Podcast #136 - Interview with Paleontologist Dr. David Hone - Pterosaurs Part 1

welcome to the dinosaur Gorge podcast a show about paleontology and other earth sciences dinosaur George is a public speaker author and TV host with of study in paleontology he has performed live in over 4,500 events across the u.s. and Canada here is dinosaur George [Music] hey happy 2019 can you believe it has been a year since my last podcast well I cannot believe that much time has transpired I want to welcome all of you back I know so many of you have written to me and asked if I was going to do another podcast and I and I apologize so much for not being able to do these I enjoy them immensely and I wish I had more time to get dedicate to doing them but it's been a crazy 2018 and now we're into 2019 and today is the 3rd of January so it is truly the start of a new year so what have I been doing all this time well I've been doing a lot of things thanks for asking my biggest has been my traveling museum it is continuing to take up all of my time which I absolutely love don't get me wrong I I enjoy it immensely so it's been a lot of traveling I still remain pretty much here in Texas as far as traveling with the museum I've done some lecturing outside of Texas I've done it in a couple of different states but I mostly stay here in Texas the museum stays mostly here in Texas as well and I've seen literally hundreds of thousands of kids with this museum and it is very rewarding and the most exciting part for me is that I'm taking it into communities where some of the children and quite frankly a lot of the residents have just never seen fossils before now mine are replicas I don't travel with real stuff but still it's the idea that they just don't get a chance to ever see dinosaur bones and so I'm giving them the opportunity to see something that is quite fascinating and of course my hope in life is that I can encourage kids to do whatever it is they choose to do it doesn't necessarily have to be paleontology I hope it just encourages them to get out there and and and look at the outdoors and look at the sciences as a possible career and and look at things from a different perspective that's my hope so anyway that's been the majority I went up to Canada I did a series of lectures up in Canada with my friends at the Jurassic Jurassic oh my gosh my mind just went blank Jurassic forest holy smokes I kept wanting to say Jurassic Fight Club that's seven years ago the Jurassic forest right outside of Gibbons it's a beautiful place to go see robotic dinosaurs set up in environments that look so real you would swear some of these animals are alive so I went up there I also flew over to England to drop in and surprise visit my best friend Alex alex is a very good friend of mine I was fortunate enough to meet Alex when he and his family came over here to the States and we became best of buds and so I went over there and surprised Alex and got to spend a couple of days with he and his family and I enjoyed it immensely it is a beautiful country and I certainly am making plans now to go back so I've been a very busy person and I'm glad to finally have time to jump back in here and do a little do a little podcasting so anyway this podcast is going to be very exciting because it is dedicated to one subject and that is the subject of pterosaurs the pterodactyl id's I am thrilled to have got dr. dave hone to come back again and talk about pterosaurs and so this entire show is dedicated to the subject of pterosaurs it's an interview with dr. hone I think you guys are gonna really really enjoy it because I can tell you I learned some really incredible stuff and I know you will too so sit back and we're gonna jump right into the interview with dr. hone and I hope you guys enjoyed and again for all of you that have stuck around for a year I hope your I hope you're glad I'm back I know I am and I hope you guys will enjoy this so we'll get into right into that interview we often hear the words flying dinosaurs but they associate that with pterosaurs and that is not correct and to help us understand more about these animals that we often just referred to as pterodactyls is someone we had on the previous year dr. David hone dr. hone welcome back to the show we are thrilled to have you back with us thank you for having me again so let me ask you is a pterosaur a dinosaur no they're not pterosaurs as far as we know our very close relatives of dinosaurs so they basically there's an evolutionary split very close to the origin of dinosaurs just after crocodiles evolved and one of those groups went on to become pterosaurs and another group after a few little changes became dinosaurs so they are very close relatives but they are not part of that group we do not consider pterosaurs to be dinosaurs but they lived at the same time right or they were there when dinosaurs were there right yeah absolutely I mean lots of things around at the same time we have the early mammals there were lizards and snakes and fish and of course even birds later appeared and was still living alongside both dinosaurs and pterosaurs and then marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs so there's loads and loads of stuff around at the same time that doesn't mean of course they're all dinosaurs and the pterosaurs you know kind of group which kind of fade into the background of these scenes you know the dinosaurs get all the glory and after that some of the marine reptiles because you know some of the playa source for example were just so enormous the people really interested in and then pterosaurs just kind of there but they had a worldwide distribution we found pterosaurs on all seven continents as we say they involved basically at the same time as dinosaurs they went extinct at the same time as dinosaurs so they were around just as long as the die and we find them in pretty much every environment that they could be found in and indeed you know these were animals were also getting out over the open oceans something that the dinosaurs never really did so in some ways they were every bit as successful and diverse as the dinosaurs now see I'm surprised at that because in almost all imagery of pterosaurs we only see one we see Pteranodon with a big fancy big crest on the black of its skull that being the most iconic one but as I learned more about pterosaurs I was stunned at the sheer variety but also we always see them depicted as ocean and as as sea animals as reptiles that lived solely along the shores of ancient oceans but you just said that they were found pretty much everywhere so their distribution is is not just limited to marine environment no you can understand why these misconceptions come about because pterosaurs have astoundingly thin bones we talk about theropod dinosaurs having you know various air sacs and hollows in them and so to the sauropod dinosaurs and birds have this to an even greater degree so birds have very thin walled bones pterosaurs are thinner again so the bones of pterosaurs are astonishingly thin and that means actually it's very difficult for them to preserve that they just break or you can just break down you know decay very very easily right and so as a result of that they only tend to preserve in places where the preservation is absolutely perfect and most of the time those kinds of preservation conditions are in the sea or at least in shallow lagoons and kind of bay areas so it's mostly an artifact of the preservation we simply can't find pterosaurs or at least they're just incredibly hard to find in classic inland environments so even though they were there in large numbers and as far as we can tell reasonable diversity just don't find them but then yet Pteranodon in particular is known from over a thousand specimens which is a hell of a lot I mean that that's an awful lot you know most dinosaurs can't begin to touch those kinds of numbers now mostly a lot of them are Pteranodon a very fragmentary they're very broken the very incomplete there's only a few bits of wing or a few bits of leg or a head but Houston specimens is an awful lot and so we probably know more about Pteranodon than any other pterosaur and it was very big and as you say it's a conic big head big crusty was one of the first pterosaurs found and so it's perhaps not a big surprise that it's kind of seeped into the consciousness as kind of like you know lead heiress or but we have give or take 150 species or so that have been named that's nothing like as many of the dinosaurs room coming in more like a thousand but again pterosaurs are pterosaur fossils are very few and far between so I'd be you know their diversity was almost certainly considerably higher we just can't find the fossils well with that number of named species can you give us a general idea of size range because we always think of pterosaurs as they're always showing either a small airplane or a en Collider but but what are the what are some of the what are some of the size ranges of these animals yes the big ones really work just as you've described there's things like Quetzalcoatl Asst Aaron Burr gr Nia