Podcast 324 - Pick Up the Pieces

The gang discusses two papers that use fragmentary fossils of animals to investigate the origins of major groups. The first paper describes an Early Ordovician eurypterid, and the second paper looks at mosaic evolutionary patterns in an early squamate. Meanwhile, James has bird opinions, Curt delights in not knowing, and Amanda will definitely be on time.   Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): The friends look at two papers that are using broken bits of things to learn a lot about animals from a long time ago. Both of these papers are looking at old animals that may give us new looks at how big groups of animals changed over time. These animals may be some of the first animals in these groups, or at least let us know what kinds of things those early animals could have been doing. The first paper looks at a group of animals that lived in the big blue wet thing a long time ago and are part of a group that today has animals that make homes that they use to catch food. The new parts this paper finds shows that this group may have come around a lot earlier than we thought. The second paper looks at parts from an animal that is in a group that is cold and has hard skin, some with legs and some without legs. These parts show that the early animals in this group had a lot of changes going on in their hard parts, maybe they changed more early on then they do today.   References: Benson, Roger BJ, et al. "Mosaic anatomy in an early fossil squamate." Nature (2025): 1-7. Van Roy, Peter, Jared C. Richards, and Javier Ortega-Hernández. "Early Ordovician sea scorpions from Morocco suggest Cambrian origins and main diversification of Eurypterida." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 292.2058 (2025).