Susannah Maidment on stegosaurs

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

Susie was dinosaur-mad as a child. But unlike most children, she never grew out of her obsession. She tells Jim about an exciting new stegosaur find in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and describes the time she spent dinosaur hunting (with a toddler in tow) in the Morrison Formation in the American Mid-West: a place where there are thought to be enough dinosaur remains to keep a thousand paleontologists happy for a thousand years. She is at her happiest out in the field, with a hammer and a notebook, studying rocks and looking for dinosaur remains. We tend to lump dinosaurs together as though they all roamed the earth at the same time which is silly - given that they had the run of the place for nearly two hundred million years. Susie wants to sort out exactly which dinosaurs lived when. Although she warns, the fossil record is woefully incomplete. We will probably only ever know about 1% of what there is to know about all the dinosaurs that ever lived. Producer: Anna Buckley

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.2	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know I also know that comedy is really
0:24.4	subjective and everyone has different tastes so we've got a huge range of comedy on offer
0:29.6	from satire to silly shocking to soothing profound to just general pratting about.
0:35.2	So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	Welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.
0:44.0	BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts.
0:48.0	I remember my first encounter with the dinosaur,
0:51.0	the fossilized skeleton of Dippy the Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum in London.
0:55.8	This was of course long before Jurassic Park turned velociraptors and T-Rexes into celebrities.
1:01.4	My guest today, Susanna Maidment, knows more about a particularly well-loved
1:05.6	species of dinosaur, the herbivore stegosaurus, than almost anyone else on earth. It's the one with
1:11.6	the recognizable row of plates on its back and spikes on its tail.
1:15.0	Susanna works at the Natural History Museum in London and is internationally recognized for
1:20.0	her research on stegasors and the evolutionary history of dinosaurs more generally.
1:25.3	We tend to lump dinosaurs together as though they all roam the earth at the same time, which,
1:30.3	given that they had the run of the place for nearly 200 million years is rather silly.
1:35.0	Dr. Susanna madement, welcome to the life scientific.
	...

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