The Age of Dinosaurs with Henry Gee

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Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. Hello, I hope you're doing well and I have a question for you today.

“I want to see answers in the comments, what is your favorite dinosaur?”

Because that is what we are covering today. We are covering the whole age of dinosaurs, so over 100 million years of paleontology from triassic to their extinction, with a fan favorite guest returning to the show, none other than Doctor Henry G. I loved doing this conversation, you're going to hear what my favorite dinosaur is, what

Henry's favorite dinosaur is, and so many other things, I think my favorite part of this interview was addressing the question of whether dinosaurs did swim or not, still one whereas

a big bone of contention around it, but we cover that and so much more, Henry, as always,

his family, but he's also incredibly engaging at the same time, I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go.

“250 million years ago, our world witnessed the greatest mass extinction event in its 4.5 billion”

year history. 90% of life was wiped out, it's known as the Great Dying for a reason. The world took millions of years to recover, but ultimately it did. This great dying beckoned in a brand new prehistoric world. At this time, Earth still only had one giant continent known as Pangea, and it soon became full of new and diverse life.

There were giant crocodile-like apex predators, herds of bizarre, heavy herbivores, small creatures that borrowed into the soil, the earliest mammals, and amongst all of this emerged a group of reptiles that would go on to dominate the world, the dinosaurs. Over 100 million years, dinosaurs would rule the lands, diversifying into all shapes and sizes, from great carnivores to arm-applated plant heaters to small feather-covered raptors, until

they too, ultimately fell foul to their own mass extinction. Today we're going to talk you through their story from beginning to end more than 100 million years of dinosaur history. This is the Age of Dinosaur's, with our fan favorite returning guest, Dr. Henry Gigi. Henry, Legend of Paleontology, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast.

Thank you very much, Tristan, Legend, I'm more than myth.

Well, today we've got a big topic, Henry, but we always have big topics with you, we've

done the origins of life on Earth, and we've done the rise of humans. Now we're going to cover the Age of the Dinosaur's from beginning to end. In about 60 minutes or so, it's another big task, are you ready to give it a go? I'm ready, fantastic. So with the Age of the Dinosaur's Henry, where should we begin, when are we talking?

“I think you should cast your mind back if you will to about 250 million years ago, right?”

This is somewhat before the dinosaurs came along, but it was a very important moment in the Earth's history.

So, 250 million years ago, what's happening?

That was the great dying, that was the end of the Permian period, when a series of super volcanic eruptions released toxic gasses into the atmosphere and poisoned the sea and resulted in the extinction of 95% of all life in the sea and over 70% on land. So this was the Earth's greatest attempt to extinguish life in the past 500 million years, but that was followed by the terrific, triatic period, and it was in that, that the dinosaurs

and many other things originated. And it seems important to highlight straight away, so when talking about dinosaurs, in the story of the emergence of life on Earth, they actually come about pretty late in the story. So, before 250 million years ago, we've got all of these other creatures that

onto the sea in the triatic.

“Yes, what happened was after the great dying at the end of the Permian period, life, as”

you know, has a motto, which is whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So the triatic period, which if anyone were going to ask is my favorite period of the whole of life, that was a triumphant raspberry to the end Permian extinction, and after

a few million years, in which life got its breath back, during which there was basically

one genus of reptile that mattered, life to Thorous. Life to Thorous was no, it was more close to the ratio of us than to dinosaurs, but only very recently. Life to Thorous was across between a pig, a golden retriever, and an electric can opener, and it used to go around hovering up everything on the Earth, and it was a kind of a disaster

to tax on.

“But after a while, other things came out from under there where they were hiding, and”

there was a tremendous evolutionary radiation of all kinds of bizarre reptiles, the

like of which have never been seen had never been seen before, and died out during the

triatic period, which was lasted 50 million years. So there were all kinds of completely bonkers, aquatic reptiles, many of which died out, but some which persisted like the famous Ikthia swords, which became to look like dolphins, and the largest Ikthia sword shown as Thorous lived in the triatic period. It was about 21 meters long, it was a big beast, and various other crazy things. There were things like tannies, trophies that was a kind

of lizardy thing with a neck that was longer than its body and tail combined. There was a strange flying reptile called Charavittorics, in which the wings were formed by the hindlands,

“leaving the front limbs free, which is completely back to front, and there were some”

other very strange creatures called Dripana swords, and there were, there was the emergence of things that we see today, lizards, the ancestors of snakes, the earliest mammals, frogs, originated, but also some other things terrorist wars, the flying cousins of dinosaurs originated in the triatic, and there were all kinds of gigantic crocodile-like things called Rauysukians, which were huge predators. They were quadruped, but some had heads that looked like Tyrannosaurus.

They were big porotis, carnivores, but in the middle of the triatic emerged the dinosaurs,

and for a long time they were just the kind of second violins in the orchestra reptiles behind

the star soloists, but they originated in the middle of the triatic amid all this flourish of biological diversity, and if you were to go and visit the triatic period, you'd not know or suspect that these unassuming crocodile-like reptiles among a whole load of others would one day inherit the earth. And just also to paint more of a picture of this triatic world Henry, you know, following that massive extinction event, do we know what the triatic world

looks like for those earliest dinosaurs and all of the other animals that were roaming the world at that time? In the triatic, the all the major land masses of the earth were united into a gigantic supercontinent with these days called Kanjir. And if you were to look at it, it was a kind of a seashape. It extended almost from pole to pole. In the the Gulf of the sea, that was what was called the Tethis Ocean, and there were various islands and other little continents in there. One was

South China, which at that time was a kind of land that time forgot. That was a kind of strange island continent. We all sort of ancient relics. But the climate was very, very extreme. Because water could flow to the North Pole and the South Pole, there wasn't the extreme contrasts of weather that we see of climate that we see today. There was no ice, there was no permanent ice caps. However, the Tethis Ocean, because of the surrounding continent, had very extreme climate.

