Palaeo After Dark - Episodes: Recent Episodes
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Wet Hot Archosaur Summer continues as the gang discusses two papers about crocodylomorph evolution. The first paper looks at the impact mass extinctions had on disparity within the group, and the second paper uses new phylogenetic data to revise our understanding of size trends and biogeography of crocodylomorphs during the Cenozoic. Meanwhile, Curt invents a measurement, James invents a new way of eating, and Amanda invents a new phobia for herself.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at big angry animals that you should never smile at, again! This time they are looking at very old big angry animals you should never smile at. The first paper looks at how different these animals were in the past and looks at how different they are today. A lot of people think that the big angry animals today are not as different than they were in the past and that this might be weird. The paper finds that these big angry animals have been more different in the past, but that the animals today are not so much the same as each other in a weird way. There were times in the past where these animals were as different from each other as we see today, and they even got more different again after that.
The second paper looks at a new way of thinking about two animals from the past that were really big and you really should not smile at. These animals were thought to be part of this one group that is not as big today and also would be really weird because these some of these animals in the past are found across the big blue wet thing and we do not think that they can move across that big blue wet thing because of the stuff that is in the big blue wet thing that is not water that makes your food good. This paper shows that these big animals are probably not in that group, and so they use this to see what this means about where this one group of animals was living and how they got smaller.
References:
Melstrom, Keegan M., et al. "For a while, crocodile: crocodylomorph resilience to mass extinctions." Palaeontology 68.2 (2025): e70005.
Walter, Jules D., et al. "Expanded phylogeny elucidates Deinosuchus relationships, crocodylian osmoregulation and body-size evolution." Communications Biology 8.1 (2025): 611.
The gang kicks off a summer of archosaurs by talking about crocodyliforms. The first paper describes an early Cenozoic large notosuchian, and the second paper investigates how cryptic species impacts divergence times within the clade. Meanwhile, Curt diagnoses a problem, James tries to “help”, and Amanda does not care.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at animals that today most of the time live in water and grab food from the edge of the water and you should never smile at. The first paper a really big one of these animals that lived a long time ago. This animal was found after a really big rock hit the ground and killed most of the big animals. This big animal shows that some of the animals that you should never smile at were able to live through the big rock hitting.
The second paper looks at animals you should never smile at today and finds that there are some animals that look the same but are not actually the same animals. This paper uses these animals that look the same but are different and finds that they have been different for a long time. This means that if we want to try and make sure that these animals are safe, we can not just say that animals that look the same are going to do the same things when things change.
References:
Bravo, Gonzalo Gabriel, et al. "A new notosuchian crocodyliform from the Early Palaeocene of Patagonia and the survival of a large-bodied terrestrial lineage across the K–Pg mass extinction." Proceedings B 292.2043 (2025): 20241980.
Darlim, Gustavo, and Sebastian Höhna. "The effects of cryptic diversity on diversification dynamics analyses in Crocodylia." Proceedings B 292.2043 (2025): 20250091.
The gang tries to discuss two papers that look at the evolutionary impacts of the K-Pg mass extinction. Specifically, they look at one paper that estimates sampling probability throughout the late Cretaceous to determine if record bias influences our understanding of the extinction, and another paper that looks at species area relationships to investigate ecological shifts in response to the event. However, the gang gets completely lost and sidetracked throughout. They starting talking about the papers around 18 minutes in… and very quickly lose track again. It’s going to be one of those podcasts.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends do a real bad job of talking about two papers that look at what happened when a big rock fell from the sky a long time ago. The first paper looks at the rocks we have from that time and tries to see how well we know what was happening and what was going on with the animals that were around at that time. Given the rocks we have, how sure are we that we know where animals were and how many of those things were around. It turns out that just before the big rock hit, we do not have a good idea of what things were around and where they were.
The second paper looks at how the places where things were living in the past changed before and after the big rock hit. The idea is that some animals may have done well because they could go to all of the places when things get bad because they do well when things go bad. This paper says that this is not happening and that there is way more going on with these groups that were doing well after the big rock hit.
References:
Close, Roger Adam, and Bouwe Rutger Reijenga. "Tetrapod species–area relationships across the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122.13 (2025): e2419052122.
Dean, Christopher D., et al. "The structure of the end-Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record in North America." Current Biology (2025).
The gang discusses two papers that look at the evolutionary impact of shifts in habitat occupation. The first paper looks at a clade of sharks moving into the depths, and the second paper investigates habitat shifts in mammals across the Cretaceous and Paleogene. Meanwhile, Amanda has some opinions, James is doing much better, and Curt is easy to amuse.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look into how animals change when they move from one type of place to another. The first paper looks at animals with big teeth that has soft parts inside and live in the water. One group of these animals is found in really deep water today, but in the past they were found in water that is not deep. This paper looks at when this move into the deep happened, and what it happened along with.
The second paper looks at parts of animals that have hair and how these parts have changed over time. These parts are used for moving around and so they can let us know how these animals were moving in the past. This paper shows that before a really bad thing happened, a lot of these animals were moving in the trees, but after that big thing happened these animals were moving in a lot more different ways with more on the ground.
References:
Marion, Alexis FP, Fabien L. Condamine, and Guillaume Guinot. "Bioluminescence and repeated deep-sea colonization shaped the diversification and body size evolution of squaliform sharks." Proceedings B 292.2042 (2025): 20242932.
Janis, Christine M., et al. "Down to earth: therian mammals became more terrestrial towards the end of the Cretaceous." Palaeontology 68.2 (2025): e70004.
The gang discusses two papers that use morphometrics to investigate patterns of selection on bird morphology. The first paper looks at the morphology of feathers, while the second paper looks more broadly at various parts of the avian body. Meanwhile, James breathes new life into a classic, Amanda is passionate about formatting, and Curt exposes “the truth”.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at animals that move in the air. Both of these papers look at how these animals look and try to find out why these animals look the way they do. The first paper looks at the different types of soft things that these animals use to fly and also to stay warm. They look at how these soft things look and how that look has changed over time and between groups. Some of these animals that don't fly have soft things that are different from the ones that do fly, but they way they are different is different with each group that does not fly.
The second paper looks at parts of these animals like their mouths to see how they change between groups. They find that there are lots of things these animals could be doing that most of them are not doing. This makes them say that maybe there is something keeping the animals looking like that because if they change too much in one way it might be really really bad for them.
References:
Sayol, Ferran, et al. "Biophysical constraints on avian adaptation and diversification." BioRxiv (2023): 2023-10.
Saitta, Evan T., et al. "Feather evolution following flight loss in crown group birds: relaxed selection and developmental constraints." Evolution (2025): qpaf020.
The gang discusses two papers that look at preserved skin/external tissues. The first paper shows a unique record of Cambrian molting, and the second paper looks at the first preserved samples of plesiosaur skin. Meanwhile, Amanda commits an "own goal”, Curt shares some old internet fun, and James has opinions about fins.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at skin that is very very very old. The first paper looks at animals from a long time ago that lose their skin when they get too big for it when then grow. They found these parts on the skin that are hard and most of the time there are two but some of them have four, and that these ones that have four are because they are growing new skin under the old skin.
The second paper looks at an animal from a long time ago that breathes air but lives in the water and is close to things today that have harder skin. Other animals like this animal have some skin that we know about, but for this group of animal we did not know a lot about their skin. In the other animals that move into water, their skin gets soft, but this group shows that some of their skin is hard like the animals that are on land. This might be because how these animals live.
References:
Yu, Chiyang, Deng Wang, and Jian Han. "Cambrian palaeoscolecidomorph Cricocosmia caught in the act of moulting." Historical Biology 37.3 (2025): 643-649.
Marx, Miguel, et al. "Skin, scales, and cells in a Jurassic plesiosaur." Current Biology (2025).
The gang discusses two papers that look into the evolution and timing of key morphological innovations within animal groups. The first paper describes possible raptorial appendages in fossil artiopods, and the second paper finds early evidence of modern bird morphologies in the Jurassic. Meanwhile, Amanda gloats, Curt dies, and James eulogizes.
Up-Goer Five (Amanda Edition):
Today our friends look at two papers where one friend can feel better about how they do the work than how other people do the work. One paper is about big face hand animals with many parts to their legs that use their big face hands to maybe grab and eat other animals. It says that maybe these animals with many parts to their legs all got the big face hand parts in different ways that other animals with many parts that also have the big face hand parts.
The other paper is about the animals that do not have hair or hard skin that fly. It says that the animals that do not have hair or hard skin that fly show up earlier than people maybe thought that they did. They are animals that are more like today's animals that do not have hair or hard skin that can fly. One of our friends has said this for a long time and felt good when they saw this paper.
References:
O'Flynn, Robert J., et al. "The early Cambrian Kuamaia lata, an artiopodan euarthropod with a raptorial frontal appendage." Journal of Paleontology (2025): 1-13.
Chen, Runsheng, et al. "Earliest short-tailed bird from the Late Jurassic of China." Nature 638.8050 (2025): 441-448.
The gang discusses two papers that look into the timing of evolution of the “crown group”. The first paper looks at fossil glass sponges, and the second paper looks at the phylogeny of lampreys. Meanwhile, James gives some sound advice, Amanda has ambitious hobby plans, and Curt imagines the perfect media crossover.
Up-Goer Five: (Curt Edition)
The friends talk about two papers that look at groups of animals and try to see when the things that we see today in these groups may have first happened in the past and what we can tell us about why those things might have happened. The first paper looks at a group of animals that are made up of many single parts that can all act on their own and these animals get food out of water in a very simple way. This paper finds some very old animals that look a lot like some groups of these animals we see today. This would mean that this group may have been around a lot longer ago than we think.
The second paper looks at a group of animals that are long without much going on and a round mouth and live in the water. This group has animals that live in different places that have made people ask why. This paper looks at how all of these animals changed over time and uses that to see when the animals that we see today may have first been around. They find that these animals may have first appeared during a time that was really hot, and that might be why the animals are where they are today.
References:
Botting, Joseph P., et al. "Advanced crown‐group Rossellidae (Porifera: Hexactinellida) resembling extant taxa from the Hirnantian (Late Ordovician) Anji Biota." Papers in Palaeontology 11.1 (2025): e70000.
Hughes, Lily C., et al. "Phylogenomic resolution of lampreys reveals the recent evolution of an ancient vertebrate lineage." Proceedings B 292.2038 (2025): 20242101.
The gang celebrates the research of the late Elisabeth Vrba by talking about two of her papers, as well as her research more broadly. And, despite their best efforts, they get easily distracted on tangentially related side discussions.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers from someone who they want to remember the memory of because that person is no longer with us. They talk a lot about this person's work, and some other things that come up as they are talking. The big things these two papers look at are how small things working together can build things that are bigger than themselves, and how those bigger things can be changed by the small things but not in a way where the big things can be known just by looking at the small things. The big things have stuff in them that come up from the way the small things work together to build something bigger than themselves.
References:
Vrba, Elisabeth S. "Macroevolutionary trends: new perspectives on the roles of adaptation and incidental effect." Science 221.4608 (1983): 387-389.
Vrba, Elisabeth S. "Mammals as a key to evolutionary theory." Journal of mammalogy 73.1 (1992): 1-28.
The gang discusses two papers that look at some exceptional soft-tissue preservation during the Silurian. The first paper potentially identifies a unique type of pterobranch, and the second paper looks at some early molluscs. Meanwhile, James has seen some movies, Amanda has a skibidi day, and Curt’s soul dies.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two animals from a long time ago that are only found as soft parts and that makes it hard to find the parts of them that were in the ground a long long time ago. The first paper looks at an animal that is not well known in the past but is close to another animal that is better known. These soft parts are weird and people did not know what they were for a long while. This paper makes the case for this being one of this group of animals that all live in long empty round things together. They also say that this one may have lived moving in the water even though the ones today all sit at the bottom of the water on the ground.
The second paper looks at another group of animals that many today have a hard part on them and some of them turn their body when they grow. The animals that they are looking at do not do these things. They have hair and are long. These are animals are from a group that we think might be close to what the early animals in this group today would have looked like. The friends talk about this paper because they gave the animals funny names.
References:
Briggs, Derek EG, and Nicolás Mongiardino Koch. "A Silurian pseudocolonial pterobranch." Current Biology 33.23 (2023): 5225-5232.
Sutton, Mark D., et al. "New Silurian aculiferan fossils reveal complex early history of Mollusca." Nature (2025): 1-6.
The gang discusses two papers that look at some exceptionally preserved juvenile fossil specimens and the interesting clues these fossils give to the ontogeny of extinct groups. The first paper is the current oldest preserved tadpole, and the second paper is an exceptionally preserved mummified sabre-toothed cat. Meanwhile, Amanda becomes light, James is visited, and Curt is left in the dust and the filth.
Content warning: This episode contains covers some potentially dark material given that these fossils are juveniles. The following time stamps represent some of the more sensitive moments in which the group make morbid jokes about the subject matter.
6 min 3 sec to 6 min 39 secs.
58 min 13 seconds to 58 min 29 secs
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that show some kids from animals groups that are no longer around. These papers are cool because they show how animals from a long time ago changed as they got older. The first paper looks at the kid of an animal group that changes a lot from a thing that moves through water to a thing that jumps on the ground. This kid is somewhere in the middle of jumping and moving through water. This is the oldest of this type of kid we have found so far. The group today is different because they go through this really big change. This paper shows that they were going through this really big change a long long time ago and shows that this change probably happened early on in their time line.
The second paper looks at a kid that is from a group of animals with hair and long teeth. This kid was in ice and so we have a lot of things that we would not get that are soft. This is the first time we have seen the soft parts for this age of this animal and it shows us that lots of things we see in the grown animals were also there when they were kids.
References:
Chuliver, Mariana, et al. "The oldest tadpole reveals evolutionary stability of the anuran life cycle." Nature (2024): 1-5.
Lopatin, A. V., et al. "Mummy of a juvenile sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens from the Upper Pleistocene of Siberia." Scientific Reports 14.1 (2024): 28016.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the evolution of photosynthesis in different groups. The first paper looks at what might be the first fossil evidence of thylakoids, and the second paper finds evidence for photosynthesizing symbiotes in Devonian fossil corals. Meanwhile, Amanda is making a lasagna, James has a lot of opinions about lasagna (~10 minutes until we actually get to the paper), and Curt is all about those sponges.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at how some types of living things can make food from the sun. The first paper looks at these very very old things that are very very very small. Inside these things they find very very very small parts of things that are used today by some living things to help make food from the sun. This might be the oldest one of these things that we have ever found, and it makes it so that we can see how things might have gotten better at making food from the sun over time.
The second paper looks at old animals that live in the big blue wet thing that all live close together and make big hard parts that make walls in the water. These old animals are like the ones we see today but they are a group that is not around anymore. Groups today have friends that help make food from the sun for them. This paper looks to see if the old animals had those friends (or friends like them) too. They find that animals today keep some bits of things they do not usually want so that their friends can eat them. This can be seen in the hard parts they make. When they looked at the hard parts of the old group of animals, they saw that they were doing this too. This means that these animals were keeping food for friends just like that animals we see today.
References:
Demoulin, Catherine F., et al. "Oldest thylakoids in fossil cells directly evidence oxygenic photosynthesis." Nature 625.7995 (2024): 529-534.
Jung, Jonathan, et al. "Coral photosymbiosis on Mid-Devonian reefs." Nature (2024): 1-7.
Sausage, Biscuits, Eggey, and Crankshaft make their way into the big mansion. Will they be able to pull off the heist of the century and deliver a perfect Christmas for the raccoons of the junkyard, or will they all go down in a blaze of glory?
"Sergio's Magic Dustbin" and “Silent Night” from Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Check out “Raccoon Sky Pirates” on itch,io https://hecticelectron.itch.io/raccoon-sky-pirates
Sausage, Biscuits, Eggey, and Crankshaft board the Dumpster Fire and prepare for a holiday adventure... despite the wishes of an unsuspecting populace.
