The other week we were at Amberley, parked up by the railway station to walk the dog. It’s a dinosaurian kind of place, under the inland chalk cliffs covered by trees at the top and thick with ferns at the bottom. There was a thin scream and then a load more, like someone yanking a set of rusty winches. We looked up and it was four hawks chasing a fifth with something in its claws. They wheeled and grabbed at each other before it made off with its catch. The kestrels have been out this week but we’d never seen so many all together like that. Like dinosaurs. Actually like seeing dinosaurs. They must’ve sounded and behaved exactly like this.

Deinonychus, © Emily Willoughby, 2019.

Our idea of what dinosaurs looked like and how they behaved is constantly evolving. Deinonychus in this illustration is the animal also known as Velociraptor in Jurassic Park. The movie version represents the most modern reconstruction in the 1990s. Now we see them as even more birdlike.

Birdlike dinosaurs, the idea not just that dinosaurs turned into birds but that dinosaurs below a certain mass-weight ratio were feathered – huge ones weren’t feathered, just as elephants and rhinos today aren’t particularly hairy – that they were warm-blooded and that dinosaur and that bird and dinosaur should be synonymous terms – it’s amazing how much palaeontology has given dinosaurs a boost in the past fifty years. I grew up never believing in the too-slow, too-dim, how-did-they-manage? dinosaurs science kept banging on about it in the seventies and early eighties.

So it was incredibly exciting then one Saturday in Summer in 1991 I found a copy of Robert Bakker’s 1986 book Dinosaur Heresies in Blackwell’s. Bakker completely debunked the dim/slow/couldn’t/shouldn’t view of dinosaurs and represented them as you knew they were all along – real animals acting exactly like animals today. And warm-blooded. Not just the smaller birdlike ones. All of them. Just incredible. What a genius Bakker was. And his co-prophet Gregory Paul whose Predatory Dinosaurs of the World classified the new vigorous, avian theropods in 1988. Total vindication of everyone’s gut instinct who always knew they had to be lively, dangerous and exciting as they were in the oldest dinosaur books. This is Laelaps, also known as Dryptosaurus in Charles Knight’s painting from 1897 – a 25 foot animal leaping about as agile as Deinonychus – or an eagle.

© American Museum of Natural History

The only thing I can compare it to – right now – would be the feeling of someone who always believed the Princes in the Tower survived Tricky Dicky and now reads new theories that the King crowned in Dublin was really Edward V – that Lambert Simnel was an obliging substitute – and that Perkin Warbeck really was Richard Duke of York. I like this theory because it has Henry VII pumping out Kremlin-level disinformatsya and I think that’s pretty spot-on for the old Dark Prince. What a genius he was.

The other day Mum told me about this discovery in China. Palaeontologists have found a skeleton of a young Psittacosaurus apparently being attacked by the badger-like mammal Reponomamus. This single fossil establishes that early mammals weren’t just skulking in the undergrowth or easy prey for the dinosaurs, and hunting could be the other way round, with fierce mammals taking on dinosaurs several times their own size. As happens with animals today.

Photo © Gang Han

The discovery by Gang Han, Jordan C. Mallon, Aaron J. Lussier, Xiao-Chun Wu, Robert Mitchell and Ling-Ji Li is published in Nature this month and is worth having a look at (‘An extraordinary fossil captures the struggle for existence during the Mesozoic’ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-37545-8).

Initially some people suggested that this fossil could have been staged, put together from genuine bones but remounted to suggest that something more exciting was happening. How did they happen to die in that moment? Why are there no bite-marks on the dinosaur bones? But the findings convincingly show that the two animals were killed in a volcanic event at the very moment captured in the fossils, when a reponomamus was just subduing a psittacosaurus and about to give the death bite when they died in that instant like people in Pompeii. In fact, the deposit they were found in, the Lujiatun Member of the Yixian Formation, is known as ‘the Chinese Pompeii.’

This is a very satisfactory finding, because it comes with an ‘of course’ moment. Of course mammals would have preyed on bigger animals, like wolves do on moose or lions on buffalo. Why wouldn’t they? In evolutionary terms, 150 millions years isn’t a very long time. Some animals haven’t changed at all in that time. Crocodiles and turtles, for example. Fish. Mammals then wouldn’t be much different in behaviour and basic ‘mammalness’ to mammals now. Dinosaurs would’ve been recognisably birdlike. The feathered ones, obviously. But even dinosaurs too big to be covered in feathers would’ve had something about them that made you think, ‘Wow! They’re really birds.’

With these game-changers under our belt it was a shame to see the other exciting discovery of the week getting a bit of a kicking. We watched Unknown: Cave of Bones on Netflix. In 2013 cavers Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker discovered hominid bones in the Rising Star Cave System in the South African site known as The Cradle of Humankind from the profusion of hominid fossils found there. They took their discover to Palaeoanthropologists Lee Berger and Pedro Boshoff, who named them Homo naledi from the cave they were found in and date them to about 250,000 years ago. Berger’s programme described how they found the bones of 15 individuals in Naledi cave. The bones were found deep in the cave system, apparently buried – from the position of the bones – in the final cavern which was accessible only by a narrow vertical shaft in places only 9 inches wide. Homo naledi was only about 4 foot 9 inches tall but even for them carrying a dead body through the caves and down this shaft represented a great effort. Ritual burial was a logical conclusion, and the discovery of traces of fires within the caves and in the final chamber supported a deliberate enterprise and led, inevitably to the conclusion that Homo naledi buried their dead in a ritual manner. Regular scratches in places on the rock were interpreted as deliberate and the fact that a juvenile skeleton was buried holding a stone scraper argued that they Homo naledi believed in an afterlife. Since we watched the programme I’ve been reading that the palaeoanthropological community has been piling on . They attack the conclusion that the skeletons are a deliberate burial without answering why there is no other sign of how they got there. If dragged by predators why are there no signs of teethmarks to the bones, or trace of predators in the cave? If simply dropped down the shaft why were the bones unbroken?

The nay-sayers reject, almost on principle it seems, the idea that any hominid species other than Homo sapiens – and we were only just beginning to emerge at this date – that any on other than our own species was capable of this. Of developing the communication and thought process, the mind, to believe in a life after death and develop the rituals to preserve it. But why ever not? Why should H. sapiens have a monopoly on eschatology? I think Berger’s real offence was going on television before the peer-reviewers were in. But there will be a lot more on this, and my money is on Homo naledi being every bit as sophisticated as early Homo sapiens. It feels very out of date thinking to say these small hominids couldn’t have been as clever as us because their brains were that much smaller. So like the kind of thing I used to read in the dinosaur books of the 70s. As I write this I’m glad to see the good old Natural History Museum is more encouraging. Josh Davis wrote this last month: ‘Claims the Homo naledi buried their dead could alter our understanding of human evolution.’ Totally agree. Very exciting indeed.