmaensis, a barn-owl-sized, four-winged cousin of Microraptor from about 120 million years ago in the Changma Basin in north-west China. It might finally explain the little bundles of smashed-up early bird bones found there for years. Then Yi qi, whose name means strange wing, a tiny dinosaur with bat-like skin wings that looked a lot like a mini dragon. And how scientists worked out the real colours of a dinosaur: Anchiornis was grey and black with white stripes on its wings and a rusty red crest, a bit like a woodpecker. In the Dino-Mite Question, Jonah, eight, from Glasgow, asks whether a chicken nugget is a dinosaur nugget. It is. And the wishbone in your roast chicken is the same bone you’d find in T. rex.
Then it’s Build a Dino Lab. Week seven is the arms: four wings like Microraptor, or feathered arms only with bare scaly legs underneath. Lauren picks feathered arms with seven primaries and no leg wings. Seven is two short of what you need to fly, and that’s fine, because this dinosaur was built to run, big feathers on its legs would trip it up, and it’s already carrying a heavy tail, plates and a thagomizer. Jingmai would have chosen the same. Next week, our dinosaur gets a nose.

Dinosaur chicken nuggets with Jingmai O’Connor

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 healthy dinosaur held its tail up and out behind it. The tail-dragging monsters in old paintings and old films were what scientists thought at the time, and that’s fine. Being wrong and then finding out is how science works.

This week’s word is counterbalance. It’s the seesaw, the tightrope walker’s long pole, and the heavy block on the back of a tower crane that stops it tipping over. A long tail stopped a two-legged dinosaur falling flat on its face. But a crane’s counterweight just sits there, and a dinosaur’s tail didn’t. Underneath it ran an enormous muscle, a giant bottom muscle, that ran forwards from the tail and down on to the thigh bone and pulled the leg back with every single step. So the tail was a counterbalance and an engine.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Pasha van Bijlert, a PhD researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who builds dinosaurs inside a computer and teaches them to walk. He 3D-scans a skeleton, adds muscles using the rough patches where they once gripped the bone, then drops the whole thing into a physics simulator that works out for itself how to walk and run. To check it works, he built an emu the same way, as if it were a fossil, and it topped out at about 40 kilometres an hour. Then he went to the Australian outback to film real emus with drones, and two of them ran alongside the car at 45 kilometres an hour and simply kept going.

Fresh from the Dig starts with Pasha’s own team, who worked out how fast Tyrannosaurus rex walked from the way its tail bobbed. Everything that swings has a rhythm it prefers, like a playground swing, and the rhythm of a T. rex tail gives a walking speed of about four and a half kilometres an hour. That’s your walking speed too, which is not a reason to go for a stroll with one. Then Stegouros from Chile, a small, cute armoured dinosaur whose tail ended in seven pairs of flat bony plates locked together like a fern leaf, and was about as friendly as an Aztec war club. And the footprints that settled the tail question turn out to be trace fossils, the same family as fossil nests, last meals and dinosaur poo.

Then it’s Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week six is the tail: a long, heavy, muscular one held out straight, or a light little stump like a pigeon’s. Lauren picks the long, heavy tail held off the ground, because episode one promised this dinosaur could run, and without it there is nothing to swing the thagomizer. Next week, wings, for a dinosaur that can’t fly.

