Megalosaurus

The first dinosaur to ever be scientifically named, almost 20 years before we even had the word ‘dinosaur’. In 1824, the geologist and priest William Buckland (1784-1856) stood before the Geological Society of London and announced something that would kickstart two centuries of dinosaur science. He’d been studying large, fossilised bones which didn’t resemble those of any living animal - and, as he told his rapt audience at that meeting, he had a new name for this mysterious and unusual creature: Megalosaurus. Misha Glenny and his guests discuss why the 19th century was such profound period of theological and scientific change, and how our understanding of mid Jurassic dinosaurs has changed since. This In Our Time episode examines the story of a dinosaur that led to palaeontology as we know it today. The discussion explores the influential roles of William and Mary Buckland, how we learn about animals from over 160 million years ago, and why you’d never have seen a Megalosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex together. With Emily Rayfield Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol Emma Nicholls Vertebrate Palaeontologist and Collections Manager at Oxford University Museum of Natural History And Steve Brusatte Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh Producer: Martha Owen Reading list: Deborah Cadbury, Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science (Owl Books, 2002) Michael Taylor, Impossible Monsters: How the Discovery of Dinosaurs Changed the World (Bodley Head, 2024) Roger B. J. Benson, ‘A description of Megalosaurus bucklandii (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Bathonian of the UK and the relationships of Middle Jurassic theropods’ (Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 158, 2010) William Buckland, ‘XXI.—Notice on the Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield’ (Transactions of the Geological Society of London, 2:1, 1824) P. Wilson et al, ‘Utilizing X-ray computed tomography for heritage conservation: The case of Megalosaurus bucklandii’ (2017 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference 12MTC, Torino, 2017) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is one of more than a thousand episodes that you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. On February 20, 1824, a man called William Buckland stood before the annual meeting of the Geological Society of London. He had been studying some large fossilised bones which didn't resemble those of any living creature. And as he told his rapt audience at that meeting, he had a new name

• 2:56Speaker 04

  for this mysterious and unusual creature, Megalosaurus. This is the first ever dinosaur to be scientifically named, and that 20 years before the word dinosaur had been invented. But it kick-started the last 200 years of dinosaur science, which has changed the way we understand our planet and life upon it. Well, with me to discuss Megalosaurus, I'm joined by Emily Rayfield, Professor of Paleobiology at the University of Bristol, Emma Nicholls, Vertebrate Paleontologist and Collections Manager at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and Steve Brusatti, Professor of Paleontology and Evolution

• 3:42Speaker 04

  at the University of Edinburgh. And it's to Steve Brusatti, I'd like to come first. Steve, can you set the scene for us? What's going on in geology at the start of the 19th century?

• 3:54Speaker 05

  This is at the beginning of the 1800s, and this was a very different time from today, especially here in Britain. It hadn't been too long before, really, that you had Newton, you had Galileo, you had Kepler, and these new ideas about the place of the Earth in the cosmos, and of course, what that meant for our place in the cosmos. Now, in the early 1800s, people were starting to think more about our place on the Earth. Where did humans come from? How do humans fit in? How old is the Earth? These were big questions that were being discussed by the geologists and the naturalists of the day. And this was also around the same time that professional scientists at universities

• 4:36Speaker 05

  and museums were starting to stake a claim, this new career of being a scientist. This was the world that Buckland came into. And this was a very conservative world. This was, here in Britain, the culture was very traditional, very Christian. This was a time when most people went to church every week, when most people had a Bible in their home, when most people turned to the Bible, not just for questions of morality, but also for questions about science, about nature, about our place in the world. And in the early 1800s, at this time, all of a sudden, all around Britain, and in other parts of

• 5:18Speaker 05

  the world, but especially here, these large, mysterious bones started to emerge from the ground. As people were building canals, as people were mining rock, and these impossible monsters, these giant, weird reptilian creatures, this was like a thunderbolt. What were these things? What did they imply about the Earth and the age of the Earth and the position of people on this planet?

• 5:44Speaker 04

  So I mentioned at the start, this fellow, William Buckland. Can you tell us a bit about him? He sounds like quite a character.

• 5:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's hard to talk about Buckland without making it seem so hyperbolic that he's some sort of invention of a mad screenwriter. But Buckland really was, I think, like the original nutty professor. You know, he taught at Oxford. He would give lectures in his academic robes. He loved academic robes, and I'll return to that in a second. But he would, if he was in this room, he'd be pacing up and down in his robes. He'd have a, you know, an animal skull in one hand, an ammonite in another hand. He'd be shoving these things into people's faces, asking his students what they are. He'd be impersonating animals the way they walk. He loved animals. He had a pet bear at his house, which he

• 6:30Speaker 05

  dressed in academic robes. He loved eating animals. His all-time dream was to eat his way through the animal kingdom, and he would have these dinner parties where he'd serve mice on toast, and porpoise, and possum, and penguin. But at the same time, he was a very devoutly religious man. His father was a rector in the Anglican Church. He was an ordained minister. And he was a performer. He really was. He was a pretty well-known figure in the university and academic world. He corresponded with all the other learned men of the time. He knew Darwin. In fact, Darwin found him a little bit vulgar, a little bit too much of a self-promoter. But this is who Buckland was. And the last thing I'll

• 7:15Speaker 05

  say about Buckland is that there's a crazy story about him, which, for a long time, people thought wasn't true. But it turns out, from everything I've read, that it actually could be. And that is that not only did he want to eat his way through the animal kingdom, he also apparently, apparently, ate the pickled heart of King Louis XIV of France.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Are you serious?

• 7:40Speaker 05

  It was presented to him, this pickled heart, and he took it out of the box and plopped it in his mouth. Now, it was thought to be a tall tale for a long time, but actually, a lot of historians have followed up on this, and they think that is more likely to be true than not. So even if it's not true, the fact that story exists, that legend exists, I think, tells you something about Buckland.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Do the French know about this?

• 8:02Speaker 05

  Nobody tell them. I don't know.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Emma, he was obviously a very eccentric character, but he was also a respected scientist. Before he came up with the Megalosaurus, what had he been working on?

