Dino Quest
Dinosaurs were awesome. But no dinosaur ever got everything right. Each episode, Lauren and Cassius pick one dinosaur speciality and dig into it. The fastest legs. The longest neck. The sharpest teeth. They talk to the scientists who actually study this stuff – from the woman who found a dinosaur underneath a car park to the palaeontologist who builds them inside computers – and they make a choice: one real feature, from one real fossil, to add to the perfect dinosaur they're building across the series. By the end, they'll have built a dinosaur that never existed, made entirely out of bits that did. Dino Quest is from Fun Kids, the UK's children's radio station.
Episodes
Dinosaurs had bones in their eyes. You don’t, and nor does any other mammal, from dogs to whales to elephants. We’re the odd ones out. Birds, lizards, turtles and fish all have a ring of thin bony plates sitting in the white of the eye, holding a big eyeball steady so it can focus. Because it’s bone, it sometimes fossilises, and that matters, because the age of the dinosaurs lasted around 160 million years and rou...
The most important part of your nose is inside your brain. Your nose catches the smell, but it’s a lump at the front of your brain that works out what it is: sweet, horrible, or dangerous, like gas in the kitchen. Humans tend to put smell near the bottom of their list of senses. For most animals it’s essential, for marking territory, finding each other and sniffing out food.
This week’s word is olfactory bulb. Tha...
Loads of dinosaurs had wings, but not many of them could fly. There’s a dinosaur in your garden right now, probably the one that keeps stealing your chips, because a seagull is a dinosaur, and so is every robin, pigeon and chicken. Feathers turn up again and again across the dinosaur family tree, and most of them had nothing to do with flying. Oviraptors spread their feathered arms over their nests to keep their eggs warm, an...
A dinosaur’s tail could be a third of the whole animal, about as heavy to lug around as a concrete block, and for well over a century people drew dinosaurs dragging theirs along the ground. They didn’t. Palaeontologists have found thousands of dinosaur footprints and almost no tail marks, so a healthy dinosaur held its tail up and out behind it. The tail-dragging monsters in old paintings and old films were what scienti...
The dinosaurs had around 160 million years on Earth, so there was never just one dinosaur climate. There were deserts, volcanoes and jungles, and there were forests at the North and South Poles, because for most of that time there was no permanent ice anywhere on the planet. Britain was subtropical to tropical. If you were packing for a trip, you would want a raincoat and an autumn jumper, not a snowsuit.
This week’s word is ...
If something wants to eat you, you have three options: get so big that knocking you over is not worth the trouble, get fast enough to leave, or make yourself so expensive to attack that nobody bothers. Plenty of dinosaurs took the third one, and they did it by growing bone inside their own skin. Not armour they put on, but armour they were, down to bony eyelids in the case of Ankylosaurus.
This week’s word is thagomizer, the ...
Nigersaurus grew around 500 teeth and replaced the whole lot roughly every two weeks. It never brushed them, never had to be careful with them and never once saw a dentist, because there was always another tooth coming up behind. The word for that is polyphyodont, and it is this week’s word.
Humans get two goes. Milk teeth, then the set we are stuck with. Sharks, crocodiles and most dinosaurs are on a conveyor belt instead, a...
The longest neck any animal has ever grown belonged to Mamenchisaurus, and the neck on its own was more than 15 metres, longer than a school bus before you even get to the rest of the dinosaur. Which raises the obvious question: how do you hold something like that up? The answer is that mostly you don’t have to, because sauropod neck bones were never solid. They were full of air.
That is this week’s word. Pneumatic bone...
Dinosaurs ruled for 160 million years, and the thing that made them a runaway success was where their legs went. Not out to the side like a crocodile, but straight down underneath them, a stance that costs less energy and frees the arms up for other work.
So how fast could they actually go? Footprints in Inner Mongolia, laid down 120 million years ago, put a medium-sized meat eater at around 45 kilometres an hour, quicker than Usai...
Legs that could outrun the fastest human alive. A neck longer than a double-decker bus. A tail people were once sure could crack like a whip. Every week Lauren and Cassius Morrison dig up one brand new, completely true fact about dinosaurs, and use it to add one piece to a dinosaur they are building themselves, one bone at a time.
They call up real scientists, get into discoveries that are barely out of the ground, and answer the q...
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