Megalosaurus

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1:51you can. When you join, you'll save 10 cents per gallon on your first fill, 20 cents per gallon on your second, 30 cents per gallon on your third, and more savings on every fill after that. Join the Shell Fuel Rewards program in the Shell app on your phone and enjoy life with more. Your nearest Shell station is closer than you think. This is one of more than a thousand episodes that you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. On February the 20th, 1824, a man called William Buckland stood before the annual meeting of the Geological Society of London. He had been studying some large fossilised bones

2:46which didn't resemble those of any living creature. And as he told his rapt audience at that meeting, he had a new name for this mysterious and unusual creature, Megalosaurus. This is the first ever dinosaur to be scientifically named, and that 20 years before the word dinosaur had been invented. But it kick-started the last 200 years of dinosaur science, which has changed the way we understand our planet and life upon it. Well, with me to discuss Megalosaurus, I'm joined by Emily Rayfield, Professor of Paleobiology at the University of Bristol, Emma Nichols, Vertebrate Paleontologist and Collections Manager at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and Steve Brussati, Professor of Paleontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh. And it's to Steve Brussati I'd like to come first.

3:47Steve, can you set the scene for us? What's going on in geology at the start of the 19th century? This is at the beginning of the 1800s, and this was a very different time from today, especially here in Britain. It hadn't been too long before, really, that you had Newton, you had Galileo, you had Kepler, and these new ideas about the place of the Earth in the cosmos, and of course, what that meant for our place in the cosmos. Now, in the early 1800s, people were starting to think more about our place on the Earth. Where did humans come from? How do humans fit in? How old is the Earth? These were big questions that were being discussed by the geologists and the naturalists of the day. And this was also around the same time that professional scientists at universities and museums

4:36were starting to stake a claim, this new career of being a scientist. This was the world that Buckland came into. And this was a very conservative world. This was, here in Britain, the culture was very traditional, very Christian. This was a time when most people went to church every week, when most people had a Bible in their home, when most people turned to the Bible, not just for questions of morality, but also for questions about science, about nature, about our place in the world. And in the early 1800s, at this time, all of a sudden, all around Britain, and in other parts of the world, but especially here, these large, mysterious bones started to emerge from the ground as people were building canals, as people were mining rock. And these impossible monsters, these giant, weird reptilian creatures,

5:32this was like a thunderbolt. What were these things? What did they imply about the Earth and the age of the Earth and the position of people on this planet? So I mentioned at the start this fellow, William Buckland. Can you tell us a bit about him? He sounds like quite a character. Yeah, it's hard to talk about Buckland without making it seem so hyperbolic that he's some sort of invention of a mad screenwriter. But Buckland really was, I think, like the original nutty professor. You know, he taught at Oxford. He would give lectures in his academic robes. He loved academic robes. And I'll return to that in a second. But if he was in this room, he'd be pacing up and down in his robes. He'd have an animal skull in one hand, an ammonite in another hand. He'd be shoving these things into people's faces, asking his students what they are.

6:24He'd be impersonating animals the way they walk. He loved animals. He had a pet bear at his house, which he dressed in academic robes. He loved eating animals. His all-time dream was to eat his way through the animal kingdom, and he would have these dinner parties where he'd serve mice on toast and porpoise and possum and penguin. But at the same time, he was a very devoutly religious man. His father was a rector in the Anglican church. He was an ordained minister. And he was a performer. He really was. He was a pretty well-known figure in the university and academic world. He corresponded with all the other learned men of the time. He knew Darwin. In fact, Darwin found him a little bit vulgar, a little bit too much of a

7:10self-promoter. But this is who Buckland was. And the last thing I'll say about Buckland is that there's a crazy story about him, which for a long time people thought wasn't true. But it turns out from everything I've read that it actually could be. And that is that not only did he want to eat his way through the animal kingdom, he also apparently, apparently ate the pickled heart of King Louis XIV of France. It was presented to him, this pickled heart, and he took it out of the box and plopped it in his mouth. Now, it was thought to be a tall tale for a long time, but actually a lot of historians have followed up on this and they think that is more likely to be true than not. So even if it's not true, the fact that story exists, that legend exists, I think tells you something about Buckland.

8:00Do the French know about this? Nobody tell them. I don't know. Emma, he was obviously a very eccentric character, but he was also a respected scientist. Before he came up with the Megalosaurus, what had he been working on? I mean, I think that you can definitely both be eccentric and a scientist, and I think that probably describes quite a lot of scientists that I know, in fact. So before Megalosaurus, I mean, Buckland was an incredible geologist, you know, for all of the somewhat bizarre, insane things that he did, he was a very intelligent man. And from the point of view of vertebrate paleontology, before Megalosaurus, there were two sort of really important aspects of his work, including Megalosaurus for verte were two sort of really important aspects of his work,

8:45including Megalosaurus for virtuate paleontology. These were sort of the three feathers in his cap, if you like. So the first one was he published on the Red Lady of Paveland. Now, I hasten to add that the Red Lady of Paveland is not a lady, but Buckland felt that it was likely to be a female based on what the skeleton was buried with. Where exactly was this found? Havilland is in Wales, and he didn't discover the skeleton, but he was the person who published on it. The reason that that was so important is because it was the oldest known burial in Britain. And then the second thing, just a year later, he published an incredible study on Kirkdale Cave. Now, Kirkdale Cave is up in Yorkshire. Again, he didn't discover Kirkdale

