51. When it comes to dinosaurs, was Orwell right?
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CORDIScovery podcast- Episode #51 - When it comes to dinosaurs, was Orwell right?
This is an AI transcription.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:16:01
Abigail Acton
This is CORDIScovery.
00:00:16:03 - 00:00:42:09
Abigail Acton
Hello. Welcome to this episode of CORDIScovery with me, Abigail Acton. In his novel ‘Animal Farm’, Orwell's character claims: “four legs good, two legs bad” . Would the Tyrannosaurus agree? Or did bipedalism give them an evolutionary advantage? This locomotor superiority hypothesis was first proposed to explain what made dinosaurs distinct from other Triassic populations, perhaps aiding their survival into the Jurassic.
00:00:42:14 - 00:01:04:20
Abigail Acton
But was this true? Examining how birds and crocodiles and other animals move now can tell us about the biomechanics of extinct animals and the impact that had on their survival. Beyond moving the way in which dinosaurs interacted with their environment shaped the world around them, the co-evolution of species and ecology over deep time offers insights about modern ecosystems.
00:01:05:00 - 00:01:29:20
Abigail Acton
So what can we learn from a vanished world? Estimates indicate that there are more than 8 million species providing us food, helping our wellbeing and our health, but we still don't know much about where and why biodiversity originates and vanishes. So what can we do to protect the evolutionary cradles of the future biodiversity? And can paleo climatic simulations and modeling help? In this time of mass extinction
00:01:29:20 - 00:01:56:16
Abigail Acton
We need all the insights we can get, so helping us to gain those insights are our three guests today, all of whom have been supported by EU research and innovation funding. John Hutchinson is a fellow of the Royal Society and a leader in the field of evolutionary biomechanics. His approach synthesizes experimental and computational methods, such as simulations to test hypotheses about musculoskeletal form, function, and performance.
00:01:56:18 - 00:01:57:22
Abigail Acton
Hello, John.
00:01:57:24 - 00:01:59:01
John Hutchinson
Hello. It's great to be here.
00:01:59:03 - 00:02:19:01
Abigail Acton
It's lovely to have you. David is a postdoctoral researcher in paleobiology at the University of Birmingham. He uses paleontological data to understand the origins, evolution and ecological diversity of groups and ecosystems in deep time and through major evolutionary events such as mass extinctions. Hello, David.
00:02:19:05 - 00:02:20:06
Davide Foffa
Hi. Nice to be here.
00:02:20:12 - 00:02:40:14
Abigail Acton
Hi. Sara Varela is a paleo ecologist and principal investigator at the Faculty of Biology at the University of Vigo in Spain. Her focus is on the relationship between climate and life on Earth, and how past climatic changes affected geographic ranges and evolutionary pathways of species. Hi, Sarah.
00:02:40:21 - 00:02:42:18
Sara Varela
Abigail. And hello, John and David. It's a pleasure.
00:02:43:13 - 00:02:45:01
Abigail Acton
John, I'm going to turn to you first.
00:02:45:03 - 00:03:10:21
Abigail Acton
The DAWNDINOS project experimentally measures factors such as 3D skeletal motions, limb forces, and muscle activations in birds and crocodiles to predict how ten Late Triassic Arkansas's may have moved, and to test if the results fit expected patterns for locomotor superiority ideas. Prior to your work, what did we think contributed to a dinosaur's success and what did that success actually mean?
00:03:10:23 - 00:03:43:01
John Hutchinson
So since the 1980s, the paleontological consensus somewhat was that dinosaurs, survived, the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic period, around 200 million years ago, and continue to diversify and become dominant on land in the Jurassic and Cretaceous. Just by chance or coincidental events unrelated to any, particular adaptive features. So in a way, dinosaurs were lucky.
00:03:43:01 - 00:03:49:16
John Hutchinson
That was the dominant idea. Not many papers published. To the contrary.
00:03:49:18 - 00:04:06:05
Abigail Acton
Right. And yet, we've always thought of evolution as being a process of adaptability and perfection and filling a certain, ecological niche and so on. It seems strange to imagine that in deep time, we didn't think of that as also as being applicable.
00:04:06:07 - 00:04:31:17
John Hutchinson
It is a bit of a conundrum. Surviving a mass extinction is a success in and of itself. Although evolution isn't just adaptation. And there are also are chance events that happen that have nothing to do with, like an organism's ability to perform in a certain way might just, you know, being in the wrong place at the wrong time is is unlucky.
00:04:31:19 - 00:04:41:13
Abigail Acton
Yeah. No, indeed. So it's either is special or is it lucky I understand. So, how did you go about unraveling the connections between locomotor diversity and survival?
00:04:41:15 - 00:05:04:20
John Hutchinson
Well, like you said, we first, did studies with living animals that are closely related to these Triassic animals or even descendants of those groups of birds and crocodiles and we did that in order to understand them better and to also test how well we could model and simulate those animals move today, versus the experimental data we actually got.
00:05:04:20 - 00:05:48:00
John Hutchinson
So we got to what you could call validation or testing of the quality of our models and simulations. And those ended up boosting our confidence in how good the approaches were. We then developed models and simulations of the extinct animals using a procedure that I've refined throughout my 25 year career, starting with the bones and then adding, more and more information to build a whole body model of a of a dinosaur or other animal with muscles and so forth, and then asking the computer to simulate how that animal might have moved using the anatomy, the physiology, and so forth that we put into the model, and that predicts movement.
00:05:48:00 - 00:06:02:11
John Hutchinson
And then we can compare movements in different behaviors walking, running, jumping between species and see are any of them better able to do certain things. And that gets at the superiority question ultimately.
00:06:02:13 - 00:06:05:18
Abigail Acton
Okay. That's fascinating. And what sorts of things did you find?
00:06:05:20 - 00:06:29:13
John Hutchinson
So far it's been tantalizing. We found that the simulation approach was really, really hard when we started the project. The methods were just coming to maturity in the in the human biomechanics field. They weren't really so mature in, in paleontology or, or studies of, of, of other animals, except for, except for humans.
00:06:29:13 - 00:06:35:04
Abigail Acton
Right. When you said the human biomechanics field, so are we talking about sort of the health care scenarios? Yeah.
00:06:35:05 - 00:06:49:11
John Hutchinson
So, modeling and simulating human movement in order to improve, the way humans can move other human problems that humans have, like stroke victims, cerebral palsy, and so forth. Those are areas of major research.
00:06:49:13 - 00:06:54:18
Abigail Acton
Right? So, not quite so advanced to in the paleontological context. So how did you step in that?
00:06:54:21 - 00:07:16:12
John Hutchinson
So we adapted those methods to study our living extinct animals. And learn them ourselves, because they were they were so new that we had to do quite a bit of work, learning them and making them usable on anything that's non-human. Because the methods were so tailored to humans, we didn't need to reinvent the wheel a little bit.
00:07:16:12 - 00:07:38:01
John Hutchinson
But it worked. We made progress there, and we didn't, simulate everything we wanted to simulate, which turned out to be a huge amount of work. But I, I'm not too late in my career to continue. Yeah. Analyzing those data, we've got so much that will keep busy for decades to come using what we obtained already.
00:07:38:01 - 00:07:52:03
Abigail Acton
Excellent. And what sort of animals were you looking at? So. So, I mean, tell me you were looking at crocodiles and birds. And I think also in other pachyderms such as rhinoceros and so on. Wait, what what did you actually do? I mean, you can't go and grab a rhinoceros or a crocodile. So, how did you approach this?
00:07:52:06 - 00:07:56:19
John Hutchinson
Well, we got birds and crocodiles to come into our laboratory, so we.
00:07:57:00 - 00:07:58:12
Abigail Acton
Did a crocodiles.
00:07:58:14 - 00:08:19:24
John Hutchinson
Yeah, yeah, and some Nile crocodiles. They weren't very big. Only a meter long or so. So. But still dangerous enough. Yeah. Careful. Yeah. And the birds were only, like, 500g. So these small birds called tenemos from South America. So we we use them for the experiments to get the real data on what real animals do.
00:08:20:01 - 00:08:24:09
Abigail Acton
So did you filmed them or you scanned them, filmed them and scanned them?
00:08:24:15 - 00:08:47:13
John Hutchinson
We filmed them doing a variety of behaviors, moving over devices that measure like how hard they push against their environment. The filming included what you could loosely call X-ray video. So we had the animals moving through X-rays that would show us, through a video camera attached to the X-ray, how the skeleton inside the animal moved in real time.
