Tomorrow, Today - Re-Writing Palaeontology and some Thoughts to Chew on with Dr. Dan Field

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

n this episode, we discuss the evolution of birds, how our understanding of ancient history is still evolving, and which was the baddest ancient bird of them all. Dr. Dan Field is a vertebrate palaeontologist interested in the evolutionary history of birds and other amniotes. Our group's research explores the vertebrate fossil record and organismal biology in a phylogenetic framework to explore how and when extant vertebrate diversity has arisen. His work at the Field Lab aims to decipher the origins of modern avian biodiversity using fossil, anatomical, and molecular data, although we have deep interests in evolutionary questions across the vertebrate tree of life. In 2020 we revealed the discovery of the "Wonderchicken", Asteriornis, the oldest-known modern bird fossil and an early relative of the group that gave rise to living chickens and ducks. Major themes of our research include clarifying how birds survived and diversified following the mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, studying the evolutionary histories of major bird groups, and understanding the evolutionary origins of distinctive biological features such as the modern bird skull. You can learn more about their research at: https://www.fieldpalaeo.com/ on Instagram & Twitter: @FieldPalaeo

Welcome back to tomorrow today, where you find out about tomorrow, today. Will you be around? Time doesn't care. Oh. Do you know who else didn't care? Napoleon? Geneva's. If you had to guess, what is Geneva's?

Were you going to introduce either one of us? No. Okay. I don't know. I would guess that it was like... Is it the host of this podcast named Nash Flynn? Is it the other host of this podcast called Andy Porpo's Almanac, which is his real legal last name?

Yes, I changed it just for this podcast. Not for Porpo's Alman. but for this part. But for this one. So everyone could call me that. Yes. It's all about product placement. I know.

I know. I'm just learning from you all the time. Aren't you? If I had to guess, I would say it was like a god. Geneva? I mean, yeah. I think it actually is. It's got like real, well, Janus is the Roman god.

So maybe it's like his kid. I'm Janus. This is Janavis. Wow. Sorry. All right. So actually there's like a kernel of truth in that. Oh my God.

So I will leave it to our guest for this episode, Dr. Daniel Field to explain that a little bit further, but you are on to something. Oh, good. Good for me. Yeah, good for you. So this was a really interesting conversation because we are going to dive into some really surprising bird history. Now, as the- Surprising bird history. Oh, my God. In terms of birds, I don't know a lot. I know this might be a surprise to everyone. It is a surprise to me, actually. Birds are not my thing. Like chickens, kind of ducks, me. Birds, like wild birds, I want to like birds. I do.

Like, I want to be the guy with the binoculars who's like, that's a titty-footed blue heron. A titty-footed. But that's not me, obviously. The old titty-foot. No, she's dead. Oh, my God. Yes, I do think we should have titty feet. So anyways.

Yeah, sorry. This episode is not about titty feet. Well, maybe it should be. Not yet. So what we talk about is the evolutionary path of birds. So more tities, less feet. More titty. I mean, that is the future.

More titties less feet. More titties. I guess it would be fewer feet. Fewer. We have this idea of what evolution looks like, right? Like that it's like... God. I said that only so I can see your face.

So, like, we think of evolution being like simple to complex, right? We went from like single-celled organisms to dinosaurs, right? But as newer evidence starts coming out, that doesn't always necessarily seem to be the case where things became very much more complicated and then simplified, which is really interesting in the sense of how we engage with history and also like that we think like, well, today everything is more efficient, more better at what it does because it's more complicated, unlike the way I speak English. More better. More better, right or right or wrong? You are the historian. No, no, it's true. I will say, though, this is our first session in the studio without chairs.

I don't know where the chairs went, but we're both finding it very hard to stay on task, which is... You don't know what you're talking about. I'm like a grizzlies dick. We have to stop doing this podcast. It's not good for one. Do you think a grisly's dick is more on task than other things? I don't want to know the answer to that, actually. All right, so, birds.