9:30Cave, but he did a lot of work on the fossils that were found in that cave. Kirkdale Cave was inhabited by a pack of cave hyena. So cave hyena, sadly, are extinct, but would have looked a lot like modern African hyena, slightly larger. And as I say, lived in Britain amongst other places at the time. And when you live in, let's say lions, for example, living in the Serengeti or whatever, they would hunt or they would scavenge and then they would walk away. That carcass then rots and decomposes. Whereas if you are part of a group of animals like hyena, where they look after their young, but you live in a cave, things change. So you would go out, the adults would go out, they would hunt something, they would bring it back to their cave for their young, and they would look after their young in this way. And hyena are very impressive animals. They have an incredible bite force

10:25to rival dinosaurs. But they didn't eat every molecule of all of the animals that were brought back. And so over time, these, you know, hare and bison and deer, all kinds of things, the bones piled up in the caves. And just like, you know, people are quite familiar with stalactites on the ceiling and stalagmites on the ground, the minerals dripping down onto the cave floor, they began to help to, over millions of years, fossilise these bones. And so essentially, jumping forward into the modern day, this became a paleontologist's dream, because it's essentially a cross-section of the ecosystem back in a few million years ago. Amazing. And so that was in 1823. And then in 1824, he produces the megalosaurus bones.

11:14Yes, and then he brought out the big guns. So tell us about the fossils that would become known as the megalosaurus. Well, so in the original description of Megalosaurus that was published in 1824, Buckland is the only name on it, but he certainly didn't work alone. He discussed two different sets of fossil material. And one of the sets was fossil material that is at Oxford University. It's now in our care at the museum. And there were 15 specimens that were part of the University of Oxford collections. 10 of them, we still have, they're extant specimens. And one of them is the big iconic one, and that is the jawbone. And there are a couple of reasons why that is the icon. One is a scientific reason, which is that when Megalosaurus as an animal was

12:08rigorously tested in the modern day to decide whether it did stand up to scientific rigor, is this genuinely a defensible genus of an animal? Fortunately for us, the answer to that was yes. And all of the physical diagnostic features that designate or define what megalosaurus is or was are in the jawbone. And so from a scientific point of view, the jawbone is really the most important. I said there are two reasons. The other is it's really cool. It's a jawbone from a theropod dinosaur. So it's got these amazing serrated recurved teeth. It's also really charismatic because although the jawbone would have had these big teeth all the way along, that most of them were actually lost before the jaw was buried. We know that because we have the rock that it was

12:56found in and only one fully erupted tooth remains. And so it's this really awesome, charismatic looking fossil that really, if you wanted to pick a fossil to designate the start of dinosaur science, I would pick that one. So, Emily, what did Buckland think initially his creature was? And how did he finally come to the conclusion that it was something very new? So it's important to think about the context of the ways of thinking at the time. So we were 35 years pre-Darwin and Wallace's presentation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. I mean, it must have been quite an exciting time to be a scholar of the natural sciences because people were just beginning to think about the concept of extinction.

13:50So people were still thinking through a theological lens, but researchers such as Georges Cuvier, who was working in Paris, was a proponent of comparative anatomy. So essentially trying to understand these unusual fossilised remains that people were digging out of the ground through looking at living animals and trying to see similarities. And Cuvier very famously had looked at some elephant-like bones that had come out of North America and decided that they were actually not living elephants, but they represented two kind of extinct types of elephant, a mastodon and a mammoth. So the idea that animals... Presumably because they were much bigger than... They were bigger, they had slightly different features in their bones that were different to what he could see in the bones of

14:34modern day elephants. So then we have this idea that actually there were animals that existed on the earth previously that were now extinct, that they don't exist in the modern world. You know, previously there was a biblical idea that God would not let his creatures go extinct. So we have that. And then on the other hand, we've got the new finds. So think about it. In the last 10 years, coming to light are the discoveries of Mary Anning from Lyme Regis, where we're finding extinct animals that don't look anything like living animals. Tell us a bit about Mary Anning. So Mary Anning was a fossil hunter. She was working in Lyme Regis. She was discovering, along with her family, her brother and her family,

15:12were discovering these unusual creatures from the rocks around Lyme Regis. They were also kind of Jurassic in age, a little bit later than Megalosaurus. But these are things like ichthyosaurs, so animals that look like dolphins but have like teeth and jaws plesiosaurs so long-necked small-headed animals with flippers or short necks and large heads pterosaurs, flying reptiles so these are animals that look a little bit like things we had around in the modern day but were completely unusual so ichthyosaur basically means fish lizard because it's a mixture of kind of it looks a bit like a fish but it's got these lizard characteristics so we're in this world where animals existed in the past, but not in the present. And we're finding these really unusual things. So Baughlin's looking at

15:53these as fossil remains and a megalosaurus means kind of great lizard. So he identified the fact that this was a carnivore. It has sharp recurved teeth. He also identified the fact that it was some reptilian kind of life form as well, too. But he thought this was an extremely large animal. He took what we knew about modern lizards and he scaled it up. And he came up with an animal that was about 40 foot long. And in later descriptions, it went up to about 60 foot as well. So like 18 meters, you know, just five meters short of the length of like a tennis court, for example. So we've got this enormous animal he also described it as being kind of really robust sort of elephant-like and walking around on four legs as well too but previously people thought

16:35these fossils were other rather strange things yeah exactly so if we jump back in time to kind of the the 1600s so one of the earliest descriptions and illustrations of a fossil was in Robert Plott's A Natural History of Oxfordshire. So he'd come into the possession of material that had come from the Stonesfield quarry, which was being quarried for slate, lovely Cotswold roofing slate, which is where the bones of Megalosaurus had been found. And so we're back in the 1600s now, and he'd recognised this as being a large thigh bone. But at the time, the ways of thinking, we're pre-thinking about extinction now, was that these were either some kind of living animal, perhaps it was the remains of a Roman war elephant.

