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Understanding Dinosaur Behavior, What They did and How We Know: Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone cover
Understanding Dinosaur Behavior, What They did and How We Know: Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone cover
The Not Old - Better Show

Understanding Dinosaur Behavior, What They did and How We Know: Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone

Understanding Dinosaur Behavior, What They did and How We Know: Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone

31min |05/11/2024
Play
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Understanding Dinosaur Behavior, What They did and How We Know: Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone cover
Understanding Dinosaur Behavior, What They did and How We Know: Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone cover
The Not Old - Better Show

Understanding Dinosaur Behavior, What They did and How We Know: Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone

Understanding Dinosaur Behavior, What They did and How We Know: Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone

31min |05/11/2024
Play

Description

Welcome to The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series. I’m your host, Paul Vogelzang, and today we’re diving deep into the lost world of dinosaurs—those awe-inspiring giants that have captured our imaginations for generations.

While we all know about T. rex’s mighty roar or the towering neck of the Brachiosaurus, how much do we really know about how they lived? That’s where our guest comes in. SMITHSONIAN ASSOCIATE Dr. David Hone is one of today’s leading paleontologists, known for his groundbreaking work on dinosaur behavior. His new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know, is a thrilling exploration of how these creatures lived, communicated, and even raised their young.


Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up.  Check out notes here via the links for more information. Dr. Hone is here to break down the latest discoveries and reveal how paleontologists use everything from fossils to living animal behavior to make educated guesses about these long-extinct giants. We’ll hear about everything from dinosaur signals and combat to their surprising colors and social habits—insights that challenge what we thought we knew.

Get ready for an exciting conversation that blends ancient mysteries with modern science. Whether you’re a lifelong dino fan or just curious about the prehistoric past, today’s episode will be a treat.

Dr. Hone, welcome to the show!


My thanks to Dr. David Hone for joining us today on The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview series. 


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates'interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.

  • Speaker #1

    Welcome to the Not Old Better Show Smithsonian Associates Interview Series. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and today we are diving deep into the lost world of dinosaurs, those awe-inspiring giants that have captured our imaginations for generations. We all love dinosaurs. And while we know a fair bit about T-Rex's mighty roar or the towering neck of the brachiosaurus, how much do we really know about how they lived? That's where our guest comes in. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn is one of today's leading paleontologists known for his groundbreaking work on dinosaur behavior. His new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know, is a thrilling exploration of how these creatures lived, communicated, and even raised their young. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up. The title of his presentation is Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior. You can check out more information in our show notes today, but we have Dr. Hone today and he's here to break down the latest discoveries and reveal how paleontologists use everything from fossils to living animal behavior to make educated guesses about these long extinct giants. We're going to hear today about everything from dinosaur signals to... combat to their surprising colors and social habits, insights that challenge what we thought we knew about dinosaurs. So get ready for an exciting conversation that blends ancient mysteries with modern science. Whether you're a lifelong dino fan like me, or just curious about the prehistoric past, today's episode will be a treat. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn is our guest. Please welcome him to the show.

  • Speaker #2

    Dr. David Hohn, welcome. to the program.

  • Speaker #3

    Thanks for having me on.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, it's great to talk to you. We are going to be talking about this wonderful new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, that you've written, talking about your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation is right around the corner. But welcome. Congratulations on this great book. And let me just start here and just ask to briefly what you're going to be telling our Smithsonian audience. about how you'll be using Zoom because we're all on Zoom these days.

  • Speaker #3

    Yeah, I've done one or two. I think I've done two before for the Smithsonian. You get to see my grinning face and see my slides. And I'm pretty old school. Is it not quite chalk and talk? Because we don't have a whiteboard or a blackboard or chalkboard, as you call them. But it is like, here's some pictures with some text. I'm going to talk about it for five minutes. Because when you do a subject like dinosaurs, you're mad if you're not showing people what you're talking about. Because not everyone's familiar with... all the obscure animals or fossils or specific details I'm talking about. And so I think it's always nice to stick it on screen. I'm talking about this. And if you look at this, this is the interesting bit and go from there. So that's pretty much my style.

  • Speaker #2

    Good. Well, thank you. It's interesting perspective that you have. And the book really reflects this again. The title of the book is Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know. I really love that because there's so much that we don't know. And you really focus. on that element of things so that you really are driving this idea of, well, what is it that we really know about these creatures? So how did you pick that direction to take?

  • Speaker #3

    I'm not sure I did. It's slightly worrying you said that because I'm not sure that was my aim. Ironically, and it's going to sound like a plug, but that was literally the aim of my last book was all the stuff we don't know about dinosaurs. And that was actually my original title for it is What We Don't Know About Dinosaurs, which the publisher hated. But this book is certainly more technical than my previous ones. It's trying to step up a level in that regard. But I would agree that as someone who's really interested in dinosaur behavior and done a lot of research on this in the last 15 years or so, I do think we have not necessarily a systematic problem, but I definitely think there's some deficiencies in how we as a community of paleontologists and people interested in this stuff have approached the subject. And it means that I do think there are areas... that if you spoke to the average paleontologist or average dinosaur researcher and said, do you think we've got a good handle on this bit of behavior? I think they'd say yes. And I'd say, oh, I really don't think we have at all. And actually, we could do with revising some of the foundational ideas that we have and a bit more first principle stuff and make sure that actually our case for this kind of bedrocks, if you like, is as solid as you think it is, but not as solid as I think it is. Let's see if we can get it solid. And then we've got a starting point to build up and try and develop our knowledge further.

  • Speaker #2

    I'll tell you this, too. The book is just chock-a-block full of wonderful images and illustrations that I personally found very helpful. teaching me some of those very first kind of elementary ideas, I learned very quickly that these animals were fighting for their lives at really pretty much every step of the way. And in one illustration, you hypothesize about a mating posture. What was it about some of the artistic conclusions that drew you to make some of these hypotheticals about their behavior?

  • Speaker #3

    The combination of things, it's To be blunt, partly because the publishers were prepared to pay for illustrations, which makes an enormous difference, which they not always are. In this case, it's done by a friend of mine, Gabriel Agurto, who is just a stunning illustrator and has risen to the top very, very quickly and justifiably so. Some of it, certainly the color illustrations, we were really pushing for things that are not normally illustrated. So you're avoiding that understandable standard of say museums or press release art almost, or dramatic art of combat and fighting and okay we definitely got a couple of those but as you say animals mating animals asleep at night animals in the snow the things you don't actually really see very often i remember big carnivores they were probably asleep 12 16 hours a day yeah you know for every time you see a t-rex biting the head of some other dinosaur and trying to eat it that was probably five minutes you of its life every three or four days and yet that's been illustrated a thousand times and how often do you show it asleep or just not doing anything which is a far more common part. So we definitely wanted to show some of that stuff and then again as you say a lot of that stuff is very hypothetical or theoretical you know we don't have a lot of data we don't have a lot of evidence but on the other hand some of it is pretty inevitable you know they must have mated that dinosaurs begat little dinosaurs that must have happened. And when you've got things like we've illustrated, a thing called Polar Cantus, a big armored dinosaur covered in spikes and plates, and its body is very squat and the whole thing is very stiff. It is going to be complicated and awkward no matter which way around you show it. And so, again, at least kind of showing that and getting people to think about it. And that point you made about fighting for their lives, I don't think that's quite true. But I would say the idea of the classic nature red in tooth and claw, your average zebra sitting on the Serengeti. it may not see a lion for days at a time or a hyena or some other predator. But at the same time, that could happen at any minute. And drought or a storm or a flood or a parasite's attack or a fight with another zebra is potentially around the corner. I think that's one thing I really wanted to get at is dinosaurs as real living organisms, which may sound almost a bit like patronizing and facile, but... because of the limitations of the data that we work on, we tend to focus on a few very key aspects of their biology. And I think it's all too easy to forget they would sleep. Many of them would probably sleep a large chunk of their lives. It's almost impossible to say anything meaningful about it beyond that sentence. But let's not forget T-Rex did not spend its life trying to hunt and find and kill and eat things 24, 7, 365, more like 20 minutes a day. every three or four days or something like that. It was probably a very sedentary animal in the way that lions and tigers and bears and things like this are. It wandered around a bit. It took food where it could, but it was not just constantly trying to kill Triceratops.

  • Speaker #2

    One other plug for the illustrations and your great artists that you worked with, because as you were talking, I remembered one of the images that I thought was really a dramatic illustration because it almost looks as though it's being... viewed through night vision goggles. It's of the dinosaurs actually sleeping in a trough or a hole that they've dug. And it really shows you just exactly what that might look like. I just thought that was a fascinating way to represent that particular activity to really show it at that time of day during what might be considered night. Very, very impressive work. How does some of the biomechanics of dinosaurs, the movements, the speed, some of the hunting tactics, what does that lend itself to in terms of our knowledge about their behavior and even their interaction with other creatures and species at that time?

  • Speaker #3

    It's super important because it's one of the real, in fact, probably the line of data that we can pull out from almost any decent fossil, so by which I mean I've done a lot of work on feeding and combat and stuff like this, so of course you need evidence of injuries or you need a tooth stuck in a bone or bones inside a carnivore or something like this. to show the interaction and then try and work out what's going on. And those are generally pretty rare, and they often have problems associated with them because you're trying to interpret the behavior of maybe half a skeleton or some scattered remains, or you haven't got the whole thing. But if you've got a decent skeleton, and for, of course, dozens and maybe even getting off hundreds of species of dinosaurs, we have got enough of a skeleton. We have a very, very good idea, indeed, of its basic anatomy. You can then reconstruct with pretty considerable accuracy the muscles that sit on those bones. And we've got ways of doing that and modelling them against modern animals to make sure we're doing it right. But then it's like, right, well, now I can see how tall was it? How fast could it run? How quickly could it accelerate? How well could it turn? Certain proportions of leg bones give an indication of whether animals were long distance runners or more like sprinters. So like the cheetah versus wolf kind of split or gradient. And then you can look at the strength of bones or the strength of jaws and the strength of... Well, how hard could it really bite? At what point would those teeth break? How... wide could the mouth open just what could it swallow so we can do all of that and you don't actually need ah we need that exact tooth on that exact bone that left that exact mark which if we're lucky we will reconstruct correctly as being this one trying to bite that one any decent skeleton we can do that and then again it feeds back into that previous point of thinking of them as living animals and context so you'll find people saying well you know t-rex really wasn't that quick for example so was it really a very effective hunter Well, probably because it was mostly hunting things that also weren't that quick. You know, it would have probably been quite slow compared to relatively big, fast carnivores, even like lions and hyena and stuff like this. And no, it would never have caught a zebra, let alone an impala or pronghorn. But it's not. It's trying to catch another animal, which is the size of an elephant or a rhino. And they're not that fast either. Like that old joke of escaping a lion or escaping a bear. I don't need to be faster than the predator. I just need to be faster than you. It's the same kind of thing. T-Rex only needs to be very slightly faster than what it's trying to hunt, or even a bit slower, provided it can, in some vague way, sneak up on it. I know that sounds a bit weird. And actually, I think they're probably very, very bad at that. But animals can still come over hills and behind trees, or animals are just straight up not looking. a slight advantage there. If you're already moving at top speed and the other animal needs a standing start, you can be quite a bit slower than it, but still catch it before it's got faster than you. So yeah, all of those kinds of factors play in. We need to think of them in the context of the worlds in which they lived. And while it's very, very important for a lot of stuff, that's not necessarily the same as the worlds we have now. Though of course they do give us an excellent framework for a lot of things to try and work out and understand.

  • Speaker #2

    And speaking of that, where I live here in the Northern Virginia, kind of the Washington DC area, we've had a recent cache of apparently megalodon giant shark teeth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that just gives paleontologists such a point of reference. It's hard for me to say, well, that's a tooth and that... tooth must then fit into this jaw, which then must be exponentially this size, which then exponentially leads us to... But some of those things can really give paleontologists clues and guides about animals and their behaviors.