• 8:18Speaker 06

  I mean, I think that you can definitely both be eccentric and a scientist, and I think that probably describes quite a lot of scientists that I know, in fact. So before Megalosaurus, I mean, Buckland was an incredible geologist. You know, for all of the somewhat bizarre, insane things that he did, he was a very intelligent man. And from the point of view of vertebrate paleontology, before Megalosaurus, there were two sort of really important aspects of his work. Including Megalosaurus, for vertebrate paleontology, these were the sort of the three feathers in his cap, if you like. So the first one was, he published on the Red Lady of Pavland. Now, I hasten to add that the Red Lady of

• 8:58Speaker 06

  Pavland is not a lady, but Buckland felt that it was likely to be a female based on what the skeleton was buried with.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Where exactly was this found?

• 9:09Speaker 06

  Pavland is in Wales, and he didn't discover the skeleton, but he was the person who published on it. The reason that that was so important is because it was the oldest known burial in Britain. And then the second thing, just a year later, he published an incredible study on Kirkdale Cave. Now, Kirkdale Cave's up in Yorkshire. Again, he didn't discover Kirkdale Cave, but he did a lot of work on the fossils that were found in that cave. Kirkdale Cave was inhabited by a pack of cave hyena. So cave hyena, sadly, are extinct, but, you know, would have looked a lot like modern African hyena, slightly larger. And, as I say, lived in Britain, amongst other places, at the time. And when

• 9:54Speaker 06

  you live in, let's say, lions, for example, living in the Serengeti or whatever, they would hunt, or they would scavenge, and then they would walk away. That carcass then rots and decomposes. Whereas if you are part of a group of animals, like hyena, where they look after their young, but you live in a cave, things change. So you would go out, the adults would go out, they would hunt something, they'd bring it back to their cave for their young, and they would look after their young in this way. And hyena are very impressive animals. They have an incredible bite force to rival dinosaurs. But they didn't eat every molecule of all of the animals that were brought back. And

• 10:34Speaker 06

  so over time, these, you know, hare, and bison, and deer, all kinds of things, the bones piled up in the caves, and just like, you know, people are quite familiar with stalactites on the ceiling and stalagmites on the ground, the minerals dripping down onto the cave floor, they began to help to, over millions of years, fossilise these bones. And so essentially, jumping forward into the modern day, this became a paleontologist's dream, because it's essentially a cross-section of the ecosystem back in, back in a few million years ago.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  Amazing. And so that was in 1823, and then in 1824, he produces the Megalosaurus bones.

• 11:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, so then he brought out the big guns.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  So tell us about, tell us about the fossils that would become known as the Megalosaurus.

• 11:22Speaker 06

  Well, so the... In the original description of Megalosaurus that was published in 1824, Buckland is the only name on it, but he certainly didn't work alone. He discussed two different sets of fossil material. And one of the sets was fossil material that is at Oxford University. It's now in our care at the museum. And there were 15 specimens that were part of the University of Oxford collections. 10 of them, we still have, they're extant specimens. And one of them is the the big iconic one. And that is the jawbone. And there are a couple of reasons why that is the icon. One is a scientific reason, which is that when Megalosaurus

• 12:07Speaker 06

  as an animal was rigorously tested in the modern day to decide whether it did stand up to scientific rigor, was there is this genuinely a defensible genus of an animal? Fortunately for us, the answer to that was yes. And all of the physical diagnostic features that designate or define what Megalosaurus is or was are in the jawbone. And so from a scientific point of view, the jawbone is really the most important. I said, there are two reasons. The other is it's really cool. It's a jawbone from a theropod dinosaur, so it's got these amazing serrated recurve teeth. It's also really charismatic because although the jawbone would have had these big teeth all the way along,

• 12:51Speaker 06

  that most of them were actually lost before the jaw was buried. We know that because we have the rock that it was found in. And only one fully erupted tooth remains. And so it's this really awesome charismatic looking fossil that really, if you wanted to pick a fossil to designate the start of dinosaur science, I would pick that one.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  So Emily, what did Buckland think initially his creature was? And how did he finally come to the conclusion that it was something very new?

• 13:25Speaker 07

  So it's it's important to think about the context of the ways of thinking at the time. So we were, you know, with 35 years pre Darwin and Wallace's presentation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. I mean, it must have been quite an exciting time to be a scholar of the natural sciences because people were just beginning to think about the concept of extinction. So people were still thinking through a theological lens. But researchers such as Georges Cuvier, who was working in Paris, was a proponent of comparative anatomy. So essentially trying to understand these unusual fossilized remains that people were digging out of the ground

• 14:07Speaker 07

  through looking at living animals and trying to see similarities. And Cuvier very famously had looked at some elephant-like bones that had come out of North America and decided that they were actually not living elephants, but they represented two kind of extinct types of elephant, a mastodon and a mammoth. So the idea that animals-

• 14:27Speaker 04

  Presumably because they were much bigger than-

• 14:29Speaker 07

  They were bigger, they had slightly different features in their bones that were different to what he could see in the bones of modern day elephants. So then we have this idea that actually there were animals that existed on the earth previously that were now extinct, that they don't exist in the modern world. You know, previously through, there was a biblical idea that God would not let his creatures go extinct. So we have that. And then on the other hand, we've got the new finds. So think about in the last 10 years, coming to light are the discoveries of Mary Anning from Lyme Regis, where we're finding extinct animals that don't look anything like living animals.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  Tell us a bit about Mary Anning.

• 15:03Speaker 07

  So Mary Anning was a fossil hunter. She was working in Lyme Regis. She was discovering, along with her family, her brother and her family were discovering these unusual creatures from the rocks around Lyme Regis. They were also kind of Jurassic in age, a little bit later than Megalosaurus. But these are things like ichthyosaurs, so animals that look like dolphins, but have like teeth and jaws. Pleseosaurus, so long-necked, small-headed animals with flippers or short necks and large heads. Tarasaurus, flying reptiles. So these are animals that look a little bit like things we had around in the modern day, but were completely unusual. So ichthyos obviously means fish lizard because it's a mixture of kind of, it looks a bit like a fish, but it's got these lizard characteristics.

