Series 11, eh? We don’t think we, or anyone else reading this, expected that.

Nor did we expect issues with Dave’s microphone (apologies)… Still, here we are and with more dinosaur goodness coming. We say ‘coming’ because this episode is far less about dinosaurs and pterosaurs than usual, but more about the mechanisms of science. In this case it’s really about Dave’s experiences as a science communicator and how things like this are increasingly important for science, but in the UK at least, this can be monitored and measured and so having ways to do that becomes important. And this is the central point of today’s show, a call to arms for all those who are involved in sci comms and delight in sharing new knowledge to understand why it’s important to credit your sources when new discoveries are made.

Links:

For extra content: patreon.com/terriblelizards

If you want to know a bit more about REF in the UK, here’s the main pages for it: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/

And if we’re talking communication, it seems a good time to say that Iszi and Dave are both now on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/davehone.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/iszi.com

Thanks to Kyle, Tom, Ashley, Aurous, Wayne, Paleo Pete, Tyler, Will, Israel, Charles, James and Edward

Support us on patreon.com/terriblelizards and be rewarded with extra content!

We are planning on going live on isztube at 16:00 GMT on Friday 26th December. (Time may change)

Skiphosoura – the pterosaur of the gaps

So last week Dave had a new paper out and this time it’s a new pterosaur, named Skiphosoura bavarica (the sword tail of Bavaria) and it is both really interesting and really important for pterosaur research. It tells us a lot about the key transition of pterosaurs from the early forms through to the derived pterodactyloids, which has been a major subject of research for the last 15 years. Skiphosaura also shows us that the Scottish Dearc (that we covered a couple of years back) is much more important than previously thought and helps create a fantastic series of species where we can now track a whole series of evolutionary steps for pterosaurs. This transition really is now a great example of being able to see an evolutionary change over time in the fossil record. So strap in for some overly-detailed anatomical descriptions of bits of obscure pterosaurs!

Links:

Support us on patreon and get extra content https://www.patreon.com/terriblelizards

Here’s a link to the full paper – it’s open access so anyone can read it: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)01377-0

And here’s Dave’s blog post about the specimen and it’s significance: https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2024/11/18/skiphosoura-solving-the-transition-to-pterodactyloids/

Link to the website of the Lauer Foundation: https://www.lauerfoundationpse.org/

The bonus episode we did on Dearc: https://terriblelizards.libsyn.com/tls06-bonus-jurassic-pterosaur-dearc-sgiathanach