00:08:47:16 - 00:08:57:21
John Hutchinson
And those give us very high quality data on, the, on the locomotion of those animals, which improves then our ability to test how good the models and simulations are.
00:08:57:22 - 00:09:04:08
Abigail Acton
Right. Okay. Now I understand that, for example, if we think about theropods could you just tell the listeners a little bit about what a theropod is?
00:09:04:10 - 00:09:33:08
John Hutchinson
Yeah. So a theropod is and was, bipedal, carnivorous, or at least initially carnivorous dinosaur. That originated in the Triassic period. So this is one of the first dinosaur groups to appear and then survived throughout the Mesozoic era gave rise to things like Velociraptor and T-Rex, which are their pods, and then ultimately gave rise to birds, which technically are dinosaurs because they're descendants of sauropod dinosaurs.
00:09:33:08 - 00:09:38:17
Abigail Acton
And what did you discover about their body sizes and the change their body sizes in connection, for example, with their thigh bones?
00:09:38:22 - 00:10:09:03
John Hutchinson
Well, it was it was well known that, theropods started off at a pretty small body size, but then fairly quickly, especially in the Jurassic and very famously in the Cretaceous, they raided into into large body sizes. So that was also known. We didn't discover that, but we did find through comparisons of like thigh bones and and so forth from the Triassic onwards that there were dramatic changes in bone shape that related to size and the way the animals move.
00:10:09:04 - 00:10:15:12
John Hutchinson
So if we knew the animal's shape of its bones, we could to some degree predict how it may have moved.
00:10:15:16 - 00:10:37:22
Abigail Acton
Right? Indeed. And then one final point. I was just listening to the news yesterday and, and very interestingly on, on, on BBC radio four, they were talking about that recent discovery in the Oxfordshire quarry, 100 sauropod footprints traveling over a distance of 220m. And it occurred to me very timely a moment for me to be listening to this just before we started our recording.
00:10:37:22 - 00:10:44:09
Abigail Acton
Now it occurs to me, John, that actually tracks must be telling you a huge amount about how these animals moved through their environment.
00:10:44:14 - 00:11:07:04
John Hutchinson
Absolutely. Yeah. One animal can leave thousands of tracks in its lifetime, but only leaves one skeleton in the end if anyone even finds that. So trackway information is very valuable, but unfortunately it doesn't tell us necessarily who made the track or what their anatomy was like, except for their feet. So there are very limitations to the trackway data.
00:11:07:04 - 00:11:12:22
John Hutchinson
But but they're extremely important because they are real behavior recorded in the geological record.
00:11:13:02 - 00:11:21:03
Abigail Acton
Lovely. So it adds another dimension at least. Okay. Super. And so then when we think about two legs good, four legs bad, what's the final vote?
00:11:21:05 - 00:11:49:17
John Hutchinson
I think, there's a lot of nuance to this. And I and I realized while doing the research that the different hypotheses for why dinosaurs were successful in surviving that mass extinction really were not necessarily mutually exclusive, that it could have been that dinosaurs were lucky, but also, also were successful, had certain adaptations that help them survive the Triassic extinction, like being able to be more athletic.
00:11:49:17 - 00:12:06:22
John Hutchinson
But also there's evidence that they they had different growth strategies growing pretty quickly, maybe had, warm bloodedness, early on in their evolution, so forth. So, there are probably multiple agreeing hypotheses rather than competing hypotheses.
00:12:06:22 - 00:12:15:22
Abigail Acton
Well, that makes sense. It's all part of the tapestry. Really. Super. Thank you so much. You explained us so well, John. Thanks a lot. Does anyone have any questions for John? Yes, David.
00:12:15:24 - 00:12:45:15
Davide Foffa
I so it's a little bit of of a comment here. So we know that, through the Mesozoic we have, the evolution of, similar body plants in different period. So in the Triassic, you have, essentially all the body plant that you have also in dinosaur later on. I think that speaks about the, what you were saying about, the casualty about surviving a mass extinction as well, but also the repetition of, similar strategy to deal with their environment about.
00:12:45:16 - 00:12:48:00
Davide Foffa
Well, I don't know if you have any comment about that.
00:12:48:02 - 00:13:15:18
John Hutchinson
Well, so it was thought that, dinosaurs were the only members of this broad group that includes crocodiles, birds and other extinct animals that were around in the Triassic that became bipedal. So bipedalism being walking and running on two legs was thought to be a dinosaur trait within this group. But then people have realized over the last couple decades that there were some members of the crocodile lineage that became bipedal.
00:13:15:24 - 00:13:36:01
John Hutchinson
So it's not just a dinosaur thing, and that also leads us to, to conclude that that being bipedal wasn't necessarily part of, dinosaurs success. And there certainly was convergent evolution between some of the crocodile lineage animals and dinosaurs. That's just one example.
00:13:36:03 - 00:13:50:02
Abigail Acton
I don't know why it brings such a great smile to my face, but I just have suddenly a vision of, a crocodile running on its back legs. Maybe that should mean making you smile. Maybe that should make you run for the hills? But still. Okay. Thank you very much. Davide, I'm going to turn to you now.
00:13:50:04 - 00:14:17:20
Abigail Acton
The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, known as PTME killed over 70% of vertebrate species. The ECODIV project studied the fossil records of the Permian Triassic ecosystems, along with new field data to determine how the ecological structure and composition of land systems changed across the PTME and the connection to biodiversity recovery. So, David, what do you think are the gaps in our knowledge of past biodiversity?
00:14:17:22 - 00:14:38:04
Davide Foffa
Thank you. So I believe that today we have, an incomplete vision of what past biodiversity is in that we are very good at understanding what species will are present at any given time, more or less. Give me some rope here. But, we know much less about what the ecological roles of the species, occupy in the entire ecosystem.
00:14:38:06 - 00:14:57:21
Davide Foffa
And I believe that these are two aspect that are arguably equally important because, it's only the conjunction of these two that tells us about, the composition of the ecosystem, but also their structure, their resilience to perturbations, and more broadly about the trajectory of biodiversity through time.
00:14:58:02 - 00:15:00:13
Abigail Acton
Okay. Excellent. And why the Triassic?
00:15:00:15 - 00:15:29:10
Davide Foffa
The Triassic? I think it's an ideal case scenario here because, it starts after, the biggest, most extinction that ever happened, which means that we have, about 252 million years ago, we have, a great vacancy of, roles in the ecosystems. There is, plenty of opportunity for new groups to evolve. And in fact, we have, the evolution of many groups that are still around today.
00:15:29:10 - 00:15:47:22
Davide Foffa
So John mentioned, birds so that the from dinosaurs that evolved in, first in the Triassic, lizards, they started back around there on there, turtles, modern amphibians and mammals. They are all group that, diversify. And so, after the Permian-Triassic extinction.
00:15:48:02 - 00:15:52:09
Abigail Acton
Excellent. Thank you. Yes, that's well explained. So can you tell us what you learned in the project?
00:15:52:11 - 00:16:20:21
Davide Foffa
Yeah. So pretty much we confirm many hypotheses that they were hypothesized before. So we confirm, for example, that, the evolution of new groups after the extinction, change the ecosystem in multiple ways, not only changing the composition. So what type of animal existed at the time, but also they brought a new, innovation, new evolution, innovation that in turn, creating new ecological roles.
00:16:20:22 - 00:16:24:13
Abigail Acton
Can you possibly give us some examples so that we can understand that a bit better?
00:16:24:15 - 00:16:47:22
Davide Foffa
Absolutely. So the most clear example to me would be that of, pterosaurs. So pterosaurs are the first vertebrate to fly ever. So before that, nothing would fly in the sky. But there are plenty of other examples of this. So, for example, in the, in the Permian. So before the extinction, reptiles were relegated to minor roles.
00:16:47:22 - 00:17:12:18
Davide Foffa
They were small body sized, pretty much doing things that modern lizards would do. Again, give me some rope here. But, after the, after the extinction, then we have, the radiation of many, many different groups, many of which should join as also studied. And, works like, studies like John's demonstrate that design.