"Sergio's Magic Dustbin" from Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Check out “Raccoon Sky Pirates” on itch,io https://hecticelectron.itch.io/raccoon-sky-pirates
James, Amanda, Curt, and Ants all get together to plan a holiday raccoon heist. What could possibly go wrong?
"Sergio's Magic Dustbin" from Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Check out “Raccoon Sky Pirates” on itch,io https://hecticelectron.itch.io/raccoon-sky-pirates
The gang discusses two papers that look at patterns of mosaic evolution, one paper looking at cat evolution and the other paper looking at bird ecomorphy. Which means the gang talks about Amanda’s two favorite taxonomic groups. Meanwhile, Curt enjoys some realistic bird calls, Amanda remains a threat, and James provides relevant “facts”.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends take a look at how animals change over time and how the parts of the animals might change in different ways at different times. The first paper looks at cats and things that are like cats, and they look at the parts of cats and how they have changed. What they find is that the different parts are changing in different ways across different groups of cats and cat like things.
The second paper looks at the neck of animals that move in the air. The paper is looking to see if the reason why these necks change the way they do are because of how they are trying to get food, which is what people thought might be true but no one has looked to see if it is true. A lot of work is done and it does seem that the necks change in a lot of ways that are different for different groups, but it does seem that a lot of these changes are because of how the animals try and look for food.
References:
Barrett, Paul Z., and Samantha SB Hopkins. "Mosaic evolution underlies feliform morphological disparity." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291.2028 (2024): 20240756.
Marek, Ryan D., and Ryan N. Felice. "The neck as a keystone structure in avian macroevolution and mosaicism." BMC biology 21.1 (2023): 216.
The gang discusses two papers that detail interesting findings about the soft tissues of extinct arthropods. The first paper does a detailed study of the limbs attached to the trilobite head. The second paper describes the newly discovered head of the ancient myriapod Arthropluera, and discusses the larger implications this fossil has for the evolution of millipedes. Meanwhile, Curt explores new advertising ventures, Amanda unpacks automotive anxiety, and James has no ethical complications to report concerning this podcast.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that look at parts of dead animals that have lots of parts that repeat over and over again and take off their skin every time they get bigger. The first paper looks at a group of these dead animals that are no longer around but are found a lot in the past. This paper shows that the number of legs in the head is different than we thought it was. They show that there are five legs in the head, and that it was hard to see in a lot of these animals because of the ways that we get these animals in the rocks makes it harder to see.
The second paper looks at an animal that we think is a lot like animals we see today with long bodies and two legs on each part. But we never actually found the head of these animals. This paper finds the head and it helps to show us a lot of cool things about not just these animals in the past, but also how these animals have changed over time. This helps us understand why the groups we have today are the way that they are.
References:
Lhéritier, Mickaël, et al. "Head anatomy and phylogenomics show the Carboniferous giant Arthropleura belonged to a millipede-centipede group." Science Advances 10.41 (2024): eadp6362.
Hou, Jin‐bo, and Melanie J. Hopkins. "New evidence for five cephalic appendages in trilobites and implications for segmentation of the trilobite head." Palaeontology 67.5 (2024): e12723.
The gang discusses two papers that look at examples of soft tissue preservation during the Cambrian. The first paper is a deep dive into the sedimentology and paleoenvironment of the Emu Bay Shale. The second paper makes some interesting claims about soft tissue preservation in a marginal marine environment. Meanwhile, James needs some shortcuts, Curt is locked up, and Amanda should be blamed for everything that happened here.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that look at animals from a long long time ago that lived in the water and were soft but were able to be found in rocks. The first paper looks at a place where there are a lot of animals found in rocks but the types of animals are different from other places around the same time. This paper looks at what the place was like at that time and they see that this was a place where a long line of water that you can drink made its way into the big water that you can not drink. The second paper made us all sad.
References:
Naimark, E. B., A. V. Sizov, and V. B. Khubanov. "Kimiltei Is a New Late Cambrian Lagerstätte with the Faunistic Complex of Arthropods (Euthycarcinoidae, Synziphosurina, and Chasmataspidida) in the Irkutsk Region." Doklady Earth Sciences. Vol. 512. No. 1. Moscow: Pleiades Publishing, 2023.
Gaines, Robert R., et al. "The Emu Bay Shale: A unique early Cambrian Lagerstätte from a tectonically active basin." Science advances 10.30 (2024): eadp2650.
The gang discusses two papers that look at two Lagerstätten (fossil localities of exceptional preservation). The first Lagerstätte is a unique complex early Triassic community found near the equator, and the second Lagerstätte is a collection of exceptional trace fossils from the Pennsylvanian. Meanwhile, James is convinced in the existence of a town that doesn’t exist, Amanda takes an unexpected break, and Curt once again needs to be redacted.
Up-Goer Fiver: (Curt Edition)
The friends talk about two papers that look at times when there was a lot of things in the rocks that we do not get in the rocks during most times, and these times can let us know that there were a lot more things were living at this time. The first paper talks about rocks during a time when usually there is not a lot going on because it was just after a time that most things died. Most rocks at this time do not show a lot of things living. These rocks are cool because they are just after the time almost everything died and they show the things that we know lived through that, and that they are all together in a way that looks like the groups of animals we see in rocks way later. The second paper looks at changes in rocks that are because animals move through or on the ground and that gets in the rocks. This area has a lot of these rocks with the bits of animals moving which lets us know a lot about what things were doing on land a long time ago.
References:
Dai, Xu, et al. "A Mesozoic fossil lagerstätte from 250.8 million years ago shows a modern-type marine ecosystem." Science 379.6632 (2023): 567-572.
Knecht, Richard J., et al. "Early Pennsylvanian Lagerstätte reveals a diverse ecosystem on a subhumid, alluvial fan." Nature Communications 15.1 (2024): 7876.
The gang looks at two papers that compare similar structures in unrelated animals to see if there might be evidence of convergence. The first paper compares Spinosaurus to phytosaurs and the second paper compares the hyoid bone of ichthyosaurs and toothed whales. Meanwhile, Curt will try it, James waits for something that never happens, and Amanda has a surprise.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look to see if animals that are not close are the same in ways because of what they do. The first paper looks at too old and dead big angry animals. Both of these animals look like angry animals today that move in water, and so this paper is looking to see if maybe they were both doing the same thing as what we see today. The paper doesn't come to a strong end, but it looks like maybe these things are doing things that maybe are not always the same as the things that live today that they look like.
The second paper looks at two animals that need air but move in the water all the time, one group that is living today and one that has been dead for a very very long time. There is a hard part in them that in the groups that are living today they can use to suck in water to get food to them. People had thought that the old group could have done this too. They looked at this hard part that lets things suck, and they found that the hard part in this old dead group would not let them suck. So these old dead animals would have to get food in a different way than the group living today.
References:
Yun, Chan-gyu. "SPINOSAURS AS PHYTOSAUR MIMICS: A CASE OF CONVERGENT EVOLUTION BETWEEN TWO EXTINCT ARCHOSAURIFORM CLADES." Acta Palaeontologica Romaniae 20.1 (2024).
Delsett, Lene Liebe, et al. "Is the hyoid a constraint on innovation? A study in convergence driving feeding in fish-shaped marine tetrapods." Paleobiology 49.4 (2023): 684-699.
The gang discusses two papers that look at convergence (maybe?) in modern arthropods. The first paper looks at plant/ant symbiosis in a genus of ants, and the second paper looks at color patterns in crayfish. Meanwhile, James sees through time, Amanda disappears, and Curt plays on everyone’s worst fears.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The up-goer thing is back and able to be used so we are now happy! The friends look at two papers that look at how animals can look a lot like each other. In this case the animals are really small and made of small hard parts put together. The first paper is looking at some of these small animals that live on trees. These small animals can either live in a lot of trees or just one type of tree. The animals that live on just one type of tree also look a lot like each other. This paper looks at how and why this could be.
The second paper looks at the color of small but angry animals that live along big bits of water. These animals can be lots of colors. They find that different colors appear many times in this group. They look to see if there are any reasons why, and what they find is that maybe color is changing because color is not a big deal for the animals that are living under the ground.
References:
Probst, Rodolfo S., John T. Longino, and Michael G. Branstetter. "Evolutionary déjà vu? A case of convergent evolution in an ant–plant association." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291.2026 (2024): 20241214.
Graham, Zackary A., and Dylan J. Padilla Perez. "Correlated evolution of conspicuous colouration and burrowing in crayfish." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291.2026 (2024): 20240632.
Thumbnail photo by Vojtěch Zavadil - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9959681
The gang discusses two papers that...
ok look. I'm going to level with you. No one in this podcast slept more than a few hours before we started recording. One of us was stuck on a plane and didn't get back home until 5 am the day of recording. Everyone was tired and stressed and so we all use this time to vent and drink. Sure, there are papers we talk about: growth rates of Triassic archosaurs and geographic gaps in our early tetrapod record. However, if what you want is focused discussion of the papers, this is not the podcast for you (it takes us 8 and a half minutes to get to the first paper). But if you like us at our most rambling, then do I have a podcast for you!
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): Last edition?
Oh no the up-goer five word thing has gone down. I can not make an up-goer for this. That makes sense for this because also this time the friends are tired and talking about lots of things that are not the papers, which are about how animals get big and where animals are. But since the nice place that lets us do the word thing is gone, we might not be able to do this ever again. Sorry!
References:
Marsicano, Claudia A., et al. "Giant stem tetrapod was apex predator in Gondwanan late Palaeozoic ice age." Nature (2024): 1-6.
Klein, Nicole. "Diverse growth rates in Triassic archosaurs—insights from a small terrestrial Middle Triassic pseudosuchian." The Science of Nature 111.4 (2024): 1-5.
The gang discusses two papers that look at modern bird migration patterns. The first paper looks at breading and migration patterns of the American woodcock, and the second paper looks at how migration could function as a motor of island speciation. Meanwhile, James is cursed with consciousness, Amanda is on point, and Curt's jokes are consistently ignored.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at how animals that move in the sky may move a long way to get to a new home every year. The first paper looks at one fun animal that moves up and down along the land where the friends live as everything gets warmer or colder. People have now been following these animals using big things in space that can show where something is, and this is what the paper uses to see how these animals move and how long they stay in one place. They also have people go to these places to make sure the animals are really there and that they are doing the things they think they are doing. This paper finds that these animals also make babies in many of the places that they go. Many animals that move a lot will only have babies once when they get to their new home, but these animals keep making babies in different places as they move. This paper shows that they are doing it and gives some ideas as to why they might be doing this.
The second papers looks to see if some of the animals that are stuck on small land with water on all sides. This paper wants to know if a lot of those animals come from animals moving a long way to a new home and getting lost and ending up on this small land. They run a lot of studies to see how many of these animals may have ended up on these small lands this way. And then, they look at other things that these animals have to see if there are big reasons why some animals get stuck. What they find is that a lot of the animals are there because they go stuck. They also find that animals that live in a lot of places and that move with a lot of other animals were the ones that were going to get stuck. This could be because having more of you in more places makes it so you can have at least one group of animals get stuck.
References:
Slezak, Colby R., et al. "Unconventional life history in a migratory shorebird: desegregating reproduction and migration." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291.2021 (2024): 20240021.
Dufour, Paul, et al. "The importance of migratory drop-off for island colonization in birds." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291.2021 (2024): 20232926.
The gang discusses two papers that look at functional morphology in extinct groups. The first paper looks at tooth replacement patterns in an Ornithischian dinosaur, and the second paper studies the shell articulation of Rafinesquina to unravel a long-standing mystery. Meanwhile, James has questions about taste, Amanda forgets protocol, and Curt indulges in his fixations.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at how animals did things a long time ago. The first paper looks at a group of big angry animals that are liked a lot and make their way into movies. This paper looks at how the teeth of some of these animals would grow over time. This group of big angry animals also does a lot of cool things with their teeth over a long time because they move from eating animals to eating things that do not move and make their own food from the sun. The big angry animals that they look at have lot of these animals from a lot of different ages so they can see how the teeth get changed as they grew up. What they see is that the way that the teeth grow in changes as the animal grows older. They also find that the number of times that new teeth come in has changed many times in this group of animals.
The second paper looks at a group of animals with two hard parts on either side that sits and eats food from the water. This group of animals has really made people confused for a long time because of how the hard parts come together, which could make it so that the animals could not get water inside to eat and would instead get a lot of ground and die. But this group of animals is really good at what it does because it is found all around the world. So how did these things eat? The paper shows that these animals could move their hard parts a lot more than we ever thought. Also, they show that they could move them pretty quick, and could even push out water so quickly that they could maybe move a little bit if they get covered in the ground.
References:
Hu, Jinfeng, et al. "Tooth replacement in the early-diverging neornithischian Jeholosaurus shangyuanensis and implications for dental evolution and herbivorous adaptation in Ornithischia." BMC Ecology and Evolution 24.1 (2024): 46.
Dattilo, Benjamin F., et al. "Paradox lost: wide gape in the Ordovician brachiopod Rafinesquina explains how unattached filter‐feeding strophomenoids thrived on muddy substrates." Palaeontology 67.2 (2024): e12697.
The gang discusses two papers that use new fossils to add insight into the geographic origins of groups. The first paper looks at some fossil freshwater dolphins and the second paper looks at fossil jumping spiders. The gang also uses these two papers to talk about a lot of other things because, despite being short papers, there is a lot of related things to talk about. Meanwhile, James is pretty sure he read the papers, Curt has very uninformed opinions, and Amanda gives everyone a panic attack.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that use old animals to see where animals may have been in the past. The first paper looks at animals with hair that live in the water and have moved into water that you and I can drink. This is a paper about one group of these animals and some bits of an old animal that were found in a place very far away from where these animals are today. This might mean that these animals moved into water than you and I could drink many times over the years and in many places.
The second paper looks at a small animal with many legs and hair that eats other small things. These animals are hard to find parts of in the past, but this paper finds a really nice one in a place that is important for understanding how they got where they are today. This group is found in areas that were close to each other in the past but have moved further away. This old animal being found where it is gives us more ideas about how these animals got to where they are today.
References:
Benites-Palomino, Aldo, et al. "The largest freshwater odontocete: A South Asian river dolphin relative from the proto-Amazonia." Science advances 10.12 (2024): eadk6320.
Richardson, Barry J., Matthew R. McCurry, and Michael Frese. "Description and evolutionary biogeography of the first Miocene jumping spider (Aranaea: Salticidae) from a southern continent." Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 200.4 (2024): 1013-1025.
The gang convenes in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the 2024 North American Paleontological Convention. We discuss the various talks we saw and highlights on the event.
Most of Day 2 discussion starts at 1:03:01
Day 3 discussion starts at 2:19:00
Day 4 discussion starts at 3:22:56
The gang discusses two papers that study ecological changes in the evolutionary history of some charismatic ancient animal groups. The first paper uses geographic data to infer the timing of the evolution of homeothermy in non-avian dinosaur groups, and the second paper looks at the mechanisms by which cats (and cat-like animals) developed saber teeth. Meanwhile, Curt makes some plans for Amanda, James muddles things over, and Amanda could use another.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at how where animals live can change how they look and also maybe how they look can change where they can live. The first paper looks at old big angry animals and where they live to see if they can find when these animals were able to make themselves warm inside. We have other things that make us think that some of these big angry animals may have been able to get warm inside, but that this might have happened a few times in this group. By looking at where these animals were found in the past, they see that there are times when these animals move into places that are colder. They use this to say that these times may be because these animals now being able to make themselves warm inside.
