S04E02 Dinosaur social groups

Terrible Lizards

There’s numerous illustrations and documentaries showing great herds of dinosaurs together and it is very common to come across the idea that various species (or entire groups like the hadrosaurs, ceratopsians and dromaeosaurs) fundamentally lived in groups. As usual though, this really oversimplifies a huge mess of extrapolations from limited fossil data and the complexities of social behaviour in living species. The perfect problem to solve in half an hour of a podcast. This time out we are joined by podcaster and science communicator George Hrab and general all-round science enthusiast. He wants to ask Dave a very speculative question about the future of dinosaur evolution and things spiral from there.

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Links:

A piece by Dave in The Guardian about his work on groups in Protoceratops: https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2014/nov/26/dinosaurs-formed-groups-throughout-their-lives-protoceratops

A blogpost on one of the older versions of Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology blog that covers some of the same areas as George’s question: http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/11/dinosauroids-revisited.html