Episode 165: Ants Pt2

Ants are a hugely successful family of eusocial insects with over 14,000 modern species described. They are known from every continent except Antarctica and show a wide range of ecologies. Whilst many of us are familiar with their highly organised social structures and castes, there still remain a lot of public misconceptions about how their societies function. The evolutionary history of ants is equally as impressive, with roughly as many fossil ant species known as there are of dinosaurs! Since their appearance in the Cretaceous, several early lineages of ants (stem ants) have gone extinct. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Christine Sosiak of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology as we explore what some of these stem ants were like and ask how the different groups of ants fared over geological time.

Ants are a hugely successful family of eusocial insects with over 14,000 modern species described. They are known from every continent except Antarctica and show a wide range of ecologies. Whilst many of us are familiar with their highly organised social structures and castes, there still remain a lot of public misconceptions about how their societies function. The evolutionary history of ants is equally as impressive, with roughly as many fossil ant species known as there are of dinosaurs! Since their appearance in the Cretaceous, several early lineages of ants (stem ants) have gone extinct. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Christine Sosiak of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology as we explore what some of these stem ants were like and ask how the different groups of ants fared over geological time.

An ecosystem can be described as all the interactions that occur between organisms and their physical environment. The processes acting within an ecosystem operate on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and include both biotic and abiotic factors. Ecosystem engineers are those species that have a significant impact on the availability of resources to other species and can be responsible for the creation, maintenance, modification or destruction of an ecosystem. The introduction, or even removal, of such a species can have profound effects on both physical and biological elements of an ecosystem. Whilst we can recognise the impact of ecosystem engineers in modern systems (e.g. the introduction of an invasive species), we don’t fully understand what happens when an entirely new ecosystem engineering behaviour evolves. This has undoubtedly happened numerous times throughout geological time with the Great Oxygenation Event and the Cambrian Substrate Revolution being notable examples. Joining us for this episode is Dr Tom Smith, University of Oxford, who has been using a computational approach to try to model what happens when an ecosystem engineer is introduced into an environment. The open access study is available to read here.

Found in the fossil record between the Jurassic and the middle Miocene, Notosuchia was a highly diverse and strange group of crocodylomorphs, most notable for their terrestrial lifestyle. Joining us for today’s episode is Dr Yohan Pochat-Cottilloux from the Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon, who specialises in the study of crocodylomorphs. Together, we will explore the wide range of scientific methodologies that have so far been used to study the lives of these strange reptiles and discuss how they may have looked and behaved.

The field of evolutionary biology has been greatly influenced by the development of modern genetic methodology. The understanding of genes, genomes and the molecular mechanisms key to life on Earth are all goals of evolutionary biology in the 21st century, yet its potential applications seem to be near limitless. Palaeontology and evolutionary biology continue to be closely related and both, with their deeply rooted origins, have been essential to our understanding of macroevolution (major evolutionary change over long periods of time) ever since the major development of the theory in the 19th century. In this episode, Prof. Erica Bree Rosenblum introduces us to this diverse and constantly evolving field. We cover fundamental questions such as: what are genes and genomes and why does understanding them matter; which evolutionary roles do environmental and genetic mechanisms play; and what ultimately causes the rise and fall of species. In order to better understand life on Earth, we show how evolutionary biology brings together the fields of genetics, biochemistry, ecology, palaeontology and more.

In 12 years of podcasting, we have never actually taken the time to address the fundamentals of our field. Such questions could include: what is palaeontology, what is a fossil, how does one become a palaeontologist, and why is palaeontology important? For what should have been our very first episode, we've invited Prof. Roy Plotnick, University of Illinois Chicago, to help us outline everything you need to know about the field of palaeontology. Roy has had a long and varied palaeontological career, he maintains a blog all about the field, and he is author of the book Explorers of Deep Time.

It's been two centuries since the first dinosaur, Megalosaurus, was named by William Buckland and to commemorate the date, the Natural History Museum hosted '200 Years of Dinosaurs: Their Rise, Fall, and Rebirth'. This international conference provides a snapshot of dinosaur research in 2024, demonstrating just how far our understanding of this group has come since 1824. In our coverage of this event, we speak to many of the leading palaeontologists in the field, as we look back over the last 200 years of research and consider what the next 200 might reveal.

The Middle Jurassic is incredibly important to our understanding of pterosaur evolution; however, the remarkable rarity and incompleteness of Middle Jurassic pterosaurs has long hampered scientific understanding of the lineage. Joining us this episode on the other side of the microphone is one of Palaeocast’s own team members, Dr Liz Martin Silverstone, a Technical Specialist at the University of Bristol who has recently described Ceoptera evansae, a darwinopteran pterosaur from the Isle of Skye. Together, we explore the new specimen, how it fits in to the group, and the insights it can give us in to pterosaur evolution.

Originally mounted in 1907, the Carnegie specimen is the best example of the sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus, and perhaps the most famous dinosaur skeleton in the world. Casts of the specimen, including the London example known as “Dippy”, were distributed around the world during the early 1900s, and a final concrete cast was even created in 1957 for the Utah Field House at Vernal. Although the moulds used to create these casts were lost sometime during the 1960’s, new ones created from the concrete skeleton have allowed second generation casts to be made, with some elements being incorporated into other iconic mounts.