Palaeocast

Beneath the city of Chemnitz, Germany, exists a entire fossilised forest. This whole ecosystem was preserved in life-position during a series of volcanic events. The forest is from the Permian period and thus represents a fantastic snapshot of life during a period where terrestrial fossils are notoriously rare.

Joining us to discuss the flora and fauna of the Permian of Germany is Dr Ronny Rößler, director of the Museum für Naturkunde Chemnitz.

One of the most difficult aspects of palaeontology is understanding how extinct animals moved around. It’s one thing to find a fossil and reconstruct it’s morphology, but it’s completely another to put that morphology into action and understand the locomotion or behaviour. One reason for this is because of the lack of soft tissue and muscles. The field of biomechanics can help with this by looking at the actual physics of these structures to help understand things like the forces exerted on the bones or tendons of an animal.

Professor John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College of the University of London is an expert in biomechanics of both living and extinct vertebrates. He has worked on many aspects of the tetrapod tree including early tetrapods up to birds. This episode focuses on how we can use biomechanics to understand locomotion in extinct animals, including dinosaurs, early tetrapods, and how modern animals relate to this question.

Laura interviews Dave about Palaeocast's new project: The Virtual Natural History Museum.

The Virtual Natural History Museum (V-NHM) is a project designed to make digital palaeontological resources accessible like never before. This website will integrate fossil multimedia from museums worldwide and bring them together in the one place, creating a kind of ‘master museum’. All of this data will be exhibited inside of a ‘computer game-style’ museum, allowing you to virtually explore the rich biological history of our planet, as told by the world’s best fossils.

Preparators are specialist staff working in museums and universities worldwide. They perform a very wide variety of tasks from fieldwork excavations, to specimen conservation. Any fossil has to be prepared for use, whether its to expose specific parts so that they can be studied, or to preserve and reconstruct a specimen so that it can be displayed in a museum gallery. Vertebrate preparation is an increasingly professionalised field that plays a huge part in the process of modern palaeontology.

This year the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America was held in Baltimore, Maryland. This is one of the largest conferences that palaeontologists attend, with over 6000 attendees from all fields of Earth Sciences. Caitlin and Laura went along and talked to many of the palaeontology researchers who had come to present their work on posters and in talks.

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight, and lived in the skies above the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic. They're often mistakenly identified as dinosaurs, but are in fact a separate, closely related group. This group has recently undergone a revival, with more research on pterosaurs happening now than ever before. Where are they found? How diverse was this group? How did they evolve?

Research associate and palaeoartist Dr. Mark Witton from the University of Portsmouth is well-known in the pterosaur community, and answers some of these questions and more in this episode. He's also provided us with a number of spectacular images below, so make sure you check them out! If you want to learn more about pterosaurs, check out Episode 42 with Colin Palmer on Pterosaur Aerodynamics.

The last part of our coverage from the 75th annual meeting of the society of vertebrate paleonology. In this part Caitlin speaks to Professor Christopher Smith about the history of the society, how it was recorded and archived, and how this information is being collected and maintained into the future.

In the second part of our SVP coverage we have interviews with some of the researchers on the scientific content of their posters and conference presentations.

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting is the largest conference each year for the world's vertebrate palaeontologists to present their work, network with each other, and find out what everyone else is up to. The first part of our coverage from the 2015 meeting in Dallas Texas includes interviews with palaeontology educators and museum specialists.