Now this is one I enjoyed listening to today.*
"After 27 years, Melvyn Bragg has decided to step down from the In Our Time presenter’s chair. With over a thousand episodes to choose from, he has selected just six that capture the huge range and depth of the subjects he and his experts have tackled. In this sixth of his choices, we hear Melvyn Bragg and his guests in 2017 discussing new discoveries about dinosaurs.
Their topic is the development of theories about dinosaur feathers, following discoveries of fossils which show evidence of those feathers.
All dinosaurs were originally thought to be related to lizards (the word 'dinosaur' was created from the Greek for 'terrible lizard') but that now appears false.
In the last century, discoveries of fossils with feathers established that at least some dinosaurs were feathered and that some of those survived the great extinctions and evolved into the birds we see today.
There are still many outstanding areas for study, such as what sorts of feathers they were, where on the body they were found, what their purpose was and which dinosaurs had them.
With Mike Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Bristol, Steve Brusatte, Reader and Chancellor's Fellow in Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Edinburgh, and, Maria McNamara, Senior Lecturer in Geology at University College, Cork
Producer: Simon Tillotson"
Picture; Doris the Dinosaur, 2020, from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*Feathered Dinosaurs, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b099v33p
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