It was a kind of mega monsoonal climate. Also, because panjir was so huge and quite a lot of it was far from the sea, there were some very, very hot deserts in panjir. So not the climate, but the general, well, yes, the climate of panjir generally was very different from the the very zonal climate we have today. But there were still great extremes of temperature and weather and precipitation. And do we get different kind of ecosystems in this great land as depending on

the climate and the locations? So do we get particular animals rising to the four in certain places,

Lystrosaurus and other reptiles live more or less everywhere. But certainly in the towards the poles,

“these were the lands where giant relic amphibians lived. Huge predatory salamanders were in the”

water courses. In the tropics, various things live, but things don't fossilize well in the tropics, but certainly in the deserts, that's where mammals originated. The little tiny mammals,

which were tiny things the size of shoes were basically night and evening and early morning

feeders, they used to live in their boroughs when the temperature was very very hot and come out in them morning and evening. And we know even in those early times, some of these animals had already specialized some had teeth that could crush beetles and others lived on on moths, which are softer and as we know, a moth is a male myth. But the dinosaurs originally lived at more temperate latitudes, along with a various other reptiles, and that's where they were kind of confined

“for quite a long time. And so, take a look at Henry, what do we know about these earliest”

dinosaurs and where they were living and what distinguished them from those other great creatures that were front and center at that time in the Triassic? The dinosaur started as kind of rather graceful quadrupeds, think of them as kind of greyhounds with small heads on moneks,

and possibly like doors always. They were related to creatures such as silessaws or

Athanasaws, which are reptiles, which are kind of graceful and live and ran around on four legs, like kind of false dogs. But there were a lot of other creatures like that that are related more closely to modern crocodiles, which used to be very much more barriers in their forms than they are now. Among this group of creatures were the Laga pertins, which were similar, which were probably more closely related to the territories, although

the actual transitional form of terrasaws is unknown, and they appear in the Triassic with wings, more or less fully formed. And so, the ancestry of terrasaws is a big question mark. But the dinosaur seemed more closely related to these four Laga things, and they evolved in the kind of temperate regions into bipeds, and it was that that really marked their success. Now there were other bipedal creatures related to them, but it was something about the balance

and poise of these creatures with straight backs, long legs, long tails to count of to count to balance their bodies and necks, and initially rather small heads, and they were quite fast runners. They were kind of chicken sized creatures. I could tell you an anecdote about some of the chickens we had in the G family, which you'll probably cut out, but I'll tell you anyway, me and Mrs. G like to adopt X battery chickens, and most of these are free range, but occasionally

we have adopted a chickens that come from battery farms, and their bodies, they don't have

“many feathers on, and you have to have them with little jumpers that start with, but also because”

they're battery farms, they're completely unsocialized. So we had a few of these chickens in the garden, and then I watched them back door as Mrs. G was chased round and round by these vicious little creatures, and she came back in and said, "Don't go out, it's Jurassic Park out there."

So, anyone who thinks that birds aren't dinosaurs, birds and dinosaurs aren't realators is never

kept chickens, but I digress. The earliest dinosaurs were rather like this, and the earliest dinosaurs that we know about tend to come from deposits in southern Africa and Argentina, and they're already showing signs of diverging into the major groups of dinosaurs. They were the small meeting team types, some of which grew to quite large size, Herrera Soros was a very early meeting meeting dinosaur that was a couple of meters long, maybe more, quite big, but they were also specialising to be

herbivores, the ancestors of these gigantic land whales of the of later ages, like the brachia sources and the diplodocuses, but these were kind of pro-sauropods, not the sauropods, which were the big ones. And these were quite big, they had small heads, long necks and others, long as they were going to be, and could often be bipeds. Platyosaurus is one that's a very well known from lots of remains in Germany, particularly. But already in the triassic, they were

beginning to specialise, and as the triassic progressed, the dinosaurs slowly began to fill ecological

is just the normal cause of what happens. Extinction is basically gold's way of telling you

to slow down. So there were various kind of reptiles that were herbivorous reptiles that began extinct. And the sauropods filled those gaps, similarly with the kind of more predatory, alligator-type rhosucians, the carnival filled those gaps. They were still eating some of the reptiles that were hangovers of earlier ages. In the triassic, the descendants of lystosaurus, that kind of disaster tax on, grew into enormous forms, the size of cows, or rhinos.

There's one called placerius that looked as serious, rather depressed, moving sofa that was eaten by these things. And are you really, you really do down the lystosaurus and the placerius? Oh no, the lystosaurus were fantastic. They were my favorite fossil reptile of all time, because they were so brilliant, filling in all the holes. They ate everything, and didn't really like golden retrievers. They didn't really care whether it was really edible, or they just eat it.

And these, we know a lot about these creatures, these things that were pro-to-mammals, because

“a lot of them made boros, and that's how they withstood all these mass extinction events.”

We have fossils of them still asleep in their boros. These are known mainly from Southern Africa, the great crew beds. They'd been known for decades and decades, but they're also known from Russia,

a lot from Russia and other places. But the dinosaurs we first pick up in South America and South

Africa are also, there's another great radiation of dinosaurs, the so-called Ornithiscians, that would eventually give us the arm of dinosaur, stegosaurus, and carlisaurus, triceratops, my white favorite dinosaur. But these were at the time small bipedal creatures as well, maybe there were distinguished by their relations in their teeth. It's the dentition that usually leaves the evolution in these things, but it was only because various other creatures were becoming

extinct, that the dinosaurs slowly, slowly, slowly became more common, so that by the end of the triatic, they were pretty much it, but there were still major hurdles to overcome.

“Before we go on Henry, you did mention one phrase, "Important phrase in there that I think”

it's important too." So to clarify what we mean by it, ecological niches, what are ecological niches? Well, ecological niches are the kind of living space in which creatures live. So an ecological niche could be a herbivore that browses on tall trees, for example. So if there are already lots of herbivore living around that brows on tall trees, there's no room for other creatures to evolve into that space, as it were. Similarly, you have ecological niches, you have large carnivores,

and small carnivores, a middle-sized carnivores, and each one occupies a different space in the ecosystem so that they can all live together. So that in the middle-traffic, they were already large smaller middle-sized herbivores, and large smaller middle-sized carnivores. So with the dinosaurs when they evolved, had to kind of hang around. They were very marginal. They had to wait till their turn payment till all the other ones became extinct or scarce, so they could move in and occupy

those same niches. Because all sorts of other things were happening at the time, plants were evolving. A lot insects were evolving a lot. The landscape, even though I painted the picture of Pangea, this is great dollop of a supercontinent, the climate in that was changing all the time. It was Pangea was moving around. There was a lot of volcanoes going on, and there were long spells of calm, and then there were periods of leg turbulence. So life wasn't static.

So let's go forwards now to the end of the Triassic. So Henry, very briefly,

“what time period are we talking about that we usually mark as the end of the Triassic period?”

Is that 220 million years ago? About 200. About 200 million years ago.

It's a long, interesting period, and I have to say we are talking about the dinosaurs, but I want to bang the drum for the Triassic. Because we tend to think of the Triassic as the period in which dinosaurs appeared and forget all the other amazing things that happened in the Triassic. And we forget to realise that the dinosaurs for a long time could have at least the first half of the Triassic were very, very minor features of the foreigner and tended only to live in

particular places. They didn't live all over the world, which they were to do later. But the end of the Triassic was marked by one of these gigantic mass extinctions. It was one of the big five. I mean, the end permeant that began the Triassic was the biggest. And the end Triassic was definitely

volcanic event. It was a bit slower to happen. What happened was pangear was beginning to unzip.

