Unexplainable - Dinosaur mysteries with Riley Black

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

How do we know what we know about dinosaurs? Riley Black takes us back to the Mesozoic Era and explains how paleontologists piece together the lives of dinosaurs from often fragmentary clues. Guest: Riley Black, science writer, amateur paleontologist, and consultant for the Jurassic World franchise. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠We read every email.Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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How do we know what we know about dinosaurs? I think about this whenever I'm in a natural history museum, because you have these bones that are tens or even hundreds of millions of years old. They come from a version of our planet that looks pretty different from the Earth that we walk on today. So how do we take? these fossils and spin them into the stories about dinosaurs that I love to read and watch. The dinosaurs are dead. Yet in our imaginations, they are very much alive. My guest today, Riley Black has written a lot about how to piece together an entire narrative

from fossils. Riley writes about how we know what we know about dinosaurs. Riley, thank you for being on the show. Oh, my pleasure. I mean, you asked me to show up and bring my dinosaur stuff. How could I resist? For our listeners, Riley brought some dinosaur models and a cast of a dinosaur hand along. But Riley, can you tell me a little bit about who you are, please, and what you do?

Sure. So I'm a professional science writer. I've written about a dozen books about prehistoric life in one form or another. And I'm also an amateur paleontologist. I go out in the field and I actually find some fossils. I mean, if you are going out into the field, what is amateur about it? So there's a bit of a divide sometimes between the professional paleontology side and the many, many, many amateurs and volunteers out there looking for fossils. So I call myself an amateur because I'm not a curator, I'm not a professor.

But I've been out in the field from places from Alaska to Mexico, a lot of work in the Four Corners actually finding fossils that go to museums and are cataloged and studied there. So I do it for the love of it. But why dinosaurs? It's hard not to be into dinosaurs. I mean, from what I was told, I went through a very short phase with trucks and then elephants, which I still love, and dinosaurs. So big and loud, I guess, is always what I've been kind of into. Went to the American Museum of Natural History when I was five. Heard of it.

When you are small, not as small as a Mesozoic mammal, but still quite small on seeing these big skeletons, it's hard not to be impressed. And what I love about them, and really any prehistoric life is you look at their bones or the their traces or what they leave behind. And there are all these questions of how did they move? What did they look like? What color were they? What did they sound like? What did they smell like?

All of the stuff that we may or may not have answers to. So it was a chance to get to know this whole realm of science that's fueled by the questions. We encourage to use your imagination. I think this is a perfect transition into what I wanted to talk to you about today, which is how do we know the things that we know about dinosaurs? And so I thought maybe we could start sort of where the paleontologists are. first started, which is the skeletons that they left behind. So talk to me about how we sort of take a dinosaur or a skeleton, like a bunch of bones, and turn that into a story about reptiles running

through the world. I mean, this is how paleontology as a science started. I think it's important to note that people have been finding fossils for thousands and thousands of years. We have like stone hand axes of fossils in them indigenous cultures all over the planet have encountered fossils of different kinds and understood that these were once living things. So, like, we've had this long recognition that there was life before us. But it's the late 1700s. We have geology, which is starting as a science in comparative anatomy, mostly in Western Europe. And you put those two things together, people find these weird bones, usually disarticulated, usually incomplete, but it's just big, big stuff, like a tooth from a reptile that's far larger than any crocodile or snake or anything that lives in that

part of the world today. And they know this must be something. And they try and slotted into what they knew. So this is why the earliest representations of dinosaurs look like giant lizards or giant crocodiles. It's just like what's a reptile, but it must have been 100 feet long. Then we get more complete skeletons. They're like, oh, okay, the body shape is entirely different. Which is kind of funny. Vrakiosaurus is a great example because we really only have the forelims and parts of the vertebra and some of the neck.

And that's about it. So we're really basing it on other more complete animals. Wait, wait. This dinosaur. Yes. We have like these. parts, the front legs, some of its neck. And what else?

