Fantastic Fossils

Bonebeds are some of the most diverse and important fossil deposits known and provide palaeontologists with a unique insight into life on Earth, revealing some surprising stories, from what happens when a herd of rhino is caught in a pyroclastic flow, to the social lives of dinosaurs! This talk will explore the different ways in which bone beds are formed and how each bone records a different story.

Cacti are popular plants in cultivation. They occur in the wild almost exclusively in the Americas, from Argentina to Canada, with a few, jungle dwelling forms in Africa. It is claimed that there is no fossil record for the cacti, although there is one record from rocks 50 million years old in Utah, and a very dubious occurrence in Cretaceous rocks of about 100 million years old from Texas. Botanists suggest that the absence of fossil cacti is due to their living in harsh desert environments, not conducive to preservation. In fact, deserts can provide excellent opportunities for fossilisation,

Almost all major animal groups appeared on Earth half a billion years ago in an event known as the Cambrian explosion. Certain fossil sites from this time have been used to reconstruct what communities of marine animals were like and to study the evolution of ecosystem complexity. However, the fossils are rarely considered in the context of how the sedimentary rocks in which they are preserved were deposited. Here, I will take you on a tour of fieldwork in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and into the laboratory where new experiments are helping to unravel this problem.