FACTORALY - E105 DINOSAURS

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Dinosaurs were around SO much longer than we have been. In this episode, we look into their timeline, their remains and their representation in popular fiction. Plus, we go into the Boner Wars. If you've not come across them, you'll be as fascinated as we were. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. How are you on this jolly day? I'm feeling slightly bony. Slightly bony, are you? Yes. Not got enough meat on your bones. Well, you know there is less than they used to be? sure yeah yeah yeah happens to all of us

well no I'm doing it deliberately oh I see fine I thought you were just suggesting you're wasting away oh yes well I have that as well hello to everyone at home or at work or on your dog walk or wherever you happen to be wherever you are we're in your ears we are our beautiful silken voices are in your ears we are a couple of professional voiceover artists

my name's Simon Wells and my name is Brie And that's what he sounds like in real life. It's always rather tempting to do one of these entire episodes in a silly voice, but we'll spare you. Yeah, okay, if you insist. So what are we doing here, Bruce? What's this all about? Okay, so this is factorily, which is a PhD-level inquiry into various different highly scientific subjects.

Yes, alternatively. We see this as two blokes down the pub having. a bit of a chat about something random they found out this week. Yes. Without referring to their phones. No, indeed. Because they've already done the research and don't need to refer to the phones. No, we've already done that. We may have notes scattered around us, but we shouldn't be looking at our phones. That's true. So what interesting subject are we going to be chatting about this week, Bruce? Well, I've been doing quite a lot of research and looking at some various documentaries. I've been looking

a really good Attenborough documentary but not the right Attenborough for some reason because this one had dinosaurs in it and it was Dickie Attenborough. Oh right you've been watching a Richard Attenborough documentary instead of a David Attenborough one. Yes it seemed to be a very accurate documentary Yes at the time. Jeff Goldblum especially was very

helpful. Do you know what this is this is my moment to shine how many of these episodes have I quoted Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park Yeah, but you were so busy thinking about whether or not you could You didn't stop to think if you shed There you go Now finally you get to use it in context Because today we are talking about dinosaurs

We are indeed, hooray What do you think of dinosaurs Are you a fan? I think they should get off the floor and walk That's a very, very niche cultural reference To an old song Was not Was Was that or who they were?

Yeah, it's called Walt the Dinosaur I remember. Boom, boom, akalakalakabum. Exactly. Fantastic. I haven't heard that for a while. Thank goodness. I used to love dinosaurs as a kid. I think many kids have a fascination with dinosaurs. They're just such odd things, aren't they? They're big and they're interesting and there are lots of different varieties and they're so incredibly old and detached from us. They just have a real, real novelty factor, I think. I guess when I was young, dinosaurs weren't really a thing. Really? No. I mean, you're not that old. Well, you know, two million years here or there. But, you know, not like they were after Jurassic Park with kids everywhere having models and knowing more about things ending in Soros.

Yeah. Well, I knew about the Soros, but I didn't know about. The other Soros. Yeah, the other Soros is. Yeah. Yeah. So they weren't thinking. The only place where I'd really ever go to see a dinosaur,

and it's not there anymore, is at the Natural History Museum. Yes. Dippy the Diplodocus. Yes. And I discovered stuff about Dippy, which I didn't know. Wonderful. Because if you go back to our episode on Libraries. Yes, absolutely.

You will hear us talk about Andrew Carnegie. You will. Who was a very wealthy man who gave the world an awful lot of. libraries. The other thing he did is he gave the world an awful lot of dippies. He did. Because I thought that the one we had was real. Yeah, right. So this is something I've discovered in doing the research for this episode as well. Our dippy is not the original dippy. No. So what's our dipi made from? So our dippy is a plaster of Paris cast. Right. As is the dippy of various museums in different countries around the world. Okay. So she's not unique.

sadly. But yeah, so Andrew Carnegie, so he funded the excavation of this particular dinosaur in 1898. And this Diplodocus was unearthed in Wyoming in the USA. That's right. By a guy called John Bell Hatcher. Great name. Hatcher was one of the sort of key dinosaur finders and bone finders in the world at the time. Yeah, yeah. I'll come on to him much later on in the podcast, but you would be amazed. So yes, Mr. Carnegie, you know, jumped on this bandwagon and funded the excavation and brought the skeleton back. So the original Dippy, the actual fossilized remains of the dinosaur that they are on Earth, were put on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, which is where it still is. Yes, the original.

