Tullimonstrum gregarium , better known as the ‘Tully Monster’ is a problematic fossil from the Late Carboniferous Mazon Creek lagerstätte, Illinois, USA. The identity of this fossil has been the subject of much debate, due to its peculiar form. Several competing hypotheses have placed it within the arthropods, fish, worms or even molluscs. Joining us in this interview is Dr Victoria McCoy whose work at Yale University (recently published in Nature ) was able to demonstrate that the Tully Monster...
Mar 18, 2016•48 min
Dr. Larry Witmer’s lab at Ohio University studies the anatomy of modern animals to make interpretations regarding the functional morphology of extinct vertebrates. WitmerLab incorporates anatomical studies with cutting-edge technology, allowing for the reconstructions of soft-tissue structures no longer present in fossils (including respiratory apparatuses, brains, and inner ears). These reconstructions allow Dr. Witmer and his students to study the original physiology, biomechanics, and evoluti...
Mar 15, 2016•31 min
Diet is perhaps the most important aspect of ecology. As such, understanding the diet of extinct animals is crucial if we wish to reconstruct the ecosystems of the past. However, determining what was on the menu for extinct animals, known only from fragmentary fossils, is far from straight forward. We spoke to Dr David Button, from the University of Birmingham, to learn about the techniques palaeontologists use to deduce diet from fossils.
Mar 04, 2016•41 min
Beneath the city of Chemnitz, Germany, exists a entire fossilised forest. This whole ecosystem was preserved in life-position during a series of volcanic events. The forest is from the Permian period and thus represents a fantastic snapshot of life during a period where terrestrial fossils are notoriously rare. Joining us to discuss the flora and fauna of the Permian of Germany is Dr Ronny Rößler, director of the Museum für Naturkunde Chemnitz.
Feb 22, 2016•39 min
One of the most difficult aspects of palaeontology is understanding how extinct animals moved around. It’s one thing to find a fossil and reconstruct it’s morphology, but it’s completely another to put that morphology into action and understand the locomotion or behaviour. One reason for this is because of the lack of soft tissue and muscles. The field of biomechanics can help with this by looking at the actual physics of these structures to help understand things like the forces exerted on the ...
Jan 15, 2016•49 min
The Wealden Supergroup of southern England is known for it's Cretaceous fossils, particularly of dinosaurs, but also crocodilians, pterosaurs, lizards, invertebrates, and plants. The group represents the Early Cretaceous, and is well known for showing us the environment of this time period, which is not well-represented in many other places in the world. It has been essential in helping to understand this time. Large body fossils are known, but also small microvertebrate sites, and even footprin...
Jan 01, 2016•58 min
Laura interviews Dave about Palaeocast's new project: The Virtual Natural History Museum. The Virtual Natural History Museum (V-NHM) is a project designed to make digital palaeontological resources accessible like never before. This website will integrate fossil multimedia from museums worldwide and bring them together in the one place, creating a kind of ‘master museum’. All of this data will be exhibited inside of a ‘computer game-style’ museum, allowing you to virtually explore the rich biolo...
Dec 05, 2015•51 min
Preparators are specialist staff working in museums and universities worldwide. They perform a very wide variety of tasks from fieldwork excavations, to specimen conservation. Any fossil has to be prepared for use, whether its to expose specific parts so that they can be studied, or to preserve and reconstruct a specimen so that it can be displayed in a museum gallery. Vertebrate preparation is an increasingly professionalised field that plays a huge part in the process of modern palaeontology....
Dec 01, 2015•50 min
This year the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America was held in Baltimore, Maryland. This is one of the largest conferences that palaeontologists attend, with over 6000 attendees from all fields of Earth Sciences. Caitlin and Laura went along and talked to many of the palaeontology researchers who had come to present their work on posters and in talks.
Nov 30, 2015•56 min
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight, and lived in the skies above the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic. They're often mistakenly identified as dinosaurs, but are in fact a separate, closely related group. This group has recently undergone a revival, with more research on pterosaurs happening now than ever before. Where are they found? How diverse was this group? How did they evolve? Research associate and palaeoartist Dr. Mark Witton from the University of Portsmouth is ...