Yeah. birds. Let's talk about birds. Tell me about the evolution of birds. So this conversation, we get into this idea of what evolution looks like. And what are the significances of us realizing that with new technologies, a lot of the stuff that were, you know, very fundamental to how we understood evolution are starting to be challenged. He talks a lot about technologies that exist today that we can better analyze bones without having to worry about like the human error of breaking stone where the bone is fossilized, right? with the fear that we're going to damage the bone,

so we just leave it in the stone. Right. We have this technology, and we're just starting to apply it to our understanding of these things. You know, one of the things he talks about is that his discovery is actually like, he's like, first thing you learn in paleontology is like about how birds are categorized

and organized. His discovery is like, now the first thing you learn in paleontology is no longer right. And like, that's just wild. Like, that's like if you went to like, your first algebra class, and they were just like, by the way, X plus A, 1A plus B. Yeah.

I'm an accountant. I don't know math. I'm sorry, everyone. Okay. I want to talk about that for a second, though. Not whatever that was. But I do think that there are, like, spacklings of that in other realms, in other, you know, academic pockets, you know, especially for, like, dead poet society. It's like, throw it all out the window, everything you think you knew.

Like, I do think that there have. terrible Robin Williams impression. I don't know that it was Robin Williams at all. I don't know what it was. It was just happening. There was no stopping it. But you know what I mean? Like I do feel like there's this sort of undercurrent to want to throw everything that we've ever learned away.

And I think for birds, that's probably all right. Wow. Throw the birds away. Throw the birds away. Now with Dr. Dan Field, one of the things that's really fun about having this conversation with him is he's this guy who's been like in the right place at the right time for much of his career. So not only was he involved at this ground being. breaking discovery, right? He also was involved with the groundbreaking discovery of what's called

Wonder Chicken. I'm sorry. What? Wonder Chicken is the oldest known modern bird, which, yes, it looks like a giant chicken. Or I don't know if it's a giant or a tiny chicken. It's chicken-like, whatever that means. I haven't looked at this bone.

Okay. I'm going to Google it. Please hold. Do we think actually, I'm curious, do we think Wonder Chicken searching that will pull up the Wonder Chicken or just? Or like KFC? newest. Right? Like the Wonder Chicken, chicken on Wonder Bread. I was thinking more like a chicken with like triple D's. Good news. It pulls it right up. Good news. It looks like a chicken. It looks like a chicken

on a beach. It's chickens on beaches. That's the thing. Well, it does have like, it does have aspects of turkiness. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So you guys are going to have to listen to this while you're Googling so you can really take it in the full Wonder Chicken experience. Now, my point is, that he was involved with this. And as we talk about later on in the episode, some of the people that he's been involved working with are also involved in this other major discovery around what's called and brace yourselves. Hold on to your butts. Okay. Demon ducks. Are paleontologists okay? I mean, I think you know the answer to that. I do know the answer to that. Okay. The people who name the stars go too hard in one direction. But I feel like the people who name birds and fringe

birds or maybe not... Fringed birds, that's real niche. I feel like they're maybe not trying hard enough. I don't know. They're kind of great names if you ask me. It's like if the internet was allowed to do things, but also kind of seriously, it's giving Bodie McBow face. Ducky McDuckface. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Like it's just, it's got those same vibes. Yeah. His energy is the same. So anyways, uh, as a non-archologist, the resident non-archologist, non-historian, it was really cool to hear about. I guess like the wonder that still exists in archaeology that like the wonder chicken the wonder chicken that still exists in archaeology that's what I'm here for the setups you knock them down you know if you've got a little kid at home or a nephew or a niece that is into archaeology digging up skeletons bones dinosaurs all that kind of fun stuff it's kind of cool parameters of toys. I mean, they can be, I don't know what they do in their free time.

Free range parenting, it's a thing. If your kids are into that, it's cool to hear him talk about, like, this really optimistic future in this area where I think personally when we think of, or at least when I was younger, going to college, the idea of, like, still discovering new things seems like really out of reach. It was like, everything's been, like, there are so many studies and things going on, like, how am I going to be somebody who can do something really cool? And like with the development of technology, it's basically like another layer has been taken off all the stuff we've found.

We're able to access that history is so much better. Yeah, I think you guys will really enjoy this. I agree. You agree? I agree. Please Google Wonder Chicken Demon Duck. Did you Google Demon Duck? Yes.

