The Most Exciting Dino Discoveries Of 2024

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. The end of the year is traditionally, you know, a time to sum up what’s been happening. So why not do that for dinosaurs?

Researchers learned more about T-Rex. They learned about the spiky tails of the stegosaurus, how dinosaurs evolved and more. In an article for Smithsonian Magazine, dinosaur enthusiast and science writer Riley Black rounded up the top dino discoveries of the year. Riley, welcome back to Science Friday.

RILEY BLACK: Oh, thank you so much. It’s always good to be back.

IRA FLATOW: All right, let’s get into it. What was your favorite discovery of the year?

RILEY BLACK: One of my favorites is the idea that we have not yet found the biggest dinosaurs that there were. There was a study published in Ecology and Evolution using T-Rex as a model– because it’s always T-Rex, right– saying that we’ve found pretty much the average largest dinosaurs out there.

So for T-Rex, if we think about the famous specimens like Sue, they got to be about 40 feet long and probably weighed around nine tons or so. But there could have been individuals that were up to 70% more massive, in the top sort of 0.1% of dinosaur sizes. Just like with people or any living thing, there’s going to be small ones and large ones and everything in between.

So really, these largest examples of even the most well-known dinosaurs, we probably have not found yet. And it might take centuries to find. And I just love that idea that there are these superlative examples that we’ve not yet uncovered.

IRA FLATOW: Well, if they’re so big, why are they so hard to find?

RILEY BLACK: It is difficult to bury a big body. I don’t know this from experience, just from paleontology. But when you have an animal that is that big– even some of the largest dinosaurs that we know about– to bury something that big and have it be fossilized, it requires so much sediment to be moved relatively rapidly to bury that body and preserve the bones that usually it starts decaying before that happens.

So we really only get bits and pieces. There’s kind of a sweet spot in terms of how large you can be to prevent being just gobbled up by a scavenger but not being so large that it takes forever for that body to be covered up.

IRA FLATOW: We also learned something really cool about stegosaurs. It’s one of my favorite dinosaurs. Those are the stocky ones with the spikes running down their backs and the giant barbs on their tails. Fill us in on what we learned here.

RILEY BLACK: Stegosaurs are always favorites, right? They’re so ostentatious. I love them. So this was not about Stegosaurus itself but a related dinosaur named Miragaia. And this one had these kind of elongate plates going over its neck and down its back and these long spikes going over the hips all the way to the end of the tail. It’s a little bit unusual for a stegosaur.

And previous studies on Stegosaurus itself found that Stegosaurus could swing its tail fast enough, hard enough to pierce bone if it had to as, a defensive mechanism. Its relative didn’t have that same power behind it, but a lot of flexibility.

So it seems that this animal was using its spiky tail to basically intimidate, to signal. And what we’ve learned about dinosaur combat and interactions over the past 10 years or so is that many of these elaborate structures that we used to think of as defensive weapons and things like that are actually social structures. They’re for signaling to each other and competing for mates or territory or what have you. So it’s kind of neat that even though it looks very Stegosaurus-like, it was using its tail in a different kind of way.

IRA FLATOW: Oh, that is cool. And speaking of stegosaurs, the American Museum of Natural History in New York is showing off Apex, what it claims to be the biggest stegosaur ever found.

RILEY BLACK: That’s right. So Apex is a fossil that’s currently privately owned. It has a really contentious history. It was purchased at auction for perhaps the highest price that’s ever been paid for a non-avian dinosaur at auction, well over $20 million.

So it’s currently at the AMH. Whether scientists can study it or not is a bit up in the air because normally paleontologists cannot study privately owned specimens. That fossil needs to be in the public trust so that generations of researchers can keep going back and testing old ideas and revising previous research or not.

So it’s a spectacular specimen, but it really kind of gets at basically this problem that we have in modern paleontology, where we’re having these amazing fossils come off of private lands and going on to the commercial market. But when they arrive at museums, we’re not always able to study them. It’s this tension between the academic and commercial aspects of paleontology that’s been going on for a few decades now.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk about the little guys for a minute. Paleontologists described a tiny dinosaur related to a species called “The Chicken from Hell.” It sounds like a movie.