A dinosaur&rsquo;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&rsquo;t. Palaeontologists have found thousands of dinosaur footprints and almost no tail marks, so a healthy dinosaur held its tail up and out behind it. The tail-dragging monsters in old paintings and old films were what scientists thought at the time, and that&rsquo;s fine. Being wrong and then finding out is how science works.
This week&rsquo;s word is counterbalance. It&rsquo;s the seesaw, the tightrope walker&rsquo;s long pole, and the heavy block on the back of a tower crane that stops it tipping over. A long tail stopped a two-legged dinosaur falling flat on its face. But a crane&rsquo;s counterweight just sits there, and a dinosaur&rsquo;s tail didn&rsquo;t. Underneath it ran an enormous muscle, a giant bottom muscle, that ran forwards from the tail and down on to the thigh bone and pulled the leg back with every single step. So the tail was a counterbalance and an engine.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Pasha van Bijlert, a PhD researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who builds dinosaurs inside a computer and teaches them to walk. He 3D-scans a skeleton, adds muscles using the rough patches where they once gripped the bone, then drops the whole thing into a physics simulator that works out for itself how to walk and run. To check it works, he built an emu the same way, as if it were a fossil, and it topped out at about 40 kilometres an hour. Then he went to the Australian outback to film real emus with drones, and two of them ran alongside the car at 45 kilometres an hour and simply kept going.
Fresh from the Dig starts with Pasha&rsquo;s own team, who worked out how fast Tyrannosaurus rex walked from the way its tail bobbed. Everything that swings has a rhythm it prefers, like a playground swing, and the rhythm of a T. rex tail gives a walking speed of about four and a half kilometres an hour. That&rsquo;s your walking speed too, which is not a reason to go for a stroll with one. Then Stegouros from Chile, a small, cute armoured dinosaur whose tail ended in seven pairs of flat bony plates locked together like a fern leaf, and was about as friendly as an Aztec war club. And the footprints that settled the tail question turn out to be trace fossils, the same family as fossil nests, last meals and dinosaur poo.
Then it&rsquo;s Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week six is the tail: a long, heavy, muscular one held out straight, or a light little stump like a pigeon&rsquo;s. Lauren picks the long, heavy tail held off the ground, because episode one promised this dinosaur could run, and without it there is nothing to swing the thagomizer. Next week, wings, for a dinosaur that can&rsquo;t fly.

Why dinosaurs never dragged their tails with Pasha van Bijlert

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 to tropical. If you were packing for a trip, you would want a raincoat and an autumn jumper, not a snowsuit.

This week’s word is super greenhouse. A greenhouse lets the sun’s heat in through the glass and makes it hard for it to get back out, and carbon dioxide in the air does the same thing to the whole planet. In the super greenhouse of the Cretaceous there was far more of it, sea levels were so high that a seaway split North America down the middle, and temperatures in some places may have reached 40 to 45 degrees. That is hotter than a hot bath.

Fresh from the Dig is all about where dinosaurs lived. The dinosaur highway in Oxfordshire, a 150-metre run of tracks made by long-necked sauropods and the meat-eaters following them, was laid down in a warm, muddy lagoon, exactly the kind of ground that holds on to a footprint. The Carnian Pluvial Episode, roughly two million years of rain in the Triassic, spread forests across the hot, dry supercontinent of Pangaea, and it is one of the leading ideas for why dinosaurs took over. And in northern Alaska, inside the Arctic Circle, palaeontologists have found baby dinosaurs far too young to have migrated, which means dinosaurs lived there all year round, through months of darkness and months of midnight sun.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison are joined by Professor Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist at the University of Birmingham, whose fossils are smaller than a grain of sand. She studies foraminifera, tiny plankton that build shells in the surface ocean and have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. The oxygen in those shells comes in a lighter and a heavier form, and the mix a shell takes up depends on how warm the water is, so each one is a thermometer that never knew it was a thermometer. When they die the shells sink and pile up on the seabed in layers, oldest at the bottom. Kirsty has spent two-month research voyages drilling that seabed, from Tahiti to Hawaii and from Tasmania round to Perth, one of which set off straight into the tail end of a Southern Ocean storm.

Otis, who is six and from Cardiff, wants to know whether he could have gone swimming in a 45-degree sea. Sadly not: a warm swimming pool is about 30 degrees, a hot bath is about 40, and anything else in the water would have been bigger than him and a better swimmer. Then it is Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week five is skin, and Kirsty’s advice is to make it pale, for the same reason a white T-shirt keeps you cooler than a black one. Lauren picks skin that reflects the sun, even though it makes the dinosaur easier to spot, because with a thagomizer and steak-knife teeth it can look after itself, and nobody wants a dinosaur that cooks. Next week, a tail. Probably.