“There was a fault line in pangear. As you remember in continental drift, North America was”

basically glond up against North Africa and Europe up to as far as Norway and Greenland. And

that was a very, very old seam that had been an ancient mountain range, which before had been an ancient ocean. But it now forms the, you know, that those old mountain ranges form the Scottish Northwest Highlands and the Appellations, very old mountains. But along that seam, there was a rifting, a bit like the current rift valley in Africa. What happened was the continents were beginning to pull apart and sediment slumped into the middle and formed lakes that came and went

until eventually the ocean came in. That was the, that seaway was what eventually became the Atlantic Ocean. And that caused pangear to start to split up. And it was a lot of volcanism at the time and climate change radically. And the end of the triassic saw the extinction of all these

amazing reptiles that evolved in the triassic that you know, all these weird things, only ever

lived in the triassic. And only a few things came through. It spelled almost the end of the giant amphibian. There's all those, some of them did hang on till the curtages. The exterior saws hang hung on and the ancestors of what became those other great marine staples of the, of the dinosaur age of cleatus, saws, they hung on. But, and so did the terrace saws and the mammals. And of course, the dying of saws, they managed to hang on and replace everything that had,

everything they hadn't originally replaced on land. So they became the, the dominant group of creatures

“on land at the end of the triassic, after that great rifting. And I remember a cartoon I saw in”

punch once of a large rather dim looking dinosaur standing over a widening crack in the earth. And a small intelligent looking dinosaur says, I'd make your mind up soon if I were you, the continents, beginning to drift apart. So it was in that landscape that the dinosaur had the early Jurassic period, which followed the triassic, that the dinosaurs really came into their own.

And it's fascinating because we always associate the dinosaurs with, you know, they're

ultimately going extinct with the other extinction event that we'll get to later. Yes, spoiler, spoiler alert. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to jump ahead. But what I was saying that is that we forget that actually dinosaurs early run, they did survive another extinction event where so many other animals didn't

“know, why do you think the dinosaurs survived this extinction event when so many other animals don't?”

No one knows. This is the great thing about extinction, which is kind of a lottery. Extinctions are basically the sum of a lot of tragic individual deaths. And even though maybe a lot of dinosaurs died a few survived. And it was maybe just a lottery that the, I don't know, Placadont or Rahuysucians or all these other reptiles in the where are they now files didn't survive. So a lot of these things were very similar to each other. So it was probably

a bit of a lottery that they, the sum survived and some didn't. So we get to the beginning of the next period. So the Jurassic period, it's people think of Jurassic Park and so on, although I do like your chapter in your book, which says Triassic Park, that's great. But we emerge into the Jurassic world, post this extinction event, Henry painters a scene of what this new world looks like where you know, at least some dinosaurs have survived. And now this is almost there in New Kingdom.

The world was beginning to split up into various continents. It was beginning to come separated into different continents. And this is great that evolution, because it means that different continents can have a different range of animals that are involved specifically on most continents. I mean, we think now of marsupials that only live in Australia and so on. Well, that happened in the early age of the dinosaurs. And that was key to their evolution. They evolved,

which we tend to think of the very, very large dinosaurs that evolved in the Jurassic, the kind of gigantic bracket, sawrace and outer sawrace, which was a major carnival in the Jurassic. But there were some sessions of different waves of these things that threw out the Jurassic and the subsequent creative period. There were different radiations like their Abelis saws, which were specifically South American carnivores. And Europe was a mostly underwater at the time.

in Europe. And so Europe was like an archipelago of islands. And there were dinosaurs that evolved

“each on different islands. And some were quite small because islands produced dwarfism. So there”

was a kind of cute elephant size sawropod and Madagascar, probably later in the crotaceous, Madagascar and Island we know that even today that has a very highly endemic fauna with lemurs and things that only live in Madagascar, it had its own dinosaurs. And so dinosaurs evolved in various ways, but they were usually of these three basic forms. They were the bipindal carnivores, they were the big quadrupedal herbivores, the solar pods. And a rash of armored dinosaurs,

it was things like steglasaurus that started to evolve in the in the Jurassic, that's a characteristic North American dinosaur, although they were relatives all over the northern continent,

“so or something, China of course, but of course what we forget because we don't realise that”

they were these waves of different dinosaurs that rose in became extinct. We tend to think all the dinosaurs came together. So when you see pictures of taramosaurus battling with a steta saw, that is as a magnetic as seeing rakel Welsh battle with a triceratol because when taramosaurus was around steglasaurus had been extinct for tens of millions of years, and taramosaurus would have battled with an kylosaurs or serotopsians like serotops. Waves of herbivores came and

went, the earlier sore pods were replaced by even bigger, better ones called taitanosaurus, eventually, and these were, you know, in the cretaceous, eventually in the cretaceous, the sore pods declined a lot, and were replaced by the hadrasaurus, which are also pretty big,

but they were generally bipedal things like iguanodon, and which was the first dinosaur to be described

in the world, but these were bipeds quite big, but with huge, haven't like teeth that they could used to grind up plant matter, because also other things revolving, flowering plants appeared in number during this period, and these would have posed problems and opportunities for dinosaur as well as pollinating insects. I mean, when you see documentaries about where people try to put cgi dinosaurs in modern landscapes, the biggest skirt of these landscapes is grass because grass

only evolved much later, so dinosaurs never aircrafts, they at firms and other things, you know,

maybe water lilies or magnolias, you know, the earliest flowering plant types to evolve, but grass is much later, so there was a huge amount of pollinating insects, and so the ecosystems were always changing, and so were the dinosaurs.

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Henry, I love how you mentioned to you on a don there, I've always got, I've always got time

figure on a don in its thumb spikes, which I remember you saying in a previous conversation, you know, would have been great for hailing cabbies, but since cabbies hadn't been existed for millions of years, they weren't great for much else. But, evidently, there were successful. We could go down so many different avenues from all you highlighted there, painting a picture of this ever-changing,

on four legs again, their quadrupeds. Does this always seem like, I don't think it's going back

within evolution as such, but you mentioned the importance of bipedalism earlier for dinosaurs. And yet, when you see some of these dinosaurs get very big, it's like they are bound in the bipedalists, you know, kind of aspects and go back to going on all fours, because they have that much heavier.

“I think what happens if you are an eater of vegetation and become quite large is that you have to”

eat an awful lot of vegetation to survive. And vegetation takes a lot of digestion to release nutrients. So, what happens when you see herbivores generally, they usually have large guts in which the vegetable matter ferments. We see this today. Cows have this four chambered stomach in which the bits of the vegetation come up and are regurgitated and get ground up and they're big. And all the herbivores we see are big. If they're small, like rabbits, they have some other kind of

fermentation, or they eat their own half-digested poo and digest it again. So, it's the digestion, and the dinosaurs, the herbivorous dinosaurs, solved this by becoming big. I mean, amazingly big, and the question has often been, how is it that these dinosaurs became so big when mammalian

herd it was, never got larger than maybe four meters, five meters at the shoulder,

when you were in South Africa. Yeah, and also these ancient rhinos, which all of us might know, they were even bigger. But they were absolutely nothing to Argentina'saurus, you know, and some of these things were maybe weighed 50 to 70 tons and 100 feet long. I mean, just gigantic.