  • Speaker #3

    Absolutely. The right fossil can be incredibly revealing in that context. But I guess going back to your earlier point about the stuff we don't know, it can give you information that is 100% true whilst also being really quite misleading. So an example I'd give is we do have a handful of examples of predatory dinosaurs or carnivorous dinosaurs where they got the bones of something they ate inside them. And 100% sure that that animal X ate animal Y. That is what that is showing you. But is that normal? Is that common? So a great example I came across, which I was kind of digging into, but it was, and I knew this was a phenomenon, but I didn't realize it was anything like as exaggerated as it turned out to be. So lovely study on young crocodiles. Up to a metre long. And a metre long crocodile is big. You know, that's taking a couple of fingers off. If you really mess around with it, maybe taking a hand off kind of size. Half their diet, 50% is invertebrates. Spiders, beetle larvae or beetles, dragonflies and dragonfly larvae and other aquatic and even terrestrial insects and millipedes and cockroaches and stuff like this. But those kind of things, particularly in the high acid environment of a crocodile's stomach, will not fossilize. And fish bones are very flimsy and very cartilaginous and often don't preserve well. So you could have an animal like a metre-long crocodile swimming around, half its diet is insects, maybe two-thirds of the remainder are small fish and tadpoles and things like this. And so maybe only a sixth or less, maybe 10%, are things like a big fish or a rat or a large frog. And what we would find in the fossil record is, oh, cool, we got a dozen fossil crocodiles, and this one ate a rat, and this one ate a frog, and this one's got bones of a really big fish in it. So that's what they ate. They ate relatively big vertebrates, because that's what we found in their stomach content, or at least that's what's preserved inside the body cavity. And that would be 10% or less of their diet in reality. So it would give us real meaningful information. Crocodiles would absolutely have eaten those things. But it's then so easy to fall into the trap of going, that's normal. But it's not. It's just a huge bias in the fossil record, which we didn't necessarily think of. And so those are the kind of traps that I'm trying to emphasize and think about. And so, again, what it's about, like some of these foundational ideas of X, A, Y. And we know because, look, here are all the fossils showing X, A, Y. It's like, yeah, but have we considered what else might have gone on that may have affected that? And for a lot of the times, I think there's ways we can probably test that. So, for example. You mentioned the megalodon teeth. I never read the research on megalodon teeth and megalodon feeding, but it will be the same. Enamel is incredibly strong stuff on teeth, but it still wears and it still scratches. And there's stuff called micro wear. You need not just a microscope, you need a scanning electron microscope. You need to go down to an ultra microscopic level, but you can pick up the scratches and wear on enamel, not just from things like bones, which you'd obviously think would be capable of scratching, even just meat, like just meat. has tiny fibrous bits in it, and that's enough to leave tiny scratches on the enamel. And we can see that, and thanks to doing systematic studies on living animals, we've got a pretty good idea of what a meat scratch looks like versus what a bone scratch looks like versus what a eating lots of beetles scratch looks like.

  • Speaker #1

    Interesting.

  • Speaker #3

    But I don't think anyone's looking for them in dinosaurs because we've already found the bones in the stomach, so we, quote, know what they ate. So these traps are there. but I think the solutions are also there too. And we can go and look for them. And then maybe we can go, okay, look, we can't find any evidence of that. So actually, that bone stomach content is probably bang on. And that's probably much closer to the real diet than we think. Or alternatively, maybe we'll find tons of evidence of insect type or, you know, strong insect carapace, or even just a bit and then go, well, of course, the really fine stuff is not going to show up. But if they're eating that many beetles, they're probably also eating dragonflies and eating. cockroaches and other softer, squidgier things. So actually, maybe the insects are a really significant part of the diet here.

  • Speaker #2

    Fascinating.

  • Speaker #1

    Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a non-profit organization, is excited to present... this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate Guest Speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcasts can explore our website for more information, links, and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody.

  • Speaker #2

    Our guest today, of course, is Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn. Dr. David Hohn has written the new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know. We'll have links so that our audience can find out more about Dr. Hohn and his work and this excellent new book. Congrats again on the book, Dr. Hohn. I want to talk to you more about one of the misconceptions having to do with social interactions and dinosaurs. Maybe tell us a little bit about that and how we have gotten that a little bit off.

  • Speaker #3

    Yeah, so this is something that in my own research, I've been really hammering as a point for a few years now. It was nice to kind of bring it all together in a book and be able to give a chapter onto this. And I think this is one area where I think we have often got it wrong, or at least overstated things that at first glance look convincing. But then when you delve back into them, you start finding, well, actually, this is not as obvious as it first looks. And at least part of that comes down to the use of the word social itself. Like so many words. if you dig into the ethological literature, so the study of behavior, people who study animal behavior will give a very specific meaning to the word social. But in common conversation, we will use it in a very different way. And of course, if you're not a trained ethologist, and that includes paleontologists then trying to reconstruct behavior, it's very easy to use it in a kind of common or garden term. And then that can really plaster across a whole smear of different behaviors. or being used in a very technical sense in one paper and then a very generic one in the other. And so I try and be careful about my usage of things like that because really, for me, social means interactions, you know, like in the same way that we say, oh, I'm being social, I'm seeing my friends, I'm talking to them, we're exchanging ideas and information and having company and supporting each other and loaning each other money and all those other things that come from it. And that's very different to hanging around in a group. So lions, chimpanzees, meerkats, these are things that are social. They don't just live in groups, they interact. There may or may not be a leader, but they... groom each other. They will take care of each other's offspring. They will work together to defend the group or find food or make a burrow or whatever these things may be and communicate in that sense. Those are social interactions. If you look at things like zebra, well, they don't really work like that. At another level, fish, you'll get a massive school of fish, thousands, even millions together. Do they have friends? Do they exchange ideas? Do they look after one another? Basically, no, but they're both living in groups. And this is the problem when you find mass mortality site, as we call it, so a mass graveyard, dozens, in some cases, thousands, potentially tens of thousands of individual dinosaurs in a single bed that probably died together. And people will go, well, they're social. They were living together and not just living together. They use the word social, then employ all these other interaction stuff. And I'm like. do we actually even know they died together? As in, if there had been a massive drought in this environment, every animal that normally lived on its own, or maybe in a little gang of four or five, would all end up at the same last remaining bit of water hole. And when that water runs out, they're going to die there too. And then when the rains finally come, they're going to bury all those bodies. And so what we see is, wow, a group of a thousand of them. and they lived together and they were social and interacted and this was a herd and da da da da da and maybe this is what i mean i i'm not saying that's wrong what i'm saying is i don't know because i don't trust that they didn't just die from some horrible disaster and that's what killed them or it's something like the famous zebra and wildebeest migration you get in the maasai mara every year where every single year they truck across follow the reins and loads of them drown in the bottom of the river because they've got to swim this river and lots of them drown and there's crocodiles and other things going on, which would then lead thousands and thousands of bodies at the bottom of this river to be fossilized and form a giant group. But wildebeest and zebra form these giant herds of hundreds of thousands of animals, but it's really composed of hundreds or thousands of herds of five or six animals, usually a harem of a male and half a dozen females. So even when they move together as this giant herd, they're kind of thousands of mini herds. And then when they get where they're going, they all split up into their individual herds. So again, even if that interpretation about those mass mortality sites of dinosaurs is closer to the truth, and these animals did live in groups, and that was maybe a fundamental thing that they did, it doesn't mean they lived in groups of hundreds or thousands. We also then tend to apply that and go, well, this species did. So presumably all its near relatives did, right? Because they're all kind of similar. And it's like, well, Lions hunt in groups, but their nearest relatives, leopards and tigers, don't. Jackals can hunt in groups, but they're usually in pairs. Plenty of foxes are solitary, but a couple of them operate in pairs. And then there's wolves, which are extremely social, or bush dogs, or a doll in Asia, which are extremely social. But then you've got solitary dogs that basically live on their own, like maned wolves. So just saying, ah, dogs live in groups and cats live on their own is wrong, let alone... trying to extend it to a whole raft of relatives. And you get things like this. There's a group called the dromaeosaurs. These are the very bird-like dinosaurs that include Velociraptor, which is usually the one people have heard of. Jurassic Park, but a third of the size and cuddled in feathers. A close relative of Velociraptor called Deinonychus from the US. That is the one dinosaur which has very often been argued to be social and hunting groups. And I think the evidence for that is extraordinarily flimsy. Again, not saying it's wrong, but I think the evidence purported to say. these were group living animals is flimsy, let alone they hunted in groups. And then people have extended that to all dromaeosaurs. And it's like, this is really like finding a pile of bodies of a carnivore together and basically going, oh, well, lions always hunt in groups and therefore so do tigers and leopard and jaguar and puma. And it's like, this is not how we should reconstruct behaviour. The initial example is questionable. to then extend it to all these other relatives is very questionable at best.

  • Speaker #2

    This is all fascinating, Dr. Hohn. Dr. Hohn is a Smithsonian associate, has written the wonderful new book titled Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior. We'll be at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our show notes for more details. I just have one final question for you, Dr. Hohn, and that is, What advancements are we going to see, are paleontologists going to see over the course of the next few years when it comes to behavior that we might not know much about, but are learning in the course of some of this new technology that is being developed and employed by paleontologists? I mean,

  • Speaker #3

    we're definitely going to pick more stuff up. I guess my question would be is like, how are we going to use it? So, I mean, you and some of your listeners may know, pretty getting on for about 10 years or so ago now. We developed a technique to basically detect some of the underlying colors of some dinosaurs from exceptional preservation with really cool fossils where the feathers are preserved and these pigment-bearing structures called melanosomes were preserved. And that was a massive breakthrough that has the enormous potential. And yet we've not abandoned it, but it's kind of one of those classic things of like, well, now we've worked out how to do it, no one's interested in it anymore. Speaker 1 And not necessarily pointing fingers at the scientists, which include a number of my colleagues. And I was working on one of these projects for a while. But, you know, it's very easy to go to a big grant body and go, we think we can work out the color of dinosaurs. Wow. Can you hear some money? Go and find out. And now going, we know we can work out the color of dinosaurs. Now we just want to do that a couple of hundred more times and maybe we'll learn something. You can see why it's suddenly harder to get that kind of money. And yet I think it's absolutely vital because to spin on that argument, Ankyornis, another little feathered dinosaur, chicken-sized thing from China, and this amazing study said mostly black or gray with white bits on the feathers and a red bit on its head. Wow. Amazing, incredible. And I look at this and go, it is, but I want to know, is that a male or a female, or is that an adult or a juvenile? Do they molt during the year? Because we know dinosaurs molted just like birds. They certainly have the potential to change colour. This is an animal living in a very cold environment, very wintery. Probably had loads of snow in winter. There's a whole bunch of birds which turn white in winter. Birds vary. If you're right up in the north, some birds of some species are slightly different colour to those down south. Some of them, males and females, look the same. Some of them look quite different. This is one individual animal at one point in its life. It's amazing we know its colour. but we'll know a hundred times more if we know that males and females were different colors or were the same colors. If they camouflage themselves in winter by shifting to a white coat or stayed this color year round, because this sort of thing then really tells you about behavior. Animals where males are very different colors to females usually have no involvement in raising the offspring. Animals that are very similar colors to females, either they're both quite bright or they don't have kind of any color difference at all. So think of things like penguins, Think of things like starlings, actually a lot of parrots. Usually the male takes just as much care, if not more care than the females do. So this will totally tell you something about sexual selection, display, what activities they're doing, how they probably pair up and how they partner. If they're doing that, they're probably operating in groups or at least pairs more often than if they're on their own. Peacocks tend to live on their own. Parrots tend to live in big flocks and operate in pairs a lot. This is where you pull all the really cool information out. And so this is one of those things which is annoying because I've been to a museum in eastern China that had several hundred specimens of Ankyornis with feathers. We know how to do it and the specimens are there. That will tell you far more than going, look at this one. It's cool that it's probably black with white and red on it. So I think that's more the development I want to see. Yeah, technology is always going to give us new opportunities to do stuff like that. But doing it once and finding out and going, oh, we can do that. Huh. Now let's do something else. is a fraction as interesting for me for stuff like behavior as it is to really build up a proper big data set and then go to town on it.

  • Speaker #2

    Well, as you do more work on this subject, Dr. Hung, we'd love to have you back. This is such a... Well,

  • Speaker #3

    give me a few years.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, absolutely. And selfishly, I'll take responsibility for inviting you back. But your work is so exciting. Your new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, is out as of the 5th, I believe, of November. Yes,

  • Speaker #3

    available for pre-order. And some people have already got hold of copies. I'm not sure how.

  • Speaker #2

    Excellent. Well, and thank you for sharing a copy with me. I've just loved it. I want to recommend it so highly. We will have links so that our audience can pre-order it, along with links to find out more about you and your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation. Dr. Hone, thanks for your time. We look forward to your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation.

  • Speaker #3

    Thank you so much.

  • Speaker #1

    My thanks to Dr.

  • Speaker #2

    David Hone for his time today.

  • Speaker #1

    My thanks to the Smithsonian team for all they do to support the show. My thanks always to Sam Hanegar, our executive producer, and my thanks to you, our wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Please check out more information about Dr. Hohn's presentation at Smithsonian Associates in our show notes today and be well. Be safe. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show on radio and podcast, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series.