The original. But yes, he made various casts and sent them to different museums around the world, including London. We got ours in 1905. Right. It was, I think the king, the king said to him, it would be nice to have one of those in the UK. Yes, that's right. Yeah.

And Carnegie said, yes, your majesty. That's right. You can have one next week. But yes, I was a bit disillusioned. I thought our Dippy was the Dippy. Yes. And then our Dippy went on, well, he's actually still on tour. I think it was in 2018.

Dippy took a tour around different museums in the UK on loan. And got replaced with the skeleton. of a blue whale. Right. So there's a blue whale in the Great Hall at the Natural History Museum now instead of Dippy, and everyone's a little bit sad about it. So dinosaurs have, well, were around for a long time. Yeah. How long? We've been around for about seven million years as humans. Yes. And they were around for about 148 million? Yes. so they were around an awful lot longer than we have been

they generally did they did better didn't they they did a lot better I mean there's quite a few different species of dinosaur as well yes there are have you got a number on that I tried to find out how many there are I have I think there are 108 species in the UK right and there's something like 700 globally

crikey that's a lot isn't it and I shall now proceed to name that's the thing isn't it I sort of You said dinosaurs weren't really a thing when you were a kid. They were a thing when I was a kid, and that was just before Jurassic Park. Right. You know, I remember as a lad having little plastic dinosaur toys and dinosaur encyclopedias and things like that. I think I can vaguely remember getting a little plastic dinosaur in my packet of Frosties. Yes, things like that.

Yes. And I was, I was quite enthusiastic about them, and, you know, I could name a few species and their attributes. But, yeah, suddenly finding out there's close on to. a thousand different varieties of dinosaur. You suddenly realize how few you actually know. Absolutely. We should go into etymology, shouldn't we? So what does dinosaur actually mean?

Okay, well, so dinosaur, we've had a run of really boring atomologies recently, and this is different from that. Harrah. Oh, good. So the word dinosaur only coined in the 19th century because that's when, you know, they were sort of first recognized. Yes. So it's a modern word

And it comes from the Greek words Danos meaning terrible And Saros meaning lizard Okay So terrible lizard Yes So they were first called Dana Saros Terrible lizard

Which then got shortened to dinosaur And obviously they're older than The Egyptians, Romans, the Greeks Yes, none of those guys invented them So I think recently we had one on skateboards Yes Which is very modern Which is quite new

This is one of the oldest things Yes. Well, yes and no. Well, yes, because they're obviously ancient. But the first dinosaur fossil was only discovered in 1677. Okay. So before that time, we didn't know that they existed. And in fact, the thing that was found in 1677 by a chap called Robert Plot, it wasn't recognized as a dinosaur fossil. Is this the one with the rude name? Oh, I don't know about its name, actually. What have you got on that? So it was a thigh bone. Right. And I think he thought it looked a bit like sort of a testicle.

Okay. Yeah, so I think it was named Scrotum Humannum. Oh, that's fantastic. Great. Because he thought it was a sort of a male testicle. Right, okay, fine. Well, there you go. Shows how much we've learned, doesn't it?

We've learned an awful lot. That was in 1677. It wasn't until 1824 that people actually started recognizing these strange fossils that were being dug up here and there and concluded that there was actually a thing called a dinosaur that previously hadn't been recognised. So, yes, they are ancient, but in our minds, in relation to us,

they're relatively young. Yes. If that makes sense. The study of them. The study of them, the realization that they existed. Yes. Yeah. The word dinosaur was actually coined in 1841

by an anatomist called Sir Richard Owen. Sounds like a brave. He was a Brit, yeah. Interesting, because I'll come on to this later, but quite a lot of paleontologists seem to be American. Right. Is that just because they've got more of them over there? More of the dinosaurs, not of the paleontologists.

