A new oldest dinosaur from the Northern hemisphere
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Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm

And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 531st episode, we've got a new sauropodomorph I hear. Yes, and it's changed our view of dinosaurs, which ties in well to the rest of this episode. Because we have our National Geographic Kids book coming out April 1st, which is coming up very soon. And that book, which is called I Know Dino! Exclamation mark. And a subtitle. Yes.

It's about how our understanding of dinosaurs has changed over the last 200 years. So you see, it all comes together. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and for our dinosaur of the day, we are doing a journey through those 200 years of scientific discovery. Rather than just one dinosaur of the day, it's like 200 years of dinosaurs. It's kind of a sneak peek of our book. Okay. And then, of course, we've also got our dino duels competition. So we'll let you know the first eight winners from the first round of the dino duels. And, of course, we have a fun fact.

But before we get into all that, as always, we'd like to thank some of our patrons. And this week we have 10 new patrons to thank because we have that list of patrons who all joined in the last few months. We appreciate all of you very much. And this week, those 10 new patrons are Categotitan, like Patagotitan. Mm-hmm.

Jesse, Rourie, Spinesosaurus, Ross, Carnifex Lover, Koukenosaurus, Al, Natatak, and Bookworm. So many new names. I know. A lot of really good ones in there. Thank you all so much for joining. So next week we'll have another 10 new patrons to thank because we have so many new people. We appreciate all of you joining. It means a lot to us. Yes.

Excellent way to kick off our 10-year celebration. With groups of 10s. Yes. New patrons, yeah. Yes. So thank you so much. And speaking of 10-year celebrations, for everyone who joined at the Triceratops tier and above from January to February of this year,

which was part of our 10-year celebrations, we will be sending out those Allosaurus patches soon. Yes, keep an eye on your mailbox. And of course, if you want to access the other perks, such as bonus content and our Discord server and all of those good things, head over to patreon.com slash inodino. And before we get into the news, we should go over who won the Dino Duels competition. Yes.

Dino duels, dino duels. Then we can compare notes to see how I'm doing versus how you're doing on our guesses of who would win the contest. My guess is that T-Rex is going strong. Yeah, I think that's safe to say.

So the first dino duel in the Triassic Jurassic was Gojirasaurus versus Eoraptor. And Eoraptor won. No! Pretty close win. I thought Gojirasaurus would be it because of the Godzilla connection. It is a cool name. And it is a cool dinosaur being a coelophysoid, Gojirasaurus. Which one did you pick? I picked Eoraptor. So I got it right. So you're ahead so far. Yeah.

Yeah, it is one of the earliest dinosaurs. So I think a fair number of people might know about Eoraptor. But Godzilla. In some books, it's mentioned as like the first dinosaur. But Godzilla. Yeah, that's true. And then the other Triassic-Jurassic battle duel that was going on, we had Herrerasaurus versus Heterodontosaurus. This one was really close. And Herrerasaurus pulled it off. Yes.

Yes. Yeah. So I got that one wrong. Oh, we're tied. Yeah. I thought it was going to be heterodontosaurus. That was a hard choice for me. I mean, I didn't pick it based on which one I liked better. Strictly, I picked it on which one I thought would win. Although in this case, I do like heterodontosaurus a little bit better. It's just so cool with its, you know, beaky body.

tusky mouth. They are cool. They're pretty cute, but Herrerasaurus is also pretty cool. It is cool. Yeah. It barely edged it out. 54% to 46% went for Herrerasaurus. So we're both 50-50 so far. Then there was the first Jurassic duel. That one was between Megalosaurus and Muragaya. This one, I was pretty sure was going to go to Muragaya, but Megalosaurus got it in a

landslide. Why did you think Miragaia? Because it was the only stegosaur in the list. Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur name just celebrated 200 years. We've talked about it so much on the show. Of course it's a megalosaurus. But the stegosaurus just sold for such a crazy price and it has tons of fans and I even mentioned like

Oh, there's no other stegosaurus. So you should, if you like stegosaurs, you should go for Miragaya. I didn't remember that I had picked Miragaya at that point, but I thought it would win. It just seemed like a shoo-in to me. All right. I'm ahead. You are ahead. Someone did mention Miragaya is technically not valid anymore. So it's Tassentrus. Yeah. But Miragaya is easier to say. And it's still a junior synonym, still a synonym. So you can still use it if you want.

And then the other Jurassic duel was between Yangchuanosaurus and Giraffatitan. This one was not surprising to me, the Giraffatitan one. All right, I've got three out of four. I've only got two so far. I'm in good shape. I also guessed Giraffatitan. Much better name recognition. Also one of the only sauropods. Maybe the only sauropod? Is this showing that people prefer sauropods to stegosaurs? Is that what that means?