00:17:12:18 - 00:17:39:05
Davide Foffa
We're starting doing different things, multiple different things. So, before the Triassic, you'd never seen any reptiles that were large body sized, that they were, swimming on water. Or they could live both on water and land. You didn't have a massive carnivores. You didn't have herbivores among the reptiles. At the same time, you didn't have flying reptiles or any of that could work on to or reptiles.
00:17:39:05 - 00:17:49:12
Davide Foffa
They would walk on to feet. So it's not only the evolution of new groups, but also what innovation they bring to the, to the ecosystem.
00:17:49:14 - 00:18:11:16
Abigail Acton
Excellent. Okay. So I love hearing how it's possible to build up a picture about what's happening in deep time because, you know, it's so very long ago. Can you tell us more about what you actually did to arrive at these conclusions? Because I know for non-expert listeners like myself, it it's almost magical. So can you give us a little bit of an idea of your method so we can see how you got there?
00:18:11:18 - 00:18:16:02
Davide Foffa
Of course. So it's yeah, it sounds a bit nebulous, doesn't it?
00:18:16:02 - 00:18:17:06
Abigail Acton
Yeah, a little.
00:18:17:08 - 00:18:36:19
Davide Foffa
The the right place to start for me is, the fossil record. So we need to know what animal were present at the time to know that we can do a lot of things. Well, look at the literature. You can look at previous studies, but my favorite part is, integrating these with looking at museum collections and fieldwork.
00:18:36:21 - 00:19:10:21
Davide Foffa
So the first three parts or literature, museum collections and previous studies tell us, pretty much in which area what we could find. But they also tell us a lot of what we are missing. The fossil record is incomplete. And so we can do I think we can do a lot to try to, integrate data that a) we do not normally use museum collection are full of, specimen data that we never seen or we never we never work on, but they are still valuable.
00:19:10:23 - 00:19:18:16
Davide Foffa
And also, we can go out in the field and identify areas that we have not explored before to fill in these gaps that we have.
00:19:18:19 - 00:19:22:02
Abigail Acton
And did you do that, David, can you tell us a little bit about the field work you did?
00:19:22:02 - 00:19:23:18
Davide Foffa
Of course, my favorite part.
00:19:23:19 - 00:19:25:14
Abigail Acton
So I'm sure.
00:19:25:16 - 00:19:46:20
Davide Foffa
So the first two years of my project were in, in, in the United States, I was based at Virginia Tech and, worked with my colleagues there. We, we went to a few expedition in the southwest, so Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to try to find, those, area that had the right type of rocks.
00:19:46:24 - 00:20:14:01
Davide Foffa
But the rest, they were not as explored as others. And, one of the main, one of the favorite thing that we found is that, we particularly focused on, smaller of small animals. So micro vertebrate sites. And the reason for that is that, there are multiple ones. So the, the one that ties better with modern ecology is that, the largest variety of animals occurred at small body size.
00:20:14:01 - 00:20:14:12
Abigail Acton
Yes.
00:20:14:14 - 00:20:39:15
Davide Foffa
That's a historical one as well that John mentioned. So the evolution of, new, clades, often starts at a small body size. So if you sample smaller things, you have a better chance to recognize those at the early stage of their evolution. And, so for me, particularly important was to have, the most complete picture about the composition of an ecosystem.
00:20:39:17 - 00:21:04:01
Davide Foffa
Even if it was a single tooth, I just wanted to know what specific animals were there, because that tells us that gives us a more complete picture. Now we face another problem. Now we have the composition. We have the species list for an ecosystem. Now we have to turn this data into ecological data. And that's where we can borrow, we can borrow, techniques from modern ecology, particularly trait ecology.
00:21:04:03 - 00:21:43:09
Davide Foffa
So the trick here is try to understand what every single animal do in their ecosystem. And to do that, you can understand, you can try to find out, what body size that was, what diet they had, what habitat they, they lived in and how they walked around or they moved around with these, small, and many others, by the way, and with only this small number of traits, you can characterize an ecosystem, you can come up with, a very large number of unique ecological role and a combination.
00:21:43:11 - 00:21:43:24
Abigail Acton
Excellent.
00:21:44:04 - 00:22:08:10
Davide Foffa
If you want an example, a terrible dinosaur that, John, mentioned before, in the Triassic, there would be small bodied bipedal, so walking on two, terrestrial and carnivore. So that would be an ecological role. You can do that for all the other animal in the ecosystem. You can do that for all the other assemblages. And then compare how these assemblages between each other.
00:22:08:14 - 00:22:12:14
Abigail Acton
And then bring it all together and get a clearer picture of what the world actually looked at at that time.
00:22:12:14 - 00:22:17:11
Davide Foffa
That's right. And a succession of assemblages, how they evolved through time as well.
00:22:17:14 - 00:22:31:20
Abigail Acton
Right. Okay. Super. Thank you so much, Davide. That was very, very well explained I appreciate that. Does anyone have any questions or observations to make. Yeah. Sara you would like to say something.
00:22:31:22 - 00:22:41:10
Sara Varela
So I have a curiosity for David. That how common is for people working in such old scenarios that they work in such detail.
00:22:41:12 - 00:23:08:11
Davide Foffa
Know that's a that's a good question. And, the short answer is that it's not very common at all. The main reason is that, first of all, we didn't know until quite recently how common these things were. So we start to be able to recognize that these assemblages are only only a few years ago. Really? So yeah, this is something that is much more common in, in younger, stages and in the Cretaceous, Jurassic perhaps as well.
00:23:08:13 - 00:23:25:11
Davide Foffa
It comes with pros and cons because, micro vertebrates are often very broken, very difficult to work with. So you do not you often do not have complete skeleton to work with. But the, the, the pros is that you get, a more complete picture of the ecosystem.
00:23:25:13 - 00:23:29:11
Abigail Acton
How big is the micro vertebrate, please, David, what sort of size are you talking about?
00:23:29:13 - 00:23:30:12
Davide Foffa
We can.
00:23:30:14 - 00:23:31:00
Abigail Acton
Ish.
00:23:31:00 - 00:23:39:24
Davide Foffa
Yeah. Millimeters, millimeters. Yeah. Perhaps even less. Yeah. Some are too fish too far you cannot see them without the microscope.
00:23:39:24 - 00:23:47:23
Abigail Acton
So we're talking about parts of the animal. Yes, yes. You're not talking about an entire animal. That's a couple of millimeters big. You're talking about elements of small animals.
00:23:47:23 - 00:23:53:04
Davide Foffa
Yeah. The things that are most useful are teeth. Little parts, little jaws.
00:23:53:06 - 00:23:53:18
Abigail Acton
The stuff that.
00:23:53:18 - 00:23:59:07
Davide Foffa
Yeah, they are often enough to understand what type, at least what group of animals were around
00:23:59:07 - 00:24:21:04
Abigail Acton
That's excellent. Okay. Thank you for clarifying. That's a good question. Sorry. Indeed. I mean, how do they go about it? Fascinating isn't it? Okay, I'm going to turn to you now. Sara. MAPAS used modeling and mapping processes looking at species origination and extinction through deep time to answer the theoretical and practical questions involving where and why species originate, spread, and indeed vanish.
00:24:21:07 - 00:24:34:24
Abigail Acton
So your work overlaps a bit with that of David's because he's trying to build up a a clearer ecological picture in, in its diversity. And that's what you are interested in doing too. So why do you feel that such research is needed, Sara?
00:24:35:01 - 00:24:43:11
Sara Varela
Why it matters because it has a really clear link. If we understand life, we can predict what is happening in the future.
00:24:43:11 - 00:24:55:07
Sara Varela
For instance, and now we are in a big mess because we are destroying nature at a real big rate. And we need to understand it because we depend on nature.
00:24:55:09 - 00:25:06:23
Abigail Acton
Absolutely. Okay, good. So how did MAPAS set about getting a better idea of the extinction rates and how species vanish?
00:25:07:00 - 00:25:14:23
Sara Varela
Yeah, we are trying to, the common knowledge right now is like climate is important and the species change the distribution because of climate change.
00:25:15:00 - 00:25:37:08
Sara Varela
And when you talk with paleontologists, they say like, okay, because of this big climatic change, we have more species or less species or this kind of species radiates or this kind of species gets extinct, this kind of thing. So we aimed to measure, quantify and try to make like what if scenarios. So if climate change in this way what is happening and this is this is our goal.
