Blog Archive
Episode 8 Field Guide: Crocodiles are the Chomping Champions!
Fossils are the raw materials of paleontology, but if we want to know how an animal moved or ate, paleontologists, like Dr. Paul Gignac, need to study living animals, too. Dr. Gignac studies crocodylians, measuring their bite forces across species and as they grow up to figure out how the strongest bite in nature evolved. Using techniques drawn from mechanical engineering and physiology, Dr. Gigna …
Filed under: Cretaceous, Deinosuchus, Dinosaurs, Ecology, Field Guide, Functional Morphology, Paleobiology, Reptiles, alligator, biting, croc, crocodile, supercroc
Episode 7 Field Guide: Walking through Whale Evolution
Whales are spectacularly specialized mammals that seem perfectly adapted to their marine habitat. Plenty of other mammals have gone back to the water, but whales take it to a whole new level. No back legs, weird ear bones, nose on top of the head. What could the land-based ancestor of whales have possibly looked like? Is there a fossil record of walking whales? In this episode we discover whales b …
Filed under: Cenozoic, Cetacea, Eocene, Field Guide, Hippopotamus, Locomotion, Mammals, Systematics, anatomy, evolution, hippo, whale
Prepare for the Whale’s Tale!
It’s been a crazy month as Adam and Matt travel to museum collections around the world, apply for grants, and get the teaching semester rolling, but they are still working on the next episodes. We have crocodile jaws, bird brains, and T. rex roaring for attention, but first we will dive in to the story of whale origins! Stay tuned!
Filed under: Announcement, evolution, hippo, whale
Quick Bite Field Guide: New Mammals from the Age of Dinosaurs!
Mammals from the Age of Dinosaurs (the Mesozoic Era) are usually presented as little rat-like creatures, waiting for the big scaly monsters to go extinct so they can rise up and become diverse…and interesting. But discoveries from around the world over the last three decades have revealed that Mesozoic mammals, though usually small, were diverse, accessing different foods and moving around the e …
Filed under: China, Ecology, Jurassic, Locomotion, Mesozoic, dinosaur, mammal
Episode 6 Field Guide: Tiny Horses, Galloping Crocs, and Fossilized Jungles
Fossils can be pretty scrappy. The best, most complete stuff is usually put on display at museums and photographed for books and websites, but a vast majority of material collected by paleontologists are fragments: slivers of teeth, fragments of shells, and splinters of bone. Paleontologists are trained to glean as much as they can from the patchy record, but the fragments can still leave a lot of …
Filed under: Archaeopterygx, Cenozoic, China, Ecology, Eocene, Germany, Mammals, Messel, UNESCO, bat, bird, crocodile, dinosaur, ecosystem, feather, horse, jungle, pterosaur, reptile, snake
