{"podcast":{"title":"The Fossil Files","slug":"the-fossil-files-7375611","podcast_index_feed_id":7375611,"rss_url":"https://feeds.libsyn.com/583670/rss","website_url":"https://sites.libsyn.com/Fossils","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/9/9/f/3/99f352ecbfc60de0d959afa2a1bf1c87/logo4-20250704-h86q14pd0t.jpg","author":"Robert Sansom","episode_count":40,"summary":"In \"The Fossil Files\", a pair of palaeontologists delve into the latest discoveries from the world of palaeontology and seek to bring fossils to back to life. Each episode, Susie and Rob will discuss an interesting new research paper ranging from topics of what dinosaurs ate, how plesiosaurs swam, where we came from, and the science of de-extinction. Whilst doing so, we peek under the hood of how the science of palaeontology is done and how research gets to see the light of day. It is for anybody interested in palaeontology and past life whether that is students, researchers themselves, or simply the fossil-curious - we laugh as we learn, and hope you will too. Episode guide at https://fossils.libsyn.com/ Bonus content at Patreon https://patreon.com/FossilFiles","last_synced_at":"2026-07-21T12:18:38.080077+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-fossil-files-7375611"},"episode":{"title":"Cretaceous zombie ants","slug":"cretaceous-zombie-ants","published_at":"2025-10-21T07:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-fossil-files-7375611/cretaceous-zombie-ants","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-fossil-files-7375611","url":"https://a94020de-22e2-432b-af22-019fdb3026ee.libsyn.com/cretaceous-zombie-ants","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/a94020de-22e2-432b-af22-019fdb3026ee/episode_12_ants_.mp3?dest-id=5062010","summary":"Cordyceps is a weird fungus that can take over the brain of ants and spiders causing them to go zombie and commit suicide in order to spread disease. Weirder still, some new fossils from the Cretaceous have directly captured this nightmarish behaviour for the first time. We take a look at these interesting fossils, their potentially shady origin story, and their implications for reconstructing evolution of this unsual parasitic behaviour. Side-note: did fungus cause the extinction of dinosaurs? The main paper discussed this week is by Yuhui Zhuang and colleagues \"Cretaceous entomopathogenic fungi illuminate the early evolution of insect–fungal associations\" published in Proceedings of the Royal Soceiy B in June 2025, ( https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.0407) , free version here .","meta_description":"Cordyceps is a weird fungus that can take over the brain of ants and spiders causing them to go zombie and commit suicide in order to spread disease. Weir…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2191,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-fossil-files-7375611/episodes/cretaceous-zombie-ants/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-fossil-files-7375611/cretaceous-zombie-ants.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}