A three-course food web from the Cretaceous seas of Queensland: a Platypterygius australis ichthyosaur that had been snacking on fish, cephalopods and pterosaurs — before it, in turn, got chewed on by a Kronosaurus queenslandicus. Travis and Alyssa dig into what the bite marks and gut contents tell us about who was eating whom in ancient inland Australia.

Then, Travis heads out to Gold Creek to sit down with Shannon Bourke, education and outreach coordinator at the National Dinosaur Museum in Canberra, for a tour through animatronic accuracy (and inaccuracy), seasonally repainted triceratops, and how a small private museum can uietly launch palaeontology careers.

To close out: a preview of The End of Oak Street — dinosaurs, suburbia, Ewan McGregor punching things — and the story of the one Chase question Travis really should have known.

Paper discussed: White, M. et al., "Beneath the Waves: Extraordinary Dietary Insights from a Dismembered Ichthyosaur from the Lower Cretaceous," Gondwana Research.

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Dr Jake Kotevski didn't become a palaeontologist because of a fossil. He became one because of Sam Neill. In this tribute episode, Travis and Alyssa talk with Jake about Alan Grant's quiet, unglamorous masculinity, the "sense of wonder" the movie chose over the book's horror, and why Grant's evolution across three films (and an unfortunate franchise reboot) still resonates thirty years on.

Compsognathus in a handbag. Microraptor as a pet crow. Sauropod methane energy. You're welcome.

We sit down with Professor Amy Brock-Hon from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — Alyssa's old alma mater — to talk caves, karst, and why a good geology degree might be the most versatile qualification you've never considered. Then we dig into a 2025 paper claiming scientists have found original collagen inside a 66-million-year-old Edmontosaurus hip bone — and ask what that means for the long-running soft tissue debate. Which leads us, naturally, to de-extinction — what we'd bring back, why, and whether Colossal Biosciences hatching chickens from synthetic eggs means we're closer to an answer than we'd like to admit.

Tuinstra et al. (2025), "Evidence for Endogenous Collagen in Edmontosaurus Fossil Bone," Analytical Chemistry. DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.4c03115

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