Dino Quest
Dino Quest is a children's podcast from Fun Kids, the UK's children's radio station. Each episode, Lauren and Cassius choose one dinosaur speciality, such as the fastest legs or sharpest teeth, and explore it in depth. They speak with palaeontologists and other scientists who study dinosaurs, including researchers working with fossils and computer models. Across the series, they build an imaginary perfect dinosaur using one real feature from one real fossil at a time.
Episodes
Why you can’t hide from a T. rex, with Jared Voris
The most important part of your nose is inside your brain. Your nose catches the smell, but it’s a lump at the front of your brain that works out what it is: sweet, horrible, or dangerous, like gas in the kitchen. Humans tend to put smell near the bottom of their list of senses. For most animals it’s essential, for marking territory, finding each other and sniffing out food. This week’s word is ol
Dinosaur chicken nuggets with Jingmai O’Connor
Loads of dinosaurs had wings, but not many of them could fly. There’s a dinosaur in your garden right now, probably the one that keeps stealing your chips, because a seagull is a dinosaur, and so is every robin, pigeon and chicken. Feathers turn up again and again across the dinosaur family tree, and most of them had nothing to do with flying. Oviraptors spread their feathered arms over their nest
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 painti
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 s
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 we
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
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 thi
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 ki
This is Dino Quest
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 Morrison 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
