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/
What (and when) is an animal? They are thought to have first arrived about 500 million years ago and immediately underwent an explosive diversifcation at the beginning of the Cambrian. When and how this important event took place has always been hard evolutionary problem to solve: fossils with the necessary preservation of soft-tissues are rare and limited. Two finds from China blow open new windows into this episode.
The first is a new site from just before the Cambrian. It yields all sorts of typical Ediacaran weirdos, but preserved in a way that we don’t usually get to see them. This not only sheds new light on what was going on before the Cambrian, but also means we can begin to look at the origin of animals in a new way.
The second is a new site from 27 million years after Cambrian began. The quality and diversity of the new fossil finds is massive, so much so that it could be considered a new “Burgess Shale”, the archetypal and famous Cambrian deposit with exceptional preservation.
In a final after-thought, we take a look at sponges and their evolutionary relationships. A new phylogeny helps us to understand why we have such a limited fossil record of early animals: they were likely completely squishy and devoid of a skeleton.
Together a more complete picture of our distant animal origins is emerging and how palaeontology can help us, even through the limited windows that we have.
The first paper is “The terminal Ediacaran Tongshan Lagerstätte from South China” by Jin-bo Hou and colleagues published in Nature Ecology and Evolution in November 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-65176-2
The second paper is “A Cambrian soft-bodied biota after the first Phanerozoic mass extinction” by Han Zeng and colleagues published in Nature in Janaury 2026 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-10030-0
The final paper is “Independent origins of spicules reconcile paleontological and molecular evidence of sponge evolutionary history” by Maria Eleonora Rossi and colleagues published in Science Advances in January 2026 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx1754
Wide screen art by Dinghua Yang.
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