17:21Later on, people debated that, saying, well, there weren't any historical evidence of elephants in England. Or it could be giants. You know, the Bible, the book of Genesis describes giants walking the earth in ancient times. So one explanation was these massive bones were actually, you know, male or female giants, products of the sons of gods and human women. So Steve, what did Buckland do with these bones next? I talked about the Geological Society earlier. How did he interpret it and present it to the outside world? Buckland's talk at the Geological Society in 1824, this was one of these landmark moments in the history of science. And of course, we recognize it today as the starting point,

18:06the starting pistol for dynomania. And really it is, you know, because the public started to become fascinated as well, because it wasn't only Buckland that was discovering these fossils. As Emily's talking about, Mary Anning down in Lyme Regis had been discovering other bizarre, giant, weird, clearly extinct reptilian creatures for several decades. And then people started to find others across Europe and eventually as the American frontier opened. So Buckland's talk was the starting point. And these dinosaurs, they became a subject of fascination, but they weren't dinosaurs yet. It took another 20 years for Richard Owen, who founded the Natural History Museum, to come up with that term. And he came

18:49up with that term because other people started to find other bones, including a county doctor, Gideon Mantell, who actually stood up after Buckland gave his talk at the Geological Society and said, hi, I think I found something too. And he mentioned these bones of this strange kind of giant reptilian creature that he found. That's what became Iguanodon, that soon became the second dinosaur given a formal scientific name. So quite quickly, people started to find more of these animals. And this became a subject of public fascination because imagine, and I think it's hard for us to imagine just how deeply conservative and traditional and religious Britain was then. This was a thunderbolt from out of nowhere.

19:38What are these giant creatures? Well, I wanted to ask about Buckland himself, because as you said, he was an ordained minister and he wrote religious treatises and so on. How does he reconcile his own beliefs, because he was, you know, deeply religious, with evidence that is clearly turning biblical stories on their head? He certainly didn't seem to lose his faith or even question it. And Buckland and many of the other collectors and naturalists and early scientists of this time, they were largely religious devout men, almost entirely men, and many of them were ordained ministers. So at that time, many of them were trying to reconcile these discoveries with the Bible. And I mean, it makes a lot of sense.

20:27If you were an atheist, and hardly anybody was publicly, you couldn't graduate from university. You couldn't be elected to public office. I mean, you couldn't even do that if you're a Catholic. So this was a very different time. And they were not trying to upset the old order. They were not trying to knock down traditional religious values. They very much were trying to reconcile. So Buckland, very famously, in the decade after he announces Megalosaurus, he's commissioned to write a Bridgewater treatise. Now, this was the series of books that was commissioned by the Royal Society. The Earl of Bridgewater, another one of these characters from that era, this very wealthy man who was an ordained minister, but he left his parish and he moved to France and he led this frivolous life of decadence and fathered all of these illegitimate children.

21:13And he kind of repented on his deathbed and he gave this enormous sum of money to the Royal Society to write a series of books to celebrate the power and the glory and the majesty of God's creation. And so the Royal Society commissioned different scholars of the time to write different books. There were ones on chemistry, ones on physics, ones on astronomy. Buckland was asked to write the one on geology. And he wrote it, and it was very much a book that got a lot of attention at that time. I mean, there were no bestseller lists then, but it would have been one. It was read around the world, not just in Britain. And in that book, he laid out the case for how these fossils do not threaten the authority of the Bible,

21:55the authority of the church. In fact, these fossils show the power of God, the creativity of God. So he very much fit these fossils into a biblical worldview. But at the same time, there were younger naturalists and scientists, like a certain young guy who had just got off a boat called the Beagle that has sailed around the world. And the younger generation was reading this. They were looking at these fossils. They were becoming intrigued by these fossils. They were not really interpreting them through a biblical lens. They were getting more radical ideas. Emma, tell us about some of the other characters around Buckland, including the woman who would later become his wife, and how important they were. Because it wasn't just this

22:38one man, was it? No, absolutely not. So Buckland is the only person named on the scientific publication in 1824. But yeah, he certainly worked with other people. One person that he really got a lot of help from or, you know, really had a lot of discussion with was William Connybeare over in France. And if you Google who came up with the name Megalosaurus, depending on your source, you'll get a whole bunch of different names. And we actually think that Conny Bear came up with the name Megalosaurus, which, as Emily said, means great lizard. But sometimes you might read that it was James Parkinson who came up with the name. Now, James Parkinson was a physician, famous, of course, for discovering Parkinson's disease.

23:20And James Parkinson is part of the story because he, it seems, was actually the first person to use the name Megalosaurus in public. So sometimes he's credited with it. But we're pretty sure that it was Conubear. So we've mentioned previously the county doctor that Steve mentioned, Gideon Mantell. Now, when I was talking about the suite of Megalosaurus fossils that are described in the 1824 paper, I said that there were two groups of fossils. And one of them is the one that we have at the University of Oxford. The other one belonged to Gideon Mantel. And when William Buckland was putting together the paper, he asked Mary Morland at the time, her name at the time was Mary Morland, they obviously got

24:01on very well because they got married a year later. And she was an incredible illustrator. And she drew the specimens that we had at Oxford, because she lived in Oxford. She was part of that group. And so those are the illustrations that were actually put into the 1824 paper. Now, moving into the mid to late 1800s, this slow burn scheme of type specimens came into being. And type specimens are, if you name a new genus or a species of a plant or animal, say, in paleontology, obviously you can't just decide that you've found something, you make something up. You've got to describe something physical. And so you would describe it in your scientific paper. You'd illustrate it. In modern day, you might still draw it.

