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

Fossilised vomit can provide direct, yet disgusting, evidence of past ecosystems and interactions between long extinct organisms. This week we take a look at "the earliest terrestrial regurgitalite" from the early Permian of Germany. This prehistoric puke helps us to reconstruct who was eating what, including the Dimetrodon, the famous sail-backed synapsid.

This week's paper is "Early Permian terrestrial apex predator regurgitalite indicates opportunistic feeding behaviour" by Arnaud Rebillard and colleagues, published in Scientific Reports in February 2026. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02929-8

Another 'paper' we mention is "Unusual Arrangement of Bones at Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada" by Mark McMenamin published in 21st Century Science & Technology in 2012 (no doi). Another that we mention but couldn't remember the title of was "Carboniferous recumbirostran elucidates the origins of terrestrial herbivory" by Arjun Mann and colleagues https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02929-8

Wide screen art by Sophie Fernandez.

Getting a fossil species named after you is an unsual way to acheive quasi immortality, especially so for a species of human. In this preview of our second bonus episode we take a look at the weird, and often tragic lives of 5 people who have given their names to species of fossil humans, ranging from mad Austro-Hungarian aristrocrats to rampant imperialists and German pastors. Along the way we ask if we can learn some lessons from this ecletic bunch, and explore the fascinating new science revealing the face of human ancestors.

The full episode is available via our Patreon.

The paper tangentially discussed this week is "Denisovan mitochondrial DNA from dental calculus of the >146,000-year-old Harbin cranium" by Qiaomei Fu and colleagues published in Cell in July 2025 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040.

Wide screen art by Australian Museum.