• 15:46Speaker 07

  So we're in this world where animals existed in the past, but not in the present. And we're finding these really unusual things. So Buckland's looking at these fossil remains and Megalosaurus means kind of great lizard. So he identified the fact that this was a carnivore. It has sharp recurve teeth. He also identified the fact that it was some reptilian kind of life form as well too. But he thought this was an extremely large animal. He took what we knew about modern lizards and he scaled it up. And he came up with an animal that was about 40 foot long. And in later descriptions, it went up to about 60 foot as well. So like 18 meters, you know, just five meters short of the length of like a tennis court, for example. So we've got this enormous animal.

• 16:27Speaker 07

  He also described it as being kind of really robust, sort of elephant-like and walking around on four legs as well too.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  But previously, people thought these fossils were other rather strange things.

• 16:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. So if we jump back in time to kind of the 1600s. So one of the earliest descriptions and illustrations of a fossil was in Robert Plot's A Natural History of Oxfordshire. So he'd come into the possession of material that had come from the Stonesfield Quarry, which was being quarried for a slate, lovely Cotswold roofing slate, which is where the bones of Megalosaurus had been found. And so we're back in the 1600s now and he'd recognized this as being a large thigh bone. But at the time, the ways of thinking, we're pre kind of thinking about extinction now, was that these were either, you know, some kind of living animal, perhaps it was the remains of a kind of a Roman war elephant.

• 17:22Speaker 07

  Later on, people debated that, saying, well, you know, there weren't any historical evidence of elephants in England. Or it could be giants. You know, the Bible, the book of Genesis describes giants walking the earth in ancient times. So one explanation was these massive bones were actually, you know, male or female giants, products of the sons of gods and human women.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  So Steve, what did Buckland do with these bones next? I talked about the Geological Society earlier. How did he interpret it and present it to the outside world?

• 17:55Speaker 05

  Buckland's talk at the Geological Society in 1824, this was one of these landmark moments in the history of science. And of course, we recognize it today as the starting point, the the starting pistol for dino mania. And really it is, you know, because the public started to become fascinated as well. Because it wasn't only Buckland that was discovering these fossils. As Emily is talking about, Mary Anning down in Lyme Regis had been discovering other bizarre, giant, weird, clearly extinct reptilian creatures for several decades. And then people started to find others across Europe and eventually as the American frontier opened. So Buckland's talk was the starting point.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  And these dinosaurs, they became a subject of fascination, but they weren't dinosaurs yet. It took another 20 years for Richard Owen, who founded the Natural History Museum, to come up with that term. And he came up with that term because other people started to find other bones, including a county doctor, Gideon Mantell, who actually stood up after Buckland gave his talk at the Geological Society and said, hi, I think I found something too. And he mentioned these bones of this strange kind of giant reptilian creature that he found. That's what became Iguanodon, that soon became the second dinosaur, given a formal scientific name. So quite quickly, people started to find more of these animals.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  And this became a subject of public fascination because imagine, and I think it's hard for us to imagine just how deeply conservative and traditional and religious Britain was then. This was a thunderbolt from out of nowhere. What are these giant creatures?

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Well, I wanted to ask about Buckland himself because as you said, he was an ordained minister. And he wrote religious treatises and so on. How does he reconcile his own beliefs? Because he was, you know, deeply religious with evidence that is clearly turning biblical stories on their head?

• 20:02Speaker 05

  He certainly didn't seem to lose his faith or even question it. And Buckland and many of the other collectors and naturalists and early scientists of this time, they were largely religious devout men, almost entirely men. And many of them were ordained ministers. So at that time, many of them were trying to reconcile these discoveries with the Bible. And I mean, it makes a lot of sense. If you were an atheist, and hardly anybody was publicly, you couldn't graduate from university. You couldn't be elected to public office. I mean, you couldn't even do that if you're a Catholic. So this was a very different time and they were not trying to upset the old order. They were not trying to knock down traditional religious values. They very much were trying to reconcile.

• 20:45Speaker 05

  So Buckland, very famously, in the decade after he announces Megalosaurus, he's commissioned to write a Bridgewater Treatise. This was the series of books that was commissioned by the Royal Society. The Earl of Bridgewater, another one of these characters from that era, this very wealthy man who was an ordained minister, but he left his parish and he moved to France and he led this frivolous life of decadence and fathered all of these illegitimate children. And he kind of repented on his deathbed. And he gave this enormous sum of money to the Royal Society to write a series of books to celebrate the power and the glory and the majesty of God's creation. And so the Royal Society commissioned different scholars of the time to write different books.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  There were ones on chemistry, ones on physics, ones on astronomy. Buckland was asked to write the one on geology. And he wrote it and it was very much a book that got a lot of attention at that time. I mean, there were no bestseller lists then, but it would have been one. It was read around the world, not just in Britain. And in that book, he laid out the case for how these fossils do not threaten- The authority of the Bible, the authority of the church. In fact, these fossils show the power of God, the creativity of God. So he very much fit these fossils into a biblical worldview. But at the same time, there were younger naturalists and scientists like a certain young guy who had just got off a boat called the Beagle that had sailed around the world.

• 22:14Speaker 05

  And the younger generation was reading this. They were looking at these fossils. They were becoming intrigued by these fossils. They were not really interpreting them through a biblical lens. They were getting more radical ideas.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  Emma, tell us about some of the other characters around Buckland, including the woman who would later become his wife and how important they were. Because it wasn't just this one man, was it?