and a whole bunch of others which a group called the Aged are kids and yet these were huge absolutely enormous ten metres plus within wingspan 250 maybe 350 kilos which is extraordinarily heavy for a flying animal but on the other hand very light for an animal with the ten meter wingspan so the upper size range is you know massive multiple times bigger than the largest flying birds bigger by far than the largest extinct flying birds that we know of pterosaurs were huge at the small scale it starts to get very complicated you will often see people discuss pterosaurs with a wingspan of you know 20 thirty centimetres even down to kind of 15 maybe even ten we certainly have specimens of animals that size what we do not have these adults of that size we think that pterosaurs could probably fly as juveniles some people including me think they could probably fly within days or weeks of hatching out of the egg so much much faster than most birds or things like bats manage for example but the smallest adult pterosaurs that we know of were actually around a meter in wingspan so that's pretty big that's kind of the size of a crow or so so there were definitely smaller pterosaurs than that that could fly but the smallest adults were about a meter so actually you know compared to birds where you know and and bats where you've got animals with you know ten centimeter wing spans as adults hummingbirds things like the bumblebee bat the smallest pterosaurs were actually quite large that is amazing and of course like with the general public the big things always seem to we gravitate our attention towards so my question would be let's take an animal like Quetzalcoatl s and some here in Texas and that's one of our iconic creatures how does that animal become airborne does it have the musculature to flap its wings and fly what is your opinion of that yes this is another classic thing of the idea that the very largest pterosaurs were you know terrestrial basically they couldn't fly they were too big they were too heavy they couldn't get into the air there's lots of reasons to think that isn't true for a start we have loads and loads of flightless birds there's you know everyone knows things like ostriches and penguins but there's a whole bunch of lineages which have basically lost the ability to fly there's a whole bunch of Greaves there's things like the kakapo New Zealand the flightless parrot things like Kiwis though it used to be a flightless wren in New Zealand this has happened many many times and we see some systemic changes with the loss of flight and one of them really unsurprised is that the wings get smaller you know if you're not flying evolution will soon get rid of those big heavy wings and those massive flight muscles because you're just not using them and even the biggest pterosaurs have properly developed wings and properly developed joints on those wings and places to attach muscles so if Quetzalcoatl's couldn't fly it still got all of the flight musculature and all the wing proportions of a flying animal which is a very odd thing to have done so bat you know immediately makes it look very unlikely similarly flightless birds tend to stop having those super thin bones their bones start to thicken up again because losing weight is less of a problem being strong so you don't break your bones while you run around on the ground is more of a more of a thing to have catalyst doesn't have that the ashtar kids have proportionally the thinnest bones of pterosaurs which is what you'd expect from flying animals so there's a bunch of things to assume that you know make it look like they did fly so it's a reasonable assumption that they did then we can actually look at the mechanics could they get off the ground and fly and well actually if you run the numbers is a friend and colleague of mine called mike Abib down in Los Angeles who's done an awful lot of this work and yeah it looks really pretty fine that they could get off the ground and this is because pterosaurs are actually built a lot more like bats than they are like birds a problem in the past is people have looked at birds and gone well you know you get albatross and condors getting up to you know 3 4 meters in wingspan and they they struggle to fly at the best of times and these animals are you know in the tens of kilos how are you gonna get something that's ten plus times that heavy into the air and the thing is birds are kind of weird because they walk around on their back legs on the ground and then in the air they're propelled entirely by their front legs their wings and so actually they need two entirely independent sets of muscles to do that they need muscles that are strong enough to let them run around and indeed jump to take off and they need muscles strong enough to flap around and in both cases they kind of now carrying the extra weight because when they're flying in particular they're now carrying all that extra weight of heavy legs what bats do is almost the sensible way round in that actually most of the energy they're expelling while on the ground to walk and indeed run things like vampire bats can run and jump which most people don't expect they gallop like horses quite literally there's some wonderful videos of this online which I suggest people look up but they're doing that with their front legs the majority of that power and energy is coming from their fore limbs and their flight muscles and their back legs aren't really doing very much so when they take off they're not taking off with those back legs they're taking off with their massively powerful front legs and the back legs aren't doing very much so this is a brilliant kind of multiple saving because you're jumping off with the powerful muscles and then once you're in the air you don't need to lug around all those extra heavy almost like dead weight of your legs and this is what pterosaurs do on the ground pterosaurs for quadrupeds then walking on all fours we can see that their hind legs are incredibly spindly they have a reduced pelvis and there's not a lot of leg muscles on there but their chest muscles are huge so as far as we can tell and again the berries berries biomechanical studies bear this out they have that falling power to jump off the ground and launch and then they have that falling power combined with relatively lightweight legs and then relatively lightweight skeletons even compared to birds which means that proportionately they're not that heavy they've got the extra muscle they can get themselves into the air and flap around quite happily that's amazing and I guess like a hand glider once it's airborne it doesn't take a tremendous amount of effort to glide right yeah not necessarily so again that there's it gets a bit more complicated than that quite quickly inevitably but yes if you're an inland animal most aged are kids as far as we can tell lived you know inland they're not coastal animals they're not like gulls and launching off cliffs and landing back near cliffs and getting those kinds of off the sea they're relying as far as we can tell on thermals so hot columns of air from patches of the grounds that heat up that would certainly get them up as dark it's general in quetzalcoatl us certainly seem actually to have the power to fly properly by which I mean yeah you're talking about things like condors and buzzards which can certainly flap to takeoff but really get most of their height and distance from thermal soaring catching this warm air undoubtedly things like Quetzalcoatl's for doing that but catalyst actually seems to be more have more power and more endurance than those kinds of animals so actually they could probably flap a fair way as well so it's it's actually a mixture of both they almost certainly were massively efficient as you say catching the air using that to drift you know miles and miles and miles tens maybe hundreds of miles but these guys could flap pretty well too again they've actually they're built better than birds for want of a better expression with that distribution of muscles and and lack of finally math but they need to lug around some that's amazing well obviously they're needing to travel to find food sources there is there any evidence that helps you figure out what it is these animals are eating because again I go back to these iconic images we all see which is a pterosaur swooping down and grabbing a fish out of the water and and that's repeated a million times and books but is that the case or was it more diverse than that it was than that so again we have pterosaurs living in land now obviously that doesn't rule out fish when there's rivers and lakes but that's probably not there they're gonna be their main source of food yeah we have pterosaurs that were definitely hanging around coastlines pterosaurs that were flying well out to sea but pterosaurs that also lived well inland and we see a variety of adaptations in the skulls in particular once you roll out the skull pterosaurs are pretty similar to each other they fall in to talk to broad groups but the heads are where where it's at pretty much we definitely have pterosaurs that