“But the key is that dinosaurs were built in a completely different way. And the key to that”

was the way they breathed. Now, when you and I breathe in, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, failure to master this and reaching Earth on, it will be the least of your problems. But the thing is, it's not a very efficient way of gas exchange, because all the oxygen that comes in on your intake has to be replaced by the carbon dioxide coming out and it all mixes up. So,

you'd never really get a full breath of fresh air each time you breathe. Now, but in dinosaur

and also birds, which is very, very crucial, they have a completely different way of gas exchange. Now, okay, they breathe in and breathe out through the same hole. But the lungs are connected to lots and lots of other air sacs, but permeate the rest of the body, including the bones. So, the bones of dinosaurs and also birds are very hollow and they're sort of these air sacs. So, dinosaurs were probably, they could grow bigger, because they were mostly full of air.

And this is good for heat exchange. When you are big and fat, like me, and not slim and felt like you, heat exchanges are the difficult, because as you get bigger, you had proportionally less surface area to your volume. In other words, your insides are much further from your outsides.

“So, you have to have special ways of getting heat out. This is the limiting factor.”

Now, the biggest organ in the body that generates heat is the liver. That's the kind of biochemical factor. That's where all your digestive food goes from your intestines. It goes to the liver. It gets broken down into all the nutrients you need and spread throughout the blood to the body. In a big dinosaur, a liver would be the size of a car. It would generate enormous amounts of heat, but the thing is, it had air sacs right next to it.

So, the liver was air cool. And rather than what happens in mammals, which is the heat goes into the bloodstream, which then has to go to the lungs to be converted to dissolved gases to gas in the air, which is quite an efficient, it would go straight into the air. So, it was if the liver was kind on the outside. So, it was because of this heat and air handling system that dinosaurs could grow so big without boiling themselves from the inside out.

So, that explains how dinosaurs grew so big, but also they were marvels of engineering. If you look at the emibone in a solar pod, particularly the backbone, it's each bone is reduced to struts, which are the major load bearing components. Any bone that wasn't load bearing basically evolved the way. So, even those animals were huge, they were constructed very, very, very likely. And if you look at one of these gigantic quadruped,

it was less a reptile or a mammal than a gigantic quadruped or flightless bird.

were constructed in that way. This was basically a worked out buyer, a guy,

I know called Martin Sander, who wrote a fantastic paper on the heat handling of dinosaurs,

“but I think it contributed to their success. It was their amazing physiology.”

Now, this kind of air handling is found in birds, bits of it are found in certain lizards. So, certainly in reptiles, there is this tendency to have this kind of one-way air flow system that doesn't happen in mammals at all. Mammals breathe. One thing you can tell about a mammal is the rib cage only goes halfway down the body. In a reptile the rib cage goes all the way down, because in the mammals,

the halfway down rib cage is interrupted by the Donathram, which is the muscle we use to

help inflate and deflate our rib cage to allow this kind of breathing that we do. So interesting, and I'm glad we could focus on these bigger dinosaurs Henry. But, as you've highlighted there, you've got those big Titan herbivores, and then you've got those big scary carnivores living side-by-side in this Jurassic world. But, what about the smaller dinosaurs? Were there smaller on-nivores

“that lived in the shadows of these massive dinosaurs of the Jurassic?”

Yes, there were. Among the kind of armored dinosaur branch of the dinosaurs, were some fairly small creatures that like citacasores were paratlids that had crushing horny beaks, and more the iguanodom pipe dinosaur, there was quite small herbivores that lived in the shadows of the large ones, but the general tendency in the Jurassic certainly was to large size, although among the carnivorous dinosaurs there was a lineage

that made a virtue in smallness, partly associated with tree climbing. There were a number of creatures that as the Jurassic wore on, they adopted some of the characteristics we now say mid birds, and we've discussed this before, they were the feathered dinosaur. The feathered dinosaurs. The iconic feathered dinosaur is Archaeopteryx,

which everyone thinks was the first bird, which lived at the very end of the Jurassic period,

although it had perfectly good feathers and may have been capable of flight. It had a long, bony reptilian tail, it had claws on its wings, it had a mouthful of cheese rather than a beak. Now, it's been associated as being the first bird, because for a long time, it was the only one known, and the reason why it was preserved in beautiful, beautiful, very fine-grained limestone in what is now pavaria. It's a lithographic limestone, it was used in printing,

it was so fine-grained. And the sole hope and limestone of the upper geographic of pavaria have yielded all the known specimens of Archaeopteryx, and other things too, basically they were they'd fallen into a lake, which had very peaceful, quiet sedimentation, and were swiftly buried, and so are preserved intact with all the feathers. Now, for a long time, Archaeopteryx was the only known fossil bird. The problem with birds is they have very fragile skeletons, I mean I mentioned

the hollow bones, I mean when they died, they just shatter. So there were a few bits and pieces that nobody could really fit into anything, and there were some upper cretaceous birds from Kansas and Nebraska, which in the upper cretaceous were by the sea. It was there was a huge seaway that went from North America from North to South at the time, and there was itch the ornice that looked like a sea y'all with teeth, and there was Hesparornis, which was a big diving bird,

which had already reduced its wings in a way like penguins or something like that. So obviously, there was a lot going on, but evolution hasn't preserved until the late 90s when reports came through of fantastic beautiful deposits in China, which combined which were of lakes, that had no oxygen, so no decay bacteria, and lots of volcano, so everything in tuned in ash layers, which preserved birds with feathers, dinosaurs with feathers, mammals with furry coats,

“and the remnants of their last meal. And you have to remember, but mammalian palentaurus”

usually only look at teeth, they rarely get anymore. So what we now know is that at the end of the Jurassic, there was quite a lot of evolution of feathering forms among very small dinosaurs.

that had feathers, but the wings were bat-like, made of membranes, there was a little dinosaur,

“and the Scansauriopterrigiids, they could sit in the palm of your hand, they were the size of a”

thrush, and then there were dinosaurs, called like microreactor, that was more crow-sized, that had wings on its front legs and its back legs, so it was a kind of bite-plane, and there were loads and loads of these, what tend to happen there were, there were three groups of dinosaurs that evolved around then and into the protatious, the Dromia saws, the Troward Doms, and the birds. Now, Dromia saws include some of these very ferocious velociraptic type things,

with a great, big, slashing claw on their hind legs. Troward Doms were similar, but they had very large brains, and by knock it a vision, and people have thought that if they dinosaurs hadn't died out, spoiler at the end of the pitatious, they might have become of humanoid intelligence or what, pretty spectacular of course, and then the birds, but because these things at the time were all kind of similar, it's quite hard to tease out. One from the other, but certainly,

there was a flurry of evolution of activity at the end of the Jurassic period going into the crotatious period, which produced these small feathered dinosaurs. Now, many other dinosaurs were feathered even quite large ones. I mean, there's some very, very odd, secondary herbivorous carnivorous dinosaurs, called seren dinosaurs, which had tiny heads, huge bellies, immense meter-long claws on their forearms. And feathers, I mean, they were about as fair, they were about as aerodynamic as

a stack of spanners, but they had feathers, so it seems that the tendency to have what scientists called integumentary structures was when way back, we now know that terosaurs, the terradactyls, which are close-customs and banners, they were fluffy on their bodies, although their wings were membranous. So, there was a great deal of evolution. Now, when my son, who was, is now 27, was at nursery school, an absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs, used to whist around the playground, going,