Well, I mean, we've got the Jurassic Coast, where you find little tiny bits of things, but they've got very large open spaces where you can find large bits of dinosaurs. Yes. So, you know, you go to Wyoming. There's an awful lot of wide open space that was probably once running with dinosaurs

and you can sort of still find them buried in the rock. Yes, exactly, yeah. So you said that dinosaurs were around for a really long time sort of almost 200 million years. And I think it's very easy for us to think of dinosaurs all being around at the same time and all being obliterated in the extinction event at the same time.

Yes. start, finish, that's it. Yeah. But they were around for a couple of hundred million years, you know. Yes. There would have been evolution. Absolutely. There were species that came along, died out.

New species came along, died out, came along, died out. You know, there were millions upon millions of years of time where two different varieties of dinosaur didn't exist at the same time. You know, there's about 100 million years between the time of the Brontosaurus and the time of the T-Rex. Yes. They would never have met. by a very, very long shot, you know. So the extinction event, which I think everyone these days pretty much agrees it was a meteorite

that hit the earth, made vast climate changes in temperature, blocked out the sun because of all the dust, and things died off, bit by bit. I have been to where that happened. Oh, really? It's in... Yucatan. That's the one, yes. In Mexico.

So that's why, you know, we had an episode on Holes. Oh, yeah. And we talked about Chinotes, which is this sort of level. of water underneath the... So that's... Where the chinotis are is where the asteroid hit. Is that right?

Yes. Oh, okay, right. But yes, they're already in the process of evolution before that happened. You know, there's... We sort of think of the beginning of Jurassic Park where Dr. Grant is first putting forward the theory that maybe dinosaurs

didn't evolve into reptiles, maybe they evolved into birds. Yes. There were already birds around at the time of the dinosaurs, you know, that there were all these different species all together at the same time. It was mostly the flying animals that survived the meteor strike. That's right, yes, because they were able to sort of move around

and avoid particular local areas that were having trouble. They were smaller as well, so they didn't need quite so much food, so they could get buy on less. So the birds survived whilst the dinosaurs didn't. But it's not so linear. I remember thinking as a kid, okay, you used to have a T-Rex. eventually became an iguana i don't know yes yeah yeah it's not as straightforward as that or an alligator or something yeah but then you know there were crocodiles there were massive massive crocodiles around at the

same time yes as some of the dinosaurs um so it's not it's not quite as linear as straightforward as we think so you say that dinosaurs weren't around at the same time as dinosaurs yes loosely speaking did you did you know that about 40 percent of americans Americans think that humans were around at the same time as dinosaurs. Do they still think that? They still think that. Wow.

I think it's to do with another documentary. I mentioned the documentary, the Attenborough documentary. I think it's another documentary featuring the Flintstone family. Oh, yes, sure. That has possibly caused that view. With their barking dinosaur. Dino. Yes.

Yeah, I think it's, I don't know, I'm fairly sure I can sort of picture old boys comic books and things like that with pictures of caves. men fighting off dinosaurs. Sort of like the land that time forgot. Yeah, exactly. Things like that. Yeah. But no, utter nonsense. Actually, think of the Flintsters, you know who did the

voice for Barney Rubble? Oh, no, I don't. It was Mel Blank. Sorry, we're voiceovers, so we kind of we're getting nasty about stuff like that. Really, was Mel Blank, Barney Rob. Mel Blank was the voice of Barney. And Mel had a big car crash in 1961.