  • Speaker #2

    Thanks, everybody.

  • Speaker #1

    We will see you next time.

  • Speaker #0

    Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep... dive into some of the most fascinating real-life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about Better, the Not Old Better Show.

  • Speaker #1

    Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about the Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is Not Old Better, and we're on Instagram at Not Old Better too. The Not Old Better Show is a production of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.

Description

Welcome to The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series. I’m your host, Paul Vogelzang, and today we’re diving deep into the lost world of dinosaurs—those awe-inspiring giants that have captured our imaginations for generations.

While we all know about T. rex’s mighty roar or the towering neck of the Brachiosaurus, how much do we really know about how they lived? That’s where our guest comes in. SMITHSONIAN ASSOCIATE Dr. David Hone is one of today’s leading paleontologists, known for his groundbreaking work on dinosaur behavior. His new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know, is a thrilling exploration of how these creatures lived, communicated, and even raised their young.


Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up.  Check out notes here via the links for more information. Dr. Hone is here to break down the latest discoveries and reveal how paleontologists use everything from fossils to living animal behavior to make educated guesses about these long-extinct giants. We’ll hear about everything from dinosaur signals and combat to their surprising colors and social habits—insights that challenge what we thought we knew.

Get ready for an exciting conversation that blends ancient mysteries with modern science. Whether you’re a lifelong dino fan or just curious about the prehistoric past, today’s episode will be a treat.

Dr. Hone, welcome to the show!


My thanks to Dr. David Hone for joining us today on The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview series. 


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates'interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.

  • Speaker #1

    Welcome to the Not Old Better Show Smithsonian Associates Interview Series. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and today we are diving deep into the lost world of dinosaurs, those awe-inspiring giants that have captured our imaginations for generations. We all love dinosaurs. And while we know a fair bit about T-Rex's mighty roar or the towering neck of the brachiosaurus, how much do we really know about how they lived? That's where our guest comes in. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn is one of today's leading paleontologists known for his groundbreaking work on dinosaur behavior. His new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know, is a thrilling exploration of how these creatures lived, communicated, and even raised their young. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up. The title of his presentation is Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior. You can check out more information in our show notes today, but we have Dr. Hone today and he's here to break down the latest discoveries and reveal how paleontologists use everything from fossils to living animal behavior to make educated guesses about these long extinct giants. We're going to hear today about everything from dinosaur signals to... combat to their surprising colors and social habits, insights that challenge what we thought we knew about dinosaurs. So get ready for an exciting conversation that blends ancient mysteries with modern science. Whether you're a lifelong dino fan like me, or just curious about the prehistoric past, today's episode will be a treat. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn is our guest. Please welcome him to the show.

  • Speaker #2

    Dr. David Hohn, welcome. to the program.

  • Speaker #3

    Thanks for having me on.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, it's great to talk to you. We are going to be talking about this wonderful new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, that you've written, talking about your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation is right around the corner. But welcome. Congratulations on this great book. And let me just start here and just ask to briefly what you're going to be telling our Smithsonian audience. about how you'll be using Zoom because we're all on Zoom these days.

  • Speaker #3

    Yeah, I've done one or two. I think I've done two before for the Smithsonian. You get to see my grinning face and see my slides. And I'm pretty old school. Is it not quite chalk and talk? Because we don't have a whiteboard or a blackboard or chalkboard, as you call them. But it is like, here's some pictures with some text. I'm going to talk about it for five minutes. Because when you do a subject like dinosaurs, you're mad if you're not showing people what you're talking about. Because not everyone's familiar with... all the obscure animals or fossils or specific details I'm talking about. And so I think it's always nice to stick it on screen. I'm talking about this. And if you look at this, this is the interesting bit and go from there. So that's pretty much my style.

  • Speaker #2

    Good. Well, thank you. It's interesting perspective that you have. And the book really reflects this again. The title of the book is Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know. I really love that because there's so much that we don't know. And you really focus. on that element of things so that you really are driving this idea of, well, what is it that we really know about these creatures? So how did you pick that direction to take?

  • Speaker #3

    I'm not sure I did. It's slightly worrying you said that because I'm not sure that was my aim. Ironically, and it's going to sound like a plug, but that was literally the aim of my last book was all the stuff we don't know about dinosaurs. And that was actually my original title for it is What We Don't Know About Dinosaurs, which the publisher hated. But this book is certainly more technical than my previous ones. It's trying to step up a level in that regard. But I would agree that as someone who's really interested in dinosaur behavior and done a lot of research on this in the last 15 years or so, I do think we have not necessarily a systematic problem, but I definitely think there's some deficiencies in how we as a community of paleontologists and people interested in this stuff have approached the subject. And it means that I do think there are areas... that if you spoke to the average paleontologist or average dinosaur researcher and said, do you think we've got a good handle on this bit of behavior? I think they'd say yes. And I'd say, oh, I really don't think we have at all. And actually, we could do with revising some of the foundational ideas that we have and a bit more first principle stuff and make sure that actually our case for this kind of bedrocks, if you like, is as solid as you think it is, but not as solid as I think it is. Let's see if we can get it solid. And then we've got a starting point to build up and try and develop our knowledge further.

  • Speaker #2

    I'll tell you this, too. The book is just chock-a-block full of wonderful images and illustrations that I personally found very helpful. teaching me some of those very first kind of elementary ideas, I learned very quickly that these animals were fighting for their lives at really pretty much every step of the way. And in one illustration, you hypothesize about a mating posture. What was it about some of the artistic conclusions that drew you to make some of these hypotheticals about their behavior?

  • Speaker #3

    The combination of things, it's To be blunt, partly because the publishers were prepared to pay for illustrations, which makes an enormous difference, which they not always are. In this case, it's done by a friend of mine, Gabriel Agurto, who is just a stunning illustrator and has risen to the top very, very quickly and justifiably so. Some of it, certainly the color illustrations, we were really pushing for things that are not normally illustrated. So you're avoiding that understandable standard of say museums or press release art almost, or dramatic art of combat and fighting and okay we definitely got a couple of those but as you say animals mating animals asleep at night animals in the snow the things you don't actually really see very often i remember big carnivores they were probably asleep 12 16 hours a day yeah you know for every time you see a t-rex biting the head of some other dinosaur and trying to eat it that was probably five minutes you of its life every three or four days and yet that's been illustrated a thousand times and how often do you show it asleep or just not doing anything which is a far more common part. So we definitely wanted to show some of that stuff and then again as you say a lot of that stuff is very hypothetical or theoretical you know we don't have a lot of data we don't have a lot of evidence but on the other hand some of it is pretty inevitable you know they must have mated that dinosaurs begat little dinosaurs that must have happened. And when you've got things like we've illustrated, a thing called Polar Cantus, a big armored dinosaur covered in spikes and plates, and its body is very squat and the whole thing is very stiff. It is going to be complicated and awkward no matter which way around you show it. And so, again, at least kind of showing that and getting people to think about it. And that point you made about fighting for their lives, I don't think that's quite true. But I would say the idea of the classic nature red in tooth and claw, your average zebra sitting on the Serengeti. it may not see a lion for days at a time or a hyena or some other predator. But at the same time, that could happen at any minute. And drought or a storm or a flood or a parasite's attack or a fight with another zebra is potentially around the corner. I think that's one thing I really wanted to get at is dinosaurs as real living organisms, which may sound almost a bit like patronizing and facile, but... because of the limitations of the data that we work on, we tend to focus on a few very key aspects of their biology. And I think it's all too easy to forget they would sleep. Many of them would probably sleep a large chunk of their lives. It's almost impossible to say anything meaningful about it beyond that sentence. But let's not forget T-Rex did not spend its life trying to hunt and find and kill and eat things 24, 7, 365, more like 20 minutes a day. every three or four days or something like that. It was probably a very sedentary animal in the way that lions and tigers and bears and things like this are. It wandered around a bit. It took food where it could, but it was not just constantly trying to kill Triceratops.

  • Speaker #2

    One other plug for the illustrations and your great artists that you worked with, because as you were talking, I remembered one of the images that I thought was really a dramatic illustration because it almost looks as though it's being... viewed through night vision goggles. It's of the dinosaurs actually sleeping in a trough or a hole that they've dug. And it really shows you just exactly what that might look like. I just thought that was a fascinating way to represent that particular activity to really show it at that time of day during what might be considered night. Very, very impressive work. How does some of the biomechanics of dinosaurs, the movements, the speed, some of the hunting tactics, what does that lend itself to in terms of our knowledge about their behavior and even their interaction with other creatures and species at that time?

  • Speaker #3

    It's super important because it's one of the real, in fact, probably the line of data that we can pull out from almost any decent fossil, so by which I mean I've done a lot of work on feeding and combat and stuff like this, so of course you need evidence of injuries or you need a tooth stuck in a bone or bones inside a carnivore or something like this. to show the interaction and then try and work out what's going on. And those are generally pretty rare, and they often have problems associated with them because you're trying to interpret the behavior of maybe half a skeleton or some scattered remains, or you haven't got the whole thing. But if you've got a decent skeleton, and for, of course, dozens and maybe even getting off hundreds of species of dinosaurs, we have got enough of a skeleton. We have a very, very good idea, indeed, of its basic anatomy. You can then reconstruct with pretty considerable accuracy the muscles that sit on those bones. And we've got ways of doing that and modelling them against modern animals to make sure we're doing it right. But then it's like, right, well, now I can see how tall was it? How fast could it run? How quickly could it accelerate? How well could it turn? Certain proportions of leg bones give an indication of whether animals were long distance runners or more like sprinters. So like the cheetah versus wolf kind of split or gradient. And then you can look at the strength of bones or the strength of jaws and the strength of... Well, how hard could it really bite? At what point would those teeth break? How... wide could the mouth open just what could it swallow so we can do all of that and you don't actually need ah we need that exact tooth on that exact bone that left that exact mark which if we're lucky we will reconstruct correctly as being this one trying to bite that one any decent skeleton we can do that and then again it feeds back into that previous point of thinking of them as living animals and context so you'll find people saying well you know t-rex really wasn't that quick for example so was it really a very effective hunter Well, probably because it was mostly hunting things that also weren't that quick. You know, it would have probably been quite slow compared to relatively big, fast carnivores, even like lions and hyena and stuff like this. And no, it would never have caught a zebra, let alone an impala or pronghorn. But it's not. It's trying to catch another animal, which is the size of an elephant or a rhino. And they're not that fast either. Like that old joke of escaping a lion or escaping a bear. I don't need to be faster than the predator. I just need to be faster than you. It's the same kind of thing. T-Rex only needs to be very slightly faster than what it's trying to hunt, or even a bit slower, provided it can, in some vague way, sneak up on it. I know that sounds a bit weird. And actually, I think they're probably very, very bad at that. But animals can still come over hills and behind trees, or animals are just straight up not looking. a slight advantage there. If you're already moving at top speed and the other animal needs a standing start, you can be quite a bit slower than it, but still catch it before it's got faster than you. So yeah, all of those kinds of factors play in. We need to think of them in the context of the worlds in which they lived. And while it's very, very important for a lot of stuff, that's not necessarily the same as the worlds we have now. Though of course they do give us an excellent framework for a lot of things to try and work out and understand.

  • Speaker #2

    And speaking of that, where I live here in the Northern Virginia, kind of the Washington DC area, we've had a recent cache of apparently megalodon giant shark teeth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that just gives paleontologists such a point of reference. It's hard for me to say, well, that's a tooth and that... tooth must then fit into this jaw, which then must be exponentially this size, which then exponentially leads us to... But some of those things can really give paleontologists clues and guides about animals and their behaviors.