And then in the comments section, I guess we don't have a comment section. In the review section on iTunes, please let us know who you think would win in a fight. I'm on Demon Duck. You know those things are like 25 feet tall, right? Yes. Okay. I want to be with you. A herd of wonder chickens? No, no, it's just, it's one on one. Okay. So a David versus Glythe situation? Yes. But I'm Wonder Chicken solely for they have pointy beaks and pointy toes, right? So that's two weapons. Ducks just have hatred. And teeth. The demon ducks have teeth. Also, ducks have teeth. You know this. I do know this. I've been bitten by more than one duck in my lifetime.

Put it on the resume. But I think in the interest of having people agree and disagree, I am, oh my God, that thing's neck. You're looking at the demon. Yeah. So you lied, you had not seen one. That's a ripped ass neck. It's a thick neck. Yeah, that is.

No, you know what? I'm still, I'm still a wonder chick. Is it a thick Rick, Nash? It is so tall. I'm ignoring you my purpose. Look at, it's taller than a person. Yeah, I told you they're like 20 feet tall. Don't argue with me on this podcast.

Anyway, I'm still firmly Wonder Chicken. if solely to develop the tension between our belief systems. I got the D squares, the demon ducks. You have the ducks, I have the chickens. Mighty ducks. I have the titty-footed chickens. Please vote in the review section. The very informal review section where...

Just let us know who you think is going to win in a fight and who do you think is better at podcasting. And if you can sponsor it. Oh, yes. If you're from Wonderbread or ducks. If you're from ducks. Yeah. If you're from ducks, please.

Send us some money. Or eggs. either. We'll take place. Yeah, that's true. Daniel, thanks so much for coming on. Please, tell us how you got into working in paleontology. Thanks very much for having me, Andy. I've been interested in paleontology

for as long as I can remember. I think, like lots of kids, I was sort of obsessed with dinosaurs when I was young. But I had sort of parallel interests in living animals. So I sort of recall going through phases when I was really quite young, where I was quite obsessed with things like

marine life. And around the age of nine, I got very interested in birds as well. And it took quite a while for me to sort of realize that I could link up my interest in birds and my interest in paleontology by studying bird evolution. But around the time that I was starting university, that's something that I started to see a little more clearly. So I've been interested in studying bird evolution in deep time ever since then. So today we're going to be talking about one of your particular discoveries. But it's interesting. As I was doing research about the work you were doing,

you've had like this kind of buildup of different discoveries that kind of play into one another. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. Tell us about, and I'm going to pronounce this terribly, and I apologize. Javanus, is that correct? So, I mean, the thing about these Latin names, right, is that probably nobody really pronounces them very well.

I call the new discovery Janavis. so named for the Roman god Janus or Janus. And Janus was the god of beginnings, endings, and transitions. So that's where that name comes from. It makes a lot of sense. I know it had been discovered, or the bones themselves have been found a long time ago, a couple decades ago. And you guys went back to look at them again. So could you talk a little bit about that?

Oh, yeah, of course. So the discovery was made along the border, essentially between Belgium and, in the Netherlands. So the rocks around there are very interesting. They're from the very end of the age of dinosaurs. So this is the absolute latest part of the Cretaceous period. And that's an interval of time that is known as the Mastrichtian stage of the Cretaceous. That name Mastrichton comes from a city in the southern part of the Netherlands called Mastricht. And the rocks that are exposed in that part of the Netherlands and the adjoining part of Belgium were the first rocks ever recognized to be from the very end of the Cretaceous. So that's why the entire stage globally is known

as the Mastrichtian. So obviously, this interval of time is a fascinating point in the history of our planet, right? This is the very end of the age of dinosaurs themselves. The asteroid strikes right around 66.02 million years ago. So these rocks were deposited just before the dinosaur killing asteroids struck the earth. And the following interval, the earliest part of the Paleocene, or the earliest part of the Cenozoic, is what we can think of in a way as the dawn of the modern world, right? So this is the time period where mammals and birds really diversify and take over. So any fossils that tell us a little bit about what the evolutionary precursors of modern birds and mammals were like from the very end of the age of dinosaurs are potentially really fascinating.

And Janavis is one of the very few fossil birds that have ever been found from the rocks of this age from this part of the world. So the specimen was originally collected by a citizen, scientist, an amateur fossil collector named Rudy Dortons in the late 1990s. And it was reported on. It was initially published in a very brief report in the year 2002. So in that paper, the authors noted that this was the first bird ever discovered from the type Mastrichtian, and that was interesting. But it was sort of a pre-modern bird. It had teeth, which in a way is kind of what you'd expect bird-wise, sort of at this point in time. And it wasn't really recognized as as all that much of a remarkable find at the time back in 2002.