A few bits of its backbone along the spine, a couple limb elements. And there's some that I know are undescribed. There might be skull pieces. How do we make something like this from some forelims, some vertebra, some other bones, and a dream? Yeah, how we get to something like this, our friend Bacios for us here. So you're showing me right now a model. have of a beautiful long-necked dinosaur with a long-curving tail, four lovely long legs, red and green coloring.

For something like brachiosaurus, where we don't have the whole skeleton, even now, we look to their closest relatives. There's a related animal called giraffe a titan that's found in... Giraffatitan? Yes. So, like, giant giraffe. Yeah, we have the arm lizard, and we have the giant giraffe. Giant giraffe is more complete.

And we can, they're close enough that, you know, we know that they must have had similar bones. Like the system, like we know they're a vertebrates, right, based upon the bones that we find. So when you have a vertebrate, they must also have a circulatory system and a nervous system and skin. Even if we don't have the exact fossil, we can start filling in those pieces as a hypothesis. So anytime you see a complete dinosaur, unless it's really literally that specimen or that cast that someone's made a one-to-one of, it's a hypothesis. Anyone's vision of a dinosaur. Like, I can say T-Rex. And the T-Rex I see in my head, it's going to be different from what you see in your head.

And this is what I love about it is that we're taking sort of this bare scaffolding. And based upon what we know and what we see from experience, filling in, like, what might have been there. What are some of the most interesting or maybe even counterintuitive ways that we have been able to say, no, I'm pretty sure this looked this way, just by looking at the bones alone? So the bones alone, usually we need a complete skeleton or a fairly complete skeleton. It's how about this little T-Rex hand that I brought in as a really good example. I mean, this is an animal that would have been more than 30 feet long, and you can hold this hand in your hand. It would have been an arm about as long as yours. So I'm looking at, just to be clear, sort of a looks like two fingers of a T-Rex hand that have very pointy claws on the end of them.

And you actually have a little bit of a third finger there. So there's a little splint bone that's underneath the larger finger. And that third one, that splint, is the remainder of the third finger. We always make fun of T-Rex for having tiny, tiny hands, right? Well, they used to have three fingers, and their ancestors lost them. Okay. So this tiny little bone, this bone that's actually the size of my pinky is like an ancestral third finger, like a tailbone of a third finger that they have. Right, which was lost.

And we didn't know that. So when the first Tyrannosaurist ract was being reconstructed here in New York City, we used to think it was related to other carnivorous dinosaurs that we knew about. But there was no arm. You know, we had the big old skull. We had the backbone, ribs, all this stuff. No arms. The arms are tiny. Of course, they'd probably wash away and not get buried.

It wasn't until someone actually found a T-Rex arm with the hand at the end of it. So early on, they thought, well, has three fingers, like all the other carnivorous dinosaurs do. And then someone found a related form in Canada and Alberta that only had two. And we know that they were closer to T-Rex. It's like, okay, we have to change the model. And that's why T-R-X is two little fingers. Fascinating. Okay.

So finding bones, finding more bones to complete out a skeleton can really tell us like, oh, we got this wrong, we got this wrong, et cetera. But you also had an article that you wrote that was also about tiny arms that was a little different that I loved. Can you tell me a little bit about Alvorisaurus? Am I saying that right? Yes, the Alvarisaurus. I'm glad to talk about them because nobody talks about Alvarasaurus. This is like the indie band that only does vinyl. So let me pull the photo.

Yeah, show me a picture of Alvur's sore, please. This is a little critter called Mononikis. Oh, this is mononikis. It belongs to a group called Alvoresores. So I'm looking at this very small, very cute creature that has very long legs. It has a really long neck. And then it just has these rinky dink little arms coming off of it that it's holding together in a little. Oh, like a little please, like a begging posture.

You're like, can I go home an hour early? Kind of pose. That's just one claw. That's what its name means is one claw. So what is its one claw for? We don't know. We don't know because a skeleton can't really tell us exactly what it's for. Right.

In that it can give us the range of motion and we can reconstruct the musculature and things like that. But it can't really tell us, like, well, what did it use that musculature for? How did it move those limbs? If we know it has a short range of motion, then to what? purpose, what function. Are there ideas? Yes. Do people have theories?

