Episode 20: Year Review

As Palaeocast celebrates it’s 1st Birthday, we take the chance to look back over the past year and review our highlights. We also look towards the future and discuss our plans to attend some upcoming palaeontology conferences. We introduce a new member of the Palaeocast team and hear a little about the scientific work of all our members.

As we move into our 2nd year, we’d like to hear from you, our listeners, so that we can find out the best ways in which we can improve our podcast. Palaeocast’s mission is to give scientists the opportunity to communicate palaeontological research to a non-specialist audience. With this in mind, we aim to make our content clear, simple and accessible to our audience. Please help us with this goal by completing this short survey, the results of which are confidential. Your feedback will be invaluable for improving our content and quality!

The response to Palaeocast in just 1 year has been amazing and we are all massively proud and grateful to our listeners. We look forward to bringing you more of the most fascinating palaeontology from around the world.

Thanks for listening!

The Palaeocast Team.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 47:54 — 38.4MB)

Palaeocast celebrates it’s first birthday. With [non-photoshopped] cake.

In the past year, Dave Marshall has started his own biostratigraphy company. Amazingly, he has somehow still found the time to advertise directly to our Italian demographic.

Dave has been working on Palaeozoic fossil arthropods for the past 5 years, the results of which have recently been accepted for publication. In this photo, Dave is on the hunt for Silurian sea scorpions in the Welsh Borderlands.

Here’s Joe Keating looking for fossils at Aust in the south of Gloucestershire.

Joe has just completed the 1st year of his PhD investigating “The Evolution of the Vertebrate Skeleton”. In this photo, Joe is mounting a specimen at the Swiss Light Source. He is using Synchrotron Xray Tomography, a powerful technique used for producing high resolution 3D scans.

Joe has been looking at the growth and microstructure of the dermal (skin) skeleton of heterostracans – a type of early jawless fish which lived in the Silurian and Devonian.

Jon Tennant is nearing the completion the 1st year of his PhD. Jon is studying a possible ‘hidden’ mass extinction at the end of the Jurassic period, and the dynamics that may, or may not have, driven it. Here’s Jon at “Progressive Palaeontology”, a conference for early career researchers.

Laura Soul is our newest member. Laura is starting the 3rd year of her PhD at the University of Oxford, studying how our understanding of evolutionary relationships may impact our interpretations of extinction in deep time. In this photo she is sat next to some dinosaur footprints.

Here’s Laura investigating some stunning cross bedding, evidence of ancient flowing water, or sometimes even wind-blown sand dunes

We’d like to thank all our interviewees, without whom Palaeocast couldn’t continue. We have talked to some amazing people around the world and we are all extremely grateful for their time and patience. Here Dave is talking to Professor William Stein of Binghamton University about the fossil forests of Gilboa.

Last year we reported from the Palaeontological Association’s AGM in Dublin. This year we will return to the AGM, which will be held in Zurich, where we plan to provide live coverage of the event! We are also planning to attend conferences in the USA and Argentina during 2014. Stay tuned.

Tags: Dino, Dinosaur, Dinosaurs, Ecology, Evolution, Fossil Hunting, Fossils, macroevolution, nautilus, NHM, Palaeocast, Palaeozoic, Paleozoic, podcast, Sauropods, Science Communication, Trilobite