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 to tropical. If you were packing for a trip, you would want a raincoat and an autumn jumper, not a snowsuit.
This week’s word is super greenhouse. A greenhouse lets the sun’s heat in through the glass and makes it hard for it to get back out, and carbon dioxide in the air does the same thing to the whole planet. In the super greenhouse of the Cretaceous there was far more of it, sea levels were so high that a seaway split North America down the middle, and temperatures in some places may have reached 40 to 45 degrees. That is hotter than a hot bath.
Fresh from the Dig is all about where dinosaurs lived. The dinosaur highway in Oxfordshire, a 150-metre run of tracks made by long-necked sauropods and the meat-eaters following them, was laid down in a warm, muddy lagoon, exactly the kind of ground that holds on to a footprint. The Carnian Pluvial Episode, roughly two million years of rain in the Triassic, spread forests across the hot, dry supercontinent of Pangaea, and it is one of the leading ideas for why dinosaurs took over. And in northern Alaska, inside the Arctic Circle, palaeontologists have found baby dinosaurs far too young to have migrated, which means dinosaurs lived there all year round, through months of darkness and months of midnight sun.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison are joined by Professor Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist at the University of Birmingham, whose fossils are smaller than a grain of sand. She studies foraminifera, tiny plankton that build shells in the surface ocean and have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. The oxygen in those shells comes in a lighter and a heavier form, and the mix a shell takes up depends on how warm the water is, so each one is a thermometer that never knew it was a thermometer. When they die the shells sink and pile up on the seabed in layers, oldest at the bottom. Kirsty has spent two-month research voyages drilling that seabed, from Tahiti to Hawaii and from Tasmania round to Perth, one of which set off straight into the tail end of a Southern Ocean storm.
Otis, who is six and from Cardiff, wants to know whether he could have gone swimming in a 45-degree sea. Sadly not: a warm swimming pool is about 30 degrees, a hot bath is about 40, and anything else in the water would have been bigger than him and a better swimmer. Then it is Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week five is skin, and Kirsty’s advice is to make it pale, for the same reason a white T-shirt keeps you cooler than a black one. Lauren picks skin that reflects the sun, even though it makes the dinosaur easier to spot, because with a thagomizer and steak-knife teeth it can look after itself, and nobody wants a dinosaur that cooks. Next week, a tail. Probably.

Life in a super greenhouse with Kirsty Edgar

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. Not armour they put on, but armour they were, down to bony eyelids in the case of Ankylosaurus.

This week’s word is thagomizer, the cluster of spikes on the end of a Stegosaurus tail, and it is the only piece of dinosaur anatomy named by a newspaper cartoon. Gary Larson drew one in The Far Side in 1982, with a caveman lecturing his class and crediting “the late Thag Simmons”. Thag Simmons never existed. Palaeontologists liked the word too much to let that stop them, and it stuck. It describes something genuinely dangerous: there is an Allosaurus bone with a thagomizer-sized hole punched through it, which had begun to heal before the animal died.

Fresh from the Dig is all armour. Two vertebrae collected in the 1950s, filed as sauropod and left in a display case, turn out at 27 and a half and 29 inches to belong to the largest Stegosaurus known. Vectipelta barretti, an armoured dinosaur from the Isle of Wight, is named after Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum by colleagues who wanted to honour his work on exactly this kind of dinosaur. And Sophie, about 85 per cent of a skeleton and the most complete Stegosaurus ever found, whose skull was the first preserved well enough to show what a Stegosaurus head actually looked like. She weighed 1.6 tonnes and was not fully grown.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison are joined by Dr ReBecca Hunt-Foster, the monument palaeontologist at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, whose office is essentially a cliff with about 1,500 dinosaur bones still stuck in it. She explains how a Diplodocus turned up under a car park that was being repaved, and why more of it was deliberately left in the ground for whoever digs next; how clam fossils found open rather than shut are the evidence for the drought that killed the animals in the quarry; and how a single foot was enough to name a new species. Her advice on armour: cover your back, your sides and your neck.

Freya, who is nine and from Newcastle, wants to know whether the plates on a Stegosaurus were for fighting or for showing off, and palaeontology has been arguing about it for a century. Then it is Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week four is tank or knight, and Lauren goes for plates, shoulder spikes and a thagomizer, because full ankylosaur armour on a dinosaur built to run would slow it to a crawl. Next week, where all of this lived, and a scientist whose fossils are smaller than a grain of sand.

