Dino Quest

Latest episode

5 Oct 2026 · 33 minNew

Why dinosaurs never dragged their tails with Pasha van Bijlert

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 scientists thought at the time, and that’s fine. Being wrong and then finding out is how science works. This week’s word is counterbalance. It’s the…

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Earlier episodes 6 most recent

1. 

   S1 · E5 · 28 Sep 2026 · 31 min

   Life in a super greenhouse with Kirsty Edgar

   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 super greenhouse. A greenhouse lets the sun’s heat in through the glass and makes it hard for it to get back out, and carbon dioxide in the air does the same thing to…

2. 

   S1 · E4 · 21 Sep 2026 · 33 min

   What the thagomizer?! with ReBecca Hunt-Foster

   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 cluster of spikes on the end of a Stegosaurus tail, and it is the only piece of dinosaur anatomy named by a newspaper cartoon. Gary Larson drew one in The Far Side…

3. 

   S1 · E3 · 14 Sep 2026 · 39 min

   Dinosaurs never needed a dentist with Emma Nicholls

   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, and that changes what a tooth can be. If breaking one costs you nothing, your teeth are free to evolve into exactly the right shape for the job rather than something…

4. 

   S1 · E2 · 7 Sep 2026 · 32 min

   Dinosaurs with necks full of air with Mike Taylor

   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,…

5. 

   S1 · E1 · 31 Aug 2026 · 30 min

   The dinosaurs that ran faster than Usain Bolt with John Hutchinson

   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…

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