Podcast 314 - Weird Archosaur Summer

Palaeo After Dark

The gang is all back together in one place again as they unite in an undisclosed cabin in the woods to record the last two podcasts for Wet Hot Archosaur Summer. For this episode, the gang talks about herbivorous pterosaurs and wadding T-rex. Meanwhile, James experiences relative sobriety, Curt welcomes everyone to the Great Northern, Amanda is fueled by spite, and we all get completely off track.

Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):

The friends are together for the first time in a long time and so they have a lot of fun together and sometimes they talk about a paper or two. The first paper that they sort of talk about is about big angry animals that fly and are no longer around. This paper looks at one group of these big angry animals and finds that they have bits and pieces of things that are found in green things that make their own food from the sun. They do a lot of things to make sure that these bits are found inside these animals and they use this to say that this one group of big angry animals probably ate these green things.

The second paper looks at how big angry animals moved and how fast they could move in air or in water. This is because some big angry animals that are in all of the movies are said to maybe not be as fast as the things they would eat. This paper says maybe they chased food into water where they would be faster. The friends point out that other animals today do not have to be faster than the animals they eat, but sure... go off.

References:

Blanco, R. Ernesto. "Tyrannosaurus rex runs again: a theoretical analysis of the hypothesis that full-grown large theropods had a locomotory advantage to hunt in a shallow-water environment." Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 198.1 (2023): 202-219.

Jiang, Shunxing, et al. "First occurrence of phytoliths in pterosaurs-evidence for herbivory." Science bulletin (2025): S2095-9273.