Podcast 275 - Big N Wormy

The gang discusses two papers that look at... well... let's be honest here... we really didn't have much of a hook. You see, James was slammed with bureaucratic work, Curt was knee deep in grading hell, and Amanda was traveling for the holidays. So we made... this; a podcast about a worm and a lamprey. 

We're sorry.

Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):

The friends look at two papers about animals that are long with no legs. The first  paper looks at a small long animal that is actually pretty big for the  kind of animal that it is. It is very old and is found in a very cold  place. This is an important animal to find from a long time ago because  there are not a lot of these animals found at this time, and not a lot  of them in the cold. The fact that it is big could be a part of  something we see a lot where some animals get big to live in the cold. 

The second paper looks at a long animals that moves through water and  some of them will eat parts of other animals while they are still  living. This paper is looking at two new animals from a long time ago  that have not been seen before and seeing how it changes our ideas of  where these things come from and how they lived. And it does!

References:

Wu, Feixiang, Philippe Janvier, and Chi Zhang. "The rise of predation in Jurassic lampreys." Nature Communications 14.1 (2023): 6652.

García-Bellido, Diego C., and Juan  Carlos Gutiérrez-Marco. "Polar gigantism and remarkable taxonomic  longevity in new palaeoscolecid worms from the Late Ordovician Tafilalt  Lagerstätte of Morocco." Historical Biology 35.11 (2023): 2011-2021.