00:25:37:11 - 00:25:55:00
Abigail Acton
Okey and and you sit at a crossroads I think between two fields that are usually separate, which is ecology, which looks at different species across space and evolution, which looks at differences in time. So how do you do this when you say you sit at the crossroads, what's the benefit? And and how do you actually get your data?
00:25:55:00 - 00:26:13:20
Sara Varela
The data is from people go into the field. So we have large datasets that are now available online. And this is a common effort like people are doing. And now we have also physicists working with climate making really nice models for the present to understand the future. But they are also put in these models to understand the past.
00:26:13:20 - 00:26:33:02
Sara Varela
So it's nice. Now we are in a time that we can try to make computational biogeography or something like that, that in the past it was not like that. In the past, we were working in a field in one place, trying to understand the climate of this place and trying to describe the place. Now we have many places.
00:26:33:02 - 00:26:45:22
Sara Varela
We have models of climate for instance, and we try we can try to gain knowledge of traits like adaptation because of like constraints of life, because of whatever.
00:26:45:24 - 00:26:56:08
Abigail Acton
Lovely. And so can you tell me how did you go about within the MAPAS project Sara to get a more rounded picture? What did you actually do?
00:26:56:10 - 00:27:21:04
Sara Varela
We have two ways of doing this. One is just loading a lot of data from, for instance, this large database of fossil records. And with this we can describe what is happening. We can try to have a hint of patterns, and we can try to link with these potential processes that are behind this to try to understand what are the constraints of life. And then for testing this, what we do is trying to do the so-called mechanistic models.
00:27:21:06 - 00:27:45:14
Sara Varela
And these are models that you started. Imagine the world is starting one cell, this, this, lineage that you are starting have some traits. You can put body mass, you can put anything that normally, as David, we're saying like in the for for past species, we have body size, we have diet and we have locomotion. This is the classic three axis of of paleo, traits.
00:27:45:16 - 00:28:07:11
Sara Varela
And then with these we can say how far they disperse. And we have the layers of climate and we have the climate each 1 million years or something like that. Continents move also. And you have everything. All the picture is like a video game and you allow the species to evolve and you put certain rules and then you try these what if scenarios.
00:28:07:11 - 00:28:29:23
Abigail Acton
What if climate is ruling the lineage evolution? What is the competitive behaviorist role in this? If more than like you have like a current capacity linked with precipitation or anything. So so we build what if scenarios and trying to look what are the patterns that we have at the end, how many species we have in each area. And these things.
00:28:29:23 - 00:28:33:03
Abigail Acton
Okay, that sounds excellent. Brilliant. And what sort of things did you discover?
00:28:33:05 - 00:28:34:11
Sara Varela
We are still there.
00:28:34:11 - 00:28:37:15
Abigail Acton
Yes, but what was you uncovering at the moment?
00:28:37:17 - 00:28:51:10
Sara Varela
I think people are very focused on specialization and like some species, are super special and that there in the tropics. And this is amazing and, and we have more diversity in the tropics because typically have more specialization and niche partitioning.
00:28:51:10 - 00:29:05:16
Sara Varela
And this is ecology framework and what people think. And we are discovering that being generalist is a really nice thing. And all ecosystems can be really dominated by generalist species.
00:29:05:16 - 00:29:10:12
Abigail Acton
So when you say generalist species, sorry, what do you mean to be a species that they have?
00:29:10:12 - 00:29:14:10
Sara Varela
They're pretty plastic and they can survive in the tropics or in the temperate areas.
00:29:14:10 - 00:29:15:14
Abigail Acton
Can you give us an example?
00:29:15:18 - 00:29:18:22
Sara Varela
A wolf is a very generalist species.
00:29:18:24 - 00:29:28:20
Abigail Acton
The wolf. There we go. Lovely. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. And then a specialist creature, I suppose, would be like a koala or something that just really you just only eat a certain type of eucalyptus leaf or something.
00:29:28:22 - 00:29:31:02
Sara Varela
It can be about diet, it can be about climate.
00:29:31:02 - 00:29:44:05
Sara Varela
You can have also different acts of specialization. For instance, you have an ant eater is very specialized in the diet, but it lives across very like a lot of environments. So yeah, you can you can divide it.
00:29:44:10 - 00:29:55:14
Abigail Acton
Fantastic. And so the fossil record other data, information coming from paleontologists like John and David can feed into your computer models And they can tell us what ultimately.
00:29:55:16 - 00:30:02:10
Sara Varela
They can help us to gain basic knowledge.
00:30:02:12 - 00:30:09:20
Abigail Acton
Excellent. Okay. Thank you. Does anyone have any observations for Sara or comments for Sara, please? Yes, John.
00:30:09:22 - 00:30:33:08
John Hutchinson
I find it interesting that, as is usual for paleontology, all three of our projects rely heavily on the fossil record itself and real bones and so forth, which all paleontology relies ultimately on discovery of specimens and curation of them in museums. But also, there's a common thread through all of our studies of modeling or even some kind of simulation.
00:30:33:10 - 00:31:06:07
John Hutchinson
And as someone who does quite a bit of that, I sometimes run into people who say, oh, that's just from model, which is, I think used as a sort of dismissal of, theoretical approaches as, as opposed to a very empirical observation based, approaches like looking at fossils. So I'm wondering how, you, Sarah, view the pros and cons of modeling and simulation in, in your kind of, research?
00:31:06:09 - 00:31:33:19
Sara Varela
I think in research, as we are all doing models, even the people that are measuring things, they, they do an Anova or something and these are models. So this is comparison means with a distribution and these are models. So we are all now we are in a phase. We have these kind of small stats and tests. And now we we are entering a much more complex because we can because computers are faster and they are cheaper.
00:31:33:21 - 00:31:47:23
Sara Varela
And now we can run things that, 10 or 20 years ago it was impossible. Apart from models, we need data and we need people like that to go into the field and taking crazy detailed data to test all these things.
00:31:47:23 - 00:31:53:13
Abigail Acton
And John, I mean, he spent 20 years looking at how rhinoceroses and crocodiles chase him around the laboratory.
00:31:53:15 - 00:32:11:24
Abigail Acton
You know, that's got to count for something, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they're both very practical out about people. Superb. Well, that was really interesting. Thank you very much for your time. I think you've all explained your work very well and how it shines a light, how the deep time past shines a light on, on the future. I think it's an interesting and interesting concept.
00:32:11:24 - 00:32:13:09
Davide Foffa
Thank you. Thank you very much.
00:32:13:09 - 00:32:14:24
John Hutchinson
It was very enjoyable. Thank you.
00:32:15:00 - 00:32:16:12
Sara Varela
Thank you very much.
00:32:16:14 - 00:32:37:20
Abigail Acton
Goodbye. You're very welcome. Goodbye. Goodbye, everyone. If you've enjoyed this podcast, follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or wherever you stream your podcasts. And check out the homepage on the CORDIS website. Subscribe to make sure the hottest research and EU funded science isn't passing you by. And if you're enjoying listening, why not spread the word?
00:32:38:01 - 00:33:00:20
Abigail Acton
We've talked about robotic bees and the work that's improving our ability to deflect asteroids. In our last 50 episodes, they'll be something that to tweak curiosity. Perhaps you want to know what other EU funded projects are doing in the field of paleontology? The CORDIS website will give you an insight into the results of projects funded by horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe that are working in this area.
00:33:00:22 - 00:33:16:13
Abigail Acton
So come and check out the research that's revealing what makes our world tick. We're always happy to hear from you. Drop us a line editorial@cordis.europa.eu. Until next time.
This is an AI transcription.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:16:01
Abigail Acton
This is CORDIScovery.
00:00:16:03 - 00:00:42:09
Abigail Acton
Hello. Welcome to this episode of CORDIScovery with me, Abigail Acton. In his novel ‘Animal Farm’, Orwell's character claims: “four legs good, two legs bad” . Would the Tyrannosaurus agree? Or did bipedalism give them an evolutionary advantage? This locomotor superiority hypothesis was first proposed to explain what made dinosaurs distinct from other Triassic populations, perhaps aiding their survival into the Jurassic.
00:00:42:14 - 00:01:04:20
Abigail Acton
But was this true? Examining how birds and crocodiles and other animals move now can tell us about the biomechanics of extinct animals and the impact that had on their survival. Beyond moving the way in which dinosaurs interacted with their environment shaped the world around them, the co-evolution of species and ecology over deep time offers insights about modern ecosystems.
