Episode 168: Grasslands Pt1
Palaeocast
Grassy biomes, including grasslands, savannahs and crops, cover over 40% of all land on Earth. They play a significant role in carbon and silica cycles and have a large impact upon the climate. Grasslands (grass-dominated ecosystems) have shaped the evolution of numerous groups of organisms, most obviously grazing mammals, and can support a huge amount of biodiversity. Humans evolved in the savannas and through domestication of grasses formed agriculture, leading to a modern diet dominated by grasses such as oats, rice, wheat and corn. As anthropogenic climate change threatens large scale...
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Episode 167: Origin of Teeth Pt2
Palaeocast
Determining the origin of teeth in vertebrates is an incredibly significant but notoriously difficult problem within palaeontology. Teeth didn’t evolve in the mouths of our ancestors, but are first seen as part of the external skeletons of jawless fish as structures called ‘odontodes’. These would later migrate into the mouth with the evolution of jaws, becoming the teeth we have today, but odontodes still remain present in the skin of modern cartilaginous fish, giving them their rough texture. The oldest known odontodes are from the late Cambrian Period and represent the very first...
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Episode 166: Origin of Teeth Pt1
Palaeocast
Determining the origin of teeth in vertebrates is an incredibly significant but notoriously difficult problem within palaeontology. Teeth didn't evolve in the mouths of our ancestors, but are first seen as part of the external skeletons of jawless fish as structures called 'odontodes'. These would later migrate into the mouth with the evolution of jaws, becoming the teeth we have today, but odontodes still remain present in the skin of modern cartilaginous fish, giving them their rough texture. The oldest known odontodes are from the late Cambrian Period and represent the very first...
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Episode 165: Ants Pt2
Palaeocast
Ants are a hugely successful family of eusocial insects with over 14,000 modern species described. They are known from every continent except Antarctica and show a wide range of ecologies. Whilst many of us are familiar with their highly organised social structures and castes, there still remain a lot of public misconceptions about how their societies function. The evolutionary history of ants is equally as impressive, with roughly as many fossil ant species known as there are of dinosaurs! Since their appearance in the Cretaceous, several early lineages of ants (stem ants) have gone extinct....
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Episode 164: Ants Pt1
Palaeocast
Ants are a hugely successful family of eusocial insects with over 14,000 modern species described. They are known from every continent except Antarctica and show a wide range of ecologies. Whilst many of us are familiar with their highly organised social structures and castes, there still remain a lot of public misconceptions about how their societies function. The evolutionary history of ants is equally as impressive, with roughly as many fossil ant species known as there are of dinosaurs! Since their appearance in the Cretaceous, several early lineages of ants (stem ants) have gone extinct....
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Episode 163: Ecosystem Engineers
Palaeocast
An ecosystem can be described as all the interactions that occur between organisms and their physical environment. The processes acting within an ecosystem operate on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and include both biotic and abiotic factors. Ecosystem engineers are those species that have a significant impact on the availability of resources to other species and can be responsible for the creation, maintenance, modification or destruction of an ecosystem. The introduction, or even removal, of such a species can have profound effects on both physical and biological elements of an...
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Episode 162: Cerney Wick
Palaeocast
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Episode 161: Notosuchians
Palaeocast
Found in the fossil record between the Jurassic and the middle Miocene, Notosuchia was a highly diverse and strange group of crocodylomorphs, most notable for their terrestrial lifestyle. Joining us for today’s episode is Dr Yohan Pochat-Cottilloux from the Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon, who specialises in the study of crocodylomorphs. Together, we will explore the wide range of scientific methodologies that have so far been used to study the lives of these strange reptiles and discuss how they may have looked and behaved.
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Episode 160: An introduction to Evolutionary Biology
Palaeocast
The field of evolutionary biology has been greatly influenced by the development of modern genetic methodology. The understanding of genes, genomes and the molecular mechanisms key to life on Earth are all goals of evolutionary biology in the 21st century, yet its potential applications seem to be near limitless. Palaeontology and evolutionary biology continue to be closely related and both, with their deeply rooted origins, have been essential to our understanding of macroevolution (major evolutionary change over long periods of time) ever since the major development of the theory in the...
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Episode 159: An Introduction to Palaeontology
Palaeocast
In 12 years of podcasting, we have never actually taken the time to address the fundamentals of our field. Such questions could include: what is palaeontology, what is a fossil, how does one become a palaeontologist, and why is palaeontology important? For what should have been our very first episode, we've invited Prof. Roy Plotnick, University of Illinois Chicago, to help us outline everything you need to know about the field of palaeontology. Roy has had a long and varied palaeontological career, he maintains a all about the field, and he is author of the book .
info_outlineGrassy biomes, including grasslands, savannahs and crops, cover over 40% of all land on Earth. They play a significant role in carbon and silica cycles and have a large impact upon the climate. Grasslands (grass-dominated ecosystems) have shaped the evolution of numerous groups of organisms, most obviously grazing mammals, and can support a huge amount of biodiversity. Humans evolved in the savannas and through domestication of grasses formed agriculture, leading to a modern diet dominated by grasses such as oats, rice, wheat and corn.
As anthropogenic climate change threatens large scale uncertainty, it’s vital that we understand the controls that govern the success of this fundamentally important group. It is only by studying the evolutionary history of grasses that we might be able to predict how they will fare in future.
Joining us in this episode to speak about the challenges of piecing together the evolutionary history of grasses from a relatively poor fossil record is Prof. Caroline Stromberg of the University of Washington.