"I'm archaeopteryx, the first bird, I'm archaeopteryx, the first bird, and then my wife used

to go and collect him and try and get away very quickly." So, she wasn't button-hole by the nursery school teacher who, one day said, "He's not a archaeopteryx, he's a little child." But now, of course, she'd say, "He's not the first bird, he's just another feather, dinosaur." Of course, she would. Very naughty boy. Yeah, well, you know, things haven't changed. I must have also asked, just because you said it in part, yes. Did you clarify also? You said

“with that species, primarily carnivorous, secondarily herbivore. Do you mean by that?”

They are omnivores, they eat meat and plants, but they would primarily eat meat, compared to when they evolved from carnivorous forms. And then they evolved back and evolved to be herbivores, these serrys dinosaurs, they had the shape generally of a big biped, but they were, they evolved to eat vegetation. These long claws are pretty, I mean, they're meat along, they're biggest claws in nature that serrys dinosaur claws,

nobody knows what they would be used for. I painted a picture of it. In a book I did a long time ago with a marvellous artist called Louis Threy. I did a lot of speculation and I said that serrys dinosaurs produce so much methane that if they were struck by lightning made explode, but I just liked the image. I don't think there's any evidence for this. Exploding dinosaurs, there we go. Well, we're getting towards the end of the Jurassic period,

“aren't we, Henry? And once again, a time-wise, when are we talking in the age of the dinosaurs?”

We're talking about 150 million years ago. Okay. There were other extinctions between the

Jurassic and the Jurassic. Now the distinction between all these periods is usually made by changes in the rock record and those changes in the rock record are usually related to some violent convulsion in the past. So there were, you know, ranges of volcanic activity, the continents were still drifting apart. I mean, by the end of the Cretaceous, the continents were getting towards their present position, although India or Australia and Antarctica were still

kind of joined and Antarctica was beginning to move southwards. India was separated and was moving towards Asia where it would eventually collide and produce the Himalayas. Madagascar was

separate in the Cretaceous, which led to an incredible radiation of dinosaurs only found in Madagascar.

So we were beginning to get in the Cretaceous, that endomism. There were dinosaurs only known from Western North America and China, because Western North America was separated from Eastern North America by the neo-Barara C-way, but it was joined through Alaska to Eastern Asia.

kind of changing sea levels, if you can kind of half close your eyes, the Cretaceous distribution

of the continents was beginning to look much like our own. There's still, but Antarctica hadn't

“drifted over the south pole, which was important, because when Antarctica drifted over the south pole,”

that was much later after the dinosaurs had become extinct, we started to go into the kind of Ice Ages in which we live now. But the Cretaceous world was very climatically stable. There were it was pretty much as warm as it was in the far north, as it was in the far south, as it was in the middle. So we didn't, there wasn't a great deal of stormy weather. It was very calm. It was kind of the earth, it was kind of taken a break, it was kind of a bit sleepy. There weren't

even many reversals of magnetic fields, which popping up. So there were dinosaurs living in the

north slope of Alaska. Now even though it was quite warm, we still got six months of complete darkness. I mean, it still was quite more, and there were dinosaurs living in Antarctica, which was covered in faldists at the time. There were dinosaurs that were

“inemic to particular areas. So the dinosaur world became very fragmented and very much more diverse”

in the Cretaceous than it had been in the Jurassic, although the Tychanosaurus or Rapults was still going, a lot of the herbivore world was replaced by the iguanodont type adressors, some of which lived in huge herds and had these immense crests and an ornamentation, a bit like

herds and antelopes or something today. The carnivores became very varied. There were big ones,

little ones, and huge ones, like the at the very end of the Cretaceous, our friend Tyranosaurus Rex, which lived by battling huge armoured dinosaurs, such as triceratops, an ancalisaur, Tyranosaurus Rex, everyone's favorite, probably except my wife, you know, prefers triceratops, but it's a good good reason. It was five tons of muscle and bone and teeth that had the shape and consistency of bananas if bananas were made of carbon steel, and it could crush right through

bone. And we know this because we even have Tyranosaurus or poo, and Tyranosaurus or poo fossilized as well because it's mostly made of crushed bone. So nobody really knows if it was a scavenger or it actually etched my prey, probably a bit of both, but nothing like it has been seen before or since the only bigger carnivorous creatures on earth were aquatic ones, the prior source, which lived in the Cretaceous period, and they would have made Tyranosaurus look like a big

girl's plow. I mean, they were just, you know, ferocious. Of course, by the end of the Cretaceous, the X theosols have become extinct. They were really, they became extinct in the middle of the cretaceous, but we still had in the marine realm gigantic sea serpents, you know, the mosa sauce that were gigantic sea lizards, closely related to Komodo dragons, only much bigger and with flippers, and the pleasier source, which, like, snaked Cretaceous turtles, and of course the plow

source, these immense short-necked, huge headed pleasier source that were the primary creditors of the sea alongside turtles as big as Volkswagen beetles and amonites, the mola size of truck tires, so it was, there was a big stop in the sea in the, in the later stages as well as on the land, and in the air, too. Now, because the climate was quite mild, there wasn't too much storm and wind. These terrasoles could evolve huge sizes, the biggest aeroplanes that just

saw, so they didn't need to flat, they saw, and there were some of the latest terrasoles. They were so big, they didn't fly much at all, they just walked around on the ground with their legs, and their wrists, and their wings sticking up, and their huge necks, looking like gigantic animated markings, and some of the very last ones could have stood eye to eye with a giraffe. Is this the one which is like Cretaceous Coratlus, the Aztecs

serpent god of the sky? Cretaceous Coratlus is one, but there were even bigger ones called Outdog, it's, I can't remember. Cretaceous Coratlus is an edge-darked. But these were, those one called

“Aramborgiarma, I think they're known from the Middle East, these very, very large ones,”

nobody knows if they could fly, but if they could fly, they just needed to open those enormous wings into a slight breeze, and they'd take off, but they could only live when the climate was fairly gentle. At the end of the Cretaceous, it got more stormy, and they would have just been blown out of the sky, like umbrellas, and so the, the, towards the end of the Cretaceous was the most

land, but also tiny ones, because in the Cretaceous, the first true birds appeared, and by the

“end of the Cretaceous, there were birds kind of of modern aspect, at the end of the Cretaceous,”

there were the ancestors of ducks and chickens, they were the, what's called transitional shorebirds, they lived then, and some signs of birds of a more modern aspect have begun to appear, but they didn't start their flourish until after the dinosaurs have died out. Land of Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the poisonous cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on echoes of history, we uncover the epic

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brought to you by history hits, there are new episodes every week. You've given a wonderful overview of the great variety of animals in the Cretaceous world, and you're actually preempted a couple of my questions, which was to look at the world, you know, these animals in the sea and also these great animals in the air as well. I'd actually like to ask one other small question about animals in this age,

which is he mentioned in passing much earlier, how giant salamanders from an ancient, you know, a much earlier age had survived in the Arctic and Antarctic areas. Is that still the case in the Cretaceous? Do you still have giant salamanders in the

“like at this time? Yes, there were giant salamanders in the Cretaceous. They were the very last ones.”

