Top 24 Dinosaur Discoveries of 2024
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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 Sabrina. And today in our 523rd episode, we're doing our best of 2024, also known as top 24 dinosaur discoveries of 2024. Yes. Although there might be more than 24 items that we mentioned. Some bonuses. Some bonuses. Some bonuses.

Also, we are still on parental leave. We're expecting our second baby any day now. So we did record some episodes ahead of time because, well, we wanted to make sure that you still got your dino fix while we were out. Yeah, so that means that even though it's the top discoveries of 2024, it's sort of not including November and December. Right. We are up to date as of the end of October, except that I noticed that

Right after we recorded our last October episode, a new dinosaur came out. Yeah, that happens. What we always do with our best of episodes is it's really the best of our show for the year. The things that we covered on the show, the things that we talked about and discussed, not necessarily the things that came out.

technically published this year versus last year because there's always this oddball thing that happens with publications where it may say that the publication date is officially 2024, but it might be available online in its final version for the last five months of 2023. Or in a preprint because we did cover one preprint, which we don't normally do. Yeah.

but it was a cool one. And sometimes also there'll be something that comes out in late December that we don't end up covering until January of the next year. So there's always a little bit of

wiggle room around the dinosaur discovery so if you hear one and you're like wait that came out in 2023 yeah that it happens sometimes 10 out of 12 months i think it's pretty good yeah that just means the best of next year we'll have two extra months in it yes and yeah don't worry we will be covering whatever new dinosaurs come out or came out i suppose in november catching up for sure catching up

So before we jump into all of that, we have a new patron to thank, and that is Rachel Raptor. I really enjoy that name. Thank you very much for joining. And if you have joined since the end of October, you may not get a shout out for a little while because we have prerecorded, like Sabrina was saying. But we promise, as well as including all of the dinosaur discoveries that came out, we will be shouting out all of the new patrons as well. And then rounding out our shout outs, we've got Luke.

Yes, thank you so much for being our patron and supporting our show. And we really, really appreciate all your support, especially while we're taking some time off for our growing family.

I also want to mention in this episode, we do have a new dinosaur of the day, Yin Long, one of the earliest known ceratopsians, because I don't know how or why we started that tradition. But even though these are kind of recap episodes, we have always included a new dinosaur of the day. It's probably from the early episodes where we had so many dinosaur requests that we were so far behind that you were like, I'm going to do one anyway, because I need to try

try to keep up. Could be. But now that we're getting a little more caught up, maybe in the future we might drop that. Also, if we're doing top 24 of 2024 and top 25 of 2025, eventually... It'll get to be a very long list. Yes, without even including a new dinosaur of the day.

So back to our Patreon. A huge thank you again to all our Dino-it-alls, and we hope that you have enjoyed some of the perks from this year. With I Know Paleo and other bonus content, we now have over 100 recordings of premium content on our Patreon, which includes another year's worth of ad-free episodes, as well as 12 new episodes of I Know Paleo. Those topics range from hell ants, gorgonopsians, parasites of the Mesozoic,

And we have nine new extended interviews and some miscellaneous bonus content, like segments on dinosaur phylogeny if you want to get real deep. And we do have more perks and bonus content. We have a short story for our Tyrannosaurus patrons. We have a free audiobook for our Tyrannosaurus and Spinosaurus patrons, as well as a gift package for our Spinal patrons. This year it's an Allosaurus metal print by Jen Cotton, a signed copy of Keep Your Dinosaurs Here, and a really...

I really like how it turned out, this Dino-It-All pen. Mm-hmm. That's a nice pen. So if you want to access those perks and then keep getting perks into the new year, then please consider joining. It's at patreon.com slash inodino. And before we get into our top 24 dinosaurs of 2024, I also just want to mention our most popular episode from 2024 was as of the end of October 2024, because that's when we're recording this, how dinosaurs got so big.

Which was cool to see because I think the last couple of years it was one of your episodes, Garrett, that was the popular. Oh, because that was your episode. We knew that that topic would be popular. A big topic. Yeah. And I've seen that question asked a lot just around. And that was why we did it because somebody asked that question. Yeah. So you did a deep dive into it, which was really cool. Also, I wanted to know.

Yes, the answer is complicated. Listen to episode 486 if you want to know. And of course, there's a lot about sauropods.

So this year, there were a lot of new theropods, which is very different from last year because last year we called the episode the Year of the Herbivore. Yeah, I remember at one point when we were talking about the different discoveries and which ones we were going to cover, you said something like, were there any good sauropod discoveries this year? And we did find a couple that were decent, but... Not as good as the theropods. No, and not as good as sauropods in recent years, I don't think either. Yeah. Yeah.

How did it stack up to that ankylosaur, though? Which ankylosaur? I think there was only one ankylosaur. Oh, you're jumping way into it. Yeah. Oh, I am. I'm giving things away. I'm sorry. The best ankylosaur is way better than the best sauropod, I think. Well, let's jump in.

I'm going to start with a theropod because there's so many theropods. We've got for 2024 best new tyrannosaur. This is a small tyrannosaur, Asia tyrannus. We covered this in episode 508. Yeah, that was a really cool one. Basically, the thing that made it unique is that it had a skull that was sort of deep, muscly.

meaning top to bottom deep and not long and pointy like you see on nanotyrannus or chingosaurus the pinocchio rex yeah which it lived alongside chingosaurus but was half the size and we're used to those smaller tyrannosaurs having long skinny heads this was sort of the first one that had a deeper more like proportionally t-rex head that you see on a theropod rather than

The longer, more gracile head. Yeah. I think also just coexisting with a bigger Tyrannosaur is interesting. And a bigger one that has a longer, skinnier head. Yeah. Really weird. Yeah. So that's the Asia Tyrant. That's what Asia Tyrannus means. Yeah, it was really cool. I also want to point out a couple other things about it. It was about 13 years old, or I should say at least 13 years old, based on the lags. A subadult.

But not that young for a Tyrannosaur, and it may have been closer to fully grown based on the lag spacing. Although I remember pointing out at the time, people have very much rejected that idea.

analysis when it comes to nanotyrannus. So I'm still curious about how big this would have gotten if it actually was nearly done growing or if it would have grown quite a bit more. We really don't know yet. That was a cool one. Then our runner up for the best new tyrannosaurus is actually a species of tyrannosaurus that

Not to be confused with the Greg Paul species of Regina and Imperator. This one is Macraensis. So it's T. Macraensis if you want to do it in the T-Rex format. Yes. It felt like we had to include this one because anytime you have a new species of Tyrannosaurus, it's big news. Yes. We covered it in episode 477. So it came out pretty early in the year.

It's not the first new Tyrannosaurus species in addition to Regina and Imperator. There was also Tyrannosaurus batar, which now is generally considered Tarbosaurus batar. And there was also Tyrannosaurus juchungensis, which later became Juchung tyrannus as its own genus. But this one so far has not been split out into its own genus. We'll see if that happens later.

I think the main reason that this one was split out as a new genus is because it was earlier than T. rex. The rough estimation is maybe five to seven million years before T. rex. And since species rarely last over two million years, it makes sense to have a new species if you're five plus million years away in time. But there were a couple of unique features on the bones as well.