But as you said, you know, over the last decade or so, we've learned a huge amount about bird evolution at this point in the history of our planet. So my PhD student, Juan Benito and I got very interested in re-studying this specimen, not that we had any inkling that it would be kind of earth-shattering in any way, but just because we wanted to get a better understanding of what birds at this point in Earth's history were like. And that's what sort of initially drew us to this specimen that at the time was still unnamed. The thing about this bird is the jaw, correct? Yeah, well, I mean, so the bird's fascinating for a number of reasons.

A good portion of the skeleton is preserved, enough to tell us that this was a very large bird. up there in terms of size with the world's largest species of gulls. But as I mentioned, this is a pre-modern bird, so it still has teeth and it's upper and its lowered jaws. And so think of like a really large gull that could, you know, take your hand off, essentially. That's sort of what we're dealing with is pretty fascinating animal. Yeah, it sounds like something you'd find in Australia. Yeah, that's right.

It's probably not venomous, though, so that's the difference. But you're right, sort of the thing about the specimen that turned out to be really surprising that we think overturns about 150 years of our preconceptions about bird evolution is something related to the jaws. There were these fused plates that birds had and that they evolved to no longer require those fused plates. And then this kind of turns that on its head, right? Yeah, in a way.

So, you know, we've got bones in the roof of our mouths, our power. are pallid bones. And birds have pallets as well. The architecture of a bird palate is very different from the architecture of our own palates. But something that has been recognized since 1867 is that the two major groups of living birds can be recognized on the basis of differences in their palate bones. So one major group of living birds is the group that includes, includes ostriches and their relatives. And they've been known since 1867 as the paleognathous birds. So paleo meaning ancient like paleontology, naithus meaning jaw. So ostriches and their relatives have always been thought to exhibit an ancient jaw or pallet architecture,

whereas all other living birds that aren't close relatives of ostriches belong to a group called the neognaiths, the new jaws, which have a different structure of their palate bones, which includes a mobile joint between the two principal elements of the palate. So the fact that there's a mobile joint within the palette of neognathous birds enables a greater degree of flexibility, dexterity, and precision in terms of beak movement. movements than paleonathous birds are capable of. So the scenario since 1867 that has always been imagined is that modern birds initially exhibited this ancient immobile jaw condition, which today is retained by ostriches and their relatives, and that this ancient condition eventually

gave rise to the mobile neignathus jaw, which was inherited by all non-Austrich birds. So what's really surprising about the architecture of the palette in Janavis is that this pre-modern bird that still retained teeth that is well outside of modern bird diversity exhibits a mobile palette, just like Neognathus birds do. So this suggests to us that actually the Neognathus palate probably evolved first. all modern birds probably inherited an ancestral mobile neignathus palette. And then the immobile paleognathous condition that ostriches and their relatives exhibited evolved subsequently for reasons that we don't really understand, considering the fact that this neignathous architecture is thought to confer these sorts of functional benefits to neognathus birds.

So the scenario here that the Neognathus or mobile pallid actually predates the evolution of the paleognathus pallid as seen in ostriches and their relatives is really surprising. And at least in the world of bird systematics and bird evolution, this is a major change to one of the things that we learn sort of on the very first day of undergraduate ornithel. courses. Yeah, I wonder, you know, as you guys are discovering things like this, I think we assume things start simple and then become more complex. As somebody who doesn't know much about archaeology, admittedly, that this might be pointing to the fact that there's probably a lot of these instances that we haven't found yet in archaeology where we assume things became more complicated when in reality maybe things did kind of test out different waters and then some some of those simpler designs worked for a while and then you know disappeared over time or

anything like that yeah andy that's an interesting point right so you know paleontology is fascinating for evolutionary biologists because fossils can when we're lucky provide us with direct insight into how evolutionary changes happened a really long time ago and truthfully the only direct insight will ever be able to obtain that can illuminate these sorts of evolutionary questions comes from the fossil record. But the problem is that for many evolutionary transitions throughout the history of life on earth, the fossil record is not particularly well fleshed out. And as a result, we have to draw as many justified inferences as we can from our understanding of the evolution of living species. And what frequently happens, you're absolutely right, is that we can