I mean, they were ones. They were great big ones in Australia called Kulosukas, great big crocodile like amphibians, but they were the loss of a long lineage. They were beginning to be replaced by really Otrudio crocodiles by the end of the Cretaceous, because the crocodiles had kept evolving as well. There were some absolutely gigantic crocodiles in the Cretaceous, one called Fobosukas that was just enormous. In the Cretaceous, there was also a gigantic snake

in the tropical jungles of Colombia called Taitano Boa, which was the size of a bus. So, there were also lots of mammals as well, and although mammals tend to be very nocturnal and quite small, there were at least 20 different kinds of major groups of mammals that lived and died before the dinosaurs began to think. Some of the earliest ones, the Haramides, were gliding mammals, and they were probably in the trees gliding about before birds originated.

There were some mammals that were like beavers, castero calder, it was a very primitive mammal, but it had a very flattened beaver-like tail, and there were there was a badger-like creature called Repano mammus that actually etch dinosaur eggs and babies. So, it wasn't all one way. Now, a lot of these mammals would have laid eggs like the current monotremes, like the platypus cells today, but platypus and its rate of the kidma are the descendants of a very ancient triatic

lineage of mammals that survived to the present day, but in the Jurassic and Cretaceous,

mammals were also evolving, and they evolved the first more supials, like kangaroons and wombats,

originated in the during the time of the dinosaurs, and they lived around the southern continents, the South America, and Australia, and even at a time they invaded North America, and apostles, which are malsupials, raid suburban trashcans in America to this day, but they were also the earliest mammals that are percentile mammals that would bear live young. These originated in the time of the dinosaurs, in the early Cretaceous, maybe,

but at the time, you wouldn't have been able to tell the differences by looking at them. I mean, they would all look much of a much as small, furry, lads, you know, internal, lived on insectivores, plants, eggs, eggs of birds, eggs of dinosaurs, eggs of each other, and other things they could get their little sharp pointy teeth into, but they were evolving as well, and as I say, there were many different kinds of mammals that came and went

before the extinction of the dinosaurs. Could some dinosaurs also swim?

land, but it's almost certainly the case that some dinosaurs could serve the paddle,

“there are, there's a group of dinosaurs called Spinosaur's, which had very long crocodile like”

heads, with very long crocodile like teeth, which look for all the world like fish eating creatures, which tend to have long long snouts and lots of long quantities, and there is a very famous Spinosaur's, Egyptiacas that lived in Egypt and North Africa, that most of the original remains were destroyed in the war. They were in Germany, but quite a few have been found since, and the case has been made that they could swim. They had big swissie tails, which, you know,

vertically extended up and down tails, they had crocodile like jaws, and they might well have

swam. They were related one school Sukho mimma, which means crocodile mimic, which may have swam,

but you mentioned that on an internet forum, you know, just put a hard hat on and hide on the ground, really. There's a lot of debate about whether Spinosaur's could swim,

“but I think dinosaurs could have swam in a general way. It used to be thought that the”

geys giant sauropods were so big and heavy, they couldn't support their weight on land, and had to live in the water. Certainly when I was a kid, that was the prevailing view, and there's a chapel brand for who wrote a book saying too heavy to walk or something, that that makes its view, but I have to say these views are now no longer current. They, they've been, so I say blown out of the water by other evidence from modeling their weight distribution,

and because sauropods were my elephants, they were like birds, so they're really lightly constructed, they couldn't walk from land, and to do with the sediment in which they were, were found. Also, we now know that the metabolism of dinosaurs was much greater than we thought. They weren't lumbering grey reptiles, so we're very alert, abyssey creatures, and they were quite capable of a living and surviving on land, but there is no reason why some of them might not have swam

on in the way that mammals that don't usually swim do swim, like elephants, and other things, they could have migrated between various islands by swimming. This is not impossible. I mean, if you look at a skeleton of a golden retriever, you wouldn't know that it was a capable swimmer. If you look at a skeleton of a goat, you wouldn't believe that they can climb trees, so it's very hard when you just look at a skeleton to dismiss the use of occasional lifestyle

choices, like swimming. So let's move on to the late Cretaceous, and you've already mentioned you, those well-known dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the Triceratops, and Kylasaurus with

“this massive club, isn't it? And I think like, how could any ferocious carnival try and take”

down a massive arm that played a dinosaur like an and Kylasaurus? It's surely just a death wish. Those animals, those dinosaurs, feel impregnable. If there is an animal to evolve, that's another animal that's evolved to eat it. No, in Tyrannosaurus was very big, and not only had enormous teeth the neck muscles, but could have penetrated bone. It had enormous hind legs that could in anything down, maybe turn it over and you know, scrape it out, using an Kylasaurus, a kind of bowl of

Raymond Neudel, I don't know. But it seems to have been especially if it's in eating these arm at dinosaurs, certainly try serotops. There are try serotops fossils that seem to have puncture wounds from large carnivorous dinosaurs in their bony neck frills, and there are, I think, large seropod dinosaurs with wounds that might suggest they'd been in battle with an arm of dinosaur, or perhaps another large carnivorous dinosaur. So these things were tough, and these

were things were tough and ruthless, they certainly weren't rough and toothless. So they would have been specialised for this sort of thing. It's kind of an arms race as herbivores evolved stronger defenses against carnivores and carnivores become more fierce and powerful to attack over herbivores. And were real life velociraptors as ferocious as they've been depicted

in the media today. Probably there was always a kind of in the ecosystems of the dinosaurs

for the small-fast moving carnivorous dinosaur. I mean, back in the triassic, they were these things called constant natus, which was small-fast moving dinosaurs that would have et small things, like insects and small mammals and frogs and things. Velociraptor was about the size of a turkey, or a chicken. The ones that you see in Jurassic Park, now that was kind of fortuitous, because the Velociraptor's in Jurassic Park still a wonderful film, I think, after all these years,

but as it would have it, some people found a Velociraptor-like dinosaur in Utah, which became