00:01:05:00 - 00:01:29:20
Abigail Acton
So what can we learn from a vanished world? Estimates indicate that there are more than 8 million species providing us food, helping our wellbeing and our health, but we still don't know much about where and why biodiversity originates and vanishes. So what can we do to protect the evolutionary cradles of the future biodiversity? And can paleo climatic simulations and modeling help? In this time of mass extinction
00:01:29:20 - 00:01:56:16
Abigail Acton
We need all the insights we can get, so helping us to gain those insights are our three guests today, all of whom have been supported by EU research and innovation funding. John Hutchinson is a fellow of the Royal Society and a leader in the field of evolutionary biomechanics. His approach synthesizes experimental and computational methods, such as simulations to test hypotheses about musculoskeletal form, function, and performance.
00:01:56:18 - 00:01:57:22
Abigail Acton
Hello, John.
00:01:57:24 - 00:01:59:01
John Hutchinson
Hello. It's great to be here.
00:01:59:03 - 00:02:19:01
Abigail Acton
It's lovely to have you. David is a postdoctoral researcher in paleobiology at the University of Birmingham. He uses paleontological data to understand the origins, evolution and ecological diversity of groups and ecosystems in deep time and through major evolutionary events such as mass extinctions. Hello, David.
00:02:19:05 - 00:02:20:06
Davide Foffa
Hi. Nice to be here.
00:02:20:12 - 00:02:40:14
Abigail Acton
Hi. Sara Varela is a paleo ecologist and principal investigator at the Faculty of Biology at the University of Vigo in Spain. Her focus is on the relationship between climate and life on Earth, and how past climatic changes affected geographic ranges and evolutionary pathways of species. Hi, Sarah.
00:02:40:21 - 00:02:42:18
Sara Varela
Abigail. And hello, John and David. It's a pleasure.
00:02:43:13 - 00:02:45:01
Abigail Acton
John, I'm going to turn to you first.
00:02:45:03 - 00:03:10:21
Abigail Acton
The DAWNDINOS project experimentally measures factors such as 3D skeletal motions, limb forces, and muscle activations in birds and crocodiles to predict how ten Late Triassic Arkansas's may have moved, and to test if the results fit expected patterns for locomotor superiority ideas. Prior to your work, what did we think contributed to a dinosaur's success and what did that success actually mean?
00:03:10:23 - 00:03:43:01
John Hutchinson
So since the 1980s, the paleontological consensus somewhat was that dinosaurs, survived, the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic period, around 200 million years ago, and continue to diversify and become dominant on land in the Jurassic and Cretaceous. Just by chance or coincidental events unrelated to any, particular adaptive features. So in a way, dinosaurs were lucky.
00:03:43:01 - 00:03:49:16
John Hutchinson
That was the dominant idea. Not many papers published. To the contrary.
00:03:49:18 - 00:04:06:05
Abigail Acton
Right. And yet, we've always thought of evolution as being a process of adaptability and perfection and filling a certain, ecological niche and so on. It seems strange to imagine that in deep time, we didn't think of that as also as being applicable.
00:04:06:07 - 00:04:31:17
John Hutchinson
It is a bit of a conundrum. Surviving a mass extinction is a success in and of itself. Although evolution isn't just adaptation. And there are also are chance events that happen that have nothing to do with, like an organism's ability to perform in a certain way might just, you know, being in the wrong place at the wrong time is is unlucky.
00:04:31:19 - 00:04:41:13
Abigail Acton
Yeah. No, indeed. So it's either is special or is it lucky I understand. So, how did you go about unraveling the connections between locomotor diversity and survival?
00:04:41:15 - 00:05:04:20
John Hutchinson
Well, like you said, we first, did studies with living animals that are closely related to these Triassic animals or even descendants of those groups of birds and crocodiles and we did that in order to understand them better and to also test how well we could model and simulate those animals move today, versus the experimental data we actually got.
00:05:04:20 - 00:05:48:00
John Hutchinson
So we got to what you could call validation or testing of the quality of our models and simulations. And those ended up boosting our confidence in how good the approaches were. We then developed models and simulations of the extinct animals using a procedure that I've refined throughout my 25 year career, starting with the bones and then adding, more and more information to build a whole body model of a of a dinosaur or other animal with muscles and so forth, and then asking the computer to simulate how that animal might have moved using the anatomy, the physiology, and so forth that we put into the model, and that predicts movement.
00:05:48:00 - 00:06:02:11
John Hutchinson
And then we can compare movements in different behaviors walking, running, jumping between species and see are any of them better able to do certain things. And that gets at the superiority question ultimately.
00:06:02:13 - 00:06:05:18
Abigail Acton
Okay. That's fascinating. And what sorts of things did you find?
00:06:05:20 - 00:06:29:13
John Hutchinson
So far it's been tantalizing. We found that the simulation approach was really, really hard when we started the project. The methods were just coming to maturity in the in the human biomechanics field. They weren't really so mature in, in paleontology or, or studies of, of, of other animals, except for, except for humans.
00:06:29:13 - 00:06:35:04
Abigail Acton
Right. When you said the human biomechanics field, so are we talking about sort of the health care scenarios? Yeah.
00:06:35:05 - 00:06:49:11
John Hutchinson
So, modeling and simulating human movement in order to improve, the way humans can move other human problems that humans have, like stroke victims, cerebral palsy, and so forth. Those are areas of major research.
00:06:49:13 - 00:06:54:18
Abigail Acton
Right? So, not quite so advanced to in the paleontological context. So how did you step in that?
00:06:54:21 - 00:07:16:12
John Hutchinson
So we adapted those methods to study our living extinct animals. And learn them ourselves, because they were they were so new that we had to do quite a bit of work, learning them and making them usable on anything that's non-human. Because the methods were so tailored to humans, we didn't need to reinvent the wheel a little bit.
00:07:16:12 - 00:07:38:01
John Hutchinson
But it worked. We made progress there, and we didn't, simulate everything we wanted to simulate, which turned out to be a huge amount of work. But I, I'm not too late in my career to continue. Yeah. Analyzing those data, we've got so much that will keep busy for decades to come using what we obtained already.
00:07:38:01 - 00:07:52:03
Abigail Acton
Excellent. And what sort of animals were you looking at? So. So, I mean, tell me you were looking at crocodiles and birds. And I think also in other pachyderms such as rhinoceros and so on. Wait, what what did you actually do? I mean, you can't go and grab a rhinoceros or a crocodile. So, how did you approach this?
00:07:52:06 - 00:07:56:19
John Hutchinson
Well, we got birds and crocodiles to come into our laboratory, so we.
00:07:57:00 - 00:07:58:12
Abigail Acton
Did a crocodiles.
00:07:58:14 - 00:08:19:24
John Hutchinson
Yeah, yeah, and some Nile crocodiles. They weren't very big. Only a meter long or so. So. But still dangerous enough. Yeah. Careful. Yeah. And the birds were only, like, 500g. So these small birds called tenemos from South America. So we we use them for the experiments to get the real data on what real animals do.
00:08:20:01 - 00:08:24:09
Abigail Acton
So did you filmed them or you scanned them, filmed them and scanned them?
00:08:24:15 - 00:08:47:13
John Hutchinson
We filmed them doing a variety of behaviors, moving over devices that measure like how hard they push against their environment. The filming included what you could loosely call X-ray video. So we had the animals moving through X-rays that would show us, through a video camera attached to the X-ray, how the skeleton inside the animal moved in real time.
00:08:47:16 - 00:08:57:21
John Hutchinson
And those give us very high quality data on, the, on the locomotion of those animals, which improves then our ability to test how good the models and simulations are.
00:08:57:22 - 00:09:04:08
Abigail Acton
Right. Okay. Now I understand that, for example, if we think about theropods could you just tell the listeners a little bit about what a theropod is?
00:09:04:10 - 00:09:33:08
John Hutchinson
Yeah. So a theropod is and was, bipedal, carnivorous, or at least initially carnivorous dinosaur. That originated in the Triassic period. So this is one of the first dinosaur groups to appear and then survived throughout the Mesozoic era gave rise to things like Velociraptor and T-Rex, which are their pods, and then ultimately gave rise to birds, which technically are dinosaurs because they're descendants of sauropod dinosaurs.