The second paper looks at animals that are cats and cat like animals. Some of these cats and cat like animals have very long teeth. This paper does a lot of things to study how these cats and cat like animals change their heads when they get these big teeth. They find that some of these cat like groups do this in a different way than cats, but also that cats start to change their heads to be a bit more like the cat like things when they get bigger teeth but also not in the same way.
References:
Chiarenza, Alfio Alessandro, et al. "Early Jurassic origin of avian endothermy and thermophysiological diversity in Dinosauria." bioRxiv (2023): 2023-12.
Chatar, Narimane, et al. "Evolutionary patterns of cat-like carnivorans unveil drivers of the sabertooth morphology." Current Biology (2024).
The gang discusses two papers that look into long term trends in body size over time. The first paper looks at body size trends in corals, and the second looks at body size and ecology of terror birds. Meanwhile, James loses a bit of himself, Amanda is bad at transitions, and Curt goes places no one wants to go.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at how big things are and how that changes over time. The first paper looks at tiny animals that live together in a group and share their homes with even smaller living things that help give them food. It turns out that being small makes it good for the smaller things living with them. So this paper wants to see if these animals have been getting smaller over time. Turns out that it is not that easy, and that some of these earlier animals were bigger than today but probably did have even smaller living things with them helping them. But it seems like there is some bit of these animals getting smaller, so maybe these animals have gotten better at building homes for these even smaller living things.
The second paper looks at big angry animals that are close to things that can fly but these big angry animals could not fly. This paper looks to see if these animals lived at the same time and did the same things and were as big as each other, or do we see these animals doing different things at the same time or with one of them being bigger than the other. They find that most of the time, when there are two of these animals living at the same time, they are either doing different things or one of them is much bigger than the other. The paper says this shows that these animals were trying not to fight each other for the same stuff, but the friends have other questions about what could be going on.
References:
LaBarge, Thomas W., Jacob D. Gardner, and Chris L. Organ. "The evolution and ecology of gigantism in terror birds (Aves, Phorusrhacidae)." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291.2021 (2024): 20240235.
Dimitrijević, Danijela, Nussaïbah B. Raja, and Wolfgang Kiessling. "Corallite sizes of reef corals: decoupling of evolutionary and ecological trends." Paleobiology 50.1 (2024): 43-53.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the shark fossil record. The first paper looks into the completeness of the record, and the second paper discusses the ecological implications of an exceptionally preserved specimen. Meanwhile, James has ideas of what is normal, Curt has a hard out, and Amanda shows her specific history interests.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at animals with lots of soft parts that move through the water and have lots and lots of teeth. The first paper is looking at how well we know these animals in the past, since most of the time we may only know them by their teeth. They do a lot of things to see how much of the animals we have at any time. What they find is that, most of the time, we do not have many parts of these animals. However, there are some times in the past when we do see more parts that are not just teeth, so there might be times in the past that were better and making sure the soft parts were able to stick around and be found later. But most of the time, we really only have teeth or a few other parts, and that this makes these animals different from most other animals that are close to them and that makes sense because the rest of these animals have hard parts where these animals have soft parts.
The second paper looks at one of these animals with soft parts where those soft parts were found today. This is the first time this type of animal has been found with its soft parts. Most of the time, we just find the teeth, which look like they were good at breaking hard things. With the soft parts, we can get an idea of how it would move through the water and if it was slow or fast. We can also find out what its brothers and sisters were. What they find is that the soft parts show that this animal looked like a lot of the animals in this group we see today that are not breaking hard things but are catching fast moving food in the water. This is not something we would think would happen, because today animals that have teeth like the ones this animal had don't need to move very fast to catch their food. This shows that this animal was doing something that we don't see today. This might be because there were lots of animals with hard parts on the outside that were moving in the water really fast at that time, which this one animal would have tried to catch for food.
References:
Schnetz, Lisa, et al. "The skeletal completeness of the Palaeozoic chondrichthyan fossil record." Royal Society Open Science 11.1 (2024): 231451.
Vullo, Romain, et al. "Exceptionally preserved shark fossils from Mexico elucidate the long-standing enigma of the Cretaceous elasmobranch Ptychodus." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291.2021 (2024): 20240262.
The gang discusses two papers about an interesting locality in South America and the various body fossils and ichnofossils found in this locality. This podcast originally started as a patreon request to podcast about fossil procyonids… but it ended up like this… ooops!
Meanwhile, James has a vocal doppelganger, Amanda deals with being human, Curt deals with scams, and everyone talks way too much about visuals on an audio podcast.
Up-Goer Five: (Curt Edition)
The friends talk about a place that has rocks from a long time ago that give us an idea of the types of animals that were around in the land areas under where the friends are today. The land where our friends are one used to not be touching the land that is under them like it is now. Once these two lands touched, then the animals from each land moved into the other lands. This place is from a time before these two lands had finished touching, so some animals moved over but others had not yet. The first paper looks at some parts of a type of animals that is brother/sister to animals that grab food out of our place we put food that we can not eat anymore. These animals had moved onto the land under the land our friends are on before the two lands had stopped touching. The place where these parts are found is interesting because it seems like it is under water for some time but there are some bits that are not under water. The first paper shows some marks in the ground that are interesting, but the second paper goes in on these marks to show that they are homes and marks from food searches from other animals. These marks show that the animals in this area were doing a lot of things to make homes and look for food under the ground. This shows that even before other animals moved from the other land, animals in this area were doing cool things in the ground.
References:
Soibelzon, Leopoldo H., et al. "First record of fossil procyonid (Mammalia, Carnivora) from Uruguay." Journal of South American Earth Sciences 92 (2019): 368-373.
Varela, Luciano, et al. "Late Miocene mammalian burrows in the Camacho Formation of Uruguay reveal a complex community of ecosystem engineers." Evolving Earth 1 (2023): 100023.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the morphology and ecology of early fishes. The first paper investigates a hypothesis for how the pectoral girdle could have evolved, and the second paper looks at the functional morphology of a Paleozoic jawless fish. Meanwhile, Amanda missed some context, James throws some shade, and Curt is annoyed by AI.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at animals from a long time ago that live in water. The first paper looks at how part of the shoulder in people may have first started as a part of another part of the animal in these animals that lived in water a long long time ago. They find these parts of this animals from a long long time ago that they can use to see how the parts around the head grew. They use this to say that the shoulder parts may have started as a part of the thing these animals use to breath.
The second paper looks at the mouth of a type of animal that lived in water a long long time ago that did not have a hard part in the mouth to move up and down and eat food. They use an animal they found with a lot of parts to see how these animals may have lived and what they could have eaten. They find that this animal could have been picking up food from ground at the bottom of the water or they could have been of taking food out of the water. This shows that even animals without a hard part to move up and down to eat food were finding ways to eat a lot of different things.
References:
Brazeau, Martin D., et al. "Fossil evidence for a pharyngeal origin of the vertebrate pectoral girdle." Nature 623.7987 (2023): 550-554.
Dearden, Richard P., et al. "The three-dimensionally articulated oral apparatus of a Devonian heterostracan sheds light on feeding in Palaeozoic jawless fishes." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291.2019 (2024): 20232258.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the correlation between climate change and extinction risk in the fossil record. The first paper uses climate modeling to simulate extinction risk during past periods of climate change, and the second paper uses new radiometric age dates to infer diachronous extinction between marine and terrestrial environments during the Permian mass extinction. Meanwhile, James orders food, Curt stirs the pot, and Amanda lives with her choices.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that look at times when a lot of things died. The first paper uses computers and numbers to see how things could die during times when things get real hot or real cold. They look at real times in the past when lots of things die during these cold and hot times, and then they use their computers and numbers to make those things happen in the world of a computer to see if they can find out what may or may not make that happen. They find that lots of things can cause animals to die during these times when things get hot or cold, but how big the space animals live in and how many different types of places these animals can live in are big for knowing if they will or will not die.
The second paper looks at a time in the past when almost everything died. This is a time when it got real hot. Things die on the land and in the water. A lot of what we study is in the water because those things are able to get covered in ground faster than the things that live on the land. But this paper finds some rocks from the land and does some work with the matter that makes up these rocks to see how old the rocks are. These rocks have animals in them that would die because of this big bad time when everything died. But the time that they found was after when everything in the water died. So this could mean that animals may have died first in the water and then died after on the land. This could be because the way the world changes when things get hot is going to be different in the water and on land.
References:
Malanoski, Cooper M., et al. "Climate change is an important predictor of extinction risk on macroevolutionary timescales." Science 383.6687 (2024): 1130-1134.
Wu, Qiong, et al. "The terrestrial end-Permian mass extinction in the paleotropics postdates the marine extinction." Science Advances 10.5 (2024): eadi7284.
The gang talks about two papers that look through existing museum collections to discover some fascinating new discoveries. Meanwhile, Curt may be haunted, James may be losing energy, and Amanda may not be real.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers about new things that found when going through the stuff stored in a big building where you keep things so that people can look at them later. The first paper finds some really cool new small things that live in water that had been found before and put in a big building to keep things, but no one saw that these small things were not the same as the other small things. These small things are part of a group that lives in fast moving water that we usually do not get a lot of them in the ground.
The second paper finds that a thing that was put in a big building a long time ago was actually a lie. This thing is not what everyone thinks it is and the paper looks into what it really is, which is that it is a painting on rock. The paper talks about how it could have ended up this way.
References:
Godunko, Roman J., and Pavel Sroka. "A new mayfly subfamily sheds light on the early evolution and Pangean origin of Baetiscidae (Insecta: Ephemeroptera)." Scientific Reports 14.1 (2024): 1599.
Rossi, Valentina, et al. "Forged soft tissues revealed in the oldest fossil reptile from the early Permian of the Alps." Palaeontology 67.1 (2024): e12690.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the fossil frog record. The first paper identifies fossil frogs from Antarctica, and the second paper looks at some exceptional soft-tissue preservation. Meanwhile, James has ideas for expanding the brand, Amanda asks for clarification on an important topic, and Curt makes some executive decisions.
Up-Goer Five (James Edition):
The group looks at two papers that are interested in animals that are wrong and good at jumping and live in the water but some can walk on land and climb trees. The first paper is looking at one from the very cold land in the bottom of the round thing we live on, where we do not find any of them today because it is too cold. The animal is known by two small bits but we can tell what type of jumping thing it is and so we know it is part of a group that is found in two areas that do not touch today, but the place at the bottom of the round thing we live on is between them, so that makes sense! But it is very cold today, so that is strange, but the animal being there and the things we find with it seems to show that is must have been a little hotter then.
The second paper is looking at one of the animals that is good at jumping that is found with lots of round things that become babies in it. This is very cool because the animal is also still soft in places in it that means it was not the most grown it could be and so was making babies when it was still young. There is also a thought that the animal may have died while trying to make babies which is interesting.
References:
Mörs, Thomas, Marcelo Reguero, and Davit Vasilyan. "First fossil frog from Antarctica: implications for Eocene high latitude climate conditions and Gondwanan cosmopolitanism of Australobatrachia." Scientific Reports 10.1 (2020): 5051.
Du, Baoxia, et al. "A cretaceous frog with eggs from northwestern China provides fossil evidence for sexual maturity preceding skeletal maturity in anurans." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291.2016 (2024): 20232320.
The gang discusses two papers that investigate evidence of symbiosis in the fossil record. The first paper looks at wormy organisms living inside Cambrian vetulicolians, and the second paper shows potential evidence of hydroids growing in mollusc shells. Meanwhile, Amanda is haunted, James’s computer is totally cooperating, and Curt may or may not have had to stitch this podcast together from other sources.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that look at animals that live inside of other animals. Sometimes these things live inside other things and both of the things do well because of it. Sometimes, these things live inside other things and they cause problems for the thing they live in. These two papers look at the ways we can see old bits of things that used to live in other things and how we can try and figure out why they might have lived inside other things. The first paper looks long animals living inside a weird animal from a long long time ago. These long animals are all in a small part of these animals that looks like where these weird animals would breathe. Many long animals live inside one of these weird animals. The second paper looks at how hard parts of animals grow over things trying to live on them and we can use use the way these things grow to get an idea of what could have been living on them.
References:
Li, Yujing, et al. "Symbiotic fouling of Vetulicola, an early Cambrian nektonic animal." Communications Biology 3.1 (2020): 517.
Wisshak, Max, et al. "Putative hydroid symbionts recorded by bioclaustrations in fossil molluscan shells: a revision and reinterpretation of the cecidogenus Rodocanalis." Papers in Palaeontology 9.2 (2023): e1484.
The gang discusses two papers that look at Mesozoic tracks that may or may not have been made by an avian archosaur. Meanwhile, Curt becomes activated, Amanda has to deal with harsh truths, James gets creative with taxon names, and everyone get distracted very quickly. (Editor’s Note: If you want to just “get to the science” skip to 11 minutes in. We hadn’t talked in 2 months and it shows. I just didn’t have the heart to cut all of it)
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that look at foot falls in the ground from a very very long time ago which may or may not be made by animals that can fly through the sky, or may have been made by big angry animals. The problem is that big angry animals and the animals that can fly are very close to each other, and their foot falls can look a lot like each other. The first paper looks at some very old foot falls and some of these foot falls do look like they were made by animals that can fly, but that would be very very strange because it would need a lot of other things to be true if that were true. They say that there was something moving like these animals today that can fly but were probably not those types of animals, but it shows how hard it can be to see if these foot falls were made by these animals that can fly.
The second paper uses numbers to try and see if we can really see if some of these foot falls were made by animals that fly. What they find is that we have used how big these foot falls are as a reason why we think some are from big angry animals and some are from animals that can fly. This is maybe a problem because we know there are small big angry animals, and that today there are some big animals that are from the group that can fly. If you use numbers to take how big they are out of the running, it seem like some of these foot falls could be from big animals part of the group that can fly.
References:
Abrahams, Miengah, and Emese M. Bordy. "The oldest fossil bird-like footprints from the upper Triassic of southern Africa." Plos one 18.11 (2023): e0293021.
Hong, Sung-Yoon, et al. "The discovery of Wupus agilis in South Korea and a new quantitative analysis of intermediate ichnospecies between non-avian theropods and birds." Cretaceous Research 155 (2024): 105785.
A cleric, a wizard, and a paladin finally make their way into the center of the woods. What will they find at the end of their journey?
"The Builder", “The Other Side of the Door”, “For Originz” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
A paladin, a wizard, and a cleric continue their trek through a totally normal nature preserve where I am sure nothing bad will happen whatsoever.
"The Builder", “Constancy Part Three” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
A cleric, a wizard, and a paladin prepare for a trip through a dangerous wood. What could go wrong?
"The Builder", “Constancy Part Three” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gang discusses two papers that look at... well... let's be honest here... we really didn't have much of a hook. You see, James was slammed with bureaucratic work, Curt was knee deep in grading hell, and Amanda was traveling for the holidays. So we made... this; a podcast about a worm and a lamprey.
We're sorry.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers about animals that are long with no legs. The first paper looks at a small long animal that is actually pretty big for the kind of animal that it is. It is very old and is found in a very cold place. This is an important animal to find from a long time ago because there are not a lot of these animals found at this time, and not a lot of them in the cold. The fact that it is big could be a part of something we see a lot where some animals get big to live in the cold.
The second paper looks at a long animals that moves through water and some of them will eat parts of other animals while they are still living. This paper is looking at two new animals from a long time ago that have not been seen before and seeing how it changes our ideas of where these things come from and how they lived. And it does!
References:
Wu, Feixiang, Philippe Janvier, and Chi Zhang. "The rise of predation in Jurassic lampreys." Nature Communications 14.1 (2023): 6652.
García-Bellido, Diego C., and Juan Carlos Gutiérrez-Marco. "Polar gigantism and remarkable taxonomic longevity in new palaeoscolecid worms from the Late Ordovician Tafilalt Lagerstätte of Morocco." Historical Biology 35.11 (2023): 2011-2021.