“called Utah Raptor, that was the size of the Velociraptors in the film. These dinosaurs,”

these carnivorous dinosaurs, of course a lot of it's very speculative, but there's no reason to think they weren't highly intelligent pack hunting creatures like hunting dogs or hyenas, and they would have had a kind of intelligence and they could have worked together

to hunt and also these particular dinosaurs, called the dronial source, had on their second

digit of their hindlead in this size-like claw, that could be used to disembowl something, certainly they would be more than you'd need to scratch your nose. They could have been formidable weapons and they were very active and there were reconstructions of them jumping on the backs of creatures and swashing with their claws, maybe they, in a pattern, weakened their prey by a thousand cuts, basically, which is what happens sometimes in

predators and prey to day. So I don't think there is any reason why Velociraptor-like creatures weren't every bit as fierce as they are portrayed. I don't think they spent their time sitting around having a couple of wear parties. There are so many more questions. I'm going to sneak in a couple more because this is such a fun chair and I know everyone listening is loving it. Henry, I will ask the classic whole question by the field. It's

important with this topic and then I'll share mine as well. We mentioned how Mrs. G's favourite dinosaur is triceratons. I've asked people around the office, what is their favourite dinosaur? It was an interesting one. It's like a packy, cephalosaurus. Brontosaurus was quite a popular one. They're big one. Stegosaurus as well. Not many T-rex is actually, but what is your favourite dinosaur? Well, I have to say it's triceratons because you know happy work is happy life.

“I thought you'd say one of the feather dinosaurs, honestly, Henry. I thought you'd say one of the”

feather dinosaurs, honestly, Henry. Maybe if my wife is not listening, I'd say something like

micro raptor. Okay. Okay. And I will always go over Guana-don because... Well, I know, I know,

I know from our previous chats, you have a family connection. You are not actually related to an iguanodon, but I think you're related to the people who discovered it on you. You know, like your son at Kindergarten exactly saying, I'm an architecture. I was saying, I'm an iguanodon everywhere and saying, but no, I'll always go to about, yes, I'm a very, very distant relation to the mantels, which is a lovely one. But Henry, go and then let's go to the big climax. We have

spoiled it a little, but I think most people do know what happens to the dinosaurs or get a sense that they're not around today. So there is an extinction. Talk us through what happens in the late Cretaceous period. What do we think? The extinction of the dinosaurs for a long time was a non-question. And the reason why is that people thought that creatures evolved, they flourished, and they died, as a kind of a natural order of things, they fredged and started on their stage,

and then made their various exits. And the end of the dinosaurs just came. It was going to happen anyway, but it seems that was not the case. People came up with all sorts of wacky ideas for why dinosaurs became extinct. They got so big, they couldn't move for they died of arthritis, or their eggs got so sick that the baby dinosaurs couldn't hatch, or the eggs got so thin that they died before they could hatch, or they died of hay fever from those new fangled flowering plants,

or they died from indigestion from those new fangled flowering plants, or they forgot about having sex, or they just got bored. And this is either there's even a word for this, it's called

paleovelch meds. After 160 million years as a lot of creation, they ran out of things to do and

“just died. Professor Mike Benton, who's now in Bristol, and I believe you know him, he's the”

absolute legend. Great dying. He actually wrote a paper summarizing all many, many hypotheses about dinosaurs becoming extinct. And it's a, if you can look it up, it's a great read. But one of the more outrageous ideas at the time was that the earth was struck by gigantic asteroid that wiped out a lot of life. And of course everyone who's this idea is completely ridiculous compared with paleovelch meds or any of the others. But that was the idea that turned out to be true. It

seems that at the end of the Cretaceous period, the sediment that the layer in the rocks that separates the Cretaceous period from the overlying rocks is very thin and has a concentration of a metal called iridium that's a very rare honour, which is actually quite common in certain asteroids.

and a couple of physicists, Luis and Walter Alvarez or father and son, team of physicists,

“they worked out the sedimentation rate of this eridium and showed it would have happened very quickly.”

Also in around the Gulf of Mexico are what are called tsunami beds. At the end of the Cretaceous, the rocks are what kind of jumbled up, looking like there was a immense disturbance like a tsunami. And eventually the smoking gun was found underneath the Yucatan Peninsula is a circular structure that was originally discovered by Mexican oil geology. It was the part of the state oil company of Mexico. They found this circular structure about 160 kilometers wide and that's since been buried

by other sediment, but that seems to have been the place where an asteroid 10 to 20 kilometers in diameter hits the earth and it would have hit the earth. It would have given it a great old smack and it would have gone right through the crust. And now a lot of the, a lot of the sediments

“it penetrated were full of sulfates. It was gypsum from an ancient sea bed where it had all”

evaporated and that produced a lot of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that poisoned the seas.

The smoke would have basically hid the entire earth from the sun for years and years.

The actual blast wave of the impact would have been felt for at least a thousand kilometers around. All the trees would have been flattened and there'd been widespread wildfires. Well, not surprisingly, this had a big effect on all the wildfires. Now, all the dinosaurs that weren't birds disappeared. There have been claims that some survived, but none of these claims to be substantial. All the big marine reptiles, the mosa sauce, the pleasedy sauce,

so on they died out as well. As well as the big truck tire size, Ammonites, they died out as well. And quite a lot of other things died out as well. Quite a lot of these groups of mammals died out, all except for, of the 20 or so, a died out and quite a lot of plants. So it had a big effect on the ecosystem. But of course, everyone remembers the extinction of the dinosaurs, the all what we now call the non-adian dinosaurs, particularly because they were the kind of poster child

of the quotations. They all disappeared. Now, like all overnight sensations, this took a long time in the telling, it now appears that the origins of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs

was in the collision in the inner solar system between two other asteroids about 160 million years ago.

So in the apagiratic, so everything was evolving on earth, unaware that its cart has been marked. The this collision produced a magazine of a thousand fragments which started migrating into the inner solar system and one of these was the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. How can we know this? That is insane. Well, just from very, very patient examination of rocks, we know that the, and all the orbital parameters of asteroids. So the dinosaurs were, you know,

their appointment with, with destiny or as one comedian said, when I saw one stage designee, was marked a long time ago before the dinosaurs began extinct. Now, of course, we wonder whether dinosaurs would have become extinct anyway. I think they probably would eventually, you'd preempted what my next question was going to be. If dinosaurs have gone extinct,

“if there had not been an asteroid. Yes, eventually, because that's what all species would do,”

but they wouldn't have done all at once. They'd have done it one at a time. And in different ways, and the world might have been completely different had the dinosaurs not become extinct. I am proud to have coined the Karrenna principle, which says that all happy thriving species of the same, but all species in danger of extinction die in their own way. So that's a literary reference, their kid. But who knows what might have happened? There are, there's been science fiction written

that the dinosaurs lived until the present day with, with humans living in a kind of sub-servient niche environment. So who knows what would have happened? But it's quite interesting that of the

big five mass extinctions of the last 500 million years. The endcrotaceous extinction is the only

one certainly known to have been caused as far as we know by an asteroid. There was a lot of

but could cause of a certain amount of disruption. So if they just happened without the asteroid, there may have been some kind of extinction, but that's kind of been over-printed as it were by the by the asteroid. So we don't know what would have happened if the asteroid had missed. Well, there we go. Another is big water, moments of, well, free history, and the story of the dinosaurs.