Well, we'll never know because the sauropod isn't going up against Miragaya. I thought they were going to go up against each other, but the stegosaur didn't even make it. They definitely prefer megalosaurus to Miragaya. We know this much. Or we don't know what criteria people are using. They might just think that megalosaurus would have won in a fight versus Miragaya, or they were going based on scientific significance. Who knows? Yeah.

So jumping over to the Cretaceous, we've got our first early Cretaceous one, Nigerosaurus versus Deinonychus. And no surprise here, Deinonychus won. Yeah. Pretty much a landslide. Raptor. Yeah. Yeah. And Nigerosaurus is not one of the most famous sauropods, so that's not too surprising. It's okay. We've got Giraffatitan. So you guessed Deinonychus.

Yeah, it's a raptor. Okay, I guessed it too. My criteria was, what do I think is going to win? Oh, I see. Yeah, that's a good way to go about it. I think that's what I did too. The next one, also early Cretaceous, was Ichthyovenator versus Hypsilophodon.

I thought it was going to be Hypsilophodon, but it was Ichthyovenator. All right. I'm on a roll. Clearly the predators have a tendency to win maybe in every one of these. Oh, no, not Giraffatitan versus Yangchuanosaurus. The sore paw prevails. Well, except for against Deinonychus. Anyway.

So Ichthyovenator, the winner in that one. And then we've got Tyrannosaurus versus Albertosaurus. This one I'm fairly confident. Yeah. Similar level of landslide to the other ones. About three to one people voted for Tyrannosaurus. So you got that one right? Oh yeah. Did you? Yeah. And then last but not least, we've got Styracosaurus versus City Potty or Cheaty Potty.

And that one went to Styracosaurus. The frill. Yeah. How do you not? By an even wider margin than Tyrannosaurus won. Styracosaurus won by, that might have been the widest margin of victory of any of the dinosaur duels. Ooh, then we're going to have Tyrannosaurus against Styracosaurus. Tyrannosaur versus Ceratopsian. Yeah. A classic battle. It is. So I got five out of eight. You got six out of eight?

Sounds like. I got seven out of eight. You got seven out of eight? Yeah. Which one did you not get? Gojirasaurus. That's the only one you missed? The only one. You got Herrerasaurus. Megalosaurus, Giraffatitan, Deinonychus, Ichthyovenator, Tyrannosaurus, Styracosaurus. Oh, man. You're sweeping the floor with me. You're two points ahead, but I can still make a comeback. You can. I bet there's also somebody listening who got all eight. Probably. Yeah.

But it comes down to the upcoming battles to see who really won it all. True. And fortunately for me, the only one I had going to the next round was Heterodontosaurus. So I can still claw back some good points. Yes. Because most of mine for future rounds are still in it. So there you go. Those are the winners for this week's round. The first round, the Sweet 16 round. I'm happy with those results. Yep.

So we'll have only four more polls for this week because we've eliminated half of the dinosaurs. But if you want to vote on any of those four matchups, head over to patreon.com slash inodino. There will be four individual polls by the time this airs. And you'll be able to vote on your picks. And good luck. Yes, good luck.

Jumping into the news, one of the many questions we have about dinosaurs is when did they start taking over Earth? When did they start appearing everywhere on the planet? Rather than just being in one little local area, like maybe Brazil? Yes. It turns out it happened way earlier than we previously thought. So for a long time, we thought they started in the South, like you were saying, Brazil or Gondwana.

and then they spread to the north, Laurasia. The oldest known dinosaur from the northern hemisphere was Lepidus Lepidus,

That's from about 221 million years ago, and it's a theropod that was found in the Dockum group in what's now Texas in the US. But now there's a new sauropodomorph, yay, sauropodomorphs, that shows that dinosaurs were in the northern hemisphere as early as 230 million years ago. So about 10 million years earlier. Yes. And actually, it might be a little bit earlier than that based on some tracks. But anyway, this...

changes what we know about dinosaurs because they were being more successful than we thought even earlier than we thought. And again, that goes well with our theme of our National Geographic kids book, I Know Dino! So this paper

was published by David Lovelace and others in the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society. And it's from January of this year. We are catching up after parental leave. But you know what? It kind of worked out for this episode. So like I mentioned, Garrett, a second ago,

Yes, there's this new sauropodomorph that's from about 10 million years, give or take, earlier. But there are footprints, trace fossils, from even a few million years earlier than that that the team found. Oh, it's all the same group. I was thinking we already knew about the track site, but they're talking about both at the same time. A little bit, yes. Yeah, and that track site was at the Jelm Dino track site.