  • Speaker #3

    Absolutely. The right fossil can be incredibly revealing in that context. But I guess going back to your earlier point about the stuff we don't know, it can give you information that is 100% true whilst also being really quite misleading. So an example I'd give is we do have a handful of examples of predatory dinosaurs or carnivorous dinosaurs where they got the bones of something they ate inside them. And 100% sure that that animal X ate animal Y. That is what that is showing you. But is that normal? Is that common? So a great example I came across, which I was kind of digging into, but it was, and I knew this was a phenomenon, but I didn't realize it was anything like as exaggerated as it turned out to be. So lovely study on young crocodiles. Up to a metre long. And a metre long crocodile is big. You know, that's taking a couple of fingers off. If you really mess around with it, maybe taking a hand off kind of size. Half their diet, 50% is invertebrates. Spiders, beetle larvae or beetles, dragonflies and dragonfly larvae and other aquatic and even terrestrial insects and millipedes and cockroaches and stuff like this. But those kind of things, particularly in the high acid environment of a crocodile's stomach, will not fossilize. And fish bones are very flimsy and very cartilaginous and often don't preserve well. So you could have an animal like a metre-long crocodile swimming around, half its diet is insects, maybe two-thirds of the remainder are small fish and tadpoles and things like this. And so maybe only a sixth or less, maybe 10%, are things like a big fish or a rat or a large frog. And what we would find in the fossil record is, oh, cool, we got a dozen fossil crocodiles, and this one ate a rat, and this one ate a frog, and this one's got bones of a really big fish in it. So that's what they ate. They ate relatively big vertebrates, because that's what we found in their stomach content, or at least that's what's preserved inside the body cavity. And that would be 10% or less of their diet in reality. So it would give us real meaningful information. Crocodiles would absolutely have eaten those things. But it's then so easy to fall into the trap of going, that's normal. But it's not. It's just a huge bias in the fossil record, which we didn't necessarily think of. And so those are the kind of traps that I'm trying to emphasize and think about. And so, again, what it's about, like some of these foundational ideas of X, A, Y. And we know because, look, here are all the fossils showing X, A, Y. It's like, yeah, but have we considered what else might have gone on that may have affected that? And for a lot of the times, I think there's ways we can probably test that. So, for example. You mentioned the megalodon teeth. I never read the research on megalodon teeth and megalodon feeding, but it will be the same. Enamel is incredibly strong stuff on teeth, but it still wears and it still scratches. And there's stuff called micro wear. You need not just a microscope, you need a scanning electron microscope. You need to go down to an ultra microscopic level, but you can pick up the scratches and wear on enamel, not just from things like bones, which you'd obviously think would be capable of scratching, even just meat, like just meat. has tiny fibrous bits in it, and that's enough to leave tiny scratches on the enamel. And we can see that, and thanks to doing systematic studies on living animals, we've got a pretty good idea of what a meat scratch looks like versus what a bone scratch looks like versus what a eating lots of beetles scratch looks like.

  • Speaker #1

    Interesting.

  • Speaker #3

    But I don't think anyone's looking for them in dinosaurs because we've already found the bones in the stomach, so we, quote, know what they ate. So these traps are there. but I think the solutions are also there too. And we can go and look for them. And then maybe we can go, okay, look, we can't find any evidence of that. So actually, that bone stomach content is probably bang on. And that's probably much closer to the real diet than we think. Or alternatively, maybe we'll find tons of evidence of insect type or, you know, strong insect carapace, or even just a bit and then go, well, of course, the really fine stuff is not going to show up. But if they're eating that many beetles, they're probably also eating dragonflies and eating. cockroaches and other softer, squidgier things. So actually, maybe the insects are a really significant part of the diet here.

  • Speaker #2

    Fascinating.

  • Speaker #1

    Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a non-profit organization, is excited to present... this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate Guest Speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcasts can explore our website for more information, links, and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody.

  • Speaker #2

    Our guest today, of course, is Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn. Dr. David Hohn has written the new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know. We'll have links so that our audience can find out more about Dr. Hohn and his work and this excellent new book. Congrats again on the book, Dr. Hohn. I want to talk to you more about one of the misconceptions having to do with social interactions and dinosaurs. Maybe tell us a little bit about that and how we have gotten that a little bit off.

  • Speaker #3

    Yeah, so this is something that in my own research, I've been really hammering as a point for a few years now. It was nice to kind of bring it all together in a book and be able to give a chapter onto this. And I think this is one area where I think we have often got it wrong, or at least overstated things that at first glance look convincing. But then when you delve back into them, you start finding, well, actually, this is not as obvious as it first looks. And at least part of that comes down to the use of the word social itself. Like so many words. if you dig into the ethological literature, so the study of behavior, people who study animal behavior will give a very specific meaning to the word social. But in common conversation, we will use it in a very different way. And of course, if you're not a trained ethologist, and that includes paleontologists then trying to reconstruct behavior, it's very easy to use it in a kind of common or garden term. And then that can really plaster across a whole smear of different behaviors. or being used in a very technical sense in one paper and then a very generic one in the other. And so I try and be careful about my usage of things like that because really, for me, social means interactions, you know, like in the same way that we say, oh, I'm being social, I'm seeing my friends, I'm talking to them, we're exchanging ideas and information and having company and supporting each other and loaning each other money and all those other things that come from it. And that's very different to hanging around in a group. So lions, chimpanzees, meerkats, these are things that are social. They don't just live in groups, they interact. There may or may not be a leader, but they... groom each other. They will take care of each other's offspring. They will work together to defend the group or find food or make a burrow or whatever these things may be and communicate in that sense. Those are social interactions. If you look at things like zebra, well, they don't really work like that. At another level, fish, you'll get a massive school of fish, thousands, even millions together. Do they have friends? Do they exchange ideas? Do they look after one another? Basically, no, but they're both living in groups. And this is the problem when you find mass mortality site, as we call it, so a mass graveyard, dozens, in some cases, thousands, potentially tens of thousands of individual dinosaurs in a single bed that probably died together. And people will go, well, they're social. They were living together and not just living together. They use the word social, then employ all these other interaction stuff. And I'm like. do we actually even know they died together? As in, if there had been a massive drought in this environment, every animal that normally lived on its own, or maybe in a little gang of four or five, would all end up at the same last remaining bit of water hole. And when that water runs out, they're going to die there too. And then when the rains finally come, they're going to bury all those bodies. And so what we see is, wow, a group of a thousand of them. and they lived together and they were social and interacted and this was a herd and da da da da da and maybe this is what i mean i i'm not saying that's wrong what i'm saying is i don't know because i don't trust that they didn't just die from some horrible disaster and that's what killed them or it's something like the famous zebra and wildebeest migration you get in the maasai mara every year where every single year they truck across follow the reins and loads of them drown in the bottom of the river because they've got to swim this river and lots of them drown and there's crocodiles and other things going on, which would then lead thousands and thousands of bodies at the bottom of this river to be fossilized and form a giant group. But wildebeest and zebra form these giant herds of hundreds of thousands of animals, but it's really composed of hundreds or thousands of herds of five or six animals, usually a harem of a male and half a dozen females. So even when they move together as this giant herd, they're kind of thousands of mini herds. And then when they get where they're going, they all split up into their individual herds. So again, even if that interpretation about those mass mortality sites of dinosaurs is closer to the truth, and these animals did live in groups, and that was maybe a fundamental thing that they did, it doesn't mean they lived in groups of hundreds or thousands. We also then tend to apply that and go, well, this species did. So presumably all its near relatives did, right? Because they're all kind of similar. And it's like, well, Lions hunt in groups, but their nearest relatives, leopards and tigers, don't. Jackals can hunt in groups, but they're usually in pairs. Plenty of foxes are solitary, but a couple of them operate in pairs. And then there's wolves, which are extremely social, or bush dogs, or a doll in Asia, which are extremely social. But then you've got solitary dogs that basically live on their own, like maned wolves. So just saying, ah, dogs live in groups and cats live on their own is wrong, let alone... trying to extend it to a whole raft of relatives. And you get things like this. There's a group called the dromaeosaurs. These are the very bird-like dinosaurs that include Velociraptor, which is usually the one people have heard of. Jurassic Park, but a third of the size and cuddled in feathers. A close relative of Velociraptor called Deinonychus from the US. That is the one dinosaur which has very often been argued to be social and hunting groups. And I think the evidence for that is extraordinarily flimsy. Again, not saying it's wrong, but I think the evidence purported to say. these were group living animals is flimsy, let alone they hunted in groups. And then people have extended that to all dromaeosaurs. And it's like, this is really like finding a pile of bodies of a carnivore together and basically going, oh, well, lions always hunt in groups and therefore so do tigers and leopard and jaguar and puma. And it's like, this is not how we should reconstruct behaviour. The initial example is questionable. to then extend it to all these other relatives is very questionable at best.

  • Speaker #2

    This is all fascinating, Dr. Hohn. Dr. Hohn is a Smithsonian associate, has written the wonderful new book titled Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior. We'll be at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our show notes for more details. I just have one final question for you, Dr. Hohn, and that is, What advancements are we going to see, are paleontologists going to see over the course of the next few years when it comes to behavior that we might not know much about, but are learning in the course of some of this new technology that is being developed and employed by paleontologists? I mean,

  • Speaker #3

    we're definitely going to pick more stuff up. I guess my question would be is like, how are we going to use it? So, I mean, you and some of your listeners may know, pretty getting on for about 10 years or so ago now. We developed a technique to basically detect some of the underlying colors of some dinosaurs from exceptional preservation with really cool fossils where the feathers are preserved and these pigment-bearing structures called melanosomes were preserved. And that was a massive breakthrough that has the enormous potential. And yet we've not abandoned it, but it's kind of one of those classic things of like, well, now we've worked out how to do it, no one's interested in it anymore. Speaker 1 And not necessarily pointing fingers at the scientists, which include a number of my colleagues. And I was working on one of these projects for a while. But, you know, it's very easy to go to a big grant body and go, we think we can work out the color of dinosaurs. Wow. Can you hear some money? Go and find out. And now going, we know we can work out the color of dinosaurs. Now we just want to do that a couple of hundred more times and maybe we'll learn something. You can see why it's suddenly harder to get that kind of money. And yet I think it's absolutely vital because to spin on that argument, Ankyornis, another little feathered dinosaur, chicken-sized thing from China, and this amazing study said mostly black or gray with white bits on the feathers and a red bit on its head. Wow. Amazing, incredible. And I look at this and go, it is, but I want to know, is that a male or a female, or is that an adult or a juvenile? Do they molt during the year? Because we know dinosaurs molted just like birds. They certainly have the potential to change colour. This is an animal living in a very cold environment, very wintery. Probably had loads of snow in winter. There's a whole bunch of birds which turn white in winter. Birds vary. If you're right up in the north, some birds of some species are slightly different colour to those down south. Some of them, males and females, look the same. Some of them look quite different. This is one individual animal at one point in its life. It's amazing we know its colour. but we'll know a hundred times more if we know that males and females were different colors or were the same colors. If they camouflage themselves in winter by shifting to a white coat or stayed this color year round, because this sort of thing then really tells you about behavior. Animals where males are very different colors to females usually have no involvement in raising the offspring. Animals that are very similar colors to females, either they're both quite bright or they don't have kind of any color difference at all. So think of things like penguins, Think of things like starlings, actually a lot of parrots. Usually the male takes just as much care, if not more care than the females do. So this will totally tell you something about sexual selection, display, what activities they're doing, how they probably pair up and how they partner. If they're doing that, they're probably operating in groups or at least pairs more often than if they're on their own. Peacocks tend to live on their own. Parrots tend to live in big flocks and operate in pairs a lot. This is where you pull all the really cool information out. And so this is one of those things which is annoying because I've been to a museum in eastern China that had several hundred specimens of Ankyornis with feathers. We know how to do it and the specimens are there. That will tell you far more than going, look at this one. It's cool that it's probably black with white and red on it. So I think that's more the development I want to see. Yeah, technology is always going to give us new opportunities to do stuff like that. But doing it once and finding out and going, oh, we can do that. Huh. Now let's do something else. is a fraction as interesting for me for stuff like behavior as it is to really build up a proper big data set and then go to town on it.

  • Speaker #2

    Well, as you do more work on this subject, Dr. Hung, we'd love to have you back. This is such a... Well,

  • Speaker #3

    give me a few years.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, absolutely. And selfishly, I'll take responsibility for inviting you back. But your work is so exciting. Your new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, is out as of the 5th, I believe, of November. Yes,

  • Speaker #3

    available for pre-order. And some people have already got hold of copies. I'm not sure how.

  • Speaker #2

    Excellent. Well, and thank you for sharing a copy with me. I've just loved it. I want to recommend it so highly. We will have links so that our audience can pre-order it, along with links to find out more about you and your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation. Dr. Hone, thanks for your time. We look forward to your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation.

  • Speaker #3

    Thank you so much.

  • Speaker #1

    My thanks to Dr.

  • Speaker #2

    David Hone for his time today.

  • Speaker #1

    My thanks to the Smithsonian team for all they do to support the show. My thanks always to Sam Hanegar, our executive producer, and my thanks to you, our wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Please check out more information about Dr. Hohn's presentation at Smithsonian Associates in our show notes today and be well. Be safe. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show on radio and podcast, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series.

  • Speaker #2

    Thanks, everybody.

