In this episode we talk to Professor Christine Janis about mammal palaeontology, and her career. Christine is one of the world’s foremost experts in mammal palaeontology and mammalogy. She has authored dozens of scientific papers, and has been co-author of the major textbook Vertebrate Life for the last 20 years.

Christine has had a long and distinguished career, and is currently a researcher at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her work is particularly focused on mammal locomotion and ecology. We’ll be talking about some of the research Christine has led, including on hoofed mammals, sabre-toothed South American ‘marsupials’, and Australia’s extinct giant kangaroos. We’ll talk about the use and limits of comparative anatomy, the importance of direct observation of specimens in the discipline of palaeontology, and how things have changed for researchers during her lifetime.

It can be argued that palaeoart is the single biggest hook for getting people interested in prehistoric life. It takes the complex scientific terminology and data found within the academic literature and translates it into a reconstruction of an extinct organism. It is only through palaeoart that we can visualise some extinct organisms (particularly the vertebrates, and dinosaurs in this instance, whose external tissues are rarely preserved as fossils) and show some of the behaviours they might have possessed. Any kind of reconstruction that attempts to accurately depict an extinct organism as a living one could be considered palaeoart and this covers all forms of media, from traditional painting, to animation, 3D models and even how skeletons are posed in a museum.

In this episode, we speak to behavioural geneticist and palaeoartist and Dr Emily Willoughby, University of Minnesota. We take a look at what palaeoart is, how to go about making your own artwork and the release of her new book ‘Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs‘.