The gang discusses two papers about taphonomy and its influence on our understanding of the fossil record. The first paper looks at how taphonomic processes can blur our understanding of cause and effect, while the second paper looks at the impacts of collector and size biases on our understanding of the ecology of an ancient plant. Meanwhile, James deals with spirits, Curt gets philosophical, and Amanda smartly ignores things.
Up-Goer Five (Curt):
The friends talk about two papers that look at the ways in which the things we know can be changed because of other problems that we do not always know are there to make things look like one thing but actually be another thing. The first paper looks at how not getting things to be saved over time could mean that you might not see the reason something happens until it looks like it is after that thing has happened. The paper uses a time in the past when it got very cold and looks at what could have made this happen. There are lots of talk about the growing of big things that make their own food from the sun on land, but this paper shows that what we can see might not be the real time when big things started really doing well. While it sounds strange, it might be best to look at something that we see in the rocks after the time that it gets cold, since the thing that changed probably changed before we can see it in the rocks.
The second paper looks at another thing that makes its own food from the sun. This old thing could have lived in a lot of different ways and there are lots of people who think one way or another. Some think these things need to burn as part of their life, and some people think that these things would live near water and might get burned only sometimes. The people who wrote this paper looked at how people found these things, if they picked up ones that were big or small, and also went out to find more of these things. What they find is that some of the reasons people have not known how these things lived is because we grab big parts to save but most of the things are found as small parts that have burned. This means that it seems that burning was an important part of the lives of these things.
References:
Blanco‐Moreno, Candela, Hugo Martín‐Abad, and Ángela D. Buscalioni. "Quantitative plant taphonomy: the cosmopolitan Mesozoic fern Weichselia reticulata as a case study." Palaeontology 65.6 (2022): e12627.
D'Antonio, Michael P., Daniel E. Ibarra, and C. Kevin Boyce. "The preservation of cause and effect in the rock record." Paleobiology 49.2 (2023): 204-214.
The gang discusses two papers that look at plankton through time. The first paper looks at some Cambrian acritarch fossils and shows that they are likely colonial algae, and the second paper looks at how shifting temperature affected plankton distribution across the Cenozoic. Meanwhile, everyone stays completely on task with the stated goals of this podcast: a detailed (and wrong) discussion on the events of the movie “The Hunt for Red October”. Yes, it is going to be “one of those” podcasts.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at things that live in the water without having to move parts to stay in the water and maybe they are single cells and maybe they are groups of cells. The first paper looks very very old things that live in the water. These old things are so old and hard to figure out that people are not always sure what they are. These things are often thought to be all single cells. This paper shows that some of these things that are very old might be groups of cells that are living together. The way that these cells group together does look like some things that live in the water today that make food from the sun. This paper shows that this type of cell or something like it might have been around a very very long time ago.
The second paper looks at how where things living in the water but not moving and maybe they are single cells and maybe they are groups of cells, could have lived when things got cold in the past. They see that there are changes in the types of these things over time and where the live. They show that the way things are today is because it was getting colder. It also shows that, when things warm up, we might see some big changes in where these things are.
References:
Woodhouse, Adam, et al. "Late Cenozoic cooling restructured global marine plankton communities." Nature 614.7949 (2023): 713-718.
Harvey, Thomas HP. "Colonial green algae in the Cambrian plankton." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.2009 (2023): 20231882.
The gang discusses two papers that deal with the evolution of tardigrades. The first paper looks at some fossil tardigrades in amber, and the second paper looks to the Cambrian to determine the ancestors of modern tardigrades. Meanwhile, Amanda confuses some details about medication, James has some money making crab solutions, and Curt is somehow the one person trying to keep people on track.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that look at a group of animals that are very very very small and have been seen as cute by a lot of people even though you can not really see them without help. The first paper finds some of these very very small animals in bits that come out of things that grow big and make their own food. These bits get hard when they get covered in ground over a long time and things that get stuck in the stuff can be there. This paper looks at these old very very small animals and tries to see what they could be like. It also talks about how we might not have as good an idea of these animals because they are so small and we do not always look for small things in these kinds of places.
The second paper looks at the older things that might be great great great great mom and dad to the tiny animals today. These animals are much bigger and much much older. This paper shows that lots of things we see in these tiny animals today may have been parts that we see in these older animals. But also, that in order to get so very very very small, these animals may have lost some parts so that they could get that small.
References:
Kihm, Ji-Hoon, et al. "Cambrian lobopodians shed light on the origin of the tardigrade body plan." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120.28 (2023): e2211251120.
Mapalo, Marc A., et al. "A tardigrade in Dominican amber." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 288.1960 (2021): 20211760.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the gut contents and traces of ancient animals. The first paper reconstructs gut traces (or lack thereof) for Ediacarans and then the second paper looks at the detailed gut contents and 3d track of a lichid trilobite. Meanwhile, Amanda’s cat is changing careers, James is feeling “motivated”, and Curt has some house improvement recommendations.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about the insides of different animals from a long long time ago. The first paper looks at animals from a long long time ago that do not look much like things we see today. There is a lot of talk about how these animal would eat and where the food would go when they did eat. This paper looks at the parts that remain and looks over the things that are left behind to see if they can find out what the insides of these things were like. What they find is that the things we think are more like things we see today all have insides where the food goes. The one really strange thing does not and could have had food move into it along its outside.
The second paper looks at a small animal with many parts that makes a hard home. This paper finds the food that it ate in its insides and can use it to see what the insides look like. This is a great way for us to see the insides where the food goes in a group that is not around anymore. Also, the food in the insides lets us know how this animal ate things and the way it ate is strange when we look at things today. This thing ate hard things but it did it in a way that is not like what we see today. Also, this animal may have been getting ready to grow but did not make it.
References:
Kraft, Petr, et al. "Uniquely preserved gut contents illuminate trilobite palaeophysiology." Nature (2023): 1-7.
Bobrovskiy, Ilya, et al. "Guts, gut contents, and feeding strategies of Ediacaran animals." Current Biology 32.24 (2022): 5382-5389.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the provide clues to the modern biogeographic distribution of species, specifically bees and new world monkeys. Meanwhile, Amanda shares something, James finds out about where’s the beef in more ways than one, and Curt invents a band.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at where animals live and how those animals got to those places. The first paper looks at group of small animals that fly and go to things that grow their own food and picks up parts of them when looking for food that helps these things that grow their own food make more of themselves. A long time ago, people had an idea that all of these small animals that fly came from one place and them moved to other places. No one had done a big paper using computers to see if this was true. This paper uses computers and finds that it does seem to be true.
The second paper looks at small animals that move in trees and can not fly but are closer to people than lots of other animals. This group came from across a big blue wet thing. However, lots of people wonder how they got across the big blue wet thing. This paper looks at new parts of these animals and sees that maybe these animals got across the big blue wet thing a lot of times. This might mean that at some times in the past it was easier for some of these small animals to make it across that big blue wet thing.
References:
Almeida, Eduardo AB, et al. "The evolutionary history of bees in time and space." Current biology 33.16 (2023): 3409-3422.
Marivaux, Laurent, et al. "An eosimiid primate of South Asian affinities in the Paleogene of Western Amazonia and the origin of New World monkeys." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120.28 (2023): e2301338120.
The gang discusses two papers that look at fossils of the early whale group Basilosauridae. Specially, these papers describe the largest whale recovered from this group, as well as the smallest whale from the group. Meanwhile, Amanda has a lovely home, James has some whale facts, and Curt has some art critiques.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at one group of big animals that breathe air but move in the water that are no longer around today. These papers are looking at different animals within the same group. The cool thing about both of these papers is that they talk about the same thing, but from different ways of looking at it. This is because one of these papers is about the biggest animal that people have found in this group and the other paper is about the smallest animal found in this group. This is a big thing because this is a group that today has gotten really big and the reasons why these groups get big has been something people are really interested in. These papers show that these animals were getting both big and small very early on in the group.
References:
Bianucci, Giovanni, et al. "A heavyweight early whale pushes the boundaries of vertebrate morphology." Nature (2023): 1-6.
Antar, Mohammed S., et al. "A diminutive new basilosaurid whale reveals the trajectory of the cetacean life histories during the Eocene." Communications Biology 6.1 (2023): 707.
The gang discusses two papers that investigate the feeding strategies of ancient animals, including a fossil stingray and an ancient bird. Meanwhile, James is recovering, Curt refuses to do his job, and Amanda is in podcast heaven but teetering over podcast hell.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that looks into what old animals that are long dead would eat. The first paper looks at the teeth of a group of animals that move through the water like waves and have a long back part. Animals in this group today eat lots of different things. In the past, we do not know what these animals would eat so we do not know the ways in which these animals have changed to better eat the things they eat. This paper finds an old animal with teeth and body parts and finds that this thing could break hard things with its teeth, but also that it moved through the water in a different way than the animals today that break hard things.
The second paper looks at hard things in the stomach of an old animal that flies. This animal has a lot of questions about what it would eat. This paper finds that the hard things in the stomach show that this animal was eating green things that make their own food. This animal was not just eating the soft easy to eat things like sweet parts that hold the things that make new green things, but also the leaves as well.
References:
Marramà, Giuseppe, et al. "The evolutionary origin of the durophagous pelagic stingray ecomorph." Palaeontology 66.4 (2023): e12669.
Wu, Yan, et al. "Intra-gastric phytoliths provide evidence for folivory in basal avialans of the Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota." Nature Communications 14.1 (2023): 4558.
The gang discusses two papers that use Blender 3d modeling techniques (and other functional morphology techniques) to study arthropod morphology. The first paper looks at trilobite enrollment and the second paper looks at the anomalocaris great frontal appendages. Meanwhile, James likes horses, Amanda has some name ideas, and Curt fails to segue.
Up-Goer Five (Amanda Edition):
Today our friends look at two papers that talk about things with legs that have many parts. The first paper looks at very old pretty large things with mouth legs that people can't decide if they were strong or not strong. The paper does lots of computer stuff to figure out just how strong the mouth legs are. They find that the mouth legs are not as strong as people thought they might be and so they did not eat things with very hard parts, probably, but things that were not hard at all. The second paper looks at how cute little things with legs that have many parts might have made themselves into balls. There are many ways that they might have made themselves into balls, with the way the head fits with the back end. They think only one or two were very good, and that it might have changed as the cute little things with legs that have many parts grew up.
References:
Esteve, Jorge, and Nigel C. Hughes. "Developmental and functional controls on enrolment in an ancient, extinct arthropod." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.2000 (2023): 20230871.
Bicknell, Russell DC, et al. "Raptorial appendages of the Cambrian apex predator Anomalocaris canadensis are built for soft prey and speed." Proceedings of the royal society B 290.2002 (2023): 20230638.
The gang discusses two papers that looks at mammal jaws and teeth. The first paper uses many different analyses to study how the mammal jaw evolved, and the second paper looks at a unique set of teeth in a fossil whale group. Meanwhile, Curt gets ideas from Mortal Kombat, James has discusses farming practices, and Amanda finds any excuse to be fabulous.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at how mouths for animals with hair have changed over time. The first paper looks at the bottom hard part of the mouth to see how it first started and how it has changed and why it changed. Lots of people have ideas about this, but this paper is the first attempt to really look at this problem for a lot of different ways of handling it. They do a lot of things that are very number heavy to look at how these hard parts are able to move, and they look at a lot of parts from living and long dead things. What they find is that the bottom mouth parts of animals with hair are not as good as we thought. They are hard so they do not break, but other animals have bottom mouth parts that are easier to use and quicker. Because animals with hair make their bottom mouth from just one hard part, it may have made it easier for them to get many different teeth in the mouth. This is a story that has a lot more parts than just, "animals with hair had better everything so that is why there are now a lot of them" and instead shows that some changes were not "better" but may have opened doors to other ways to use a mouth (like many different teeth in the same mouth).
The second paper looks at one animal with hair that moves through the water and has some very weird teeth that push out the front of the mouth. But first, the paper needs to see if these are really teeth. Some long teeth like things are found in other animals with hair, but these long things do not have all the parts to be teeth. When they look at this animal, they see that these are actually really long teeth. This is interesting because teeth can be more hurt by things than the long teeth like things. So if these are teeth, what did they do with them? They do not have breaks and they would not be good for moving through the ground looking for food, so the people who wrote the paper think they might be used to cut food.
References:
Tseng, Z. Jack, et al. "A switch in jaw form–function coupling during the evolution of mammals." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378.1880 (2023): 20220091.
Coste, Ambre, R. Ewan Fordyce, and Carolina Loch. "A new dolphin with tusk-like teeth from the late Oligocene of New Zealand indicates evolution of novel feeding strategies." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.2000 (2023): 20230873.
The gang discusses two papers that look at examples of unusually large animals in the fossil record; one large lacewing larvae and one very large skink. Meanwhile, James is having a great day, Amanda starts a chant, and Curt learns the true meaning of “cool fossil bro”.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers about things that are big for what they are. The first paper is a type of kid of an animal that is small thing that flies when it is grown but does not fly when it is a kid. These animals have a neck when they are kids which some of these animals do not have. This animal has a really long body and a really long neck. They found it in water, so they think this animal would have been a big thing living in the water and eating things that it caught with its long neck.
The second paper looks at another group of animals with cold blood and hard bits on its skin that runs around on four legs. This animal is really big for its group. Parts of this animal were found before, but they were smaller and so they were thought to be something else. This paper finds new parts that show those are parts are from this bigger thing when it was a kid. This big animal is close to another animal that is around today. When this bigger animal died, the smaller animal it is close to came into the same places and seems to have taken its place.
References:
Du, Xuheng, Kecheng Niu, and Tong Bao. "Giant Jurassic dragon lacewing larvae with lacustrine palaeoecology represent the oldest fossil record of larval neuropterans." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.1993 (2023): 20222500.
Thorn, Kailah M., et al. "A giant armoured skink from Australia expands lizard morphospace and the scope of the Pleistocene extinctions." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.2000 (2023): 20230704.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the ecomorphology of Mesozoic swimming reptiles. The first paper investigates swimming strategies in various marine swimming reptile groups, and the second paper looks at changes in the skull of mosasaurs compared to stem whales. Meanwhile, James has a meal, Amanda “makes” animals, and Curt needs more insight.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that look at how big angry animals that move through the water lived a long time ago. The first paper looks at how these big animals moved through the water, because there are many ways that an animal can move through water. They use numbers to look at how these animals look, and they also use some animals from today that move through water to see if the way they look is like the ones from the past. They find that there are some ways that animals look with their bodies that change how they move through the water. This shows a lot of cool things. Some groups start moving through water in one way and over time move to a different way. This shows that there was a lot of different ways these groups of big angry animals were able to move through the water.
The second paper looks at the heads of one group of big angry animals from the past that move through water and also an old group of big animals with hair that move through water that are still around today. The paper wants to see if both of these groups do the same things with their heads since they are both moving into moving through water. They find that a few of the heads kind of look like each other between these two groups, which could be that they were trying to eat the same things. However, most of the time these two groups are not looking the same in the head. This is because these two groups come from different things and so they are not able to change their head in the same way.
References:
Gutarra, Susana, et al. "The locomotor ecomorphology of Mesozoic marine reptiles." Palaeontology 66.2 (2023): e12645.
Bennion, Rebecca F., et al. "Convergence and constraint in the cranial evolution of mosasaurid reptiles and early cetaceans." Paleobiology 49.2 (2023): 215-231.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the impact of humans on bird populations. The first paper looks at the history of a condor nesting site in the Andes, and the second paper looks at the impact of artificial light on the circadian rhythms of urban bird populations. Meanwhile, James is highly engaged, Curt tries to sell some property, Amanda finds something slightly more horrifying, and everyone is in the presence of ALAN.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at how people have made life different for small animals that fly in the air and some of them make sweet sounds. The first paper looks at the home for one type of these animals that is pretty big and eats things that are dead. These animals have been using this home for a really long time, and we can look at their shit (yes this is the only word I can use) to see what they ate in the past and also see how long they have been there. A long time ago, their shit shows that they ate a lot of things from the big blue wet thing, probably lots of big animals that have hair and move through the water. When people started to kill these big animals, these animals that fly started to eat less of them. We can even see when these animals started to eat things that people from across a different big blue wet thing brought with them to eat. This shows that these homes are used for very long time, and so making sure that these animals can get to these homes and that the homes are safe is important to keeping them living.
