E29: Fossil mammaliaforms that walked the Earth with dinosaurs!
Dr. Elsa Panciroli, a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in England, and associate researcher at National Museums Scotland, is my guest this week.
She’s also the author of a new book called Beasts Before Us: the Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution, which is coming out in the US on September 7th, 2021. She talks to me about her paper published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society in which she and her coauthors describe a species of an extinct mammaliaform, as well as a new genus, all from the British Isles!
We talk about early mammals that roamed Earth with dinosaurs, what the world may have looked like when these organisms and dinosaurs roamed the planet, the joys of looking for fossils on the Isle of Skye, how to see bones embedded in rock, teeth that look like mountains, “mammals the size of pit bulls” that ate baby dinosaurs, pictures of a book in a nook!
The title of the paper is “New species of mammaliaform and the cranium of Borealestes (Mammaliaformes: Docodonta) from the Middle Jurassic of the British Isles.” The paper is currently available open access in the August 2021 issues of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society: https://academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/article-abstract/192/4/1323/6118471redirectedFrom=fulltext
To learn more about Dr. Elsa Panciroli, follow her on Twitter (@gsciencelady), or visit her website: https://elsapanciroli.wordpress.com/ For a quick video about this work, be sure to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmvN0DrXTTc