And the dinosaur extinction Henry will lead. I mean, isn't it first to the dominance of birds

“for a small part, for a small period of time, and then ultimately the rise of mammals?”

Hmm, now just off to the end of the quotations. Of course, off to any kind of mass extinction, there's a kind of breeding space in which for a while all kinds of weird things happened. The mammals probably breathing with relief that the dinosaurs had gone away. When they put their heads out of their burrows, they were bitten off by these gigantic birds, these terabirds, the terabirds, and they had heads, the size of horses heads,

and they inormous beasts. And they were flightless birds. They weren't related to ostriches, or the other flightless birds, but they were related to cranes and rales. They were that kind of bird. But these, you came and went, and then the mammals were the birds evolved explosively into most of the modern birds. The kind of group of birds called neo aides,

basically is all the modern birds that aren't ducks, geese, and waterbowl, or ostriches or ratites.

“And they evolved explosively at the end after the encutations into all the birds you see today.”

And there's a lot of scientific debate about how fast it was, and which bird evolved before what and whether some of them might have evolved earlier in the crotaceous. I mean, there's a paleontologist called Tom Stidham, and he found this fossil, which looked like a parrot beak, and he would show it round to people and say, "What do you think these were?" and they'd say, "It's the parrot beak," and then they would say,

"How old did it?" and he'd say, "Crotaceous," and they'd say, "No, it's not a parrot." And we published this in nature. I was an editor at the time, and I also wrote the press release, which I enjoyed doing at the time. I still dream of writing, I loved writing, as we, so the managing editor came over to me and said, "Lay off the monkey python references." You know, so I called the title of the press release, "Sketch of Dead Parrot," and I didn't say it

to chuckle off its mortal coil or gone to join the core invisible. So I played it absolutely straight, but at the end I wrote the beauty of the plumage of this species is not recorded. Now it's thought that this wasn't a dead parrot, it was a kind of a small dinosaur with a beak, because some herbivorous dinosaurs had a beak. Anyway, birds, but also mammals, there were four kinds of mammals, four groups of mammals, that survived the extinction. One were the monotreams, the egg laying

mammals, that just kept on trogging along in their own way. The other was the marsupials, who had a big flourish in South America, which was an island continent for a long time, and they had gigantic saber-tooth marsupials that looked like saber-tooth wagons, that lived in South America. So, but nowadays they live in Australia where you have kangaroos and wombats and koalas, but they've been quite successful for a long time because of

their strange mode of reproduction, which makes it easy for them to colonize their arid harid habitat. And then they were, then there was a group of multi-tuberculates, which actually they were evolved in the Cretaceus, and they survived till the EOC, and so about 10 million years after the dinosaurs began to think. And they were very rodent-like, they had strange multi-tuberculate teeth, they were teeth, we had lots of tubercles on, and they had long

incisors, so they were much like rodents, and they died out in the EOC, probably in competition with real rodents that evolved by then. And rodents were part of the placental mammals, which includes

you and me, and most mammals that we know of. But in the first flush, the first few million years,

the placental mammal evolution, after the end of the dinosaurs, there were some placental mammals that got very big, very quickly, and the first flush of mammals, they weren't very clear on their life goals. Some of these strange early ungulates, they had hooves, but in almost teeth, there was this creature called Andrew Zarkus, which was a gigantic terror pig. I mean, you wouldn't want to call it a warog to its face, but there were these numbering creatures

called Pantasyas and Dinosaurates, which are not closely related to any mammal. And they used to

“be called Ambly Pods, and I remember being an undergraduate learning about these, and I was”

charmed, and after the day I went to a telephone box, because that's all we had in those days, and I phoned my mum and told them about these creatures called Ambly Pods, and she said, "That's nice dear, you can just imagine them ambling their pods, can't you?" So anyway,

in the Eocene where the Earth was basically a jungle from Poland. It was a hothouse planet.

“It was called the Paleo Eocene, Paleocene thermal maximum, and after that, the Earth started to get”

cooler when Antarctica moved over the South Pole, it got cooler still, and that replaced a lot of the jungles with grasslands, and it was then that the placental mammals that we know today evolved the old antique ungulates and antique carnivores began extinct to replace be replaced by the ancestors of dogs, cats, lions, and tigers, cows, and horses. Also, there was one of the biggest evolutionary transitions in the whole of the evolution, which is these ungulate

like creatures that look like dogs evolved into whales in eight million years, and which still

is utterly remarkable. There were all sorts of amazing, weird mammals that have lived and died

“in the subsequent 50-60 million years since the dinosaurs died out, and until we get to our wonderful”

world today. Well, Henry, you mentioned so many things there, terabirds, say, beduth cats, whales, you know, all creatures to be covered in future episodes that have their own great stories to tell. I would love the fact that yes, between the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago or so and today is a smaller amount of time than between 66 million years

ago, and where we started our chat over 200 million years ago, so that also puts into perspective

how long the dinosaurs age was. Good last so many more questions, but I must wrap up now. Henry, last but certainly not least, you have written a book in the last few years,

“which does cover the story of the dinosaurs and life before the dinosaurs and after it is called,”

it is called a very short history of life on earth, which is available in all good book shops, and on audio book and Kindle and so on. But I've written a couple of other books since then, one is about human extinction, it's called the decline on four of the human empire, but I can now announce to you that I've got another book coming out in February. I'm going to show you it. If we got the scoop, you may well have the scoop. It's called the wonder of life on earth,

and it's basically for kids. It's like when I wrote the the very short history of life on earth, people said it hasn't got any pictures, so I was approached by a publisher of children's books called two hoops that are an imprint of my current publisher, and they said writer tools, but so I completely rewrote the text, and a wonderful illustrator in the Philippines called Raktin Manikiz has illustrated it, and it's coming out in February, February the 5th, it will be published,

and you can pre-order it now, it's called the wonder of life on earth. I'm fortunate to come out to Christmas, but it can come out for Christmas after, so it's very nice by it for your kids,

niches, nephews, and all the dyno tops in your life. Henry, as always, such a pleasure. It just

goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. Very welcome, it's always a blast, and I always look forward to another, another visit to history hit. Well, there you go, there was the one, the only Dr Henry G returning to the show to talk you through the age of dinosaurs. I really do hope you enjoyed the episode, thank you so much for listening. Now, if you did enjoy this episode, please make sure that you are following the ancients on Spotify,

or wherever you get to your podcasts, that really helps us and you be doing us a big favor. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating as well, what we do really appreciate that. Now, don't forget, you can also sign up to history hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribed. As all from me, I'll see you in the next episode.

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