The second paper looks at how some small animals that fly sleep and if being in a city makes these animals sleep at different times or for longer or shorter. The idea is that the city has a lot more light than the woods and can make it harder to get to sleep. The paper looks at these animals living in the woods and animals living in the city. It first looks at their homes to see how much time they spend in their homes. They find that both groups of animals spend about the same time in their homes. City animals get out of their homes earlier in the day, but that seems to be that they are also setting up their home earlier in the year and need to get out to get stuff for the home. They then take these animals and they put them in a dark room to see how much they move with no change in light. They find the woods animals start moving less right away, but the city animals take longer before they start moving less. This could be because the room has low light and the animals from the city are more used to that, or it could be that the animals from the city are more used to being in bad spots. Either way, it shows that these animals are showing changes to work around the light from the city.
References:
Duda, Matthew P., et al. "A 2200-year record of Andean Condor diet and nest site usage reflects natural and anthropogenic stressors." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.1998 (2023): 20230106.
Tomotani, Barbara M., Fabian Timpen, and Kamiel Spoelstra. "Ingrained city rhythms: flexible activity timing but more persistent circadian pace in urban birds." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.1999 (2023): 20222605.
The gang discusses two papers that study the paleoecology of the Ediacaran fauna. The first paper looks at environmental information that can be gleaned from the microbial mats these organisms lived on, and the second paper studies how different Ediacaran fossils are distributed on this microbial mat. Meanwhile, James is having a week, Curt is unsure about chips, and Amanda is comfortable being very on brand.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that study some very old animals that lived a long long time ago and lived on these beds of tiny tiny tiny animals and not animals. In fact, these two papers are also interested in the beds these things lived on and how they lived on the bed. The first paper looks at these parts of the beds and how you can find them in different beds made of tiny tiny tiny animals and not animals. There are these lines in the beds that are found in some beds but not all of the beds. They think that the way water moves over the beds may cause these lines to form. The other cool thing they find is that the animals are found when there are these lines, and are not found when there are not these lines. This means that the way the water moves might be important for these animals to live.
The second paper looks at how these animals lived in space with each other. Did they want to live close to each other or did they want to be far from each other, or do they not really care? Some earlier papers had said they wanted to be far from each other, which is weird when we look at animals in the big blue wet thing today which want to stay close to each other. So they run a lot of studies on three different animals that can show if they are close to each other because they all need the same thing (and that thing is in small parts around the ground) or if they seem to want to be very close to each other because they either use each other or they can not move far from each other. They show that these animals all show that they are close to each other, but two of the animals are close because they all want something that is in just a few places. One animal shows a really strong need to be close, which could mean that this is something about the animal that makes new babies be closer to the father/mother. This shows we can learn things about how these animals lived and why they lived where they did, even for things that are very very very old.
References:
Boan, Phillip C., et al. "Spatial distributions of Tribrachidium, Rugoconites, and Obamus from the Ediacara Member (Rawnsley Quartzite), South Australia." Paleobiology (2023): 1-20.
Tarhan, Lidya G., Mary L. Droser, and James G. Gehling. "Picking out the warp and weft of the Ediacaran seafloor: Paleoenvironment and paleoecology of an Ediacara textured organic surface." Precambrian Research 369 (2022): 106539.
The gang discusses two papers about inferring life habit and ecology from extinct animals. The first paper summarizes the data for ichthyosaur birth to see if they really do preferentially come out tail first, and the second paper investigates a fossil that could complicate the narrative for the origins of a European sabretooth cat group. Meanwhile, James has opinions about browsers, Amanda is camouflaged, Curt needs a drink, and everyone is surprised by a paper for the first time in a long time.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that looks at how animals did things and where they lived in the past. The first paper looks at a group of animals that lived in the water and had their kids inside them. This group used to be on land before they went into the water for all time. Lots of people say that when a group of animals goes from being on land to being on water, they need to change the way the babies come out of them, with the head coming out last so that they do not breathe in water. This paper looks into this to see if this is true. It turns out that lots of things today that used to be on land but are now in the water and have kids inside them usually have the kids come out with the head last. However, this is not always what happens. And, when the kids come out head first it is fine and they do not die and the mom also does not die. When we look at the parts of the dead animals from a long time ago that live in the water, we also see that, even in the groups that everyone says they go out head second, there are some that show they come out head first. It seems like, instead of being a change that is always true, these animals went from being most of the time head first, to being half and half head first, to being most of the time head second but sometimes head first.
The second paper looks at a group of angry animals with hair and long teeth. This group is found all over the world in the past and this paper is looking at one group that is most of the time found in one place but may have also had some groups close to it from other places. This paper names a new type of these animals and says that it is the first of this group, but also the study they do says that it isn't so that is weird. They also do another study to show that this group went through most of its big changes in this new place, but the study they do also seems to say that it is a third different place where a lot of important things happen but they do not talk about it. This paper is weird.
References:
Jiangzuo, Qigao, et al. "Origin of adaptations to open environments and social behaviour in sabretoothed cats from the northeastern border of the Tibetan Plateau." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.1997 (2023): 20230019.
Miedema, Feiko, et al. "Heads or tails first? Evolution of fetal orientation in ichthyosaurs, with a scrutiny of the prevailing hypothesis." BMC Ecology and Evolution 23.1 (2023): 1-13.
The gang discusses two functional morphology papers. The first paper looks at eye placement and skull morphology in Thylacosmilus and the second paper looks at the ungals of maniraptoran theropods. Meanwhile, James has milk filled “vegan” food, Amanda is replaced by alternate universe goatee Amanda, and Curt looks to rebrand.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at animals who have very strange parts and how they may or may not have used those parts. The first paper looks at a group of animals with long teeth that eats other animals but is not close to the animal group with long teeth that we all know. This group got long teeth on their own and through a different way. This paper looks at their heads and shows that the way they got long teeth changes how their eyes are put into the head. Most animals that eat other animals have eyes that face forward, this helps them see how close things are in front of them. The long teeth of this animal pushed the eyes to the side, which makes it look very different from other animals that eat animals. The paper shows that there are other changes in the head that make it so the eyes can focus better even though they are not in the "right" place. This shows that there are other ways for animals to get good sight to eat other animals even if their eyes are not facing forward.
The second paper looks at the hands of a group of big angry animals from a long time ago. One part of this group gets really long fingers, and another part of this group get very short fingers (some only a few fingers). This paper looks at many ways to see how these animals could have used their really long or really short fingers. What they find is that the fingers get more strange as the groups go on. Earlier animals from these groups seem to be able to use their fingers for lots of things, but as the animals get more strange fingers they seem to only be used for a few things. The short fingers might be used to move ground out of the way. The long fingers are so strange that we are not sure what they were used for.
References:
Qin, Zichuan, et al. "Functional space analyses reveal the function and evolution of the most bizarre theropod manual unguals." Communications Biology 6.1 (2023): 181.
Gaillard, Charlène, Ross DE MacPhee, and Analía M. Forasiepi. "Seeing through the eyes of the sabertooth Thylacosmilus atrox (Metatheria, Sparassodonta)." Communications Biology 6.1 (2023): 257.
The gang discusses two papers that look at patterns of niche conservatism or niche evolution in the fossil record. The first paper looks at the pollen records of trees in Portugal to test if changing climate can explain modern tree distributions, and the second paper looks at the impact of Late Devonian extinction pulses/invasions on brachiopod communities. Meanwhile, Curt summarizes the podcast, James has brachiopod facts, and Amanda cannot control her cats.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at where animals live and what they do in the world, and also if that stays the same or changes over time. The first paper looks at tall living things that make their own food and lose a part of themselves every fall. This looks at one place that has just a few of these types of living things but in the past there were different types there. Also, back then it was not as warm and the rain was different. This paper wants to see why the tall living things we have in this part of the world are where they are right now. What they saw was that, some of the changes in the tall things seem to be tall things following where they want to live; when things get warmer or colder they move to follow the change. But some things seem to be moving into places that are very different from where they started, so they are changing what types of places they like to live in.
The second paper looks at animals that live on the bottom of the big blue wet thing and take food out of the water and were found all over the world a long time ago. It looks at a time when a big change killed a lot of living things. This paper looks at how this changed the types of these animals over time. What they find is that, a lot of the animals that die because of the change have another animal from somewhere else doing the same thing move in and take that animal's place. The things that do not die just keep on doing their own thing. It does not look like there is much change in what the animals are doing either from the big change that happened, or from the new animals moving in.
References:
Vieira, Manuel, et al. "Niche evolution versus niche conservatism and habitat loss determine persistence and extirpation in late Neogene European Fagaceae." Quaternary Science Reviews 300 (2023): 107896.
Brisson, Sarah K., et al. "Niche conservatism and ecological change during the Late Devonian mass extinction." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.1996 (2023): 20222524.
The gang discusses two papers that look at some Cambrian problematic fossils and find new clues that allow us to determine what groups they might belong to. One paper finds new evidence that some of these tube fossils in the Cambrian may be cnidarians and the other paper identifies potential gastropod radula in Cambrian rocks with adaptations for grazing. Meanwhile, James is not at all tired, Amanda will totally clean out her garage, and Curt is in the loop about what is going on.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at some things from a long time ago that are very hard to see what is going on with them but these new finds give us a better idea of what they might be. The first paper looks at these long and soft things. We used to think they were long and soft things that live in the ground today. However, this paper finds that there are little arms on one side and that they have these parts that we see in a very different group of animals that instead has one way in that it uses to eat and shit and has lots of these small arms. They show this for one of these types of animals but it could be that a lot of the long soft animals we find that we are not sure about could all be parts of this group.
The second paper looks at these small bits that people find when they take rocks and break them down into bits. These small things look like the mouth parts of animals that are soft and some of them carry their home with them. Not just mouth parts, but mouth parts that can eat green things that make their own food. This could be the first time we see animals that just eat these kinds of green things in the past.
References:
Zhang, Guangxu, et al. "Exceptional soft tissue preservation reveals a cnidarian affinity for a Cambrian phosphatic tubicolous enigma." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1986 (2022): 20221623.
Slater, Ben J. "Cambrian ‘sap-sucking’molluscan radulae among small carbonaceous fossils (SCFs)." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290.1995 (2023): 20230257.
The gang discusses two papers that use morphometric studies to investigate patterns of ecomorphy in the fossil record. Specifically, they look at two papers that investigate how morphology in sloths and pterosaurs changes over time, and how well these changes map onto changes in body size and ecological shifts. Meanwhile, Amanda could be dean, Curt has opinions on figures, and James provides butchery advice.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at how things look and how that changes over time, and looks to see if these things are changing because of what they do. The first paper looks at animals with hair and long arms that move very slow. There are not a lot of these animals today, but in the past there was a lot of these animals and they did a lot of other things that we do not see them do today. These animals were also looking different as well. But it seems that the things that look different are closer to each other by being close sisters to each other. They also do find that these animals are also doing different things when they look different.
The second paper looks at angry animals who can fly but are not the animals that can fly today. These animals start small and get big over time. They actually get big a few times. This paper looks at the parts of these animals and shows the many different ways that parts can change to make these animals big or small. It also shows that, when these things get really big is when the group seems to be doing really bad.
References:
Yu, Yilun, Chi Zhang, and Xing Xu. "Complex macroevolution of pterosaurs." Current Biology 33.4 (2023): 770-779.
Casali, Daniel M., et al. "Morphological disparity and evolutionary rates of cranial and postcranial characters in sloths (Mammalia, Pilosa, Folivora)." Palaeontology 66.1 (2023): e12639.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the body size of ancient animals. The first paper uses new metrics to estimate the size of the ancient fish Dunkleosteus, and the second paper looks at the various ways that theropod dinosaurs can get big or small. Meanwhile, Amanda is 10 minutes away from being taken to Oz, Curt invents a new adaptation, James figures out perpetual energy, and everyone is forced to record over a conference call.
Up-Goer Five (Amanda Edition):
Today our friends talk about a large animal that lives in water with no legs but a big mouth and moving mouth pieces and a hard outer cover. This big animal was one with a hard part in its back that ate lots of things very early before many other things with hard parts in its back were around that ate other things. People used to think that it got very very very big but this study uses numbers to show that it was actually not as big as people used to think. The numbers are very good and are probably going to be very good for lots of animals that live in water with no legs.
The second paper looks at large angry animals with no hair and big teeth that lived a long time ago, but not as long ago as the large animal that lives in water with no legs and a big mouth and moving mouth pieces. It looks at how the hard pieces of these large angry animals with no hair and big teeth grew to see how they got big or small, because some got very big and some got very small. It turns out that the ones that got big did it in some different ways, and the ones that got small did it in some different ways, which is very cool.
References:
Engelman, Russell K. "A Devonian Fish Tale: A New Method of Body Length Estimation Suggests Much Smaller Sizes for Dunkleosteus terrelli (Placodermi: Arthrodira)." Diversity 15.3 (2023): 318.
D'Emic, Michael D., et al. "Developmental strategies underlying gigantism and miniaturization in non-avialan theropod dinosaurs." Science 379.6634 (2023): 811-814.
The gang celebrates their 10 year anniversary by talking about two papers on the same topic that are 10 years apart. Both papers take a critical look at how we define the “big five” mass extinctions and what this term means. Meanwhile, everyone waxes philosophical for the last 20 minutes, discussing how things have changed in our lives since we started this weird show. Thanks for listening!
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that were written ten years from each other. Both papers look at times when a lot of animals died. The first paper is looking at how these times changed the types of animals that were around after the big dying, and it finds that some times that didn't kill as many animals had much bigger changes in the types of animals around than times when a lot more animals died. The second paper continues this idea to ask, why do we look at the big times that we do and is there anything about these times that make the all the same. What do these times mean?
References:
Marshall, Charles R. "Forty years later: The status of the “Big Five” mass extinctions." Cambridge Prisms: Extinction 1 (2023): e5.
McGhee Jr, George R., et al. "A new ecological-severity ranking of major Phanerozoic biodiversity crises." Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 370 (2013): 260-270.
The gang discusses two papers about trilobite evolution and morphology. The first paper looks at disparity and taxonomic trends of trilobites across the Devonian, and the second paper looks at the unique tridents of Walliserops. Meanwhile, Amanda makes a choice, James does some unique functional morphology, and Curt critiques tilapia.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends talk about two papers that look at small hard animals that live in the water and some of them can roll into a ball. The first paper looks at how these animals looked over time. They look at whether or not these animals looked more different when there were more different types of these animals around. This is not usually the case, for lot of animals how different the animals in the group look to each other is not just because to there being more types of animals. For this group that some can roll into a ball, it seems like they look a lot more different when there are also a lot of different types of them. So when something kills a lot of them, they also lose what makes them different. After a really bad time for these animals, only one group was left and we saw that they kind of looked the same for a long time until they all died.
The second paper looks at one of these types of animals that had a weird thing on its nose. They try and find out what it could have used this weird thing for because it is very big and it does not move on its own so it probably would not be good for a lot of things. They look at some other animals that have things on their nose they use to fight each other for space and girls. While these animals are very different, they show some ways that this thing on the nose look like these other animals. So maybe they used this thing on their nose to fight each other.
References:
Gishlick, Alan D., and Richard A. Fortey. "Trilobite tridents demonstrate sexual combat at 400 Mya." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120.4 (2023): e2119970120.