• 22:40Speaker 06

  No, absolutely not. So Buckland is the only person named on the scientific publication in 1824. But yeah, he certainly worked with other people. One person that he really got a lot of help from, or you know, really had a lot of discussion with was William Connybeath over in France. And if you Google, who came up with the name Megalosaurus? Depending on your source, you'll get a whole bunch of different names. And we actually think that Connybeath came up with the name Megalosaurus, which as Emily said, means great lizard. But sometimes you might read that it was James Parkinson who came up with the name. Now, James Parkinson was a physician, famous, of course, for discovering Parkinson's disease. And James Parkinson is part of the story because he, it seems, was actually the first

• 23:24Speaker 06

  person to use the name Megalosaurus in public. So sometimes he's credited with it. But we're pretty sure that it was Connybeath. So we've mentioned previously, the county doctor that Steve mentioned, Gideon Mantell. Now, when I was talking about the suite of Megalosaurus fossils that are described in the 1824 paper, I said that there were two groups of fossils. And one of them is the one that we have at the University of Oxford. The other one belonged to Gideon Mantell. And when William Buckland was putting together the paper, he asked Mary Morland at the time, her name at the time was Mary Morland, they obviously got on very well because they got married a year later. And she was an incredible illustrator and she drew the specimens that we had at Oxford

• 24:09Speaker 06

  because she lived in Oxford. She, you know, she was part of that group. And so those are the illustrations that were actually put into the 1824 paper. Now, moving into the mid to the late 1800s, this slow burn scheme of type specimens came into being. And type specimens are, if you name a new genus or a species of a plant or animal, say, in paleontology, obviously you can't just decide that you've found something, you make something up. You've got to describe something physical. And so you would describe it in your, in your scientific paper, you'd illustrate it. In the modern day, you might still draw it, but you might use CT scans, you might use photogrammetry, you know, whatever happens to be. And the point is that you are creating a description, you're creating a template by

• 24:54Speaker 06

  which all subsequent discoveries or other discoveries that may or may not be the same thing can be compared to. And so that fossil, that becomes what we call the type specimen. And so scientifically, that's the most, at the time, that's the most important specimen. Now, if you go back to Megalosaurus, the type specimen scheme didn't exist at that point. And so, does that matter? Well, at the time, it didn't matter. It matters now. And it certainly matters when you're talking about the first dinosaur to ever be scientifically named and described. So going back to Mantell and Buckland's collections that were both talked about in the paper, it was only the University of Oxford collections that were actually figured and illustrated. So moving forward into the modern day, even though Mantell's collections went to the

• 25:39Speaker 06

  Natural History Museum in London, they're not figured. So we don't know for sure exactly which specific specimens are being described in Buckland's paper. And so the type specimens are the ones from Oxford and only the ones from Oxford. So I'm very sorry to the Natural History Museum in London, but I'm afraid that Oxford has all of the type specimens of Megalosaurus.

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• 28:50Speaker 04

  Talking about the specimens, Emily, we don't have a full Megalosaurus. So there's a degree of sort of guesswork and speculation about this. So given that, what impact scientifically did Buckland have by describing the Megalosaurus at the time and since?

• 29:12Speaker 06

  Yes, so as you, as you say, we still don't have a full specimen, what we would call it, associated material of Megalosaurus, you know, a complete specimen that we can see what the whole skeleton looks like. But if we go back at the time as well and think about the concepts of the ways people were thinking at the time. So we're in 1824. Not only do we have the idea now that animals existed in the past, that they're not around in the present day, there might be extinction. And we're also at a time when the geologist and surveyor William Smith is also starting to create these geological maps of counties and then of England as well. So, and the idea being recognized that the rocks have been laid down in succession and

• 29:56Speaker 06

  that you have fossils which distinguish a particular layer of those rocks that are not found in rocks earlier or since. And scientifically, one of the things that Buckland's discovery, the description of Megalosaurus did, along with the soon to follow other dinosaurs that were described, like Iguana Don, and then also soon after that, Heliosaurus as well, with, creates this idea that was this past age of reptiles. So that there was a time when these giant lumbering animals lived on Earth. And what was interesting, at the same time that Buckland presented Megalosaurus to the Geological Society, he also described a fossil mammal from the same area. And so that created quite a stir as well, too, because you were thinking you've got this age of reptiles, but then also you've got these mammals living alongside, but that's perhaps another program.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Just out of interest, what, what sort of mammal was that? Because this is much further back than I imagined mammals to exist.

• 30:47Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly. So this is a very, very early representative of mammals and kind of before the living groups of mammals that we know today all appeared on the scene. So it's much earlier than that, but it is, it does have some characteristics of mammals.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Because I think it's important to stress that the Megalosaurus is much earlier than the sort of classic dinosaurs like, like T. rex.

• 31:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. Tens of millions of years earlier than that. So we're in the Middle Jurassic at this time, about 166 million years ago. If you think about animals like T. rex, for example, you're talking about 66 million years ago. So we've got 100 million years separating those animals. And also earlier than that as well, we've got dinosaurs going back to probably around 200 million years. So if you think about that timeframe, there's a huge amount of time that's elapsed, even since the origin of dinosaurs. And then between Megalosaurus and then things like T. rex.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  And that's extraordinary to contemplate, the extent of that, that period. So we're right in the middle with the Megalosaurus, which is the Middle Jurassic period, as you said. Steve, can you describe to us what the world looked like in the Middle Jurassic period?

• 32:01Speaker 05

  The Middle Jurassic, as Emily said, is a long time ago. I mean, T. rex is closer to us than it was to Megalosaurus. And I'll repeat that because I think this is one of these facts that it still blows my mind studying dinosaurs. T. rex is closer in time to us than it was to Megalosaurus. So back in the Middle Jurassic, the supercontinent of Pangaea, which had once existed, all of the land had been gathered together into this one giant slab that stretched from the North Pole to the South Pole. That supercontinent had begun to split apart about 200 million years ago, but it was just beginning to fracture. So the modern continents were beginning to take shape, and you had these very narrow oceans in between. And there was this sliver

• 32:44Speaker 05

  of an ocean that was the Proto-Atlantic. And in that ocean was a series of islands, including some islands that now are parts of what would be Britain. You know, it was a different shaped island. It's not like modern Britain was the same shape back then. But this is why we have fossils from that time in England, but also in Scotland. So my crew in Edinburgh, we work a lot on the Isle of Skye. Emily's worked on Skye in the past. There's also Middle Jurassic fossils in Scotland. Back when these animals like Megalosaurus were living in the Middle Jurassic on these islands, the world was much warmer. There were no big ice caps at the poles, no big glaciers, maybe on the tallest mountain somewhere, but that's it. The world was so much warmer, and Britain would have been

• 33:29Speaker 05

  subtropical. So imagine a Britain that was like the Canary Islands, or like Southern California. That's the sort of world. But the plants would have been totally different. There would have been nothing with fruits, nothing with flowers, very different types of trees. That's the world Megalosaurus lived in. And it was the largest predator, as far as we know, in its ecosystem. But there were also long-necked dinosaurs. There were stegosaurs, the ones with plates on their backs, and many other smaller dinosaurs.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Emma, I wanted to ask you that. What else have we got in the Middle Jurassic period apart from the Megalosaurus?