It was part of a right footprint. You can see the second, third, and fourth toes and a faint hand impression. These toes, they're relatively straight. They're long. They're slender. There's some claw impressions. So they think that it belongs to an early Ornithischian, although it could also be a theropod. Okay. So there's two different lineages, either a sauropodomorph and an Ornithischian or a sauropodomorph and a theropod. Yes. But the theropod or Ornithischian...

And in the 230s of millions of years ago, that is right around the very earliest dinosaurs that we have, depending on what you consider a dinosaur versus a early ancestor to what became dinosaurs. Mm-hmm.

But going back to the sauropodomorph and the bones, those fossils were found back in 2013 in Wyoming. They were found in the Papoja Formation. And these bones, this dinosaur, is now the oldest North American dinosaur because 230 million years ago, it's in the late Triassic.

In the late Triassic, but before the middle point of the Triassic. Yes, the early late Triassic. Yes. Or even just the first half of the Triassic. It's just weird naming conventions. So it took a long time to figure out the age of this formation, the Popogea formation. The team studied the rocks. They analyzed fossils of several species and

And eventually they concluded 230 million years ago, which I think makes this a very significant find. Yeah, the Northern Hemisphere catching up with the Southern Hemisphere a little bit. As for the sauropodomorph's name, they named it Avedum bonduivici. And Eastern Shoshone tribal elders and middle school students helped to name this dinosaur. It's named in the language of the Eastern Shoshone tribe. The fossils were found on their ancestral lands.

The full name means long ago dinosaur.

The species name, Bonduivici, means water's young handsome man, and it refers to the colorful salamanders found in the area. But the species name also means dinosaur, so that's why the full name is Long Ago Dinosaur. Interesting. Water's young handsome man, aka dinosaur. I mean, I guess terrible lizard is also dinosaur, which is a little weird. Yeah.

There's an excellent pronunciation guide in the paper, too. For example, it says for the species name, Bon as in bonnet, Dewey as in dewey, V as in ivy, and Chee as in cheese. Dewey as in dewey, huh? Instead of doughy. Oh, okay.

The specific spot where the fossils were found, Garrett, is called the Garrett's Surprise. It's named after an undergraduate field assistant, Garrett Johnson, who found the locality. Well, good job, Garrett. So the holotype of this sauropodomorph is an isolated left astragalus, an ankle bone. And they also found part of a left femur, a thigh bone. So there's not too much there.

But the details in those bones show that it's a sauropodomorph. And sauropodomorphs, as a reminder, they include sauropods, the largest dinosaurs with the long necks and tails. The early sauropodomorphs, though, were much smaller. Though they did have small skulls and long necks and tails. However, they tended to walk on two legs. Yeah, if you're going this old, they might not have even had that significantly longer of a neck and tail than everything else around at the same time. True. Yeah, at that point...

All the dinosaurs looked pretty similar. Yeah, and probably largely carnivorous or omnivorous. Yes. Kind of coelophysis looking. But the details on the ankle bone of this one is what makes it unique and why they were able to name it as a new genus.

They're estimating that a vetum is about the size of a chicken with a long tail. That's according to Lovelace in a news release on University of Wisconsin-Madison. It's estimated to be over one foot tall, or 0.3 meters, and about three feet long, or one meter. They did do histology on the bones. There were no lines of arrested growth or lags, which usually is what tells you roughly how old. In years. In years of dinosaurs, like counting tree rings.

But it did have some smooth bone textures and muscle scars, which indicate that it was an older specimen. So even though there were no lags, it was probably on the older end specimen.

Yeah. More than a year old-ish. And a lot of times sauropods don't have lags. I'm not sure how true that is of the early sauropodomorphs, but it's not too surprising. Yes. They don't think it was done growing. It was probably still slowly growing when it died because there was no external fundamental system or EFS, which is this band of slow-growing tissue that forms in the outermost layer of some bones. And if you have it, that's a sign that you're done growing. Yeah. Yeah.

Although sometimes the EFS is just like close together lags. So if there's no lags, sort of foregone conclusion that there wouldn't be an EFS, but maybe you could piece it together with just the density alone without the actual lags. Yeah. So like you were saying, Garrett, based on the time it lived, based on its relatives, it was likely an omnivore. And it lived in an area that's similar to probably modern day coastal Texas with some dry periods and wet periods.

The team also found an indeterminate psilosaurid. Not enough bones to name it, though, from the same time and place as the sauropodomorph. So that's pretty cool. And then depending on whether or not you define a psilosaurid as a dinosaur. Yeah. As an ornithischian, then you could have, if that other one isn't an ornithischian but is a theropod, was that the other potential option, I think? For the tracks? You could have all three of the major groups. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, the sauropodomorph and the tracks help show that dinosaurs were all over the world by 6 to 10 million years earlier than we previously thought. So pretty cool. Yeah. And there's been that question before of during Pangea was the center of Pangea, essentially Africa and South America. Yeah.

too hot to allow dinosaurs to easily cross it. So maybe they were just sort of stuck in Brazil and the surrounding area for a while before the climate changed a little bit or they adapted a little bit to the hotter climates, and then they could make it across the desert and into other parts of the world. But now it sounds like at least some of them might have figured out a way to make it across. The sauropodomorphs.