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. Not armour they put on, but armour they were, down to bony eyelids in the case of Ankylosaurus.
This week&rsquo;s word is thagomizer, the cluster of spikes on the end of a Stegosaurus tail, and it is the only piece of dinosaur anatomy named by a newspaper cartoon. Gary Larson drew one in The Far Side in 1982, with a caveman lecturing his class and crediting &ldquo;the late Thag Simmons&rdquo;. Thag Simmons never existed. Palaeontologists liked the word too much to let that stop them, and it stuck. It describes something genuinely dangerous: there is an Allosaurus bone with a thagomizer-sized hole punched through it, which had begun to heal before the animal died.
Fresh from the Dig is all armour. Two vertebrae collected in the 1950s, filed as sauropod and left in a display case, turn out at 27 and a half and 29 inches to belong to the largest Stegosaurus known. Vectipelta barretti, an armoured dinosaur from the Isle of Wight, is named after Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum by colleagues who wanted to honour his work on exactly this kind of dinosaur. And Sophie, about 85 per cent of a skeleton and the most complete Stegosaurus ever found, whose skull was the first preserved well enough to show what a Stegosaurus head actually looked like. She weighed 1.6 tonnes and was not fully grown.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison are joined by Dr ReBecca Hunt-Foster, the monument palaeontologist at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, whose office is essentially a cliff with about 1,500 dinosaur bones still stuck in it. She explains how a Diplodocus turned up under a car park that was being repaved, and why more of it was deliberately left in the ground for whoever digs next; how clam fossils found open rather than shut are the evidence for the drought that killed the animals in the quarry; and how a single foot was enough to name a new species. Her advice on armour: cover your back, your sides and your neck.
Freya, who is nine and from Newcastle, wants to know whether the plates on a Stegosaurus were for fighting or for showing off, and palaeontology has been arguing about it for a century. Then it is Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week four is tank or knight, and Lauren goes for plates, shoulder spikes and a thagomizer, because full ankylosaur armour on a dinosaur built to run would slow it to a crawl. Next week, where all of this lived, and a scientist whose fossils are smaller than a grain of sand.

What the thagomizer?! with ReBecca Hunt-Foster

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.

Humans get two goes. Milk teeth, then the set we are stuck with. Sharks, crocodiles and most dinosaurs are on a conveyor belt instead, and that changes what a tooth can be. If breaking one costs you nothing, your teeth are free to evolve into exactly the right shape for the job rather than something built to survive a fight, which is how theropods ended up with thin serrated blades in their mouths.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison go to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to meet Dr Emma Nicholls, who looks after 40,000 fossil animals, anything with a backbone. She explains that sharks have no bones at all, only cartilage, the same stuff as your ear, which is why nearly all we have of them is teeth. One tooth is enough to work out a great deal. Tall, thin and triangular means a fast pursuit predator shaped like a great white. Flat and crushing means something on the seafloor eating sea urchins. She also spent three weeks digging up the Rutland Sea Dragon, a ten-metre ichthyosaur found in a drained reservoir in the middle of England, and points out that it looks almost identical to a shark despite being a reptile and not related to one at all.

Fresh from the Dig has Nigersaurus, nicknamed the sauropod lawnmower, whose fortnightly new set makes sense once you know it fed off the ground and swallowed grit with every mouthful. Diplodocus, eating higher up, got about 35 days out of a set. Plus the Oxford museum’s rebuilt fossil gallery, where Megalosaurus, named in 1824 and the first dinosaur ever described, is joined by a young Eustreptospondylus going on public display for the first time, part real bone and part 3D print. And Cassius’s own research reading the scratches and pits on theropod teeth under a microscope, with something from the UK he is not allowed to tell us about yet.

Moosa, who is seven and from Leicester, wants to know whether dinosaurs ever got toothache. Then it is Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week three is slicers or crushers, and Lauren goes for tall, thin, curved, serrated theropod teeth, because a fast two-legged dinosaur chasing shellfish would be a waste of a good pair of legs. Next week, something bigger, and a word invented by a cartoonist.