Pretty subtle ones, but for example, the jaw isn't quite as deep as T-Rex and the back bottom of the jaw angles up rather than expanding down dramatically. And there are some other bumps and curves around it. So they think there's enough justification for it to be its own new species of Tyrannosaurus. And I saw virtually no pushback on this one compared to Imperator and Regine, which people did not like.

Yeah, it was interesting how that unfolded. It was very interesting to see the comparison between the two. But I think the biggest one is that time separation, because when it came to T-Rex, Regina and Imperator, all of those came from the same time period and basically pre-existing known T-Rex specimens, whereas this was a newer find and from a newer formation even. I should say older formation. Yeah.

Well, next we have to do an herbivore. So best new titanosaur, Bustongori titan. Although that one was named in 2023, but we covered it in early 2024. Yeah, because like we said, this is really the best of our year of dinosaurs. What's really cool about it is it's one of the largest sauropods ever.

Hmm.

There's five titanosaurs that weighed over 50 metric tons. We got Patagotitan, Argentinosaurus, Notocolossus, Puertosaurus, Dreadnoughtus, and Bustingory Titan now makes six. It was also found in Patagonia. There are more, too, depending on your interpretation. Yes. And your error bars on which ones you're saying are which sizes. Yeah.

But yeah, speaking of large sauropods, there we go. It was cool. And the thing that I think makes it the best new titanosaur of the year is the fact that it came with a partial skull. So there was a jaw with at least 12 tooth sockets, including 10 in situ teeth, which is not something you usually see with sauropod remains. A lot of times we're just finding like

like some vertebrae, a femur, things like that. But this has a lot more of the body. It has vertebrae and legs, but also feet, part of the pelvis. It's got arms, it's got a shoulder, and it's got a jaw with it. So pretty cool. Yeah. And it's got those chisel-like teeth, which are always cool to see. Yes.

We do have a runner-up or honorable mention for best new titanosaur. This one was published in 2024, and that's Kunkasaur. It's a pretty complete sauropod. Well, titanosaur sauropod. It's one of the most complete sauropod skeletons found in Europe. They found the neck, back, tailbones, part of the hips, parts of the limbs.

And what makes it stand out, too, is the unique features in the tail. And it's a saltosaurid, which means it has osteoderms. Or maybe could have osteoderms. Yes, some of them do have osteoderms, but actually what makes a saltosaurid a saltosaurid is details in their tail. I remember this one was fun, too, because the Sora part of the name is actually after a person. Because it's Antonio Sora or Saura or maybe Saura.

Yes, an important painter of 20th century Spain. It's just a fun thing that it's not named after it being a lizard, but instead it's named after someone with Sora in their name. It's fun. It is. Up next, we've got the best new ankylosaur, which when we first talked about it, I said was a contender for best ankylosaur of the year. And it was the only one, I think, so it wins. Yes.

It did. It was also just really cool discovery. It's named Datai, which basically translates to a sensible and stable animal. Yeah.

It's one of those that was discovered during construction work. It was noticed after using explosives. So we don't know exactly where it was found because it was kind of found after it was exploded out and moved a little bit. But it probably wouldn't have been found if that hadn't happened. Very true. Also, by the time it was found, that area is...

now a buried construction site, as they put it. So can't really go back and do any investigating either.

But we do know that the holotype is a juvenile, which isn't ideal since we like holotypes to be from adults. So you're not accidentally comparing young animal characteristics to adult animal characteristics in the same species. We have a whole bonus segment on that on our Patreon about theropods specifically. Is that our bonus phylogeny episode? One of them, yeah. Spoilers. I don't think that's a spoiler. Okay.

The cool thing about this, I think, or maybe the coolest thing about it is that there are actually two individuals and they were preserved stacked on top of each other. The skull of one of them is on top of the neck of the other, which is facing the opposite direction. And they interpreted that to be, as they put it, consistent with the hypothesis that juvenile ankylosaurids are gregarious. In other words, that they were friends and they hung out together. That's nice. Yeah.

So that's pretty much what makes it the coolest ankylosaur, other than it just being the only ankylosaur that I remember, is pretty small. It's only about two-thirds the size of Jinyun Pelta, and a display of Jinyun Pelta in Japan estimated it at about 5 meters or 16 feet long, which would make Datai somewhere around 3 meters or 10 feet long, which is pretty cute and small. Just the right size. Yeah. There was also a little bit of...

pathology with them because there are some holes in the vertebrae which were interpreted as beetle burrows possibly that they were foraging on the soft tissues after Datai died it's not presumed that they were killed by like flesh-eating beetles or anything like that that'd be a way to go

No, the beetles just took advantage of the carcass after. And it's about 90 million years old, which is fairly old for an ankylosaur, especially considering it's considered an ankylosaurid, meaning that it probably had a tail club. Nice.

Next up is our best new abelisaur. Abelisaur is a pretty cool. Those are the ones that have extremely small arms that make T-Rex arms look large by comparison. Yes, at least most of them did.

And this one was found from the late Cretaceous in Patagonia, as many of them are. They didn't give a size or weight estimate for it, but the femur that they found was quite a bit smaller than a Carnotaurus, so it was probably not the biggest.

The thing that makes it such a good discovery, though, is that in addition to vertebrae and some hips, they also found nearly complete hind limbs that go all the way down to the toe claws, as well as several bones from the skull. Yeah, that was cool. Unfortunately, the skull bones are in pretty rough shape, but they do have part of the maxilla, which is in several pieces. And...

a little bit from the top of the head, which from those pieces we can tell that it's probably missing the impressive Carnotaurus horns. But there are only about six lines of arrested growth in the bone, which means that it lived through about six winters and was probably about six years old or a little older if it lost some of the earlier ones in bone remodeling.

But one of the cool things about it is that it has a crest on the side of the snout, whereas Carnotaurus doesn't have that crest. I also like the name. Colican means coming from clay and water. It is a good name.

Going back to the herbivores, there were some good herbivores this year too. There's the best new ceratopsian and that is Loki ceratops. That mischievous one. It is named after Loki. I don't think they named it after Loki for being mischievous. They just said that it refers to the god Loki from Norse mythology.

And then Greek for horned face with Ceratops. If I remember correctly, it's because of the way the horns looked. Yes, they made a comparison to it's sort of this asymmetrical horn situation it's got going on. And it does have some really big, impressive frill ornamentation.

To me, it looks kind of like a center part hairstyle, but it is a little bit off center or maybe not off center, but off symmetry. One of them is a little higher than the other side. A little askew. They did find more than just the skull. They got a good skull out of it, but they also got some vertebrae and shoulder and most of the hips.

The hips are actually really impressive because they have 10 sacral vertebrae between the hips that are all sort of fused together as you get in the sacrum. It also probably lived alongside Wendy Ceratops, Alberta Ceratops, and Medusa Ceratops, as well as the chasmosaur Judy Ceratops. So there were quite a few Ceratopsians going around in this formation. And also...

All of the dinosaurs were found really close to each other as well. At the time, I put it as within a day's walk, probably about 10 kilometers or six miles radius between all of them. What were they all doing together? Yeah.