  • Speaker #1

    We will see you next time.

  • Speaker #0

    Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep... dive into some of the most fascinating real-life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about Better, the Not Old Better Show.

  • Speaker #1

    Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about the Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is Not Old Better, and we're on Instagram at Not Old Better too. The Not Old Better Show is a production of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.

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Welcome to The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series. I’m your host, Paul Vogelzang, and today we’re diving deep into the lost world of dinosaurs—those awe-inspiring giants that have captured our imaginations for generations.

While we all know about T. rex’s mighty roar or the towering neck of the Brachiosaurus, how much do we really know about how they lived? That’s where our guest comes in. SMITHSONIAN ASSOCIATE Dr. David Hone is one of today’s leading paleontologists, known for his groundbreaking work on dinosaur behavior. His new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know, is a thrilling exploration of how these creatures lived, communicated, and even raised their young.


Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up.  Check out notes here via the links for more information. Dr. Hone is here to break down the latest discoveries and reveal how paleontologists use everything from fossils to living animal behavior to make educated guesses about these long-extinct giants. We’ll hear about everything from dinosaur signals and combat to their surprising colors and social habits—insights that challenge what we thought we knew.

Get ready for an exciting conversation that blends ancient mysteries with modern science. Whether you’re a lifelong dino fan or just curious about the prehistoric past, today’s episode will be a treat.

Dr. Hone, welcome to the show!


My thanks to Dr. David Hone for joining us today on The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview series. 


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates'interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.

  • Speaker #1

    Welcome to the Not Old Better Show Smithsonian Associates Interview Series. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and today we are diving deep into the lost world of dinosaurs, those awe-inspiring giants that have captured our imaginations for generations. We all love dinosaurs. And while we know a fair bit about T-Rex's mighty roar or the towering neck of the brachiosaurus, how much do we really know about how they lived? That's where our guest comes in. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn is one of today's leading paleontologists known for his groundbreaking work on dinosaur behavior. His new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know, is a thrilling exploration of how these creatures lived, communicated, and even raised their young. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up. The title of his presentation is Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior. You can check out more information in our show notes today, but we have Dr. Hone today and he's here to break down the latest discoveries and reveal how paleontologists use everything from fossils to living animal behavior to make educated guesses about these long extinct giants. We're going to hear today about everything from dinosaur signals to... combat to their surprising colors and social habits, insights that challenge what we thought we knew about dinosaurs. So get ready for an exciting conversation that blends ancient mysteries with modern science. Whether you're a lifelong dino fan like me, or just curious about the prehistoric past, today's episode will be a treat. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn is our guest. Please welcome him to the show.

  • Speaker #2

    Dr. David Hohn, welcome. to the program.

  • Speaker #3

    Thanks for having me on.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, it's great to talk to you. We are going to be talking about this wonderful new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, that you've written, talking about your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation is right around the corner. But welcome. Congratulations on this great book. And let me just start here and just ask to briefly what you're going to be telling our Smithsonian audience. about how you'll be using Zoom because we're all on Zoom these days.

  • Speaker #3

    Yeah, I've done one or two. I think I've done two before for the Smithsonian. You get to see my grinning face and see my slides. And I'm pretty old school. Is it not quite chalk and talk? Because we don't have a whiteboard or a blackboard or chalkboard, as you call them. But it is like, here's some pictures with some text. I'm going to talk about it for five minutes. Because when you do a subject like dinosaurs, you're mad if you're not showing people what you're talking about. Because not everyone's familiar with... all the obscure animals or fossils or specific details I'm talking about. And so I think it's always nice to stick it on screen. I'm talking about this. And if you look at this, this is the interesting bit and go from there. So that's pretty much my style.

  • Speaker #2

    Good. Well, thank you. It's interesting perspective that you have. And the book really reflects this again. The title of the book is Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know. I really love that because there's so much that we don't know. And you really focus. on that element of things so that you really are driving this idea of, well, what is it that we really know about these creatures? So how did you pick that direction to take?

  • Speaker #3

    I'm not sure I did. It's slightly worrying you said that because I'm not sure that was my aim. Ironically, and it's going to sound like a plug, but that was literally the aim of my last book was all the stuff we don't know about dinosaurs. And that was actually my original title for it is What We Don't Know About Dinosaurs, which the publisher hated. But this book is certainly more technical than my previous ones. It's trying to step up a level in that regard. But I would agree that as someone who's really interested in dinosaur behavior and done a lot of research on this in the last 15 years or so, I do think we have not necessarily a systematic problem, but I definitely think there's some deficiencies in how we as a community of paleontologists and people interested in this stuff have approached the subject. And it means that I do think there are areas... that if you spoke to the average paleontologist or average dinosaur researcher and said, do you think we've got a good handle on this bit of behavior? I think they'd say yes. And I'd say, oh, I really don't think we have at all. And actually, we could do with revising some of the foundational ideas that we have and a bit more first principle stuff and make sure that actually our case for this kind of bedrocks, if you like, is as solid as you think it is, but not as solid as I think it is. Let's see if we can get it solid. And then we've got a starting point to build up and try and develop our knowledge further.

  • Speaker #2

    I'll tell you this, too. The book is just chock-a-block full of wonderful images and illustrations that I personally found very helpful. teaching me some of those very first kind of elementary ideas, I learned very quickly that these animals were fighting for their lives at really pretty much every step of the way. And in one illustration, you hypothesize about a mating posture. What was it about some of the artistic conclusions that drew you to make some of these hypotheticals about their behavior?

  • Speaker #3

    The combination of things, it's To be blunt, partly because the publishers were prepared to pay for illustrations, which makes an enormous difference, which they not always are. In this case, it's done by a friend of mine, Gabriel Agurto, who is just a stunning illustrator and has risen to the top very, very quickly and justifiably so. Some of it, certainly the color illustrations, we were really pushing for things that are not normally illustrated. So you're avoiding that understandable standard of say museums or press release art almost, or dramatic art of combat and fighting and okay we definitely got a couple of those but as you say animals mating animals asleep at night animals in the snow the things you don't actually really see very often i remember big carnivores they were probably asleep 12 16 hours a day yeah you know for every time you see a t-rex biting the head of some other dinosaur and trying to eat it that was probably five minutes you of its life every three or four days and yet that's been illustrated a thousand times and how often do you show it asleep or just not doing anything which is a far more common part. So we definitely wanted to show some of that stuff and then again as you say a lot of that stuff is very hypothetical or theoretical you know we don't have a lot of data we don't have a lot of evidence but on the other hand some of it is pretty inevitable you know they must have mated that dinosaurs begat little dinosaurs that must have happened. And when you've got things like we've illustrated, a thing called Polar Cantus, a big armored dinosaur covered in spikes and plates, and its body is very squat and the whole thing is very stiff. It is going to be complicated and awkward no matter which way around you show it. And so, again, at least kind of showing that and getting people to think about it. And that point you made about fighting for their lives, I don't think that's quite true. But I would say the idea of the classic nature red in tooth and claw, your average zebra sitting on the Serengeti. it may not see a lion for days at a time or a hyena or some other predator. But at the same time, that could happen at any minute. And drought or a storm or a flood or a parasite's attack or a fight with another zebra is potentially around the corner. I think that's one thing I really wanted to get at is dinosaurs as real living organisms, which may sound almost a bit like patronizing and facile, but... because of the limitations of the data that we work on, we tend to focus on a few very key aspects of their biology. And I think it's all too easy to forget they would sleep. Many of them would probably sleep a large chunk of their lives. It's almost impossible to say anything meaningful about it beyond that sentence. But let's not forget T-Rex did not spend its life trying to hunt and find and kill and eat things 24, 7, 365, more like 20 minutes a day. every three or four days or something like that. It was probably a very sedentary animal in the way that lions and tigers and bears and things like this are. It wandered around a bit. It took food where it could, but it was not just constantly trying to kill Triceratops.

  • Speaker #2

    One other plug for the illustrations and your great artists that you worked with, because as you were talking, I remembered one of the images that I thought was really a dramatic illustration because it almost looks as though it's being... viewed through night vision goggles. It's of the dinosaurs actually sleeping in a trough or a hole that they've dug. And it really shows you just exactly what that might look like. I just thought that was a fascinating way to represent that particular activity to really show it at that time of day during what might be considered night. Very, very impressive work. How does some of the biomechanics of dinosaurs, the movements, the speed, some of the hunting tactics, what does that lend itself to in terms of our knowledge about their behavior and even their interaction with other creatures and species at that time?

  • Speaker #3

    It's super important because it's one of the real, in fact, probably the line of data that we can pull out from almost any decent fossil, so by which I mean I've done a lot of work on feeding and combat and stuff like this, so of course you need evidence of injuries or you need a tooth stuck in a bone or bones inside a carnivore or something like this. to show the interaction and then try and work out what's going on. And those are generally pretty rare, and they often have problems associated with them because you're trying to interpret the behavior of maybe half a skeleton or some scattered remains, or you haven't got the whole thing. But if you've got a decent skeleton, and for, of course, dozens and maybe even getting off hundreds of species of dinosaurs, we have got enough of a skeleton. We have a very, very good idea, indeed, of its basic anatomy. You can then reconstruct with pretty considerable accuracy the muscles that sit on those bones. And we've got ways of doing that and modelling them against modern animals to make sure we're doing it right. But then it's like, right, well, now I can see how tall was it? How fast could it run? How quickly could it accelerate? How well could it turn? Certain proportions of leg bones give an indication of whether animals were long distance runners or more like sprinters. So like the cheetah versus wolf kind of split or gradient. And then you can look at the strength of bones or the strength of jaws and the strength of... Well, how hard could it really bite? At what point would those teeth break? How... wide could the mouth open just what could it swallow so we can do all of that and you don't actually need ah we need that exact tooth on that exact bone that left that exact mark which if we're lucky we will reconstruct correctly as being this one trying to bite that one any decent skeleton we can do that and then again it feeds back into that previous point of thinking of them as living animals and context so you'll find people saying well you know t-rex really wasn't that quick for example so was it really a very effective hunter Well, probably because it was mostly hunting things that also weren't that quick. You know, it would have probably been quite slow compared to relatively big, fast carnivores, even like lions and hyena and stuff like this. And no, it would never have caught a zebra, let alone an impala or pronghorn. But it's not. It's trying to catch another animal, which is the size of an elephant or a rhino. And they're not that fast either. Like that old joke of escaping a lion or escaping a bear. I don't need to be faster than the predator. I just need to be faster than you. It's the same kind of thing. T-Rex only needs to be very slightly faster than what it's trying to hunt, or even a bit slower, provided it can, in some vague way, sneak up on it. I know that sounds a bit weird. And actually, I think they're probably very, very bad at that. But animals can still come over hills and behind trees, or animals are just straight up not looking. a slight advantage there. If you're already moving at top speed and the other animal needs a standing start, you can be quite a bit slower than it, but still catch it before it's got faster than you. So yeah, all of those kinds of factors play in. We need to think of them in the context of the worlds in which they lived. And while it's very, very important for a lot of stuff, that's not necessarily the same as the worlds we have now. Though of course they do give us an excellent framework for a lot of things to try and work out and understand.

  • Speaker #2

    And speaking of that, where I live here in the Northern Virginia, kind of the Washington DC area, we've had a recent cache of apparently megalodon giant shark teeth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that just gives paleontologists such a point of reference. It's hard for me to say, well, that's a tooth and that... tooth must then fit into this jaw, which then must be exponentially this size, which then exponentially leads us to... But some of those things can really give paleontologists clues and guides about animals and their behaviors.