Nov 15, 2015•1 hr 8 min
The last part of our coverage from the 75th annual meeting of the society of vertebrate paleonology. In this part Caitlin speaks to Professor Christopher Smith about the history of the society, how it was recorded and archived, and how this information is being collected and maintained into the future.
Nov 10, 2015•34 min
In the second part of our SVP coverage we have interviews with some of the researchers on the scientific content of their posters and conference presentations.
Nov 10, 2015•49 min
The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting is the largest conference each year for the world's vertebrate palaeontologists to present their work, network with each other, and find out what everyone else is up to. The first part of our coverage from the 2015 meeting in Dallas Texas includes interviews with palaeontology educators and museum specialists.
Nov 10, 2015•19 min
The ‘Crystal Palace Dinosaurs’ are a series of sculptures of extinct animals including dinosaurs, other extinct reptiles and mammals, which can be found in the grounds of the Crystal Palace in London. Commissioned in 1852, these are the earliest examples of dinosaur sculptures in the world. In fact, the first dinosaurs had only recently been discovered some 30 years earlier. Why were these models built? And what do they tell us about early scientific hypotheses of dinosaurs and other extinct ani...
Nov 01, 2015•47 min
Ankylosaurs are a group of non-avian dinosaurs best known for their armour, tank-like bodies, and sometimes large tail clubs. First appearing in the Jurassic, they were common in Late Cretaceous ecosystems, with several species known from around the world. But how different were these species really? And just where did they evolve from? What was that tail for? Dr. Victoria Arbour of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is one of the leading experts on ankylosaurs, and has published a nu...
Oct 15, 2015•45 min
Melanin is a pigment that is found across the animal kingdom. Melanosomes, the organelles that contain melanin, have been found preserved in fossil feathers and melanosome shape has been used to infer the original colors of birds and dinosaurs. Today we’re talking to Caitlin Colleary whose paper - on her Masters research at the University of Bristol - delves into detail regarding the structural and chemical preservation of melanin and describes the color of a fossil mammal for the first time....
Sep 28, 2015•28 min
The Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA) annual conference was held at the University of Southampton National Oceanography Centre at the beginning of September. This is the first year we've covered this event, and covered a wide range of topics in vertebrate palaeontology. We spoke to several people, which you can listen to here, including information on Romanian and Hungarian fossils, ceratopsian dinosaurs, ankylosaur histology, sesamoid bones, and more.
Sep 27, 2015•49 min
Eurypterids, or ‘sea-scorpions’ are an extinct group of chelicerates: the group containing the terrestrial arachnids (such as spiders and scorpions) and the aquatic ‘merostomes’ (represented today solely by the horseshoe crabs). They bear a gross-morphological resemblance to scorpions (hence the informal name) but, in being aquatic, may have shared more in common with horseshoe crabs. They inhabited the waters of the Paleozoic Era and were typically scavengers or predators. Most eurypterids were...
Sep 01, 2015•1 hr 19 min
On today's episode we're revisiting Mistaken Point , Newfoundland, Canada. At this lagerstätte it is possible to find large bedding planes full of Precambrian organisms called rangeomorphs. These are an enigmatic group, which still can't be placed on the 'tree of life'. We are joined by Dr Emily Mitchell of the University of Cambridge, who's recent paper in Nature was able to show that you don't need to be able to fully understand the anatomy of an organism to discern some of its most intricate ...
Aug 14, 2015•40 min
Synapsids are one of the major groups of terrestrial vertebrates. They first appear in the Carboniferous period and since that time have gone through many radiation and extinction events. But what did these first stem-mammals look like, how did they live and how do they differ from modern mammals? These may sound like simple questions, but there is an underrepresentation of terrestial deposits from the Permian. How then can we understand larger-scale evolutionary patterns when so much data is mi...