Those clever animals. Well, at least one of them, right? Because it's not like all sauropodomorphs could make it across because this is likely a different species and genus. Well, it was named a different genus than what was down in Brazil. So...

We often talk about dinosaurs as if they're one thing and like, oh, they were all down there in Brazil, southern Brazil. That's where they started out. But some of them may have made it across. And the fact that we've been looking at Triassic sites for a very long time, and this is the first time somebody's found something from 230 million years ago that looks like a dinosaur, might mean that they were a lot more common in Brazil and doing a lot better and more diverse and all that kind of stuff down there. But a few of them made it out into the rest of the world.

Could be. Or we just haven't found them yet. That is also very possible because there's that huge bias in the fossil record of different areas preserve different time periods really well. So maybe we just don't have a good time period of that slice of dinosaurs in the northern hemisphere yet. Maybe it was all sauropodomorphs everywhere. Maybe. Probably not. Probably not. Considering you already mentioned silosaurs and a theropod slash ornithischian track. Good point.

I was testing you. And we'll get into our Dinosaur of the Day segment in just a moment. But first, a quick word from our sponsors.

This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College, and their summer dig and lab programs are now open. With limited space. Yes. And you can dig at sites from both the Jurassic and Triassic. Yeah, the Jurassic site has some huge named dinosaurs in it. There's Allosaurus, the massive carnivore with impressive claws to match its bite.

There's also Gargoylosaurus, or a close relative, an ankylosaur with an impressive armor shield above its hips, something even ankylosaurus.

Probably didn't have. And there's Diplodocus, or a close relative, the sauropod famous for their long necks and even longer tails. The whip-like tails. Yeah. I keep saying, or a close relative, because these are still partially embedded in rock and need to be excavated out. That's what you can join to help with. And we won't know for sure which dinosaurs they are or if they're a new dinosaur until they're fully excavated and prepared in a lab where you can get into all the details of the dinosaurs.

There are even more dinosaurs in the field that you might see out there. So you might get to be the one to remove enough rock so that it can be identified or so that it can be fully excavated out of the ground. That would be so cool. Yeah. So go to cncc.edu slash dino dig. You'll get all the details and register online by May 31st. Again, that's cncc.edu slash dino dig.

Today, the beverage aisle looks a lot different than it used to. America's beverage companies are working together. We're delivering the options everyone wants. In fact, nearly 60% of beverages Americans buy have zero sugar. You'll find more variety than ever, including more of your favorites, now available with zero sugar. You'll also find more sizes and clear calorie information on the front of every can, bottle, and pack.

We know when it comes to finding balance, the more choices, the better. Well, that brings us into our, I'm going to say dinosaur of the day segment, but this is a bit different from how we usually do the dinosaur of the day. It was, however, fortuitous that one of our patrons, Morgan, did request 200 years of dinosaurs through our Patreon and Discord.

They said a journey through the scientific view of dinosaurs through 200 years would be quite a treat. And I said, that's great because that's what our book is about. It's almost exactly what our book is about. Yes. It was a request last year around the time that we were celebrating megalosaurs and 200 years of dinosaurs. Yep. And I think we had started writing the book.

Three years ago now? I can't remember how long ago it's been. Yes, this book was three years in the making. Both of our babies were born while we were working on this book. Yep. It takes a while to make books. It does. But it's cool because dinosaur paleontology has changed so much in 200 years and we wanted to look into it and share all the fun facts we learned because we learned a lot.

One challenge, though, when you're writing a book for three years about how our understanding of dinosaurs and dinosaur paleontology has changed, it's kind of hard to future-proof. Yep. Because like you said, we're already...

Talking about, oh, there are some dinosaurs in North America. So if we have something in there about the earliest dinosaurs were in South America, that could already be out of date. Yes. And it's not even out yet. We tried our best. And we even knew, like we're expecting some papers to come out about some of the dinosaurs that we covered that will probably change what we know about that dinosaur. So we tried to keep those a bit vague. Yes. So as not to...

make ourselves outdated before even publishing. I like the way that the creators of the video game Saurian put it when we interviewed them, which is at some point the game has to just be a snapshot of time because they were trying to faithfully represent the Hellcreek ecosystem. So you've got T-Rex,

You've got triceratops, you've got all these dinosaurs. And as new papers and new research comes out, they wanted to keep tweaking what they looked like. I think at one point they had a fully feathered T-Rex, then they went back to less feathers. And it's difficult to decide what exactly you want to stick to as the science changes or scientific understanding changes, I should say.

