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17 Emily Bamforth: Canada's polar dinosaurs
51 Plays7 days ago
Palaeontologist and curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum Dr Emily Bamforth uses fossils to recreate ancient worlds, painting a vivid picture of Alberta’s polar dinosaurs of 65 million years ago. She shares her philosophy of deep time, her interest in evolutionary ‘failed experiments’, and how the study of ancient life has shaped her unique perspective.
Bio:
Dr Emily Bamforth is the Curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada. She completed a BSc with Specialisation in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Alberta, which sparked a fascination in the origins of multicellular life on Earth. She went on to do a MSc degree at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario under Dr Guy Narbonne. Her fieldwork in Mistaken Point, Newfoundland explored fossils of the oldest complex multicellular life on the planet, from which she described three new species. Returning to her first love (dinosaurs), Dr Bamforth completed a PhD at McGill University in Montreal under Dr Hans Larsson, with a thesis based on the dinosaur mass extinction in Saskatchewan. After graduating in 2014, she went on to work as a palaeontologist with the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, where her research focused on Late Cretaceous and early Cenozoic paleoecology and paleobotany, as well as mass extinction. She began as Curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in 2022, where her work focuses on late Cretaceous paleoecosystems with an emphasis on understanding the relationships between paleoclimate, paleobotany and dinosaur ecology. Dr Bamforth is an adjunct professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of Biological Sciences and the University of Saskatchewan’s Geological Sciences Department. In her free time, Dr Bamforth enjoys hiking, photography and singing in choirs.
Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction to Plant Kingdom Series and Guest
00:00:08
Speaker
I'm Katherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about the sublime in nature and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers, and writers. Today's conversation is with paleontologist and curator Dr. Emily Bamforth.
00:00:23
Speaker
In our conversation, we spoke about how she recreates the world of 100 million years ago and shares stories of the curious animals that have come before us. We also talk in depth about triceratops-like dinosaur, Pachyrhinosaurus.
00:00:37
Speaker
In her work at the Philip J. Curry Dinosaur Museum, she tries to understand dinosaur behavior and their environment through the stories written in the fossil record. Here's our conversation.
Meet Dr. Emily Bamforth: Paleontologist and Curator
00:00:54
Speaker
Thank you, Emily, so much for chatting with me today. I guess to get us started, can you just introduce yourself and kind of the big picture of your research? Yeah, so my name is Emily Bamforth. I'm a paleontologist. And so I fit into what's called vertebrate paleontology, which is basically studying things that have teeth and bones.
00:01:14
Speaker
And my particular area of interest is the late Cretaceous period. So that's the the last ah period of the age of dinosaurs. And I work up here in northern Alberta. So this is kind of my my area of specialty now is studying dinosaurs from northern Alberta, as well as the the ecosystems that they lived in.
00:01:32
Speaker
So I'm actually really interested in in kind of big picture research, so understanding not only the dinosaurs, but also the the environment and the world that they lived in as well. And you have a very amazing job title. You are a curator at the Philip J. Curry Dinosaur Museum in Northern Alberta. Can you tell us about the museum, where it is, and kind of the highlights and breadth of the collection?
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, so we
Defining Dinosaurs and Common Misconceptions
00:01:59
Speaker
our museum is called the Philip J. Curry Dinosaur Museum. We're in a little town in northwestern Alberta called Wembley. um It's right outside the the city of Grand Prairie. so So to put that into kind of a geographical framework, the two big cities in Alberta called Edmonton and Calgary. Edmonton is the northern one. We are a five-hour drive north of Edmonton, about 500 kilometers or about kind 400 miles or so.
00:02:25
Speaker
So we are reasonably far north. We're actually right beside the the Rocky Mountains as well, which is kind of nice. So our museum is it actually opened in 2015. So we are still a relatively new museum. We're still the newest naturalistic museum in Canada. And our focus is paleontology in northern Alberta. and So our collections here are primarily things that have been collected within a 250 kilometer radius of the museum here. So we primarily have dinosaur fossils, but we also have fossils of other plants and animals that lived here at the same time. And we also have a big teaching collection as well. We're really big into to public outreach and education as well as as research.
00:03:05
Speaker
And we're going to talk much more about dinosaurs today. And before we really go deeper into it, I just wanted to do some Dinosaur 101 with you What, I think we all have a picture in our mind, but what are we talking about when we're talking about
Reptile Diversity During the Dinosaur Era
00:03:21
Speaker
dinosaurs? What what makes ah a dinosaur characterizes it from other animals?
00:03:26
Speaker
So really good question. So dinosaurs are like most biological groups in that they're defined what we call phylogenetically. So basically, they're defined based on where they fit on a family tree.
