The gang discusses two papers that look at... well... let's be honest here... we really didn't have much of a hook. You see, James was slammed with bureaucratic work, Curt was knee deep in grading hell, and Amanda was traveling for the holidays. So we made... this; a podcast about a worm and a lamprey.
We're sorry.
Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):
The friends look at two papers about animals that are long with no legs. The first paper looks at a small long animal that is actually pretty big for the kind of animal that it is. It is very old and is found in a very cold place. This is an important animal to find from a long time ago because there are not a lot of these animals found at this time, and not a lot of them in the cold. The fact that it is big could be a part of something we see a lot where some animals get big to live in the cold.
The second paper looks at a long animals that moves through water and some of them will eat parts of other animals while they are still living. This paper is looking at two new animals from a long time ago that have not been seen before and seeing how it changes our ideas of where these things come from and how they lived. And it does!
References:
Angst, Delphine, et al. "A new method for estimating locomotion type in large ground birds." Palaeontology (2015).
Degrange, Federico J. "Hind limb morphometry of terror birds (Aves, Cariamiformes, Phorusrhacidae): functional implications for substrate preferences and locomotor lifestyle." Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh 106.4 (2017): 257-276.