Okay. I love a theory. So my favorite one is that these were dinosaur ant eaters because they often have either no teeth or very, very, very, very small teeth. And this is something that we see happen with like a shift away from carnivorous foods and more towards like insects and plants and things like that. But we think that they were like ant eater dinosaurs using those little claws to basically stick their chest to the ground and just kind of scratch away at ant and termite mounds, which you know we're around at the time. We actually find dinosaur bones sometimes with termite damage to them. So theory one is they were ant-eaters, just like poking their fingers in there.

What are the other theories for what these tiny claws could be for? They might have been for grasping eggs. There was a species that was named a few months ago that they thought that they were just kind of clasping eggs to their chest. They're just kind of doing a little dip, picking up an egg and kind of skittering away with it. Okay. And that's really about it so far. We don't really like, you look at that stubby arm, is this kind of like, what? And there's not a whole lot else.

We don't have a lot of equivalence for arms like these other than animals that dig into the ground somehow. Okay, so we have T-Rex claws. We have alversore claws. Are there other sort of dinosaurs where we're just sort of like, well, we have a bunch of bones? What could this possibly be? What does it look like? So dinosaurs love their bizarre. structures. Like the fashion through the Mesozoic was just something else, like the ornamentation

on these animals constantly, like our little triceratops friend, even though that's a very traditional, you know, three horn face look, there are lots of horn dinosaurs with all these different arrays of horns and spikes and hooks and everything else that help them differentiate each other. And that we have a fair handle on. But in terms of ornamentation, there are dinosaurs with like sails on their backs, and we have no idea why. Sales? Yes, sailback dinosaurs. So there's one in particular called Oranosaurus. This is an herbivore. So everybody knows Spinosaurus that got its name for the spines on his back.

We're doing indie dinosaurs here. We're not doing Spinosaurus. The It Girl, like, on the cover in that, Gio. We're doing, again, the deep cuts. So this is an Oranosaurus. It is something related to Aguonadong, the Duckbeat Dinosaurs. And it has a sail on its back. Okay.

So I'm looking at a dinosaur. It's very difficult to describe. So the middle part of it sort of looks like a regular dinosaur. And then on its back, it just has like a whole fan of bones coming out. So I see what you mean now about a sail. What? I feel like I know the answer, and the answer is we don't know. But what's the sale for?

We don't know. Amazingly, there have been a few ideas. one of which one of my favorite sort of discarded hypotheses is that we see these long neural spines. So these flat bones that come off the backbone in things like bison or various mammals. And they usually hold a hump or the end of a ligament that goes from the back of the head to between the shoulders. Because a lot of these mammals have big, heavy heads. They need like an extra, basically, rubber band to help them keep their heads up. And we used to think that this was true for the dinosaurs as well.

But then you'd have this basically mound-shaped dinosaur with legs. If you imagine like a little hill with legs kind of shuffling around, that's more less what they would look like. But that was one of the ideas that this is sort of head support or something like that. Okay. What seems more likely is it's some kind of billboard. Basically, it's dinosaur advertising that they're communicating to other members of their species, saying, like, I'm bigger than you, or I'm an adult, or I'm a juvenile, or like, different

dinosaur sexes. Like a peacock tail almost, but on their, a permanent peacocktail on their back. Yes, always peacocking. And you're like Cautacious. Yeah, and with something that's that big and that elaborate, and it takes energy to grow, right? This is an investment this animal is making. Bone is constantly remodeling itself. It must have had formed some purpose in this animal's life.