I mean, presumably eating different things and doing different stuff so that they weren't competing too much. Yeah. But this one's pretty cool. The skull is about 1.7 meters or five feet long. And one estimate put the whole animal at about 22 feet or seven meters long and weighing about five tons, which isn't huge for a ceratopsian, but it's pretty big. And that skull is fairly large, too, for a really heavily ornamented one.

It's also about 78 million years old from the Judith River Formation, in case you're wondering which formation it is that has all of these dinosaurs. Specifically, too, Loki's Ceratops was found near the border between the U.S. and Canada. Seems like almost every year there's a new Ceratopsian found with some cool new head ornamentation. Yeah. What's it going to be next year?

Next up, we have best new, maybe, probably burrowing dinosaur, which is Phona. This one was really cool. It's closely related to Eryctodromeus, which we know was a burrowing dinosaur. Although that's not even, well, that's kind of the reason they think it was burrowing, but it's more like it has all these features and that's how they know it was closely related. It was small and herbivorous. It's been compared in size to like a large dog, about seven feet long.

But you think a lot of that would be tail. And they found multiple individuals in what's probably a burrow, although the burrow hasn't been identified yet. But there are burrows found of Eryctodromeus nearby. So that's

That's why I say maybe, probably did burrow. Yeah, sort of like piled up on top of each other. But also, yeah, it's also got the large biceps, the strong muscle attachments on the hips and legs, fused bones along the pelvis. These are all things that would have helped it with digging. And its legs were proportionally larger than its arms, and the legs and the feet being robust, that would have helped it kick dirt out of the burrow. So it's pretty cool. I always

I also like the name. It means the origin. But there's kind of a long explanation to go with that name. So if you want to listen to that, episode 506. Which, speaking of that episode, because there were so many new dinosaurs, especially around the summertime, it seemed like two or three a week were coming out. So we were covering a bunch in the same episodes. And in that same episode, we also talked about

What's our 2024 best new ornithopod? And the most complete one found in the UK in 100 years, Comptonatus. It was an iguanodont. The last most complete new dinosaur found in Britain was in 1914. That was Mantellosaurus.

So that alone makes it a pretty cool find. Yeah, not a lot of times do we talk about a dinosaur that's the most complete in any category over a hundred year time span. Yes. So the nearly complete skeleton includes the skull. The bones are crushed and heavily piratized, so they're shiny. But that does mean it's hard to see some fine details like muscle scars. And it is missing some parts like the left humerus or upper arm bone.

But they, for the most part, found most of the skeleton, including 40 tail bones, the caudal vertebrae. That's so cool. Because almost always with length estimates, it's like you find five, 10 vertebrae and then they try to extrapolate out. We think the tail was about this long. But if you find 40, you can get a much better estimation at the total length and size of the animal. Yes. Although they said they might be missing a bone or two at the tail. Yeah. That's not so bad.

And in general, iguanodons aren't that well preserved. So this find helps show a lot of things like just them being more diverse than we thought. It's also known for having a really large pubic hip bone that's been compared to the size of a dinner plate. Just to give you an idea of how big this dinosaur was. I think that was like the end on it, right? The boot? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a really cool find.

All right, we did say this was the year of the theropods, and then we went into a whole bunch of herbivores. But going back to the theropods, for this year's best new theropod brow... Very specific category, because we had a lot of good theropods. And that's what this one is known for. We have alfcaracush, which was a large theropod.

So they did find vertebrae, parts of the shoulder and arms, most of the hips and legs, but they also found the skull bones. And it's described as having this distinct quote-unquote eyebrow because it's this protruding, wrinkled eyebrow shape.

On the post-orbital bone, that's the bone behind the eye socket, which shows that there was a horn there. Yeah, they also found two of them, which is really cool because there's the holotype, which they think was about 17 years old or obviously could be a little bit older, as is usually the case. But then there's also a smaller one. Yeah, it was smaller by like 15 to 20 percent. So that one might be a little younger. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's estimated, to give you an idea of how big it got, it's estimated to be about 23 to 26 feet or 7 to 8 meters long. The other really cool thing about it is that it was found in a place where we don't find a lot of dinosaurs, which is in Kyrgyzstan. But apparently there are a lot of good dinosaurs to be found there. It's just a little tricky to get in there and do research. And there isn't a big paleontology community at the moment.

But maybe that will change if there's more cool discoveries like Alf Karakush. Yes. Maybe Alf Karakush is the push that they needed. I was going to say maybe the eyebrow will draw people in. Then we've got best new sauropod vertebra. A little nod to sauropod vertebra picture of the week. Yes. This one comes from Cider Sora. The star lizard. Yeah, because cider means star.

And that's because when you look at the hemol arch of Cytosaurus from the front or back, it looks a lot like a star.

The hemolyarch, just as a reminder, are these things on the bottom of the vertebrae that hold a lot of blood vessels when they're alive. Now they're just pieces of bone. But it looks pretty cool on Cytosaurus. Very cool looking vertebrae, I have to say. They did find several bones from a total of four individuals. They were actually found at the same time as the huge theropod Meraxes gigas, which

which was, I guess, more exciting because they worked on those first. Also, maybe smaller bones and easier to work on. But in addition to the backbone, they did find some other cool stuff like the top of the skull and the scapula, as well as a little bit of the foot and some claws. So overall, really not a bad find. It's just that vertebra is the real star of the show, you might say. That is from Argentina.

We also have an honorable mention that's related to Cytosaurus for Riboccystis sauropod cool finds. Oh yeah, I didn't mention that Cytosaurus is a Riboccystis sauropod. Yes. I think originally we might have called it the best new Riboccystis sauropod, but then we decided to focus on the vertebrae for some reason. Well, this one was closely related to Cytosaurus, Campanianaean.

And this dinosaur had extreme pneumaticity in its skeleton, which means there were a lot of air sacs, like in the hips. There were air sacs that invaded and provided resistance to support the forces of the muscles. And the hips are important for muscle attachments. But since it's so thin, it might have needed some structure to help it so those muscle forces didn't collapse the bone structure of the hips.

So that's a bit of a mystery. But the holotype also includes a brain case in part of the skull, which I think brain cases are not... Well, they're definitely not common for sauropods. Yeah. I'm hesitant to say rare because I feel like depending on who you talk to... Yeah. I mean, brain cases aren't as rare as they at first sound because a brain case makes it sound like you're getting...

a brain or something really closely related to a brain in terms of rarity of fossilizing. But really, it's just if you get that part of the head that contained the brain, you get the brain case with it. It's just the inside cavity of it. Yeah. So as long as it's not

crushed into oblivion or you're only getting a really small piece of the outside, you often get the brain case. Yeah, so pretty cool find. And I just realized we've been talking about these best dinosaurs for a while without pausing for a sponsor break. But we're going to pause real quick for a sponsor break and then we'll get back with some new theropods, get back to the meat eaters for a little bit before getting into a huge set of stegosaurs because, wow, were there a lot of stegosaurs this year.

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Next, we're back to the theropods and we're doing the best and only noasaurid theropod of 2024.

Noasaurids are that interesting group that include both Meshikasaurus, which is known for its long, sharp teeth in the downturn jaw that sort of look like they were sticking out of their mouth like a really nasty underbite in a lot of pictures. And they also include Limusaurus, which lost all of their teeth as adults. So very weird group of dinosaurs, especially when you're looking at their mouths.

