Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff, Lauren
Speaker 1: Boglebaum here Today. The late nineteen sixties through the seventies
Speaker 1: are fondly remembered as the dinosaur Retaissance. There was a
Speaker 1: sudden surge of exciting new discourse about our favorite prehistoric beasts.
Speaker 1: The idea that birds descend from dinosaurs and now a
Speaker 1: scientific consensus gained new traction. At the same time, old
Speaker 1: beliefs regarding dinosaur metabolic rates came into question awhere. Previously,
Speaker 1: our best scientific guess was that dinosaurs would have been big,
Speaker 1: cold blooded lizards and therefore mostly slow and lethargic. During
Speaker 1: this time, we started to understand that some might have
Speaker 1: been active hunters. And it was all thanks to one
Speaker 1: species unearthed in Montana that also became the basis of
Speaker 1: Jurassic parks velociraptors. Today, let's talk about Diynonicus. Back in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty one, while exploring southern Montana, paleontologist Barnum Brown
Speaker 1: found the incomplete skeleton of a dinosaur that would have
Speaker 1: measured some eight feet that's two and a half meters
Speaker 1: in length. It was clearly a theropod, a member of
Speaker 1: the same group as Alosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex. This one
Speaker 1: had an agile build. Not only was it light boned,
Speaker 1: but there were long, wiry extensions on the tail vertebra.
Speaker 1: Brown guessed the stiffened the appendage as a whole, helping
Speaker 1: the tail act as a better counterweight to the rest
Speaker 1: of the body. Though Brown planned to write a manuscript
Speaker 1: about this intriguing new dinosaur, he was unable to finish
Speaker 1: before his death in nineteen sixty three, But in his
Speaker 1: later years, Brown showed the skeleton to a young researcher
Speaker 1: named John Ostrom. August of nineteen sixty four found Ostrom
Speaker 1: hunting for early Cretaceous dinosaurs around Bridger, Montana. Under the
Speaker 1: summer sun. He and a colleague discovered the clawed hand
Speaker 1: of a theropod peeking out of the earth. Then a
Speaker 1: foot turned up, so did thousands of other bones. Ostrom
Speaker 1: soon realized he was dealing with the same species that
Speaker 1: Brown had unearthed decades earlier. He named the creature Dinonicus
Speaker 1: anti rappus. At the time, he had recovered the bodies
Speaker 1: of four individuals at a single Montana quarry, all lying
Speaker 1: in close proximity to some bones from t Nantosaurus, a
Speaker 1: plant eating dinosaur with a beak and a long tail
Speaker 1: that would have grown to over twice the size of
Speaker 1: a Dinonicus, possibly over five times the size. Dinonicus means
Speaker 1: terrible claw. This was inspired by the huge curved claws
Speaker 1: that topped the second toe of each foot. To Ostroum,
Speaker 1: this was a revelation. Dinonicus would have held these claws
Speaker 1: off the ground as it walked, standing sort of perched
Speaker 1: with light bones, battle ready and athletic. Historically, dinosaurs were
Speaker 1: thought to be plotting beasts, Buticus contradicted this assumption. Ostrom
Speaker 1: wrote in nineteen sixty nine, it must have been a
Speaker 1: fleet footed, highly predacious, extremely agile, and very active animal,
Speaker 1: sensitive to many stimuli and quick in its responses. Ostrom's
Speaker 1: work on Diynonicus was a catalyst for the dinosaur renaissance,
Speaker 1: but you don't have to be a science enthusiast or
Speaker 1: a history buff to appreciate its impact. The famous, though
Speaker 1: fictionalized velociraptors from Jurassic Park were based on Dinonicus. Don't
Speaker 1: get us wrong, there was an actual theropod named Velociraptor
Speaker 1: that lived in Central Asia some seventy five to seventy
Speaker 1: one million years ago. However, it was way smaller than
Speaker 1: the creatures shown in the popular movies, which can look
Speaker 1: a grown man in the eye. The real Velociraptor stood
Speaker 1: just twenty eight inches tall at the hip. That's seventy
Speaker 1: two centimeters, closer to the size of a wild turkey,
Speaker 1: just with the longer body and more weight on its bones.