00:03:37
Speaker
So it's it's a descendant and all of its ancestors. So all of the dinosaurs that ever lived have a series of characteristics that define them as dinosaurs. um They all lived during the Mesozoic period, except for birds, which we can talk about later. But they were basically restricted in time, but and they all primarily lived on land. So there are some things that are called dinosaurs, kind of in the wider world, that actually aren't. So things like pterosaurs, the flying reptiles, are actually not dinosaurs. They belong to a different group of reptiles, even though they lived at the same time. Also, things like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, kind of those Loch Ness monster type things, They're often mistakenly called dinosaurs, but like the pterosaurs, they're part of a different group of reptiles. And so dinosaurs are defined based on their phylog their phylogenetic group, basically. So they they basically all fit onto one place on a family tree, and they have a series of characteristics that define what they are. That's amazing. And thinking about reptile diversity at that time, too, there's so many extinct groups of
Discovery and Distribution of Dinosaurs
00:04:40
Speaker
reptiles. Like to think about flying reptiles seems just as foreign, doesn't it?
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I mean, this was it was it definitely a reptile heyday. So there were the dinosaurs, there flying reptiles, there was the marine reptiles living in the ocean, and there was also a whole series of really cool lizards and some of the early snakes. So this was really the heyday of reptiles. Yeah, it's so we think, I guess, dinosaurs take up all this space in our minds, but they would have lived along so many different kinds of animals, not only dinosaurs, right? There's...
00:05:13
Speaker
what else is What else is there at the time? Are there their early mammals? Are there insects? Yeah, so good question. So even in in the Cretaceous period, which is kind of the area that I study, yeah um there are dinosaurs, mammals, lizards, snakes, mammals, crocodiles, all kinds of fish, sharks. So it was really ah turtles, lots of turtles back then, too. And so actually a lot of the animals that we recognize from today's world lived alongside the dinosaurs.
00:05:43
Speaker
And how many species of dinosaur are known to science? So there are roughly 700 valid species. So a valid species is one that has been basically confirmed by the scientific community. um The real number is probably closer to a thousand if we consider all of the species that we have specimens for, but haven't ah officially been described yet. So somewhere between 700 and 1000 known species of dinosaur. Wow, and so many more that we don't know, might never know.
00:06:15
Speaker
And how long has science known about dinosaurs? Can you speak to that? how How long have we known about them? Yeah, so that's that's a very interesting question. So the term dinosaur was coined in the early 1800s by a naturalist called Richard Owens, and he was the first one to to use the term dinosaur. But dinosaurs as as kind of a phenomenon, as something that is found in the natural world, um have been known about for thousands and of years. So different cultures have found them. So the the First Nations people, the Indigenous people in Canada knew about them. People in in Europe and Australia would would have come across these large bones and they all have different kind of traditional stories about but what
Misrepresentation of Dinosaurs in Media
00:06:59
Speaker
they represent. But in terms of what what we today as a scientific community recognize as a dinosaur, um that term again was was coined in the the early eighteen hundreds Yeah, wow And during their time, guess we spoke about how many there are, they were, they were everywhere on earth, they're on every continent. Is is that right? How widespread were they, I guess, geographically? And then how many different kind of ecological niches and roles did they fill? So so would not yeah, really great question. So dinosaurs are arguably one of the the most successful group of vertebrates ever.
00:07:35
Speaker
um They occupied every continent on earth, including Antarctica. Now, a little caveat to that is back in when the dinosaurs around Antarctica was not a polar continent. I mean, it was, it was on the pole, but it was not covered by ice snow.
00:07:49
Speaker
It was, ah it was the warm, the world was a lot warmer back then. So they were living in these polar forests. But dinosaurs are globally widespread, again, found on every continent on earth. And are there any kind of really common misconceptions of dinosaurs that that are a bugbear to you or that you want to mention?
00:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, so there's, unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions about dinosaurs. um Unfortunately, largely due to things like Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, you know, the Flintstones, um a lot of popular media is is great for kind of generating enthusiasm enthusiasm and interest in dinosaurs, but it also carries a lot of misconceptions. So one of my particular things that that annoys me is that dinosaurs are often perceived as monsters.
00:08:34
Speaker
So, you if you think of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, um Whereas in fact, they were just animals. So a T-Rex was no more of a monster than say a lion or a rhino would be today. So they were basically just animals living in their environments, doing what animals do. So that the the idea that dinosaurs were not monsters, I think is ah is a really important thing to to convey to the public.
00:09:00
Speaker
um the The other big misconception um is that dinosaurs all All dinosaurs lived all at once. um Whereas in fact, they were spread out over over hundreds of millions of years. In fact, one of my favorite statistics is that by the time T. rex was around, Stegosaurus was already a fossil.
00:09:21
Speaker
um And there's there's more time that separates Stegosaurus from T. rex than separates T. rex from us. um And so dinosaurs did not all live together. um They were basically separated in time and they were separated in space as well. So we had groups of dinosaurs that were specific to North America, you know, specific to Australia, specific to South America, specific to Europe. So just like animals today, they didn't live everywhere all at once.
00:09:47
Speaker
um And I think the other misconception is is that dinosaurs are extinct. um They are actually still with us. A subset of dinosaurs are with us in the form of birds.
00:09:58
Speaker
um So there were some dinosaurs that survived that mass extinction. and are still with us today, and are still incredibly successful as a group of vertebrates. Obviously, birds are everywhere. So looking at birds from a phylogenetics perspective, they're in the same group as dinosaurs.