This new noasaurid is named Keokursar longipez, longipez meaning long foot, which is kind of fun. And then Keokursar refers to the Kia River and runner. It was found in what's now Western Siberia, Russia.

And it's actually the first ceratosaur from the early Cretaceous in what is now Asia and shows that there were ceratosaurs 40 million years later in Asia than previously thought. So that's pretty cool. That is pretty cool. It's also one of those where...

It had been found a while ago, and it just took a while to get a name. But it was medium-sized at roughly two and a half meters or about eight feet long. And it was at least four years old, I would say. They said they found up to four lags. So maybe you could say three and a question mark fourth lags.

But it was still growing. So it was a sub adult. We don't know exactly how big it would have gotten, but it lived alongside Psittacosaurus and the sauropod Siberotitan. So an interesting little fauna starting to be built up there in what's now Siberia. Yes. Would have been a lot warmer back then, though.

And then we've got our best new Cenonathid or Canonathid, depending on how hard you want to hit that C. Which is a type of theropod. Yes, Cenonathids are theropods. This one's named Eoneophron. I like the rhyme element. It is a fun name to say. Reading it is a little odd looking because it's a lot of O's.

in it a lot of vowels in general but the name is pretty fun because if you remember anzu the dinosaur it means or it was nicknamed chicken from hell and eoneofron builds on that because the genus name eo

means dawn. And then the Egyptian vulture neophron is sometimes referred to as the pharaoh's chicken. And the species name is Infernalis, which basically means hell in Latin.

So when you put it all together, it could mean the Pharaoh's Dawn Chicken from Hell. Ooh, it's quite a name. It is. It's a really cool name. And the reason that they picked that name is because it was found in the same formation as Anzu. And for a while, it was thought to be Anzu. But then they found enough differences in it where they consider it now to be its own genus. And they decided to sort of lean into that chicken from hell nickname that Anzu had and apply it to this new dinosaur.

It is smaller though. It's estimated to be somewhere in the ballpark of about 80 kilograms or maybe 180 pounds. Whereas Anzu is more like 200 to 350 kilograms, which is more in the 450 to 800 pound kind of range. So quite a bit smaller, but even on the light end of its estimates, Eoneophron would have been about the size of an ostrich or bigger.

So not small compared to today's largest bird, but just small compared to Anzu, I guess. And definitely small compared to some of the other stuff going around at that time because it was in the Hell Creek with T-Rex. Yeah. Hard to beat T-Rex. Yeah. Unless you're a sauropod. Keeping with our theropod theme, we've got best new sleeping dinosaur, the troodontid theropod, Hypnovenidor. This one's cool for a number of reasons. The name means sleep hunter.

And it's because it was found in what looks like a sleeping position. Its left arm was folded at an angle at the elbow and wrist, and both ankles are folded. And the way it was buried makes it very well preserved. It's also cool that it was named from Japan, because there aren't a ton of theropods named from Japan. Yes. This one, I believe, is the only troodontid named from Japan.

And like many fossils, we've already talked about one on this episode, it was found during construction, in this case of a public park. They actually found the heel a year later. So that's nice. They were able to find another bone. Yeah. And it had some mosaic features in its feet for grasping and running. So it might help show a transition for later Troodontines being better runners.

That's the Venator part. Yes. So you've got a part for the Hypno that it looks like it was sleeping and it's got some running adaptations for the

Venator. Although I guess that's not running, that's hunting. But presumably you have to run to hunt. I think that's more it being a troodontid. Oh, that's true. Sleeping dinosaur. Careful though, it's still a hunter. The sleep hunter. It also sounds kind of like a monster like Freddy Krueger style. They're going to hunt you in your sleep. Yes. In your dreams. Maybe that'd be a dream hunter more than a sleep hunter. Yeah, sleep hunter sounds more like...

It could be sleepwalking and hunting. That's true, it does. I feel like not a very effective hunter. Or it's so effective it could do it in its sleep. We're going to switch gears a little bit to herbivores. This one's most basal rhabdodontomorph or nithopod. That's a mouthful.

It's the most basal in its group. It's Emeliosora. Maybe you recognize that one because we talked about it fairly recently. Yeah, the cool thing about this one is that they found partial skeletons of two individuals and that it's pretty well documented overall. It's also the first recognized rhabdodontoid ornithopod from South America. This is a group of herbivorous dinosaurs. They're known for their spade-shaped teeth, uniquely shaped femur, humerus, and ulna, so thigh bone and arm bones. And

And if you want to picture one, think like Zalmoxis from Prehistoric Planet. Yeah, rhabdodontomorphs or rhabdodontoids are cool looking dinosaurs. They don't get enough love like most ornithopods. And this one had wide, strong feet. That's good. It's a good idea. Probably not running particularly fast, but it's an herbivore. Yeah. Needed to focus on eating and growing. Mm-hmm.

Then we've got best new psilosaurid, and maybe best name, Gondwanax. And that's because, yes, we are, for now, counting psilosaurids as dinosaurs. Yeah, I think it's fun, at least for now. Not committing to the future to include psilosaurs every time there is a new psilosaur in our best ofs. Depends what the phylogeny papers say. As a reminder, psilosaurs are this group of triassic quadrupedal dinosaurs that...

for now, that sort of fill in the missing piece of where were Ornithischians during the Triassic, because before we only really had them starting in the Jurassic. But we presumed that the first Ornithischians should have been around in the Triassic, and maybe psilosaurs will help fill in that gap. Yes. And this one, Gondwanix, lived in the middle to late Triassic in what's now southern Brazil. So it lived at 237 million years ago.

It's one of the oldest known psilosaurids. And it's the earliest psilosaurid with a sacrum with three vertebrae in between the hip bones because usually that's in later more derived psilosaurids and the earlier ones usually have two, which isn't very many for a dinosaur. And then as for the name Gondwanix, that means Gondwana King or Gondwana Lord. So it's ruling over. It's

Fellow psilosaurs? Or just Gondwana in general. Oh, yeah. There we go. That's more lofty. Yeah. Although there were way bigger, tougher things around at the time. It did what it could. Yeah. All right. This next grouping, we found when we were going through our notes that there were a number of new stegosaurs named. It seemed like we needed to mention that. Yeah. So we've got the most expanded dinosaur group, which is Stegosauria.

At the beginning of the year, there were only about 25 known Stegosaurian genuses, genera. And now at the end of the year, we're up to 28 or 29, depending on how that preprint turning into a full print goes. There might be more, too, since we're recording early. That's true. So even if it's only going from 25 to 28, that would mean that over 10% of all known Stegosaur genera were named this year.

Which is a large number, one in ten, considering how many years stegosaurs have been known, well over 100 years. So we've got Thyreosaurus.

which is a really interesting name because it's stegosaurs and ankylosaurs are part of Thyreophora. Mm-hmm. Thyreophora. Yeah. And I think that one is a pretty early one, which is why they did that more basil-sounding name. Right. It lived in the middle Jurassic. It had these thick osteoderms. They were up to four centimeters or over one and a half inches thick, and they ranged in shape from like kind of egg-shaped to sub-rectangular-shaped eggs.