Oh. And really wasn't very well. but he was basically laid up for 70 days in hospital gosh and they thought well we can't just stop producing the flintstones so they brought a whole load of recording equipment to his hospital bed no way and they record they recorded episodes basically just just continued doing barney rubble from his bed so there he is laid up in hospital with various things broken and injured

laying in bed going hey friend exactly gosh poor guy actually while we're on the subject of fictional dinosaurs Godzilla was Godzilla a dinosaur oh now that's interesting isn't it well the thing is he's he's supposed to be a lizard that's been altered thanks to radiation yeah sort of mutation yeah but there's a possibility nerds suggest that he might actually be an arcosol oh is that right yeah So he looks a bit like an arcassol.

How interesting. Yeah. Oh, here's a question for you. Was, is, will the Loch Ness Monster be a dinosaur? Ah, now, no, because there's a distinction between dinosaurs and prehistoric aquatic animals. Okay. Which is to say that, generally speaking, I think it's accepted that dinosaurs are the things that go on the land. Right.

And the things that go in the water are not dinosaurs purely because of that distinction. So Nessie isn't a dinosaur No. She may be related to sort of the plassia sore Which has sore in the name Which suggests it's a dinosaur but it's not I don't make the rules We've mentioned Jurassic Park

A few times I think it's impossible to do an episode on dinosaurs Without talking about Jurassic Park Yeah So the book Jurassic Park was released in 1990 The film came out in 1993 I went to see it in the cinema on a school trip. Did you?

Yes. It was big and exciting and just, you know, the effects, the realism was just extraordinary compared to what had gone before. Yes. And obviously, I hate to say it, but that was over 30 years ago. Wow. And there's been an awful lot of remakes. Including it's one of the moments, I think. Yeah, yeah, they're still going.

Jurassic Park has become Jurassic World and it's still going strong. But, you know, in the last 30-odd years, they've made some discoveries that, you know, have proven that the Jurassic Park was not quite as accurate and amazing as I thought it was when I saw it as a boy. Well, I mean, the velociraptors, I mean, a velociraptor was basically about the size of a turkey. Yeah, and had feathers. So that's totally inaccurate. Yes. It turns out some wonderful person online has done the maths and worked out that actually only 29% of the dinosaur. varieties in Jurassic Park were actually

from the Jurassic period. The majority of them were from the Cretaceous period. But Cretaceous Park doesn't sound quite so cool. No. But in the first movie at least, the Brachiosaurus and the Dolophosaurus, which is the one with the fan

collar around its neck. Oh, okay. Yeah. Those two are from the Jurassic period, which is roughly 145 to 200 million years ago. The T-Rex, the T-Seratops, the velociraptor, the Gallomimus are all from the Cretaceous period, which is only 60-od to 80-od million years ago. So that's inaccurate to start with.

There are inaccuracies about some Dutlophosaurus, the one I just mentioned, was probably be about six metres long and didn't spit venom. Okay. That's wrong. Yes. I know the sound of the raptors wasn't entirely accurate. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how we know, you know.

Well, I think we know because the guys who did. did develop the sound of the raptors, used the sound of tortoises having sex. The most terrifying and dinosaur-like noise in the world. Yeah, they just slowed it down and made it more bassy. That's brilliant. More like the Barry White of tortoises. That's fantastic. Apparently, they reckon now that the T-Rex actually couldn't run all that fast.

it could only sort of only just outrun a human. So that entire scene where it's chasing a Jeep, which it does in every subsequent movie, is total hogwash. But, you know, it's just a jolly good film, doesn't it? It's a great film. It doesn't really matter whether it's accurate or not. It's just, it's fun.

Accuracy is not that important. Before you even dig into the whole premise of sucking the blood out of a mosquito and making hundreds of different varieties of dinosaurs out of it. Yes, from that little bit of DNA. Yeah, exactly. Oh, well. It's fun. It's all good.

And it's got some good quotes, so that's fine. Dinosaur exhibitions have been a big, you know, there are dinosaurs in Victoria Park, I think. Oh, is that right? They actually move. Oh, animatronic ones? Animatronic ones by the lake. Oh, that's brilliant.

