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 Preprint: 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

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

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/

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

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.

A three-course food web from the Cretaceous seas of Queensland: a Platypterygius australis ichthyosaur that had been snacking on fish, cephalopods and pterosaurs — before it, in turn, got chewed on by a Kronosaurus queenslandicus. Travis and Alyssa dig into what the bite marks and gut contents tell us about who was eating whom in ancient inland Australia.

Then, Travis heads out to Gold Creek to sit down with Shannon Bourke, education and outreach coordinator at the National Dinosaur Museum in Canberra, for a tour through animatronic accuracy (and inaccuracy), seasonally repainted triceratops, and how a small private museum can uietly launch palaeontology careers.

To close out: a preview of The End of Oak Street — dinosaurs, suburbia, Ewan McGregor punching things — and the story of the one Chase question Travis really should have known.

Paper discussed: White, M. et al., "Beneath the Waves: Extraordinary Dietary Insights from a Dismembered Ichthyosaur from the Lower Cretaceous," Gondwana Research.

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Dr Jake Kotevski didn't become a palaeontologist because of a fossil. He became one because of Sam Neill. In this tribute episode, Travis and Alyssa talk with Jake about Alan Grant's quiet, unglamorous masculinity, the "sense of wonder" the movie chose over the book's horror, and why Grant's evolution across three films (and an unfortunate franchise reboot) still resonates thirty years on.