Bault, Valentin, Catherine Crônier, and Claude Monnet. "Coupling of taxonomic diversity and morphological disparity in Devonian trilobites?." Historical Biology (2023): 1-12.
The gang discusses two papers that look at how species respond to climate change. The first paper uses models to study how bird migration patterns may have changed over the last 800,000 years, and the second paper looks at how blooming times for plants in the UK have changed over the last 300 years. Meanwhile, James and Amanda prepare for a trip (2 months ago), and Curt is left a little confused.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at how living things can change when it gets hotter or colder across the world. The first paper looks at animals that can fly and some of them move around when it gets hot or cold during a year. This paper uses computers to look at how these animals may have changed how they move around during times that were colder and warmer than today. This is part of a bigger story where some people think that these animals moving around during the year is something that might be pretty new, since the last time we warmed up. The computers say that these types of animals were probably still moving around during these colder times, and that there are some cool things about how where theses animals are might have changed how they moved over time, since some places got colder than others.
The second paper looks at green things that make their own food. These green things start to grow and make the things they need to make babies during the warm parts of the year. Some of them use light, but a lot of them use how warm it is to know if it is time to start growing again. For this one part of the world, they have been looking at these green things for almost 300 years. When we look at when these green things start growing, we are seeing them start growing earlier in the year than they did in the past. This is not happening every place in the same way and not to every type of green thing. But all of these changes all show the same idea; that the world is getting warmer and these green things are starting to grow earlier in the year because of it, and places that are getting warmer faster and seeing those green things grow even earlier.
References:
Büntgen, Ulf, et al. "Plants in the UK flower a month earlier under recent warming." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1968 (2022): 20212456.
Somveille, Marius, et al. "Simulation-based reconstruction of global bird migration over the past 50,000 years." Nature communications 11.1 (2020): 801.
The gang discusses two papers that look at live birth in squamates. The first paper is fossil evidence of live birth in an ancient snake species, and the second paper looks at the evolutionary pressures that might drive some lizards towards live birth. Meanwhile, James has advice for reptiles, Curt celebrates a belated “spooky season”, Amanda continues to have extreme face blindness, and we are all haunted by a corrupted PDF.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about animals that have cold blood but also have babies inside of them. The first paper looks at some old animals that have cold blood and no legs that have babies inside of them. These parts of the old animal with babies inside of them might be one of the first times that this has been seen for this group at this time. It raises some interesting questions about how and why these animals that most do not have babies inside of them might change to having babies inside of them. One thought was that maybe this happens when these animals with cold blood have to live in cold places, but this paper is not able to say if that is the case.
The next paper looks at a different group of cold blooded animals that is close to the other one but has legs. In this group, there are some animals that have babies inside and some that do not. The people who worked on the paper looked at all of the things about these animals, from how cold they liked it, how warm they liked it, where they are found, how many babies they had and how big they got, and other things to try and see if having babies inside is something that happens when these animals move into cold. What they found was very cool. Animals with babies inside did like it colder than animals without babies inside. But they found that having babies inside did not match with where these animals lived, and that animals with babies inside could be in warm places, and animals without babies inside could be in colder places. It might make it easier to be in colder places, but it did not look like it was because they were in colder places. This means that having babies inside is part of a bigger thing, like do you want to live fast or do you want to live slow; because animals with babies inside would have less babies than animals without babies inside.
References:
Chuliver, Mariana, Agustín Scanferla, and Krister T. Smith. "Live birth in a 47-million-year-old snake." The Science of Nature 109.6 (2022): 1-5.
Domínguez-Guerrero, Saúl F., et al. "Exceptional parallelisms characterize the evolutionary transition to live birth in phrynosomatid lizards." Nature communications 13.1 (2022): 1-12.
After meeting the denizens of this vast contraption and escaping the tight and claustrophobic engine our heroes have nowhere to go but up. Will they meet the master of this grand device and bring its movements to an end or fall foul to some unfortunate fate on the way?
Join Beppo the Bard (James), Bix the Druid (Aly), Gregg the Ranger (Curtis) and Kinross the Wizard (Amanda) for the conclusion to their adventure.
"Skye Cuillin", “Moonlight Hall”, “The Pyre”, “The Snow Queen”, “Mystic Force”, “Final Battle of the Dark Wizards”, “Ascending the Vale”, “Soaring”, “Eternal Terminal”, by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
After managing a precarious ascent up a magical clockwork limb we rejoin our heroes Beppo the Bard (James), Bix the Druid (Aly), Gregg the Ranger (Curtis) and Kinross the Wizard (Amanda) in the next stage of their journey to bring the roaming fortress to a halt.
"Skye Cuillin", “Mystic Force”, “Malicious”, “Scheming Weasel slower”, “Holiday Weasel”, “Krampus Workshop”, “Sneaky Snitch”, “Magic Escape Room”, “Volatile Reaction”, “Darkling” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Dispatched to pursue a giant roaming monolith laying waste wherever it walks join our heroes Beppo the Bard (James), Bix the Druid (Aly), Gregg the Ranger (Curtis) and Kinroth the Wizard (Amanda) as they set out to bring a halt to this lumbering gargantuan structure's meandering path of destruction in a story orchestrated and told by our visiting Dungeon Master (Antony).
"Skye Cuillin", “Lord of the Land”, “Mountain Emperor”, “Black Vortex”, “Evening of Chaos” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Snake Eater” midi from vgmusic.com http://www.vgmusic.com/new-files/MGS3_Snake_Eater.mid
The gang goes back to their favorite hypothetical deathtrap amusement park, Penguin Deathland. They discuss two papers that look at the taphonomy of penguin fossil deposits and what they can tell us about ancient environments and the processes that can break down bone. Meanwhile, James loves old movie cliches, Amanda upsets the natural order, and Curt enjoys totally real colors.
Up-Goer Five (Amanda):
Today our friends talk about animals with no hair that usually can fly but these can't fly. These are found on an small place surrounded by water that is very cold. These animals lived during the ice age so they are only sort of rock at this time. The first paper looks at numbers of these animals and other stuff all together in one place. The paper shows that there were places where there were baby animals long ago where there aren't any now. It also shows that there were some tiny animals with no rock parts that suck blood that are not on these small places today. But it is possible that some of these tiny animals were brought in later by people.
The second paper looks at how things that are green things and sometimes good to eat not-animals that are living together are hurting the rock parts of these animals with no hair that can usually fly but can't. It turns out that the things that are green things living together with sometimes good to eat not-animals might be very good at hurting the rock parts of these animals, and we can actually see exactly what that looks like and so can tell if we see this in rock parts that would be much much older.
References:
Acosta Hospitaleche, Carolina, et al. "Taphonomy of two Holocene penguin taphocoenoses in Potter Peninsula, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica." Historical Biology (2022): 1-18.
García, Renato, Carolina Acosta Hospitaleche, and Gonzalo Márquez. "Biodeterioration of Antarctic fossil penguin bones caused by lichens from the Eocene La Meseta Formation." Polar Biology 44.12 (2021): 2243-2254.
The gang discusses two papers from a new locality of early fishes that give a lot of new insights into fish evolution. Meanwhile, Curt loves new Discord features, James shares some fun stories, and Amanda know how best/worst to keep everyone on track.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends look at two papers from a group of papers that just came out about a place where you can get really good parts from very very old things that live in the water and have hard parts on the inside and would be great great great great mom and dad to a lot of things that have hard parts inside and live on land. One paper looks at these animals that do not have a hard part in the place where they eat and looks at how they have really cool ways to move through water that gives us ideas about how these things that help move through water have changed over time. The other paper looks at a lot of different types of these animals that live in water and shows that they were doing a lot of different things very early on.
References:
Zhu, You-an, et al. "The oldest complete jawed vertebrates from the early Silurian of China." Nature 609.7929 (2022): 954-958.
Gai, Zhikun, et al. "Galeaspid anatomy and the origin of vertebrate paired appendages." Nature 609.7929 (2022): 959-963.
The gang discusses two papers that look at two papers that discuss the origin and evolution of a sessile filter feeding life habit. The first paper discusses how a new tommotiid fossil helps us better understand lophophorate evolution, and the second paper looks at the genetic pathways that barnacles and molluscs use to generate their shells. Meanwhile, James makes a sound, Amanda gets a surprise, and Curt shares totally real facts.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends look at how animals that make hard parts and do not do much moving around first started. The first looks at one type of animal that could be the start of one of these groups of animals that do not move much. These early animals are usually hard to find because they have parts that do not stick around for along time. However, this animal that was found had a lot of soft parts that showed what these animals would have looked like. It seems that these animals started out as being able to move a lot more, even though the animals that would come later would stop moving.
The second paper looks at two other groups of animals that make hard parts and do not move. It looks at how these animals make their hard parts. Even though these two groups are not close to each other, they both use a lot of the same ways of making their hard parts, with things that are not the same making sense because of how these animals need to stick to other things.
References:
Guo, Jin, et al. "A Cambrian tommotiid preserving soft tissues reveals the metameric ancestry of lophophorates." Current Biology (2022).
Yuan, Jianbo, et al. "Convergent evolution of barnacles and molluscs sheds lights in origin and diversification of calcareous shell and sessile lifestyle." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1982 (2022): 20221535.
James, Curt, Carlie, and Brendan talk about the 2022 Geological Society of America Meeting in Denver.
The gang talks about two papers that look at evidence of parental care in the fossil record, in early synapsids and in insects. Meanwhile, Amanda is going to have an island, Curt is trying not to die, and James has some unique alternative interpretations to explain these fossils.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at moms and dads from a long long time ago. Not all animals have moms and dads that stick around or do anything to keep the babies from not getting dead. The first paper looks at a group of animals that looks like some animals today and is part of a group that is close to the group that has hair. This paper looks at some hard parts from these animals that were in a thing made by pulling up the ground so you can live there under the ground. There is a big one and a small one. The big one looks like it was holding the small one when the place under the ground fell in and covered them. The other thing about this paper is that the small one looks like a lot of other animals we have found from this group, which could mean that most of our animals we have named from this group could be kids.
The second paper looks at a type of small animal with hard parts on the outside and many legs that lives in water and can go deep in the water but takes in air to live. This animal is old but looks a lot like the ones we still have around today. Some of these animals have a leg that looks different from the others, and this leg has a whole lot of small balls that hold babies in them on it. So some of these animals carry the babies with them until they are ready to leave the small balls. This is different from how the animals like these ones that we have today handle their babies.
References:
Fu, Yanzhe, et al. "The earliest known brood care in insects." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1978 (2022): 20220447.
Maddin, Hillary C., Arjan Mann, and Brian Hebert. "Varanopid from the Carboniferous of Nova Scotia reveals evidence of parental care in amniotes." Nature Ecology & Evolution 4.1 (2020): 50-56.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the complicated path tetrapods took to getting on land. The first paper looks at a more derived stem tetrapod that went back into the water, and the second paper uses trace fossils to investigate the foodweb of a community dominated by some early tetrapods. Meanwhile, Amanda has a friend over, James knows how to be silent, and Curt teaches everyone that things continue to exist even when we don’t see them.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two animals that are great great great great great great father and mother to all of the animals that are on the land. But these animals did not all make their way on to the land in a simple way. The first paper looks at an animal that looks like it went back into water. This animal has all of the parts that you need to live well in the water, even though it also has parts from animals that would be on the land, or at least spending some time on the land. This means that the way on to the land has a lot more steps forward and back than we like to think.
The second paper looks at the places these animals were living in and tries to use the parts that are around and how they were hurt to see what may have been eating what. People have thought that these animals went on to the land to get away from things that might have been eating them. This paper shows that those animals might have been the things that were eating other animals. It seems like being one of these animals that lives in the water was a pretty good way to live.
References:
Robin, Ninon, et al. "Vertebrate predation in the Late Devonian evidenced by bite traces and regurgitations: implications within an early tetrapod freshwater ecosystem." Papers in Palaeontology 8.4 (2022): e1460.
Stewart, Thomas A., et al. "A new elpistostegalian from the Late Devonian of the Canadian Arctic." Nature 608.7923 (2022): 563-568.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the evolutionary changes occurring in early synapsids. The first paper suggests that some synapsids may have evolved a mammal-like walking gate and respiration earlier than we expected, and the other paper uses the inner ear of synapsids to infer body temperature. Meanwhile, James is adapting to a new environment, Amanda drinks some “tea”, and Curt gives acronym advice.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at animals which are not the animals today with hair and warm blood but are part of the group that is brother and sister to those animals. These animals were around a long long time ago. These papers show that some of the things we see in animals with hair and warm blood today also happened in some of these other animals too. The first paper looks at a hard part inside the chest of these other animals. Most of these other animals have a hard part that is very different from the one we see in the animals with hair and warm blood. However, on group of these other animals seems to have a hard part that looks a lot like the ones we see today in animals with hair. This hard part is important for how we breathe and also how we move. This means that this group may have walked and breathed like the animals who have hair today, even though animals with hair got this hard part much later.
The second paper looks at the ear to see how warm the blood is for these other animals that are not animals with hair but are part of the group. This paper uses the water stuff in the ear to try and figure out how warm these animals would be. They look at the ear for a lot of dead animals from this group, as well as animals around today that we can see how warm they are. When they use what they find today on the very old dead animals, they see that there is a point in the past of these animals where they start to really get warm. This is still earlier in the group than our animals we have around today with hair that are warm.
References:
Bendel, Eva-Maria, et al. "The earliest segmental sternum in a Permian synapsid and its implications for the evolution of mammalian locomotion and ventilation." Scientific Reports 12.1 (2022): 1-9.
Araújo, Ricardo, et al. "Inner ear biomechanics reveals a Late Triassic origin for mammalian endothermy." Nature (2022): 1-6.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the ecological impacts of major extinction events. The first paper looks at the ecological stability of marine communities before and after two mass extinction events, the late Ordovician and the end Permian. The second paper simulates an extinction event on modern bird populations to determine if this would most strongly impact functional diversity or phylogenetic diversity. Meanwhile, Amanda learns about something new to worry about, James shares dubious life advice, and Curt questions movie curses.
Up-Goer Five (Amanda Edition):
Today our friends look at two papers about things dying. The first paper wants to know if having more things that do all the same stuff will help keep the world better when everything else is dying. They look at an early time and then a later time that everyone knows is very, very, very bad. The earlier time is thought to be the second-most bad time for taking out things that do different things. But the paper shows that since, in that earlier time, there are more things doing the same thing, it's actually not so bad as the later time, when there are not so many things doing the same thing. More things are doing different things, so that the dying is worse.
The second paper is looking at animals that fly and don't have hair or hard skin. This paper is saying that some animals that fly and don't have hair or hard skin are dying more. However, these animals are not like brothers and sisters to each other, instead, they look like each other. This paper finds that animals that fly that do not have hair or hard skins that live in some places will start to look like each other more and more because some of the animals die out. That means that the remaining animals that fly but do not have hair or hard skin will be more like each other, and it means that things in these places might get bad, because there will be only a few things left that do one or two things.
References:
Dick, Daniel G., et al. "Does functional redundancy determine the ecological severity of a mass extinction event?." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1979 (2022): 20220440.
Hughes, Emma C., David P. Edwards, and Gavin H. Thomas. "The homogenization of avian morphological and phylogenetic diversity under the global extinction crisis." Current Biology (2022).
The gang discusses two papers that analyze exceptional fossils using CT scanning. The first paper looks at an exceptionally preserved vampire squid, and the second paper looks at an exceptionally preserved early mammal. Meanwhile, Amanda follows medical advice, James is a consummate professional, and Curt learns about coleoids in real-time.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends look at two papers that use an important way of looking at things through hard stuff to try and figure out what a lot of older animals actually looked like. The first paper looks at an animal with an arm, and an arm, and an arm, and an arm, and an arm, and an arm, and an arm, and an arm which looks like it could hurt you but really just spends its time eating dead things. There is only one of these animals around today, but this older animal is thought to be a part of this group. By using this way of looking through hard parts, we can say that this old animal is a part of this group. Also, we can see that there are some ways that it is not the same as the living one. It seems that the old animal may have eaten things that were living, which is very different from how the animal around today lives.