• 34:02Speaker 06

  Well, so in the Middle Jurassic of Oxfordshire, for example, where the type specimens are from, and where we also have trackways of Megalosaurus as well, we know that we had other dinosaurs, such as Eustreptospondylus, which is a dinosaur a lot like Megalosaurus, closely related, a little bit smaller. So Megalosaurus, we think, could have grown up to about nine meters in length. Eustreptospondylus, probably about six meters in length. But the only specimen we have in the world is actually a sub-adult, so, you know, we don't know for sure. We also have herbivores. Steve's named some. But in Oxfordshire, we've got Cetusaurus, for example, which is a long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur called a sauropod. So

• 34:43Speaker 06

  very famous ones are Brontosaurus, Brachiosaurus, for example. But it's worth saying that of all the dinosaurs that we know, people think we know a lot about dinosaurs. Actually, that's not true. We know very little about dinosaurs. And the number of dinosaurs that we know of, there are around 700 genera, but we've already elucidated how many millions of years dinosaurs have been around for. And dinosaurs are still around. Birds are dinosaurs. So dinosaurs have been around for over 200 million years. So think about how many species of dinosaurs there must actually have been compared to what we know. So those are some of the dinosaurs that we know would have been around, but it's a drop in the ocean. There would have been an awful lot more.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  So Emily, Buckland, we mentioned earlier, he referred to it as a four-legged lizard, I think. How much did Buckland get right about Megalosaurus? And what have we learnt about the beast since?

• 35:42Speaker 07

  So Buckland got right the fact that it was a really large carnivore. So those blade-like serrated teeth are indicative of something that's eating meat. He was right in the sense that it was in somewhat reptilian. So if we remember, we're talking about a time like nearly two decades before the concept of dinosaurs, and the name dinosaurio was actually announced. So he wasn't even aware that there was a thing called a dinosaur. But dinosaurs are fit within that kind of wider group that we think of as kind of reptilian. So he got that right. The things that he didn't get right were that it's not four-legged, it walks on two legs. But again, it goes back to this idea of, at the time, people

• 36:26Speaker 07

  had no concept of these giant, two-legged, massive carnivorous animals that we're all familiar with now, since childhood, you know, things like T. rex and other large carnivores like Megalosaurus. One interesting thing that he did get right, which was a really smart observation, was that rather than walking like a lizard with its arms out to the side, Megalosaurus had its legs underneath its body. And this is a characteristic trait of dinosaurs, to have its legs under the body and the top of the hip pointing inwards into an open hip socket. So Buckland realised that that was the case. So that was a really astute observation at the time.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  And was, do we think that Megalosaurus was one of the first species to start walking in that way? Or is there evidence that it had been happening for some time?

• 37:15Speaker 07

  Since the origin of dinosaurs, there were groups, all the dinosaurs were walking with their legs underneath their body. That is a kind of characteristic trait. It puts your legs under your body, it enables you to have a longer stride length, like we do, essentially. Mammals do the same thing. So rather than having our legs out to the side and using a twisting of our bodies to move, we have the legs under our bodies. And that enables us to walk in a kind of what we call a parasagittal way of moving.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  I'll take your word for it. So, Emma, it was the first name dinosaur, but let's face it, it's not the best-known dinosaur today. Why did Megalosaurus, which captured the public so intensely in the 1820s, it's kind of dropped out of our common knowledge about dinosaurs? I'm going to be perfectly honest here, I had not heard of a Megalosaurus before we started researching this program. But I mean, I just wonder why it sort of dropped out.

• 38:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's interesting, because Megalosaurus, as you say, it started dinosaur science, it started global fandom, this phenomenon that we have. And yet, yeah, it's not that well-known. It's not even as though it's not the most popular. It's actually not that well-known by the public. So Megalosaurus, as Emily was describing, we don't have a whole skeleton. We know what it would have looked like, and that's because we can use other closely related animals to basically fill in the missing puzzle pieces. So we've got an accurate picture of what it would have looked like now. But I think, to be honest, I think the reason that other dinosaurs have overtaken Megalosaurus in the public

• 38:52Speaker 06

  imagination, I'm going to lay the blame at the feet of Hollywood, because, to be honest, when Tyrannosaurus was named in 1900, yes, okay, there was more of it, fine, so we knew what it looked like, perhaps. But, you know, going back to, even right back to 1925, the black and white silent film, The Lost World.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  The Lost World, yes.

• 39:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, an incredible new type of film. And, you know, newspapers at the time actually reported people leaving the cinema because they were frightened. They hadn't seen stop-motion animation. They thought these animals were real. And, you know, maybe moving forward slightly to 1940, Disney's Fantasia, the dinosaurs that were put on screen in these films, in both of those films as examples, are North American. There are T. rex, there are Allosaurus, there's stegosaurus, there's a triceratops. Yeah, it's not Megalosaurus.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  So do you think there's a case for Jurassic Park, the prequel?

• 39:50Speaker 06

  Yes, I write a daily letter.

• 39:52Speaker 07

  The Oxfordshire version.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 39:56Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 39:58Speaker 04

  So Steve, we've established the Megalosaurus wouldn't be hanging out with the T. rex, but they look quite similar. I mean, it's, you know, even though they're tens of millions of years apart, clearly, things didn't develop that dramatically.