RILEY BLACK: Yes, and I love small dinosaurs because traditionally– we were talking about this a moment ago– we would find the big ones, things like Stegosaurus and Triceratops and things like that, ones that were sturdy enough to survive preservation.

And the little ones, we’d usually miss out on. And sometimes museums wouldn’t even go looking for them. They’d say, we need a showstopper dinosaur for our displays. And it’s really just been recently that paleontology has been going back to these traditional stomping grounds, looking for the little ones.

So this comes out of the Hell Creek Formation, so about 66 million years old. And it’s a turkey-sized dinosaur. It would have looked kind of like a parrot with a long tail. Aside from living alongside two of its other relatives of different sizes, showing us that these things proliferated in their ancient habitat, living at different sizes, eating different things, it really underscores some of probably ironically biggest dinosaur discoveries yet to come are going to be among these small species that were traditionally overlooked.

IRA FLATOW: And because they’re smaller, are they easier to find, like you were talking about before?

RILEY BLACK: So very small dinosaurs, the littlest dinosaurs, are very difficult to find because if you think about the prehistoric world, number one, a lot of things probably wanted to eat them. Larger dinosaurs probably preyed upon smaller dinosaurs pretty consistently.

And even if you had a carcass of this animal– so this one’s called Eoneophron– if you had a carcass of this little turkey-sized dinosaur in the ancient Hell Creek environment, it is more likely to break up, decay, be eaten by scavengers, basically destroyed before it has a chance to enter the fossil record.

So this has to do with the science called taphonomy, what happens between the death of an organism and its discovery by scientists. And the odds are generally against these very fragile, bird-like, small dinosaurs.

But we do find them. There are circumstances in which they can be preserved. So part of it is just going looking for them, knowing that they’re out there, and thinking small rather than looking for that big femur.

IRA FLATOW: Well, speaking of small, good segue you gave me. Because I was surprised to read that ants– ants made your list of dino discoveries? Why did you include them?

RILEY BLACK: That’s right. This is a little bit of a personal favorite because it has to do with the world’s fifth mass extinction. It has to do with the mass extinction that basically meant that we only have birds as the only living dinosaurs today, the asteroid-caused catastrophe of 66 million years ago.

So a study came out this year looking at ants that farm fungus. So if you’ve seen leafcutter ants on a documentary or at a museum, it’s these sorts of ants that basically have evolved agriculture. They tend to fungus and use that to feed.

And this new analysis found that this relationship, this symbiosis, goes back to just after that asteroid impact. What was going on at the time was almost all the world’s vegetation was burnt up, destroyed, dead in some way. But fungus, fungus proliferated. It was basically eating all the dead stuff that was decaying.

And ants looking for a new food source basically switched to fungus for a little while, start defending it as their own food source, and developed this agricultural relationship. So something that is so close in a matter of cooperation between species today started in the wake of the mass extinction. That means that we don’t have T-Rex and Triceratops today.

IRA FLATOW: Do you have any wish, holiday season, in the dino world that you would discover or hope to learn next year?

RILEY BLACK: Oh, goodness! There’s always so much to find. I would love to know more about dinosaur colors. We can figure out dinosaur colors now when we have skin or feathers that preserve some semblance of the pigmentation that they used to have, these little organelles called melanosomes, so we can work out some dinosaur colors from that.

So I would love to know what colors– I’m just going to pick one of my favorites– an Apatosaurus was. We have the bones. We have some skin impressions. I’m sure there are fossils out there. We can learn something, whether this was brightly colored or drab, like the old illustrations or what. And I would love to know a bit more about that.

What color were these really big dinosaurs shaded? Were they blending into their environments, or were they so big that they’re just completely ostentatious because they’re too big to be bothered and didn’t mind sticking out?

IRA FLATOW: Well, thank you for joining us. This was fascinating.

RILEY BLACK: Always a pleasure.

IRA FLATOW: Riley Black, science writer and amateur paleontologist, based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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