The second paper looks at an old animal from a group we are a part of that has hair and warm blood. As we have talked about before, figuring out when we have the first of this group of animals is very hard, and lots of changes happen early on that then go back again. This animal gives us some really cool ways to look at some of these changes early on in this group. By using this way of looking through hard parts, they can look inside the head and see the ear parts. Ear parts are an important part of being a part of this group. So seeing how the ear parts have changed is a good way to see how this group is changing over time.
References:
Wang, Hai-Bing, et al. "A new mammal from the Lower Cretaceous Jehol Biota and implications for eutherian evolution." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 377.1847 (2022): 20210042.
Rowe, Alison J., et al. "Exceptional soft-tissue preservation of Jurassic Vampyronassa rhodanica provides new insights on the evolution and palaeoecology of vampyroteuthids." Scientific reports 12.1 (2022): 1-9.
The gang discusses two papers that look at what past sharks might have eaten. The first paper uses nitrogen isotopes to determine the trophic level of species belonging to the extinct shark genus Otodus, and the second paper shows evidence of predation/scavenging of sperm whales by sharks in the late Miocene. Meanwhile, James has a couch to burn, Curt proposes an experiment to find the best animal, Amanda becomes shark Nietzsche.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends look at two papers that look at what big angry animals with big teeth who breathe water and lived in the past could have eaten. The first paper looks at the parts of these animals from the past and uses what those parts of made of to try and see what kind of things they might have eaten. This is the first time that this has been done using these parts of the animal, since most of these kinds of papers look at living animals and so they can get parts that do not last when the animals die. It had been said that these big angry animals in the past may have eaten big animals that eat small things, and that they might have died out when there was less big animals that eat small things. This paper finds that the parts that make up these animals show that maybe these animals were eating things that ate other bigger things, that these big animals were probably not just eating this one type of animal but may have gone for anything, as well as other animals that also eat pretty much everything. One animal that they mention these big angry animals that breathe water could have eaten is a big animal with warm blood and big teeth that lives in water.
The second paper looks at how the hard parts of big animals with warm blood and big teeth that live in water at this time have hurt marks on their hard parts that look like they were from the teeth of big angry animals that breathe water. These hurt marks are along a part of the head that has a lot of stuff in it which animals would like to eat. The hurt marks are all different, with some that look like the animal bit them right on the head, and others look like marks from teeth that were biting at the body when it was already dead. It seems like many different types of angry animals with big teeth who breathe water may have been eating these animals with warm blood and big teeth.
References:
Kast, Emma R., et al. "Cenozoic megatooth sharks occupied extremely high trophic positions." Science Advances 8.25 (2022): eabl6529.
Benites-Palomino, Aldo, et al. "Sperm whales (Physeteroidea) from the Pisco Formation, Peru, and their trophic role as fat sources for late Miocene sharks." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1977 (2022): 20220774
The gang discusses two papers that look at the impact of the end Cretaceous mass extinction. The first paper looks at ecomorphospace changes in mosasaur communities prior to the extinction event, and the second paper discusses the importance of a large freshwater gar which lived through the recovery. Meanwhile, James has some new and interesting ecological theories, Curt is simpatico with his recording equipment, and Amanda acts as our resident “fish” expert.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at a time when a big rock hit us a long long time ago. The first paper looks at how big angry animals in the water that you can not drink did before the big rock hit. There is a big question about if these big angry animals that live in water you can not drink were doing well before the big rock hit, or if they were already on their way out. This paper looks at how the heads of these animals changed over space and time by looking at a large number of these from lots of different places. What they find is that there is a lot going on before the big rock hit. Some places are having their big animals look like they are having real problems, but in other places there seems to be a lot of new change in these big animals. It seems that this time before the big rock was a time when these big animals were going through a lot of changes. The big rock may have hit at a very bad time because things were not calm because of all of these changing going on.
The second paper looks at animals living in water you can drink after the big rock hit. This paper finds a very large animal that breathes water head. Since this is a group of animals that are still around today, they can use the head to figure out how big the animal would have been, and they find that it would have been pretty big and also would have eaten other animals. This animal lived pretty soon after the big rock hit. This might mean that animals living on land and in the water that you can drink may have been doing a lot better than things living in the water you can not drink. If an animal was able to get that big eating other animals, it seems that these places were doing well. One of the ways animals respond when things get bad and foot is short is that they get smaller. Since we do not see that happening in this place, it could mean that places like this were not hit that bad when the rock hit.
References:
MacLaren, Jamie A., et al. "Global ecomorphological restructuring of dominant marine reptiles prior to the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1975 (2022): 20220585.
Brownstein, Chase Doran, and Tyler R. Lyson. "Giant gar from directly above the Cretaceous–Palaeogene boundary suggests healthy freshwater ecosystems existed within thousands of years of the asteroid impact." Biology Letters 18.6 (2022): 20220118.
The gang discusses two papers that look at how combining fossil and modern data can affect our understanding of evolution. The first paper looks at studying primate biogeography, and the second paper studies how human interactions have affected dog morphology and disparity. Meanwhile, James finds a song he likes, Amanda could use some skin, and Curt appreciates how timely we’ve always been.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends look at two papers that show how using stuff from today and stuff from the past together can give you a better idea of what is going on with living things. The first paper looks at how we study where animals who look a lot like us lived in the past and how they came to live where they live today. The paper looks at how we can use old animals along with the animals around today to get a better idea of how the animals today got to where they are. That said, they do find that you need to take some care with the old animals you put in the study. You want to make sure that you really know what these old animals actually are. If not, it can make your study give weird answers. But, in the end, they show that it is better to use both old and today animals when you can.
The second paper looks at old dogs. Dogs can look like a lot of different things today. So people wanted to know if dogs could always look like so many different things in the past. So they found old parts of dogs from old human remains that date back to before people started to really change how dogs looked. They ran a study to see how different those dogs were from each other, and from dogs we have today, and also other things that are not dogs but are close to dogs. They find that these old dogs could be very different from each other, but not as different as the dogs we see today. They were a lot different from the other dog like animals too. So it shows that dogs were able to be very different in the past, but people have made this change even bigger.
References:
Wisniewski, Anna L., Graeme T. Lloyd, and Graham J. Slater. "Extant species fail to estimate ancestral geographical ranges at older nodes in primate phylogeny." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1975 (2022): 20212535.
Brassard, Colline, et al. "Unexpected morphological diversity in ancient dogs compared to modern relatives." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1975 (2022): 20220147.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the co-evolution of plants and herbivores. The first paper finds the earliest evidence of a unique type of insect herbivory in the fossil record, and the second looks at the evolutionary impact of the extinction of large herbivores on palm trees. Meanwhile, Curt recovers from COVID round 2, Amanda is a static character, and James finds that getting what he wants is almost worse than not getting it at all.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about things that live in the ground and make their own food but are not able to move (like a tree and other things) and also the animals that eat these things. Some small animals eat the parts of trees that catch the sun but have this stuff that is supposed to get these small animals stuck if they try and eat these parts of the tree. The way that these small animals do this is either by cutting off the stuff that would get them stuck and then eating the rest of these parts that grab sun. We know that trees and other things like trees started to use this stuff a long time ago. This paper finds the first time that we know of in which these small animals were able to cut off the stuff that would get them stuck. They used the same ideas in the past that they use today, and it happened pretty close to when trees and other things like them started to use this stuff. This means that the trees and the small animals that eat them were changing with each other.
The second paper looks at how a type of tree that is not a real tree changed when the large animals that could have eaten it were not there. The people who wrote this paper had ideas about what changes could have happened when these not trees didn't have large animals around to eat them, but it turns out to have been a little different from what they might have thought. These not trees stopped making parts that would stop animals from eating them, but they didn't stop making big food. This might mean that big food is not just something that big animals can use, and that maybe small animals were eating the food and that would help the not tree to move its babies around.
References:
Onstein, Renske E., W. Daniel Kissling, and H. Peter Linder. "The megaherbivore gap after the non-avian dinosaur extinctions modified trait evolution and diversification of tropical palms." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1972 (2022): 20212633.
McCoy, Victoria E., et al. "Oldest fossil evidence of latex sabotaging behavior by herbivorous insects." Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 300 (2022): 104631.
The gang discusses two papers which use morphology to infer behavior in the fossil record. The first paper looks at the origins of the “killer whale” type morphology in fossil cetaceans, and the second paper describes the earliest example of a diurnal owl in the fossil record. Meanwhile, James proposes an unconventional workforce, Curt imagines the sea mammal revolution, and Amanda cuts the crap… out of her basement.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at how things look and how we can use that to tell how animals might have lived in the past. The first paper looks at a group of animals with hair that breathe air but live their whole lives in water and do not have legs. There are lots of different types of these animals but one of these animals is named after being someone that kills. However, there is another group of these animals that look a lot like these animals that are named after killing but are not the same. This paper finds a really old one of these animals that looks like but is not one of these killing animals. These animals have things that make them eat in different ways than most of the animals with hair that live in water. This older animal may be the first time that these animals with hair who live in water were eating in this way. It also shows that this type of body that looks like these animals that are named for killing really did appear many times within the group.
The second paper looks at animals who fly that are usually out at night and kill very quietly. They find a very old one of these animals that is very complete and allows them to see lots of parts of the animal we usually do not get. These parts show that this animal may have actually been moving around during the day instead of at night, like most of the other animals in this group. They show that moving around in the day is something that a few of these animals today do and that it has appeared many times in the past. This animal might be the oldest one of these animals that lived in the day, and shows that, even though most of these animals today are out at night, the group has a lot more going on with whether or not these animals were out in the day or at night.
References:
Li, Zhiheng, et al. "Early evolution of diurnal habits in owls (Aves, Strigiformes) documented by a new and exquisitely preserved Miocene owl fossil from China." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119.15 (2022): e2119217119.
Bianucci, Giovanni, et al. "The origins of the killer whale ecomorph." Current Biology (2022).
The gang discusses two papers that show examples of exceptional preservation. The first paper looks at melanosome patterns in pterosaur barbules, and the second paper looks at a pathway for exceptional preservation in fossil spiders. Meanwhile, Curt (and his audio apparently) recover from COVID, James shares a story about renting, and Amanda tries to pronounce French.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at animal parts that have held up really well for a long time. The first paper looks at soft things on the skin of angry flying animals that are not the same as flying animals that often can make happy sounds but are old brothers and sisters. The soft things on the skin of this animal have small things that make the soft things either light or dark. These small things look different from the other small things on the skin. We find this in big angry animals which are more close to the flying animals that make happy sounds. This might mean that the way these small things are put together on the animal might have appeared a lot more in the past than we thought.
The second paper looks at small things with many legs that are usually really hard to find in rocks. However, we start seeing a lot more of them at a point. The ones that we do find look weird, and so this paper looked into how these small things that usually don't hold up in rocks managed to stay together in the rocks. They find that these small things with many legs fell into water that had a lot of other even smaller things made up of one part. These really small animals push out stuff that makes it easier for these really small animals to live there. This stuff changed the bodies of the small animals with many legs into something that wouldn't break down so easily. This is the first time this has been found in rocks, and it might be something that has happened more often than we know.
References:
Olcott, Alison N., et al. "The exceptional preservation of Aix-en-Provence spider fossils could have been facilitated by diatoms." Communications Earth & Environment 3.1 (2022): 1-10.
Cincotta, Aude, et al. "Pterosaur melanosomes support signalling functions for early feathers." Nature (2022): 1-5.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the function of the ceratopsian frill. One paper looks at forensic evidence to understand the cause of an injury, and the other paper looks for clues to the adaptive origins of the Protoceratops frill. Meanwhile, Curt ruins the Muppets, James counts our cancellations, and Amanda is being silenced… by Discord.
EDITOR’S NOTE: To head off any discussions about food science crimes committed by this podcast, we have been made aware by reviewers of an early draft of this podcast (i.e. patreon members) that a discussion on rice may have implied that glutinous rice had “gluten” in it. This is completely incorrect. Glutinous rice is just named that way because it is sticky. As an eater of many types of glutinous rice who is married to a registered dietician, your humble editor was deeply ashamed that such horrible misinformation had made it into a draft of this podcast. The ethical decision would be to remove this discussion to prevent the spread of misinformation. However, that would take work... so instead he decided not to bother. What is the context of the conversation? When in the podcast does this conversation happen? Who implied this food crime? Did this conversation actually happen at all or is the person on the patreon just pulling the editor’s leg? All of these questions would require just a modest amount of work to investigate and so they will remain forever unanswered. Was this important enough to warrant such a long note? Probably not, but your humble editor is recovering from COVID and so is filling the boredom by extending this rather minor correction into an overblown bit. If you would like to see early drafts of this podcast, go to www.patreon.com/palaeoafterdark.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about a group of big angry animals that everyone likes with a fun thing on their heads. Both of these papers look at different types of these animals but at the end of the day, the papers are all trying to figure out how these animals used that fun thing on their heads. The first paper looks at an animal that had a small part missing in the fun thing on its head. The paper tries to find out why this animals is missing this small part. Some people have said that the small parts could go away when the animal gets bigger, but we have already shown in another one of these shows that this does not happen. So it seems that instead this animal probably got hurt. It seems that the animal was hit with something long from the back. This is different from a lot of the ways people have said this animal would usually get hurt with the fun thing on its head.
The second paper looks at another animal from this group that is far older and tries to see if they can figure out what the animals could have used their fun things on their head. They have an idea that it could be used to get other animals to love them. In order to see if that is the case, they come up with other things they should see if this was true. They look at a lot of these animals and find that some of these things are true but other things are not. So it seems that they really could have used these fun things on their head for finding love, but they also say that it might be for other things. The point is, it seems like a pretty good case could be made that they used it for love.
References:
Knapp, A., R. J. Knell, and D. W. E. Hone. "Three-dimensional geometric morphometric analysis of the skull of Protoceratops andrewsi supports a socio-sexual signalling role for the ceratopsian frill." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 288.1944 (2021): 20202938.
D’Anastasio, Ruggero, et al. "Histological and chemical diagnosis of a combat lesion in Triceratops." Scientific reports 12.1 (2022): 1-8.
The gang discusses two papers which discuss the fascinating information which can be gleaned from studying fossil trackways, particularly the taphonomy of fossil trackways. The first paper looks at how enigmatic elongate tracks may have formed, and the second paper uses tracks to infer paleo topology. Meanwhile, James is a latchkey kid, Amanda opens up the wrong folder, and Curt would like you to know that the joke is over now.
Up-Goer Five (Amanda Edition):
Today our friends look at two papers that talk about foot marks. The first paper is looking at how the foot marks might get long. The ones made by big angry animals with big teeth and no hair are not supposed to be long in the back, but sometimes they are. This paper asks why they are. These big angry animals with big teeth and no hair usually walk on only the very front of their feet. Sometimes papers say it's because the whole foot is put on the ground. But this paper says that it is not because of that but instead that the whole foot goes deep into the ground. This makes the foot mark look very much longer than it should be.
The second paper looks at how some big angry animals with big teeth and no hair walked along a place where the ground was not together and not straight. These animals were walking up and down along this not-straight ground. The tracks they left were not good but they can tell us how things did stuff and walked around and moved on the ground. It just shows that even bad tracks can tell us lots of good things.
References:
Xing, Lida, et al. "Unusual dinosaur trackway preservation as clues to paleo-landscape and behavior from the Lower Cretaceous Luohe Formation, Shaanxi Province, China." Geoscience Frontiers 12.2 (2021): 737-745.