24:45You might use CT scans. You might use photogrammetry, you know, whatever happens to be. And the point is that you are creating a description, you're creating a template by which all subsequent discoveries or other discoveries that may or may not be the same thing can be compared to. And so that fossil, that becomes what we call the type specimen. And so scientifically, that's the most, at the time, that's the most important specimen. Now, if you go back to Megalosaurus, the type specimen scheme didn't exist at that point. And so does that matter? Well, at the time, it didn't matter. It matters now. And it certainly matters when you're talking about the first dinosaur to ever be scientifically named and described. So going back to Mantell

25:25and Buckland's collections that were both talked about in the paper, it was only the University of Oxford collections that were actually figured and illustrated. So moving forward into the modern day, even though Mantell's collections went to the Natural History Museum in London, they're not figured. So we don't know for sure exactly which specific specimens are being described in Buckland's paper. And so the typed specimens are the ones from Oxford and only the ones from Oxford. So I'm very sorry to the Natural History Museum in London, but I'm afraid that Oxford has all of the typed specimens of Agnus saurus. Sometimes we all need an extra help in hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off.

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28:20See, there are no extra steps and no changes to your routine, just more value built into it. It fits naturally into what you already do throughout your day. And all of your savings stack, so you can add them on top of your everyday savings. So wherever your day takes you, you get a little more out of every stop along the way with Shell. Find the Shell app on your phone and enjoy life with more. Your nearest Shell station is less than five miles away. Talking about those specimens, Emily, we don't have a full megalosaurus. So there's a degree of sort of guesswork and speculation about this. So given that, what impact scientifically did Buckland have by describing the megalosaurus at the time and since? Yes, so as you say, we still don't have a full specimen,

29:26what we would call an associated material of Megalosaurus, a complete specimen that we can see what the whole skeleton looks like. But if we go back at the time as well and think about the concepts of the ways people were thinking at the time, so we're in 1824. Not only do we have the idea now that animals existed in the past, that they're not around in the present day, there might be extinction. And we're also at a time when the geologist and surveyor William Smith is also starting to create these geological maps of counties and then of England as well. And the idea being recognised that the rocks have been laid down in succession and that you have fossils which distinguish a particular layer of those rocks that are not

30:09found in rocks earlier or since. And scientifically, one of the things that Buckland's discovery, the description of Megalosaurus did, along with the soon-to-follow other dinosaurs that were described like Iguanodon and then also soon after that, Heliosaurus as well, created this idea that it was this past age of reptiles. So there was a time when these giant lumbering animals lived on Earth. And what was interesting, at the same time that Buckland presented Megalosaurus to the Geological Society, he also described a fossil mammal from the same area. And so that created quite a stir as well too, because you were thinking you've got this age of reptiles, but then also you've got these mammals living alongside,

30:47but that's perhaps another programme. Just out of interest, what sort of mammal was that? Because this is much further back than I imagined mammals to exist. Exactly, exactly. So this is a very, very early representative of mammals and kind of before the living groups of mammals that we know today all appeared on the scene. So it's much earlier than that, but it does have some characteristics of mammals. Because I think it's important to stress that the Megalosaurus is much earlier than the sort of classic dinosaurs like T-Rex. Yeah, absolutely. Tens of millions of years earlier than that. So we're in the middle Jurassic at this time, about 166 million years ago. If you think about animals like T-Rex, for example, you're talking about 66 million years ago. So we've got 100 million years separating those animals. And also earlier than that as well, we've got dinosaurs going back to probably around 200 million years. So if you think about that timeframe,

31:45there's a huge amount of time that's elapsed even since the origin of dinosaurs. And then between megalosaurus and then things like T. rex. And that's extraordinary to contemplate the extent of that period. So we're right in the middle with the megalosaurus, which is the middle Jurassic period, as you said. Steve, can you describe to us what the world looked like in the Middle Jurassic period? The Middle Jurassic, as Emily said, is a long time ago. T-Rex is closer to us than it was to megalosaurus. And I'll repeat that, because I think this is one of these facts that it still blows my mind studying dinosaurs. T-Rex is closer in time to us than it was to Megalosaurus. So back in the Middle Jurassic, the supercontinent of Pangea, which had once existed, all of the land had been gathered together into this one giant slab that stretched from the North Pole to the South Pole.

32:39That supercontinent had begun to split apart about 200 million years ago. But it was just beginning to fracture. So the modern continents were beginning to take shape and you had these very narrow oceans in between. And there was this sliver of an ocean that was the Proto-Atlantic. And in that ocean was a series of islands, including some islands that now are parts of what would be Britain. You know, it was a different shaped island. It's not like modern Britain was the same shape back then. But this is why we have fossils from that time in England, but also in Scotland. So my crew in Edinburgh, we work a lot on the Isle of Skye. Emily's worked on Skye in the past. There's also Middle Jurassic fossils in Scotland.

33:20Back when these animals, like Megalosaurus, were living in the Middle Jurassic on these islands, the world was much warmer. There were no big ice caps at the poles, no big glaciers, maybe on the tallest mountain somewhere, but that's it. The world was so much warmer. And Britain would have been subtropical. So imagine a Britain that was like the Canary Islands or like Southern California. That's the sort of world. But the plants would have been totally different. There would have been nothing with fruits, nothing with flowers, very different types of trees. That's the world Megalosaurus lived in. And it was the largest predator, as far as we know, in its ecosystem. But there were also long-necked dinosaurs.