The Mystery of Pipestone Creek Bone Bed
00:10:14
Speaker
The line keeps going down. Yeah, that's right.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah. It's an amazing thing to remember remember, and I love what you're saying about viewing them as animals. the The job of recreating how they lived, how they may have interacted, that's something that you'll soon we'll talk about as well.
00:10:33
Speaker
I wanted to talk to you about as a special place you do a lot of work at, which is a ah creek bed called Pipestone Creek. Can you talk about its significance and what the site is like today?
00:10:46
Speaker
and then what, going back, what would it have been like some 65 plus million years ago in the Cretaceous? Yeah, so one of our, kind of our marquee sites here in northern Alberta is is a site called the Pipestone Creek Bone Bed. And this is actually the reason why our museum is here, is because of this particular bone bed. So a bone bed is basically an area where we have um ah basically a lot of bones all preserved in the same place. And in this case, they're all preserved in the plain same place because it's ah a bunch of dinosaurs that all died at once and got buried at once.
00:11:22
Speaker
um So the Pipestone Creek Bonebed is one of the largest and densest dinosaur deposits in all of North America. And when I say dense, I mean if you have a squared meter, there are roughly 100 to 300 bones per square meter in this bonebed. So it is incredibly dense.
00:11:40
Speaker
um And we've so far what's being excavated is about the size of a tennis court. um But we've done drill cores back into the hill. and We figured out this bone bed is about the size of a football field.
00:11:53
Speaker
um So it is a huge bone bed, very, very dense, um and it has a lot of individual dinosaurs in it. So our our estimation for the number of dinosaurs in this bone bed is up to 10,000. And oh and and these are not small dinosaurs. So the dinosaur in this bone bed primarily is is a creature called a Pachyrhinosaurus, which is a smaller, older cousin of the Triceratops.
00:12:21
Speaker
um But instead of having a horn on its nose like a Triceratops would have, they have this huge bony mass called a boss. And that's kind of what makes Pachyrhinosaurus unique. So these animals were kind of roughly the size of an Indian elephant. So if you can imagine a herd of these things. 10,000.
00:12:41
Speaker
10,000 Indian elephant sized animals um that are all preserved all in this one place. it is It's a very extremely important bone bed for a number of reasons, but it also has a very compelling story behind it because of course the the yeah the question arises, like how did all of these dinosaurs end up here?
00:13:01
Speaker
um So it's one of it has a great mystery behind it as well. So its it is a great site to work in. And again, It's significant enough that that this whole museum was basically built around it.
00:13:12
Speaker
Wow. And are there theories as to how they did end up all dying there?
Alberta's Ancient Ecosystem and Dinosaur Behavior
00:13:19
Speaker
Yeah. So our our leading hypothesis right now, and of course we won't know for sure unless we build a time machine, but our our leading hypothesis right now is that this was a mega herd of pachybrhinosaurs. So we think that they may have lived primarily in smaller groups, but when it came to migration, they would have come together in a big mega herd. So this is something that things like caribou will do today.
00:13:42
Speaker
um so they live in small groups and when it comes for time for their seasonal migration, they'll kind of group together and go basically do their migration as ah as a huge mega herd. um So we suspect that's kind of what our pachyrhinosaurs were doing at the time. this that part of Alberta was actually even farther north than it was back in the Cretaceous period. And so there would have been, the world was a lot warmer back then, but it would have had the same photo period. So it would have been still very dark in the winter, still lots of light in the summer. And so the plants would have responded to that. So there would still have been a um what we what we call northern vigor. So basically, As soon as the spring arrives, the plants go gangbusters because they know they um um only have a short window to grow. And that's the kind of thing that draws animals on northern migrations today. So the same would have applied in the Cretaceous. So we think these animals were on a seasonal migration.
00:14:39
Speaker
And then one terrible day, something happened that wiped out more or less the entire herd. And our hypothesis right now is that that was a flood. um so basically,
00:14:51
Speaker
um there's ah There's a number of lines of evidence that support that, but we think back in the Cretaceous period, this part of Alberta was sandwiched between the Rocky Mountains, which would been built at the time, and a shallow inland sea called the Western Interior Sea that basically would have covered the middle of the continent. And so between the mountains and the sea, there was kind of this this nice coastal lowland, relatively flat, But you can imagine if there was a storm in the mountains, all of that water would pour down the mountains onto this flat coastal plain going towards the ocean.
00:15:23
Speaker
So things like catastrophic floods would have not been unheard of. So that's that's our theory right now is this this herd of of dinosaurs basically got wiped out in in a catastrophic flood. Wow. And to think that they were looking at the same mountains too, maybe a bit more pointy then. Yeah, and you know, still kind of watching the northern lights just like we do today as well. Wow. Because you're quite far north right now. What's the photo period? Like how many hours of darkness are there in December right now?
00:15:57
Speaker
Right now we're getting about kind of six and a half, seven hours of of daylight. Of daylight. So these dinosaurs were even more north. They might have had four hours. Yeah, yeah, exactly. None, maybe. Yeah. the other end of the year in in June, like around the summer solstice here, the sky never gets dark.