And they also lay flat on the body. They weren't standing erect. Yeah. So it does sound kind of like a combination of an ankylosaur and a stegosaur. Although I think some details about like the shape of the ribs, like they looked not like a wide, flat body like you get on an ankylosaur. And then some other details made them name it a stegosaur rather than just a generic thyreophoran.

And we've got Bionosaurus, which was also Middle Jurassic, and also had features of both early Thireophorans as well as the early diverging Stegosaurs. So maybe it's really the year of the early Stegosaurs. Well, at least these two are. Yeah.

They only found a partial skeleton, including part of the skull and jaws and neck bone, back bones, and tailbone. So there's not too much to go off of in terms of what it looked like. But they do think it was probably an adult based on some sutures being invisible on the back vertebrae. Yeah.

And with stegosaurs, they seem to be so uncommon in the fossil record that a lot of times when you find it, it's the first time you've seen one in that formation. So you can name a new genus because it's like, well, there's nothing remotely near this time and place. So we're sure we can name a new genus. Then we've got our preprint stegosaur.

I'm not sure how long it'll take to get peer-reviewed. Maybe it'll be fully peer-reviewed by the time this episode airs. Maybe. That's Angustan Guai. Is that the one with oddly shaped feet? It is. It's kind of a thing that it might be known for. This one lived in the late Jurassic, so it's a little later on. And it's those claw-shaped ungules that make it so unique.

Its genus name means narrow claw. Yeah, because usually on stegosaurs, you get broader claws that aren't so... Narrow? Stabby. Stabby. Yes. I wanted to say something other than narrow.

Usually, yeah, the narrow claws are on things that are more predatory. You get the broader, sometimes you call them like hoof-shaped claws, I know. Yeah. And these herbivores, not this time. No, actually, the claw-shaped ungules, similar to the, going back to basal thyriforans, it's more like scolidosaurus, which used its claw-shaped ungules to help support its weight and to dig.

And then the last stegosaur that we've talked about this year is Yen Bailong, which is much newer. It lived in the early Cretaceous. Yeah, in that paper, they actually said there were only 17 valid stegosaurus taxa. I was being pretty broad with the 25. If there's only 17 and we got four new ones this year, that's almost like a 20% increase. Yeah, because this one was named, well, it was

published way earlier in the year so might have been the first or second stegosaur of the year it was also a partial skeleton there were bones from the neck and back one tail bone and parts of the pelvic area that were found but they know it was unique based on features in the upper back vertebrae and pelvis the hips yep so that's the four new stegosaurs that we talked about so many stegosaurs yes

But it was still the year of the theropod. Yeah. We didn't pick out one as the best because they were all pretty partial, right? It was a lot of just backbones or, you know, a little bit of other stuff going on. Yeah. But... They all help fill in gaps in the stegosaur story. Yeah. And there are so few, like we were saying, that any number of them are really useful. If I had to pick, I think I'd go with thyreosaurus just because it has like big old osteoderms on it. Mm.

It's the most ankylosaur-like of them, but I could see arguments for the others too. So switching gears a little bit, our next best of 2024 is the coolest discovery story, which was of the sauropodomorph Musonqua. The team that found it was living on a boat at the time. It was their home in their mobile lab.

During their field expeditions. This is in Zimbabwe. And while they're on the boat. They saw some leg bones sticking out of the ground. That's how they found it. It's like being on. Like those old movies. Where someone's on a boat. And they're like land ahead. Except it's like dinosaur fossil over there. Yeah. I'm imagining them looking through one of those like.

single telescope like those expandable telescopes at the shore looking for any dinosaur bones. Ahoy! So yeah, I like that story of that find. Yep. And that was a pretty small sauropodomorph too, which is cool. Although I guess it's not surprising since we're talking Triassic finds.

I'm going to keep with the sauropod, well, sauropodomorph, I guess, theme for a bit. With most tenacious fossil, this is Ardentosaurus. It was a Diplodocid that survived malicious arson.

It kind of had a long journey from Wyoming. It was found in the Morrison Formation. Then it ended up in Switzerland. Then it was sent to Germany at some point. That's where the malicious arson happened at the museum where it was being held, unfortunately. And now it's in the Netherlands.

And that genus name, Ardentosaurus, means to burn lizard. It refers to it getting burned by the fire because some bones were lost and other bones have the burn marks still. Yeah, that's quite a story. It's amazing how many of the fossils are still in good enough shape that they can study them and actually see all these details on. And then I think you mentioned that there are decent pictures of a lot of them too. So it wasn't a total loss, even the bones that we're missing now. There are photographs. Some of them just aren't

You just can't describe the bones in detail based on them, but it's something. That's why we're all about digitizing. Yes. Just in case. And then moving on, we do have some birds that we covered this year.

We definitely didn't cover all of the birds, but we covered some cool Mesozoic birds. Yeah, we tend to cover them when there's something really exciting about them. Yeah. They are technically dinosaurs. Yes. Sometimes that line between non-avian dinosaur and avian dinosaur, also known as bird, is a little bit hard to distinguish. Yeah. Well, so for 2024 most exciting new Mesozoic bird, we've got Shwe Lingornis.

The pretty and vivid bird, and one of the earliest known birds to demonstrate semi-aquatic adaptations. Yeah, it looked like it had sort of short but powerful looking arms, presumably having to do with maybe a little bit of swimming. It's not as well adapted for swimming as its close relatives, but it helps show that its group...

was more diverse in the niches that they filled than previously thought. I remember you describing it as duck-like, and the fossil, I think, does look fairly duck-like. Yes, but it doesn't have the webbed feet. It had more pigeon-like feet. It was a cool one, and it was a pretty good find, too. You could see most of the skeleton. Yes. And then there were a couple other birds we want to mention.

Mostly because of their names. They're in anti-ornithines. There's avosaurus, which means bird lizard. Yeah. Pretty good description of just about any dinosaur, actually. Yes. And then there's magnus avis, which means big bird. I love that. Me too. Yeah.

Although I think you said that there was like another way they could have Latinized it, but then they chose Magnus Avis because the other one was trademarked or something. Copyrighted for a company. Yeah. Yeah. But I love Big Bird. That's the actual dinosaur now. It's the Big Bird dinosaur. It's pretty good. Speaking of names, we've got Fastest Name Change.

of 2024. Really? Maybe ever. I don't know. It was quick. And that's Jingjia, which got renamed to Jingjiella pretty quickly after it was published.

And even the articles that wrote about it put Jingjia in quotes when it was first published because people already knew that the name was preoccupied by a moth. Yeah. And there were only, what, seven episodes in between us covering the first dinosaur and the renaming, which probably got renamed within just a few months. Yes. And we might not have covered it right away either. Yeah. But months is like light speed when it comes to updating articles. Yeah.