But unless we can see these dinosaurs interact, it's very difficult to tell what they were doing. Now, there's some ways that maybe we can get at it. If you can find some skin and find out what color that skin was, which is the thing we can do now. Maybe we can start to get at. But again, it takes the luck of the fossil record to actually make such a finds. Got it. So if you could find skin from another part of his body and then skin from this sale and the skin on the sale was like neon and the skin on the rest of its body was like fairly gray. It would be relatively clear. And the neon sign said like two for a dollar at

Spinosaurus land. You'd be like, oh, it's a billboard. Yeah, that vapor wave aesthetic going on the sale. Amazing. So what you've told us to this point is essentially that skeletons can't tell us everything we need to know. Bons are not the be-all and end-all. We still have a lot of questions. We have questions about the sails on dinosaurs like Oranosaurus or even Spinosaurus or what alversors use their claws for. What else can we look at to understand dinosaurs in more depth? Yes. So you're getting to one of my favorite kinds of fossils, and those are trace fossils. Race fossils. Yes.

So these are things that animals leave behind in the fossil record. So it's not the tooth of the bone or whatever itself, but it's the marks that animal made in life. So we're talking about things like tooth marks and tracks and fossil feces and all these other things that basically an animal leaves behind just through living. It's interaction, its behavior. So like when you see a dinosaur trackway, it's not just footprints in the rock that is moments in that animal's life. and we can calculate how tall it was, how fast it was moving, maybe the direction it was going in. Is there another animal nearby?

Is it going in a certain direction, like to get around an obstacle or to avoid something? So these are actually like moments of prehistoric time that we still have as fossils. More on that. After the break. Original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum.

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I get to talk about stuff that I have found. out in the field. What's one of your favorite traces? One of my favorite traces. So what I'm showing you on the phone is it kind of looks like multiple toes there. You can see one, two, three, four. Yes. And then there's a couple small toes next to it.

So it's basically the front foot and the back foot of a crocodile-like armadillo thing called an Aedosaur. Okay. Aetosaur. How do you know just is it like that's what matches up that footprint? Yeah. So you can look at the skeletons. And you can look at what other animals are found in that formation and see kind of whose foot matches what print. It's rarely one to one unless an animal literally dies in its tracks.

But sometimes this happens. It's hard to be 100% certain. But in this case, the hand and foot anatomy matched this armadillo-like crocodile relative that was Nervivore that was living around when dinosaurs are really small. And it looked like the ground was giving me a high five. It was like impossible to mess. And so how did you find this? Yeah, so I was out on an expedition with the Naturalistic Museum of Utah out in the eastern part of the state. So like outside Arches National Park, that kind of area, desert country.

You're miles and miles from anybody. And the rocks are very, very ancient there. So we're talking about the end of sort of the dawn of the dinosaurs, the Triassic, about 220 million years ago. You hop out of the truck, you have your water and everything that you need for the day, and you just go walking and looking for fossils. So I start picking around the rocks nearby. And you have to look at these walls of rock and kind of determine. what layers you're going to look at, where you're going to go,

like the angle, the sun that can matter in terms of what you're going to find. And I start picking along, and I find these little invertebrate traces, basically little, like, beetle footprints. And it's like, okay, there are traces here. So I find those little beetle traces. I find a little plant fossil,

and then there's a dinosaur track. I actually have a, brought one of the photos of that one as well. And this was, like, indisputable. That's what it was as soon as I saw. Oh, yeah. So I'm looking at what is, it looks like a footprint. Yeah, it just looks like a little trick and track. It was about that size, really.

Just those three toes with the claws at the ends. And then I start taking my field notes and start, you know, looking for other stuff. And I see that footprint from the Aetosaur as well as a whole bunch of other ones. Like now I'm, you know, just reliving this trip, basically having a happy little flashback here. But so you have these, you have these footprints. What can those footprints tell you? Yeah. So footprints can tell you in animal's moving speed.

There's a relatively simple calculation that you can use between foot strides to tell how fast it was like moving. Longer apart usually means it's moving quicker. It's really basic, like kind of like animal physics kind of stuff. One of my favorites, it's not at this site, but it's at a place nearby where I found those tracks. It's a Jurassic Age site that has tracks that were likely made by an animal like Allosaurus. So think like a Jurassic T-Rex, just three fingers, a little bit smaller. and the stride lengths on one foot are different than the other. And what that means is that dinosaur's limping.