hypothesize very plausible and in many instances very well justified evolutionary scenarios on the basis of inferences we can draw from living organisms only. But when we actually have the opportunity to directly test those hypotheses by reference to the fossil record. Sometimes we see that evolution is actually far more complex than we often would hypothesize. So there's this sort of overarching desire, or at least there has been for a very long time in paleontology and macroevolution in general, to think of alternative hypotheses to sort of rank alternative hypotheses, according to how simple and straightforward they are. This is the principle of parsimony, right,

where the simplest explanation is often assumed to be the best. And I'm sure that that holds true in many different intellectual pursuits. But one thing that has fascinated me throughout my career as a paleontologist is the frequency with which this assumption of naive nice parsimonious evolutionary change, not really matching the data when we do have good direct information of how evolutionary transitions have actually occurred. And I think the evolutionary history of jaw architecture, the paleonathous and the neognathous jaws that we see in birds is one of these instances where our initial hypotheses, which were very plausible that never really

really were questioned because they seemed so sensible turn out to be erroneous when actual direct fossil information bearing on these questions has come to light. And so that's really fascinating to me. And as somebody whose main motivation for studying paleontology comes from a desire to understand the evolutionary history of birds better to understand how and where and when modern bird biodiversity has come to be. This is one of those discoveries that to me demonstrates more clearly than ever before that without direct insight from the fossil record, it's difficult to feel fully confident in these sorts of macro evolutionary hypotheses. And so I think this is a great illustration of just how important fossil data can be for helping us feel confident in our understanding of

how avian evolution has played out. Yeah. It's one of those things that it's so encompassing and it's also static because it's part of history or we think of it as static. Like these animals have been extinct for millions of years in some cases, that how could we be still learning more about the things we dug up, you know, 20, 30 years ago? But it's really interesting to see how that technology has evolved and allowed you to do these types of things.

So could you talk a little bit about how that played into this? Yeah, sure. So like I said before, this is a fossil that has actually been known for a long time. It was originally dug up in the 90s and this sort of brief communication reporting the discovery of a bird from the Mastrichtian of Northwest Europe was published back in 2002. But a major revolution has occurred in academic paleontology over the last 20 years or so. And that has been the increased ease with which paleontologists have managed to study fossils using non-invasive imaging techniques like micro-CT scanning. So with this fossil, we were able to take it to a CT scanning facility that we operate here at the University of Cambridge called the Cambridge Biotomography Center. And we were able to x-ray CT scan the specimen with very high-energy x-rays.

in order to study it at very high resolution. So at the Cambridge Biotomography Center, we can generate data down to a resolution in three dimensions of about three microns. So by taking this specimen, which really was sort of a lump of rock with some bones poking out, we were able to peer beneath the surface of the rock

and examine the morphology of the specimen in very high resolution. And we were able to observe skeletal elements from this specimen that were not observable from the outside. And so, I mean, it's easy to see how much of a revolution this has actually been in paleontology. These sorts of imaging advances have allowed us to peer inside of rocks and discover specimens that we didn't really know anything about before. But we've also been able to study the anatomy of known specimens in much better. detail than we might have been able to do previously. So the sort of key discovery of these pallet bones that allowed us to recognize that Janavis exhibited a mobile neignathus pallet. That came

from reexamination of a bone that had originally been recognized as a portion of the shoulder. So I'm not trying to throw shade on my colleagues who published this paper 20 years ago. A lot of these people are, you know, major, major heroes of mine. And to be completely fair, these bones actually look surprisingly similar to one another, even though they're from totally different parts of the body. The real advance was that digitally we were able to put this one broken bones together and recognize that, man, that is not a shoulder bone at all. that is a bone of the palate.

So the shoulder bone in question is a bone called the coracoid. The palate bone in question is a bone called the pteragoid. It sounds crazy that those bones could ever be mixed up, other than the fact that the words coracoid and terragoid sort of sounds similar. They're from totally different parts of the body. They have totally different functions. But in knee-agnates-birds, when you break these bones apart, they actually have some relatively similar anatomical attributes.

But thanks to our very high-resolution three-dimensional data, we were able to digitally stitch this bone together, recognize it as a palate bone, and immediately see that, okay, wow, if that is a pallet bone, what we're dealing with here is a mobile pallet in a bird with teeth. So that was a crazy realization, because we never expected to find something like that.

