Author: mike.benton

Bristol MSc student Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul published the second paper from his MSc thesis, about the internal structure of tooth replacement in rhynchosaurs, a group of reptiles that walked the earth between 250-225 million years ago, in the Middle and early Late Triassic, before being replaced by the dinosaurs.

Since he graduated in 2021, Will Richardson writes that he has been working as a lava cave tour guide in Iceland, inside Víðgelmir lava cave. Here he is (left) in a spectacular view.

Tom Halliday, who completed the MSc in 2011, has just published his first book, ‘Otherlands’ to high critical acclaim. The publisher, Allen Lane-Penguin, provide this blurb, “Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.

“Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description – whether the colour of a beetle’s shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air – is grounded in the fossil record.”

Tom Holland, author of Dominion, says ‘The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read’. That’s pretty unequivocal praise. Otherlands is in the Sunday Times bestseller list for February and March 2022, and is already recommended as one of the best books of 2022.

In his MSc, Tom worked on fossil crocodilians from Central Asia, including a visit to see the specimens in Moscow. Since then, he has completed his PhD on the evolution of early fossil mammals, and is Honorary Researcher at the University of Birmingham.

Tom comments: “I loved my year as part of the Palaeobiology MSc cohort in Bristol, and it reaffirmed my desire to continue to study the history of life in all its aspects. From biomechanics to palaeoecology, from a day in the prep lab to a foreign museum visit, I was introduced to the diverse world of palaeontological research beyond taxonomy. In a sense, Otherlands is continuing that more complete vision of Earth history that I first encountered in Bristol more than a decade ago.

Jane’s MSc project on ‘Evolution of ecospace occupancy by Mesozoic marine tetrapods’ has just been published in Palaeontology, and you can read it here. In her study, Jane reviewed all the ichthyosaur, plesiosaurs and other toothy monsters of the Mesozoic seas, and determined their body sizes, diets (fishes, molluscs, each other), swimming styles, as well as their stratigraphic ranges. In previous studies, researchers had determined guilds (= ecological groupings that share modes of life) either on diet or locomotion, but here she combined all aspects of ecology that could be determined reasonably reliably. She coded 35 ecological traits for 371 species (work out how many cells in the data table!).

The multivariate numerical analysis showed that all these marine reptiles could be divided into just six ecological categories linking how they moved, where they lived, and how they fed: pursuit predators that chased their prey, ambush predators that lurked and waited for the prey to swim past (two groups, one in deep water, one in shallow), a fourth group of reptiles that could still walk on land, shallow-water shell-crushers and foragers, and marine turtles with a variety of life modes.

Jane then looked at how the different guilds responded to mass extinctions, such as that at the end of the Triassic, and confirmed the huge extinction and replacement by new clades. However, the surviving ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs showed considerable conservatism. They didn’t expand their ecological roles at all, and many niches were left empty until new groups of crocodiles and turtles emerged later in the Jurassic to take over these roles.

Jane Reeves added: “It was a great experience being able to study a large variety of creatures, and to then reconstruct the ecological lifestyles of extinct animals from just their fossils”. She is now doing a NERC-funded PhD on ‘The soft tissue fossil record to elucidate the origin and diversification of vertebrates’ at the University of Manchester.

You can read the University of Bristol press release here.

Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology student Jack Cooper has just published his thesis work, and to great acclaim. He studied the legendary giant shark Megalodon (Otodus megalodon) and his detailed morphometric study has revealed the size of the rest of its body, including fins that are as large as an adult human.

Matthew Skinner, who completed the MSc in Palaeobiology at Bristol in 2019, has just published his research in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. He studied a collection of fossils rom Ruthin Quarry in South Wales, which in the Late Triassic was a small island set in a tropical sea. Matthew discovered that most of the Ruthin beasts showed greatest similarity to relatives from North America.

He also found that many of the reptiles were more primitive than expected, a common feature of island species, and there was some evidence for the species-area effect (many animals on large islands; fewer on small islands). Matthew also named a new species, Smilodonterpeton ruthinensis (‘chisel-toothed reptile from Ruthin’), a procolophonid with strange, chisel-like teeth, and he used Ct scanning to determine the true nature of a mystery reptile that had been named from Ruthin in the 1950s, the plant-eating Tricuspisaurus thomasi (see scan and 3D digital model).

Read Matthew’s paper here.

Former Bristol MSc Palaeobiology student Emma Schachner, noted professor at LSU Health Sciences Center, Utah, has made the link from dinosaurs to the impact of the Sars-2 virus! She and collaborators modelled the impact of Sars-Cov-2 on the lungs of three patients from CT scans, and included a healthy person for comparison.  Emma’s journey is roughly this: Dinosaur-mad person -> experimental studies of respiration in modern crocodilians and dinosaurs (crocodilians, by the way, provide evidence for having a bird-like one-way respiratory system, evidence they were formerly endothermic, and reverted to ectothermy) -> human lungs and Sars damage to lungs. Excellent.

Read Emma’s paper here.

