Ben Garrod tells Chris Evans about 'digging up the world's largest dinosaur with Sir David Attenborough'

Virgin Radio

25 Sep 2023, 10:32

Evolutionary biologist Ben Garrod joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch to talk about his Ultimate Dinosaurs stage show.

The broadcaster and dino aficionado’s 21-date tour continues this Saturday this Saturday 30th September and concludes on 12th November. It will see him share fascinating information on prehistoric predators, and will give children the chance to pit their dinosaur knowledge against him and other adults.

Speaking about the asteroid which struck the earth 66 million years ago and ended the dinosaurs’ time on earth, the professor said: “It was 11 kilometres across. You’re talking the size of Greater London, straight over Scandinavia, over the UK, over the Atlantic and [it] hit just north of where Mexico is now, in a place called Chicxulub. I went there a few years ago, and we drilled into it with an amazing team of academics. The crater goes 20 miles deep and 120 miles across.”

Speaking more about the impact, he said: “The angle was really unusual. Most asteroids come at quite a broad angle, whereas this one came almost straight down. It's like, skimming a stone, you make a little bit of a ripple. You chuck a stone straight in, it makes a massive, massive ripple there and then a splash. It did that.”

On visiting the site, he said: “It was incredible to see that drill, that core sample coming out. It looked like a Mr Whippy in the rock. You could see the devastation, but there was a tiny, thin, only about two or three mil wide, little green layer. That's Iridium that's from space. That was all my Christmases in one.”

When Chris asked for some other highlights from his career, the Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Science Engagement at the University of East Anglia said: “I'm going to name drop massively. I'm really sorry. Digging up the world's largest dinosaur with Sir David Attenborough in Argentina was pretty cool. I'm not gonna lie!"

Talking further about working with the legend on BBC documentary programme Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur, which focused on the discovery of a new species of titanosaur, Ben said: "He's on his hands and knees. He’s got his little yellow jacket on. He's absolutely scrambling around, and he is so knowledgeable. He was in amongst the dirt with the rest of us. He loved it. He absolutely loved it.” 

Speaking about his tour, Ben said: “The love of dinosaurs never gets old. There's always a new bunch of kids who absolutely love dinosaurs. And the cool thing is, as much as these kids think they know almost everything there is to know about them, there's new species being described, there's new discoveries coming in thick and fast, and it's something that really challenges the kids, but also really allows them to play with their imagination.” 

When asked what predated dinosaurs, the expert told Chris: “It depends how far back you want to go. If you want to go back 440 million years, we've got things like Anomalocaris, one of the biggest animals on the planet.

“It is like chapters in a book. And we go through these different chapters where at one point fish dominated our planet, and then we had the dinosaurs dominating our planet. I would say now, mammals are doing really well.”

He added: “If you go back to Canada, just under 300 million years ago, there was an animal that was about a metre-and-a-half long called Tiktaalik, which looked like a big salamandery thing, that was a fish with specialised limbs that could walk on land. We can see that in an evolutionary, step by step process. Not every piece is there. But it's like having a jigsaw set of a million pieces, and we've got a couple of hundred thousand pieces.”

The Ultimate Dinosaurs tour continues this Saturday 30th September in Andover. For tickets visit bengarrod.co.uk.

For more great interviews listen to  The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or catch up on-demand here.