Past Time: A Podcast of Paleontology

17/03/2021

More Tales of Ancient Life from Curator Adam at the Virginia Museum of Natural History. Matt is really hoping Adam lets him tag along to the Solite Quarry. He's ready to find a few clam shrimp! 🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐

07/08/2020

As the Fossil Curator Duke Lemur Center Matt is working with a team of researchers to track down the relatives of lemurs all over the world. Unfortunately lemur fossils from more than 80,000 years ago in Madagascar are unknown. Why? Why are there Cretaceous dinosaur fossils in Colorado, and Ordovician trilobite fossils in Ohio? Matt tries to explain why, and he gets a chance to show off some giant lemur fossils along the way.

23/07/2020

T. rex. Adam made a video about T. rex as curator of VMNH. You know you want to spend about 15 minutes with The King.

18/06/2020

Giant lemurs. Gianter birds. Meet these giants in the Duke Lemur Center fossil collection with Matt in this collaboration with the virtual classroom program Exploring by the Seat of Your Pants

Get a behind-the-scenes tour of the Madagascar fossil collection at the Duke Lemur Center with paleontologist Dr. Matt Borths! Meet the extinct giants that o...

18/06/2020

Another Tale of Ancient Life with Adam Pritchard and the Virginia Museum of Natural History!

21/05/2020

Adam branches out a bit into invertebrates. Matt is particularly excited because this story involves colonial American history. Be sure to follow the VMNH for more natural history updates!

16/05/2020

Adam turns to the dark side and talks mammals. Matt couldn't be more proud.

02/05/2020

22/04/2020

It's been a minute since we posted a new episode. Part of the reason for that is we've been telling some fossil stories at our new institutional homes!

If you want to find out what Adam has been working on as a curator, follow the Virginia Museum of Natural History on whatever social media platform you like.

Matt has been working on new content and research with the Duke Lemur Center, which has both living lemurs and a fossil collection. A good and very fuzzy follow.

Catherine has been creating content and research as a postdoc at the University of Florida Museum of Natural History as part of the OVERT project. The museum and the project have great fossil material.

We're still planning to make Past Time content, but for now, enjoy what we've been working on elsewhere. Here's a video series Adam has been making each week while the VMNH is on lockdown to help flatten the curve.

10/02/2020

Long ago, groups of insect-like trilobites lined up on the seafloor...and over 400 million years later the Past Time team is here to tell the story! Join Matt, Catherine, and Adam as they follow in the footsteps of the trilobite Ampyx on an all-new PAST TIME!

https://www.pasttime.org/podcast/episode-34-march-of-the-trilobites/

The Past Time Team investigates the trilobites of Morocco and the secrets of ancient animal behavior! Why would these creatures gather into conga lines?

26/11/2019

Now, where were we?

https://www.pasttime.org/podcast/past-time-episode-33-the-story-of-the-sloth/

PAST TIME is back! Join Adam Pritchard and paleontologist Ryan Haupt for an epic exploration of the history of SLOTHS! For over thirty million years, sloths lived all across the American continents from the Canadian Arctic to the tip of South America. Only in the past few thousand years have sloths been reduced to the adorable tree climbers we have today! Learn WHAT we know about sloth evolution and HOW we know it!

Ryan is a host and producer of SCIENCE...SORT OF: a popular podcast focused on science conversations of all kinds. Be sure to check it out at: www.sciencesortof.com.

Image from Wikimedia User Dallas Krentzel (CC 2.0 License).

Science...Sort Of podcaster Ryan Haupt joins Past Time to explore over thirty million years of SLOTH HISTORY!

24/10/2019

Ecological recovery after the Cretaceous Mass Extinction has fascinated researchers for decades. How quickly did the world move on from the non-avian dinosaur ecosystem to the mammalian ecosystem?

One problem is the fossil record from right after the extinction can be pretty fragmentary, with lots of isolated tooth and scaly bits, but few large specimens.

Today, a large team of researchers announced new discoveries from a stack of rock near Colorado Springs that preserves skulls and leaves from sites only a few hundred thousand years after the extinction. Turns out, the world moved on pretty quickly.

Check out some of these beautiful fossils!

Here's a generally accessible article on the discovery:https://gizmodo.com/incredible-new-fossils-show-how-quickly-mammals-took-ov-1839326256

And here's the research paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/10/23/science.aay2268

Also, tune in to NOVA on October 30 for a documentary on the discovery! https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6464/430

An absolute treasure trove of rare fossils has been uncovered in central Colorado. The collection reveals the stunning speed at which mammals emerged and diversified once the dinosaurs were gone.