I mean, they used to. I don't know if they still do. I remember seeing the first animatronic dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum shortly after Jurassic Park, you know. Yes. It's phenomenal. It really brought the whole thing to life. There was an exhibition in Memphis in 1992,

which is called Dinosaurs Live. Oh. Which is great. And there were people who went to it and then asked for a refund because the dinosaurs weren't live. Of goodness sake. I've been to a couple of things like that whilst on holiday. I've taken my son to a few sort of dinosaur trail places, you know.

Yes. Some of them move. Some of them have sound effects. some of them are just incredibly large and impressive it's just there's something about them I just it is the size isn't it it is the size yeah the size is a big thing I mean you talked about a blue well replacing Dippy as far as I know

the biggest dinosaur that I think we know of is a thing called the Argentinosaurus where's that from I wonder hmm nothing's Salisbury probably Welsh so the Argentinosaurus was about 40 meters long 40 meters yeah about 10 times as long as a blue whale.

Blewnack. So you've got one blue whale in the natural. Imagine like 10 of those. Flemingora. I mean, and it used to eat so much veg. Really? I mean, his mum would have been very proud of it. Unfortunately, what that meant was it, I mean, the poo was quite significant as well.

Sure. Apparently, they've discovered about, they reckon it was 26 pints of poo at a time. Good grief. That's a lot of poo. That is a lot of poo. And then you've got the T-Rex. They found a T-Rex tooth, which was a foot sort of 30 centimetres long. Wow.

That's a long tooth. That's going to rip through you, isn't it? Yeah. One particular display of dinosaurs that I remember from my childhood is at Crystal Palace Park. Oh, right. Have you ever been there? No. So Crystal Palace Park, aside from anything else, I actually learned some interesting.

history about Crystal Palace Park has a total side effect of this. I have been to Crystal Palace because they used to have motor racing there. I've actually been to a recreation of a motor race there. Oh, fantastic. Oh, well, there you go. So you've been there. Right. So Crystal Palace, this isn't going to be an episode on Crystal Palace.

But the glass house, the Crystal Palace, was originally built for the great exhibition at Hyde Park in 1851. When the exhibition was over, they moved it to this random corner of southeast London, built a park around it. and that whole area is what is the part of London that we now know as Crystal Palace purely because the Crystal Palace was moved there. The park was built around the palace

and in 1854 they decided to build some replica dinosaurs and other extinct animals life size in Crystal Palace Park. Oh wow. And they're still there. And as a kid my dad took me to Crystal Palace Park and we walked around the lake

and there are all these dinosaurs sitting on the island in the middle of the lake. Did you visit the radio museum? No. Because the first BBC broadcasts were made from an antenna. Of course they were. Yes, of course they were, yeah. So there was a weird thing at school when I was at school,

which was if it was clear enough to see Crystal Palace from the headmaster study, the whole school got a day off. Why? I don't know. It's one of those things. That's odd. Yeah. It was a strange thing.

think the headmaster just fancied a day off. But anyway, yeah, so these dinosaurs were sort of created out of concrete from a mold. And you look at them now, they are wildly inaccurate. You know, if we think the Jurassic Park depiction of a velociraptor is inaccurate, these things are so inaccurate. They just, they hardly even look like dinosaurs at all. But at the time, you know, created in 1854, only 30 odd years after the study of dinosaurs really began. They were

remarkable for the time. Yes. And these things were sculpted by a fellow called Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, another great name, under the scientific direction of Richard Owen, who I mentioned earlier, who's the chap who came up with the word dinosaur.

And yeah, these models are sort of scattered around this park and they're known collectively as the geological court because they had different themed areas in the park, representing different eras and different styles of art and architecture and so on. And then you have the geological bit as well.