But at some point you have to just be like, okay, we're doing it now. It's going to be this point inside. We know that we're accurate to the science of the time and that's the best you can do at a certain point. And so that's what our book is, right? It's like the early...

to mid-2020s scientific consensus on what these dinosaurs looked like and what these dinosaurs may have behaved like and where they lived, how big they were, that kind of stuff. And then we have sort of an old illustration, like a pencil-style illustration of the original idea of what each of these

major dinosaurs we talk about are. And then we have a big full color illustration of what we think they're like now. Yes. It's like a before and after. Yeah. But the after isn't, this is exactly what it's definitely like. Now we know perfectly every detail so we can draw it in this lifelike color. And that means that it's never going to change. And that's the real version. That's what we think it is now. Yes.

And in another 20, 30 years, there's a good chance that some, if not all of them, will look a little different. Yes.

Although I do love all of the illustrations. Oh, they're beautiful. Illustrator was amazing. And many of them are the most realistic version of that dinosaur that I've ever seen. Probably all of them actually, because like we were saying, everything's changing so much. And a lot of dinosaur books are made and they don't use new art. Yeah. They'll use the same picture you've seen for 10, 20 years. And you go, oh, that's, I know that dinosaur picture. I think most of the dinosaurs in our book

gotten new art, partly because a lot of the dinosaurs that we mentioned aren't

that often in other books. Yeah, a lot of them. And then they did give us a bunch of images to review of other dinosaurs and if they were accurate enough for our liking. And we had notes on all of them, right? Like, we need to move this nostril. We need to add feathers here. The coloring's a little different. That neck is a little too thin. The club is the wrong proportion. It was... Yes. We had copious notes. Yeah.

We also had a paleontologist, Tito and Aline, who have been on our show a few times. And they are, in addition to being great at what they do with research and paleontology, they are also excellent science communicators. They were our expert reviewers for the book. So they had a lot of notes, too, on all the images. But when it all came together, I think it looks fantastic. Yes. Oh, yes. I'm very excited to see it in stores and everything. And we did...

Like we said, even though some of this stuff, our understanding might change. And that's great because science is about change.

changing or you know being open to change and dinosaur science is a great way to see that in action but just like with saurian we had our line in the sand like this year this is everything's accurate up to this year we did i tallied it up have something like nearly 400 references that included scientific articles papers books websites news stories that we used to research this book and

And that's what made it into the actual book. We read more than that and considered more than that, that we didn't end up actually including in the book. Yes.

But researching this book helped us with a number of episodes for the podcast and vice versa, because some of our past episodes we'd already released helped us, especially with refinding sources. Yeah, there were so many of those moments where you're like, I'm pretty sure we talked about this group of dinosaurs and having this thing going on or, you know, using volcanism to incubate eggs. Which dinosaur was that? Search through and find it.

Before we get into our 200 years of dinosaurs, I just want to give a quick shout out to our agent, Joseph Perry, and our editor, Katie.

Without them, this book wouldn't be happening. So yeah, thank you. They took it easy on us too, especially Katie, because we wrote way over the word limits of almost every spread and they found a way to squeeze it in for the most part. Who knew podcasters were so wordy? Yeah, it was really hard. The target word counts for the dinosaurs were so low compared to what we're used to doing. Right. Also, it's technically a children's book for kids eight to 12.

I will argue, in my totally unbiased opinion, of course, that this book is great for any age. I think it is, yeah. Maybe not the teething age when your kid just wants to chew on everything. Yeah, maybe not that. But every other age. Yeah, eight and up, maybe, is a better way to put it. I would say younger, because the illustrations are so cool. Oh, that is a good point.

Yeah. And it is obviously family friendly, just like our show is. But there are quite a few big words in the book. We have a glossary to explain all of them. But, you know, we talk about things like desiccation and the whole fossilization process. And we go into it in the same sort of detail we do on our show. Mm hmm.

And then we tried to insert some kid humor. That proved to be tricky because we're so used to talking to adults. Yes. And some of our humor was dated. Yeah. Turns out you can't just assume that everyone knows about Jurassic Park. Yeah, yeah. Because we keep passing new anniversaries. Like what's the most recent one? 30 years at least. So 12-year-olds don't necessarily know about a 30-year-old movie. Yeah.