look like specialist insect eaters they have very small broad heads with a few fine Speight like teeth just like most insectivorous bats and to be honest like an awful lot of insect Empress lizards we're pretty happy that these are fundamentally insectivores we have some with some kind of big spiky teeth and little processing teeth which appear to be kind of generalist carnivores maybe generalist omnivores and obviously eating little animals meeting insects maybe taking a bit of fruit or something like that we have lots which are specialized for fish again that's not a big surprise as we said most of the fossils come from marine sediments a lot of the pterosaurs that we do know off we're definitely living in and around coastlines we have some which her were filter feeders again probably eating small fish and things like that but also small crustaceans and loads and loads and loads of loads of teeth so either snatching tiny fish or you know doing something maybe flamingos like and pumping the tongue to move water through and filter out tiny things we have a few well a quarter of Vegas animals so these are things that eat hard things there's a whole group of these from China called the single rip turrets I've worked on them quite a bit and they have these giant crushing teeth at the back of the jaws these lived in a basically around a joint inland sea or even an inland lake it was fresh of water in the middle of a desert and as far as we can tell it was full of things like clams and crabs and so these guys are presumably hooking them out and then crushing these things and then swallowing the remainder and then we have the edge dockets which we think are probably big predators of whatever they could get down their mouths they had huge Heron like bills or stalk like bills and they're probably hunting like some of the big terrestrial stalks things like marabou storks so maybe they were scavenging a bit but they were probably also gulping down baby dinosaurs larger mammals snakes anything like this and then there's a few pterosaurs where frankly we don't really know what they were eating there's hints that they are eating fish there's hints that they were scavengers there's hints that they are eating fruit is hints that they're eating leaves we really don't know because they have very odd skull shapes they look kind of like terrestrial fruit eaters but then we only ever find them in the sea but then that could be because they live near the sea and again that's where you're tend to find the fossils so that's a group the tap yards in particular and those are a real confusion and an endless source of argument we don't know what those were eating well you mentioned teeth so when we when we go into museums the majority either have the skeleton or a a reproduced body mount the Pteranodon and there's no teeth in its mouth and yet you're referring to teeth in some of these so some pterosaurs had teeth some did not yes had teeth and most of them had a huge number of teeth then the number reduced quite radically during getting on to kind of the the early cretaceous several different lineages independently lost their teeth so this happened multiple times just like the dinosaurs we have multiple different groups at various times decided to ditch teeth and go for peaks tariffs or did the same thing Pteranodon was one group depending on who you speak to a close relative of Pteranodon called Nick to Saurus Nick to Soros definitely didn't have teeth depending on who you speak to his whether or not it's a close relative of Pteranodon the edge darkens and the tap yards and their relatives they all form a group that we've talked about all of them have lost their teeth and a couple of others reduced it heavily as well and again so that's also covering a diversity of forms it's not like it's just the fish eaters did this the big group which is a close relative of Pteranodon is a group called the hornet Sakai reeds and they had loads of big teeth then they were fish eaters too they weren't doing the same thing that Pteranodon was but Pteranodon appears to have gone for a toothless way of grabbing fish all the cards have gone for big spikey fang-like teeth to grab fish so they're much more like crocodiles or dolphins in that respect rather than you know most modern fishing birds so clearly you can do a similar thing in a different way and you know a various times eeveelution goes down different routes but they were both tooth and toothless pterosaurs Wow now what about tails because we see images of some having long extended tails and and others having none or what appears to be none so is that a variety as well yeah that's so I mentioned a few minutes ago so there are basically two main groups of pterosaurs as ever it's a little more complicated than that the earliest pterosaurs pterodactyls pterosaurs in other words they're not the pterodactyl eyes which we'll get onto in a second the non pterodactyl eggs are generally small mostly under two meters at a dock there's a few pretty big ones which is creeping over two meters but mostly they're under that they have smallish heads shortish necks they do have a long tail and then in the wing what's called the metacarpal so this is the bone which in us makes up the basically the the kind of palm of the hand obviously we have five because of our five fingers pterosaurs will have one giant mad carpal because they're flying off a single finger which is actually before the wing metacarpal in non pterodactyl heads is is really short it's like one of the shortest binds in the hand and the second major group is I'm surprising the pterodactyl and they have the reverse of this they have really big heads they have really long necks they have a very short tail and they have a huge wing metacarpal in some including Quetzalcoatl's it's the longest bone in the wing so that's basically your your two divisions there's actually a group that kind of sits between the two which have only been known about for about ten years so this used to be one of the great mysteries aapanaadu of vertebrate paleontology not just pterosaur all vertebrate paleontology is you have the non pterodactyl eggs and the pterodactyl eggs and they are really very different from each other the question is how and when did they transition because if you look to the Late Jurassic we have both groups living together the song Hoff and limestone's of Germany which gave us things like Archaeopteryx which most people are familiar with you know the first bird we have loads of pterodactyl eggs and loads of non pterodactyl eat so at some point before the Late Jurassic this group split and we didn't know when and we didn't know how and then this small group of pterosaurs turned up which sit wonderfully between the two they are a brilliant example of an evolutionary transition they have a relatively small head on a relatively short neck she's non pterodactyl I'd like sorry excuse me they have a relatively long head and long neck which is pterodactyl I'd like I've just got that backwards that's terrible of me so a long head and a long neck they then have a long tail which is not in pterodactyl I'd like and their metacarpals are short but wait a bit longer than the other non pterodactyl Heights so it's like the head and neck turned into a pterodactyl wide head and neck and then later the rest of the body caught up and we're now now again that we understand this and we recognize this we're starting to find a whole bunch of these the first ones that we found were from the middle Jurassic of China so it's exactly the time that you'd expect just before the Late Jurassic where the pterodactyl loads of first appear properly so they're from the right they're from the right time we've now got one from England which shows this transition and we've got two different ones from Germany again songs often one of which looks just like the Chinese and the European and the English one the other of which actually looks rather more like a pterodactyl egg so the wings are looking much more pterodactyl I'd like and it's got an even bigger head than this intermediate group but still not quite as big as the pterodactyl eats so we're actually starting to see you know that huge disparity where if you like there was black and there was white we've already found one band of grey and now we're starting to find some other shades of grey between grey and black so it's really starting to turn into a continuum now we've got more and more fossils and we're starting to see that pattern but to go back to the original question yeah there's a fundamental split between long tales and short tales but that doesn't mean that you don't see loads and loads of toys of things that look very Pteranodon like which then have a great big long tail really shouldn't well how satisfying is it from as a from a scientists perspective to be able to find those connections of the gradual evolutionary change of animals because so much of that is missing in paleontology either because we don't have access to formations so they just haven't found those transitional animals how satisfying is that for you to be