• 40:12Speaker 05

  They do look quite similar. And, you know, I'm somebody who studies dinosaurs for my job, and I know all the minutiae, but I don't get offended if somebody looks at a Megalosaurus and says that looks like a little T. rex, because it really does. I mean, it's a meat-eating dinosaur. It walked on its hind legs. It had smaller arms. It had these ferocious steak-knife teeth. It was basically an early cousin, a smaller version of a T. rex. And this goes back to what Emily was just talking about. Dinosaurs go back a long way. They go back all the way to the Triassic period, the time of Pangaea, 230 million years ago or more. And early on in their evolution, they started to walk upright, and they evolved some of these classic features. It was clearly a very successful evolutionary

• 40:56Speaker 05

  adaptation, and that persisted, and it persists in birds today. I know that a sparrow doesn't look like a T. rex, but when you see a bird walking around, hopping around, it's walking in the same basic way that a Megalosaurus did with its legs underneath its body.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  So Holly, are you telling us that dinosaurs existed already before the continents broke apart?

• 41:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. The origin story of dinosaurs goes back to Pangaea. Pangaea was their birthplace. And that goes to show, I think, just the antiquity of all of this. We are dealing with animals that go back more than 230 million years, and they still exist today as birds.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Would that explain why you'll find bones in China, which are not dissimilar from bones you might find in, say, the United States?

• 41:42Speaker 05

  Absolutely, especially earlier on in the Triassic period, when the land was connected. It's not that any dinosaur could just walk anywhere. I mean, Pangaea was huge. There were deserts. There were other barriers. When you got into the Jurassic, the continents were beginning to split, but they were still quite close. And there were probably lots of land corridors and land bridges, and as sea level would rise and fall, things could move around. So there are dinosaurs like Megalosaurus in China, in the US, that are from a similar age. So it's not that the entire world would have been populated by Megalosaurus. It is very much this classic quintessential homegrown British dinosaur, but it did have cousins that were living quite widely afield, 160, 170 million years ago.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Emily, I want you to tell us about something, a fascinating thing, which is the trackways of the Megalosaurus. What do trackways tell us? What are they?

• 42:35Speaker 07

  So fossils are not only the body fossils, not only the shells and bones, but we can also get behavioural remnants, things like tracks. And dinosaurs are not unique in that they leave trackways, like many other types of animals do. And back in 1997, in Ardley, which is in partly between Oxford and Banbury, a quarry was discovered, a bedding plain, where it was peppered with trackways. Some of them were three-toed, which is a distinctive track made by theropod dinosaurs, the group to which Megalosaurus and T. rex belong to. Others were a collection of kind of really giant round prints compiled, and then sort of small, kind of curved half-moon prints, which are classic prints made by the large

• 43:17Speaker 07

  sauropod dinosaurs like Cetusaurus that Emma was describing. So we don't know for sure what animals made these tracks. They're not dead at the end of the track. But the largest animals around at that time that probably made the tracks were Megalosaurus and Cetusaurus. Now, tracks are neat because... Way back in the seventies, McNeil Alexander, who was a biomechanist, had a genius interpretation of tracks to realise that there's a relationship between the stride length of a track and also how high the hip of the track maker was and the speed that animal was actually moving in. So by measuring the distance of a stride and by measuring, he also realised there's

• 44:01Speaker 07

  a rough relationship that the length of the foot is about four times that is the height of the hip. So you can measure the trackways and you can work out from that a rough estimate of how fast that animal's moving. And when you apply that to some of the trackways from Oxfordshire that were probably made by Megalosaurus, it reveals two really neat things. One is that the animal was moving, first of all, the one track, it starts off moving about four miles an hour and its legs were a little bit out to the side, and we talked about having legs and things, and its toes are pointing inwards. And then during the track moving along, it moves its legs underneath its body more, points its toes forward, and the speed increases to around 18 miles an hour. So not only do we get an idea of how fast these animals roughly were moving, we can

• 44:46Speaker 07

  also see that how they were moving as well, that they had their legs a little bit out to the side, they move them right underneath their body when they were running, a bit like we do, you know, when we really start running if we can. I don't do that, run that fast, but you you start moving your legs really underneath your body and these dinosaurs were doing the same thing.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  Emily, you've actually been working on the most recently discovered dinosaur highway. What have you been doing on those trackways and what have you found?

• 45:11Speaker 06

  So the 1997 Ardley trackways are actually the same horizon as the trackways that have been discovered in Dewas Farm. And so together, those sites are one of the largest dinosaur trackway sites in the world when put together. So myself and my colleague Duncan Murdoch at Oxford, Kirsty Edgar and Richard Butler at Birmingham, the four of us for the last three years have had the great privilege, frankly, to lead excavations at Dewas Farm, digging up these dinosaur footprints. And it's been amazing. So the Megalosaurus was first published in 1824, of course, as we've talked about already. And 200 years later, we were leading the excavation of Dewas Farm.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  And so literally in the 200th anniversary, in the bicentenary year of Megalosaurus, first dinosaur ever named, as we've said, we were there digging up new footprints, discovering new things about this animal. And so, you know, every time I talk about that, it gives me goosebumps to think about the sheer coincidence, frankly, of being able to do that in the 200th year. But also there was, you know, moments like Justin Pitts, I'm not joking, that is his name, he's one of the site managers, and he was excavating some of these footprints in front of us. And my colleagues were off to the side having a conversation. Justin couldn't see exactly what was on the floor in front of him because the diggers in the way.

• 46:35Speaker 06

  And so in that moment, I realised not only was I the first human that had ever seen those footprints, but I will always be the first human that had ever seen those dinosaur footprints. And that that was amazing.

• 46:50Speaker 04

  And there's at one point where I believe that you work out that a dinosaur was looking behind itself to see what was coming after it.

• 47:00Speaker 06

  I mean, sadly, we were not there 166 million years ago, I would have loved to have been. So we can only elucidate things from the fossil record. But something, as Emily mentioned earlier, something really incredible about trace fossils is that body fossils tell you what an animal might have looked like. Trace fossils show you their behaviour. I mean, we were literally looking at an individual animal's behaviour. This trackway that you're referring to, the Megalosaurus, the predator, and the Cetusaurus, which is the plant eater, the herbivore, the trackways cross over each other. And the Megalosaurus, we know, we're pretty sure came second because the the back of the foot of the Megalosaurus has crushed the side of what we call the displacement rim.

