Past Time

Sauropod dinosaurs, the long necked creatures like Apatasaurus and Brachiosaurus, were the biggest animals to ever leave a footprint on the Earth. They were the size of whales, but didn't have the luxury of water to help them support their bulk! The massive size of sauropod dinosaurs intrigued Dr. Michael D'Emic and he has been scrutinizing their bone structure and relationships to figure out how these saurian giants managed to get around and consume enough food to keep growing.

We all know what a reptile is, right? Scaly, sprawling legs, cold blooded. But where did they come from and how are they all related to one another? What makes a lizard different from a crocodile? In this episode Adam teaches Matt about the different lineages of reptiles alive today and some of the mysteries biologists and paleontologists are still wrestling with in the reptile family tree. Spoiler alert: Turtles are the black sheep of the family.

What is a dinosaur? What is a bird? They're related somehow, but how does a paleontologist figure out how close Velociraptors and penguins are in the dinosaur family tree? In this episode of Past Time, Matt and Adam talk to Dr. Alan Turner, an expert on fossils from the dino-bird transition to figure out which animals are most important in sorting out this incredible evolutionary story.

Are there really new fossils to find out there? How do paleontologists even figure out where to look? In the first episode of Past Time, Adam and Matt talk to Dr. Dave Krause from Stony Brook University about his incredible discoveries from Madagascar. He went to Madagascar to try to find the ancestors of weird animals like lemurs and chameleons. What he found were the even weirder dinosaurs and crocodiles that called Madagascar home 65 million years ago.