{"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":"Fossil Fails: The tiny dino with a massive flaw","slug":"fossil-fails-the-tiny-dino-with-a-massive-flaw","published_at":"2025-10-07T07:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-fossil-files-7375611/fossil-fails-the-tiny-dino-with-a-massive-flaw","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-fossil-files-7375611","url":"https://a94020de-22e2-432b-af22-019fdb3026ee.libsyn.com/fossil-fails-2-the-tiny-dino-with-a-massive-flaw","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/a94020de-22e2-432b-af22-019fdb3026ee/Episode_11_Oculudentavis.mp3?dest-id=5062010","summary":"Discovery of the smallest ever dinosaur acheived quite a splash when it was publised on the front cover of Nature in 2020. The new critter, Oculodentavis , was the size of a hummingbird and reconstructed as close to Archaeopteryx on the lineage to birds. In this episode, Susie and Rob take a look at how this story quickly started to unravel as it turned out Oculodentavis might been something else altogether. This how episode also shed some light on a dark underbelly of an ethical problem for palaeontologists - what if your fossils are coming from a war zone and potentially funding ethic violence? The main paper discussed this week is by Lida Xing and Jingmai O'Connor and colleagues \"Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of Myanmar\" published in Nature in 2020, now retracted ( https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2068-4 ) . A brief accessible summary of what happened afterwards can be found here by Krister Smith in Current Biology \"It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Oculudentavis !\" ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.06.017 ) . A summary of the situation with Myanmar amber fossils including discussion of the paper by Emma Dunne and colleagues can be found in Science \" Violent conflict in Myanmar linked to boom in fossil amber research, study claims \" by Rodrigo Pérez Ortega (doi: 10.1126/science.adf0973) Wide screen palaeoart by Stephanie Abramowicz .","meta_description":"Discovery of the smallest ever dinosaur acheived quite a splash when it was publised on the front cover of Nature in 2020. The new critter, Oculodentavis…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2640,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-fossil-files-7375611/episodes/fossil-fails-the-tiny-dino-with-a-massive-flaw/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/fossil-fails-the-tiny-dino-with-a-massive-flaw.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}