Speaker 1: Dinonicus wasn't all that big either, but would have stood
Speaker 1: about thirty eight inches tall at the hip or one meter,
Speaker 1: and could grow more than eleven feet long that's three
Speaker 1: and the third meters, so it would have been staring
Speaker 1: into sam Nil's chest, not his eyes. Both Velociraptor and
Speaker 1: Dinonicus belonged to the same family of bear pods, the dromiosaurs,
Speaker 1: found in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. The dromiosaurs had
Speaker 1: knife like teeth, big skulls, and long limbs. At least
Speaker 1: some probably all of them had feathers to boot, but
Speaker 1: let's revisit those terrible claws. Dinonicus was not unique in
Speaker 1: having an enlarged talon on the second toe of each foot.
Speaker 1: It was a standard dromiosaur feature, said toes were hyper extensible,
Speaker 1: they could be pulled back into an almost vertical position.
Speaker 1: Besides keeping the claw tips sharp, this trait gave them
Speaker 1: a wide arc of motion. Ostrum Dgennonicus leaping through the air,
Speaker 1: slashing wildly with the curved daggers on its flexible toes.
Speaker 1: But more recent modeling has painted a different picture. In
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, paleontologist Peter J. Bishop published a three D
Speaker 1: Dinonicus hind limb reconstruction. According to his simulations, the toe
Speaker 1: claws couldn't exert very much force. They were probably better
Speaker 1: at grasping prey than disemboweling it. And remember the long
Speaker 1: rods on Dinonicus's tail vertebra, Velociraptor, uteriraptor and other dromiosaurs
Speaker 1: had those two experts think that they made all but
Speaker 1: the base of the tail very rigid. That sort of
Speaker 1: like a tightrope walker's long pole. It would have kept
Speaker 1: the animal upright and balanced while moving. One velociraptor fossil,
Speaker 1: discovered in nineteen ninety nine, with its tail in an
Speaker 1: s curve, may challenge that view, though it's hard to
Speaker 1: say whether the shape was the result of motion during
Speaker 1: life or the settling of the bones after death. Speaking
Speaker 1: of fossils, let's go back to Ostrum's find a four
Speaker 1: carnivorous Dynonicus in close proximity to a herbivorous but much
Speaker 1: larger to Nontosaurus. It got him thinking, he wrote in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine. The multiple remains suggest that Dinonicus may
Speaker 1: have been gregarious and hunted in packs. Author Michael Crichton
Speaker 1: ran with the idea. His original Jurassic Park novel published
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety, which was the basis for Steven Spielberg's
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three movie adaptation, describes the raptors attacking their
Speaker 1: prey in organized packs, working together to bring down dinosaurs
Speaker 1: and humans alike. Yet scientists have cause for skepticism. Habitual
Speaker 1: strategic pack hunting is quite rare among modern animals. Perhaps
Speaker 1: Dinonicus and other dromiosaurs were loners for the most part,
Speaker 1: but went into spontaneous group feeding frenzies every now and then.
Speaker 1: After all, that's how modern komodo dragons roll. However, some birds,
Speaker 1: the closest living relative of dinosaurs, have been observed hunting
Speaker 1: in pairs, like peregrine falcons and Harris's hawks of the
Speaker 1: American Southwest coordinate in groups of five, communicating through movements
Speaker 1: and converging on prey from multiple angles. So maybe Crichton's
Speaker 1: raptors and Prehistory's dromosaurs hunting like this isn't too far
Speaker 1: fetched after all. Today's episode is based on the article
Speaker 1: how Dynonicus Upended the way we look at Dinosaurs on
Speaker 1: how stuffworks dot com, written by Mark Mancini. Brainstuff is
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com.
Speaker 1: It is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from
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