9 Sept 2026
Dinosaurs on Mars
A supermarket tabloid once ran a front page reading "Space Probe Finds Dinosaurs on Mars." That issue ended up pinned to the wall of the Montana dig trailer in Jurassic Park — and it's the starting point for a wander through everything that connects palaeontology and space.
Travis and Alyssa cover the 1992 Weekly World News hoax and how it accidentally recreated the founding error of dinosaur science, the supernovae that may have triggered two mass extinctions, the asteroid ejecta you can touch in the Flinders Ranges, the hypothesis that Earth had rings while trilobites were alive, dinosaurs living on the far side of the galaxy, and NASA's carefully-worded potential biosignature on Mars.
Plus: 65, Strange New Worlds, Love, Death & Robots, and why every screen dinosaur still says 65 million years when the answer changed in 2012.
Recorded on the 60th anniversary of Star Trek.
Papers and sources
Quintana, A.L., Wright, N.J. et al. (2025). "A census of OB stars within 1 kpc and the star formation and core collapse supernova rates of the Milky Way." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Royal Astronomical Society release: https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/violent-supernovae-triggered-least-two-earth-extinctions (https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/violent-supernovae-triggered-least-two-earth-extinctions) Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08286 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08286)
Tomkins, A.G., Martin, E.L. & Cawood, P.A. (2024). "Evidence suggesting that earth had a ring in the Ordovician." Earth and Planetary Science Letters 646: 118991. (Monash University) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2024.118991 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2024.118991)
Fischer-Gödde, M. et al. (2024). "Ruthenium isotopes show the Chicxulub impactor was a carbonaceous-type asteroid." Science 385(6710): 752–756. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adk4868 (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adk4868)
Alvarez, L.W., Alvarez, W., Asaro, F. & Michel, H.V. (1980). "Extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction." Science 208(4448): 1095–1108.
Williams, G.E. & Wallace, M.W. (2003). "The Acraman asteroid impact, South Australia:cmagnitude and implications for the late Vendian environment" Journal of the Geological Society 160: 545–554.
Hurowitz, J.A. et al. (2025). "Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars." Nature, 10 September 2025. NASA release: https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/perseverance/ (https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/perseverance/)
McKay, D.S. et al. (1996). "Search for past life on Mars: possible relic biogenic activity in Martian meteorite ALH84001." Science 273(5277): 924–930.
Schmidt, G.A. & Frank, A. (2019). "The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?" International Journal of Astrobiology 18(2): 142–150. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550418000095 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550418000095)
Russell, D.A. & Séguin, R. (1982). Reconstruction of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauroid. Syllogeus 37.
Weekly World News, 16 June 1992. Cover: "Space Probe Finds Dinosaurs on Mars." Interior, p. 24: "Dinosaurs on Mars!" Digitised in Google Books.