Made me feel a little old, but that's okay. Yeah. But it was cool writing it in a kid book format, though, because the main thing we took advantage of was all the little pop outs. So you have little did you knows little things about like, oh, here's a thagomizer where that name comes from. So many fun facts. Yeah. It's so easy to squeeze those in when you can have these little colorful pop out things all over the place. Which brings me to our

Dinosaur of the day, for lack of a better term, dinosaurs of the 200 years. Dinosaurs of the years. Of the years, yeah. So we talk about a lot. Dinosaurs have been around, the non-avia ones specifically, for a long time, at least 167 million years. And longer if you include birds today. Yes, because they're still around today. Then it's just 230 or 235 or whenever the first one ago came up. Yeah.

And dinosaurs have been inspiring people for thousands of years. Last year, there was a paper published about a set of dinosaur footprints from northeast Brazil with petroglyphs that marked the steps. And those petroglyphs are somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 years old. That unfortunately is not in our book because that came out after we were done writing it. No, but two of the authors of that paper were Tito and Aline. True. Yeah.

So we've talked about on the show, the term Dinosauria wasn't coined until 1842 by Richard Owen. Though the first dinosaur, Megalosaurus, was named even earlier, 1824, by William Buckland. Good old Billy Bucky. Yes. We've learned a lot about him over the years. So again, our book goes through those 200 years since Megalosaurus was named and how our understanding of what dinosaurs looked like has changed over time.

And the book is split up into six chapters. We got Dinosaur First between the 1820s to 1860s. We kind of just came up with that name. It's when the first dinosaurs were being discovered. Yep. There's the Bone Wars, the 1870s to the 1890s. We did not make up that name. No. The Exploration Era, which we categorize as between the 1900s to 1950s.

We also, I think we might've come up with that name. Yeah. Or expanded it slightly because sometimes it's attributed a little bit earlier, like Roy Chapman Andrews, more like the 20s. Yes. And then you've got the dinosaur Renaissance, which is roughly the 1960s to 1980s. And that term is well known throughout paleontology. Mm-hmm. Dinosaur blockbusters. That's from the 1990s to early 2000s. Also known as the Jurassic Park generation. Yeah. Yeah.

And then we've got the Golden Age, which is the present day. Yep. What a time to be. Some people lump together. They just call it the Golden Age from the 1990s on. Yes. But there are so many discoveries there. We wanted to break it up a little more specifically. Yes. Otherwise, that chapter would have been way too long. But you're right. It is a good time to be alive in the Golden Age. So we did try to include as many dinosaurs as possible.

And then we went into more detail about some, their spreads for the various dinosaurs found in each chapter or period of dinosaur paleontology. And then again, the illustrations that go with them are gorgeous. Yeah. But we only had, what, 112 or 14, something like that, pages to work with. And then each spread is two pages. So you're talking about roughly 50 pages.

once you have the front matter and back matter. Plus a few dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus and Spinosaurus got extra space. Got a double spread. Yeah. And we had some extra spreads for things like all the uses of claws and things like that. So we were very limited in the dinosaurs we could choose. And it was very hard to choose which dinosaurs to put in the book. Yes.

Yeah, we went back and forth for a long time. But of course, we start with Megalosaurus because you kind of have to. And the Crystal Palace sculpture that looks to me kind of like a bear with a tail dragging behind it. But of course, now we know it was fast and walked on two legs. Yeah, very big change from Megalosaurus. Yes. And that sort of was a theme too. The longer ago it was discovered, the more it's changed to the present. Yeah.

Yes. There's also Hadrosaurus, which when it was first assembled was given the head of an iguana. And now we know it was a duck-billed dinosaur with hundreds of teeth in its mouth. A literal iguana. Yes. Not like an Iguana Don, an iguana. They had to give it something. Although I'll say at least Hadrosaurus got a head because the first illustration of Archaeopteryx was headless. Nobody wanted to guess what the head looked like.

because they didn't have the skull. But now more skeletons have been found, so we know a lot more, including that its feet didn't have a backward-facing toe, so it couldn't perch on a tree branch.

I think one of the more surprising finds in our research was that an illustration of Stegosaurus, which came out seven years before Marsh published his Stegosaurus skeleton, showed it looking pretty much like Godzilla. And this is back in 1884, so it's way before Godzilla. Although maybe Godzilla was inspired by this sketch. Maybe. I don't know if they would have seen it. There were a lot of upright dinosaurs that were drawn later on. True.

I don't know enough about the history of Godzilla. And Godzilla also was a, I don't remember what they call it, but the kaiju outfit. So it had to stand on the two legs because there was a person in it. True. Yeah. So like this illustration of Stegosaurus, it's on two legs, it's tails dragging, and there's sharp spikes in rows on the back and tail.