But the anatomy is so clearly interpretable when you're dealing with the Neognathus bird that there was no question that, functionally, this would have been a mobile pallet. This is exactly the kind of pallet architecture that we see in modern Neognathus birds, like chickens and ducks, which exhibit this sort of mobile palette.

So, I mean, this was big, surprise but we sort of were able to interpret it relatively easily just because when we realized what we were looking at the anatomy was quite clear now do you think this is something you're gonna see more of like not necessarily it just in your field but in archaeology as a whole with this with this technology oh I think so I think these sort of unanticipated discoveries are going to keep on coming in the fields of paleontology and and other historical sciences as well, not only the ability to study newly discovered fossils

in this incredible degree of three-dimensional detail, but also the ability to go back and look at fossils that in some cases have sat in museums for decades, like Janavis, and investigate them in new and more thorough ways than they've ever been able to be investigated before. I think there's no doubt this find of ours is just one of a huge and very exciting series of anatomical discoveries that these new high-resolution visualization techniques have enabled. That's awesome. It's really exciting for somebody with a little kid who's into dinosaurs. Maybe there is a career for them. Yeah, hey, there's there's, it really is kind of opening up new, new approaches.

And it's cool. It's a way to study paleontology and make major contributions to paleontology in ways, you know, that are different from the way that people classically think of paleontology, right? Rudy Dortongs did find this fossil by going out and knowing what he's looking for in the field. But these fossils that end up in museums, they're the gifts that keep on giving, right? As new visualization techniques keep emerging, there's more and more information that we can squeeze out of these valuable specimens. So, yeah, I mean, by the time your kiddos grown up and kind of taking their interest in paleontology to the next level, who knows what sort of new techniques will have emerged that might allow us to discover even more interesting things about animals like Jenny, and and even bigger, even scarier dinosaurs. Yeah, I'd seen something online, and of course, like, who knows, with stuff you see on

the internet, but this, you know, blurb was about, I think it was T-Rexes, and that they, it's supposedly, and you probably will laugh, because this is probably entirely inaccurate, that their arms were not actually arms, but possibly probably wings, which, again, I, who knows on the internet, but, you know, I think about, things like that that it's like, wow, that reshapes in everything we think about that dinosaur. Yeah, I mean, I don't know about that. You're trying not to laugh and that's okay.

Specifically, but yeah, I mean, I mean, one thing that the last 30 or four years of vertebrae paleontology has shown us beyond a doubt is that the wings that we see in living birds are derived from the arms of dinosaurs. And so there is a, you know, there is a link there for sure. I think the arms of T-Rex were not wings, but yeah, I mean, as a general principle, it's certainly true that there's homology there, right? The wings of birds are just weird, messed up dinosaur arms.

There's no doubt about that. I'll take that as a win. So I do want to ask you about something you had worked on before this. And it's got a close spot to my heart because of its name, and that's why. wonder chicken. It sounds like I'm like making a joke, but it actually is the name that I keep seeing used. And you were involved with that too.

Could you talk a little bit about Wonder Chicken? Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, the name Wonder Chicken was a little joke, but it's so that's sort of news. So, you know, it's stuck. That's right. Yeah. So that's the sort of nickname that we gave to a previous fossil bird that comes from the very

same locality in in Belgium that genevis comes from. Geneva's we didn't give such a fun nickname too, but Wonder Chicken seemed to fit because it really looks like a teeny tiny chicken skull. So this fossil, its actual scientific name is not Wonder Chicken, its actual scientific name is Astereornis, named for the Greek goddess of falling stars, the falling star, in this case being the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaurs. So, Asteroonus is much smaller than Janavis. And unlike Janavis, we think that it's an early representative of the modern bird group.

