Tolkien's interest in dinosaurs and how it shaped his writing
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Episode 433: Tolkien’s interest in dinosaurs and how it shaped his writing. Professor John Holmes—who recently re-enacted Tolkien’s 1938 dinosaur presentation in full—joins us to share how Tolkien used his knowledge of dinosaurs while writing The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit.

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Dinosaur of the day *Atlasaurus, *a close relative of Brachiosaurus from Morocco that lived 15 million years earlier than Brachiosaurus.

Interview with John Holmes, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. He is an expert on the Gothic Revival and the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He recently recreated Tolkien's 1938 Christmas lecture ‘On Dragons’) which featured several dinosaurs from Oxfordshire.

In dinosaur news this week:

• A new study shows that dinosaurs weren't declining before the asteroid impact, but a shift in which herbivores were most important in their ecosystems may have made dinosaurs more vulnerable to extinction
• Scientists found that climate may have affected the early evolution of dinosaurs including how and where they lived

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