00:09:33:08 - 00:09:38:17
Abigail Acton
And what did you discover about their body sizes and the change their body sizes in connection, for example, with their thigh bones?
00:09:38:22 - 00:10:09:03
John Hutchinson
Well, it was it was well known that, theropods started off at a pretty small body size, but then fairly quickly, especially in the Jurassic and very famously in the Cretaceous, they raided into into large body sizes. So that was also known. We didn't discover that, but we did find through comparisons of like thigh bones and and so forth from the Triassic onwards that there were dramatic changes in bone shape that related to size and the way the animals move.
00:10:09:04 - 00:10:15:12
John Hutchinson
So if we knew the animal's shape of its bones, we could to some degree predict how it may have moved.
00:10:15:16 - 00:10:37:22
Abigail Acton
Right? Indeed. And then one final point. I was just listening to the news yesterday and, and very interestingly on, on, on BBC radio four, they were talking about that recent discovery in the Oxfordshire quarry, 100 sauropod footprints traveling over a distance of 220m. And it occurred to me very timely a moment for me to be listening to this just before we started our recording.
00:10:37:22 - 00:10:44:09
Abigail Acton
Now it occurs to me, John, that actually tracks must be telling you a huge amount about how these animals moved through their environment.
00:10:44:14 - 00:11:07:04
John Hutchinson
Absolutely. Yeah. One animal can leave thousands of tracks in its lifetime, but only leaves one skeleton in the end if anyone even finds that. So trackway information is very valuable, but unfortunately it doesn't tell us necessarily who made the track or what their anatomy was like, except for their feet. So there are very limitations to the trackway data.
00:11:07:04 - 00:11:12:22
John Hutchinson
But but they're extremely important because they are real behavior recorded in the geological record.
00:11:13:02 - 00:11:21:03
Abigail Acton
Lovely. So it adds another dimension at least. Okay. Super. And so then when we think about two legs good, four legs bad, what's the final vote?
00:11:21:05 - 00:11:49:17
John Hutchinson
I think, there's a lot of nuance to this. And I and I realized while doing the research that the different hypotheses for why dinosaurs were successful in surviving that mass extinction really were not necessarily mutually exclusive, that it could have been that dinosaurs were lucky, but also, also were successful, had certain adaptations that help them survive the Triassic extinction, like being able to be more athletic.
00:11:49:17 - 00:12:06:22
John Hutchinson
But also there's evidence that they they had different growth strategies growing pretty quickly, maybe had, warm bloodedness, early on in their evolution, so forth. So, there are probably multiple agreeing hypotheses rather than competing hypotheses.
00:12:06:22 - 00:12:15:22
Abigail Acton
Well, that makes sense. It's all part of the tapestry. Really. Super. Thank you so much. You explained us so well, John. Thanks a lot. Does anyone have any questions for John? Yes, David.
00:12:15:24 - 00:12:45:15
Davide Foffa
I so it's a little bit of of a comment here. So we know that, through the Mesozoic we have, the evolution of, similar body plants in different period. So in the Triassic, you have, essentially all the body plant that you have also in dinosaur later on. I think that speaks about the, what you were saying about, the casualty about surviving a mass extinction as well, but also the repetition of, similar strategy to deal with their environment about.
00:12:45:16 - 00:12:48:00
Davide Foffa
Well, I don't know if you have any comment about that.
00:12:48:02 - 00:13:15:18
John Hutchinson
Well, so it was thought that, dinosaurs were the only members of this broad group that includes crocodiles, birds and other extinct animals that were around in the Triassic that became bipedal. So bipedalism being walking and running on two legs was thought to be a dinosaur trait within this group. But then people have realized over the last couple decades that there were some members of the crocodile lineage that became bipedal.
00:13:15:24 - 00:13:36:01
John Hutchinson
So it's not just a dinosaur thing, and that also leads us to, to conclude that that being bipedal wasn't necessarily part of, dinosaurs success. And there certainly was convergent evolution between some of the crocodile lineage animals and dinosaurs. That's just one example.
00:13:36:03 - 00:13:50:02
Abigail Acton
I don't know why it brings such a great smile to my face, but I just have suddenly a vision of, a crocodile running on its back legs. Maybe that should mean making you smile. Maybe that should make you run for the hills? But still. Okay. Thank you very much. Davide, I'm going to turn to you now.
00:13:50:04 - 00:14:17:20
Abigail Acton
The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, known as PTME killed over 70% of vertebrate species. The ECODIV project studied the fossil records of the Permian Triassic ecosystems, along with new field data to determine how the ecological structure and composition of land systems changed across the PTME and the connection to biodiversity recovery. So, David, what do you think are the gaps in our knowledge of past biodiversity?
00:14:17:22 - 00:14:38:04
Davide Foffa
Thank you. So I believe that today we have, an incomplete vision of what past biodiversity is in that we are very good at understanding what species will are present at any given time, more or less. Give me some rope here. But, we know much less about what the ecological roles of the species, occupy in the entire ecosystem.
00:14:38:06 - 00:14:57:21
Davide Foffa
And I believe that these are two aspect that are arguably equally important because, it's only the conjunction of these two that tells us about, the composition of the ecosystem, but also their structure, their resilience to perturbations, and more broadly about the trajectory of biodiversity through time.
00:14:58:02 - 00:15:00:13
Abigail Acton
Okay. Excellent. And why the Triassic?
00:15:00:15 - 00:15:29:10
Davide Foffa
The Triassic? I think it's an ideal case scenario here because, it starts after, the biggest, most extinction that ever happened, which means that we have, about 252 million years ago, we have, a great vacancy of, roles in the ecosystems. There is, plenty of opportunity for new groups to evolve. And in fact, we have, the evolution of many groups that are still around today.
00:15:29:10 - 00:15:47:22
Davide Foffa
So John mentioned, birds so that the from dinosaurs that evolved in, first in the Triassic, lizards, they started back around there on there, turtles, modern amphibians and mammals. They are all group that, diversify. And so, after the Permian-Triassic extinction.
00:15:48:02 - 00:15:52:09
Abigail Acton
Excellent. Thank you. Yes, that's well explained. So can you tell us what you learned in the project?
00:15:52:11 - 00:16:20:21
Davide Foffa
Yeah. So pretty much we confirm many hypotheses that they were hypothesized before. So we confirm, for example, that, the evolution of new groups after the extinction, change the ecosystem in multiple ways, not only changing the composition. So what type of animal existed at the time, but also they brought a new, innovation, new evolution, innovation that in turn, creating new ecological roles.
00:16:20:22 - 00:16:24:13
Abigail Acton
Can you possibly give us some examples so that we can understand that a bit better?
00:16:24:15 - 00:16:47:22
Davide Foffa
Absolutely. So the most clear example to me would be that of, pterosaurs. So pterosaurs are the first vertebrate to fly ever. So before that, nothing would fly in the sky. But there are plenty of other examples of this. So, for example, in the, in the Permian. So before the extinction, reptiles were relegated to minor roles.
00:16:47:22 - 00:17:12:18
Davide Foffa
They were small body sized, pretty much doing things that modern lizards would do. Again, give me some rope here. But, after the, after the extinction, then we have, the radiation of many, many different groups, many of which should join as also studied. And, works like, studies like John's demonstrate that design.
00:17:12:18 - 00:17:39:05
Davide Foffa
We're starting doing different things, multiple different things. So, before the Triassic, you'd never seen any reptiles that were large body sized, that they were, swimming on water. Or they could live both on water and land. You didn't have a massive carnivores. You didn't have herbivores among the reptiles. At the same time, you didn't have flying reptiles or any of that could work on to or reptiles.
00:17:39:05 - 00:17:49:12
Davide Foffa
They would walk on to feet. So it's not only the evolution of new groups, but also what innovation they bring to the, to the ecosystem.
00:17:49:14 - 00:18:11:16
Abigail Acton
Excellent. Okay. So I love hearing how it's possible to build up a picture about what's happening in deep time because, you know, it's so very long ago. Can you tell us more about what you actually did to arrive at these conclusions? Because I know for non-expert listeners like myself, it it's almost magical. So can you give us a little bit of an idea of your method so we can see how you got there?
00:18:11:18 - 00:18:16:02
Davide Foffa
Of course. So it's yeah, it sounds a bit nebulous, doesn't it?
00:18:16:02 - 00:18:17:06
Abigail Acton
Yeah, a little.