00:16:15
Speaker
So the sun sets, but there's there's always kind of twilight. So you get the, you know, you get the benefit of the other end of the year too. And these are really northern kind of polar dinosaurs. What kind of other dinosaurs lived in northern Alberta all these years ago? So this area was it was actually had a ah really good dinosaur diversity.
00:16:37
Speaker
um and and so The Pachyrhinosaurs, they belong to the the big group of horn dinosaurs or what paleontologists call Ceratopsians. um But outside of Pipestone Creek, our most common dinosaur is actually the duckbill dinosaurs or the hadrosaurs. um So we had a number of different species of hadrosaurs. Probably our our biggest was was ah a giant hadrosaur called an Edmontosaurus.
00:17:00
Speaker
um They are roughly the size of a T-Rex. As long as a school bus, they probably weigh five or six tons. um So that would probably be our biggest dinosaurs, these these big hadrosaurs.
00:17:11
Speaker
um Our big predator at the time was a smaller, older cousin of the T-Rex called an Albertosaurus. um It was a Tyrannosaur, like a T-Rex, but was only about half the size.
00:17:23
Speaker
um But we think was actually a much more agile animal. So like a faster runner, a better pursuit predator, probably hunted in packs. They would have been kind of scary animals.
00:17:34
Speaker
And we know we also have kind of a bevy of of small bipedal dinosaurs as well. so um things like dromaeosaurs, which are kind of like the velociraptor in Jurassic Park, a series of those. One of our famous dinosaurs is something called a truodon, which is a also one of these kind of raptor-like dinosaurs.
00:17:55
Speaker
um So that dinosaur is actually the one on our museum's logo. Okay. And then we would have had some some very rare dinosaurs, like the the armored dinosaurs.
00:18:05
Speaker
and have We have ah basically ah and like a like a literal handful of of fossils from them, as well as a really nice footprint. So they were here, but they were not very common. So we actually have a really good diversity of dinosaurs up here alongside of our pachyrhinosaurs.
00:18:22
Speaker
Amazing. And scary. It's the herding seen as a way of Protection, kind
Paleoecology and Climate Impact on Ancient Life
00:18:31
Speaker
of the same reasons animals heard today. do we know? Yeah, we think it was probably, so protection, so i'd like a herd a herd of animals, ah herbivorous animals, pachyranosaurs were herbivores, probably a lot safer to move in in groups, especially if you're predators hunting packs.
00:18:48
Speaker
But it was also probably something about energy efficiency as well. Like it's easier to move through a forested area if there's there's lots of you, and to kind of like create a trail. And of course, you know, we think that these things had had complicated social lives, social lives as well. So they would have been maintaining a social structure as well at the same time as as migrating.
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, just by virtue of them being so many together. And in the bones, there's different ages of dinosaurs too. Yeah, that's right. Aren't there? Yeah. Yeah. so we have at the bone bed. That's the other thing that makes it really unique is we have the entire growth series right from from the little babies all the way up to like the big adults. um we almost certainly have got males and females. At this point, that we're not really sure um what the sexual adyamorphosin looks like, but we're we're fairly certain that we have both.
00:19:40
Speaker
um And so this is a really unique opportunity to actually study not only kind of the growth of dinosaurs, but also understand a little bit about their social structure. And it's so obvious and so interesting, of course, like the same rules apply to them as they do animals today, right? The same types of behaviors are seen, the same evolutionary pressures, looking at...
00:20:03
Speaker
animals today can really help you piece together what life may have been like, which is the incredible work of paleontologists like you. How do you piece together information from fossils and how do you recreate their world. And you're looking at in your work, not just the pachy rhinosaurus, but what do we know about the world around them? Your work is in the field of paleoecology. Can you, i guess, introduce that for us? What is paleoecology? So paleoecology is, as the name suggests, it's a study of ancient ecologies. So the study of ecology is basically under understanding the interactions in in the biological world. So in in my work in paleoecology, I'm looking not only at the dinosaurs, but also how the dinosaurs interact with each other and with the world around them and how sort of changes in in changes through time. So things like long term climate change or the recession of sea waves, how those affect those those ecological relationships. And actually one of my areas of study also is mass extinction. So understanding about how mass extinctions happen based on an ecological level. So it's basically trying to piece, and in the fossil record it's a little bit challenging, trying to piece together how these extinct animals interacted with their extinct environments. And I think you're right. We base a lot of our understanding based on what we know about ecological principles today. But one of the remarkable things is that it looks like those ecological principles, at least in vertebrate communities, um have not changed in millions of years. So we're still seeing predator-prey interactions. We're still seeing food webs. um
00:21:50
Speaker
We're still seeing just as some animals today have got parental care, some dinosaurs had parental care. So it is, that's one of the of the really remarkable things is some of these ecological relationships are very, very deeply rooted. especially We see it especially in vertebrate communities.