Jul 31, 2015•41 min
The Burgess Shale is probably the world's most famous lagerstätte (site of special preservation). Discovered in 1909 on Mt. Stephen, in the Canadian Rockies of British Colombia, Canada, this locality provided an early representation of the true biodiversity of the Cambrian Period. For decades, discoveries from this site have helped palaeontologists better understand the 'Cambrian Explosion' and the origins of modern lineages. Since that time, many more early lagerstätten have been discovered, so...
Jul 17, 2015•44 min
It's been quite a week for lobopodians! First off, we've had the redescription of Hallucigenia by Dr Martin Smith. This enigmatic fossil from the Burgess Shale typifies the difficulty palaeontologists have had in interpreting some of the earliest animals in the fossil record. It has famously been reconstructed upside-down and is now shown to also have been back-to-front too! Dr Smith joins us to tell us about the observations, including some new anatomical characters, that put an end to the unce...
Jun 29, 2015•46 min
The world is currently undergoing a massive biodiversity crisis, and many people have said that we are in the next major mass extinction event, with species going extinct each day. Unfortunately, we don't currently understand what aspects control biodiversity, and how the past can help us understand the present and the future. Associate Professor Lindsey Leighton of the University of Alberta discusses his work combining research of modern invertebrate marine fauna related to biodiversity and eco...
Jun 15, 2015•1 hr 5 min
The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction was the latest of the 'big five' events. Approximately 75% of species went extinct, with the most notable victims being non-avian dinosaurs. But what happened afterwards? By which methods were some of the survivors able to spread to fill vacant niches? The University of Bath's Dr Nick Longrich joins us to hypothesise about the dispersal mechanism of a very unusual group of ground-dwelling predatory reptiles called amphisbaenians (worm lizards)....
Jun 01, 2015•47 min
We've covered ichnology before, in Episode 14 , but it's time to revisit trackways with a high-tech approach. We talk to ichnologist and computer expert Dr Peter Falkingham, from Liverpool John Moores University, who's been looking at footprints using state-of-the-art techniques.
May 01, 2015•42 min
After the success of last year’s palaeoart competition we’re stepping up a gear and launching an even bigger and better contest. This time we've got three times as many prizes to give away courtesy of Cider Mill Press , Palaeoplushies and Paleocreations . We're running the competition on Facebook and Twitter between the 1st May and 1st June using #palaeocastart....
Apr 29, 2015•5 min
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is a molecule that encodes the genetic information within every species of life on earth. The information contained within the sequence of base pairs determines how any given organism develops and biologically functions. DNA is not just limited to the biological world, but is also now being utilised in palaeontology. But why is DNA not normally preserved? What's the oldest DNA we can recover? And what can we learn about fossil animals from their DNA? We spoke to ancie...
Apr 15, 2015•53 min
Palaeontology is more than just going out into the field, digging up bones, and putting them back together. A good understanding of biology, geology, and even engineering can help to figure out how extinct animals lived and especially how they moved around. To further comprehend how we can use knowledge of engineering in palaeontology, especially with respect to understanding extinct animal flight, we spoke to Colin Palmer from the University of Bristol, and the University of Southampton. His ba...
Apr 01, 2015•46 min
Insects are the most abundant and diverse group on animals on the planet today. Would they therefore also be expected to have the richest fossil record? When did they first evolve and how rapid was their diversification? Do we give enough attention to the evolution of insects? To get answers we spoke to Dr. David Penney, honorary lecturer at the University of Manchester and founder of Siri Scientific Press . Dr. Penney has just recently published an overview of palaeoentomology entitled 'Fossil ...
Mar 15, 2015•28 min
Insects are the most abundant and diverse group on animals on the planet today. Would they therefore also be expected to have the richest fossil record? When did they first evolve and how rapid was their diversification? Do we give enough attention to the evolution of insects? To get answers we spoke to Dr. David Penney, honorary lecturer at the University of Manchester and founder of Siri Scientific Press . Dr. Penney has just recently published an overview of palaeoentomology entitled 'Fossil ...
Mar 01, 2015•31 min