able to literally see those transitions occurring in the fossil record I mean this is this is one of those things which is you know there's a pterosaur researcher just thought we wouldn't get you know we assumed that there was some rapid bursts of evolution you know probably somewhere that we'd never find the fossils you know big changes like this can happen very very rapidly under the right circumstances and therefore you know it's perfectly plausible that one small island somewhere within half a million years the first pterodactyl eggs appeared spread around the globe and you know that Island then sank into the ocean and you know there's literally no fossil record to be found that's kind of what I assumed probably happened and so the idea that we'd ever find a really good transitional fossil something that really fit exactly between the two maybe we'd shave the edges together a bit but something that really showed you how they went together and again what if all first we now know it's the head/neck that evolved first I didn't think would ever appear so when this thing was first announced you know there were pretty much jaws on the floor I don't get to too many paleontology conferences unfortunately but I happen to be at the one where this was done it was the Society of vertebrate paleontology conference in Bristol you know and were pretty much jaws on the floor and then you know the first question that came up well actually it was it was kind of for stalled but the the the inevitable question you could see people thinking about this is this was at the time when there had been a couple of high profile of faked fossils coming out of China and the assumption was is that you know someone's been sold a dud and some guy has given you two you know with a head glued onto a body and you think you've got something amazing and you kind of heaven and no they knew this was gonna be a problem and they went here's the photos of us in our lab we when someone showed this to us we assumed that it was Dudley we you know we as pterosaur researchers couldn't believe that this was a real you know it's obviously the wrong head on the wrong body and so we took it into the lab and you know did the work ourselves make sure no one else touched the damn thing and yeah it's real so you know and then of course once you know that you start looking at you know you've got more evidence to go with so you know this is one of these things were you know from an evolutionary perspective it's enlightening but it also then gets you to look at other things with a new eye so I mentioned you know there's this british pterosaur which you know appears to be one of these transitional forms and it had been you know entirely understandably assumed to have been a bit of an odd pterodactyl because it's basically just a head and people went well you know it's like a pterodactyl cuz it's got a great big long head miss call these classic pterodactyl egg features of the head but it's kind of a bit weird so we just assume it's an odd one but of course once you now know that there are things out there which kind of look like a pterodactyl egg head but aren't quite you then go back to specimens like that and lo and behold yeah it's it's Late Jurassic sure but that's around the time these things should still be out there it's not too far from Germany being from the South of the UK you start comparing it to the German one you start comparing it to the Chinese ones and lo and behold it's now fairly obvious in hindsight because you've got all the extra data in it information but yeah this is another case of one of those transitional animals and then it helps fill the gap in a little better so yeah it's amazing to get this kind of information and understanding but as ever it actually breeds new understanding and appreciation and allows you to bring in you know other information that you didn't have before or didn't know that you had that's that's so amazing that's pretty cool okay so eggs did do pterosaurs lay eggs or did they give live birth or both what do you think as far as we know they all laid eggs so all modern birds lay eggs or crocodiles lay eggs and the or crocodilians and these are the two groups that kind of found both dinosaurs and pterosaurs birds are the literal descendants of dinosaurs and crocodiles are the nearest living relatives and as far as we know every dinosaur laid eggs we've never found any evidence of life birthing dinosaurs that you might from getting say an embryo in a chest cavity without an eggshell we found them for lots of other things that give birth to live young so egg Theo Soares polizia Soares we have these we'd expect to find them for dinosaurs if they gave birth to live young we never have pterosaurs are in the same boat so yeah we've always been on the assumption that for some reason this whole group this is collectively called the ARCA Soares dinosaurs Birds pterosaurs crocodilians never evolved life-bearing even though a whole bunch of lizards and lizard relatives and snakes and things did but pterosaur eggs were basically unknown even though you know we've had dinosaur eggs for well over 100 years pterosaur eggs we didn't have until I'm trying to remember the date now I think it was 2001 may have been 2003 where we suddenly got to in the same issue of one journal and then another one turned up a few weeks later we now have actually we now have a lot of eggs from only about two years ago this entire new fossil bed of pterosaurs a group called an animal called a mattress from western China has turned up and that has been dozens of eggs and dozens of embryos before that we had you could count the pterosaur eggs basically on one hand we had one from Argentina which has worked from one of the filter feeders and then we had two or three from China the famously owning beds were racing all the fed the dinosaurs are from again exceptional preservation yet furthers you actually tend to get pterosaurs because the preservation is so good they tend to survive so we had a handful of pterosaur eggs and a couple of them had embryos in which again amazing incredible news now we suddenly got dozens of pterosaur eggs but that research is kind of being done at the moment so be it'll be a while before we know too much more but what do we know about pterosaur eggs well they were pretty large given the size of the pterosaur but not huge some birds have absolutely enormous eggs for their body size I'd say in rough ratios are kind of talking about you know duck eggs chicken eggs you know quite big for the size the animal but not massive they were relatively thin shelled so they'd have come out rather like crocodile eggs or even turtle eggs you know almost kind of papery kind of soft you know you'd actually have to squeeze them quite hard to break them unlike say a classic Birds egg you know which is actually you know you'd have to crack an egg you know you have to really quite beat it to get through the shell and the embryos that hatched all that from them were pretty big and as I said earlier you know probably basically ready to fly they have very well ossified bones the bones are strong you know very young animals babies tend to have very soft thin bones what they do tend to firm up at the bones they're gonna use so things like baby antelope when they're born they run within hours of being born their legs are pretty well put together the rest of the skeleton less so and the legs are well grown you know they're big and then they're strong bones this is what we see in the embryonic pterosaurs they've grown a full wing all the wing finger bones are there and they're pretty well ossified this is not what you'd expect for an animal that's not going to fly for weeks or months bats when they hatch out the claws are really big and strong because they've got to hold on either to mum or the roof the wings there's barely anything of them they're actually really small and they're very weak not what we see with pterosaurs so the implication again is that these things are hatching and they are maybe ready to fly again very very hard to say if we're talking you know hours days a couple of weeks but definitely not you know months as you'd expect for comparably sized birds and bats so young pterosaurs were flying and that's supported by some other evidence for example things like some of the smallest pterosaurs that we talked about are from marine sediments and they're from quite a long way out to sea well okay if the babies were hanging around on land sure occasionally they might die and fall in the water and then the water might you know currents might drift them out in you know well away from the coastline but we keep finding large numbers of them out there that shouldn't be happening that would be very unlikely to happen so many times what's far more likely is they're out there because they were flying out there when they died presumably from some kind of accident but that seems much more plausible to me so yeah the skeleton looks like they're ready to fly and where we actually tend to find them suggests that they're flying now then the eggs that are found