  • Speaker #3

    Absolutely. The right fossil can be incredibly revealing in that context. But I guess going back to your earlier point about the stuff we don't know, it can give you information that is 100% true whilst also being really quite misleading. So an example I'd give is we do have a handful of examples of predatory dinosaurs or carnivorous dinosaurs where they got the bones of something they ate inside them. And 100% sure that that animal X ate animal Y. That is what that is showing you. But is that normal? Is that common? So a great example I came across, which I was kind of digging into, but it was, and I knew this was a phenomenon, but I didn't realize it was anything like as exaggerated as it turned out to be. So lovely study on young crocodiles. Up to a metre long. And a metre long crocodile is big. You know, that's taking a couple of fingers off. If you really mess around with it, maybe taking a hand off kind of size. Half their diet, 50% is invertebrates. Spiders, beetle larvae or beetles, dragonflies and dragonfly larvae and other aquatic and even terrestrial insects and millipedes and cockroaches and stuff like this. But those kind of things, particularly in the high acid environment of a crocodile's stomach, will not fossilize. And fish bones are very flimsy and very cartilaginous and often don't preserve well. So you could have an animal like a metre-long crocodile swimming around, half its diet is insects, maybe two-thirds of the remainder are small fish and tadpoles and things like this. And so maybe only a sixth or less, maybe 10%, are things like a big fish or a rat or a large frog. And what we would find in the fossil record is, oh, cool, we got a dozen fossil crocodiles, and this one ate a rat, and this one ate a frog, and this one's got bones of a really big fish in it. So that's what they ate. They ate relatively big vertebrates, because that's what we found in their stomach content, or at least that's what's preserved inside the body cavity. And that would be 10% or less of their diet in reality. So it would give us real meaningful information. Crocodiles would absolutely have eaten those things. But it's then so easy to fall into the trap of going, that's normal. But it's not. It's just a huge bias in the fossil record, which we didn't necessarily think of. And so those are the kind of traps that I'm trying to emphasize and think about. And so, again, what it's about, like some of these foundational ideas of X, A, Y. And we know because, look, here are all the fossils showing X, A, Y. It's like, yeah, but have we considered what else might have gone on that may have affected that? And for a lot of the times, I think there's ways we can probably test that. So, for example. You mentioned the megalodon teeth. I never read the research on megalodon teeth and megalodon feeding, but it will be the same. Enamel is incredibly strong stuff on teeth, but it still wears and it still scratches. And there's stuff called micro wear. You need not just a microscope, you need a scanning electron microscope. You need to go down to an ultra microscopic level, but you can pick up the scratches and wear on enamel, not just from things like bones, which you'd obviously think would be capable of scratching, even just meat, like just meat. has tiny fibrous bits in it, and that's enough to leave tiny scratches on the enamel. And we can see that, and thanks to doing systematic studies on living animals, we've got a pretty good idea of what a meat scratch looks like versus what a bone scratch looks like versus what a eating lots of beetles scratch looks like.

  • Speaker #1

    Interesting.

  • Speaker #3

    But I don't think anyone's looking for them in dinosaurs because we've already found the bones in the stomach, so we, quote, know what they ate. So these traps are there. but I think the solutions are also there too. And we can go and look for them. And then maybe we can go, okay, look, we can't find any evidence of that. So actually, that bone stomach content is probably bang on. And that's probably much closer to the real diet than we think. Or alternatively, maybe we'll find tons of evidence of insect type or, you know, strong insect carapace, or even just a bit and then go, well, of course, the really fine stuff is not going to show up. But if they're eating that many beetles, they're probably also eating dragonflies and eating. cockroaches and other softer, squidgier things. So actually, maybe the insects are a really significant part of the diet here.

  • Speaker #2

    Fascinating.

  • Speaker #1

    Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a non-profit organization, is excited to present... this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate Guest Speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcasts can explore our website for more information, links, and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody.

  • Speaker #2

    Our guest today, of course, is Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn. Dr. David Hohn has written the new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know. We'll have links so that our audience can find out more about Dr. Hohn and his work and this excellent new book. Congrats again on the book, Dr. Hohn. I want to talk to you more about one of the misconceptions having to do with social interactions and dinosaurs. Maybe tell us a little bit about that and how we have gotten that a little bit off.

  • Speaker #3

    Yeah, so this is something that in my own research, I've been really hammering as a point for a few years now. It was nice to kind of bring it all together in a book and be able to give a chapter onto this. And I think this is one area where I think we have often got it wrong, or at least overstated things that at first glance look convincing. But then when you delve back into them, you start finding, well, actually, this is not as obvious as it first looks. And at least part of that comes down to the use of the word social itself. Like so many words. if you dig into the ethological literature, so the study of behavior, people who study animal behavior will give a very specific meaning to the word social. But in common conversation, we will use it in a very different way. And of course, if you're not a trained ethologist, and that includes paleontologists then trying to reconstruct behavior, it's very easy to use it in a kind of common or garden term. And then that can really plaster across a whole smear of different behaviors. or being used in a very technical sense in one paper and then a very generic one in the other. And so I try and be careful about my usage of things like that because really, for me, social means interactions, you know, like in the same way that we say, oh, I'm being social, I'm seeing my friends, I'm talking to them, we're exchanging ideas and information and having company and supporting each other and loaning each other money and all those other things that come from it. And that's very different to hanging around in a group. So lions, chimpanzees, meerkats, these are things that are social. They don't just live in groups, they interact. There may or may not be a leader, but they... groom each other. They will take care of each other's offspring. They will work together to defend the group or find food or make a burrow or whatever these things may be and communicate in that sense. Those are social interactions. If you look at things like zebra, well, they don't really work like that. At another level, fish, you'll get a massive school of fish, thousands, even millions together. Do they have friends? Do they exchange ideas? Do they look after one another? Basically, no, but they're both living in groups. And this is the problem when you find mass mortality site, as we call it, so a mass graveyard, dozens, in some cases, thousands, potentially tens of thousands of individual dinosaurs in a single bed that probably died together. And people will go, well, they're social. They were living together and not just living together. They use the word social, then employ all these other interaction stuff. And I'm like. do we actually even know they died together? As in, if there had been a massive drought in this environment, every animal that normally lived on its own, or maybe in a little gang of four or five, would all end up at the same last remaining bit of water hole. And when that water runs out, they're going to die there too. And then when the rains finally come, they're going to bury all those bodies. And so what we see is, wow, a group of a thousand of them. and they lived together and they were social and interacted and this was a herd and da da da da da and maybe this is what i mean i i'm not saying that's wrong what i'm saying is i don't know because i don't trust that they didn't just die from some horrible disaster and that's what killed them or it's something like the famous zebra and wildebeest migration you get in the maasai mara every year where every single year they truck across follow the reins and loads of them drown in the bottom of the river because they've got to swim this river and lots of them drown and there's crocodiles and other things going on, which would then lead thousands and thousands of bodies at the bottom of this river to be fossilized and form a giant group. But wildebeest and zebra form these giant herds of hundreds of thousands of animals, but it's really composed of hundreds or thousands of herds of five or six animals, usually a harem of a male and half a dozen females. So even when they move together as this giant herd, they're kind of thousands of mini herds. And then when they get where they're going, they all split up into their individual herds. So again, even if that interpretation about those mass mortality sites of dinosaurs is closer to the truth, and these animals did live in groups, and that was maybe a fundamental thing that they did, it doesn't mean they lived in groups of hundreds or thousands. We also then tend to apply that and go, well, this species did. So presumably all its near relatives did, right? Because they're all kind of similar. And it's like, well, Lions hunt in groups, but their nearest relatives, leopards and tigers, don't. Jackals can hunt in groups, but they're usually in pairs. Plenty of foxes are solitary, but a couple of them operate in pairs. And then there's wolves, which are extremely social, or bush dogs, or a doll in Asia, which are extremely social. But then you've got solitary dogs that basically live on their own, like maned wolves. So just saying, ah, dogs live in groups and cats live on their own is wrong, let alone... trying to extend it to a whole raft of relatives. And you get things like this. There's a group called the dromaeosaurs. These are the very bird-like dinosaurs that include Velociraptor, which is usually the one people have heard of. Jurassic Park, but a third of the size and cuddled in feathers. A close relative of Velociraptor called Deinonychus from the US. That is the one dinosaur which has very often been argued to be social and hunting groups. And I think the evidence for that is extraordinarily flimsy. Again, not saying it's wrong, but I think the evidence purported to say. these were group living animals is flimsy, let alone they hunted in groups. And then people have extended that to all dromaeosaurs. And it's like, this is really like finding a pile of bodies of a carnivore together and basically going, oh, well, lions always hunt in groups and therefore so do tigers and leopard and jaguar and puma. And it's like, this is not how we should reconstruct behaviour. The initial example is questionable. to then extend it to all these other relatives is very questionable at best.

  • Speaker #2

    This is all fascinating, Dr. Hohn. Dr. Hohn is a Smithsonian associate, has written the wonderful new book titled Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior. We'll be at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our show notes for more details. I just have one final question for you, Dr. Hohn, and that is, What advancements are we going to see, are paleontologists going to see over the course of the next few years when it comes to behavior that we might not know much about, but are learning in the course of some of this new technology that is being developed and employed by paleontologists? I mean,

  • Speaker #3

    we're definitely going to pick more stuff up. I guess my question would be is like, how are we going to use it? So, I mean, you and some of your listeners may know, pretty getting on for about 10 years or so ago now. We developed a technique to basically detect some of the underlying colors of some dinosaurs from exceptional preservation with really cool fossils where the feathers are preserved and these pigment-bearing structures called melanosomes were preserved. And that was a massive breakthrough that has the enormous potential. And yet we've not abandoned it, but it's kind of one of those classic things of like, well, now we've worked out how to do it, no one's interested in it anymore. Speaker 1 And not necessarily pointing fingers at the scientists, which include a number of my colleagues. And I was working on one of these projects for a while. But, you know, it's very easy to go to a big grant body and go, we think we can work out the color of dinosaurs. Wow. Can you hear some money? Go and find out. And now going, we know we can work out the color of dinosaurs. Now we just want to do that a couple of hundred more times and maybe we'll learn something. You can see why it's suddenly harder to get that kind of money. And yet I think it's absolutely vital because to spin on that argument, Ankyornis, another little feathered dinosaur, chicken-sized thing from China, and this amazing study said mostly black or gray with white bits on the feathers and a red bit on its head. Wow. Amazing, incredible. And I look at this and go, it is, but I want to know, is that a male or a female, or is that an adult or a juvenile? Do they molt during the year? Because we know dinosaurs molted just like birds. They certainly have the potential to change colour. This is an animal living in a very cold environment, very wintery. Probably had loads of snow in winter. There's a whole bunch of birds which turn white in winter. Birds vary. If you're right up in the north, some birds of some species are slightly different colour to those down south. Some of them, males and females, look the same. Some of them look quite different. This is one individual animal at one point in its life. It's amazing we know its colour. but we'll know a hundred times more if we know that males and females were different colors or were the same colors. If they camouflage themselves in winter by shifting to a white coat or stayed this color year round, because this sort of thing then really tells you about behavior. Animals where males are very different colors to females usually have no involvement in raising the offspring. Animals that are very similar colors to females, either they're both quite bright or they don't have kind of any color difference at all. So think of things like penguins, Think of things like starlings, actually a lot of parrots. Usually the male takes just as much care, if not more care than the females do. So this will totally tell you something about sexual selection, display, what activities they're doing, how they probably pair up and how they partner. If they're doing that, they're probably operating in groups or at least pairs more often than if they're on their own. Peacocks tend to live on their own. Parrots tend to live in big flocks and operate in pairs a lot. This is where you pull all the really cool information out. And so this is one of those things which is annoying because I've been to a museum in eastern China that had several hundred specimens of Ankyornis with feathers. We know how to do it and the specimens are there. That will tell you far more than going, look at this one. It's cool that it's probably black with white and red on it. So I think that's more the development I want to see. Yeah, technology is always going to give us new opportunities to do stuff like that. But doing it once and finding out and going, oh, we can do that. Huh. Now let's do something else. is a fraction as interesting for me for stuff like behavior as it is to really build up a proper big data set and then go to town on it.

  • Speaker #2

    Well, as you do more work on this subject, Dr. Hung, we'd love to have you back. This is such a... Well,

  • Speaker #3

    give me a few years.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, absolutely. And selfishly, I'll take responsibility for inviting you back. But your work is so exciting. Your new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, is out as of the 5th, I believe, of November. Yes,

  • Speaker #3

    available for pre-order. And some people have already got hold of copies. I'm not sure how.

  • Speaker #2

    Excellent. Well, and thank you for sharing a copy with me. I've just loved it. I want to recommend it so highly. We will have links so that our audience can pre-order it, along with links to find out more about you and your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation. Dr. Hone, thanks for your time. We look forward to your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation.

  • Speaker #3

    Thank you so much.

  • Speaker #1

    My thanks to Dr.

  • Speaker #2

    David Hone for his time today.

  • Speaker #1

    My thanks to the Smithsonian team for all they do to support the show. My thanks always to Sam Hanegar, our executive producer, and my thanks to you, our wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Please check out more information about Dr. Hohn's presentation at Smithsonian Associates in our show notes today and be well. Be safe. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show on radio and podcast, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series.

  • Speaker #2

    Thanks, everybody.

  • Speaker #1

    We will see you next time.

  • Speaker #0

    Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep... dive into some of the most fascinating real-life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about Better, the Not Old Better Show.