00:22:07
Speaker
i love the story about, I think it's the oviraptor dinosaur that they found this fossilized skeleton near eggs. So they just thought that the dinosaur was just stealing eggs.
00:22:20
Speaker
And then they found it again and again. And they looked in one of the eggs and saw that it was actually the baby of the oviraptor and that it was actually parenting and protecting its eggs. Is that is that the story?
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, that is that's a great example of how yeah it's it's it's in paleontology. It's not only finding new specimen specimens that advances our understanding.
00:22:44
Speaker
It's changing how we think about dinosaurs. So the idea that the dinosaurs would have parental care, you know, back in the 1800s when they were first described, they were just seen as, you know, like giant iguanas or something. They probably would have just, they thought they just laid their eggs and left them like ah like some reptiles do today. But we now we have a lot of good evidence that like the over raptor.
00:23:05
Speaker
um These were animals that would have laid eggs, cared for their young, lived in herds, had parental relationships with their young. um And so it's that whole possibility of parental care in dinosaurs is shifting how we understand the fossil record. So yeah, the over raptor story is a really great example of how we had to shift what we thought we knew about dinosaurs to better fit what we were finding in the fossil record. And what, what are, what's the role of fossil plants in paleoecology and in the ways that you work with fossil plants?
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah. So I love fossil plants. Um, the study is called paleobotany. Um, and paleobotany was actually something i I came upon accidentally. Um, so when I was doing, ah My PhD research, I was looking at the dinosaur mass extinction in Saskatchewan, which is the province the east of us here. And I was trying to get a proxy for paleoclimate. So this is actually really hard to do. How you measure how hot or cold or warm or wet it was in the fossil record is actually really challenging. And it's often done with isotopes. So I initially went in and I was trying to look at isotopes to give me a paleoclimate estimate.
00:24:17
Speaker
I was having no luck at all. No luck at all. And so I turned to plants, I did some some research and I was like, oh, it turns out plants can actually tell you a lot about the climate. um So I went back to my field sites and lo and behold, there was lots of fossil plants preserved alongside the dinosaurs. um And that was how I got really interested in them. um Initially from a climate reconstruction point of view, plants are incredible um indicators of of climate for for a whole bunch of reasons.
00:24:49
Speaker
But it also got me thinking about the role that plants played in basically in the lives of dinosaurs. And effectively, if there were no plants, there would have been no dinosaurs.
00:25:00
Speaker
um So plants are, you know, the foundations of these fossil ecosystems. And so to understand the dinosaurs, 100 percent, we have to understand the plants, too. And now ah I say love fossil plants. They're remarkable in that they're the Cretaceous plants were different than the ones we find today, but a lot of them are also very similar. So it's interesting to kind of track these botanical groups over time.
00:25:26
Speaker
Yeah, so plants have got a cool story as well. Are you are you familiar with Mary E.
Role of Fossil Plants in Understanding Paleoclimate
00:25:31
Speaker
White, the paleobotanist? Yeah, I'm just reading um reading her book, The Greening of Gondwana. She...
00:25:40
Speaker
is an Australian paleobotanist. She worked for years at the Australian Museum just down the road from where i am now and did amazing work on really, really early fossil plants, like the the first land plants. And yeah, I'm just, it's, it's a, fossil plants is a a new obsession of mine thinking about being in Australia, being a Canadian botanist that's moved to Australia.
00:26:07
Speaker
and Kind of my interest plants has changed. They look so different than they do in Canada and trying to understand, i guess been more interested in the questions of why are they so different. Australia really celebrates its Gondwanan heritage um and still has a lot of these really ancient plant lineages preserved in rainforest throughout the the East Coast and then amazing plants in the in the fossil record. So they've got a cool global, I mean, as cool a story as the dinosaurs, but um they they often get overlooked. um but But the the plants are are so critical to our understanding of of the ancient world.
00:26:47
Speaker
And talking about how you can recreate the environment from from plants, that's something we spoke a little bit about earlier, just using, you know, comparing Australia. Again, if you were just to look at the leaves of the plants here, they're very adapted to the dry and hot conditions. They're very thick. They're very sclerophilic. They're very small. They're so different than the big, fresh, soft, fleshy, deciduous leaves of spring and in North America, aren't they? Yeah. I mean, that's and that's why plants are so great at at telling us about the climate. Like um the size and shape of a leaf is what we call leaf architecture. um And that is is highly correlated to climate. And so what you can do is you can take ah an assemblage of plants in the fossil record.
00:27:40
Speaker
um You can score them for a bunch of characters. So basically what the you know what the base looks like, what the tip looks like, what the vanation is like, the overall shape. um And you can plug it into a program called the Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program or CLAMP. um And it'll compare your fossil assemblage to assemblages today around the world. And from that, it can give you an estimate of a whole bunch of climate parameters. So like how warm it was in the warm period, how cold it was in the cold period, how wet it was, you know, even even what the entropy was, what the how long the growing season was. And that's accurate to within two degrees Celsius.