are these found in an actual nest or were these just individual eggs and if they were found in a nest are they nesting on the side of a mountain like like shorebirds will do were they nesting on the ground what what what do you think yeah so we we have no pterosaur nests frustratingly based on the fact that actually the the eggshell itself is really soft that means it would dry out very quickly this is unlike a bird egg so the implications for this is that these are almost certainly buried in some way Wow soft earth maybe with some vegetation broad we something a lot like a modern alligator or crocodile nest that much we do know for the eggs that we have hermit truss which I mentioned it has these huge numbers of eggs from China unfortunately those eggs were all kind of buried in equivalent of like a mudslide so if they were in a nest it's all been disturbed because basically there are bones of adults and babies and embryos and eggs all mixed up together so if there wasn't this we haven't got it anymore that doesn't mean we won't find one in the future because obviously if there was a big enough mudslide that buried everything hopefully somewhere you know there's an original intact nest so we don't have nests right now we wouldn't probably find nests from anything nesting more like a shore bird because that's not the kind of place that you'll ever get deposit you know you might if you were very lucky find a fossil nest of something like a crow you know big nest upper tree happened to be over water the entire nest falls in the water and gets buried you're not gonna get that from something you know like a gull or a puffin living on a cliff you just don't get deposits there and if it does fall into the water it's gonna be beaten up by the waves long before it gets buried right so yeah I'm sure things like Pteranodon were nesting on cliffs or hilltops or maybe even beaches if it's a nice protected Cove you know in the way that seals and sea lions do now because it keeps the predators away but you know that's the kind of thing we're just never going to find I've said that many times they've been proved wrong but this one I'm pretty pleased were I'm pretty confident of inland something again hermit hrus may yet turn up it remains to be seen but again it's it's going to be horses for courses you know things like ash dar kids which are living you know incontinence things like some directorís which is living are the margin of a lake in the middle of a desert are not gonna be building nests in the same places that Pteranodon is that lives out over the ocean spends most of its time out over the water so we'd probably expect to see at least some variety there if only in you know the places that they pick but probably also quite how they built them and you know what materials are available is gonna be different here there and everywhere right so having that softer shell you wouldn't expect a like a bird for the female to sit on the nest or sit on a clutch right I'm not sure they probably could you know birds you know we watch bird's nest you know we've got these famous things like you know various brooding dinosaurs you know they're crouching down spreading the arms out and the feathers of the body and the arms would neatly cover the eggs and help keep them warm keep them insulated pterosaurs can't really sit like that now pterosaurs did have feather like filaments there's been some very recent studies like in the last two weeks suggesting that those body filaments may indeed be some level eeveelution airily the same as feathers whether or not you want to call them feathers is another argument but certainly pterosaurs had feather like filaments on the bodies and to a degree on the wings these are called peak note fibers that would presumably potentially act something like a feather like insulator in the way that birds sit on the nest but I think the physical shape of the pterosaur is going to make that very very difficult I wouldn't rule it out I'd be surprised if they were brooding animals plus um so again you'll remember these these eggs need to be kept moist and actually warming them up too much with your body you might actually risk you know drying them out so they're probably better off burying them and leaving them Wow so you mentioned fur and feathers yeah the earliest imagery as a kid I grew up with was these things were look like naked mole rats they had no they were just skin but yeah then later images started to show them having a furry body so what what is the fact that based on the evidence of today that that what what they have feathers do they have fur with a hairless I mean fur is kind of restricted to two mammals fur like fur these are definitely very clearly filamentous structures so that they are they certainly like individual hairs or they like the feathers you get on things like baby birds on chicks right you know they're they're kind of single strands or maybe a little cluster of strands terminating at a point let's let's say that so very much like hair for feathers of baby birds early on we assume pterosaurs were naked and scaly because it was entirely you know these were very obviously reptiles it was entirely reasonable to assume that that was their primary covering we were finding the wings we're finding wing membranes and things like the the vein that you get on the tail of the long-tailed terrorist source and some other bits but we didn't really have proper skin or any kind of body covering scales were not an unreasonable assumption extremely reasonable assumption and then a specimen turned up from Kazakhstan in I think the mid to late 50s and they was first described in the 60s and everything so he called Saudis pilosa s-- the hairy devil and this thing there's two or three specimens of them that they're held in an institute in Moscow are very obviously covered in these filaments what we now call pikna fibers basically head to tail at any part of the body had pikna fibers on it quite long you know this would have been a fairly nice early shaggy but you know these aren't tiny little tight bristles you know this was an animal properly covered in fluff and presumably looked like most baby birds maybe a you know hamster or something like that you know smooth very distinctly fuzzy following on from Saudis there was a big gap and then we started finding a bunch of others like this there's a whole bunch of specimens in China inevitably again areas of exceptional preservation good enough for preserves pterosaurs good enough preserve skin you start finding things like these these filaments and we now have a handful of pterosaur species that show these pikna fibers on the body and these include some of the earliest pterosaurs that we know of so animals from the middle jurassic which we think actually have a more rather older ancestry these are rather late survivors so certainly some of the earliest in evolutionary terms pterosaurs had these pigna fibers and the reasonable assumption is once these things were evolved they probably were retained in most if not all lineages so our assumption is basically all pterosaurs were fuzzy that you had these pikna fibers on the body almost certainly they had bare bits we've actually got some pterosaur the soles of their feet preserved we can see those have scales like modern Birds again not a big surprise you know you know what you want to be walking around on fur you want to be walking around on scales that will give you some grip so they weren't like a hundred percent furry certainly things like Pteranodon has a big beak that's not gonna be furry may be things like Quetzalcoatl's had a relatively bald head if it was living in a really hot environment didn't want to overheat maybe desert-dwelling pterosaurs had much less covering we don't know we don't have the direct evidence for that there's some reasonable speculation there but you know as a first approximation all pterosaurs have pigna fibers the question has been for some time are these in some evolutionary sense basically the same as feathers could you literally call them feathers was there a to rephrase was there a single evolutionary origin of these fibers which were then inherited on the one hand by pterosaurs and on the other hand by carnivorous dinosaurs which ultimately gave rise to birds and things we don't know but it's an extraordinarily intriguing question because if if that's true that means that a whole bunch of dinosaurs may well have had feathers that we didn't think did it also means that feather at some level were lost on multiple different occasions in various different dinosaur lineages basically only leaving them present in the bird and the the ancestors of birds you know the dromaeosaurus and troodontid and actually even Tyrannosaurus and a few other things but we don't know as I say there's a very recent paper that suggested that actually pick more fibers and feathers were closer to each other than we had thought and suggested that they may have a true single origin obviously more work needs to be done on that and even if that is true it doesn't mean that every dinosaur's feathered