But today, of course, we know Stegosaurus walked on all fours and it had the huge plates on its back and the spikes were only on the end of the tail, the thagomizer. Yeah, and there's those spikes. It's almost like a porcupine, like big porcupine quills or something. But then there's another version, too, that had the plates flat against its body. Yes, that's what the cover is. Or is it? Actually, it might be the spikes. Yeah. Another fun nugget we found was that the first Triceratops fossils...

They were long, pointy horns with a piece of skull connecting them. And Marsh thought that they were bison horns.

But now we know Triceratops and its relatives had giant heads with frills and the horns were above its eyes and the horns could be huge over three feet or one meter long. Yes. Yeah, they're really impressive. And it was funny. We were just in the collections at the University of California, Berkeley, looking at some of their dinosaur material. We got a tour from the people at Y Dinosaurs. Thank you for including us. Yes. And yeah.

It was so funny because out of the corner of my eye, when I saw them opening that, I was like, oh, they're looking at bison horns. And then as I got closer, I was like, oh, wait, it's triceratops. Yeah, a juvenile triceratops. Yeah. Because they really do look a lot like what you just see the horn by itself. Yes. We shared pictures of that tour we got on our Patreon if anyone wants to see. See if you got fooled too. Yeah.

Oh, I did mention that Spinosaurus got some extra space because how our understanding of Spinosaurus has really changed over the last hundred years. It's actually what inspired our book.

Yes. And we still are learning quite a bit about it. I love the illustration of Spinosaurus in there that shows the modern idea of what it looked like, depending on who you ask, because it's still... Well, there's still the debate. Not full consensus. How good of a swimmer was it? What is semi-aquatic anyway? Yeah, because the first thoughts about it were that it walked on two legs. It had that tripod tail, so the tail's dragging or acting like a third leg. Yeah.

Now, depending who you ask, really strong swimmer that pursued fish or some sort of swimmer. Yep. At least it was either standing in the water, plucking out fish or it was swimming in the water, snatching fish. Maybe both.

Finding a lot of skeletons has helped fill in a lot of the blanks with dinosaurs. We see that with dinosaurs like Psittacosaurus, where hundreds of them have been found. And Psittacosaurus is a pretty cute dinosaur. It's got that beaky head that looked a lot like a parrot, but with cheekbones that looked like horns.

Because so many specimens have been found, we know a little bit about its colors. Like it was counter shaded, light on the bottom, dark on the top to blend in with its surroundings. And my favorite fact is that it had a belly button. Actually, it's one of my favorite dinosaur facts. It's a very good fun fact.

And bring it up a lot. Yeah, we used it at Trivia recently, and a lot of people got that one wrong because you would think it grows in an egg. Why would it have a belly button? They don't have an umbilical cord to attach to the mom. But in the case of Psittacosaurus and every dinosaur, they grew in an egg and they still needed to get nutrients in.

Yes.

The umbilicus. Mm-hmm. I prefer saying belly button. Yeah. There's another dinosaur where our understanding has almost completely changed, I would say, is Deinokyrus. Oh, yeah. Because at first, we only found basically two giant arms. And it seemed like this really terrifying animal. But then many decades later, more fossils were found. And then overnight...

or almost overnight, I would say, became this goofy dinosaur. In some headlines, it was compared to Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars. Yeah. Yeah. Extrapolating the huge arms, scaling them up onto like an Allosaurus or something. You just imagine this incredible, massive predator, but then they find the rest of the body and they're like, oh, it was an herbivore and it had this big, goofy head. Yeah. My favorite

thing we know about Deinokyris are its wide hips to give it space for its large plant-digesting gut and the fact that it had a hump or a sail on its back. Yeah, the hump back is pretty good.

Sometimes it takes finding close relatives to learn more about a dinosaur. That was the case with Alvoresaurus, which is a really cool dinosaur. It looks kind of like a roadrunner, but with a much longer tail. And it's got these tiny arms with the one huge claw on each arm. Or each hand, I guess I should say. But the first Alvoresaurus fossils...

that were found didn't tell us much about it. It was missing its head as well as most of the arms and legs. Then two years after Alvarosaurus was named came Mononychus, its close relative, and that had a much more complete skeleton and had the powerful arms that ended in large claws. And then over time, more Alvarosaurus were found and they all had the large claws with short arms.

It also seems that the later ones, the ones that lived later in time, had more specialized arms and claws, so they could probably break through termite mounds or anthills with their claws. Yeah, I liked the paper where they showed the transition. It's almost exactly what you imagine when you're imagining evolution in sort of fast-forward versions. You start with five fingers, then four, then three, then two, then one. As it changes, that one finger gets bigger and more specialized slowly over time.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. The consensus now, we used to ask almost everyone we interviewed for a little while, like, what do you think they were doing with those hands? But now we know people specialize within dinosaur paleontology. Yeah. We liked getting a lot of opinions though, just because that was such a big mystery, one of our favorites. Yes. But yeah, the breaking open mounds is the

one we hear the most now. Although there was the one that was named for chest bumping eggs, like eating eggs, kind of like Oviraptor. It's just so tempting to think of something that you see all these beautiful eggs in the fossil record and you think, yeah, something must have specialized in eating those. But it makes more sense that just everything would have eaten them if it got a chance and it'd be hard to specialize on just that.