So we actually think that Assyrianus is close to the last common ancestor that ducks and chickens shared. So again, this is a fossil around 66.67 million years old, so the same age as Janavis. And the fact that we have Janavis, a toothed pre-modern bird, coexisting in the same place at the same time with Asteriornis, which is a very early modern bird, actually makes that pair of fossils the only pre-modern bird plus modern bird ever discovered to have coexisted in the same ancient ecosystem. So that's pretty exciting. Astereonis was actually found after Rudy Dortung's discovered Janavis. Asteroonus was also discovered by citizen scientist from the Netherlands named Martin van Dynther, who's a researcher in the biomedical industry. But it's quite popular in that part of Belgium and the Netherlands to go to these type Mastrichtian rocks and dig up

fossil seashells from from you know this ancient near-shore ecosystem and both rudy and martin stumbled across these bird bones by complete accident you know they were looking for other things but martin recognized the the fossil bones that he found as hollow and therefore birdleg so we brought them to a natural history museum in mastricht in the netherlands where they sat unstudied for i think think 18 years. I think the holotype or the original specimen of Asteroonis was collected in the year 2000 and we didn't work on it until 2018. So, you know, it was another sort of serendipitous discovery enabled by micro-CT scanning. So the reason Asteroorne's sat unstudied for so long is that it doesn't look exciting at all.

It's just a couple broken bones poking out of a tiny little block of rock that's only about 10 centimeters in laying. But we popped in the CT scanner and to our utter shock and amazement, we realized that there was a nearly complete skull of a bird inside this tiny fragment of rock to go along with the broken leg bones that we saw at the surface. So that discovery was shocking. It was easy to write up because it was such a, such an unprecedentedly important early modern bird fossil and it was such a surprising find. We wrote that that paper up relatively quickly and published it back in 2020 just as the world was entering the first lockdown. Yeah, I think the paper was published on March 18th, 2020 or something like that. So thinking back,

it was sort of an interesting time to be trying to get anything other. than virus science in the news. But that, I mean, there's sort of an interesting history because after we published this work on Asterioris, this important bird that lived 66.7 million years ago, that's when we started taking a close look at the CT scans that we had taken of Janavis. And we realized that there was actually something really interesting going on with it as well. So Janavis was a, a very, a really fun lockdown project that my research group worked on. This is work that was led by my PhD student, Juan Benito,

and two other PhD students in our group, Clara Widrig, who's from New York State, and Pichenguo, who's from Taiwan. They were co-authors on this work as well, and so it was really fun to kind of collaborate with these, you know, junior scientists in my research group. usually remotely because we were doing this work during the pandemic and kind of end up working towards a paper that turned out to be very exciting. That's awesome. Yeah, I started getting into this research as I found your paper and I was, I felt like I was, I don't even, I can't even describe it.

Like when I saw like we've got the Wonder Chicken and then like a few lines down later in the same article, it started talking about demon ducks. And I'm like, who is naming these things? and why isn't anyone like keeping them in check? So, yeah, do you have any demon ducks you've gotten to work with? Yeah, well, it's funny, right? These things, demon ducks, they're these giant flightless relatives of ducks from Australia called Jerome or Nithids. And the truth is, the work that we've done on Geneva, sort of looking at the palate, has gotten us very interested in taking a closer look.

at the palettes of these drone magnets or demon ducks if your listeners prefer that. And so this is something that we're quite interested. I know Pay Chen, who I just mentioned, is quite interested in investigating their skulls in more detail. So he's hoping to get to Australia later this year now that, you know, travel is a thing that we can do again. So I think he's applying to grants and he's hoping to get down to Australia in order to look at the pallets of these demon ducks.

to see what we can figure out about them. That's awesome. One thing we ask or try to ask every show is the research you're doing, what you've seen, what are some of the things, and this is obviously completely conjecture, what you think you'll be seeing 10, 15 years from now a discovery or something that you can't prove yet, but you've got a gut feeling you might be able to prove someday in the future. I mean, that's a cool question. Honestly, it's something that I like to think about a lot.

the thing about paleontology is there's often so much serendipity involved right it can be really hard to predict what the next interesting discovery is going to be but at the same time there are some big gaps in our knowledge that i genuinely feel are going to be filled by novel discoveries in the next 10 to 15 years so you know prior to the work that we did on a posteriorness you know sometimes it'd be asked a similar question like what sort of fossil would you most like to find what would you most like to work on I said to me, the most interesting possible thing at this point in the history of our field and at this point in my career would be an early modern bird from the end of the age of dinosaurs. That would be so fascinating. It would answer so many questions. And then exterior artists came along. And it was amazing.