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.
Humans get two goes. Milk teeth, then the set we are stuck with. Sharks, crocodiles and most dinosaurs are on a conveyor belt instead, and that changes what a tooth can be. If breaking one costs you nothing, your teeth are free to evolve into exactly the right shape for the job rather than something built to survive a fight, which is how theropods ended up with thin serrated blades in their mouths.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison go to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to meet Dr Emma Nicholls, who looks after 40,000 fossil animals, anything with a backbone. She explains that sharks have no bones at all, only cartilage, the same stuff as your ear, which is why nearly all we have of them is teeth. One tooth is enough to work out a great deal. Tall, thin and triangular means a fast pursuit predator shaped like a great white. Flat and crushing means something on the seafloor eating sea urchins. She also spent three weeks digging up the Rutland Sea Dragon, a ten-metre ichthyosaur found in a drained reservoir in the middle of England, and points out that it looks almost identical to a shark despite being a reptile and not related to one at all.
Fresh from the Dig has Nigersaurus, nicknamed the sauropod lawnmower, whose fortnightly new set makes sense once you know it fed off the ground and swallowed grit with every mouthful. Diplodocus, eating higher up, got about 35 days out of a set. Plus the Oxford museum’s rebuilt fossil gallery, where Megalosaurus, named in 1824 and the first dinosaur ever described, is joined by a young Eustreptospondylus going on public display for the first time, part real bone and part 3D print. And Cassius’s own research reading the scratches and pits on theropod teeth under a microscope, with something from the UK he is not allowed to tell us about yet.
Moosa, who is seven and from Leicester, wants to know whether dinosaurs ever got toothache. Then it is Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week three is slicers or crushers, and Lauren goes for tall, thin, curved, serrated theropod teeth, because a fast two-legged dinosaur chasing shellfish would be a waste of a good pair of legs. Next week, something bigger, and a word invented by a cartoonist.

Dinosaurs never needed a dentist with Emma Nicholls

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 don’t have to, because sauropod neck bones were never solid. They were full of air.

That is this week’s word. Pneumatic bone is built like a honeycomb, riddled with air spaces a millimetre or two across, which makes it far lighter and, oddly, no weaker at all. Birds have the same trick, which is part of how they get off the ground, and birds are dinosaurs. On Mamenchisaurus roughly half the animal’s total length was neck, carried on as many as 19 neck bones. A giraffe, the record holder among mammals at 2.2 metres, manages with seven. So do you.

Fresh from the Dig has a Diplodocus found underneath a car park at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, where people had been parking on top of it for years. Only the part in the way of the building work has been dug out, and the rest has been left in the ground for future palaeontologists. Plus Mamenchisaurus and its two seconds of screen time in The Lost World, and Cetiosaurus, the whale lizard, dug up in Oxfordshire and named in 1841 by Richard Owen, who took one look at bones that size and decided they had to belong to a whale. It was the first long-necked dinosaur ever named, and it is stuck with the name.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison are joined by Dr Mike Taylor, a computer programmer by day who studies sauropod necks in the evenings. He explains why taking bone out of the middle of something makes it stronger rather than weaker, suggests boiling down a turkey neck at Christmas so you can see the air spaces for yourself, and points out that nobody needs permission to do palaeontology. Two of his colleagues had their first scientific papers published while they were still at school.

Elsie, who is eight and from Bristol, wants to know how many bones are in a sauropod’s neck. Then it is Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week two is long neck or short, and Lauren goes short, because 15 metres of neck on a two-legged dinosaur ends with its face in the mud. 

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 don&rsquo;t have to, because sauropod neck bones were never solid. They were full of air.
That is this week&rsquo;s word. Pneumatic bone is built like a honeycomb, riddled with air spaces a millimetre or two across, which makes it far lighter and, oddly, no weaker at all. Birds have the same trick, which is part of how they get off the ground, and birds are dinosaurs. On Mamenchisaurus roughly half the animal&rsquo;s total length was neck, carried on as many as 19 neck bones. A giraffe, the record holder among mammals at 2.2 metres, manages with seven. So do you.
Fresh from the Dig has a Diplodocus found underneath a car park at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, where people had been parking on top of it for years. Only the part in the way of the building work has been dug out, and the rest has been left in the ground for future palaeontologists. Plus Mamenchisaurus and its two seconds of screen time in The Lost World, and Cetiosaurus, the whale lizard, dug up in Oxfordshire and named in 1841 by Richard Owen, who took one look at bones that size and decided they had to belong to a whale. It was the first long-necked dinosaur ever named, and it is stuck with the name.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison are joined by Dr Mike Taylor, a computer programmer by day who studies sauropod necks in the evenings. He explains why taking bone out of the middle of something makes it stronger rather than weaker, suggests boiling down a turkey neck at Christmas so you can see the air spaces for yourself, and points out that nobody needs permission to do palaeontology. Two of his colleagues had their first scientific papers published while they were still at school.
Elsie, who is eight and from Bristol, wants to know how many bones are in a sauropod&rsquo;s neck. Then it is Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week two is long neck or short, and Lauren goes short, because 15 metres of neck on a two-legged dinosaur ends with its face in the mud.&nbsp;