  • Speaker #1

    Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about the Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is Not Old Better, and we're on Instagram at Not Old Better too. The Not Old Better Show is a production of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.

Description

Welcome to The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series. I’m your host, Paul Vogelzang, and today we’re diving deep into the lost world of dinosaurs—those awe-inspiring giants that have captured our imaginations for generations.

While we all know about T. rex’s mighty roar or the towering neck of the Brachiosaurus, how much do we really know about how they lived? That’s where our guest comes in. SMITHSONIAN ASSOCIATE Dr. David Hone is one of today’s leading paleontologists, known for his groundbreaking work on dinosaur behavior. His new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know, is a thrilling exploration of how these creatures lived, communicated, and even raised their young.


Smithsonian Associate, Dr. David Hone will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up.  Check out notes here via the links for more information. Dr. Hone is here to break down the latest discoveries and reveal how paleontologists use everything from fossils to living animal behavior to make educated guesses about these long-extinct giants. We’ll hear about everything from dinosaur signals and combat to their surprising colors and social habits—insights that challenge what we thought we knew.

Get ready for an exciting conversation that blends ancient mysteries with modern science. Whether you’re a lifelong dino fan or just curious about the prehistoric past, today’s episode will be a treat.

Dr. Hone, welcome to the show!


My thanks to Dr. David Hone for joining us today on The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview series. 


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates'interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.

  • Speaker #1

    Welcome to the Not Old Better Show Smithsonian Associates Interview Series. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and today we are diving deep into the lost world of dinosaurs, those awe-inspiring giants that have captured our imaginations for generations. We all love dinosaurs. And while we know a fair bit about T-Rex's mighty roar or the towering neck of the brachiosaurus, how much do we really know about how they lived? That's where our guest comes in. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn is one of today's leading paleontologists known for his groundbreaking work on dinosaur behavior. His new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know, is a thrilling exploration of how these creatures lived, communicated, and even raised their young. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up. The title of his presentation is Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior. You can check out more information in our show notes today, but we have Dr. Hone today and he's here to break down the latest discoveries and reveal how paleontologists use everything from fossils to living animal behavior to make educated guesses about these long extinct giants. We're going to hear today about everything from dinosaur signals to... combat to their surprising colors and social habits, insights that challenge what we thought we knew about dinosaurs. So get ready for an exciting conversation that blends ancient mysteries with modern science. Whether you're a lifelong dino fan like me, or just curious about the prehistoric past, today's episode will be a treat. Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn is our guest. Please welcome him to the show.

  • Speaker #2

    Dr. David Hohn, welcome. to the program.

  • Speaker #3

    Thanks for having me on.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, it's great to talk to you. We are going to be talking about this wonderful new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, that you've written, talking about your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation is right around the corner. But welcome. Congratulations on this great book. And let me just start here and just ask to briefly what you're going to be telling our Smithsonian audience. about how you'll be using Zoom because we're all on Zoom these days.

  • Speaker #3

    Yeah, I've done one or two. I think I've done two before for the Smithsonian. You get to see my grinning face and see my slides. And I'm pretty old school. Is it not quite chalk and talk? Because we don't have a whiteboard or a blackboard or chalkboard, as you call them. But it is like, here's some pictures with some text. I'm going to talk about it for five minutes. Because when you do a subject like dinosaurs, you're mad if you're not showing people what you're talking about. Because not everyone's familiar with... all the obscure animals or fossils or specific details I'm talking about. And so I think it's always nice to stick it on screen. I'm talking about this. And if you look at this, this is the interesting bit and go from there. So that's pretty much my style.

  • Speaker #2

    Good. Well, thank you. It's interesting perspective that you have. And the book really reflects this again. The title of the book is Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know. I really love that because there's so much that we don't know. And you really focus. on that element of things so that you really are driving this idea of, well, what is it that we really know about these creatures? So how did you pick that direction to take?

  • Speaker #3

    I'm not sure I did. It's slightly worrying you said that because I'm not sure that was my aim. Ironically, and it's going to sound like a plug, but that was literally the aim of my last book was all the stuff we don't know about dinosaurs. And that was actually my original title for it is What We Don't Know About Dinosaurs, which the publisher hated. But this book is certainly more technical than my previous ones. It's trying to step up a level in that regard. But I would agree that as someone who's really interested in dinosaur behavior and done a lot of research on this in the last 15 years or so, I do think we have not necessarily a systematic problem, but I definitely think there's some deficiencies in how we as a community of paleontologists and people interested in this stuff have approached the subject. And it means that I do think there are areas... that if you spoke to the average paleontologist or average dinosaur researcher and said, do you think we've got a good handle on this bit of behavior? I think they'd say yes. And I'd say, oh, I really don't think we have at all. And actually, we could do with revising some of the foundational ideas that we have and a bit more first principle stuff and make sure that actually our case for this kind of bedrocks, if you like, is as solid as you think it is, but not as solid as I think it is. Let's see if we can get it solid. And then we've got a starting point to build up and try and develop our knowledge further.

  • Speaker #2

    I'll tell you this, too. The book is just chock-a-block full of wonderful images and illustrations that I personally found very helpful. teaching me some of those very first kind of elementary ideas, I learned very quickly that these animals were fighting for their lives at really pretty much every step of the way. And in one illustration, you hypothesize about a mating posture. What was it about some of the artistic conclusions that drew you to make some of these hypotheticals about their behavior?

  • Speaker #3

    The combination of things, it's To be blunt, partly because the publishers were prepared to pay for illustrations, which makes an enormous difference, which they not always are. In this case, it's done by a friend of mine, Gabriel Agurto, who is just a stunning illustrator and has risen to the top very, very quickly and justifiably so. Some of it, certainly the color illustrations, we were really pushing for things that are not normally illustrated. So you're avoiding that understandable standard of say museums or press release art almost, or dramatic art of combat and fighting and okay we definitely got a couple of those but as you say animals mating animals asleep at night animals in the snow the things you don't actually really see very often i remember big carnivores they were probably asleep 12 16 hours a day yeah you know for every time you see a t-rex biting the head of some other dinosaur and trying to eat it that was probably five minutes you of its life every three or four days and yet that's been illustrated a thousand times and how often do you show it asleep or just not doing anything which is a far more common part. So we definitely wanted to show some of that stuff and then again as you say a lot of that stuff is very hypothetical or theoretical you know we don't have a lot of data we don't have a lot of evidence but on the other hand some of it is pretty inevitable you know they must have mated that dinosaurs begat little dinosaurs that must have happened. And when you've got things like we've illustrated, a thing called Polar Cantus, a big armored dinosaur covered in spikes and plates, and its body is very squat and the whole thing is very stiff. It is going to be complicated and awkward no matter which way around you show it. And so, again, at least kind of showing that and getting people to think about it. And that point you made about fighting for their lives, I don't think that's quite true. But I would say the idea of the classic nature red in tooth and claw, your average zebra sitting on the Serengeti. it may not see a lion for days at a time or a hyena or some other predator. But at the same time, that could happen at any minute. And drought or a storm or a flood or a parasite's attack or a fight with another zebra is potentially around the corner. I think that's one thing I really wanted to get at is dinosaurs as real living organisms, which may sound almost a bit like patronizing and facile, but... because of the limitations of the data that we work on, we tend to focus on a few very key aspects of their biology. And I think it's all too easy to forget they would sleep. Many of them would probably sleep a large chunk of their lives. It's almost impossible to say anything meaningful about it beyond that sentence. But let's not forget T-Rex did not spend its life trying to hunt and find and kill and eat things 24, 7, 365, more like 20 minutes a day. every three or four days or something like that. It was probably a very sedentary animal in the way that lions and tigers and bears and things like this are. It wandered around a bit. It took food where it could, but it was not just constantly trying to kill Triceratops.

  • Speaker #2

    One other plug for the illustrations and your great artists that you worked with, because as you were talking, I remembered one of the images that I thought was really a dramatic illustration because it almost looks as though it's being... viewed through night vision goggles. It's of the dinosaurs actually sleeping in a trough or a hole that they've dug. And it really shows you just exactly what that might look like. I just thought that was a fascinating way to represent that particular activity to really show it at that time of day during what might be considered night. Very, very impressive work. How does some of the biomechanics of dinosaurs, the movements, the speed, some of the hunting tactics, what does that lend itself to in terms of our knowledge about their behavior and even their interaction with other creatures and species at that time?

  • Speaker #3

    It's super important because it's one of the real, in fact, probably the line of data that we can pull out from almost any decent fossil, so by which I mean I've done a lot of work on feeding and combat and stuff like this, so of course you need evidence of injuries or you need a tooth stuck in a bone or bones inside a carnivore or something like this. to show the interaction and then try and work out what's going on. And those are generally pretty rare, and they often have problems associated with them because you're trying to interpret the behavior of maybe half a skeleton or some scattered remains, or you haven't got the whole thing. But if you've got a decent skeleton, and for, of course, dozens and maybe even getting off hundreds of species of dinosaurs, we have got enough of a skeleton. We have a very, very good idea, indeed, of its basic anatomy. You can then reconstruct with pretty considerable accuracy the muscles that sit on those bones. And we've got ways of doing that and modelling them against modern animals to make sure we're doing it right. But then it's like, right, well, now I can see how tall was it? How fast could it run? How quickly could it accelerate? How well could it turn? Certain proportions of leg bones give an indication of whether animals were long distance runners or more like sprinters. So like the cheetah versus wolf kind of split or gradient. And then you can look at the strength of bones or the strength of jaws and the strength of... Well, how hard could it really bite? At what point would those teeth break? How... wide could the mouth open just what could it swallow so we can do all of that and you don't actually need ah we need that exact tooth on that exact bone that left that exact mark which if we're lucky we will reconstruct correctly as being this one trying to bite that one any decent skeleton we can do that and then again it feeds back into that previous point of thinking of them as living animals and context so you'll find people saying well you know t-rex really wasn't that quick for example so was it really a very effective hunter Well, probably because it was mostly hunting things that also weren't that quick. You know, it would have probably been quite slow compared to relatively big, fast carnivores, even like lions and hyena and stuff like this. And no, it would never have caught a zebra, let alone an impala or pronghorn. But it's not. It's trying to catch another animal, which is the size of an elephant or a rhino. And they're not that fast either. Like that old joke of escaping a lion or escaping a bear. I don't need to be faster than the predator. I just need to be faster than you. It's the same kind of thing. T-Rex only needs to be very slightly faster than what it's trying to hunt, or even a bit slower, provided it can, in some vague way, sneak up on it. I know that sounds a bit weird. And actually, I think they're probably very, very bad at that. But animals can still come over hills and behind trees, or animals are just straight up not looking. a slight advantage there. If you're already moving at top speed and the other animal needs a standing start, you can be quite a bit slower than it, but still catch it before it's got faster than you. So yeah, all of those kinds of factors play in. We need to think of them in the context of the worlds in which they lived. And while it's very, very important for a lot of stuff, that's not necessarily the same as the worlds we have now. Though of course they do give us an excellent framework for a lot of things to try and work out and understand.

  • Speaker #2

    And speaking of that, where I live here in the Northern Virginia, kind of the Washington DC area, we've had a recent cache of apparently megalodon giant shark teeth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that just gives paleontologists such a point of reference. It's hard for me to say, well, that's a tooth and that... tooth must then fit into this jaw, which then must be exponentially this size, which then exponentially leads us to... But some of those things can really give paleontologists clues and guides about animals and their behaviors.