10/10/2019

Friends of the show, led by crocodylian expert Jennifer Nestler are hosting a Reddit Ask Me Anything for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology!

If a question about paleontology has been burning a hole in your brain (ew), type it up for Jennifer's crack team of paleontological answerers! Shark experts! Mammal masters! This AMA has it all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dfwv71/we_are_scientists_from_the_society_of_vertebrate/

Please join us as we chat with scientists from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in their 6th annual AMA! They're coming to us this year from their annual meeting in Brisbane, Australia! https://redd.it/dfwv71

17/09/2019

Far from educational, but a lot of fun! Adam thinks that the new Jurassic World short film "Battle at Big Rock" is pretty darn good. It is lean, teanse, and it fulfills a lot of the potential of 'dinosaurs in our world' that the Jurassic World films have been hinting at for nearly five years now, complete with an appearance by the bull-headed horned dinosaur Nasutoceratops!
..and here's a shameless plug for our Past Time episode starring the co-discoverer of Nasutoceratops, Dr. Eric Lund!

https://www.pasttime.org/podcast/episode-27-machairoceratops-an-extinct-horned-dinosaur-under-threat/

Watch the all-new short film Battle at Big Rock now. BATTLE AT BIG ROCK is an all-new short film directed by Colin Trevorrow, written by Trevorrow and Emily ...

24/08/2019

Did somebody say "crossover?" No? Well, here's a crossover anyway!

Adam joined paleontologist and sloth biologist RYAN HAUPT for an episode of the podcast Science...Sort Of. The series deals with " things that are science, things that are sort of science, and things that wish they were science." We chatted all things reptile and fossil!

Ryan will make an appearance on an upcoming episode of Past Time featuring all the sloths in the world!

00:00:00 - Paleontologist Adam Pritchard ( ), post-doc at NMNH and future Assistant Collections Manager at VNMN , joins Ryan to talk about all things reptiles ! Diapsids , crown versus stem , mass extinctions ; this segment has something for everyone (who likes reptiles)! 00:32:

21/07/2019

On this hot summer day, join PAST TIME for a cold-blooded episode. Crocodylian faces have varied enormously over the past 66 million years. Join Adam and paleontologist/developmental biologist Zachary Morris on the journey to discover how they evolved using embryos and the fossil record!

Crocodile skulls are incredibly varied, both today and in the fossil record. Join Adam and biologist Zach Morris to find out why using fossils and embryos!

16/07/2019

I think we're back in business... Past Time seems to be back up and running on iTunes, Stitcher, and other major podcast outlets. If anyone else could give us the thumbs-up that you can see all our episodes, please let us know.

NEW episode coming this week!

13/07/2019

Good morning, Past Timers... Our podcast feed is experiencing technical difficulties at the moment, such that only one episode is available to stream. If you wish to access the rest of the episodes, we recommend you check us out on Spotify while we resolve the issue.

www.spotify.com

UPDATE: ...and now we're trying to figure out why we're not showing up universally on Spotify search results. For the short term, here is the direct link to the podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5cXt4urgdXkAoKpggHQ84A.

Spotify is all the music you’ll ever need.

08/07/2019

In the Mesozoic Era—The Age of Dinosaurs—crocodyliforms were an incredibly successful and varied group of animals. They lived on land and in the sea and at tiny sizes and as giants. Some also had incredibly complex teeth, radically different from the pointed cones we see in modern crocodylians. For all of these incredible varieties, paleontologists must address the question: how did they fit into their environments? What did they do with these strangest of teeth?

Paleontologist Keegan Melstrom, a PhD student at the University of Utah, set out to answer that question. I (Adam) have known him since before his graduate school days, and he has always been deeply passionate about determining how fossil animals survived in their environments. Early in his training, Keegan became interested in using 3D models of teeth and computer algorithms to study ancient diets. This was a monumental task, as such modeling was used almost entirely on mammal before Keegan’s work. It has been an amazing experience to watch his research go from a spark of inspiration, to a long arduous journey of collecting data, to a completed project with incredible implications for understanding crocodyliform evolution.