00:28:16
Speaker
and So more accurate than is isotopic studies. So it is an incredibly powerful tool. And plants, yeah, so they're shaping the world. They're a big driver of evolution and co-evolution during this time as they are now. And one of the biggest, biggest plant revolutions, let's call it the appearance of angiosperms, flowering plants in the in the late Cretaceous, would have been Of huge impact, they evolved, they showed up in the fossil record, and they proliferated. And today they're the most common group of of plants. Prior to the angiosperms, the dinosaurs would have been eating and living in think with things like ferns, horsetails, gymnosperms, our pine trees, our ancient
Impact of Angiosperms on Dinosaur Diversity
00:29:05
Speaker
animals.
00:29:05
Speaker
pines do we do we know at all the ecological impact of the appearance of angiosperms and maybe what flowering plants and animal relationships would have changed or or formed yeah really good question that's actually one of my my particular areas of interest up here is is understanding the role of the angiosperm revolution on the dinosaurs up here in northern alberta so as you were saying um angiosturbs appear probably in the early Cretaceous, and as soon as they appear, they are everywhere. so they have this huge adaptive radiation.
00:29:40
Speaker
um And in up here in Northern Alberta, there's there's a very interesting story in terms of what we'll call a megafaunal turnover. So basically ah a turnover in dinosaurs diversity. So in the early Cretaceous, we've got a lot of the big ankylosaurs, kind of these armored dinosaurs. um And we know from one exceptionally well-preserved specimen, something called Borealopelta, that actually had gut contents preserved. So we know that that individual was eating a lot of ferns.
00:30:10
Speaker
So arguably ankylosaurs loved ferns. um But by the time we get to the late Cretaceous, which is you know what we find in the Pipestone Creek bone bed, the ankylosaurs are extremely rare. And what we find are horned dinosaurs and hadrosaurs, whose duckbilled dinosaurs.
00:30:26
Speaker
um And so there's this big turnover from ankylosaurs to hadrosaurs and ceratopsians that correlates with the angiosperm revolution. um So one of my areas of interest is looking to see whether that is correlational or whether that's actually a causational relationship.
00:30:43
Speaker
So angiosperms turn up, the ankylosaurs kind of disappear because the ferns are getting less kind of less diverse and less common, and things like ceratopsins and hadrosaurs actually prefer angiosperms, so they they do better in their ecosystems.
00:30:57
Speaker
um So this is one of the studies, that's the hypothesis. This is one of the studies we're trying to like ground-based and looking for more evidence that that this is actually what happened. And I want to talk to you about one of the one of the many plants in the area, the the meta sequoia, kind of the giant redward redwoods of the Cretaceous time. is there What's kind of the evidence of of these plants being in Alberta?
00:31:22
Speaker
so So meta sequoia is probably... the most common plant in the fossil record. yeah these are, you know, these big giant gym of sperms, like very similar to a redwood today. so we think that they were probably forming the canopy of these, these forests. um wow So are these like a hundred meters tall or 70 meters tall? How big?
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah. So, so huge, huge trees. yeah You know, like the kind that you could probably drive a car through them, similar to, to giant redwoods today. and what we find of them, we find a lot of their needles,
00:31:55
Speaker
um or you know what we call fronds, so like the ah stalks with the needles on them. We also had a lot of pine cones as well. um So they were very, very common plants in the Cretaceous. And again, probably forming the canopies of these these forests with ah the understory being where we get all these flowering plants. Yeah, wow. So Metasequoia definitely had a huge role in in forests up here in the Cretaceous.
00:32:20
Speaker
Yeah, wow. And their descendants live more south now. That's right. Yeah. um So they don't they don't live here anymore. yeah They really don't like cold temperatures. So you you can't even grow them inside here anymore. But at one time, they were all over the place. It's beautiful to think about the changes in range and evolution of the conifers and gymnosperms on that continent over time.
Exploring Ediacaran Organisms and Ancient Life
00:32:44
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, obviously, we still have boreal forest here, which is primarily conifers, but yeah very different types of conifers.
00:32:52
Speaker
I wanted to talk to you, go back to a different geologic era now, one much, much further, further back, the Ediacaran. But this is a period that spanned millions of years before working in the Cretaceous. You got your start in the Ediacaran geologic period. It was something, it ended something like 538 million years ago, i believe. can you tell us about this time, what kind of creatures lived in this time and where, where can you find them today?
00:33:27
Speaker
yeah So I actually, um, didn't, didn't start out in vertebrate paleontology. I did my, my master's. Yeah. My master's degree in the Ediacaran period, um, which, and and the fossils I was studying, they were about 565 million years ago. ums so the Ediacaran is a very, very interesting time in earth's history.
00:33:47
Speaker
We gen tend to think of it as the point in time where life got big. So basically where we went from a world of unicellular organisms. So unicellular organisms had been around for about three billion years.
00:33:59
Speaker
And then suddenly about half a billion years ago, multicellularity kind of exploded onto the scene. So he basically, you know, ah everything, big life today, plants, animals, fungi, that's all multicellular life. That sort of suddenly appeared about half a billion years ago. And the Ediakran period is is right on that threshold. um So we start to see things that start looking a little like plants and animals. um the The group that I studied were from Newfoundland, so basically the east coast of Canada. There's a site called Mistaken Point.