we've got enough of them preserved with skin we know full well that plenty of them weren't but it certainly is an extremely important question because the other possibility is that they're just really really similar but then that opens up some new questions does it mean that there was something lurking around in the genes of these animals that made it you know relatively easy that there were already had maybe some genes that would allow scales to turn into these filaments and if it's that you know easy it's a very dodgy word I know to use and evolutionary terms but as in it may not require much selection pressure it may not require many mutations then these things could come and go quite easily that may explain why pterosaurs have filaments a couple of groups of ornithischian dinosaurs have filaments and then of course the birds as well so that's this whole question of did these things evolve once or twice or three or four times and how many times did they evolve and how many times were they lost and exactly which groups had them and when did they get them and when did they lose them and why did they lose them is unfortunately a giant mess at the moment but any of the answers will be absolutely fascinating and our solo or key to answering you know part of the questions of how did we get birds because we know that feathers weren't you know initially for flight they go all the way back to big you know one-ton tyrannosaurs but the question is did they then go back another hundred plus million years all the way back to the earlier even middle triassic and then they're floating around with maybe even some non dinosaurs you know things like dinosaur morphs and again pterosaurs potentially and so you know do they even go back to crocodiles it's not impossible at that point were there fuzzy crocodiles if he went back 260 million years and maybe Crocs ditched them for scales when they became aquatic we don't know that's that's exciting though it's exciting to think about I mean that's just well so with with a lot of the latest latest information there paleontologists now that are able to start to determine color that is I guess for layman's terms color pigment that's trapped in those fibrous things yeah if that is the case do do you know of any work or any future work that might come from that to help us understand the coloration of pterosaurs yes so the group that published a paper just a couple of weeks ago talking about pikna fibers and their potential evolutionary history with feathers did that and said these guys were brown now the ones they were working on a group called the annual ignited that I myself have done an awful lot of work on and your ignite these are these small insect hunting animals that I mentioned earlier they got and urug naked means frog jaw they have very rounded frog like heads with little spiky teeth and we think these things may even be nocturnal and they really are acting like bats not hanging upside down but like frog males and Potter's and some of these other birds they're flying around grabbing little insects on the wing and then probably hiding on tree trunks or excuse me you know in holes in trees that is not a big surprise if those guys are brown another group a few years ago published a paper looking at coloring dinosaurs and frustratingly buried in the depths of one of their supplementary files they go oh we had a look at this pterosaur - and it was brown and is like in like three lines for like even one line if you bothered to read through like 20 extra pages of data and nothing else has come out of it and that base it's oh we've got like a couple of aerosols that we think will probably Brown but they're both inland animals that lived in heavily forested environments this is not a surprise to anyone so at one level it's amazing we've got this data on the other hand it's not like we're testing the kind of pterosaurs which would be a lot more interesting now here you have a two-fold problem first of all the ones which might be a lot more interesting like Pteranodon like Quetzalcoatl us for example the tapi Yared mostly we don't have pink no fibers for them so there's nothing to test the other problem is you know you think feathers are rare on dinosaurs pick no fibers on pterosaurs are you know hen's teeth these are gold dust these are staggeringly rare and the problem with very very very rare fossils is that they are then very very valuable and currently the only way we can check for things like color is to literally physically go in and take a chunk off the specimen and then put it into some kind of very expensive analysis machine to tell us what the chemicals were and what structure it was and oddly enough museums don't like it when you do that to very very very expensive fossils I actually used to be part of the research group who just published this newspaper and I lived in China for three years I worked with my Chinese colleagues out there on a whole bunch of pterosaurs and when I joined the research group that were looking at among other things color in dinosaurs the first thing I did is email every pterosaur researcher and every museum curator with a pterosaur in it that had pigna fibers and said can I take a chunk off your specimen and they either didn't reply which meant no what they replied and said no so it's great that there's been this like little breakthrough but I don't think much is gonna happen for a while because the specimens are too rare and the procedure is destructive you know we've we've done this anchiornis you know one of the few further dinosaurs that this has really been done seriously for there are a few hundred specimens of anchiornis with good feathers known in museums so it's still obviously always a judgment call as to whether or not it's worth doing some basically irreparable damage to get some data out but you can understand how when you got 200 people are willing to let one or two go sure there's like eight pterosaurs with pikna fibers Wow I mean eight pterosaurs not eight of one species right so you know the fact that actually people have looked at three is quite incredible the fact that they haven't done very much and I've taken only a couple of little bits is not a big surprise and again it's unfortunate that in some ways these animals aren't particularly exciting and the other problem of course is when you're only taking a few little bits you know we've all seen plenty of birds which have you know mostly quite boring and then have really bright wings or a really bright tail or a really bright head so you can pick a dozen spots on the animal and going oh it's just brown but you might miss the red and green stripes with yellow spots bit right well you bring up the head let's talk about those glorious crests and the variety of crests and whether you think even though no research has been done I don't think do you think the crest what what is the function and do you see them as where we would expect to find the brighter colors if in fact they had them yes so actually there's quite a lot of research has been done on this and I think most of its been done by me so yeah so yeah the variety you know Pteranodon everyone knows it's got this big kind of flat blade off the back of its head that's actually one species of Pteranodon Troodon longus eps there's a second one Pteranodon Sternberg ii and that's kind of got like this weird pentagram pentagonal crest which kind of sticks vertically off the head not backwards but up so there's there's two Pteranodons and they're already quite different I mentioned the tap yahrens before they have huge spikes off the top and back of their head which we know because we found them have like a fan of skin in between them some of the earliest pterosaurs who have big boney crest on the snout so on the front of the head between the eyes and the nose we have things like NICTA soros we mentioned earlier buck has an enormous antler it has one rod going up and run rod going back and those rods are about the size of its own wing so it's almost like it's got three wings one on the left one on the right and one on its head as far as we know Nick Turse doesn't have skin in between but it's still an outrageous amount of bone on its head and on and on and on there are some which are bone some which are skin so which are skin and bone all kinds of combinations some of which are very very big indeed and basically they're mostly massive and for a long time the assumption for these is that they were something to do with flight in some way these help the animals fly by steering lighting like a rudder on a plane or a counterbalance to the jaw so Pteranodon Nick to Saurus the bone sticks out the back so the heads heavy at the front the bones heavy at the back it kind of helps hold the head in place and things like this and that that idea held sway for really quite a long time but it was always a terrible idea for the simple reason that you know flying is really hard work it's a lot of effort energetically you're pumping your muscles you're a constant risk and if something goes wrong you crash horribly intend to die particularly feel very