Palaeocast22 Feb 2025

Episode 163: Ecosystem Engineers

An ecosystem can be described as all the interactions that occur between organisms and their physical environment. The processes acting within an ecosystem operate on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and include both biotic and abiotic factors.

Ecosystem engineers are those species that have a significant impact on the availability of resources to other species and can be responsible for the creation, maintenance, modification or destruction of an ecosystem. The introduction, or even removal, of such a species can have profound effects on both physical and biological elements of an ecosystem.

Whilst we can recognise the impact of ecosystem engineers in modern systems (e.g. the introduction of an invasive species), we don't fully understand what happens when an entirely new ecosystem engineering behaviour evolves. This has undoubtedly happened numerous times throughout geological time with the Great Oxygenation Event and the Cambrian Substrate Revolution being notable examples.

Joining us for this episode is Dr Tom Smith, University of Oxford, who has been using a computational approach to try to model what happens when an ecosystem engineer is introduced into an environment. The open access study is available to read here.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(245)

Episode 176: Insect Gigantism Pt2

The Carboniferous period is host to some of the largest arthropods to have ever lived. Giant taxa such as the griffenfly Meganuera and the millipede Arthropleura are almost talismanic and are often de...

13 Mai 48min

Episode 175: Insect Gigantism Pt1

2 Mai 39min

Episode 174: A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils

Prof. Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London, recently authored A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils. We took this as an opportunity to get an overview of what we really know about dinosau...

15 Apr 58min

Episode 173: Petrified Forest

Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona, USA is a hub for Triassic palaeontology and has exposures representing 20 million years of the Late Triassic Chinle Formation. Visitors marvel a...

17 Mar 49min

Episode 172: Rhynchocephalians

Today, there is only one living species of rhynchocephalian: the tuatara of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Despite today's paucity of species, this was once a diverse group of reptiles, with a wide range of li...

5 Feb 52min

Episode 171: Freshwater Mosasaurs

We've been given exclusive access to a brand new study examining the chemistry of a mosasaur tooth found within the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation, North Dakota. The remarkable circumstances of ...

12 Des 20251h 34min

SVP 2025

3 Des 202557min

Episode 170: Cariocecus bocagei

The iguanodontians were an incredibly successful group within the Cretaceous. They could reach incredible sizes, with the largest species even matching the proportions of some sauropods, and they also...

19 Sep 20251h 50min