Leila Battison

Whenever I tell people that I was a palaeontologist, I invariably get one of two responses:

“Oh, like Ross from friends?!” or

“Oh, my kid LOVES dinosaurs”

…and then I have to witness their disappointment when I tell them that actually, my kind of palaeontology is a lot older and a lot less…toothy.

Since leaving academia and becoming more of a palaeontological generalist, I’ve dabbled in the recent world of the macroscopic, and with History of the Earth I have had the opportunity to write about everything from the first spark of life, through mineralisation, right up to the lives and deaths of the dinosaurs. I love how the perspective of the whole story of life on (and off) Earth can help us understand and appreciate each era on a deeper level.

My latest video for the channel: ‘What was the First Predator on Earth?’ is no exception. For most of Earth’s history, life got by with the simplest of two-tiered food chains. Priamry producers took energy from the sun or the earth and turned it into nutritious organic molecules. And opportunistic consumers and decomposers used those organic molecules for their food. So far, so peacefully pastoral. But with the rise of animals, their larger size and larger energy requirements called for a new approach leading, a scant few million years after the Cambrian Explosion, to the first apex predator: Anomalcaris.

This video takes us on a journey from the surprising discovery of anomalcaris thanks to an unthinkable act of fossil destruction, through the roles and ramifications of predation in an ecoystem, the ever-accelerating arms race that predator-prey interactions ignite, to finally how we can use the fossil evidence to interpret how anomalocaris lived in the Cambrian seas.

It was such a fun video to write, and a great story that pulls together principles of ecology, evolution, and traditional palaeontological endeavor. Almost makes me wish I was back at the coalface. Almost.

Give it a watch and tell me what you think? And yes, it is uncanny how anomalocaris looks like Trump in the thumbnail!