00:18:17:08 - 00:18:36:19
Davide Foffa
The the right place to start for me is, the fossil record. So we need to know what animal were present at the time to know that we can do a lot of things. Well, look at the literature. You can look at previous studies, but my favorite part is, integrating these with looking at museum collections and fieldwork.
00:18:36:21 - 00:19:10:21
Davide Foffa
So the first three parts or literature, museum collections and previous studies tell us, pretty much in which area what we could find. But they also tell us a lot of what we are missing. The fossil record is incomplete. And so we can do I think we can do a lot to try to, integrate data that a) we do not normally use museum collection are full of, specimen data that we never seen or we never we never work on, but they are still valuable.
00:19:10:23 - 00:19:18:16
Davide Foffa
And also, we can go out in the field and identify areas that we have not explored before to fill in these gaps that we have.
00:19:18:19 - 00:19:22:02
Abigail Acton
And did you do that, David, can you tell us a little bit about the field work you did?
00:19:22:02 - 00:19:23:18
Davide Foffa
Of course, my favorite part.
00:19:23:19 - 00:19:25:14
Abigail Acton
So I'm sure.
00:19:25:16 - 00:19:46:20
Davide Foffa
So the first two years of my project were in, in, in the United States, I was based at Virginia Tech and, worked with my colleagues there. We, we went to a few expedition in the southwest, so Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to try to find, those, area that had the right type of rocks.
00:19:46:24 - 00:20:14:01
Davide Foffa
But the rest, they were not as explored as others. And, one of the main, one of the favorite thing that we found is that, we particularly focused on, smaller of small animals. So micro vertebrate sites. And the reason for that is that, there are multiple ones. So the, the one that ties better with modern ecology is that, the largest variety of animals occurred at small body size.
00:20:14:01 - 00:20:14:12
Abigail Acton
Yes.
00:20:14:14 - 00:20:39:15
Davide Foffa
That's a historical one as well that John mentioned. So the evolution of, new, clades, often starts at a small body size. So if you sample smaller things, you have a better chance to recognize those at the early stage of their evolution. And, so for me, particularly important was to have, the most complete picture about the composition of an ecosystem.
00:20:39:17 - 00:21:04:01
Davide Foffa
Even if it was a single tooth, I just wanted to know what specific animals were there, because that tells us that gives us a more complete picture. Now we face another problem. Now we have the composition. We have the species list for an ecosystem. Now we have to turn this data into ecological data. And that's where we can borrow, we can borrow, techniques from modern ecology, particularly trait ecology.
00:21:04:03 - 00:21:43:09
Davide Foffa
So the trick here is try to understand what every single animal do in their ecosystem. And to do that, you can understand, you can try to find out, what body size that was, what diet they had, what habitat they, they lived in and how they walked around or they moved around with these, small, and many others, by the way, and with only this small number of traits, you can characterize an ecosystem, you can come up with, a very large number of unique ecological role and a combination.
00:21:43:11 - 00:21:43:24
Abigail Acton
Excellent.
00:21:44:04 - 00:22:08:10
Davide Foffa
If you want an example, a terrible dinosaur that, John, mentioned before, in the Triassic, there would be small bodied bipedal, so walking on two, terrestrial and carnivore. So that would be an ecological role. You can do that for all the other animal in the ecosystem. You can do that for all the other assemblages. And then compare how these assemblages between each other.
00:22:08:14 - 00:22:12:14
Abigail Acton
And then bring it all together and get a clearer picture of what the world actually looked at at that time.
00:22:12:14 - 00:22:17:11
Davide Foffa
That's right. And a succession of assemblages, how they evolved through time as well.
00:22:17:14 - 00:22:31:20
Abigail Acton
Right. Okay. Super. Thank you so much, Davide. That was very, very well explained I appreciate that. Does anyone have any questions or observations to make. Yeah. Sara you would like to say something.
00:22:31:22 - 00:22:41:10
Sara Varela
So I have a curiosity for David. That how common is for people working in such old scenarios that they work in such detail.
00:22:41:12 - 00:23:08:11
Davide Foffa
Know that's a that's a good question. And, the short answer is that it's not very common at all. The main reason is that, first of all, we didn't know until quite recently how common these things were. So we start to be able to recognize that these assemblages are only only a few years ago. Really? So yeah, this is something that is much more common in, in younger, stages and in the Cretaceous, Jurassic perhaps as well.
00:23:08:13 - 00:23:25:11
Davide Foffa
It comes with pros and cons because, micro vertebrates are often very broken, very difficult to work with. So you do not you often do not have complete skeleton to work with. But the, the, the pros is that you get, a more complete picture of the ecosystem.
00:23:25:13 - 00:23:29:11
Abigail Acton
How big is the micro vertebrate, please, David, what sort of size are you talking about?
00:23:29:13 - 00:23:30:12
Davide Foffa
We can.
00:23:30:14 - 00:23:31:00
Abigail Acton
Ish.
00:23:31:00 - 00:23:39:24
Davide Foffa
Yeah. Millimeters, millimeters. Yeah. Perhaps even less. Yeah. Some are too fish too far you cannot see them without the microscope.
00:23:39:24 - 00:23:47:23
Abigail Acton
So we're talking about parts of the animal. Yes, yes. You're not talking about an entire animal. That's a couple of millimeters big. You're talking about elements of small animals.
00:23:47:23 - 00:23:53:04
Davide Foffa
Yeah. The things that are most useful are teeth. Little parts, little jaws.
00:23:53:06 - 00:23:53:18
Abigail Acton
The stuff that.
00:23:53:18 - 00:23:59:07
Davide Foffa
Yeah, they are often enough to understand what type, at least what group of animals were around
00:23:59:07 - 00:24:21:04
Abigail Acton
That's excellent. Okay. Thank you for clarifying. That's a good question. Sorry. Indeed. I mean, how do they go about it? Fascinating isn't it? Okay, I'm going to turn to you now. Sara. MAPAS used modeling and mapping processes looking at species origination and extinction through deep time to answer the theoretical and practical questions involving where and why species originate, spread, and indeed vanish.
00:24:21:07 - 00:24:34:24
Abigail Acton
So your work overlaps a bit with that of David's because he's trying to build up a a clearer ecological picture in, in its diversity. And that's what you are interested in doing too. So why do you feel that such research is needed, Sara?
00:24:35:01 - 00:24:43:11
Sara Varela
Why it matters because it has a really clear link. If we understand life, we can predict what is happening in the future.
00:24:43:11 - 00:24:55:07
Sara Varela
For instance, and now we are in a big mess because we are destroying nature at a real big rate. And we need to understand it because we depend on nature.
00:24:55:09 - 00:25:06:23
Abigail Acton
Absolutely. Okay, good. So how did MAPAS set about getting a better idea of the extinction rates and how species vanish?
00:25:07:00 - 00:25:14:23
Sara Varela
Yeah, we are trying to, the common knowledge right now is like climate is important and the species change the distribution because of climate change.
00:25:15:00 - 00:25:37:08
Sara Varela
And when you talk with paleontologists, they say like, okay, because of this big climatic change, we have more species or less species or this kind of species radiates or this kind of species gets extinct, this kind of thing. So we aimed to measure, quantify and try to make like what if scenarios. So if climate change in this way what is happening and this is this is our goal.
00:25:37:11 - 00:25:55:00
Abigail Acton
Okey and and you sit at a crossroads I think between two fields that are usually separate, which is ecology, which looks at different species across space and evolution, which looks at differences in time. So how do you do this when you say you sit at the crossroads, what's the benefit? And and how do you actually get your data?
00:25:55:00 - 00:26:13:20
Sara Varela
The data is from people go into the field. So we have large datasets that are now available online. And this is a common effort like people are doing. And now we have also physicists working with climate making really nice models for the present to understand the future. But they are also put in these models to understand the past.
00:26:13:20 - 00:26:33:02
Sara Varela
So it's nice. Now we are in a time that we can try to make computational biogeography or something like that, that in the past it was not like that. In the past, we were working in a field in one place, trying to understand the climate of this place and trying to describe the place. Now we have many places.
00:26:33:02 - 00:26:45:22
Sara Varela
We have models of climate for instance, and we try we can try to gain knowledge of traits like adaptation because of like constraints of life, because of whatever.
00:26:45:24 - 00:26:56:08
Abigail Acton
Lovely. And so can you tell me how did you go about within the MAPAS project Sara to get a more rounded picture? What did you actually do?