00:34:37
Speaker
um And it has a group of Ediakran organisms called rangiomorphs. um And rangyumors are these really bizarre organisms. They're not plants. They're not animals. They're not bacteria. They're kind of their own sort of, you know, trip to Mars experiment, like failed experiment in multicellular life. um And they were big, like they could be up to meters long.
00:34:59
Speaker
And they had this weird, like fractally branching pattern. And so that was that was kind of what I was studying. Meters long. Wow. Yeah. So there's one called Trapacea, which is three kind of two or three meters long. And so they were they were big organisms, but they, again, not related to anything that's alive today. So it's it's a very interesting part of the story of multicellular life on Earth. So Ediacrons today are found in Newfoundland, in Canada, in England, its a place called the Charnwood Forest. We find some Ediacrons in Newfoundland.
00:35:32
Speaker
the the White Sea in Russia, there are a few in Namibia in Africa, and also in Australia. So Ediacarans are actually named after the Ediacaran Hills in in Australia. So there's there's some very significant sites down there as well.
00:35:48
Speaker
So really, really cool period in the in the history of life. Wow. And there're they're animals? Some of them are stem animals. So some of them are kind of on the way to being animals. So the ones in Australia are actually the slightly younger taxa and So those we believe are actually kind of on the way to being animals.
00:36:10
Speaker
um The ones in in Newfoundland and England, the older ones are not animals, but they're also not plants because they're not photosynthetic. And they have no characteristics of fungi or anything like that too. So the ones, the older ones are part of this weird kind of explosion of bunch other organisms that effectively died out.
00:36:30
Speaker
So not not quite any of the kingdoms we have. Yeah. What did they eat? Or how did they get their nutrients? We don't know. Yeah. So so good question. We think the ranguomorphs, which are you know the older radiocrines from Newfoundland and ah and England, yeah um they have this fractally branching pattern. So they basically branched and branched and branched and branched. yeah And the hypothesis is that was to increase surface area because these things were called osmotrophs. So basically absorbing nutrients through their tissues. So there's no organ the line that does that. But that's the hypothesis for these rangyomorphs is they were basically just directly observing absorbing nutrients. Wow. Because this is this is before plants. This is around algae. Are there algae yet?
00:37:18
Speaker
Is this the first way things got nutrients? Yeah. Yeah, single cellular kind of algae ancestors. um But again, they're not ah it's it's before before plants and animals. It's before fungi really appeared. So they're, you know, they're they're this big enigma in the history of life.
00:37:35
Speaker
Amazing. And so you were doing fieldwork at Mistaken Point on them. What was that? What was that fieldwork like in that kind of sense of discovery at that time?
00:37:46
Speaker
it it is an Mistaken Point is an amazing place. So it's basically the coast, of the Atlantic coast, basically in Newfoundland. And there's these flat um kind of ledges. they They call them the table lands.
00:37:58
Speaker
um And on some of these ledges, you just have these big surface expanses that just have impressions of these rangy morphs, these ediacrons on them. And what's really cool is they're preserved under volcanic ash.
00:38:11
Speaker
So it was basically a snapshot of this community, community of these rangyomorphs that were basically all preserved all at once. You know, kind of like a Pipestone Creek, but back in, you know, back 500 million years before that. And so we can study the ecology rangyomorphs. Like, even though they are not related to anything today, they are still doing things that we would call eco ecology. So things like epiphaunal tiering, there was like tall ones and short ones. probably tiered to maximize the amount of of nutrients that they could absorb. So again, even though these things are not related to anything on any life on Earth today, they are still doing ecological things that we would recognize. And that to me was one of the most fascinating things.
00:38:53
Speaker
Yeah, wow. Okay, so there's a big extinction event. We lose the rangiomorphs, and then the proto-plants and proto-animals make it through. Life could looked very different today, couldn't it? Yeah, I love that, thinking about evolutionary dead ends, or the evolutionary failures. Probably most, most things that have ever lived, you can't even see a trace of them anymore, can you?
00:39:17
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's true. we the The estimate is that 95, we don't know 95% life on earth. So 95% of life on earth never fossilized, which is kind of terrifying, but also, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting when you start thinking of how, how long there's been life on earth yeah um and how diverse it is today and how much there could have been that we don't know about. And how quickly that's happened. When you think of the whole history, said 3 billion years of just single celled organisms.
00:39:49
Speaker
And you discovered new species of Ranguomorphs or new groups in that research.
Naming New Species and Cultural Impact of Dinosaurs
00:39:55
Speaker
Can you just reflect a bit about what's it like to discover a new fossil? what Is there like a responsibility you feel? What is that experience? So so naming taxa or describing taxa was a really great experience, especially to get it kind of out of my master's. So I named and described three new species of Ranguomorphs.
00:40:15
Speaker
So one one looked basically, there they were called the comb ranguomorphs, so they looked a little like a comb. So that one got called pectinophrons, which means comb of leafy branches. um There was another ranguomorph that basically looked like a big net, at least I thought they did. So they they were called the network rangids, and I call that hepcidophilus, which means network of leaves.
