Why you can’t hide from a T. rex, with Jared Voris

Dino Quest

Apple Podcasts

Why you can’t hide from a T. rex, with Jared Voris

The most important part of your nose is inside your brain. Your nose catches the smell, but it’s a lump at the front of your brain that works out what it is: sweet, horrible, or dangerous, like gas in the kitchen. Humans tend to put smell near the bottom of their list of senses. For most animals it’s essential, for marking territory, finding each other and sniffing out food.

This week’s word is olfactory bulb. That’s the lump. The bigger it is for your size, the better your nose, and because it takes up room in the skull, it leaves a space scientists can measure. But room in a head is a trade-off. A bigger bulb means a bigger head and a bigger brain, and a bigger brain needs more energy and more food.

Lauren and Cassius Morrison hear from Dr Jared Voris, a palaeontologist at the University of Calgary in Canada who studies T. rex and its relatives. When you rebuild a tyrannosaur’s brain, the smell bulbs run almost half its length, so T. rex could probably sniff out prey, a dead animal or anything else nearby, the way a wolf or a bear does today. Nobody has a real dinosaur brain, so long ago the American Museum of Natural History sawed a T. rex braincase in half to look inside. Now scientists put skulls through a CT scanner, a 3D X-ray, and rebuild the shape of the brain on a computer without breaking anything. Plant-eaters had good noses too, perhaps for finding water and telling which plants were safe to eat.

Fresh from the Dig starts with Jared’s own tyrannosaur, Thanatotheristes, the “reaper of death”, which had unusual ridges along its long face. It was found in Alberta by a family who spotted the bones, photographed them and told the museum instead of digging them up themselves. Then ankylosaurs, whose nasal passages loop round and round inside the skull and may have worked like air conditioning under all that armour. And the kiwi, which has its nostrils at the very tip of its beak and sniffs out worms on the forest floor at night. In the Dino-Mite Question, Ada, six, from Bristol, asks whether she could hide from a T. rex. Behind a tree it can’t see you, but it can smell you, and follow the trail you left ten minutes ago. Your best bet is to stand downwind.

Then it’s Build a Dino Lab. Week eight is the nose: huge T. rex-style smell bulbs that need a bigger skull and more food, or small bulbs and a hawk’s sharp eyes. Lauren picks the big bulbs. A hawk’s eyes work because it can fly and look down from above, and this dinosaur lives on the ground among the trees, where you can’t see very far and smell matters most. Next week, the lights go off.