Episode 230 - Pachycephalosaurs

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Natural Sciences, Education, Earth Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2025

⏱️ 136 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The dome-headed dinosaurs are some of the most iconic ancient reptiles, but they’re surprisingly unexplored compared to other dinos. This episode, we explore what makes these dinosaurs unique, what limits our understanding of them, and the many confounding mysteries that paleontologists have been scratching their heads over, including the question of what exactly they were doing with those thick heads. In the news: the I Know Dino children’s book, giant reptile locomotion, and dinosaur hooves. Time markers:Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00News: 00:08:45 Main discussion, Part 1: 00:46:32Main discussion, Part 2: 01:12:05Patron question: 02:05:30 Check out our website for this episode’s blog post and more: http://commondescentpodcast.com/ Join us on Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Got a topic you want to hear about? Submit your episode request here: https://commondescentpodcast.com/request-a-topic/ Lots more ways to connect with us: https://linktr.ee/common_descent The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
0:19.0	Hello, Will. Hello, David.
0:21.6	Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Common Descent, a podcast where we talk about evolution and the history of life on earth and all that sort of cool paleontology e-stuff.
0:29.9	This is episode 230, and we're back on the dinosaur train.
0:34.8	This episode's topic is Pachycephalosaurus. Friar talks. These are the famous
0:40.8	dome-headed dinosaurs that are among the most iconic dinosaurs. In my childhood, these were
0:48.4	this was one of the first really complicated dinosaur names that I ever learned was Pachy's evilosaurus. Yes, absolutely. It was the one I'd used to show off. As we have with previous
1:01.1	dinosaur-focused episodes, we'll talk about who these dinosaurs are, what defines them,
1:06.3	and we'll go into what we understand about their lifestyle, their evolution, and of course, their distinctive dome heads, what they were doing with those, and how those domes have confused us a whole bunch in the history of studying these dinosaurs.
1:22.3	A super fun topic, which was, as with all of our episodes requested by our audience this episode topic was requested
1:30.6	by Josh Evan Hadley Taterboy Fred Hayden Brent Tracy Casey and Kai
1:39.5	Great suggestion and requests everyone thank you all you all. Please enjoy the episode.
1:45.7	And listeners, if you have a topic that you'd like to hear us talk about, go over to the website and submit it via the topic request form.
1:52.6	Before we move on, let's get through some announcements first and foremost.
1:56.0	As always, we have a Patreon and the support we get on our Patreon allows us to do everything we do
2:02.0	here on the podcast. In return, patrons get bonus content. They get live streams. There's
2:08.2	merch at certain levels. And patrons at certain tiers get their name. Shout it out here on the
2:14.4	podcast when they join us this episode. We would like to welcome our new patrons, Megan and Mudgard fan.
2:21.8	Thank you so much. Welcome.
2:23.7	Welcome. We appreciate your support so very much.
2:27.3	Listeners, if you would like to consider joining us on Patreon, check out the links in the episode
2:31.5	description. Speaking of our listeners doing cool stuff to support us, we got some mail recently.
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