These sculptures have been grade two listed because of their historical importance. And, yeah, they're still there today. So you can go and have a walk around Crystal Palace and look at some very, very inaccurate dinosaur models. Have you ever heard of the book? bone wars bone wars no i have not neither had i but my god it's a great story okay so um there there are two key characters in it both have got great odd names one is called edward drinker cope right and the other one is called off meal charles marsh oh we've got some great names today haven't we we have wow so let's call them cope and marsh sure so cope was brought up as the

wealthy son of a wealthy father and marsh was brought up not in poverty but but certainly not as anywhere like as well off as the copes yeah but he did have a very wealthy um uncle who helped him and they were both fanatical about botany and biology and specifically about and getting into dinosaurs they met at a symposium in berlin and seemed to get on really really well and then they fell out over something or other after that and then they weren't friends for a bit but yes so they were doing the same thing and they were both very keen on collecting as many dinosaur bones as they could right and they were American they did a lot of dinosaur bone hunting sort of all over America well all over the world yeah but

specifically a lot of stuff in America especially around the Wyoming area right nobody really knows why they fell out I mean that there are a couple of things that they did later on, which meant that they fell up, but they started to get quite nasty with each other. For example, Cope would employ dinosaur rustlers who would go and nick bones from Marsh's digs. Oh, no. And Marsh would employ dynamite to blow up digs that Cope had been working on to destroy all the bones. Wow. And it just got, it just escalated. It got, it got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And one of the big things that happened with this, which I love, again, it's, it comes back to a John Finnamor thing that I love. Always comes back

to John Finnamor. A lot of my life comes back to John Finnamor. So one of the things that Cope discovered was an elasmusaurus. Oh, very good. Well pronounced. Thank you. And his elizmosaurus was a whole collection of bones. And he thought, well, I better like put this thing back together. And he discovered it's like there's a main body and then there's a long bit and a short bit either end and he thought well the long bit's obviously the tail naturally and the short bit's obviously the neck and so he put this thing together with the head at the end of the short bit and the tail is the long bit and then marsh pointed out that actually he'd got the head on the wrong end and that the head should be on the end of the long bit and the tail was the short bit oh so the neck was longer than the tail

yeah oh that's great those bits that he missed out for example there were paddles at the back which which at the back of the body which would have made it clear which end the head was right there's a drawing in wikimedia commons which we have we have a blog oh yes and i apologize now for this for this week's blog because it's a doozy it'll get you so engrossed in this um and there's a drawing at wikimedia commons of this elasmusoric the copse elasmus which he published as a white paper that's actually a note on the page on Wikimedia Commons which says note this historical image is not factually accurate paleontology or restoration reason head on wrong end so so cope was really embarrassed by all this and he tried to buy back every copy of the white paper that he'd had published oh no unfortunately there were certainly sort of Marsh didn't want to give his copy back yeah and I think the the national institution didn't want to give their copy back there were a few there the reason why there's still a picture of this is because

not everybody gave their copy back right okay so his his reputation was in tatters basically oh poor fella which wasn't good and and and Marsha was really happy about this and as the head of the geological society he he decided he was going to really screw over coke and he said right okay so if anybody in America has done any digging on behalf of the federal government and been paid by the federal government for that dig, they have to give all the bones back to the Smithsonian. Okay. And he thought, right, this is going to really screw over Cope.

And it didn't because Cope had kept really good records of all the, you know, the prices he'd paid for bones and the people he'd paid and the fact that, you know, the bones in his collection were not paid for by the government. Therefore, he didn't have to give any of the bones back. right right to the smithsonian however marsh hadn't kept the same records so his own rule so it totally backfired on him yeah but he had he had like a huge collection of bones and he had to give them all had to give them all to the smithsonian and this this this hatred for each other went on and on there are so many great stories about it should be a film even even in death so when edward cope

died in his will he said that you know if there is um an autopsy i want my brain to be weighed right um and and and the weight noted and i challenge marsh to do the same to prove that he is not as intelligent as i am oh how wonderful yeah so um i will put a um a link to all of this story and and a and a 50 minute documentary that's all about it which is absolutely brilliant and a of course the cartoon, the Finamore cartoon that started all this off. Yes. You've played me with the Finamore sketch, and how wonderful to know that there's actually a real story behind it all.