00:40:36
Speaker
um And there was another one that looked, it used to be called the Christmas tree. So again, another really, really tall one, kind of about about a meter and a half long. wow And that was called, we called that one Frondophyllus, which means a tree of leafy branches.
00:40:49
Speaker
So it was really thrilling to get to do that, to basically just put my name on a very kind of small, small part of that story was really, really thrilling. And, you know, to this day, I always kind of keep in touch with the Ediacaran community and and keep up on the research and and figure out, you know, as as we piece together this really enigmatic period in Earth's history, like, what more can we learn about these, these organisms?
00:41:15
Speaker
And so much of your work is public facing at the museum, you create exhibitions about the dinosaurs. um You mentioned media, and you were featured on BBC's incredible new Walking with Dinosaurs with the Pachyrhinosaurus episodes. Dinosaurs, we know, we've talked about this already, they loom really large in our cultural and collective imagination. in Your opinion, what do you think people love about dinosaurs so much?
00:41:45
Speaker
I think dinosaurs really capture people's imaginations. And like, this was my personal experience as well. I fell in love with dinosaurs as as a very small child, but and they just captivated me. And I think it's that, you know, the idea that they're these magnificent creatures, you know, they're they're akin to things, you know, like dragons and minotaurs.
00:42:04
Speaker
but they were real. Like they really lived on planet Earth. You know, it's almost like that they are too, too spectacular to actually have been real, except they were real. And it really gives us like an insight into the ancient world and and just what the incredible things that have happened on this planet before we were here. So I think for that reason, the dinosaurs just really capture people's imaginations and kids in particular. it's why we consider paleontology a what's called a gateway science. It's a way to get kids and young people and and adults like into a field of science that that really is is very kind of electrifying and captures people's imaginations.
00:42:45
Speaker
It's amazing. And they were, they were perfect in their time, isn't it? Like, looking back at all these different eras and all the different assemblages of creatures, not everything was on a trajectory to today, right? Like, there were millions and millions of years where world just looked so different, and everything that lived was as in tune with its world. Yeah.
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah, so was thinking, like, think of the, you know, the complexity and the depth and the breadth of yeah diversity in life today, and now think that That has been happening on planet Earth for at least 500 million years in terms of multicellular organisms.
00:43:24
Speaker
um So really gives me at least a really deep appreciation for life on Earth. Yeah, and you would probably have the ability to look at different creatures and see them in their place, in their evolutionary lineage and group, aren't they? Like everything has same ancient nature.
00:43:42
Speaker
the same ancient origins and story. And you know, it's it also is it's interesting to think about like everything that is alive today, yeah has a framework in the past.
00:43:55
Speaker
So everything today came from somewhere. So like you know, understanding the stories of of how we came to be where we are today and where we may go in the future. Paleontology as a science is really critical to to those kind of questions.
Reflecting on Deep Time and Humanity's Place
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah, so interesting to think about the future and how different that may look we can't really predict how different the world will look in the next 50 million years 1 million year can we well it's true i mean we can't predict it but but we can get a sense if we look in the past we can yes help to understand the future and that's why i always tell people you know paleontology isn't just about you know understanding ancient things it's about understanding how life operates which of course is is an important consideration as as we go into a future where we have things like rapid climate change and things like that.
00:44:45
Speaker
Paleontology can help us understand what could happen um yeah and and what to expect. And the kind of finality of extinction.
00:44:56
Speaker
yep The ending of those stories, yeah. in In your opinion, Emily, are there benefits to thinking about deep time? I know for some people it can be related Scary for some it can be really comforting. What's kind of your relationship with time or what has it given?
00:45:14
Speaker
Given you? So I think the idea of deep time is it does take a little while to get your head around it. So, you know, as as humans, we tend to think on, you know, decades, centuries, sometimes millennia.
00:45:27
Speaker
But when you start talking about millions of years ago, like it almost loses its meaning. um Which is why you know I like that analysis of like when T-Rex was around, a Stegosaurus was already a fossil. Like that's how much time we're talking about dinosaurs being on the planet. yeah um I think ultimately like deep time gives me a really deep appreciation and respect for for life on Earth. You know, the understanding that that we're this is not a definitive time period, that we're on a continuum of time, that things have been developing and thriving and flourishing on life on earth for millions and millions of years. We're, you know, we're not the end point at all. We're just a point, you know, in this, this big long story. And so I think because of that, it gives me kind of a deep respect for life on earth, where we are today, you know, where where humanity fits. um And I think having that, that, that perspective of our place in deep time um is a way to, you know, kind of get over like, you know, small anxieties and and frustrations and things like that is, if you know, if you remember, We are part of something so, so, so much bigger than us. And I think that that has really helped me not only as a scientist, but as as a human being.
00:46:50
Speaker
That was my conversation with Dr. Emily Bamforth. Thank you for listening and thank you to Emily for sharing her work. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Catherine Poults, and our music is by Carl Deiter.
00:47:03
Speaker
Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom.earth.