34:01There were stegosaurs, the ones with plates on their backs, and many other smaller dinosaurs too. Emma, I wanted to ask you that what else have we got in the Middle Jurassic period apart from the megalosaurus? Well, so in the Middle Jurassic of Oxfordshire, for example, where the type specimens are from and where we also have trackways of megalosaurus as well, we know that we had other dinosaurs such as Eustreptospondylus, which is a dinosaur a lot like megalosaurus, closely related, a little bit smaller. So megalosaurus we think could have grown up to about nine meters in length. Eustreptospondylus, probably about six meters in length. But the only specimen we have in the world is actually

34:40a sub-adult. So, you know, we don't know for sure. We also have herbivores, Steve's named some, but in Oxfordshire, we've got cetosaurus, for example, which is a long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur called a sauropod. So very famous ones are brontosaurus, brachiosaurus, for example. But it's worth saying that of all the dinosaurs that we know, people think we know a lot about dinosaurs. Actually, that's not true. We know very little about dinosaurs. And the number of dinosaurs that we know of, there are around 700 genera. But we've already elucidated how many millions of years dinosaurs have been around for. And dinosaurs are still around. Birds are dinosaurs. So dinosaurs have been around for over 200 million years.

35:24So think about how many species of dinosaur there So dinosaurs have been around for over 200 million years. So think about how many species of dinosaur there must actually have been compared to what we know. So those are some of the dinosaurs that we know would have been around, but it's a drop in the ocean, there would have been an awful lot more. So Emily, Buckland, we mentioned earlier, he referred to it as a four-legged lizard, I think. How much did Buckland get right about Megalosaurus and what have we learned about the beast since? So Buckland got right the fact that it was a really large carnivore. So those blade-like serrated teeth are indicative of something that's eating meat. He was right in the sense that it was in

36:06somewhat reptilian. So if we remember, we're talking about a time like nearly two decades before the concept of dinosaurs and the name dinosauria was actually announced. So he wasn't even aware that there was a thing called a dinosaur, but dinosaurs are fit within that kind of wider group that we think of as kind of reptilians. So he got that right. The things that he didn't get right were that it's not four-legged, it walks on two legs. But again, it goes back to this idea of at the time people had no concept of these giant two-legged massive carnivorous animals that we're all familiar with now since childhood, you know, things like T-Rex and other large carnivores like Megalosaurus. One interesting thing that he did get right,

36:51which was a really smart observation, was that rather than walking like a lizard with its arms out to the side, Megalosaurus had its legs underneath its body. And this is a characteristic trait of dinosaurs to have its legs under the body and the top of the hip pointing inwards into an open hip socket. So Buckland realised that that was the case. So that was a really astute observation at the time. And do we think the Megalosaurus was one of the first species to start walking in that way? Or is there evidence that it had been happening for some time? Since the origin of dinosaurs, there were groups, all the dinosaurs were walking with their legs underneath their body. That is a kind of characteristic trait. It puts your

37:33legs under your body, it enables you to have a longer stride length. Like we do essentially, mammals do the same thing. So rather than having our legs out to the side and using a twisting of our bodies to move, we have the legs under our bodies and that enables us to walk in a kind of what we call a parasitical way of moving. I'll take your word for it. So Emma, it was the first name dinosaur, but let's face it, it's not the best known dinosaur today. Why did Megalosaurus, which captured the public so intensely in the 1820s, it's kind of dropped out of our common knowledge about dinosaurs. I'm going to be perfectly honest here, I had not heard of a megalosaurus before we started researching this program. But I mean,

38:19I just wonder why it sort of dropped out. Yeah, it's interesting because megalosaurus, as you say, it started dinosaur science. It started global fandom, this phenomenon that we have. And yet, yeah, it's not that well known. It's not even as though it's not the most popular. It's actually not that well known by the public. So megalosaurus, as Emily was describing, we don't have a whole skeleton. We know what it would have looked like. And that's because we can use other closely related animals to basically fill in the missing puzzle pieces. So we've got an accurate picture of what it would have looked like now. But I think, to be honest, I think the reason that other dinosaurs have overtaken

39:00megalosaurus in the public imagination, I'm going to lay the blame at the feet of Hollywood. Because, to be honest, when Tyrannosaurus was named in 1900, yes, okay, there was more of it, fine. So we knew what it looked like, perhaps. But, you know, going back to even right back to 1925, the black and white silent film, The Lost World. The Lost World, yes. An incredible new type of film. And, you know, newspapers at the time actually reported people leaving the cinema because they were frightened. They hadn't seen stop motion animation. They thought these animals were real. And, you know, maybe moving forward slightly to 1940, Disney's Fantasia, the dinosaurs that were put on screen in these films,

39:45in both of those films as examples, are North American. They're T-Rex, they're Allosaurus, they're Stegosaurus, there's a Triceratops. Yeah, it's not Megalosaurus. So do you think there's a case for Jurassic Park, the prequel? Yes, I write a daily letter. The Oxford Jurassic. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. So, Steve, we've established the megalosaurus wouldn't be hanging out with the T-Rex, but they look quite similar. I mean, it's, you know, even though they're tens of millions of years apart, clearly things didn't develop that dramatically. They do look quite similar. And I'm somebody who studies dinosaurs for my job, and I know all the minutiae, but I don't get offended if somebody looks at a megalosaurus and says, that looks like a little T-Rex, because it really does. I mean, it's a

40:35meat-eating dinosaur. It walked on its hind legs. It had smaller arms. It had these ferocious steak knife teeth. It was basically an early cousin, a smaller version of a T-Rex. And this goes back to what Emily was just talking about. Dinosaurs go back a long way. They go back all the way to the Triassic period, the time of Pangea, 230 million years ago or more. And early on in their evolution, they started to walk upright and they evolved some of these classic features. It was clearly a very successful evolutionary adaptation, and that persisted, and it persists in birds today. I know that a sparrow doesn't look like a T-Rex, but when you see a bird walking around, hopping around, it's walking in the same basic way that a megalosaurus did with its legs underneath its body.