Yes. So those are all our favorite new dinosaur discoveries and names and stories about dinosaur discoveries from 2024. Definitely a lot of cool ones in there, both herbivores and carnivores, I will say. Yes. I also want to mention the best dino connection challenge, or at least my favorite dinosaur connection challenge, and that was the Bubonic Plague.

also known as the Black Death Pandemic. Oh yeah, thank you Tyrant King for that challenge. That was a fun one. The most interesting thing to me that I discovered while digging deep into the connections and not connections between dinosaurs and the plague is that the bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia, and it's actually a parasite-

of the rat flea and that's how it spreads often to people but it's also a parasite of rats so it's a hyper parasite that uracinia the fact that there are hyper parasites was interesting yes but learning that it's called bubonic plague is because it causes buboes to break open and ooze pus which are nodes that can get as large as eggs was very interesting although a little bit gross

And that there are other types of plagues that go along with it too, like pneumonicoccyc and septicemic. But maybe the best news for dinosaurs was that fleas did not coexist with dinosaurs for all of their reign. As far as we know, the oldest fleas are maybe about 165 million years old, or maybe a little bit newer, depending on where you fall on which fleas exist.

are likely to be biting dinosaurs, and there are no direct fossils showing fleas dining on dinosaurs. So we don't know for sure if even if this bacteria or something similar to it existed at the time, if it would have been spread among dinosaurs by fleas. Yes. And I didn't get the chance at the time

to find the connection, but I might have just found it now because the challenge was bubonic plague slash black death pandemic, your choice as to the disease or the outbreak, which I read as if I could find another plague or pandemic. And I did. There's the dancing plague of 1518 or the dance epidemic. It was this dancing mania that happened in modern day France before

for a couple of months. Did we talk about that on the show or were you just telling me about that in regular day-to-day life? I've just been telling you about it and I've been trying to find a way to work it in the show and I think I have because one of the theories is that it was stress-induced mass hysteria but another theory is ergot which is a type of fungi which we talk about in an upcoming episode while we're on parental leave when we get into fungi and dinosaurs and one

And one of the questions I dug into for that episode was if dinosaurs ever ate hallucinogenic fungi, which maybe, maybe not. Listen to the episode. But ergot is one of those that causes hallucinations. And potentially dancing plagues.

So if dinosaurs ate ergot, maybe they would have had their own dancing plague. Is that what you're getting at? Oh my gosh, that would be amazing. Would it be amazing? Well, I mean, it would be terrible for them, but the fact that it happened would be pretty amazing. It would be. There's,

Probably no way we would ever know. It would be a hard one. If you found a bunch of those scratch marks that some dinosaurs make while they're dancing that we have found fossilized, and at the same time you found a fossilized dinosaur with ergot in its gut contents. There we go. That would be a way. That'd be pretty good circumstantial evidence, but that would be quite an unlikely thing to find.

Especially considering a lot of times things that fossilized footprints don't necessarily always fossilize actual bones. A little bonus connection there. Mm-hmm.

Then we always like to do our favorite paleopathology studies of the year. I think our best paleopathology study was about the pathologies of South American theropods. It went through a whole bunch of different theropods and all the different injuries and ailments that they've dealt with. Like there's Kilmesaurus, which has an unknown condition.

cause for its right tibia variation, but it could be caused by a disease or injury from straining the tibia, maybe because of a weakened or broken fibula in the lower leg. There are also occasaurus with vertebrae fused together. There was elamgasum that had arthritis, giving its vertebrae a quote-unquote bamboo appearance. Hmm.

Yikes. Yeah. And then they had a summary of 337 bones that were affected by pathology, and they broke it down by which family they were from, with the biggest group being Tyrannosaurids, accounting for almost 37% of all pathological bones. All that face biting. Yeah, that is some of it. And then I think also just their weight led to a lot of stresses and other injuries. Then Allosaurids were at 23%. Oh, big L. Yeah. Yeah.

And then below you get carcharodontosaurids, other abelosaurids, and then every other family is below 5%. But they did say since big theropods fossilize better, they get more into the data set and maybe you find more pathologies on their bones as a result. That makes sense. It could also be because 39% of the injuries were a type of fracture. You might be more likely to fracture something if you weigh more. So unclear exactly why, but there were

A lot of interesting different types of injuries, including gout, which is a type of arthritis. And I didn't realize they had found gout on a dinosaur before. Too many fatty meats. Maybe that dinosaur was eating too well. Yeah.

Of course, it wasn't just theropods that got injured. So our honorable mention is best paleopathology study. And that's about pladiosaurus pathologies because there were a couple of individuals found with injuries on their tails and the bones were really well preserved. So one individual had a potential tendon injury, which could be it got mired in a mud trap and then the tail, maybe it was semi stuck in place and the dinosaurs thrashing to break free and hurt itself doing that. Mm-hmm.

And then in the other one, there was some kind of external trauma. So some large force that caused some trauma from below the tail. We don't really know what happened. Maybe there was trampling or fighting or playing or mating or just an accidental fall. There were no bite marks, but that still doesn't mean there wasn't a predator involved. Poor Pleidiosaurs. We have a couple other stories we wanted to mention. We weren't sure exactly how to categorize them, but

So maybe best, oldest known paleontologists? There was a news item we covered a while back about petroglyphs found with dinosaur footprints.

Basically, they marked stars next to the dinosaur footprints like they were marking them to study them in the rock. We don't know for sure that they were studying them, but it did look like based on where the stars were that they were doing it intentionally next to the footprints and not just randomly on the same piece of rock where there happened to be dinosaur footprints. Yes. And the people who made these marks might have done it around 10,000 years ago, give or take.

So those could be the oldest paleontologists. Yeah. Maybe. But what's really cool is that it shows there was probably a close relationship between the petroglyphs and the dinosaur footprints, meaning the petroglyphs were there on purpose by the footprints. And then another one I want to mention is our best friendly sauropod study. Trying to shoo that murderous sauropod. They're not murderous. They take care of their young.

At least this sauropodomorph did, the fungosaurus. And yeah, I just wanted to show and remind people that sauropodomorphs could be caring.

At least that's the interpretation of this Lufungus oris. What was it? It was an adult found with some juveniles and that's the logic behind it, I think. There was a bone bed with embryos, sub-adults, adults, and a partial hatchling. And the team compared the embryonic and hatchling bones with modern birds to

To kind of get an idea of the levels of parental care. And it seemed like the thigh bones developed at a similar rate to modern pigeons and chickens. And that helped show that Lufungosaurus, in the beginning, it was helpless when it was young and it needed parents to feed them. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So it wouldn't have been strong enough to take care of itself. Yes. And the fact that they were found together with these weak bones...

heavily implies that there was some care happening. Yes. So at least those sauropodomorphs were friendly to their own young. Yes. You're really narrowing it down. Yes. Maybe we'll find more evidence of other sauropods. Mm-hmm.

There are also several Spinosaurid updates this year. I just want to sort of quickly go over them. There was a new Spinosaurid, Rioja Venetrix, that we talked about. It's actually the fifth Spinosaurid named from the Iberian Peninsula because there are quite a few of them over there at the moment. Unfortunately, they don't have any of its head, but they did have a few other bones and they were unique enough that they decided they could name their own genus.

So now there are five. There were also studies on spinosaurs diving or not diving, their ability to hunt in the water or out of the water. Also details about skull shapes of spinosaurus and how that may show whether or not they were in or out of the water. That one didn't really clear things up. No. And that spinosaurus had skulls and teeth that...

that would have allowed them to go after large prey, which was a cool one. It was a pretty recent one. So it was still a lot of sort of back and forth. None of them really nailed down exactly how Spinosaurus or Spinosaurus in general would have behaved. But there's just a lot of research ongoing with Spinosaurus. I think that's how it's going to go for a while. Need more fossils. It's a lot of people working with very limited data trying to make their inferences.

