Cretaceous Period: Tyrannosaurus Rex

2011/11/15

04:44

Around this time, there were more dinosaurs than ever before. It's also where you’d find one of the best known dinosaurs of them all – the Tyrannosaurus Rex! 

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Cretaceous Period: Living alone or in herds?

2011/11/12

04:23

The world by this point was home to a wider variety of environments and species than ever before... and different species behaved in different ways – some preferring to live on their own, others liking the company of the herd.

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Cretaceous Period: Sea Life

2011/11/10

04:06

More varieties of animals and plants lived at the time than ever before – from the dinosaurs on the land to the plants they ate. Things were getting pretty busy underwater too...

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Cretaceous Period: Plant Life

2011/11/8

03:58

In the Cretaceous Period, the world was experiencing some of the hottest climates ever known and was home to a wider range of environments and species than had been seen before...

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Cretaceous Period: Climate

2011/11/5

04:00

About 145 million years ago, the Jurassic Period ended and the Cretaceous began. The world changed dramatically and more dinosaurs lived during the Cretaceous period than at any other...

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Jurassic Period: Carnivores vs. Herbivores

2011/11/2

04:13

The Jurassic period was home to thousands of different dinosaurs - big and small. One easy way to learn about them is to split them into two groups – Carnivores and Herbivores.

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Jurassic Period: Flying Beasts

2011/10/31

03:49

As the Jurassic period came to a close, and the Cretaceous period began, a new kind of creature was starting to take to the skies - birds.

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Jurassic Period: Sea Life

2011/10/24

03:39

With the supercontinent Pangaea continuing to separate, more and more big watery lagoons were forming, and along with the new oceans, were teeming with life – from the tiny to the monstrous!

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Jurassic Period: Plant Life

2011/10/24

04:02

We're at the Jurassic period, which existed between 144 and 180 million years ago. It was a time when plant life began to flourish as the newly formed oceans brought rain to many parts of the world that had previously been nothing more than dry deserts.

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Jurassic Period: Climate

2011/10/24

03:43

Imagine going back in time... not one hundred years... or one thousands years... but millions of years to the Age of the Dinosaurs! We've arrived at the Jurassic Period.

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This is Dino Quest

2026/8/24

00:49

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 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 questions listeners send in. Along the way: why the pigeon on your windowsill counts as a dinosaur, and why you have almost certainly eaten part of a T. rex.

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The dinosaurs that ran faster than Usain Bolt

2026/8/31

29:52

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 Usain Bolt at his peak, and trackways in La Rioja in Spain clock theropods at almost exactly the same speed.

A quarry in Oxfordshire turned up a dinosaur highway of nearly 200 footprints running over 150 metres, made by long-necked sauropods and by Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur ever named, back in 1824. Brazil has gone one better with Farlowichnus, a dinosaur named from nothing but its footprints, no bigger than a long-legged bird. And Tyrannosaurus rex, the one everybody assumes was quickest, was nothing of the sort.

Lauren and Cassius are joined by Professor John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College, who rebuilds dinosaurs inside a computer, gives them muscles and physics, and makes them run. He worked out that a seven-tonne T. rex would have needed around three tonnes of leg muscle to sprint, more than half its body, and the force would have snapped its legs, so it managed something closer to a brisk 15 miles an hour. He also refuses to say the legs are the most important part of a dinosaur. He says it is the pelvis, because the hips tell you what the animal actually did.

Then it is time for Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. For week one the choice is two legs or four, and Lauren goes bipedal, because speed is useful whether you are running away from something or running towards fresh fruit. Next week, necks.

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Dinosaurs with necks full of air

2026/9/7

32:17

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 is built like a honeycomb, riddled with air spaces a millimetre or two across, which makes it far lighter and, oddly, no weaker at all. Birds have the same trick, which is part of how they get off the ground, and birds are dinosaurs. On Mamenchisaurus roughly half the animal’s total length was neck, carried on as many as 19 neck bones. A giraffe, the record holder among mammals at 2.2 metres, manages with seven. So do you.

Fresh from the Dig has a Diplodocus found underneath a car park at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, where people had been parking on top of it for years. Only the part in the way of the building work has been dug out, and the rest has been left in the ground for future palaeontologists. Plus Mamenchisaurus and its two seconds of screen time in The Lost World, and Cetiosaurus, the whale lizard, dug up in Oxfordshire and named in 1841 by Richard Owen, who took one look at bones that size and decided they had to belong to a whale. It was the first long-necked dinosaur ever named, and it is stuck with the name.

Lauren and Cassius are joined by Dr Mike Taylor, a computer programmer by day who studies sauropod necks in the evenings. He explains why taking bone out of the middle of something makes it stronger rather than weaker, suggests boiling down a turkey neck at Christmas so you can see the air spaces for yourself, and points out that nobody needs permission to do palaeontology. Two of his colleagues had their first scientific papers published while they were still at school.

Elsie, who is eight and from Bristol, wants to know how many bones are in a sauropod’s neck. Then it is Build a Dino Lab, where one real fact becomes one real piece of the perfect dinosaur. Week two is long neck or short, and Lauren goes short, because 15 metres of neck on a two-legged dinosaur ends with its face in the mud. 

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