41:19So, Holly, are you telling us that dinosaurs existed already before the continents broke apart? Yeah. The origin story of dinosaurs goes back to Pangea. Pangea was their birthplace. And that goes to show, I think, just the antiquity of all of this. We are dealing with animals that go back more than 230 million years, and they still exist today as birds. So would that explain why you'll find bones in China, which are not dissimilar from bones you might find in, say, the United States? Absolutely. Especially earlier on in the Triassic period, when the land was connected. It's not that any dinosaur could just walk anywhere. I mean, Pangaea was huge. There were deserts, there were other barriers. When you got into the Jurassic,

42:09the continents were beginning to split, but they were still quite close. There were probably lots of land corridors and land bridges. As sea level would rise and fall, things could move around. There are dinosaurs like Megalosaurus in China, in the US, that are from a similar age. It's not that the entire world would have been populated by Megalosaurus. It is very much this classic quintessential homegrown British dinosaur, but it did have cousins that were living quite widely afield 160, 170 million years ago. Emily, I want you to tell us about something, a fascinating thing, which is the trackways of the Megalosaurus. What do trackways tell us? What are they they so fossils are not only the

42:46body fossils not only the shells and bones but we can also get behavioral remnants things like tracks and dinosaurs are not unique in that they leave they have track ways like many other types of animals do and back in 1997 um in a in ardley which is in between Oxford and Banbury, a quarry was discovered, a bedding plane, where it was peppered with trackways. Some of them were three-toed, which is a distinctive track made by theropod dinosaurs, the group to which megalosaurus and T. rex belong to. Others were a collection of kind of really giant round prints and then sort of small kind of curved half-moon prints, which are classic prints made by the large sauropod dinosaurs like Cetosaurus that

43:29Emma was describing. So we don't know for sure what animals made these tracks. They're not dead at the end of the track. But the largest animals around at that time that probably made the tracks were Megalosaurus and Cetosaurus. Now tracks are neat because way back in the 70s, McNeil Alexander, who was a biomechanist, had a genius interpretation of tracks to realise that there's a relationship between the stride length of a track and also how high the hip of the track maker was and the speed that animal was actually moving. So by measuring the distance of a stride and by measuring, he also realised there's a rough relationship that the length of a foot is about four times that is the height of the hip. So you can measure the track

44:17ways and you can work out from that a rough estimate of how fast that animal is moving. And when you apply that to some of the trackways from Oxfordshire that were probably made by megalosaurus, it reveals two really neat things. One is that the animal was moving, first of all, that one track, it starts off moving about four miles an hour and its legs were a little bit out to the side. And we talked about having legs and its toes are pointing inwards. And then during the track moving along, it moves its legs underneath its body more, points its toes forward, and the speed increases to around 18 miles an hour. So not only do we get an idea of how fast these animals roughly were moving, we can also see how they were moving as well,

44:58that they had their legs a little bit out to the side, they moved them right underneath their body when they were running, a bit like we do, when we really start running, if we can. I don't do that, run that fast. You start moving your legs really underneath your body and these dinosaurs were doing the same thing. Emma, you've actually been working on the most recently discovered dinosaur highway. What have you been doing on those trackways and what have you found? So the 1997 Ardley trackways are actually the same horizon as the trackways that have been discovered in Dewar's Farm. And so together, those sites are one of the largest dinosaur trackway sites in the world when put together. So myself and my colleague Duncan

45:38Murdoch at Oxford, Kirsty Edgar and Richard Butler at Birmingham, the four of us for the last three years have had the great privilege, frankly, to lead excavations at Dewar's Farm, digging up these dinosaur footprints. And it's been amazing. So the Megalosaurus was first published in 1824, of course, as we've talked about already. And 200 years later, we were leading the excavation of Jewah's farm. And so literally in the 200th anniversary, in the bicentenary year of Megalosaurus first dinosaur ever named, as we've said, we were there digging up new footprints, discovering new things about this animal. And so, you know, every time I talk about that, it gives me goosebumps to think about the sheer

46:23coincidence, frankly, of being able to do that in the 200th year. But also there was moments like Justin Pitts. I'm not joking. That is his name. He's one of the site managers, and he was excavating some of these footprints in front of us. And my colleagues were off to the site having a conversation. Justin couldn't see exactly what was on the floor in front of him because the digger is in the way. And so in that moment, I realised not only was I the first human that had ever seen those footprints, but I will always be the first human that had ever seen those dinosaur footprints. And that was amazing. And there's one point where I believe that you work out that a dinosaur was looking behind itself to see what was coming after it.

