Episode 387: The day that dinosaurs went extinct. Riley Black joins us to share her take on what it would have been like to live through the Chicxulub impact event.

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News:

• There was a new response to the paper estimating there were probably billions of T. rex source
• In Missouri, the House recently voted to update the name of their state dinosaur from Hypsibema to Parrosaurus source
• A group of Toronto Raptors fans dressed up in inflatable dinosaur costumes to celebrate the team making the playoffs source
• The Smithsonian is making exclusive products with Jurassic World: Dominion source
• Past Eons Productions is recreating the BBC Walking With Dinosaurs documentary using Jurassic World Evolution 2 mods source

Sponsors:

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Interview:

Riley Black, a science writer and communicator, whose work has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, and Scientific American. She has written a number of books, including “The Last Days of Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World“, which came out this week. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @Laelaps.

The dinosaur of the day: Macrogryphosaurus

• Elasmarian ornithopod that lived in the Late Cretaceous in what is now Patagonia, Argentina (Sierra Barrosa Formation)
• Looked kind of like a hadrosaur, but with a smaller head and less bulky body
• Had a longish head, long tail, and walked on two legs
• Largest known elasmarian
• Estimated to be about 20 ft (6 m) long, though may have gotten larger
• Had a long neck and coelurosaur-like tail
• Had 10 long vertebrae in the neck
• Had intercostal plates (bony structures in the ribs) along the side of the torso
• Had a fused, birdlike sternum
• Had a short, stiff torso
• Type species is Macrogryphosaurus gondwanicus
• Genus name means “big enigmatic lizard”
• Species name refers to Gondwana
• Described in 2007 by Jorge Calvo and others
• Fossils found in 1999 during field work by the National University of Comahue
• A young boy, Rafael Moyano, first found the fossils
• Found a nearly complete, articulated adult skeleton (includes most of the neck, the thorax, the pelvis, and most of the tail)
• Has been described as beautifully preserved
• Appears in Chased by Dinosaurs, a sequel to Walking with Dinosaurs
• Other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include the titanosaurs, Kaijutitan and Mendozasaurus, and the megaraptorid Murusraptor

Fun Fact:

Both herbivorous and carnivorous theropods evolved stronger jaws over time.

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