Lallensack, Jens N., James O. Farlow, and Peter L. Falkingham. "A new solution to an old riddle: elongate dinosaur tracks explained as deep penetration of the foot, not plantigrade locomotion." Palaeontology 65.1 (2022): e12584.
The gang discusses two sets of papers about how we study crocodylomorphs, with each of these topics being replies to previous studies. The first paper looks at the importance of total evidence approaches in determining the evolutionary placement of fossil pseudosuchians, and the second set of papers discusses the potential biases and issues associated with how we handle body size data in evolutionary studies. Meanwhile, Curt goes Camus, Amanda has some bizarre funeral plans, and James continues to have opinions about pies.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends look at a lot of papers that were written to reply to another paper. All of these papers look at how we study big angry animals that spend a lot of time in water and jump out to eat things. This group of animals has been around for a long time and before today they used to do a lot of different things, even though now most of them spend a lot of time in water and jump out to eat things. These papers look at the older groups of these animals. The first paper looks at how we try and understand how these older groups go together. It shows that if you only look at how these things look, there are a lot of different ways these groups could go together. They say that things get better if we use both how they look and the changes in the small stuff that helps build up all life. This is important, because how these old groups go together will change how and when we think the groups of big angry animals we see today first came to be.
The second group of papers looks at how big these angry animals were in the past. One of these papers looked at how big these animals got over time, but the reply shows that there are some problems with how that was done. If you just take how big these animals are without doing anything to those numbers, it means that something that is big getting slightly bigger is going to seem like more than something small getting bigger about the same. It is because the bigger thing starts with bigger numbers. You can fix this by doing some things to the numbers to make sure that you can better look at changes in both small and big animals. When you do that, it does change the story of the paper.
References:
Darlim, Gustavo, et al. "The impact of molecular data on the phylogenetic position of the putative oldest crown crocodilian and the age of the clade." Biology Letters 18.2 (2022): 20210603.
Stockdale, Maximilian T., and Michael J. Benton. "Environmental drivers of body size evolution in crocodile-line archosaurs." Communications biology 4.1 (2021): 1-11.
Benson, Roger BJ, et al. "Reconstructed evolutionary patterns for crocodile-line archosaurs demonstrate impact of failure to log-transform body size data." Communications Biology 5.1 (2022): 1-4.
Stockdale, Maximilian T., and Michael J. Benton. "Reply to:‘Reconstructed evolutionary patterns from crocodile-line archosaurs demonstrate the impact of failure to log-transform body size data’." Communications biology 5.1 (2022): 1-4.
The gang discusses two taxonomy papers about dinosaurs, fulfilling their contractual obligation to produce one dinosaur-centric podcast every 8 to 10 years. The first paper finds strong evidence to support the validity of Torosaurus as a genus separate from Triceratops and is quite cool. The second paper is that awful T-rex paper from about a month ago. Meanwhile, Curt remembers too much, Amanda enjoys self-righteous fury, James goes too far, and we all get way too drunk and rambley for our own good. CONTENT WARNING: This episode gets very salty and pushes past our usual frequency of just a few expletives per podcast. You have been warned.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at big angry animals with no hair from the past. The first paper looks at a type of big angry animal that had a big thing coming out of the back of its head. There are a lot of these types of animals, but there are two of these types that have been a problem for some time. Some people think that these two types are two different things. However, some other people think that there is just one type and we are seeing the same animal get old and calling that old animal a new type that isn't real. This paper looks at some new parts from this other type that some people think is just one type that is old. They find that the parts show the animal was not old by looking at how the hard parts grow. This means that the two types have to be different and not the same. They also talk about the other parts of the animal that do not make sense if these two types are the same. So they show that we should instead see these as two different types of angry animals with a big thing coming out of the back of their heads.
The second paper is bad and no one should read it.
References:
Paul, Gregory S., W. Scott Persons, and Jay Van Raalte. "The Tyrant Lizard King, Queen and Emperor: Multiple Lines of Morphological and Stratigraphic Evidence Support Subtle Evolution and Probable Speciation Within the North American Genus Tyrannosaurus." Evolutionary Biology (2022): 1-24.
Mallon, Jordan C., et al. "The record of Torosaurus (Ornithischia: Ceratopsidae) in Canada and its taxonomic implications." Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society (2022).
The gang celebrates their 9th podcast birthday with a discussion on evolutionary rates. The first paper looks at how rates of body size evolution vary across lepidosaur lineages, and the second paper looks at how biotic and abiotic factors control freshwater gastropod diversification. Meanwhile, James finds a murder basement, Amanda has a unique diet, and Curt remembers.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at how and why animals change over time, and how those changes can be fast or slow and what makes those changes fast or slow. The first paper looks at how a group of animals with four legs who are cold and looks to see if the way they get big or small changes over time. Some groups of these animals have a lot of change in how big they are really early on, but there is another group that does really well that has a very slow change in how big they get over time. There is one point where this is not the case, and that is when a group of these animals that usually get big slowly moves into the water. These animals in the water get big very quickly.
The second paper looks at animals who make a home for themselves out of hard stuff and live in water you can drink and how the world around them and also the other animals can change how many new animals appear over time. The paper finds that lots of things control how many new animals appear, but some things that are always important are the number of other animals of this type and also how different the ground is. This paper even looks at how water can move over the ground in the past to figure out how the places where these animals would live change over time.
References:
Neubauer, Thomas A., et al. "Drivers of diversification in freshwater gastropods vary over deep time." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1968 (2022): 20212057.
Herrera‐Flores, Jorge A., et al. "Slow and fast evolutionary rates in the history of lepidosaurs." Palaeontology (2021).
The gang discusses two papers that look at topics in biogeography. The first paper reviews the concepts of cradles and museums (and whether we should retire those concepts), and the second paper explores traditionally defined Devonian bioregions. Also, the gang uses the broad topics from both of these papers to talk about a lot of tangentially related topics. Meanwhile, James has strong opinions about what is edible, Curt disagrees, and Amanda remains painfully neutral throughout.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look at the ways we talk about the places animals come from. The first paper is looking at two words that we use to talk about these places. The words are used to talk about places where new living things come from and places where living things can stick around for a long time. The paper talks about how those words were first used and why they came up in the first place, and then talks about how we have changed what we mean by those words in ways that maybe is not helping us better know about places. They talk a lot about how the way these words were first used has now been forgotten, and so the way we use them today makes things a little too simple. Instead of focusing on finding the simple form of these places, we should be looking at the ways the world works which can make some areas better for new living things to form or for old living things to stick around.
The second paper looks at whether or not animals that are close to each other come from the same places through time. Are there places that have their own types of animals which all come from just those places for a really long time. They look at the whole world a long time ago when people have said that they can find these groups of animals that all come from one place. They look at a lot of other studies and use those studies to run another study. They find that some of the smaller areas may show what people have said in the past, but most of the big areas do not have this long time where all the animals are from this one place. The reason why it may have looked like that in the past may be because of how we got those old animals and the types of people who were allowed to go out and get those old animals in the past.
References:
Vasconcelos, Thais, Brian C. O’Meara, and Jeremy M. Beaulieu. "Retiring “cradles” and “museums” of biodiversity." The American Naturalist 199.2 (2022): 194-205.
Dowding, Elizabeth M., Malte C. Ebach, and Evgeny V. Madroviev. "Validating marine Devonian biogeography: a study in bioregionalization." Palaeontology (2021).
The gang discusses two papers that explore the functional morphology of ancient groups. The first paper looks at soft tissue in ammonites which can be used to infer locomotion, and the second paper looks at how functional morphology changed as tetrapods transitioned from marine to terrestrial environments. Meanwhile, James explores the evolution of baked goods, Curt develops a new business plan, and Amanda dreams of Tiktaalik.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers that look into how we can learn how very old animals moved and how that moving changes over time by looking at the parts we can find in the ground. The first paper looks at animals with a lot of arms who live in a big hard round hard part. Today, while we have a lot of these animals with lots of arms, only one of those animals today lives in a big round thing. In the past, there was a big group of animals that lived in a round thing, but they did it in a different way than the one we have around today. However, because it is hard to find pieces that are not hard, we have used the animal that is around today as our best guess for how these old animals may have moved. This paper finds some soft pieces which give us a better idea of how the soft parts that allow animals to move were put together. And these old animals probably moved in a very different way from the other animal from today who lives in a round thing. In fact, the old animals that live in round parts may have moved in a way that is sort of like how the animals with many arms who do not live in round things today move (but not exactly the same).
The second paper looks at how the hard parts of animals with four legs changed when they animals moved onto land. This paper looks at these changes and also looks at how these changes make it so these animals move in different ways. They find that the animals with four legs in the water all have legs that look like we would expect for moving in water. The animals that are on land also have legs that fit the moving we would see for things that need to hold themselves up and move on land. The fun thing is that the animals who come from the animals who are not quite on land and not quite in water yet (the ones in the middle of this change) do not fit into any space where we would expect the animal to be able to move well. This could mean that these animals (which did well enough) were living in a time when it was alright to suck at moving. Also, it may be that some groups of animals that moved onto land from this group that sucks at moving might have had some of the animals in that group that came back to this sucking at moving space.
References:
Dickson, Blake V., et al. "Functional adaptive landscapes predict terrestrial capacity at the origin of limbs." Nature 589.7841 (2021): 242-245.
Cherns, Lesley, et al. "Correlative tomography of an exceptionally preserved Jurassic ammonite implies hyponome-propelled swimming." Geology (2021).
The gang discusses two papers that look at unique morphological features of fossil animals. The first paper looks at a new Ankylosauria species that complicates our understanding of the group’s evolution, and the second paper investigates the structure of the trilobite schizochoral eye. Meanwhile, James endures formatting, Amanda starts her new religion, and Curt finds the puns no one else sees.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
Our friends talk about two papers where we can see cool parts of animals that are very old and tell us something about how these animals lived in the past. The first paper is looking at a big angry animal with no hair who lived a long time ago and is part of a group that has a long part coming off its bottom with a hurt causing part at the end. There are two close groups of big angry animals that have this long part with a hurt causing part at the end. One group has a lot of points and the other group has a part that is hard. This animal makes it more interesting because it has parts that look like animals with the hard end and animals that have the point end. The animal is still a part of the group with the hard end, but it shows that some of the things we see with the animals with the point end were also found in some animals with the hard end.
The second paper looks at the eyes of an old group of animals who lived in the water and had their hard parts on the outside as well as legs and bodies that are broken into parts. A lot of work had been done on the eyes of some of these animals that have strange eyes where there are less round bits where the eyes can see through than in others, but the round bits are larger. This paper finds some old work and also adds to that work to say that maybe these eyes with large but less round bits might have acted like a whole lot of eyes under each of these round bits. So while most eyes for this group have tiny round bits which act as tiny eyes, this group with the large round bits might have had tiny eye parts under each of the large round bits. These large round bits may have acted as many tiny eyes.
References:
Soto-Acuña, Sergio, et al. "Bizarre tail weaponry in a transitional ankylosaur from subantarctic Chile." Nature 600.7888 (2021): 259-263.
Schoenemann, B., et al. "A 390 million-year-old hyper-compound eye in Devonian phacopid trilobites." Scientific reports 11.1 (2021): 1-10.
The gang celebrates the end of the year by taking another break to play Fiasco, a crime/noir storytelling game by Bully Pit Games.
What was that you were saying? Oh, no, I am sorry, sir; I do not accept returns. All sales are final!
Well it seems you must not have been using the sacred artifact properly, then! All of my wares are completely authentic. I can assure you of that!
Look, I simply do not have any time to argue with you about this. I am a very busy man and I need to organize a trip north to secure more sacred objects! In fact, I have already arranged my trip. I am leaving Florence tonight…
Oh, fine, I suppose I can help you out. I do happen to have a small sliver of wood from the true cross. I guess I could part with it… for a small price.
“The Priest and the Peddler” is a story of secrets, faith, mistaken identity, and the elusive search for redemption.
Grand Dark Waltz Allegretto by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7920-grand-dark-waltz-allegretto
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
The gang celebrates the end of the year by taking another break to play Fiasco, a crime/noir storytelling game by Bully Pit Games.
Have you heard about Father Valentine? Strange things happening in that church, I heard. Did you know he recently hired a mercenary? For what? An armed guard? I heard from a friend, who heard from a friend, that the father has some secret plans he doesn’t want us to know about. Anyways, I have a lovely item for sale today that I think would be perfect for you; a finger bone from St. Raphael himself. Keep it close and that cough is sure to go away! Oh of course it will work! Would I lie?
“The Priest and the Peddler” is a story of secrets, faith, mistaken identity, and the elusive search for redemption.
Grand Dark Waltz Allegretto by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7920-grand-dark-waltz-allegretto
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
It’s the end of another year, and the Palaeo After Dark team are getting together for another Fiasco. Come join us as James, Amanda, Curt, Ally, and Ants build the characters and the premise for this year’s story of mistaken identity and intrigue in de Medici era Italy.
The gang discusses two papers that look at the evolutionary history of unique teeth. The first paper looks at the history of tusks and tusk-like structures in synapsids, and the second paper looks at the shape of ancient bird teeth. Meanwhile, James gets to the point, Curt is inspired, and Amanda has a drink.
Up-Goer Five (James Edition):
The group looks at two papers that talk about teeth in different groups of animals. The first paper is interested in big teeth that keep growing and don't have a hard cover around them. While these teeth without a hard cover that don't stop growing are usually only found in animals with hair, one group that is part of the same family but much older also has teeth that seem to get big and never stop growing. However it turns out that many of them still have the hard covering, and only some of them lose it to be like the animals with hair today that have long teeth without a cover that doesn't stop growing. The other paper is looking at animals that fly and usually don't have teeth, but that are very old and so do have teeth. They look at the types of these old teeth to see whether they can tell us what these animals ate. It turns out that it is very hard to tell what these animals ate from their teeth, and it seems that other things like the type of face they have may be more important.
References:
Zhou, Ya-Chun, et al. "Evolution of tooth crown shape in Mesozoic birds, and its adaptive significance with respect to diet." Palaeoworld (2021).
Whitney, M. R., et al. "The evolution of the synapsid tusk: insights from dicynodont therapsid tusk histology." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 288.1961 (2021): 20211670.
The gang discusses two papers that look at how trace fossils can give important clues to ancient ecological interactions. The first paper identifies a unique behavior using trace fossils, and the second paper uses bite marks on bone to infer ontogenetic ecological shifts in a large caiman species. Meanwhile, Curt investigates, Amanda collects, and James fixates.
Up-Goer Five (Amanda Edition):
This week our friends talk about animals that roll in wet tiny pieces of rock that are really very tiny tiny. We also talk about a very big very slow animal with hair that got bit by a very large animal with no hair but hard skin and lots of big teeth that has a very long face. The animal with hair that rolled in wet tiny very very tiny pieces of rock shows that these animals did this thing a very long time ago; it shows that these animals with hair and two fingers on each leg were in this place at this time, along with animals with stuff that wasn't hair but made of the same stuff as hair and could fly, too. The second paper looks at how we can talk about a hard part of a very big very slow animal with hair could have gotten grabbed by a small one of a very, very, very big animal with no hair but hard skin and lots of big teeth with a very long face. It tells us that these very big animals with no hair but hard skin and lots of big teeth ate different things when they were small than when they were very, very, very big.
References:
Abbassi, Nasrollah, et al. "Vertebrate footprints and a mammal mud-bath trace fossil (Laspichnia) from the Mukdadiya Formation (Late Miocene–Pliocene), Chamchamal Area, Kurdistan Region, Northeast Iraq." Ichnos 28.1 (2021): 72-83.
Pujos, François, and Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi. "Predation of the giant Miocene caiman Purussaurus on a mylodontid ground sloth in the wetlands of proto-Amazonia." Biology Letters 16.8 (2020): 20200239.