• 47:44Speaker 06

  So at the front of a large footprint like a Cetusaurus, as we mentioned, is about 18 metres in length, as the animal lifted its foot up, it pushed some of the mud forward. And so it leaves this sort of banana shaped lump of mud that that hardens, it lithifies over time. So that's remain, it's preserved. And so we know that Megalosaurus came second. And so that's one piece of information. The second piece of information that helped us come up with that potential possibility of what was happening was that the the main Cetusaurus trackway, the area that was excavated in one go was 150 metres. We know it went further, but in one exposure, we had 150 metres exposed and the animal

• 48:24Speaker 06

  was walking at a very, very regular pace the whole way up to just in front of where this Megalosaurus crossed over, where it did something a bit odd. It put its front left foot down out of sequence too early, if you like. And if you imagine building the skeleton up from where the footprints lay, why has it done that? Well, it's entirely feasible that it is looking over its left shoulder. And frankly, if you have a nine metre predator following you, I would be looking over my shoulder as well. So, you know, it might not be what happened, but that is one way of interpreting what we can see.

• 49:00Speaker 04

  Emily, just to come back to this idea of how do we really know what a Megalosaurus was when we just don't have enough bones? How can you tell from a jawbone, for example, how it walks?

• 49:11Speaker 07

  More maybe not from a jawbone, but we've got other bones. Fortunately, we've got some limb bones as well, too. I think there's two ways. One is that is using the same kind of methods that the classic anatomists were using, so the principle of comparative anatomy. We now think of comparative anatomy not only in trying to look at fossils and living animals that might be doing the same things, but also looking at fossils and living animals that are quite closely related. And we can look for evidence for things like the shape of the teeth is a real giveaway for what animals were eating. We can look at things like the the thickness of some of the bones that are supporting the body. There's a real relationship there between how thick a bone is and the body mass of that animal. We've been able to test that in living animals and then extrapolate that back to dinosaurs to give us an estimate.

• 49:56Speaker 07

  We can also use things like where roughened patches or bumps and lumps on the bone where we muscles might have attached, you know, we we can look at the nearest living relatives of dinosaurs, which on the one hand are birds, as we've discussed, and on the other hand are crocodiles. Where do we find similar patterns on the bones that we see on the bones of these living animals? Is that because the same muscles and tendons are attaching there? If they do, what kind of leverage do those muscles and tendons give the jaws, the limbs? Are they moving fast? Are they moving forcefully? And then we can use modern techniques like X-rays to see inside the bones themselves. That can give us an idea of the shape of the brain, you know, the cavity that's left by the brain. When we flood fill that cavity in a digital model, what's the shape of it? What was the shape of the animal's brain?

• 50:37Speaker 07

  How big were different regions that were to do with sensing smell, for example? We can use computer models that are used in biomechanics to look at, for example, you know, if you were doing sports science, you know, and you were trying to see how someone's limbs were moving, we can use those same kinds of methods to look at our models of dinosaurs and say, right, if we apply those muscles, how do those limbs move? Therefore, how quickly are they moving? How fast might that animal be actually moving? So there's a whole range of kind of classic and modern techniques available to us.

• 51:07Speaker 04

  Steve, tell us, Buckland described the Megalosaurus, first of all, 200 years ago. What has happened in the field of dinosaur science since then and what are we still missing?

• 51:21Speaker 05

  Wow, I mean, it's been 200 years of discovery and it very much dinosaur paleontology at its heart is a discovery science. Now, not every single paleontologist, but many paleontologists spend a lot of time going out looking for fossils. There are still a lot of fossils to be found. And each fossil is a clue. Each fossil can tell us something new and people are still finding new species, totally new types of dinosaurs. And of course, this is happening more in places that are opening up, large countries, countries that are growing, countries that are training a lot of young scientists and places like China, Brazil, Argentina, Mongolia, South Africa. I mean, I I have colleagues in Mongolia right now that are doing an excavation as we speak.

• 52:02Speaker 05

  So there are a lot of new fossils, still 40, 50 new species a year. But the technology, of course, has helped tremendously. And paleontologists, we love to borrow technology from other fields and use all sorts of technology. Emily's a prime example of that. Emily, I mean, she's been very, you know, humble in the way she's talking about biomechanics throughout the the talk, but I mean, Emily is the pioneers in using these engineering techniques and physics techniques to understand how dinosaurs fed, how they moved. And I mean, Emily can tell you about that, I won't put words in her mouth. But I mean, these are techniques from other disciplines. We use cat scanning a lot to see inside of fossils, to see inside the brain cavity, to help us understand what the brains and senses were like.

• 52:45Speaker 05

  And we've just gained a much greater appreciation for what dinosaurs are like as living animals. But I think one thing I just have to to hammer home on is when Buckland described Megalosaurus, not only did he not know it was a dinosaur because that word, that concept didn't exist yet, but he had no concept of evolution. In fact, he was just totally aghast. He was totally against any idea that species could change over time. He never changed his mind. He died before Darwin published The Origin of Species, he died a few years before, but he wouldn't have changed his mind.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  What do you imagine, how would he have reacted to The Origin of the Species?

• 53:21Speaker 05

  He would have not accepted it because he was so devout. He would not have accepted that the authority of the Bible could be challenged in that way. In fact, when he wrote The Bridgewater Treatise, a huge part of that book was making the argument that the fossil record in the 1830s, this was. Did not support this radical new idea people were whispering about that species could transmutate over time. So Buckland would not have accepted Darwin's ideas. Darwin knew it because Darwin and Buckland, they knew each other. They got on, but they had a little bit of friction. But I think when you say in 200 years, what have we learned? Well, we've learned that dinosaurs evolved. I mean, when these first dinosaurs were found,

• 54:03Speaker 05

  there was not that concept that existed that they could change over time. They are now one of our premier records of how a major group of animals changes over long periods of time, in concert with changes in climate and changes in the environment. So dinosaurs are a huge source of information for us, understanding how evolution works.

