Yapping about sauropods on Dave Hone’s Terrible Lizards podcast

Dave Hone and me with a Sinclair brontosaur somewhere in Utah, back in May of 2023.

I started my recent UK adventure in the city of London, where my son and I stayed for a couple of days with my friend and colleague Dave Hone and his partner Connie. Dave’s footprint in the dinosphere is vast, with his long-running blog, Archosaur Musings, what is now becoming a nice run of thought-provoking books, including the ever-popular Tyrannosaur Chronicles, and his Terrible Lizards podcast, now in its 11th season.

For an evolutionary biologist and a plant-lover, Dave’s back garden is pretty much the perfect place to sit, think, vegetate, and talk.

I always enjoy talking with Dave. In the same way that I come to dinosaurs through anatomy, he comes to them via wildlife biology, and his operating system seems to naturally be operating at the level of the ecosystem. He’s a solid anatomist as well, but most of his descriptive work has been on pterosaurs and theropods, which I think of as the other two branches of the “pneumatic triumvirate” with sauropods. So Dave and I have complementary but largely non-overlapping areas of expertise, which makes for fascinating conversations that tend to run at 90mph and spin off digressions recursively.

If you’re wondering what one of those conversations is like, we taped one for his podcast (link). I don’t know if Dave had any idea where all the conversation would lead — I certainly did not — but I had fun recording it and fun revisiting it as a listener. In 57 minutes we covered some sauropodomorph basics, the unlikely arc of my career, and some mysteries of dinosaur behavior and evolution. If you can stomach the prospect of an hour of excited, discursive yapping about that stuff, give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Yeesh, how have I not gotten round to blogging about these books before? Both interesting reads — check ’em out.

Gonna end with some book plugs. Of Dave’s books, my favorite is The Future of Dinosaurs: What We Don’t Know, What We Can, and What We’ll Never Know (2022; released in the US as How Fast Did T. rex Run? Unsolved Questions From the Frontiers of Dinosaur Science), with Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know (2024) coming in a close second (sorry/not sorry, tyrannosaurs). As we discuss in the podcast, just within my career there’s been an explosion of new paleobiological knowledge about dinosaurs. Both of these books sail right up to the line that divides the knowable from the as-yet-and-possibly-always mysterious and do some valuable reconnaissance of the frontier. Highly recommended.

And for you theropod enjoyers, you don’t have long to wait for Spinosaur Tales, Dave’s forthcoming book with Mark Witton. Should be landing in early November in the UK (link) and in late January in the US (link).

Also! Dave’s podcast host, Iszi Lawrence, had the latest installment of her Time Machine Next Door book series, subtitled Inventors and Dinosaurs, out just last week (UK, US). I hadn’t met Iszi before the podcast recording session, and it was only afterward that I discovered that she has a whole constellation of creative work, including a raft of historical fiction books for kids and some pretty impressive graphic work — her pencil sketch of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter is an arresting example. She also got Dave and me to make silly sauropod noises at the end of the podcast, which I believe is a world first.

So, yeah, there’s 57 minutes of dinosaury goodness and about a zillion links. Go have fun!