Having large body sizes conferred all sorts of advantages on dinosaurs, but it potentially made breeding a bit complicated. This week we take a look at some weird pathologies in fossil hadrosaurs (duck billed dinosaurs and friends) and what they might tell us about their amourous habits - do broken backs provide evidence of rough housing in the bedroom?

This week's paper is "Deciphering causes and behaviors: A recurrent pattern of tail injuries in hadrosaurid dinosaurs" by Filippo Bertozzo and colleagues, published in IScience November 2025 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113739

The widescreen artwork is by Troco.

Part 2: Around 66 million years ago an enormous asteroid barrelled into the earth and wiped out ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs*. Debate has raged back and forth as to whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before this mass extinction or were still going strong. This week, Susie and Rob are joined by Prof. Steve Brusatte to take a look at what vertebrates were doing just before the asteroid hit. In part 2 we discuss what would have happened if the asteroid had missed, Steve's new upcoming book, Jurassic World, and Nannotyrannus.

*except birds of course.

Widescreen artwork by Natalia Jagielska

Around 66 million years ago an enormous asteroid barreled into the earth and wiped out icthyosaurs, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs*. Debate has raged back and forth as to whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before this mass extinction or were still going strong. This week, Susie and Rob are joined by Prof. Steve Brusatte to take a look at what vertebrates were doing just before the asteroid hit. We discuss his new paper on fossil vertebrates from New Mexico, its implications for scenarios of dinosaur evolution and extinction, and what is life is like for a working palaeontologist, digging up Cretaceous fossils.

This week's paper is "Late-surviving New Mexican dinosaurs illuminate high end-Cretaceous diversity and provinciality" by Andrew Flynn, Steve Brusatte and colleagues, published in Science in October 2025. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adw3282

*except birds of course.

Widescreen artwork by Natalia Jagielska