Mike Benton
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2013
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Life on earth has gone through a series of mass extinctions. Mike Benton talks about his fascination with ancient life on the planet and his work on the Bristol Dinosaur Project.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the |
| 0:03.8 | podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world. |
| 0:15.0 | What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism |
| 0:20.0 | and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines. |
| 0:23.7 | And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject |
| 0:28.3 | you might not even have thought you were interested in. |
| 0:30.2 | Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment, |
| 0:36.2 | you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.1 | Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:44.0 | What's not to love about fossils, particularly dinosaur fossils. |
| 0:48.5 | My guest today is Michael Benton, a man who knows more about the subject the most. |
| 0:53.0 | The seeds for Mike's career as a paleontologist was sown when at the tender age of seven he picked up a book about fossils. |
| 1:00.0 | Subsequent family holidays near Whitby in Yorkshire was spent fossil hunting and now half a century later he's still at it |
| 1:07.6 | his career has taken him around the world to learn and discover more about dinosaurs what they looked like and how they |
| 1:14.4 | behaved than anyone thought possible simply by examining bits of old rock. |
| 1:19.2 | He's studied some of the most cataclysmic events in Earth's geological history. It's a so he's 250 million years ago led to a mass extinction that wiped out nearly all life on the planet. |
| 1:37.2 | Alongside his academic research at the University of Bristol, Mike has worked tirelessly to satisfy |
| 1:42.0 | the public's both young and old, fascination and enduring love affair with dinosaurs. |
| 1:48.0 | From children's books to big budget TV documentaries, he knows that science can and should be explained at many |
| 1:54.8 | different levels. Mike, welcome to the Life Scientific. Hello. I think it's true |
| 1:59.4 | today as it was when we were young that many children get hooked on science by first |
... |
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