Dinosaurs with necks full of air with Mike Taylor

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? Footprints in Inner Mongolia, laid down 120 million years ago, put a medium-sized meat eater at around 45 kilometres an hour, quicker than Usain Bolt at his peak, and trackways in La Rioja in Spain clock theropods at almost exactly the same speed.

A quarry in Oxfordshire turned up a dinosaur highway of nearly 200 footprints running over 150 metres, made by long-necked sauropods and by Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur ever named, back in 1824. Brazil has gone one better with Farlowichnus, a dinosaur named from nothing but its footprints, no bigger than a long-legged bird. And Tyrannosaurus rex, the one everybody assumes was quickest, was nothing of the sort.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison are joined by Professor John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College, who rebuilds dinosaurs inside a computer, gives them muscles and physics, and makes them run. He worked out that a seven-tonne T. rex would have needed around three tonnes of leg muscle to sprint, more than half its body, and the force would have snapped its legs, so it managed something closer to a brisk 15 miles an hour. He also refuses to say the legs are the most important part of a dinosaur. He says it is the pelvis, because the hips tell you what the animal actually did.

Then it is time for Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. For week one the choice is two legs or four, and Lauren goes bipedal, because speed is useful whether you are running away from something or running towards fresh fruit. Next week, necks.

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? Footprints in Inner Mongolia, laid down 120 million years ago, put a medium-sized meat eater at around 45 kilometres an hour, quicker than Usain Bolt at his peak, and trackways in La Rioja in Spain clock theropods at almost exactly the same speed.
A quarry in Oxfordshire turned up a dinosaur highway of nearly 200 footprints running over 150 metres, made by long-necked sauropods and by Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur ever named, back in 1824. Brazil has gone one better with Farlowichnus, a dinosaur named from nothing but its footprints, no bigger than a long-legged bird. And Tyrannosaurus rex, the one everybody assumes was quickest, was nothing of the sort.
Lauren and Cassius Morrison are joined by Professor John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College, who rebuilds dinosaurs inside a computer, gives them muscles and physics, and makes them run. He worked out that a seven-tonne T. rex would have needed around three tonnes of leg muscle to sprint, more than half its body, and the force would have snapped its legs, so it managed something closer to a brisk 15 miles an hour. He also refuses to say the legs are the most important part of a dinosaur. He says it is the pelvis, because the hips tell you what the animal actually did.
Then it is time for Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. For week one the choice is two legs or four, and Lauren goes bipedal, because speed is useful whether you are running away from something or running towards fresh fruit. Next week, necks.

The dinosaurs that ran faster than Usain Bolt with John Hutchinson

Dinosaurs were awesome. But no dinosaur ever got everything right.

Each episode, Lauren and Cassius pick one dinosaur speciality and dig into it. The fastest legs. The longest neck. The sharpest teeth. 

They talk to the scientists who actually study this stuff – from the woman who found a dinosaur underneath a car park to the palaeontologist who builds them inside computers – and they make a choice: one real feature, from one real fossil, to add to the perfect dinosaur they're building across the series.

By the end, they'll have built a dinosaur that never existed, made entirely out of bits that did.

Dino Quest is from Fun Kids, the UK's children's radio station. 

Dinosaurs were awesome. But no dinosaur ever got everything right.
Each episode, Lauren and Cassius pick one dinosaur speciality and dig into it. The fastest legs. The longest neck. The sharpest teeth.&nbsp;
They talk to the scientists who actually study this stuff &ndash; from the woman who found a dinosaur underneath a car park to the palaeontologist who builds them inside computers &ndash; and they make a choice: one real feature, from one real fossil, to add to the perfect dinosaur they're building across the series.
By the end, they'll have built a dinosaur that never existed, made entirely out of bits that did.
Dino Quest is from Fun Kids, the UK's children's radio station.&nbsp;

Dino Quest

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