Hone, Dave

paleontologist and zoologist, Queen Mary University of London; author of The Tyrannosaur Chronicles, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior, and the forthcoming Spinosaur Tales

Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park

Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 4, 2025

• Tyrannosaurus rex
• paleontology
• dinosaur behavior
• Jurassic Park
• mass extinction
• Spinosaurus
• sexual selection
• taphonomy
• bird evolution
• Cope's Rule

Core ideas

Hone builds his portrait of T-Rex from raw biomechanics outward: an animal roughly 12 meters long and 7+ tons, with a skull that is strikingly "overbuilt" compared to similarly sized rivals like Giganotosaurus (whose skull has enormous window-like openings where T-Rex's is solid bone), fused nasal bones creating a rigid snout able to resist immense bite forces, and small conical "incisiform" front teeth used for stripping meat from bone (the "Oreo" technique) as distinct from the massive rear teeth used for killing and dismembering. He is emphatic that these two bite functions leave physically distinguishable marks in the fossil record, and walks through a real case (a Mongolian hadrosaur humerus) where erosion patterns underneath bite marks proved scavenging rather than predation — a broader methodological point he returns to repeatedly: interpreting fossils requires reconstructing everything that happened between death and discovery (taphonomy), not taking a bone at face value. On locomotion, he describes the foot's metatarsal-locking adaptation and tail-driven (not gluteal-driven) muscle mechanics that make T-Rex a relatively efficient long-distance "power walker" (top speed ~25mph, never true running) rather than a sprinter, arguing this fits a hyena/wolf-style hunting strategy — likely nocturnal, using size and stealth to close distance before a prey animal reaches its own top speed, since a T-Rex this size simply cannot hide in open terrain. He also rejects the "apex predator" label in favor of "arch predator" (apex predators technically eat other predators; T-Rex just eats herbivores, and unusually has essentially no comparably sized competitor in its ecosystem at all), and dismantles several evolutionary and behavioral myths with the same evidentiary rigor: prey-to-predator mass ratios (drawn from Microraptor stomach contents) show predators target juveniles at 5-20% of their own body mass, not adult megaherbivores; T-Rex almost certainly practiced both cannibalism and active predation-plus-scavenging (evidenced by healed versus unhealed bite marks); and pack-hunting claims for Velociraptor/Deinonychus rest on extremely weak evidence (a handful of trackways, a contested bonebed) that doesn't distinguish "traveled together" from "hunted together," a distinction he illustrates via real analogs like solitary leopards occasionally photographed hunting jointly, or spotted hyenas — highly social but mostly solitary hunters.

A recurring theme is how weak, indirect signals can nonetheless combine into strong conclusions when multiple independent lines of evidence converge — his go-to example being Spinosaurus, where crocodile-like teeth/skull shape, isotopic signatures matching aquatic animals, habitat association, and direct stomach-content/fish-scale evidence together support a "big wader/heron" ecology, even though he considers the popular "diving swimmer" hypothesis (which he and a colleague have published against) poorly supported; he predicts his forthcoming book will be "properly strange" and again concludes T-Rex would win a hypothetical fight due to Spinosaurus's comparatively weak, laterally unstable jaw and neck. On evolution generally, he discusses Cope's Rule (why lineages tend toward larger body size, and why big animals are simultaneously ecologically dominant and disproportionately vulnerable to extinction events, given lower population sizes, slower reproduction, and higher resource needs), the honest-signal/handicap hypothesis and "sexy sons hypothesis" as competing (non-exclusive) explanations for ornamental traits like feathers, crests, and colors, and "mutual sexual selection" (seen in black swans and starlings, where both sexes are ornamented because both invest in offspring) as a plausible but frustratingly hard-to-confirm model for dinosaur crests, given that fewer than ten dinosaur species have enough well-preserved skeletons to do real population-level analysis — Protoceratops, with 100+ specimens spanning embryo to adult from a narrow 100,000-year window in Mongolia, being the closest thing to an exception and, in his view, chronically undervalued compared to the search for flashy new species.

On the K-Pg extinction, Hone lays out the asteroid impact (Chicxulub, ~66 million years ago, hitting an unusually volatile rock formation that produced catastrophic global ash/climate disruption) as the trigger for cascading ecosystem collapse, and explains why large, terrestrial animals disproportionately die in mass extinctions (versus small or aquatic ones) — a pattern he considers paleontology's most practically relevant lesson for understanding modern climate stress. He thinks it's very likely isolated dinosaur populations survived the extinction event locally for some time (as isolated island/valley refugia do for other lineages), but considers any large-scale recovery essentially impossible once populations crash that far, and is skeptical dinosaur fossils meaningfully inspired global dragon mythology, since culturally disconnected societies (China, the Americas) would then be expected to converge on similar mythical creatures rather than producing wildly different ones. He closes with lighter reflections: a thought experiment on spending $10 billion on paleontology (mostly funding museums and buying up commercially exploited fossil-rich land to remove financial gatekeeping from research access); an extended, good-humored critique of what Jurassic Park/World gets wrong (Velociraptor's exaggerated size, the fabricated "T-Rex can't see you if you don't move" myth invented wholesale by Michael Crichton, feathers, pack hunting) versus right (T-Rex's power-walking gait, general scale); and a case that birds are, in the same direct ancestral sense that humans are apes, literally dinosaurs — feathers and warm-bloodedness having evolved at least 165 million years ago, well before and independently of the extinction event.

Excerpts