The Big Dinosaur Podcast

This extended cut is almost twice as long as the version that appears in episode 364. Some of the topics that are only in this version:

• Did the Caudofemoralis muscle help early dinosaurs thrive over other reptiles?
• Neither crocodilians nor birds are much like their common ancestor
• Possible soft tissue differences that didn’t fossilize
• Triassic rock formations in the US, including great potential in Texas (the Dockum Group)
• Ghost Ranch coelophysids
• High levels of variability in early dinosaur growth patterns
• Work on books (Including the 3rd edition of Dinosauria)
• How Archeology led Sterling to Dinosaurs
• Fossil unwrapping parties
• How it’s easier to get funding for field work than prep work
• Details on earliest possible dinosaur discovery
• What are the unique Characters of Dinosauromorphs?
• Thoughts on Ornithoscelida
• Crocodilians becoming secondarily ectothermic
• If Effigia would make a good pet
• Whether the Triassic will ever become as popular as Jurassic and Cretaceous

We covered a lot of ground on the topic of how cryptozoology, dinosaurs, legends, and colonization are intermixed.  Here’s a few of the topics included in this unabridged edition:

• “extinct” fish at fish markets
• Tarzan meeting Mokele Mbembe
• The strange history of the Congo
• More about flat-Earth beliefs
• More searching for giant animals in America
• Connections between Mokele Mbembe and mammoths
• The old idea that animals can’t go extinct. 
• “The Killing of the Mammoth”
• The common connection between folklore, pop culture, and pseudoscience

As usual we talked for much longer than we could fit in our episode.  Here’s a few of the topics discussed in this unabridged edition:

• Their thoughts on the best dinosaur to ride
• Sauropods squishing turtles (or maybe terrapins)
• More details of past and future episodes of their show
• How horses used to be tiny
• Some moments that were a little too goofy for the regular episode

As usual we talked for much longer than we could fit in our episode. Here’s a few of the topics discussed in this unabridged edition:

• More details about whale falls
• Details on how much meat different organisms would eat (T. rex, Allosaurus, etc.)
• Vulture senses: smell, sight and flying for scavenging
• Allosaurus sense of smell
• How gliding is useful for scavenging
• Elephant scavenging
• More questions: Why Allosaurus and not another carnivore; Simplifying the model; Pterosaurs functioning like vultures
• Response to criticsms; Morphology of Allosaurus; Using the model with T. rex as a scavenger and Triceratops as the carrion

As usual we streamlined the interview for the podcast. But we discussed a few topics with Albert Prieto-Marquez that didn’t make the cut. Here’s a few of the topics discussed in this unabridged edition:

• Why Albert got started studying ceratopsians
• Hadrosaurs with food in their teeth
• How hadrosaurs are usually identified by their skulls
• Hypacrosaurus hatching time in Alaska
• A good explanation of the term “diagnosis”
• How cold it gets in the Pyrenees mountains while prospecting