In a new paper in Current Biology, Keegan and his co-author Randy Irmis show that the dental evidence supports the idea that many dinosaur-age crocs were herbivore. Not only that, the data show that herbivorous crocs evolved MULTIPLE times in different parts of the croc family tree. Scientists have talked about the strangeness of some fossil croc teeth in the past, but Keegan and Randy are the first to put numbers and analysis to the idea that many crocs were indeed herbivores. We are left with incredible new frontiers to explore about how ancient crocs modified their bodies for this lifestyle and why it has not re-emerged since the end of the Cretaceous Period.

14/06/2019

TONIGHT tune in at 9:30PM (Friday June 14) for a tour of the new Fossil Halls at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History with Past Time Co-host and NMNH Researcher Adam Pritchard!

30/05/2019

Hey! Ammonites? Swirly-shelled squid relatives of the Mesozoic? Learn about them from expert Lucy Chang in this Smithsonian webcast at 2 pm!

https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/distance-learning/fossil-ammonites-paleobiologist-lucy-chang

Paleobiologist Lucy Chang explores fossil ammonites in a live webcast, May 30, 2019. She will show fossils and answer questions.

24/05/2019

Happy Fossil Friday to our followers! Today, we present a brand-new (old) species of early land-dwelling vertebrate: DIABLOROTER BOLTI. Hailing from the Carboniferous Mazon Creek locality in Illinois, Diabloroter is preserved as an impression of a skeleton.

It is...not quite an amphibian, but a distant cousin of all the living land-dwelling vertebrates: a member of the RECUMBIROSTRANS, which would have resembled solidly built salamanders. Diabloroter was described by paleontologists Arjan Mann and Hillary Maddin of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada!

24/05/2019

The REAL Meg has arrived to menace diners in the reopened café at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum!

19/05/2019

Past Time has arrived on Spotify! You can now find and stream the entire podcast catalog on Spotify. Adam really feels like we've joined the 2010s now (just in time!).

https://open.spotify.com/show/5cXt4urgdXkAoKpggHQ84A

17/05/2019

You wanna hear a story?

Past Time is back with a tale of a single specimen that pulls back the veil on the history of frogs! A single specimen from the pelvis of a pinky-sized frog reveals that the tiny animals hopped and skipped around the feet of the earliest dinosaurs. Adam tells the tale of the frog's tiny bone from the collections of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas!

http://www.pasttime.org/podcast/episode-31-the-first-frogs-of-the-age-of-dinosaurs/

The Age of Dinosaurs or the Age of Frogs? A single fossil specimen from the Triassic of Arizona reveals a whole new chapter of amphibian history in America!

21/04/2019

Good luck hunting down all the eggs, dyed and fossilized.

Really, an Easter hunt is a great way to train young paleontologists. Usually it’s worth it to look in the most unexpected places and to check behind that rock one more time.

19/04/2019

Dr. Chris Brochu is a world expert on the evolution of crocodylians and their fossil cousins. The Museum of the Rockies (Bozeman, MT) had a really cool post about his recent visit to the collections to study the Cretaceous genus Borealosuchus!

19/04/2019

Spend a moment of your in awe of Megistotherium or "The Majestic Beast." 18 million years ago this gigantic hyaenodont was roaming northern Africa, probably hunting elephant, hippo, and rhino relatives.

This fragment of jaw is stored at the Duke Lemur Center, where we made this white foam cut-out so you can see the scale of Megistotherium's majesty.

Megistotherium was the younger cousin of Simbakubwa, a 22 million year-old hyaenodont from Kenya that Past Time co-host Matt Borths helped to describe.

Here at Past Time we're bummed that we missed so many spectacular animals from the past, but the world is probably a little safer for us all without Megistotherium and Simbakubwa stalking around.

18/04/2019

Where have the Past Timers been? Well, working on some pretty cool science for one...

It was larger than a polar bear. It had canines similar in size to tyrannosaur teeth. It lived 22 million years ago in what is now Kenya, dwarfing the ancestors of the modern lions, leopards, and hyaenas living at that time. And Matthew Borths and his colleague Nancy Stevens revealed it to the world. Meet SIMBAKUBWA!

Adam is a fan of the write-up in Gizmodo, which sums up the discovery nicely with some quotes straight from Matt! https://gizmodo.com/newly-discovered-ancient-carnivore-was-bigger-than-a-po-1834136617

Amazing artwork by Mauricio Anton, a true master for reconstructing paleo-mammals. Photo by Matthew Borths himself.