• 54:23Speaker 07

  And there's a nice bit, actually, in the Bridgewater Treaties, isn't there, where Buckland describes Megalosaurus as evidence of a benevolent god and the fact that this giant animal with really sharp teeth is evident of, what is it, having a kind of quick death, basically, which is evidence of a benevolent god, that it would create such, the god would create such a fearsome predator that he would allow you to die real quickly.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  I'm still sort of struggling, the idea of the Garden of Eden with, you know, sort of Megalosaurus bumping into Adam and Eve. I mean, it's like, it must have been intellectually very challenging.

• 54:56Speaker 05

  Well, we're chuckling about it, we're joking about it, and I don't know the religious views of everybody around the table or anything. But, you know, today we have that vantage point. But imagine, imagine you're in the 1820s, your world, the whole way you see the world, not just the moral authority, but the way you understand how the world operates, it comes from the Bible. So the discovery of these giant bones, it would have rocked your concept of the world.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  But it's also, it's also quite interesting, because this is 150 years or so after Kepler, Galileo, and then philosophers like Spinoza are beginning

• 55:34Speaker 05

  Spinoza, now we're getting into it.

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Really beginning to challenge Christian theology.

• 55:42Speaker 07

  I think you've still, about the backdrop of that, though, you've got the ideas now of people like Hutton and Lyle, this principle of uniformitarianism, opposed to Cuvier's idea of animals going extinct, but through some kind of catastrophic event that also changed the structure of the earth. That you actually, on the other hand, you've got this argument that the earth is extremely old, and the processes that we see every day around us, erosion, uplift, are what's happened over huge, vast timescales that we can't comprehend, and that's what's created the earth. But still, Cuvier was very fond of, was prone to the catastrophism idea, but his idea was that species would kind of move in from somewhere else. And then it was taken on in a kind of biblical explanation

• 56:25Speaker 07

  by people like Buckland and others to say, actually, this is evidence of the flood, or previous floods, for example.

• 56:31Speaker 05

  Previous series of creations, creations that a benevolent god allowed to flourish for a period of time, maybe not a literal day, like in the Bible, but then God put a stop to it to create something new. That is very much how Buckland was reconciling things in real time, this deeply devout man, but also this man who was very curious about the natural world, who collected fossils, who was enthralled by fossils. He had to put these pieces together in his mind, and that's how he did it. But of course, Darwin came later, and society moves on, science moves on, and now we understand, and Darwin did himself. He wrote about dinosaurs in the later editions of The Origin of Species, even wrote about birds coming from dinosaurs in the very last edition of The Origin.

• 57:13Speaker 04

  Okay, as a final question, which one of the three of you is going to take on the relationship between Megalosaurus and Scrotum humanum?

• 57:23Speaker 07

  I'm absolutely going to take this. I want to talk about it also because I've researched it as well.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Emily.

• 57:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, right. So, yeah, Scrotum humanum, I think this, obviously, we need to backtrack at this point for context. So we earlier discussed Robert Plot, who in 1676 had come into the possession of this giant thigh bone. And in fact, it was the end of a giant thigh bone. And so this is the bit of the femur, the bit that articulates with our knee. And so if you can imagine the structure, it's got two big kind of knobs on the end, and then a, no pun intended, and then a distinct groove in between them. And Plot illustrated this in his book of the next year, 1677, on the Natural History of Oxfordshire. Now,

• 58:10Speaker 07

  later on, we jump forwards in time to 1763, to someone called Richard Brooks. He was a physician, he'd travelled widely, he'd written and translated books about medicine, natural history, fishing. And he described this giant thigh bone. In a text, he talks about the Roman war elephant, he talks about giant, you know, that maybe it's not that. But in the illustration, he takes Plot's illustration, and next to it, on the same page, there's something that looks a bit like a heart. And then there's a description at the top, anthropocardites. And then there's something like an ovaloid structure, which has got the description kidney stone above it. And then we have our thigh bone, and above it is the word scrotum humanum. And so there's been much debate since then about

• 58:55Speaker 07

  whether this was a kind of a new name that was attributed to the structure, or whether it was actually just a kind of descriptive wording of what the structure actually looked like, kidney stone, like something that looks like a human heart. But in the 90s, there was a petition to the Menkata, the International Court of Zoonological Menkata, who just, who rule on what you can and can't call things, basically, if you describe a new species, that actually Megalosaurus bucklandi shouldn't exist, because it was preceded by scrotum humanum. And actually, when the book was published in 1763, this actually postated the origin of the Linnaean system of taxonomy. So, you know, we're Homo sapiens, this idea

• 59:36Speaker 07

  that you've got your classes, orders, genus, et cetera. However, the ICZN ruled that it was a, it was a lost name, an old name, and therefore Megalosaurus bucklandi should stay. So we're very fortunate that it's actually the case.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  My thanks to Emma Nicholls, Emily Rayfield, and Steve Brusatti. Next week, we'll be discussing the Battle of Antietam, the deadliest day in the American Civil War, and a crucial step towards emancipation. Thank you for joining us.

• 1:00:07Speaker 07

  Ah.

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  Can we have some tea? Yeah, can we get, can we get a photo? In Our Time with Misha Glenni was produced by Martha Owen. It's a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. If you're in the UK, you can access episodes 28 days early by subscribing to In Our Time on BBC Sounds or watching on BBC iPlayer. If you're outside the UK, you can listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  I'm Daryl Bree.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  And I'm Hannah Fry.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  And we're back with another series of Curious Cases, exploring a whole new set of scientific head scratchers, including

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  Our identical twins, basically human clones.

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  Why is yawning so contagious?

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  What is the mathematical magic behind tessellation?

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  And why do we find tiny baby animals so cute?

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  We are tackling all of these vitally important questions and more in a fresh batch of curious cases. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Sometimes we all need an extra help in hand, especially with the tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is an AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report, and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you, and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system, and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit

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  right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack. And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategising your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai/solve.