In May 2021 we continued digitally with fresh coffee and very exciting research! The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin once again invited you to the Digital Science Communication Cafe. This month in English. Get ready to get exciting insights from scientist into their work while drinking coffee in front of the screens in a relaxed atmosphere. Everyone is invited to ask questions and contribute to the conversation.
This time we are joined by Antoine Verrière, doctoral researcher in #paleontology at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Antoine is part of a team that studies the evolution and the lifestyle the animals that were living on land long before the #dinosaurs.
Antoine does with fossils what others do with embryo: he tries to understand how they were growing, and what that tells us about their way of life. The animals he works on, called #mesosaurs (do not confuse them with mosasaurs!), are the first reptiles to have transitioned from living on land to living in water. Long before other marine reptiles like #plesiosaurs, #ichthyosaurs, or turtles colonized the oceans of the globe, mesosaurs were the first to attempt a return to the sea. His research tries to understand how mesosaurs were swimming and living, and how their body adapted to their new environment. Learning more about how this transition happened can teach us a lot about how #evolution works in general.