Absolutely. That's brilliant. And where can people find this bountiful supply of further study? I think it's rabbit hole, no. It's factorily.com. Factorily.com. That's it. Yep, factorialy.com.

Wonderful. It's, if you go to the blog, you'll find every one of our episodes has a whole collection of show notes with links to things, videos, all sorts of stuff. It's a really, really fun place to be if you like that kind of thing. Indeed, yes.

So obviously we have some T-Rex-sized records, surely. Yeah, so it's an interesting topic because they're all dead. They can't exactly earn a Guinness record by doing anything interesting, you know. Having done something, I mean, you know, they are the genus that's been around the longest. Yes, exactly, yeah. So there are records sort of attributed to them posthumously for being the tallest dinosaur,

the heaviest dinosaur, the longest, you know, the largest fossil, the best preserved skeleton, all that kind of stuff. But I thought that's just a little bit boring, you know, we could spend all day talking about who had the biggest tale or that sort of thing. So the more fun ones are the largest gathering of people dressed as dinosaurs. 468. I was a little bit sad that it wasn't more, but then I actually thought about it. 468 people dressed as dinosaurs.

That's quite good, actually. Yes. And this was achieved by the Cox Science Centre and Aquarium in Florida in the USA. Okay. Just this year, January 2025. It was a community event to get the locals more engaged with the science centre. They invited people to come dressed as dinosaurs and 468 of them did so. So that's that.

The largest collection of dinosaur-related items, this takes me back to beavers. 1,226. So there's a gentleman in Peru, out of all the names that we've had so far, this is my favourite. Caesar Augusto Canales Cueva from Peru. had his collection verified in 2020 and he owns, yes, 1,226 dinosaur-related items from toys, magazines, cards, books,

watches, posters, board games, keychains and other items. He's an enthusiast, I think we can say. I think you can say that he's enthusiastic. So yes, those were the more fun dinosaur-related records. So, I mean, the end of the dinosaurs then? Yes, we're done. Oh, by the way, we didn't mention the media that wiped out the dinosaurs

also turned tomatoes red. I don't know what to do with that information, Bruce. I think what we need to do with that is send people to the blog because I've got an article all about how that happened. So before, but then, how did they, what was, huh? Do you really want to know? Yeah. Okay.

So what happened, as we said, there was a massive ash cloud that went up with the impact of the meteor. Yes. And that basically led to a lot of plants dying out because they didn't get enough sun. Yeah. But the plant that eventually evolved into the tomato tripled the size of its genome, adding at least one set of genes that turned its fruit to bright red. Huh. The things you accidentally learn along the way. Yes.

I know. Anyway, they were getting off the subject there of dinosaurs, which we do quite a lot. You're very lucky that you don't hear the unedited version of this. We do go on terrible tangents often. There's a lot of editing involved. Let's put it that way. Well, I think that's it for me.

I think all of my dinosaur-related facts are extinct. Yes, I've stomped off into the distance. But thank you very much for listening. Thank you, yes. We have had a lot of fun doing this. I hope you've had a lot of fun listening to it. If you have, then could you do us a favour? Oh, yeah, go on.

Could you give us a nice five-star review, please? That would be very kind of you. And tell your fellow listeners what it is that you particularly liked about dinosaurs. Absolutely. You could go ahead and share this podcast with your equally nerdy chums, as I'm sure you all have some, and we can grow this fact-loving community further and further. And if we've got anything wrong,

obviously you can go to our Facebook page and tell us, that we got it wrong, or you can email us at hello at factorily.com and tell us what we got wrong. Yes, absolutely, yes. And then of course you can hit the subscribe button so that every Thursday morning you'll get a notification that a new episode has landed. Absolutely. Who knows what next one's going to be? Not even us yet. So thank you all for coming along and listening to this wonderful show. Please come again next time for another fascinating, fun-filled episode of Factorily.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Avoire.