And it answered a lot of questions. But what it also did was raise entirely new questions that we don't know the answer to. And so in a way, I'm more curious about birds at that point in the history of our planet now. than I was before a posterioris was even found. And so I genuinely think in the next 10, 15 years, more fossil birds from that time interval will turn up. But the other interesting thing to recognize about paleontology is that there's sort of two different kinds of gaps in our knowledge that exist. There are temporal gaps, like entire time intervals where the fossil record is very sparse. So for instance, for birds, the time interval immediately following the asteroid impact,

when the giant dinosaurs went extinct, that's an interval in which we have virtually no good bird fossils. And a lot of crazy, interesting evolutionary stuff, I think certainly was happening among birds at that point in the history of our planet. So at this stage, what I would most like to find is a fossil bird that tries, you know, helps fill that gap in our knowledge. But the other sort of gap that exists for paleontologists, these are sort of evolutionary gaps. So there are places on the bird family tree where the bird fossil record is quite sparse. So, for instance, the early evolutionary history of the group that includes ostriches, one thing that Janavis makes clear is that we understand the early evolutionary history of that group,

much less completely than we ever thought we did. And so if it's actually true that the earliest ancestors of paleoagest, gneathous birds actually had neignathus palates. I'm very interested in trying to understand what these magical, mystical, neignathous, early paleonaths were like. Yeah, I mean, I think probably 10, 15 years from now, I can't say for sure that the specific gaps in the knowledge, in our knowledge of bird evolution that I just mentioned will be filled. But I do think that there is a good chance they will be. And I think that it's a guarantee that other gaps in our knowledge that I'm not even thinking about right now will be filled by mind-bogglingly cool fossils that we just don't know anything about yet.

So that's one of the things that I really love about being a paleontologist. It's not something that I expected to be the case as a paleontologist when I was getting started. It's the fact that this field actually moves incredibly quickly. It can be advanced by individual amazing fossil discovery. and it can be advanced by the adoption of new techniques that can really push the field forward. And so over the course of the time that I've been in the field, I started my PhD back in 2010, right, so it hasn't been that long. But it's actually incredible to take a step back and think about how many of the things that I learned, you know, kind of textbook stories about vertebrate animal evolution that I learned when I was an undergraduate student,

that have been overturned in the last 10, 15 years by major paleontological discoveries, right? And these are discoveries about entire branches of the Tree of Life that we haven't talked about today, things like the evolution of sharks and things like the evolution of turtles. Our understanding of those grooves is at a much more advanced point now in 2022

than it was even in the year 2010. And so as somebody who specializes on bird paleontology, It's my hope that will be involved in some exciting discoveries over the next 10, 15 years that help push our understanding bird evolution forward and either help corroborate longstanding but untested hypotheses about bird evolution or enable us to recognize them as flawed hypotheses that we can reject and thereby adopt new and improved hypotheses about how and when modern bird biodiversity arose. If you're not in a field, I think it's really easy to forget that that evolution in industries

in academics is always changing, right? And that should give us a lot of hope. Yeah, well, it does. I mean, it is sort of funny. It seems almost like a contradiction of terms that paleontology is a fast, fast changing subject, fast developing subject. But, I mean, it really, really is. And, yeah, it's fun.

I feel why. I mean, I'm grateful to be able to do this sort of work because I've always wanted. wanted to, I've always found fascinating. But it is for me really exciting and a privilege to sort of see the field develop as it has over the last decade or so. And I see absolutely no signs of it's slowing down in any way over the next 10, 15 years. I think it's going to be an exciting time to be studying vertebrate paleontology. So for folks that have enjoyed listening to you, talk about your research and they want to see what big discovery you make next. Are you on Twitter or Instagram, any of those types of places? Yeah, I am. So,

I'm Daniel Field. Our lab is called the field paleontology research group. It's a stupid double entendre because field paleontology is what it's called when you go in and take up fossils. Well played. Anyway, so anyway, Field Paleo is our handle for on Instagram and on Twitter. And we will kind of keep people up to date with kind of new publications from our lab. Juan Benito, who have already mentioned a couple of times today, just published a huge paper that came out today on an 86 million-year-old fossil bird with teeth called Ictheornis, which is, it's actually a fossil that's been known since 1872. But this year, 150 years later, we've discovered some new stuff about it again using micro-CT scanning.

So, yeah, anyway, we'll keep anybody interested in following us posted on new stuff. as it comes up. Awesome. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you.