lightly built like a bird and so anything which is likely to help you steer or is really critical for flight is probably going to end up looking the same in all of the animals because you know mechanics are flight are really quite complicated but look really very similar to each other and they've all kind of got the same wings doing the same thing in the same way and those that do use their legs to steer kind of use their legs to steer in the same way it would be very odd if you know there are 40 different really quite different styles of crest between pterosaurs if all 40 of those help you steer in the air surely some of those would be better than others and the evolution would naturally select for those and reject the ones who didn't work very well you know how come two species of Pteranodon was so completely different to each other the other thing is these crests don't show up in babies well if this helps you fly in the babies are flying why haven't the babies got them that can't be right so the obvious conclusion or counter-argument to this is that it's something to do with being an adult and it's something to do with kind of helping you show off that these are in some way what we call sexually selected structures they're like the peacocks tail the lion's mane the was on deer they're helping you show off in some way that you're healthy and sexy and you know worth mating with you know you want to pass your genes on now that does fit with the idea that these turn up in adults and not in juveniles and that they're extraordinarily variable both within species and between species and so that's the you know the modern thinking of this is that this is this is all about display this is all about advertising there's actually being some work so one of my PhD students actually while he was a master's student we actually looked at the biomechanics of Pteranodon we built a scale model of a Pteranodon head with a crest and flew it in a wind tunnel and saw if it could actually counterbalance that head or the jaw or help you steer and you didn't do anything so growing a big heavy chunk of bone on the back of your head which doesn't actually affect your flight whatsoever doesn't seem to be the kind of thing which is going to help you fly so yeah these appear to be basically adverts and so it's no surprise if as you suggested these might be relatively brightly colored or relatively brightly patterned in most of these animals do you think that it would be a sexual dimorphism in you would only find it either in one sex or the other or do you think both of the both of the sexes would have the same cuz I guess from a distance if you're flying if you're flying and you look across and you see another thing flying it would seem like that would be an incredible recognizable feature to let you know hey this this is one of me or do you think it's something that just the male's head or just the females hat so pteranodon actually is again we've got so many specimens around and we can look at this it does look like Pteranodon has crested males and untested females it's not quite true females have a little bump at the back of the head but nothing like the males so they're a group where they appear to be genuinely different you've also got a thing called Darwin operas Darwin Opera is actually the first of these pterosaurs that we found which sits between the pterodactyl Ed's and the non pterodactyl ID so it's got a big head in a long neck but he's also got a long tail Darwin alterus appears to break it down into two groups one of which doesn't have a crest as such but it's got a little kind of weird little filigree of bone running along its nose and we know from other specimens that when you get that filigree of bone there's usually a big soft tissue crest attached to it so we've got little filigree ones and little non filigree ones and that therefore implies a crested male and a none crested female we actually for Darwin opera stone OPTrust is one of the pterosaurs that we also have eggs for and we actually have a female Darwin doctorís and we know it's female Darwin options because she's got two eggs with her one inside and one outside how exciting us there and she doesn't and that individual doesn't have the filigree so again that appears to be a case where we're showing sexual dimorphism with a crested male and a none crested female after that it gets very complicated because most of the other pterosaurs are known from so few specimens we can't say very much meaningful about the crests and whether they're in males or females or both I wouldn't be surprised if it was regularly in both this appears to be the case in dinosaurs I've written extensively about this and this is called a neutral sexual selection so this is where males are advertising to females this is the kind of class everyone knows males going hey look at me look at my lovely big head on a wonderful and trying to attract a mate but in mutual sexual selection the females are doing that too and that's because the males are helping out if you as a male don't do anything other than father the babies you want to get as many girls as possible that's what's gonna be best for you but if you as a male are gonna have to look after the eggs and feed the babies and make sure the babies are okay and guard the nest that's a huge amount of effort and therefore you don't want to get lumbered with a Duff female who's not very well and will only lay two eggs rather than three and can't bring as much food in because then your baby suffer so you want the best female and therefore females will inevitably involve big signals to go Hey look at me I'm good too now that actually is very common in sea birds things like puffins males and females both have big showy beaks they both show off to each other they pair up and they both look after the eggs so I would not be surprised if quite a few pterosaurs had some form of mutual sexual selection where the males were advertising to the females and the females are advertising to the males but mostly we don't have enough specimens to say very much meaningful Wow you know you've just opened up an entire new world I guarantee you for some of the listeners they will look at that pterosaurs from a totally different perspective is there anything on the horizon that you're working on that you can share with us any research you're doing that will kind of add to this the the amazing world of pterosaurs that has not discussed that much in to the general public in my opinion not a huge amount I've got some papers which are certainly relevant so I've got one that's ongoing looking who talked about the idea of pterosaurs being able to fly very early out of the egg a number of people have said that before I know a whole bunch of paleontologists you think that for various reasons I've got a big data set that I think reinforces that further that's in the process it's it's having a hard time in review so I don't know what it may or may not come out but I've kind of already talked about that I mean the process of naming or at least attempting to name a couple of new species of pterosaur one from Canada and one from China those will also take quite a while to come out and of course we'll have to see what my colleagues think if they disagree and think I've done it wrong then maybe those names will never come out I've had conversations obviously with a bunch of pterosaur people I've presented these at conferences no one has come up to me afterwards and threatened me that how dare I do something so stupid so those are going to come out eventually as as new names the the other one that's relevant is a specimen around for Incas that I'm working on so Bram frinkerz again is a very well-known name Bram freakiest is probably the second best known pterosaur so as we've got over a thousand specimens of Pteranodon but they're mostly very fragmentary we've got about 150 ram.4 Incas and they're mostly excellent they're mostly complete we've got whole skeletons but they're from the same place as Archaeopteryx which means they're flat so we've got 100 good animals but they're all squished which is a real pain but it means we have an awful lot of them so we know an awful lot about RAM for incus and RAM frinkerz is one of these non pterodactyl light it's got a great big long tail it's got a big head full of teeth and it ate fish and we know that it's got stomach contents full of fish kept eating fish but most of the RAM for Inca specimens are very small this is one of those ones where again the babies we keep finding them well out to sea so it looks like they're flying most ram for incus our specimens are a meter or so there's a couple just a couple that are around a metre and a half in wingspan and then there's one which is nearly 2 meters so getting on for double the size of a normal animal and you know still 30% bigger than two of the really big ones so there's this one absolute monster and that's in a collection at the Natural History Museum in London that's been in the collection for something like 80 years and everyone just kind of went oh it's a joint Ram frinkerz and then