The Fossil Files
Podcast Description
In “The Fossil Files”, a pair of palaeontologists delve into the latest discoveries from the world of palaeontology and seek to bring fossils to back to life. Each episode, Susie and Rob will discuss an interesting new research paper ranging from topics of what dinosaurs ate, how plesiosaurs swam, where we came from, and the science of de-extinction. Whilst doing so, we peek under the hood of how the science of palaeontology is done and how research gets to see the light of day. It is for anybody interested in palaeontology and past life whether that is students, researchers themselves, or simply the fossil-curious - we laugh as we learn, and hope you will too.
Episode guide at https://fossils.libsyn.com/
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on various aspects of palaeontology, covering topics such as dinosaur diets, plesiosaur locomotion, human evolution, and the science of de-extinction, with episodes like a deep dive into exceptional preservation examples in Jurassic fossils and discussions about soft tissue analysis to reconstruct past life.
In “The Fossil Files”, a pair of palaeontologists delve into the latest discoveries from the world of palaeontology and seek to bring fossils to back to life. Each episode, Susie and Rob will discuss an interesting new research paper ranging from topics of what dinosaurs ate, how plesiosaurs swam, where we came from, and the science of de-extinction. Whilst doing so, we peek under the hood of how the science of palaeontology is done and how research gets to see the light of day. It is for anybody interested in palaeontology and past life whether that is students, researchers themselves, or simply the fossil-curious – we laugh as we learn, and hope you will too.
Episode guide at https://fossils.libsyn.com/
For our first paper, we look at some exceptional preservation of soft tissue in Jurassic plesiosaur (large marine reptiles). Detailed preservation of soft tissues to the sub-cellular level is very rare in the fossil record. We discuss this specific example from Germany (which we name Nigel) and the types of analyses that the authors did of its skin and tissues. This new data helps us reconstruct how plesiosaurs may have lived and moved. Or does it?
In this figure from the paper we can see the whole fossil of Nigel (A), a close up of the preserved skin (B and C), and a cross section of the sub-cellular detail from the fossil skin (D and E) compared with skin cells from a modern turtle (F).
The paper is “Skin, scales, and cells in a Jurassic plesiosaur” published in Current Biology in 2025 by Miguel Marx of Lund Univertsity Sweden, and colleages. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.001
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