The Fossil Files

The Fossil Files is one year old! Thank you everbody for your support! To mark the occasion, Susie and Rob take a look back at the last year and put together some of their favourite moments to highlight the best of The Fossil Files (so far)
The episodes covered are:
Episode 10. Fossil Fails: A Precambrian beehive and dinosaurs on the moon (September)
Episode 3. Is de-extinction a scam? (July)
Episode 6. Where did Pterosaurs come from? (August)
Episode 12. Cretaceous zombie ants (October)
Episode 9. The Spicomellis special (September)
Episode 5. Were Neanderthals the first fossil collectors? (July) 
Episode 19. Dinosaurs were doing fine (before the asteroid), with Steve Brusatte (December) 
Episode 17. AI & the future of palaeontology (December) 
Episode 2. Dinosaur poos from Poland (June)
Episode 20. Back-breaking and baby making, the disturbing bedroom habits of hadrosaurs (January) 
Episode 28. How to get a Species of Human Named after you (March) 
Episode 32. Were giant super intelligent octopuses the top predators of the Cretaceous? (May)

400 million years ago, before the rise of forests, the land was covered in mossy carpets, loomed over by weird 8 meter tall columns called Prototaxites. These weird giants have long been thought to be some sort of fungus body, slowly digesting rotting matter. A new paper has taken a detailed look at some well preserved fossils from the Devonian of Scotland and reveals that this enigmatic giant wasn't a fungus, wasn't a plant, wasn't an animal, and wasn't a bacterium... it was something else. This week Susie and Rob take a look at the strange world of the Devonian giant Prototaxites and speculate what it might, or might not, have been. In other fungus news, we also take a look at a paper using fungal microfossils to suggests that dinosaur extinction could have been a multi-phase event, before and after the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous.
The main paper discussed this week is "Prototaxites fossils are structurally and chemically distinct from extinct and extant Fungi" by Corentin Loron and colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, published in Science Advances in January 2026 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aec6277
The other paper is "Fungal proliferation before and after the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction event in North America" by Rosanna Baker and colleagues published in PNAS in May 2026 Fungal proliferation before and after the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction event in North America https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2536899123
Wide screen art by M Humpage

Cretaceous oceans have long been accepted as a dangerous place full of massive mosaurs and other predators. Now some new fossils from Japan have upended this with the suggestion that the "top dog" was not any vertebrate, but instead giant octopuses that were far larger than any invertebrates alive today. This has generated a lot of Kraken related headlines (and social media posts), but is everything as it seems? This week Susie and Rob take a look at these claims and ask: were super intelligent giganto-octopuses the top predators in Cretaceous? Get your salt shaker to hand, because you mind need to take it with a pinch of salt. 
This weeks paper is "Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans" by Shin Ikegami and colleagues published in Science in April 2026 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aea6285
Another paper mentioned is "Synchrotron data reveal nautiloid characters in Pohlsepia mazonensis, refuting a Palaeozoic origin for octobrachians" by Thomas Clements and colleagues, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in April 2026 https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.2369
Widescreen art by HodariNundu

Are we alone? For decades a global effort has been made to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), but have we been looking in the wrong place? A new paper suggests that we should be looking for advanced technological civilizations that had access to coal as this was an important energy rich source enabling industrialisation. In this bonus episode, Susie and Rob take a look at the geological, palaeontolological and evolutionary implications of the seach for coal burning aliens. 
This week's paper is "How common are oxygenic photosynthesis and large coal deposits on exoplanets?" by Lincoln Taiz and colleagues, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology in January 2026. 
Widescreen art by NASA/SETI.

Smell defines so much of animal's life from finding a mate, to tracking down food sources and avoiding predators. Genetics and behaviour can offer us rich insights for modern organisms, but what about extinct organisms? How did they smell and what was their ecology? This week we take an interesting paper that has found evolutionary links between the endocasts of mammal brains and genetic markers for their 'smellability'. The authors explore how we can use this relationship to infer the smelling habits of sabre toothed cats and giant armadillos, and to reconstruct the evolutionary origins of whales. Get sniffing!
This week's paper is "The olfactory bulb endocast as a proxy for mammalian olfaction" by Quentin Martnez and colleagues published in PNAS in December 2025 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2510575122 We also briefing mention another paper about Cambrian critters in the Ediacaran by Li et al https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu2291