There were also a few updates to Tyrannosaurs. The most exciting one, I think, is that there were some Tyrannosaur gut contents. This came out of a juvenile Tyrannosaur, estimated to be in the ballpark of five to seven years old. It was a Gorgosaurus. It was probably about four meters long and weighed maybe around a

half a ton or a little less much smaller than an adult gorgosaurus which is more like nine meters and three tons really this juvenile was roughly the same size as a utah raptor you could think of it that way but the cool thing is in the gut contents they actually found dinosaur remains actually two dinosaurs they're both identified as the over raptor asaur

city pez or cheaty pez based on the position in the guts they say they were quote consumed in two separate feeding events both of those in the gut contents were probably under one year old so they were not the biggest dinosaurs and city pez already was kind of a small dinosaur but they could tell they're under a year because they don't have any lags or those lines of

And Gorgosaurus also didn't eat the whole animal. It only ate the legs, which is a little weird. We don't know if it's because the rest of the dinosaur had already been eaten or maybe the leg had a good amount of meat that it was going for, or maybe in a very crazy hypothesis, it just snapped off a leg and couldn't manage to get the rest of it and it

hobbled away that almost certainly didn't happen but it's just really interesting to see that we have an actual confirmed piece of evidence of a tyrannosaur eating another dinosaur in gut contents i guess it happened once before because there's a 2015 study that showed a displetosaurus with a vertebra from a juvenile hadrosaur in its stomach

But it's also a good example of the two that we have are both T-Rex or not T-Rex, neither of them are T-Rex, Tyrannosaurs eating juvenile dinosaurs. Because a lot of times when people are talking about dinosaurs eating each other, you're imagining two adults going after each other. But this was good evidence of, no, you go after the babies if you can. They're a lot easier pickings. Safer. Yep.

We also did a deep dive into NaNoToranis and the state of that debate. I'm not going to get into it now because it's too much. Episode 478 if you want to listen to it. Exactly.

And we also did another deep dive into T-Rex intelligence in episode 493. There's been some back and forth on that one. The moral of the story there is it was probably not nearly as intelligent as a baboon, which had been previously reported. Probably closer to something like a bird or an emu or ostrich. I mean, those are birds, but... Yeah, still pretty intelligent. Yes. It would still know you were there even if you were standing still. Yes. Yes.

So we have started our episode with Tyrannosaurs and ended with them. I guess theropods if I'm going to keep with the theropod theme, but yeah, Tyrannosaurs are theropods. We're going to get into our Dinosaur of the Day yinlong in just a moment, but first we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. And now we'll get into our Dinosaur of the Day yinlong, which was a request from PaleoMike716 via our Patreon and Discord. So thank you.

It was a Ceratopsian that lived in the late Jurassic in what is now Xinjiang, China, about 161 to 155 million years ago. It was found in the Xishu Gou Formation.

It's one of the earliest known Ceratopsians, and it's the first unquestionable Jurassic Ceratopsian species. Like definitive, unquestionable, all the adjectives that get thrown in to make this find the really important one, according to the authors. Yes. We did mention it briefly in our milestone episode, 450, our celebration of Ceratopsians, but it was worth going into much more detail because I think we only talked about it for less than a minute. Yeah.

It was small. It was about 3.9 feet or 1.2 meters long and weighed up to 22 pounds or 10 kilograms. It also probably walked on two legs and had shorter arms and long legs. Its arms were less than 40% the length of the legs, which is why we think it walked on two legs. It had long, robust legs and shorter, more slender arms with three fingers on each hand. It had a deep, wide skull. Its skull was proportionally larger relative to its body.

It's larger than most Ornithischians, but smaller than other Ceratopsians. It didn't have a frill. It didn't really have horns. There is another Ceratopsian that lived around the same time and also didn't have horns. That's Hualien Ceratops, which was named in 2015.

Yinlong had a small rostral bone at the end of the upper jaw. It's that beak at the tip of the snout. And that's what makes it a ceratopsian, because surprisingly, it doesn't have to do with the frill or the horns. Yeah. I mean, I guess we should know that because there are the little ceratopsians that don't have frills and horns, but the name ceratopsian, it's all about the horns. Well, this one is a little one that didn't have frills or horns. The type species is Yinlong down's eye. The

The genus name means hidden dragon. And yes, it does refer to the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Because a lot of that movie was filmed in Xinjiang near where the fossils were found. Oh, that's interesting. The species name is in honor of the paleontologist William Randall Downs III, who often took part in paleontological expeditions to China and who passed away the year before Yin Long was found. And those fossils were found in 2004. And then Yin Long was named in 2006 by Xu Xing and others.

The holotype is well-preserved and includes a skull. It's only missing part of the tail. It's probably a sub-adult based on some openings on the vertebrae. Seven gastroliths were also found with the holotype, and they were about one to one and a half centimeters in diameter, or roughly half an inch, and they were exposed within the rib cage, and they were proportionally large relative to the dinosaur's body size. So that means it would have swallowed gastroliths to help it digest plants.

Now, yinlong had a mix of features. There was some ornamentation at the back of its skull, which before was thought to be a thing only pachycephalosaurs had. As a side note, ceratopsians and pachycephalosaurs, they're part of the same clade of ornithischians called marginal cephalia. And so yinlong helps show that pachycephalosaurs and ceratopsians are indeed part of that group. It also helps show that later ceratopsians lost a lot of those marginal cephalian features and evolved their own features early on.

Now, Yinlong also had features in the skull similar to heterodontosaurids, which helps show heterodontosaurids are close relatives of marginosephalians. However, later studies didn't actually support this. Although, a 2020 study did find heterodontosaurids to be a group within pachycephalosaurs. Yinlong helps show that ceratopsians evolved the beak and large triangular head early on, but didn't evolve the frill and the large bodies that required walking on all fours until the early Cretaceous.

There was a 2015 study of the skull and jaws that found that Yinglong had a lot of features in common with Psittacosaurus and Neoceratopsians, and Neoceratopsians include dinosaurs like Triceratops. There was one small specimen that also had a canine-shaped tooth in the premaxilla, the front of the jaw, which could be sexual dimorphism or could be individual variation. Canine in a Ceratopsian skull. That's interesting. Yes. Well, canine-shaped. Yeah.

A 2017 study of nine skeletons of yinlong, which were all well-preserved, found more features that were unique to ceratopsians like details in the hips, specifically a blade-like prepubic process. That's this bony extension that extends forward from the hip socket toward the front of the animal. Yinlong lived on marshland near a small mountain range with volcanoes.

Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include, well, there's the Ceratopsian Hualienceratops, as well as the Stegosaurid Jiangjunosaurus, sauropods such as Mementiosaurus, and theropods including the toothless Limusaurus and the Tyrannosauroid Guanlong. Some other animals that lived around the same time and place include pterosaurs, crocodilomorphs, early mammals, and turtles.

And our fun fact of the day is a callback to our favorite fun fact or my favorite fun fact. And that's that the first dinosaurs had teeth, but later dinosaurs had over a thousand teeth.

And others had no teeth at all. Like lemosaurs. Yeah, exactly. And some of the dental batteries that you find in some of the titanosaurs and ornithischians. My favorite fun fact, which I guess is the runner up since I'm going next. It could just be our other favorite fun fact. Yeah.