So yeah, it probably wasn't just for chest bumping eggs, unfortunately. As funny as that would be. Eggs might have been more of a rare treat. Yeah, probably. Parents tend to protect those pretty aggressively. Mm-hmm.

There were some also fun mix-ups over time, like how initially it was thought that Velociraptor's large toe claws were on its hands and that Megaraptor's large hand claws were on its feet. Yeah. Yeah, that's very funny. Yeah, because it's like the Swift Caesar and it was seizing with those hands. Mm-hmm.

including a big claw. And then you find Megaraptor and you're like, well, we'll name it after Velociraptor, which had that big claw on its foot because this one had a big claw on its foot too. And then you find out, oh, wait, no, it has nothing to do with Velociraptor. They're not even really close relatives. That was a hand claw. So that's a taste of what you can find in our book. And again, it's called I Know Dino and the subtitle, if you want the whole thing, Amazing Breakthroughs, Mega Mistakes, and Unsolved Mysteries in Dinosaur Science.

And you can pre-order it now at bit.ly slash ikdbook2025. Yep. Or you could probably go to Amazon and search I Know Dino or wherever else you buy books. Yes. And thank you to everyone who has already pre-ordered and let us know. And if you do pre-order and let us know, we'll send you an exclusive addendum with info on a few dinosaurs we couldn't quite fit into the book. Which if you're a Velocirator...

which is the name we call ourselves for our book launch team. You'll have already gotten this. Don't worry, we've got some other stuff to give our Velocireaders. Yeah, other fun prizes, treats. Goodies. Goodies. And I made a shorter link, so if you want to order the book, you can get it at bit.ly slash inodinobook.

And if you want to tell us that you ordered it so that we can send you that exclusive addendum, you can go to bit.ly slash I ordered the book. Yes. All lowercase. But make sure that you pre-order before April 1st because the book comes out April 1st. As long as it's a pre-order, we will give you the exclusive addendum. Yes, because pre-ordering will help to boost us in the rankings and hopefully more people will see the book that way.

And our fun fact of the day is that no birds today have teeth, but some birds do have tongues which are covered in long spikes. Yeah. And some of them also have serrated bills and all sorts of other things that are sort of analogous to teeth. That fun fact comes from our book.

I think it would be kind of fun rather than saying that the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, if we just said the dinosaurs with teeth went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, because that's also true. And I think it gives a pretty easy, you don't have to know what a non-avian dinosaur is versus an avian dinosaur. That's true. Maybe we'll just start saying that from now on. Yeah.

It doesn't include all of them because there's things that didn't have teeth that also went extinct that were, you know, like some over-raptorids and things that didn't have teeth. So non-avian is more specific. But it is a fun way to say it. The toothed dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. And I guess some of the avian dinosaurs did go extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. So that's not the most clear either.

And then I have another fun fact because that one was so short is that the sharp points in Oviraptor's mouth aren't teeth, but actually points sticking directly out of the palate. Yes, I remember when we were looking at the illustration for Oviraptor in our book, it

And we thought, wait a minute, is this too confusing? Because I think like right next to it or near it, we talk about how dinosaurs today, birds don't have teeth. Yeah, really. And then we have this picture and it looks like it's got two teeth right there on the top of its mouth. But those are actually points in the palate, sort of like you get in some other animals. Sometimes they are palatine teeth. So they're actual teeth sticking out of the palate. But in the case of Oviraptor, they're just these points.

Like bone sticking down from the palate, not really teeth. That's what it was. We talked about how Oviraptors specifically didn't have teeth. That's what would have made that more confusing. Yeah. You look at the picture and you think, wait a second, I see teeth. What do they mean? Yeah. So even the non-avian dinosaurs were doing different tricks where some of them were toothless and they were coming up with ways to basically have the function of teeth without having true teeth in their mouth.

So you can read those fun facts, see that picture of Overraptor, and more if you pre-order our book, bit.ly slash inodinobook. Yes. And then let us know if you pre-order it at bit.ly slash I ordered the book, and we'll send you an addendum. And that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned. Next week, we will have more new dinosaurs and, of course, Dino Duels continues.

And again, if you want to pre-order I Know Dino the book, you can do that at bit.ly slash I Know Dino book. Thanks again. And until next time.