Before the Dinosaurs: The Age of Monsters

Engaging, thought provoking lectures by experts, professors and storytellers in Ottawa bars 📚Lecture: Before the Dinosaurs: The Age of Monsters ⏱️Time: Doors: 6pm Lecture: 7pm 🎤Speaker: Nathan Cochran (Vertebrate Palentologist & PhD student in Carleton University’s Earth Science) Before the dinosaurs roamed and ruled, a bizarre group of animals stalked the swamps, drifted through deserts, and defined the modern terrestrial ecosystem: the synapsids. Diverse and deadly, the group redefined life on land but remains relatively obscure despite being the direct ancestors of mammals. Join Nathan on an adventure through geologic time, from their dawn in the coal swamps of eastern Canada to the greatest mass extinction event the world has ever known. Meet potbellied one-ton herbivores with heads as big as a deck of cards, fearsome saber-toothed apex predators living on the brink of cataclysm, and discover the evolutionary breakthroughs that eventually made mammals what they are today. Nathan Cochran is a vertebrate paleontologist and PhD student in Carleton University’s Earth Science department with years of paleontological research experience. His master’s degree focused on identifying anatomical variation in the sail-backed apex predator Dimetrodon and developed novel statistical methods to identify the presence or absence of sexual dimorphism within species long extinct. Following his previous work on the prehistory of injury and multiple international conference presentations, his current work focusses on the diversity and evolution of the ancestors of mammals, the synapsids, using high tech micro-CT scanning to identify previously unseen anatomy of rare or delicate fossils to track the evolution of the features that makes mammals what they are today.