What dwells beneath... Beyond the rocks and bones!

One of the great challenges of palaeontology is to work out what a long dead animal actually looked like, and how it lived, when all you have is a fossilised bone or two. This is where Associate Professor Natalie Warburton, of Murdoch University, and her freezer full of dead things comes in!

In a fascinating episode, we go on a journey to discover what lies beneath an animal’s skin, and how we might come to know that for prehistoric animals… Of how we reconstruct animals from the past. In this episode, host Michael Mills chats with Natalie about how we know what muscles to put on long dead bones, learn about freezers full of dead things, and come to understand what she means when she says…“The best way to learn about how animal bodies are put together, is to take animal bodies apart!”

 

You can find Natalie on Twitter at @aNATomy_Lab https://twitter.com/aNATomy_Lab

 

You can also find Natalie’s profile at Murdoch University, including a list of publications at http://profiles.murdoch.edu.au/myprofile/natalie-warburton/

 

Natalie recently spoke on this subject for the 2022 Annual Wells Lecture, in a talk titled “Prehistoric Puzzles - reconstructing marsupials from the past”.The annual lectures help raise funds for the James Moore Memorial Prize. The Memorial prize supports secondary school students to join Flinders palaeontology field trips and learn from world-leading academics. Here's a link with more info... https://www.flinders.edu.au/giving/ways-to-give/pay-tribute/james-moore-memorial-fund