00:26:56:10 - 00:27:21:04
Sara Varela
We have two ways of doing this. One is just loading a lot of data from, for instance, this large database of fossil records. And with this we can describe what is happening. We can try to have a hint of patterns, and we can try to link with these potential processes that are behind this to try to understand what are the constraints of life. And then for testing this, what we do is trying to do the so-called mechanistic models.
00:27:21:06 - 00:27:45:14
Sara Varela
And these are models that you started. Imagine the world is starting one cell, this, this, lineage that you are starting have some traits. You can put body mass, you can put anything that normally, as David, we're saying like in the for for past species, we have body size, we have diet and we have locomotion. This is the classic three axis of of paleo, traits.
00:27:45:16 - 00:28:07:11
Sara Varela
And then with these we can say how far they disperse. And we have the layers of climate and we have the climate each 1 million years or something like that. Continents move also. And you have everything. All the picture is like a video game and you allow the species to evolve and you put certain rules and then you try these what if scenarios.
00:28:07:11 - 00:28:29:23
Abigail Acton
What if climate is ruling the lineage evolution? What is the competitive behaviorist role in this? If more than like you have like a current capacity linked with precipitation or anything. So so we build what if scenarios and trying to look what are the patterns that we have at the end, how many species we have in each area. And these things.
00:28:29:23 - 00:28:33:03
Abigail Acton
Okay, that sounds excellent. Brilliant. And what sort of things did you discover?
00:28:33:05 - 00:28:34:11
Sara Varela
We are still there.
00:28:34:11 - 00:28:37:15
Abigail Acton
Yes, but what was you uncovering at the moment?
00:28:37:17 - 00:28:51:10
Sara Varela
I think people are very focused on specialization and like some species, are super special and that there in the tropics. And this is amazing and, and we have more diversity in the tropics because typically have more specialization and niche partitioning.
00:28:51:10 - 00:29:05:16
Sara Varela
And this is ecology framework and what people think. And we are discovering that being generalist is a really nice thing. And all ecosystems can be really dominated by generalist species.
00:29:05:16 - 00:29:10:12
Abigail Acton
So when you say generalist species, sorry, what do you mean to be a species that they have?
00:29:10:12 - 00:29:14:10
Sara Varela
They're pretty plastic and they can survive in the tropics or in the temperate areas.
00:29:14:10 - 00:29:15:14
Abigail Acton
Can you give us an example?
00:29:15:18 - 00:29:18:22
Sara Varela
A wolf is a very generalist species.
00:29:18:24 - 00:29:28:20
Abigail Acton
The wolf. There we go. Lovely. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. And then a specialist creature, I suppose, would be like a koala or something that just really you just only eat a certain type of eucalyptus leaf or something.
00:29:28:22 - 00:29:31:02
Sara Varela
It can be about diet, it can be about climate.
00:29:31:02 - 00:29:44:05
Sara Varela
You can have also different acts of specialization. For instance, you have an ant eater is very specialized in the diet, but it lives across very like a lot of environments. So yeah, you can you can divide it.
00:29:44:10 - 00:29:55:14
Abigail Acton
Fantastic. And so the fossil record other data, information coming from paleontologists like John and David can feed into your computer models And they can tell us what ultimately.
00:29:55:16 - 00:30:02:10
Sara Varela
They can help us to gain basic knowledge.
00:30:02:12 - 00:30:09:20
Abigail Acton
Excellent. Okay. Thank you. Does anyone have any observations for Sara or comments for Sara, please? Yes, John.
00:30:09:22 - 00:30:33:08
John Hutchinson
I find it interesting that, as is usual for paleontology, all three of our projects rely heavily on the fossil record itself and real bones and so forth, which all paleontology relies ultimately on discovery of specimens and curation of them in museums. But also, there's a common thread through all of our studies of modeling or even some kind of simulation.
00:30:33:10 - 00:31:06:07
John Hutchinson
And as someone who does quite a bit of that, I sometimes run into people who say, oh, that's just from model, which is, I think used as a sort of dismissal of, theoretical approaches as, as opposed to a very empirical observation based, approaches like looking at fossils. So I'm wondering how, you, Sarah, view the pros and cons of modeling and simulation in, in your kind of, research?
00:31:06:09 - 00:31:33:19
Sara Varela
I think in research, as we are all doing models, even the people that are measuring things, they, they do an Anova or something and these are models. So this is comparison means with a distribution and these are models. So we are all now we are in a phase. We have these kind of small stats and tests. And now we we are entering a much more complex because we can because computers are faster and they are cheaper.
00:31:33:21 - 00:31:47:23
Sara Varela
And now we can run things that, 10 or 20 years ago it was impossible. Apart from models, we need data and we need people like that to go into the field and taking crazy detailed data to test all these things.
00:31:47:23 - 00:31:53:13
Abigail Acton
And John, I mean, he spent 20 years looking at how rhinoceroses and crocodiles chase him around the laboratory.
00:31:53:15 - 00:32:11:24
Abigail Acton
You know, that's got to count for something, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they're both very practical out about people. Superb. Well, that was really interesting. Thank you very much for your time. I think you've all explained your work very well and how it shines a light, how the deep time past shines a light on, on the future. I think it's an interesting and interesting concept.
00:32:11:24 - 00:32:13:09
Davide Foffa
Thank you. Thank you very much.
00:32:13:09 - 00:32:14:24
John Hutchinson
It was very enjoyable. Thank you.
00:32:15:00 - 00:32:16:12
Sara Varela
Thank you very much.
00:32:16:14 - 00:32:37:20
Abigail Acton
Goodbye. You're very welcome. Goodbye. Goodbye, everyone. If you've enjoyed this podcast, follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or wherever you stream your podcasts. And check out the homepage on the CORDIS website. Subscribe to make sure the hottest research and EU funded science isn't passing you by. And if you're enjoying listening, why not spread the word?
00:32:38:01 - 00:33:00:20
Abigail Acton
We've talked about robotic bees and the work that's improving our ability to deflect asteroids. In our last 50 episodes, they'll be something that to tweak curiosity. Perhaps you want to know what other EU funded projects are doing in the field of paleontology? The CORDIS website will give you an insight into the results of projects funded by horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe that are working in this area.
00:33:00:22 - 00:33:16:13
Abigail Acton
So come and check out the research that's revealing what makes our world tick. We're always happy to hear from you. Drop us a line editorial@cordis.europa.eu. Until next time.
Co-evolution and ecology – lessons to learn from deep time
The ‘locomotor superiority’ hypothesis was first proposed to explain what made dinosaurs distinct from other Triassic populations, perhaps aiding the survival of bipedal species into the Jurassic. But was this true? Examining how rhinos, crocodiles and other animals move now, can tell us about the biomechanics of extinct animals and the impact that had on their survival. Beyond moving, the way in which dinosaurs interacted with their environment shaped the world around them. The co-evolution of species and ecology over deep time offers insights about modern ecosystems, so what can we learn from a long-vanished world? Estimates indicate there are more than 8ִ million species providing us food, helping our well-being and our health. But we still don’t know much about where and why biodiversity originates and vanishes. What can we do to protect the evolutionary cradles of future biodiversity, and can paleoclimatic simulations and modelling help? In this time of mass extinction(opens in new window), we need all the insights we can get. Helping us to gain those insights, are our three guests today, all of whom have been supported by EU research and innovation funding. John Hutchinson(opens in new window) is a fellow of the Royal Society(opens in new window) and a leader in the field of evolutionary biomechanics. His approach synthesises experimental and computational approaches (such as simulations), to test hypotheses about musculoskeletal form, function and performance. He led the DAWNDINOS project. Davide Foffa(opens in new window) is a postdoctoral researcher in palaeobiology at the University of Birmingham(opens in new window). He uses palaeontological data to understand the origins and evolution of ecosystems in deep time, and through major evolutionary events such as mass extinctions, a subject he explored in the ECODIV project. Sara Varela(opens in new window) is a palaeoecologist at the faculty of biology at the University of Vigo, in Spain. In the MAPAS project she considered the relationship between climate and life on Earth, and how past climate changes affected the geographic ranges and evolutionary pathways of species.
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If you have any feedback, we’re always happy to hear from you! Send us any comments, questions or suggestions to: editorial@cordis.europa.eu.