Palaeo After Dark

In this episode, the gang discusses two papers that use modern decay experiments to determine how decay can affect our understanding of the evolution of two groups, Coleoidea and Graptolithina. Are there certain structures or behaviors that make these animals more or less likely to be preserved in the fossil record? Also, the gang faces the existential void, James offers a gift, and Amanda learns something interesting about the greatest animals on the planet. Up-Goer Five (James Edition):  This time, the group talks about what happens to things after they die. They look at studies that took things that were not dead and made them dead (or found dead ones on ice at a shop) and then watched what happened to them as time went on. We can then use the brain facts that we get from seeing these things continue to be dead to figure out what we are seeing when we look at things that have been dead for a really long time and turned into rock. First, we look at things that live in the water and have many arms. One group