Podcast 339 - Back on Our Bullshit
/
The gang discusses two papers that use fossils to understand ecological interactions in the past. The first paper reports predation patterns on fossil blastoids, and the second paper finds brooding in the soft tissue of fossil bivalves. And then… the gang gets very much back on their bullshit… Meanwhile, James simplifies his life, Curt discusses new business ventures, and Amanda is seen.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers that look at how animals from a long time ago lived their lives. The first paper looks at a group of animals made of small hard parts with a big round head and tiny things coming off the head that it uses to eat. People did not think that animals ate these animals in the past, but this paper finds a few bits that show they were eaten. It uses a lot of looking at other things to say that this may have been eaten by a fish. The question then is, do we not see more of these animals that have been eaten because the fish don't try to go for them most of the time, or because when they do go for them they completely blow them up when they eat them.
The second paper looks at a group of animals that has two hard parts on either side of them. These animals usually fall to pieces when they die because of the soft bits that go away. This paper looks at dead animals that did not fall to pieces because they got covered in the ground before that happened. This paper looks at parts of these that they show are soft bits from a long time ago. They also show the parts where the animal would get water in to breathe, and in that part they find small little animals of the same animal. This is a group that makes little ones that live in these parts that take in water, but start in the parts of the mother. This shows that this was happening in the past in ways that are like how they happen today.
References:
Delvene, Graciela, et al. "Exceptionally preserved embryos reveal maternal care in freshwater bivalves since the Cretaceous." Scientific Reports 16.1 (2026): 17691.
Drumheller, Stephanie K., Colin D. Sumrall, and J. Richard Kyle. "Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside: evidence for vertebrate predation and recovery in the Mississippian blastoid Pentremites spicatus." Lethaia 60.1 (2026): 1-12.
