The Life Scientific

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The Life Scientific: Susannah Maidment on stegosaurs

Susannah Maidment on dinosaurs

Susannah Maidment on stegosaurs

BBC Radio 4 - The Life Scientific, Susannah Maidment on stegosaurs

Susannah Maidment tells Jim how she came to be a world authority on stegosaurs

The evolution of dinosaurs. Susannah Maidment tells Jim Al Khalili how she works out which dinosaurs lived when and how she came to be a world authority on stegosaurs.

Susie was dinosaur-mad as a child. But unlike most children, she never grew out of her obsession. She tells Jim about an exciting new stegosaur find in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and describes the time she spent dinosaur hunting (with a toddler in tow) in the Morrison Formation in the American Mid-West: a  place where there are thought to be enough dinosaur remains to keep a thousand paleontologists happy for a thousand years.  
She is at her happiest out in the field, with a hammer and a notebook, studying rocks and looking for dinosaur remains.  We tend to lump dinosaurs together as though they all roamed the earth at the same time which is silly - given that they had the run of the place for nearly two hundred million years.  Susie wants to sort out exactly which dinosaurs lived when.  Although she warns, the fossil record is woefully incomplete. We will probably only ever know about 1% of what there is to know about all the dinosaurs that ever lived.           
Producer:  Anna Buckley

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Professor Jim Al-Khalili talks to leading scientists about their life and work, finding out what inspires and motivates them and asking what their discoveries might do for us in the future

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