If there's one thing that will spark an interest in palaeontology, it might just be finding 450 million-year-old fossil as a child. That's exactly what happened to Dr Nic Campione. Nic is originally from Canada but is now a Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences (Palaeontology) at the University of New England in Australia. Nic tells the story of his childhood fossil find and talks about his approach to teaching troublesome palaeontology students like your host, Dr Travis Holland. __ Dr Nic Campione's UNE profile: https://www.une.edu.au/staff-profiles/ers/dr-nicolas-campione Dr Nic Campione's research publications https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=DIilDo0AAAAJ&hl=en UNE's Undergraduate Certificate in Palaeontology https://www.une.edu.au/study/courses/undergraduate-certificate-in-palaeontology --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message

Packed with emotion and pulling the nostalgia heartstrings, how does The Land Before Time (1988) hold up today? Clemson University English Lecturer Peter Cullen Bryan takes us through the links between Don Bluth's classic film and other palaeomedia. _______________ Follow Dr Peter Cullen Bryan on Twitter @pfxbryan Don Bluth. Somewhere Out There: My Animated Life.  SmartPop, 2022.  1988 Pizza Hut puppets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce17QquyL8s  Forgotten Disney: Essays on the Lesser-Known Productions.   https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/forgotten-disney/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message

Creative all-rounder Lucas Zellers recently worked on a D&D handbook that presents the real-life stories of extinct animals, and then twists them into D&D-suitable monsters. ____ Check out Lucas' work: Scintilla Studio https://scintilla.studio/ Book of Extinction https://magehandpress.com/extinction Making a Monster podcast https://scintilla.studio/monster/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message

Dino-obsessed content creator Tom Jurassic joins me for a visit to Prehistoric Domain, an immersive dinosaur wildlife park that can be viewed in a web browser or in virtual reality. __ Prehistoric Domain https://www.prehistoricdomain.com/ Check out Tom Jurassic's 'Tales from a Jurassic World' https://www.youtube.com/@talesfromajurassicworld --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message

Check out what you'll hear on Fossils and Fiction. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message

Vicky Coules is a PhD candidate and researcher at the University of Bristol in the UK looking into the entanglements between visual culture and dinosaurs. Her research took her into the story of the 1871 attack on a nascent Palaeozoic Museum destined for New York’s Central Park. Vicky and Michael Benton recently published a paper on the topic.  __ Coules, V., & Benton, M. J. (2023). The curious case of Central Park’s dinosaurs: The destruction of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ Paleozoic Museum revisited. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pgeola.2023.04.004 Bristol Palaeomedia Project https://palaeomedia.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message

Multi-talented entertainer and science communicator Michael Mills is the feature guest on the first episode of Fossils and Fiction for 2023. Michael is the creative director of Heaps Good Productions and 'Vice-Chancellor' of Dinosaur University. Michael has a podcast, PalaeoJam, and a show playing at the Adelaide Fringe Festival about foundational palaeontologist Mary Anning. We cover all of these in our conversation. This episode also features a song called 'These Curious Things'. Words and music by Michael Mills, featuring Gemma Dandie on lead vocals with Professor Flint and Michael singing harmonies. Buy tickets to A Curious Thing: The Story of Mary Anning: https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/a-curious-thing-the-story-of-mary-anning-af2023  More on 'Curious Things': https://linktr.ee/TheseCuriousThings  More on Professor Flint: https://linktr.ee/professorflint --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message

Could you get two more different topics in palaeontology than gaming and the ethics of amber from conflict zones? Join Jake Atterby from the University of Birmingham to discuss the former and Dr Emma Dunne from Friedrich-Alexander University for the latter.  Papers:  Clements, T., Atterby, J., Cleary, T., Dearden, R. P., and Rossi, V.: The perception of palaeontology in commercial off-the-shelf video games and an assessment of their potential as educational tools, Geosci. Commun., 5, 289–306, https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-5-289-2022, 2022. Dunne, E.M., Raja, N.B., Stewens, P.P. et al. Ethics, law, and politics in palaeontological research: The case of Myanmar amber. Commun Biol 5, 1023 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03847-2 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message

In this edition of the Fossils and Fiction Research Journal, we hear from Dr Ellen Mather who was lead author on a paper reclassifying a long-known eagle fossil as instead belonging to Australia's first known vulture, and Dr Stephen Poropat who describes the discovery of sauropod teeth from Queensland.  Access the articles here:  Poropat SF, Frauenfelder TG, Mannion PD, Rigby SL, Pentland AH, Sloan T, Elliott DA. 2022. Sauropod dinosaur teeth fromthe lower Upper Cretaceous Winton Formation ofQueensland, Australia and the global record ofearly titanosauriforms. R. Soc. Open Sci.9:220381. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220381 Mather EK, Lee MSY, Worthy TH. 2022. A new look at an old Australian raptor places “Taphaetus” lacertosus de Vis 1905 in the Old World vultures (Accipitridae: Aegypiinae). Zootaxa. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5168.1.1 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message

This episode of Fossils and Fiction features two Australian PhD candidates talking about papers they've recently published. Isaac Kerr from Flinders University discusses his paper reporting the discovery of a new ancient kangaroo in Papua New Guinea while Adele Pentland from Swinburne discusses her recent work on the pterosaur Ferrodraco lentoni.  Follow Isaac on Twitter @IsaacARKerr and Adele @AdelePentland.  Papers mentioned:  Kerr, I. A. R. and Prideaux, G. J. (2022) ‘A new genus of kangaroo (Marsupialia, Macropodidae) from the late Pleistocene of Papua New Guinea’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia. Taylor & Francis, 00, pp. 1–24. doi: 10.1080/03721426.2022.2086518. Kerr, I. A. R. (2022) 'This giant kangaroo once roamed New Guinea - descended from an Australian ancestor that migrated millions of years ago'. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/this-giant-kangaroo-once-roamed-new-guinea-descended-from-an-australian-ancestor-that-migrated-millions-of-years-ago-185778  Pentland, A. H. et al. (2019) ‘Ferrodraco lentoni gen. et sp. nov., a new ornithocheirid pterosaur from the Winton Formation (Cenomanian–lower Turonian) of Queensland, Australia’, Scientific Reports. Springer US, 9(1), pp. 1–13. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-49789-4. Pentland, A. H. et al. (2022) ‘The osteology of Ferrodraco lentoni, an anhanguerid pterosaur from the mid-Cretaceous of Australia’, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 41(5). doi: 10.1080/02724634.2021.2038182. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fossilsfiction/message