wandered off and and left it and no one ever really did very much got it got a very brief description in the 1920s like two pages and that was about it and about 15 years ago actually just as I was finishing my PhD I was invited to do some work on it but the problem was is that it was a very old specimen you know bought in the late 1800 and whoever had basically got the specimen the bones out of the rock hadn't done a very good job presumably just enough to show what it was and then sell it to the museum and in order to get some really good information out of it it needed more work and as these things happen in research and in museums it basically took the thick end of 15 years for the museum to find the time and find the money to go back and do the extra units of weeks of work to basically clear this skeleton up and and expose it better but that's finally been done and so myself and Marc Whitten who literally wrote the book on pterosaurs if you're into pterosaurs go and buy his book it's a few years old but it's not out of date it's fantastic Marc paints better even than he writes so it's beautifully illustrated as well Marc and I working on this thing because it's absolutely enormous which is weird for Tara fur for inferring cos it's actually very weird for a non pterodactyl a pterosaur and it's also kinda 3d it's a bit squashed but it's not squashed flat like so many of these others are so this can hopefully really tell us something about very big round for incus very big non pterodactyl eggs generally how did they get this big did they still function the same way are they in the kind of the same proportions or you know things when they get bigger and bigger and bigger usually have to fly a different way because you get heavier much faster than you increase your wingspan so that can actually stop you being able to fly so it's a very very interesting animal and the work and fortunes at the early stages I thought I'd actually tell you a bit more about it but it's it's a really interesting specimen and potentially we don't know - we've done the work but potentially it's really important for understanding just how big these things could get while sticking to that old body plan of small head long tail short wing medica when that may tell us quite a bit about the flight of these things and and indeed why they died out because the RAM for inchoate the nonon pterodactyl aids lived alongside the pterodactyl eggs for a good twenty thirty million years and then gone and we never saw them again so at some level they either failed to compete or fail to adapt or couldn't get on with life and we still don't know why that was and maybe the fact that they couldn't get any bigger had something to do with it and this animal may shed some light on that Wow and like the dinosaurs all of them go extinct at the end of the Cretaceous right yes yeah the KT extinction which took out again lots of the marine reptiles it actually took out two birds and lots of mammals as well and yet the classic non-avian dinosaurs or when so too did the pterosaurs again it's an oddity we'd long thought that pterosaurs actually were were really kind of struggling well before the KT the ocean targets which we've talked about so much today well one of the last groups we you know we get as dark is right up to the KT boundary so it looked like they were doing fine but almost all the other pterosaurs had gone but recently quite a few more have turned up particularly in Morocco but we now know that Quetzalcoatl's like animals are around nectar source and Pteranodon like animals around and maybe some of the others like the on earth acquire it so the the to fish eaters like Pteranodon we're also around so there's still not in huge numbers of either specimens or huge numbers in terms of diversity but when we literally thought we were down to a handful of pterosaurs and they were all edge targets this is quite a big jump and it looks like yeah yet again it's a limitation of the environments we don't have many good real marine sediments going right up to the KT in places where we think pterosaurs are living we do have lots of terrestrial ones but pterosaurs there again are mostly aged our kids and those have the thinnest bone walls of all so they're very hard to find well I hope what people take away from this interview is a whole new look and animals that as we said at the very start of the interview don't receive the the recognition they do and are often used in in such a minor way in in books and you know there are always a footnote but this to me is fascinating especially with the eggs and the embryos that that's fascinating if you would like more information about dr. David Hong you can go to his website which is Dave hone da ve h o NE co uk and you can also follow him on twitter he's at dave underscore hone h o NE and your website is loaded with stuff but the thing i would absolutely recommend is for everyone to go out and read that that tear that Tyrannosaur book is spectacular as a matter of fact I flew over to the UK several months ago and that's the book I took with me and I read that book he wrote on tyrannosaurs which I thought was absolutely spectacularly written and just to tell you something really funny last night I was skyping with a friend of mine a young man that lives in the UK I mean I'm sorry in the Netherlands and I mentioned to him hey I'm getting ready to interview dr. hone on pterosaurs and he jumps off screen he jumps back and he holds up your books and he goes love it so yeah so I would encourage anyone to to go on their find any of the books that you've written you write article after article is there a pterosaur book on the horizon for us from me no I'm afraid I kind of planned to do one and then as I say my friend Witten went and wrote one and I honestly think it's probably better than a book that I could write well because the one problem I do have is I spread myself thin so I do do lots of work on pterosaurs but I also do lots on tyrannosaurs and I do quite a lot and some other dinosaurs as well and Mark is probably 95 plus percent a pterosaur researcher so he's actually more up on some of the real technical details of obscure bits of the literature than I am right and as I say he's a brilliant artist and he literally got his book and and read it and when I think I'd struggle to do better so yeah he kind of he kind of beat me to the punch on that one so I mean give it another 4 or 5 years and if he doesn't do a second edition I'll have a real heavy think about it but you know mark is a good friend of mine but that is a buddy's a brilliant book and if you want to know pterosaurs you will go from naught to expert across a couple of hundred pages and it's it's well worth getting hold of well that's that's exciting well we we appreciate you dr. Holm coming back on for a second time to talk to us and and as always if there's ever anything new and exciting you'd like to share we would absolutely love to have you and I would courage anybody if you get the opportunity to hear dr. hone speak live he is as dynamic as you would expect and it's absolutely worth it dr. hone thank you so much for taking time out to do this with us no problem thank you very much for having me you bet [Music] all right you guys that was it and I've got some really really exciting news if his schedule will allow dr. hone has agreed to do a second part interview on pterosaurs there was so much information to cover we simply couldn't do it all so he's very graciously agreed to try to do a follow-up and that follow-up could come as soon as a day from now so hopefully that will be the case and I'll be able to post it quickly for everybody out there thank you so much for hanging around even though you haven't heard anything from me for a year and I'd feel terrible that it's been that long but anyway I'm back at least for a while before I'm back on the road and I wish you all the very best New Year 2009 or 2019 2019 I wish you and your families the very best remember take care of yourselves and take care of the people around you there's only one world and we might as well make it as good a one as we can so thank you all so very much and I'll talk to you soon [Music] thank you for listening to the dinosaur George shown please follow us on our social media links and join our mailing list if you're interested in having dinosaur George speak at your events please visit our website at dinosaur George calm until next time keep digging for clues about the past [Music] you

Channel: Dino George LLC

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Keywords: Dino George LLC, questions, answers, history, dino, dinosaur, animals, museum, traveling, all, around, must, see, education, exhibit, prehistoric, raptor, t-rex, pterosaurs, george blasing, dinosaur george, Pteranodon, pterodactyl, David Hone, paleontology, paleontologist, podcast, Quetzalcoatlus, Dimorphodon, rhamphorynchus, tapejara, ornithocheirus, nyctasaurus, Dave hone, cretaceous, jurassic, triassic, archosaur

Id: xabRtWEPNdg

Length: 79min 13sec (4753 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 05 2019