Dave Hone

the same rules might be pushing it but certainly like guidelines like ecology operates in certain ways if you're bigger you need more food but you're more efficient you just are that's pretty much just physics and scaling so big dinosaurs are going to follow the rules of bigger animals and small dinosaurs are going to follow the rules of smaller animals they just will

quite how they violate it in certain ways by having unusually long necks or unusual physiology or eating an unusual diet or because there was a weird plant that was alive then that isn't now or whatever it may be that there's obviously a huge amount of variation and uncertainty but fundamentally we know what makes animals and ecosystems work and dinosaurs are animals in ecosystems

They're not that strange at some level and therefore reconstructing their actual biology is challenging, but far from impossible.

I've been asked that on live TV before, only not with the sarcastic tone.

Yes, I do.

They don't.

That's fine.

But again, we kind of touched on it, but I think there's probably very little of any kind of

paleontological law that ended up in things like chinese culture with the chinese dragons and all of that stuff you know that one comes up repeatedly the only one i do know of again from alberta um is buffalo stones uh that then apparently some of the native americans had which are actually bits of ammonites so ammonites the curly spiral shelled cephalopods are related to octopus and squid

So they have all these little segments to the shells and the right species.

And when they break open, they have like two little pairs of legs and then a bulge and then a little bulge.

And it looks very roughly like a bison.

And apparently these were...

thought to be like somehow miniature bison uh they're very rare because ironically although the dinosaur bones are extremely common um it was very swampy and so you didn't actually have a lot of sea coming in so you didn't tend to get things like ammonites and ocean going animals and then the shell would have to break in the right way but apparently for the local tribes sad i can't remember who it is in that bit of canada um but yeah these were these were quite valued

Um, if you've got a Buffalo stone and I've seen a couple of them and yeah, you have to squint a bit, but as a little Buffalo, it's not far off.

Um, but yeah, but that whole, like, were they finding mammoth legs and were they finding T-Rex's and was this inspiration for this animal or this mystical animal?

I don't,

think they were, because you just don't tend to find them.

So where do you think, like, you know, because dragons show up in a bunch of different myths.

Well, right, but that's the thing, they turn up in British mythology and we barely got any dinosaurs here at all.