47:10I mean, sadly, we were not there 166 million years ago. I would have loved to have been. So we can only elucidate things from the fossil record. But something, as Emily mentioned earlier, something really incredible about trace fossils is that body fossils tell you what an animal might have looked like. Trace fossils show you their behavior. I mean, we were literally looking at an individual animal's behavior. This trackway that you're referring to, the megalosaurus, the predator, and the cetrosaurus, which is the plant eater, the herbivore, the trackways cross over each other. And the megalosaurus, we're pretty sure came second because the back of the foot of the megalosaurus has crushed the side of what we call

47:52the displacement rim. So at the front of a large footprint like a cetiasaurus, as we mentioned, is about 18 meters in length. As the animal lifted its foot up, it pushed some of the mud forward. And so it leaves this sort of banana shaped lump of mud that hardens, that lithifies over time. So that's remained, it's preserved. And so we know that Megalosaurus came second. And so that's one piece of information. The second piece of information that helped us come up with that potential possibility of what was happening was that the main Cchysaurus trackway, the area that was excavated in one go was 150 metres. We know it went further, but in one exposure, we had 150 metres exposed and the animal was walking at a very, very regular pace the whole way up to just in front of where this Megalosaurus crossed over, where it did

48:43something a bit odd. It put its front left foot down out of sequence too early, if you like. And if you imagine building the skeleton up from where the footprints lay, why has it done that? Well, it's entirely feasible that it is looking over its left shoulder. And frankly, if you have a nine-metre predator following you, I would be looking over my shoulder as well. So, you know, it might not be what happened, but that is one way of interpreting what we can see emily just to come back to this idea of how do we really know what a megalosaurus was when we just don't have enough bones how can you tell from a jawbone for example how it walks uh well maybe not from a jawbone but we've got other bones fortunately we've got some limb bones as well too.

49:26I think there's two ways. One is that it's using the same kind of methods that the classic anatomists were using. So the principle of comparative anatomy. We now think of comparative anatomy not only in trying to look at fossils and living animals that might be doing the same things, but also looking at fossils and living animals that are quite closely related. And we can look for evidence for things like the shape of the teeth is a real giveaway for what animals were eating. We can look at things like the thickness of some of the bones that are supporting the body. There's a real relationship there between how thick a bone is and the body mass of that animal. We've been able to test that in living animals

50:02and then extrapolate that back to dinosaurs to give us an estimate. We can also use things like where rough patches or bumps and lumps on the bone where muscles might have attached. We can look at the nearest living relatives of dinosaurs, which on the one hand are birds, as we've discussed, and on the other hand are crocodiles. Where do we find similar patterns on the bones that we see on the bones of these living animals? Is that because the same muscles and tendons are attaching there? If they do, what kind of leverage do those muscles and tendons give the jaws, the limbs? Are they moving fast? Are they moving forcefully? And then we can use modern techniques like x-rays to see inside the bones themselves. That can give us an idea

50:38of the shape of the brain, you know, the cavity that's left by the brain. When we flood fill that cavity in a digital model, what's the shape of it? What was the shape of the animal's brain? How big were different regions that were to do with sensing smell, for example? We can use computer models that are used in biomechanics to look at, for example, you know, if you were doing sports science, you know, and you were trying to see how someone's limbs were moving, we can use those same kinds of methods to look at our models of dinosaurs and say, right, if we apply those muscles, how do those limbs move? How quickly are they moving? How fast might that animal be actually moving? So there's a whole range of kind of classic and modern techniques available to us.

51:17Steve, tell us, Buckland described the megalosaurus, first of all, 200 years ago. What has happened in the field of dinosaur science since then? And what are we still missing? Wow. I mean, it's been 200 years of discovery and it very much dinosaur paleontology at its heart is a discovery science. Now, not every single paleontologist, but many paleontologists spend a lot of time going out looking for fossils. There are still a lot of time going out looking for fossils. There are still a lot of fossils to be found. And each fossil is a clue. Each fossil can tell us something new. And people are still finding new species, totally new types of dinosaurs. And of course, this is happening more in places that are opening up, large countries,

51:59countries that are growing, countries that are training a lot of young scientists, and places like China, Brazil, Argentina, Mongolia, South Africa. I mean, I have colleagues in Mongolia right now that are doing an excavation as we speak. So there are a lot of new fossils, still 40, 50 new species a year. But the technology, of course, has helped tremendously. And paleontologists, we love to borrow technology from other fields and use all sorts of technology. Emily is a prime example of that. Emily, I mean, she's been very, you know, humble in the way she's talking about biomechanics throughout the talk. But, I mean, Emily is one of the pioneers in using these engineering techniques and physics techniques to understand how dinosaurs fed, how they moved.

52:41And, I mean, Emily can tell you about that. I won't put words in her mouth. But, I mean, these can tell you about that. I won't put words in her mouth. But I mean, these are techniques from other disciplines. We use CAT scanning a lot to see inside of fossils, to see inside the brain cavity, to help us understand what the brains and senses were like. And we've just gained a much greater appreciation for what dinosaurs are like as living animals. But I think one thing I just have to hammer home on is when Buckland described megalosaurus, not only did he not know it was a dinosaur because that word, that concept didn't exist yet, but he had no concept of evolution. In fact, he was just totally aghast. He was totally against

53:17any idea that species could change over time. He never changed his mind. He died before Darwin published the origin of species. He died a few years before, but he wouldn't have changed his mind. He died before Darwin published The Origin of Species. He died a few years before, but he wouldn't have changed his mind. What do you imagine, how would he have reacted to The Origin of Species? He would have not accepted it because he was so devout. He would not have accepted that the authority of the Bible could be challenged in that way. In fact, when he wrote The Bridgewater Treatise, a huge part of that book was making the argument that the fossil record in the 1830s, this was, did not support this radical new idea people were whispering about that species could transmutate over time.