  • Speaker #3

    Absolutely. The right fossil can be incredibly revealing in that context. But I guess going back to your earlier point about the stuff we don't know, it can give you information that is 100% true whilst also being really quite misleading. So an example I'd give is we do have a handful of examples of predatory dinosaurs or carnivorous dinosaurs where they got the bones of something they ate inside them. And 100% sure that that animal X ate animal Y. That is what that is showing you. But is that normal? Is that common? So a great example I came across, which I was kind of digging into, but it was, and I knew this was a phenomenon, but I didn't realize it was anything like as exaggerated as it turned out to be. So lovely study on young crocodiles. Up to a metre long. And a metre long crocodile is big. You know, that's taking a couple of fingers off. If you really mess around with it, maybe taking a hand off kind of size. Half their diet, 50% is invertebrates. Spiders, beetle larvae or beetles, dragonflies and dragonfly larvae and other aquatic and even terrestrial insects and millipedes and cockroaches and stuff like this. But those kind of things, particularly in the high acid environment of a crocodile's stomach, will not fossilize. And fish bones are very flimsy and very cartilaginous and often don't preserve well. So you could have an animal like a metre-long crocodile swimming around, half its diet is insects, maybe two-thirds of the remainder are small fish and tadpoles and things like this. And so maybe only a sixth or less, maybe 10%, are things like a big fish or a rat or a large frog. And what we would find in the fossil record is, oh, cool, we got a dozen fossil crocodiles, and this one ate a rat, and this one ate a frog, and this one's got bones of a really big fish in it. So that's what they ate. They ate relatively big vertebrates, because that's what we found in their stomach content, or at least that's what's preserved inside the body cavity. And that would be 10% or less of their diet in reality. So it would give us real meaningful information. Crocodiles would absolutely have eaten those things. But it's then so easy to fall into the trap of going, that's normal. But it's not. It's just a huge bias in the fossil record, which we didn't necessarily think of. And so those are the kind of traps that I'm trying to emphasize and think about. And so, again, what it's about, like some of these foundational ideas of X, A, Y. And we know because, look, here are all the fossils showing X, A, Y. It's like, yeah, but have we considered what else might have gone on that may have affected that? And for a lot of the times, I think there's ways we can probably test that. So, for example. You mentioned the megalodon teeth. I never read the research on megalodon teeth and megalodon feeding, but it will be the same. Enamel is incredibly strong stuff on teeth, but it still wears and it still scratches. And there's stuff called micro wear. You need not just a microscope, you need a scanning electron microscope. You need to go down to an ultra microscopic level, but you can pick up the scratches and wear on enamel, not just from things like bones, which you'd obviously think would be capable of scratching, even just meat, like just meat. has tiny fibrous bits in it, and that's enough to leave tiny scratches on the enamel. And we can see that, and thanks to doing systematic studies on living animals, we've got a pretty good idea of what a meat scratch looks like versus what a bone scratch looks like versus what a eating lots of beetles scratch looks like.

  • Speaker #1

    Interesting.

  • Speaker #3

    But I don't think anyone's looking for them in dinosaurs because we've already found the bones in the stomach, so we, quote, know what they ate. So these traps are there. but I think the solutions are also there too. And we can go and look for them. And then maybe we can go, okay, look, we can't find any evidence of that. So actually, that bone stomach content is probably bang on. And that's probably much closer to the real diet than we think. Or alternatively, maybe we'll find tons of evidence of insect type or, you know, strong insect carapace, or even just a bit and then go, well, of course, the really fine stuff is not going to show up. But if they're eating that many beetles, they're probably also eating dragonflies and eating. cockroaches and other softer, squidgier things. So actually, maybe the insects are a really significant part of the diet here.

  • Speaker #2

    Fascinating.

  • Speaker #1

    Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a non-profit organization, is excited to present... this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate Guest Speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcasts can explore our website for more information, links, and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody.

  • Speaker #2

    Our guest today, of course, is Smithsonian Associate Dr. David Hohn. Dr. David Hohn has written the new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, What They Did and How We Know. We'll have links so that our audience can find out more about Dr. Hohn and his work and this excellent new book. Congrats again on the book, Dr. Hohn. I want to talk to you more about one of the misconceptions having to do with social interactions and dinosaurs. Maybe tell us a little bit about that and how we have gotten that a little bit off.

  • Speaker #3

    Yeah, so this is something that in my own research, I've been really hammering as a point for a few years now. It was nice to kind of bring it all together in a book and be able to give a chapter onto this. And I think this is one area where I think we have often got it wrong, or at least overstated things that at first glance look convincing. But then when you delve back into them, you start finding, well, actually, this is not as obvious as it first looks. And at least part of that comes down to the use of the word social itself. Like so many words. if you dig into the ethological literature, so the study of behavior, people who study animal behavior will give a very specific meaning to the word social. But in common conversation, we will use it in a very different way. And of course, if you're not a trained ethologist, and that includes paleontologists then trying to reconstruct behavior, it's very easy to use it in a kind of common or garden term. And then that can really plaster across a whole smear of different behaviors. or being used in a very technical sense in one paper and then a very generic one in the other. And so I try and be careful about my usage of things like that because really, for me, social means interactions, you know, like in the same way that we say, oh, I'm being social, I'm seeing my friends, I'm talking to them, we're exchanging ideas and information and having company and supporting each other and loaning each other money and all those other things that come from it. And that's very different to hanging around in a group. So lions, chimpanzees, meerkats, these are things that are social. They don't just live in groups, they interact. There may or may not be a leader, but they... groom each other. They will take care of each other's offspring. They will work together to defend the group or find food or make a burrow or whatever these things may be and communicate in that sense. Those are social interactions. If you look at things like zebra, well, they don't really work like that. At another level, fish, you'll get a massive school of fish, thousands, even millions together. Do they have friends? Do they exchange ideas? Do they look after one another? Basically, no, but they're both living in groups. And this is the problem when you find mass mortality site, as we call it, so a mass graveyard, dozens, in some cases, thousands, potentially tens of thousands of individual dinosaurs in a single bed that probably died together. And people will go, well, they're social. They were living together and not just living together. They use the word social, then employ all these other interaction stuff. And I'm like. do we actually even know they died together? As in, if there had been a massive drought in this environment, every animal that normally lived on its own, or maybe in a little gang of four or five, would all end up at the same last remaining bit of water hole. And when that water runs out, they're going to die there too. And then when the rains finally come, they're going to bury all those bodies. And so what we see is, wow, a group of a thousand of them. and they lived together and they were social and interacted and this was a herd and da da da da da and maybe this is what i mean i i'm not saying that's wrong what i'm saying is i don't know because i don't trust that they didn't just die from some horrible disaster and that's what killed them or it's something like the famous zebra and wildebeest migration you get in the maasai mara every year where every single year they truck across follow the reins and loads of them drown in the bottom of the river because they've got to swim this river and lots of them drown and there's crocodiles and other things going on, which would then lead thousands and thousands of bodies at the bottom of this river to be fossilized and form a giant group. But wildebeest and zebra form these giant herds of hundreds of thousands of animals, but it's really composed of hundreds or thousands of herds of five or six animals, usually a harem of a male and half a dozen females. So even when they move together as this giant herd, they're kind of thousands of mini herds. And then when they get where they're going, they all split up into their individual herds. So again, even if that interpretation about those mass mortality sites of dinosaurs is closer to the truth, and these animals did live in groups, and that was maybe a fundamental thing that they did, it doesn't mean they lived in groups of hundreds or thousands. We also then tend to apply that and go, well, this species did. So presumably all its near relatives did, right? Because they're all kind of similar. And it's like, well, Lions hunt in groups, but their nearest relatives, leopards and tigers, don't. Jackals can hunt in groups, but they're usually in pairs. Plenty of foxes are solitary, but a couple of them operate in pairs. And then there's wolves, which are extremely social, or bush dogs, or a doll in Asia, which are extremely social. But then you've got solitary dogs that basically live on their own, like maned wolves. So just saying, ah, dogs live in groups and cats live on their own is wrong, let alone... trying to extend it to a whole raft of relatives. And you get things like this. There's a group called the dromaeosaurs. These are the very bird-like dinosaurs that include Velociraptor, which is usually the one people have heard of. Jurassic Park, but a third of the size and cuddled in feathers. A close relative of Velociraptor called Deinonychus from the US. That is the one dinosaur which has very often been argued to be social and hunting groups. And I think the evidence for that is extraordinarily flimsy. Again, not saying it's wrong, but I think the evidence purported to say. these were group living animals is flimsy, let alone they hunted in groups. And then people have extended that to all dromaeosaurs. And it's like, this is really like finding a pile of bodies of a carnivore together and basically going, oh, well, lions always hunt in groups and therefore so do tigers and leopard and jaguar and puma. And it's like, this is not how we should reconstruct behaviour. The initial example is questionable. to then extend it to all these other relatives is very questionable at best.

  • Speaker #2

    This is all fascinating, Dr. Hohn. Dr. Hohn is a Smithsonian associate, has written the wonderful new book titled Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior. We'll be at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our show notes for more details. I just have one final question for you, Dr. Hohn, and that is, What advancements are we going to see, are paleontologists going to see over the course of the next few years when it comes to behavior that we might not know much about, but are learning in the course of some of this new technology that is being developed and employed by paleontologists? I mean,

  • Speaker #3

    we're definitely going to pick more stuff up. I guess my question would be is like, how are we going to use it? So, I mean, you and some of your listeners may know, pretty getting on for about 10 years or so ago now. We developed a technique to basically detect some of the underlying colors of some dinosaurs from exceptional preservation with really cool fossils where the feathers are preserved and these pigment-bearing structures called melanosomes were preserved. And that was a massive breakthrough that has the enormous potential. And yet we've not abandoned it, but it's kind of one of those classic things of like, well, now we've worked out how to do it, no one's interested in it anymore. Speaker 1 And not necessarily pointing fingers at the scientists, which include a number of my colleagues. And I was working on one of these projects for a while. But, you know, it's very easy to go to a big grant body and go, we think we can work out the color of dinosaurs. Wow. Can you hear some money? Go and find out. And now going, we know we can work out the color of dinosaurs. Now we just want to do that a couple of hundred more times and maybe we'll learn something. You can see why it's suddenly harder to get that kind of money. And yet I think it's absolutely vital because to spin on that argument, Ankyornis, another little feathered dinosaur, chicken-sized thing from China, and this amazing study said mostly black or gray with white bits on the feathers and a red bit on its head. Wow. Amazing, incredible. And I look at this and go, it is, but I want to know, is that a male or a female, or is that an adult or a juvenile? Do they molt during the year? Because we know dinosaurs molted just like birds. They certainly have the potential to change colour. This is an animal living in a very cold environment, very wintery. Probably had loads of snow in winter. There's a whole bunch of birds which turn white in winter. Birds vary. If you're right up in the north, some birds of some species are slightly different colour to those down south. Some of them, males and females, look the same. Some of them look quite different. This is one individual animal at one point in its life. It's amazing we know its colour. but we'll know a hundred times more if we know that males and females were different colors or were the same colors. If they camouflage themselves in winter by shifting to a white coat or stayed this color year round, because this sort of thing then really tells you about behavior. Animals where males are very different colors to females usually have no involvement in raising the offspring. Animals that are very similar colors to females, either they're both quite bright or they don't have kind of any color difference at all. So think of things like penguins, Think of things like starlings, actually a lot of parrots. Usually the male takes just as much care, if not more care than the females do. So this will totally tell you something about sexual selection, display, what activities they're doing, how they probably pair up and how they partner. If they're doing that, they're probably operating in groups or at least pairs more often than if they're on their own. Peacocks tend to live on their own. Parrots tend to live in big flocks and operate in pairs a lot. This is where you pull all the really cool information out. And so this is one of those things which is annoying because I've been to a museum in eastern China that had several hundred specimens of Ankyornis with feathers. We know how to do it and the specimens are there. That will tell you far more than going, look at this one. It's cool that it's probably black with white and red on it. So I think that's more the development I want to see. Yeah, technology is always going to give us new opportunities to do stuff like that. But doing it once and finding out and going, oh, we can do that. Huh. Now let's do something else. is a fraction as interesting for me for stuff like behavior as it is to really build up a proper big data set and then go to town on it.

  • Speaker #2

    Well, as you do more work on this subject, Dr. Hung, we'd love to have you back. This is such a... Well,

  • Speaker #3

    give me a few years.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, absolutely. And selfishly, I'll take responsibility for inviting you back. But your work is so exciting. Your new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, is out as of the 5th, I believe, of November. Yes,

  • Speaker #3

    available for pre-order. And some people have already got hold of copies. I'm not sure how.

  • Speaker #2

    Excellent. Well, and thank you for sharing a copy with me. I've just loved it. I want to recommend it so highly. We will have links so that our audience can pre-order it, along with links to find out more about you and your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation. Dr. Hone, thanks for your time. We look forward to your upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation.

  • Speaker #3

    Thank you so much.

  • Speaker #1

    My thanks to Dr.

  • Speaker #2

    David Hone for his time today.

  • Speaker #1

    My thanks to the Smithsonian team for all they do to support the show. My thanks always to Sam Hanegar, our executive producer, and my thanks to you, our wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Please check out more information about Dr. Hohn's presentation at Smithsonian Associates in our show notes today and be well. Be safe. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show on radio and podcast, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series.

  • Speaker #2

    Thanks, everybody.

  • Speaker #1

    We will see you next time.

  • Speaker #0

    Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep... dive into some of the most fascinating real-life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about Better, the Not Old Better Show.

  • Speaker #1

    Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about the Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is Not Old Better, and we're on Instagram at Not Old Better too. The Not Old Better Show is a production of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.

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