27/03/2019

Researchers identify a new species of mastodon that roamed the western part of North America. Say hello to Mammut pacificus! The paper is below, and you can look at the specimens on MorphoSource: https://www.morphosource.org/Detail/ProjectDetail/Show/project_id/687

Mammut americanum is one of the oldest fossil names in North American paleontology, with researchers puzzling over the beast since 1705 (it was so puzzling that it was called "incognitum" for almost a century before being dubbed a mastodon). As more specimens were discovered across the continent, the shaggy, elephantine browser took shape.

With all of the data collected over centuries of effort, this new group of researchers can confidently identify a new species from among all the American Mastodon remains. Mammut pacificus could have been found throughout California and parts of Idaho during the Pleistocene. Recognized by its narrower teeth, chunky upper thighs, and absence of tusks in its jaw, we can now recognize a new species that was part of North American biodiversity at the end of "Ice Age".

A new species of mastodon from the Pleistocene of western North America, Mammut pacificus sp. nov. is herein recognized, with specimens identified throughout California and from two localities in southern Idaho. This new taxon differs from the contemporaneous M. americanum in having narrower teeth,....

15/03/2019

A bonebed of ~29 small ornithopod dinosaur skeletons was discovered near Proctor Lake, Texas in 1985. This year, those skeletons finally arrive in the scientific literature, courtesy of Kate Andrzejewski of Southern Methodist University and colleagues!

Meet CONVOLOSAURUS, a 1–3 meter fleet-footed cousin of Hypsilophodon. With such a big sample of different skeletons, Convolosaurus is now one of the best-represented small herbivore dinosaurs in the fossil record.

14/03/2019

The PIG-FOOTED BANDICOOT (Chaeropus) was a highly specialized herbivorous marsupial and distant cousin to the omnivorous bandicoots. Chaeropus only died out in the 1950s, succumbing to human encroachment, but it remains very mysterious. A new paper in the journal Zootaxa by Kenny Travouillon of the Western Australian Museum and colleagues restudies both fossil and modern pig-footed bandicoots, discovering that TWO species survived to the modern day.

Without living examples, museum specimens like these taxidermied skins represent our only link to lost species—fossil OR modern.

09/03/2019

Bite-related pun! Tyrannosaurs left marks from their teeth in the bones of their food items, suggesting that tyrant lizards were efficient consumers of meat! Read all about it from Brian Switek!

A bitten bone shows how a young tyrannosaur fed.

21/02/2019

Okay. Something is up with New Zealand and Madagascar. Long-time listeners may know we have a soft spot for giant birds and the unique fauna of Madagascar. In this study, researchers in New Zealand have discovered that the closest relative of the extinct New Zealand adzebill is a tiny bird that lives in Madagascar.

While both islands, they are not anywhere close to each other. They are over 7,000 miles and one Australia apart. But the relatives of the wingless adzebill somehow made it across that distance, with no relatives known in between.

This is part of an unfolding realization that the two islands share a unique faunal connection. The elephant bird of Madagascar was one of the largest birds ever. It's closest relative? The New Zealand kiwi. Not the moa, a flightless giant from New Zealand, but the kiwi, a feathery, flightless, football.

It's discoveries like these that remind us we have a lot to learn about where animal lineages came from, where they thrived, and where they went extinct.

https://www.canterburymuseum.com/about-us/media-releases/african-origins-for-the-enigmatic-adzebill/?fbclid=IwAR2npmJbLSz0fnoEwXPLdpdK8S0P6EZjRlymXqRM9QZd177llZExu7F_Zrk

The ancestor of New Zealand’s most mysterious giant bird – the extinct adzebill – likely flew here from Madagascar, Africa,...

13/02/2019

Otodus megalodon (The Meg or Megalodon to it's old friends and state fossil of North Carolina) likely went extinct earlier than paleontologists thought. Thanks to some careful geology, statistics, and comparative analysis, the extinction of the giant shark is now better constrained in time, leaving paleontologists with more accurate information for considering why it went extinct. The conclusion in this paper? The rise of great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) is suspiciously aligned with the demise of O. magalodon...

The paper is open-access, so you can read it and look at giant shark teeth to your heart's content. Don't forget to contemplate how much safer deep sea fishing is these days while you read:

https://peerj.com/articles/6088/…

The extinct giant shark Otodus megalodon is the last member of the predatory megatoothed lineage and is reported from Neogene sediments from nearly all continents. The timing of the extinction of Otodus megalodon is thought to be Pliocene, although reports of Pleistocene teeth fuel speculation that....