Trilobites are one of the most instantly recognisable groups of fossils. They were present from the very start of the Paleozoic and went on the fill a great number of ecological roles before going extinct at the Permo-Triassic mass extinction event 252 million years ago. They ranged from the very small to the very large , from the most basic appearance to the most elaborately ornamented. We were lucky enough to get the opportunity to speak to Prof. Richard Fortey of the Natural History Museum, L...
Jul 01, 2013•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ammonoids are a diverse group of cephalopods, a group of molluscs that include squid, octopuses, cuttlefish and nautiloids. They lived for over 300 million years (from the Early Devonian – the end Cretaceous) and survived multiple mass extinctions. They finally succumbed to the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous, the same event that killed the Dinosaurs. Ammonoid fossils are found abundantly around the world and offer palaeontologists a exceptional opportunity to study the evolut...
May 15, 2013•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the most significant events in Earth’s history has been the oxygenation of its atmosphere 2.45–2.32 billion years ago. This accumulation of molecular oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere was so significant that it is now commonly known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). The long-reaching effects of the GOE were literally world-changing; the compositions of the atmosphere and hydrosphere were altered, and through various redox reactions (where atoms have their oxidation state changed), the nature...
May 01, 2013•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Perhaps one of the most overlooked areas of palaeontology, within the public eye, is micropalaeontology. Micropalaeontology is an umbrella discipline, covering a diverse range of organisms, with representatives from many of the highest level biological groupings. Although small in size, microfossils prove invaluable for research into palaeoclimatology and are also one of the most commercially applicable groups of fossils. In this interview we speak to Dr. Giles Miller, Senior Curator of Micropal...
Apr 15, 2013•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ichnology is the study of trace fossils (also termed ichnofossils). Opposed to body fossils, the physical remains of an organism, trace fossils are the fossilised interactions between an organism and the substrate/sediment and include such things as trackways, excrement, burrows, bite marks and borings. Both body fossils and trace fossils are important when studying an organism and especially so in determining palaeoecology (how an organism interacted with its immediate environment). Body fossil...
Apr 01, 2013•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ichnology is the study of trace fossils (also termed ichnofossils ). Opposed to body fossils , the physical remains of an organism, trace fossils are the fossilised interactions between an organism and the substrate/sediment and include such things as trackways, excrement, burrows, bite marks and borings. Both body fossils and trace fossils are important when studying an organism and especially so in determining palaeoecology (how an organism interacted with its immediate environment). Body foss...
Mar 15, 2013•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Every palaeontologist needs to put their feet up once in a while, and what better place to do so that the Best Western Denver Southwest? This hotel is located just a stone's-throw away from Dinosaur Ridge , one of the world's most famous fossil sites. It was here that many of the house-hold dinosaur names such as Apatosaurus (formerly Brontosaurus ) and Stegosaurus were first discovered during the ' Bone Wars ' between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh in the late 19th century. The h...
Mar 01, 2013•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Fossils, at the best of times, are difficult to interpret. Palaeontologists attempt to reconstruct organisms from what little remains are left. This can be relatively simple for groups that we are familiar with today; you can easily make comparisons between a fossil lobster and a living one. But how do you interpret a fossil that has no modern counterpart and is not clearly related to any other organism? We speak to Dr Jakob Vinther of the University of Bristol about his experience of interpreti...
Feb 15, 2013•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sexual selection is responsible for much of the astounding diversity in morphology and behaviour that we can see in animals and plants today, but h ow can we reliably recognise it in the fossil record? We speak to Dr. Rob Knell of Queen Mary University of London....
Feb 01, 2013•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast The first animals came onto land sometime before 425 Ma. These early colonizers were members of a group called the arthropods - probably early relatives of the millipedes first. However, early land animals - especially those from the Palaeozoic era (542 - 252 Ma) - are relatively rarely preserved as fossils. The Carboniferous period (350-299 Ma) is an exception to this rule. During the Late Carboniferous, there is a window in which land animals are found preserved within the iron carbonate miner...
Jan 15, 2013•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast The 16th to the 18th December 2012 saw University College Dublin host The Palaeontological Association (PalAss) 56th annual general meeting . Palaeocast were present at the conference for quite a few reasons: firstly, it's always good to try and keep on top of the latest research in the field and conferences are the places to be for hearing a lot of ideas, covering a diverse array of topics, in a short period of time; secondly, we wanted to promote ourselves to the delegate in the hope of securi...
Jan 01, 2013•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Mesozoic Era saw the spectacular rise and fall of many groups, particularly in terrestrial vertebrates. These include birds, squamates, crocodiles, and pterosaurs, who wove a complex tapestry of evolution through the 185 million years of the Mesozoic, some even persisting until now. Dave Hone, now of Queen Mary in London, has extensively studied the ecology of many of these now-extinct organisms, especially theropod dinosaurs, to gain rare insights into how they would have lived millions of ...
Dec 15, 2012•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast We can observe colour to be highly important for animals today. It can be used for many different purposes, including camouflage and signalling, and produced by many different methods. What is true of colouration today is also likely to have been so in the past, however the fossilisation process replaces tissues with minerals, so finding hints of colour in fossils is very unlikely. There are however certain colour producing structures that can survive the fossilisation process. We visit the Univ...
Nov 15, 2012•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Vertebrates are one of the most diverse and successful groups of animals on the planet. Modern vertebrates come in an astounding array of sizes and shapes and can be found anywhere from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains. Yet vertebrates did not attain such success from the outset; their rise to dominance was gradual. The early evolution of vertebrates was a dynamic and, at times, a turbulent interval which, through studying the fossil record, we are able to understand in increasing det...
Nov 01, 2012•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast The biota of the Ediacaran period (635 - 541 ma) is of critical importance to our understanding of the origin of animals because it immediately precedes the Cambrian fauna, from which all subsequent animal life evolved. Localities of this age are justly famous for the exceptional quality of preservation of soft-bodied organisms. One of the best known and most important Ediacaran localities is at Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, Canada. We got to talk to Dr. Alex Liu, a research fellow at the Univer...
Oct 15, 2012•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast We interview Professor William Stein of Binghamton University about the world's first forets at Gilboa, NY, USA. We talk through the history of the research at this famous locality covering the destruction of the village of Gilboa and some of the 'paleontological difficulties' the researchers found themselves in. We discuss the palaeobotany and palaeoecology of the forests and the effect the evolution of such communities had on the world.
Oct 01, 2012•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast We got a chance to talk to Dr. George Poinar of Oregon State University about his work in amber. We discuss what it is and how it forms, but also talk about the organisms that are preserved within and the organisms within those organisms. From identifying genuine from fake amber, to parasite behaviour modification and palaeopathology, this episode has it all!
Sep 15, 2012•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast You may be forgiven for having missed the news of NASA's Curiosity rover, or Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), having landed on Mars, given all the coverage the 2012 Olympics had been getting. To try and even this up, we got in touch with Dr. Leila Battison, a palaeontologist from the University of Oxford, UK, who is currently working at NASA, researching the earliest life in the fossil record and the conditions it needed to survive. We discussed NASA's mission to Mars and explored what kind of thi...
Aug 29, 2012•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Aug 28, 2012•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