This one's that Protoceratops may not be the inspiration behind the griffin, which Mark Witten has been talking about for a long time and got into great detail about and makes a lot of good points.

Yeah, because for a long time, it was assumed that since Protoceratops had been found in the Gobi Desert recently, and that there happened to be people in that region trading things and traveling around the world, that maybe the knowledge of those fossils was discovered in antiquity. And that story made its way to Greece and other places where people had the legend of this griffin. But it turns out maybe not.

Maybe not, because there's things like the griffin is supposed to be guarding gold, but Protoceratops fossils were found really far away from the nearest gold deposits, just to name one of the things. Yeah, because that was one of the details where it was like, well, there's gold in Mongolia and there's Protoceratops. Maybe they were found together and that's why it's guarding gold. But then there are also a bunch of details about...

Other mythical creatures and how they come about and the fact that the griffin is basically all modern animals, you know, it's like eagle and lion and things like that. You don't need a Protoceratops. It's not the simplest explanation that somebody found a Protoceratops, put it together really well, completely lost it to any recordings anywhere. And then it turned into a griffin myth. Just doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, it's really hard to prove.

that dinosaurs inspired legendary myths. Yeah, I think it makes sense if it's more of a vague notion of...

Where we have heard about people talking about there was this huge footprint. And so we assume there was some huge deity here or some huge creature lived here. That makes perfect sense. But to say this specific animal was based on a reconstruction of a fossilized animal is a lot less likely. Yes. Because you'd have to actually excavate those fossils and do a pretty good job of putting them together and then.

A lot of times it's based on our modern understanding of it, not what you might expect if somebody was doing their very first guess at reconstructing one of these animals. And I like that fun fact because I know on the show we've talked before about maybe dinosaurs were the origin for a lot of these mythical creatures, including the griffin, but it seems like probably not.

So it's good to put the skeptical cap on and acknowledge that maybe that wasn't true. Things aren't always what they seem. The fun story isn't always the right story.

So yeah, that is our top discoveries and news items from 2024. Just for fun. It's kind of nice to look back at what all happened throughout the year for InoDino in addition to covering all these new discoveries. We did cover 46 new dinosaur discoveries, including a lot of enantiordithenes. That's a lot. Yeah, I think last year was a little bit less. It's nice to see that number climb back up a little bit. Yeah. We also celebrated nine years of the podcast with our Parasaurolophus patch. Next.

Next year is 10, and that's a big one for us. You'll see we have a lot of cool ideas in the works. Including another new patch. Yes. We got a new logo. Thank you to Tara for that one. We did our first Dino It All challenge, which spanned about eight episodes over this summer. That was a lot of fun to write. And to come up with trivia questions and see everyone's answers.

Next year, we have our National Geographic Kids book coming out in April. So if you want to sign up to join our launch team, head over to inodino.com slash book dash launch, and we'll have some perks that go with it.

We also did a Dino Day livestream with Dinosaurs Will Always Be Awesome, Common Descent, and Weird and Dead, which was a lot of fun. We finally got a centralized place to go if you have questions and feedback for us. That's bit.ly slash dino questions, which you are welcome to submit. We started spotlighting our Dino It All communities projects in our newsletter, and there are a lot of really cool projects.

We added more hotspots to our museum map, so thank you to everyone for those suggestions.

We had our updated holiday gift guide, which was a lot of fun to see all the cool new dinosaur-themed stuff that came out this year. Doesn't have to be just a holiday gift guide. You can use it as a gift guide at any time. That's true. We don't take it down for the year just because the holidays are over. We also celebrated 200 years of dinosaurs, speaking of holidays, with Megalosaurus. We did a live stream.

And we also had a special episode dedicated to it, episode 482. And then we celebrated 100 years of Velociraptor in episode 519. I'm just realizing now that Velociraptor was named 100 years after Megalosaurus. That's kind of fun. Yeah. We had, of course, our April Fool's episode, also known as our April Fowl episode, where we're keeping up with our bird theme. We did our first book club episode. We had a mini series all about trace fossils, like tracks, burrows, fossilized poop.

Of course, we had our milestone episode. We had episode 500 this year, which was all about raptors. That was exciting. We opened our Patreon store. If you're a paid patron, you get free access to our watch list of our recommended dinosaur movies, TV shows, and documentaries. And if you're a teacher or you're looking for lesson plans, we're also selling a few of those. One of them is sorting herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores. Pretty fun if I do say so myself. Yeah.

And then probably our biggest thing that happened this year is that we hatched our second baby. We did. I guess technically they might have hatched a lot earlier. If you're getting into the how eggs work in the mammalian system. Okay, well. Birthed. Okay, birthed, yes. Had our second baby. I was trying to keep it fun. I had to be pedantic and ruin it. Yes. Okay.

So, yes, we're looking forward to 2025. Again, we'll be celebrating 10 years of I Know Dino and we will be celebrating all year. And one of the things we'll be celebrating is a new recording studio that Garrett is actively working on. Yes. Hopefully that will be finished soon. I've been working on it for a very long time. Yes. Slow going.

And one last piece of news for 2024 is that we won our first podcast award. We got the Hubstopper 2024 Award for Best Science and Technology Podcast. Yes. So thank you so much to our listeners who you guys have made this possible. And we appreciate our community and everyone who likes the show.

Yeah. Thank you all for listening to us for the last 10 years and helping us reach that really cool milestone because we've wanted to be a quote unquote award winning podcast for a while. And now we can officially say it.

There's also some other upcoming dinosaur things we're excited about for 2025, including Jurassic World Rebirth coming out in the summer. We're also going to see what happens with those two big controversial abstracts from SVP, the new Spinosaurus species and the Saurophaganax disappointment of it maybe being a sauropod. Yeah.

There's also the teen Rex, which is on display at the Denver museum of nature and science while it's being excavated that hopefully we'll find out more about next year. And of course the ongoing preparation on the dueling dinosaurs in North Carolina, which is that Tyrannosaur and Ceratopsian possibly preserved mid battle. Oh yeah. That'll be exciting to see. Yeah. So a lot of cool stuff coming up in 2025. Yes.

So thank you so much for listening. Stay tuned. Our next episode will be all about dinosaur dancing and movement to kind of kick off the new year. The dancing fever or dancing hysteria. I was thinking the new year is when people often like to dance, get more fit and exercise. Yeah. Also dance New Year's Eve. So that seemed fitting. But sure, we can link it back to a plague.

You make it sound like I'm making it depressing. And if you want access to any of our bonus content or our Discord channel where you can connect with fellow Dino-it-alls and a bunch of other perks, then please join our Patreon. That's patreon.com slash inodino. Thanks again, and until next time. Watch me walk on my dinosaurs.

Before you go, one last reminder that we're about to mail out our limited edition Allosaurus patches to all of our patrons at the Triceratops tier and above. And if we reach 400 paid patrons by the end of February 28th, 2025, then we're also going to send everyone a Parasaurolophus and Styracosaurus patch along with the Allosaurus patch.

If you want to help us reach our goal and also help us continue to make the podcast, please head over to patreon.com slash inodino. Again, that's patreon.com slash inodino. And a huge thank you to everyone who joins and has joined.