53:56So Buckland would not have accepted Darwin's ideas. Darwin knew it because Darwin and Buckland, they knew each other. They got on, but they had a little bit of friction. But I think when you say in 200 years, what have we learned? Well, we've learned that dinosaurs evolved. I mean, when these first dinosaurs were found, there was not that concept that existed that they could change over time. They are now one of our premier records of how a major group of animals changes over long periods of time in concert with changes in climate and changes in the environment. So dinosaurs are a huge source of information for us understanding how evolution works. And there's a nice bit actually in the Bridgewater evident of, what is it, having a kind of

54:46quick death, basically, which is evidence of a benevolent God that it would create such, the God would create such a fearsome predator that he would allow you to die very quickly. I'm still sort of struggling the idea of the Garden of Eden with, you know, sort of megalosaurus bumping into Adam and Eve. I mean, it's like, it must have been, it must have been intellectually very challenging. Well, I mean, we're chuckling about it. We're joking about it. And I don't know the religious views of everybody around the table or anything. But, you know, today we have that vantage point. But imagine, imagine you're in the 1820s, your world, the whole way you see the world, not just the moral authority, but the way you understand how the world operates,

55:23it comes from the Bible. So the discovery of these giant bones, it would have rocked your concept of the world. But it's also quite interesting because this is 150 years or so after Kepler, Galileo, and then philosophers like Spinoza are beginning— Spinoza, now we're getting into it. Really beginning to challenge Christian theology. I think you've still, about the backdrop of that, you've got the ideas now of people like Hutton and Lyell, this principle of uniformitarianism, opposed to kind of Cuvier's idea of of animals going extinct but through some kind of catastrophic event that also changed the the structure of the earth that you've actually on the other hand you've got this argument that the earth is extremely old and the processes that we see every day around us

56:16erosion uplift and what's happened over huge vast time scales that we can't comprehend and that's what's created the earth but but still cuvierier was very fond of the catastrophism idea, but his idea was that species would kind of move in from somewhere else. And then it was taken on in a kind of biblical explanation by people like Buckland and others to say, actually, this is evidence of the flood or previous floods, for example. Previous series of creations, creations that a benevolent God allowed to flourish for a period of time, maybe not a literal day like in the Bible, but then God put a stop to it to create something new. That is very much how Buckland was reconciling things in real time, this deeply devout man, but also this man who was very curious about the natural world, who collected fossils, who was enthralled by fossils.

57:03He had to put these pieces together in his mind, and that's how he did it. But of course, Darwin came later, and society moves on, science moves on, and now we understand. And Darwin did himself. He wrote about dinosaurs in the later editions of The Origin of Species. He even wrote about birds coming from dinosaurs in the very last edition of The Origin. Okay, as a final question, which one of the three of you is going to take on the relationship between Megalosaurus and Scrotum humanum? I'm absolutely going to take this. Not me. I want to talk about it also because I've researched it as well. Emily. Yeah, right. So, yeah, Scrotum humanum. I think this obviously we need to backtrack at this point for context. So we only discussed Robert Plott, who in 1676 had come into the possession of this giant thigh bone. And in fact, it was the end of a giant thigh bone. And so this is the bit of the femur, the bit that articulates with our knee. And so if you can imagine the structure, it's got two

58:05big kind of knobs on the end and then a, no pun intended, and then a distinct groove in between them. And Plot illustrated this in his book of the next year, 1677, on the natural history of Oxfordshire. Now later on, we jump forward in time to 1763 to someone called Richard Brooks. He was a physician. He travelled widely. He'd written and translated books about medicine, natural history, fishing. And he described this giant thigh bone. In the text, he talks about the Roman war elephant. He talks about giant, you know, maybe it's not that. But in the illustration, he takes Plot's illustration. And next to it, on the same page, there's something that looks a bit like a heart. And then there's a description of Anthropocarditis.

58:51And then there's something like an ovuloid structure, which has got the description kidney stone above it. And then we have our thigh bone and above it is the word scrotum humanum. And so there's been much debate since then about whether this was a kind of a new name that was attributed to the structure or whether it was actually just a kind of descriptive wording of what the structure actually looked like, kidney stone, like something that looks like a human heart. But in the 90s, there was a petition to the Menkata, the International Cardiovascular Menkata, who rule on what you can and can't call things, basically, if you describe a There was a petition to the Nomencator, the International Cardivological Nomencator,

59:29who rule on what you can and can't call things, basically, if you describe a new species. That actually Megalosaurus bucklandi shouldn't exist because it was preceded by Scrotum humanum. And actually, when the book was published in 1763, this actually post-dated the origin of the Linnaean system of taxonomy. So, you know, we're Homo sapiens, this idea that you've got your classes, orders, genus, etc. However, the ICZN ruled that it was a lost name, an old name, and therefore Megalosaurus bucklandi should stay. So we're very fortunate that that is actually the case. My thanks to Emma Nichols, Emily Rayfield, and Steve Brussati. Next week we'll be discussing the Battle of Antietam, the deadliest day in the American Civil War

1:00:11and a crucial step towards emancipation. Thank you for joining us. Can we have some tea? In Our Time with Misha Gleniwas, produced by Martha Owen. It's a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. If you're in the UK, you can access episodes 28 days early by subscribing to In Our Time on BBC Sounds or watching on BBC iPlayer. If you're outside the UK, you can listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Daryl Breen. And I'm Hannah Fry. And we're back with another series of Curious Cases, exploring a whole new set of scientific head-scratchers, including... Are identical twins basically human clones? Why is yawning so contagious? What is the mathematical magic behind tessellation?

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