Podcast 341 - The Wrong Meat

The gang discusses two papers that use comparative anatomy of bone to tell some really interesting stories about fossil animals. The first paper uses the hand bones of Stegasaurus and Camarasaurus to investigate how they walked and also the evolutionary processes by which they may have developed these unique shapes. The second paper pieces together the complex taphonomy of a dead ichthyosaur. Meanwhile, Amanda fails at giving directions, James fails and following directions, and Curt fails to keep any of this on track. Up-Goer Five: (Curt Edition) The friends look at two papers that look at how you can learn cool things about how old animals lived by using their hard parts and seeing how those hard parts go together. The first paper looks at the hands of animals who are big and angry from a long time ago. This paper looks at two groups of animals that are not close to each other but both do things that look like each other for how their hands and feet work. This paper uses the hard parts of the hands and feet and uses how they fit together and how far they could move and bend and shows the most that they could move and bend to see how they would have walked. They find these two groups come at walking in a way that is the same but from different ways. The second paper looks at the parts of a thing that lived in the water and was around at the time of the big angry things. This animal shows that it had just eaten something, but also this animal looks like it was eaten itself. So, this animal ate something and then was eaten, and we can see this from the hard parts that are there and the ones that are not, as well as the bits of hard parts that are broken. References: Senter, Philip J. "Investigation of finger motion in two quadrupedal dinosaurs: the sauropod Camarasaurus and stegosaur Stegosaurus." Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology (2026): 1-11. White, Matt Andrew, et al. "Beneath the waves: Extraordinary dietary insights from a dismembered ichthyosaur from the lower Cretaceous." Gondwana Research (2026).