So I got injured somehow, and we have an injured dinosaur trackway. And we don't entirely know what caused it, but it's just a great reminder of these animals dealt with the same kind of injuries and bone breaks and everything that we see in animals now. They were living lives. They were not sort of perfect specimens of dinosaurhood. each one was an individual dinosaur with its own little trials and tribulations, I guess. Is there something that trace fossils have helped us? Are there ways that they've sort of changed our understanding of some of the skeletons that we've received

or sort of upended things that we thought we understood about dinosaurs? Absolutely. So trace fossils are not just for dinosaurs, all sorts of prehistory things, left trace. and including traces on dinosaur fossils. So there's a place in Western Colorado called My Got More Dinosauri. It's like 150 million years old. This is like heyday of allosaurus, stegosaurus, like all those favorites.

But everything there is in a jumble. So we don't get complete skeletons out of that site. It's this base of this pond where things were disarticulating and falling apart. And scavengers came by. There's so many bite marks on these fossils. You see the ends of thigh bones. They're just raked with these teeth. from all the feeding and stuff on.

And we can tell from where those bite marks are, sort of what were the favorite parts of, like, a sauropod body. So if you have an allosaurus coming to scavenge, where is it going to start? Some of it suggests that they were going in through the cloaca to get at the pelvis after they'd taken off, like, the other tail meat and stuff.

So they were going in through, sorry to be crass, the butt hole. Yes, they were, yeah. Yeah, they would enjoy, like, basically, you know, there's a big tail muscle called the Catofemoralis, that they'd take that stuff for. And when they're getting down on like the prime cuts, that's how they got into the rest of it. I'm such a child.

So we have those bite marks on those bones, but we also have beetle damage. So a lot of museums use like dermested beetles to clean their skeletons, right? You have a skeleton, you want it to be clean for display. You put it in with the beetles, and then you take it out before the beetles start to burrow into it because that's what they want to do. Sorry, I love that you were saying this just sort of like casually. And we all know. Sorry, they use beetles to clean spec. Okay, great.

Yes. Fact I learned. But. Yes. So those beetles, normally to complete their life cycle, they want to burrow into that bone. So naturally, that's what tends to occur is. And that's what we find on some of these dinosaur bones, that they were exposed now in the open long enough, that those beetles were, like, basically eating their way through the bone, leaving trails in them, which tells us those bones were exposed, like on the surface for a while. So this whole idea of we need quick burial to make a dinosaur fossil, probably not true.

some of these bones were on the surface for months to even years before they got buried, which makes sense because even though we have our pint-sized brachiosaurus in front of us, the real animal would have been about, you know, like 60 feet long and way upwards of 20 tons. It takes a lot of sediment to bury something like that. So by looking at what the insects were doing, the traces that they left, is the same kind of stuff that forensic investigators use today to kind of determine how long a body has been exposed. We can do that with dinosaurs thanks to traces. So if we return to sort of the questions you were laying out,

at the beginning about, say, like, Alversaurus, why does it have such tiny little finger claws? Could trace fossils potentially help us kind of answer the questions that are posed by these skeletons? Yes, because one of the things that we always want to know about dinosaurs, right, is what did they eat? And so often when it comes to the teeth and claws and other things, it comes down to a question of feeding and how are they acquiring that food and how are they processing it. So we think of our little alversaur friends, a little friend like Mononikis. If they were sticking their chest against an ancient termite mound, which also like, ow, I hope they don't bite.

This sure is a strategy to pick. And digging away with their arms, we might be able to find a prehistoric termite mound that has scratch marks in it. We actually have scratches made by dinosaurs in the fossil record from Utah in different part of the state than I was prospecting in. There is a mammal burrow that has claw prints from a velociraptor-like dinosaur, basically digging in, that this dinosaur is. trying to dig into the burrow to pull the mammals out. So we could find something like that with alversors, these claw scratches on the insect mountains, and that would give us some clues. More likely, we're going to get the answer through fossil poop.

