Dreadnoughtus

Mm-hmm.

Right? Um, so my, my thought is Littlefoot and his parents are either, uh, Dreadnoughtus, which is a fucking badass name for a dinosaur.

Yeah, that is.

That's a-

Dreadnoughtus?

Yeah.

Oh.

Will, what's our patron question today?

Our question is from Hannah, who asks, "In the deserts episode on Prehistoric Planet, a herd of Dreadnoughtus is shown hanging out in the desert during the mating season.

Without a plant in sight, would that environment actually be a place where sauropods could live? Is there evidence that Dreadnoughtus or other sauropods lived in deserts, or is this more speculation?"

That is an excellent question.

So for those of you who haven't seen Prehistoric Planet, or you forget, yeah, there's a big set piece with these big old sauropods in, at, like, a, a, around, like, a watering hole-

So yes, there is evidence to s- to suggest that some sauropods, including some of the real big ones, were spending time in very arid, very desert or desert-like habitats.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know if Dreadnoughtus is one of those, um, but we do have other...

There, there's probably some landscape picture.

Well, there, the, that, uh, what, fourth one is me laying next to a, a big bone of Dreadnoughtus there in the field.

And, uh-

That's the-- We're gonna talk about that.

... feeling.

Um, it's very sublime.

My best moment in the field, um, which I am sure I will never top, this is, like, peak Dreadnoughtus, right? So we have, we have most of this enormous skeleton exposed.

It's just, it's an unbelievable find.

In many ways, it felt to me like a kind of an immersive illustrated book, if you will.

We know, of course, that there were re-edited sequences from Apple TV's Prehistoric Planet, which are projected onto the walls of the show space in 360 degrees, and in most cases at life-size, so that you could, for example, feel yourself at the feet of Dreadnoughtus as they walked through.

And these weren't done at random as a kind of montage, but the sequences were organized under sort of mini chapter headings of sorts about the Mesozoic world.

whilst recalling parallels with the extant wildlife of the modern one and how they inform how we reconstruct the animals of the past.