The Brothers McLeod, animated film-makers based in Stratford-upon Avon, have just had their short documentary animation ‘Marfa‘ nominated as one of three for this year’s Best British Animation Short at the BAFTA Film Awards. Miles McLeod, one of the ‘brothers’ completed the MSc in Palaeontology in 1999, and since then has worked with his brother Greg.

Myles is a BAFTA Award winning writer. He is an award-winning short filmmaker (two nominations for BAFTA Film Award) and has written dozens of scripts for TV. He has also created shows including co-creating DreamWorks’ Noddy Toyland Detective. In 2011 he won a BAFTA Children’s Award for his work on Quiff and Boot for the BBC.

Read more about the work of the Brothers McLeod, and about Myles’ writing career and ethos.

What possible connection could there be between palaeobiology and animated film?

Simone Conti, who completed the MSc in 2018, has published his Masters thesis on ‘The oldest lambeosaurine dinosaur from Europe: Insights into the arrival of Tsintaosaurini’ in Cretaceous Research for April 2020. He had the chance to work on some beautiful specimens from Spain, and it turns out the new specimens prove the existence of an unusual group of hadrosaurs, the Tsintaosaurini, in Europe, a group otherwise known from eastern Asia. Members of the tsintaosaurine tribe would have dispersed into the Ibero-Armorican Domain not later than the early Maastrichtian, coexisting with endemic dinosaurian groups for some time. Simone is now beginning his PhD in Portugal on the biomechanics of diplodocid sauropods, using engineering techniques, such as Finite Element Analyses and Multi-Body Simulation Systems. It is a joint PhD between the Aerospace Department of Politecnico of Milan (Italy) and the Geology Department of Universidade Nova of Lisbon (Portugal). You can read Simone’s paper here. The image shows the femur of Simone’s Spanish dinosaur.

Emma Schachner, who completed the Bristol MSc a while ago and is now a Professor at Louisiana State University, gave a TED talk at her University last year about her work on respiration in vertebrates and what this tells us about the origin and success of dinosaurs. The talk has now been selected to go live on the international TED talks site, and you can watch it here. The photo shows Emma and one of her greatest fans.

Bristol City Museum has shrouded some of its exhibits to highlight the impending risk of their extinction. This striking exhibit has been featured in an article in The Guardian, and is attracting widespread attention. Isla graduated from the Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology some years ago, and has since worked in a number of museum jobs. She is currently Curator of Natural History at the Museum.

Isla said, “The extinction crisis is causing a lot of anxiety among people. We have a unique role to play with our animal stories and histories, and in creating a space for conversation and doing something positive to raise awareness. We want to help people imagine a world without these incredible creatures.”

She is shown with a stuffed Bengal tiger, once represented by 100,000 individuals, now only 4000. “Some animals on the list are surprising, like the giraffe and chimp,” she says. “Familiarity is part of the problem. Extinctions can be silent, especially as many iconic animals seem a common part of our everyday culture.”

Emma Bernard, Curator of Fossil Fish at the Natural History Museum, has just taken part in the ‘Mission Jurassic’ excavations in Wyoming. These are a partnership between The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (project lead), with the Natural History Museum, the University of Manchester and Naturalis (Leiden).

A key part of the programme was to document the geology and all fossils, not just the dinosaurs, and Emma was there to keep an eye on this wider range of finds. Emma completed the MSc in Palaeobiology in Bristol in 2007, and did a variety of jobs before getting the Curator position.

As she reports on her NHM web page, “I participate and lead in a number of outreach events every year, such as the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. I regularly take part in collection enhancing fieldwork all around the world; America, Morocco, France and have lead field teams to various localities within the UK.” Here she is leaving the BBC (yet again) after a live interview on Radio 5 about the recent dig.

Here’s former Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology student, Emma Schachner, now a Professor at LSU School of Medicine, New Orleans, presenting her TED talk yesterday, on the evolution of vertebrate lungs. This is what Bristol MSc graduates do.

Congratulations to Adam Smith, curator of natural sciences, Nottingham City Council, who completed the MSc in Palaeobiology in 2003, and a PhD on plesiosaurs, in Dublin, in 2007. Adam has just been awarded a share of a grant of £200,000 awarded to seven curators in various museums around the country. His proposal is to research and display the museum’s nationally significant herbarium collection.

The Headley Fellowships with Art Fund is designed to help curators take time away from their day-to-day responsibilities to carry out in-depth research into their museum’s collection. The funding is linked to the ongoing decline in public spending on museums and galleries in England, which has fallen 13% in real terms over the past decade.

During his time in Nottingham, Adam has staged several highly successful exhibitions, including a massive exhibition in 2017 and 2018 on Chinese dinosaurs.

More details of the award are here.

Here is Adam, hiding down at bottom left (green trousers), behind Chris Packham, who opened the dinosaur exhibition in 2017.

Bethany Allen, who graduated from the MSc in 2017 and is working on her PhD at the University of Leeds, writes about her active outreach and engagement work here.

Bethany fossil hunting in the Lias at Robin Hood’s Bay, Yorkshire.