Copperlites. So copperlites, that's a kind of trace fossils. It's basically what an animal is eating. It's the remainder of the gut contents. Sometimes we get gut contents. Sometimes we get something called a cololite, which is basically when it's in the intestine but hasn't exited yet. Copperlite is just fossil poop.

usually contains if there were scales or exoskeletons or anything like that, it would be in there. So if alversores were eating these little insects, we should be able to find a coprolite from them. There'll be more coprolite fossils than skeletal fossils because they'd be making them all the time, basically back in the Cretaceous. And these should be full of little ants or termites or something like that. Or maybe we'll look into them and find eggshell or little mammal bones or who knows what. But that would be the test of the actual animal's behavior. We can look their skeleton and say, like, maybe they did this, but trace is, like, basically to have the remainder of what they actually ate. How would you know it was an alvarosaurus coprolate?

That's a great question, because you wouldn't really be 100% sure, except if it were exceptionally rare. So most of the time we find coprolites just by themselves. They're just individual fossils, and we can say, okay, the body size matches are based upon what we've collected for other animals. It seems like it came from a similar sort of animal. if we found it as a cololite or found it associated with a skeleton, then you could say, like, okay, these are close together. You know, like there's some kind of association between them. So it's probably that might be able to look at the geochemistry. But here's the thing, right?

Like, it goes back to what you were saying at the beginning for anything that we find the fossil record. It's like, find one fossil. Here's a dozen questions. And what, I guess what keeps you interested in? and sort of trying to piece everything together. There's always something more to learn. There's always something that I didn't know. Nature is so surprising, even familiar animals,

even the most basic questions about dinosaurs, we don't necessarily have answers for yet. But in my lifetime, the amount of things that we've learned, that I was told even as a kid, we were never, ever going to know. For example, dinosaur color used to be, you know what? Do whatever colors you want. Nobody knows what color dinosaurs were. you know, make that neon pink, you know, T-Rex or, you know, Stegosaurus with, you know, bright yellow plates or what have you.

Now we're starting to find out what colors they actually were by comparisons to modern birds and looking at, you know, skin and feathers and the microscopic nature of it that creates structural color. So, you know, in a way, like it didn't kill the magic. It just made it more interesting. Like, okay, we get some color. Now what other colors were there? What color patterns were there? Did they vary between different sexes or populations or species? So all of this curiosity, it's incremental and cumulative, and it changes our perception of what the ancient world was like.

I love the fact that the dinosaurs that I grew up with, especially seeing older documentaries and books and out-of-date museum displays, are now fundamentally different. It's the same species, sometimes the same skeletons, but they're rearranged. They're brought to life in a different way. And it feels like something that everybody can participate in. And I love that paleontology can be welcoming in that way. that it's something, if you can put boots on and go look for fossils or even just like volunteering a museum, poking through drawers, you can change the way people see ancient life. I love that.

Riley, thank you so much for coming on, talking to us about dinosaurs. If people want to read your books, which one would you recommend that they start with? I would recommend the last days of the dinosaurs. Okay. It is the first narrative book that I wrote. So this is like if you were there 66 million years ago, you're standing in ancient Montana. from the day before the asteroid hits through the first hour, the first day, the first week, through the first million years, as you see life changed. It's basically the making of the world, as we know it now, the reason why we're here.

So if you really want to get a feel for not only what it's like to be there in the Mesozoic, but sort of the way that I think a paleontologist sees the world, the way that I see the world, when I'm out in the rocks, when I'm looking for these animals, the kind of visual mental landscape that you kind of create from what you know. I think that's the best place to start. All right. Riley Black, they are science writer, amateur paleontologist, and a wonderful guest. So thank you so much. Oh, it's been a joy. If you want to know more about Riley's books,

we will link to their website in the description for this episode. This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Joanna Solitaroff, Our video editor is Alex Coles. Our animator is Kareem Karea. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Our studio engineers are Davon Howard and Joe Nebris. Mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassanfeld,

and Meredith Hodnott runs the show. Special thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Noam. And if you want to see the video version of this episode, you can find us on Netflix. If you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at Unexplanable at Vox.com. Or if you'd like to support the show, join Vox. Become a member. Just go to box.com slash members.

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