Welcome to this special series of podcasts relating to a fieldtrip that I have been invited on by Dr Martin Brazeau of Imperial College London.

I’m being flown out as the Palaeozoic arthropod “expert” of the team and I’ll be there to deal with all the eurypterids and phyllocaridids we come across, along as documenting the whole process for outreach and hopefully your enjoyment.

In all, this trip will last around 6 weeks, during which time I’ll have no internet, electricity, running water or even any toilets. It’s going to be a gruelling trip, but hopefully one that will give you an insight into what life is like in the field. You will join us as we discuss the science, prepare for the trip, arrive in the field, go out digging and finally wrap things up. You will experience all the highs of discovering new and exciting fossils and the lows of when we’ve just all had enough. This expedition is a unique opportunity to share with you a single research project from start to finish, rather than just the results. In this first episode, we contextualise why we’re going into the field. What is the current lay of the research landscape? What we already know? and what are we aiming to find out about the early evolution of the jawed vertebrates, a group to which we ourselves belong?