Invited talk in Creswell Crags

On 19th February, I delivered an online invited talk for the audience of Creswell Crags. The lecturer was entitled "A story of extinct small mammals told through their bones" and was followed by over fifty people. The event was organized by Creswell Crags staff, using Eventbrite platform.

I was very happy to deliver this talk to explain my research lines and the most outstanding publications of my career. I split the presentation in four sections. In the first section, I introduced several biological concepts, like what is a small mammal, and explained how paleontologists study them. In it, I also talked about the systematics and biodiversity data of taxa, and which are the historical used of small mammal data. Particularly, my reserach lines are focused on insular lagomorphs (rabbits, hares and pikas). The second section was to detail why islands are so special ecosystems, and the most awesome shifts that occurred to the mammals that lived there: gigantism, dwarfism, loss of teeth, robuster limbs, small brains, longer lifes, etc.

In the third section, I explained the techniques that I generally used to deep into the paleobiology of extinct lagomorphs, and the most interesting publications that I leaded. For example, we discovered that Sardinian giant pikas had very large teeth (more larger than expected by their size), and this could be realted with a more abrasive diet but also with an extended lifespan. Another example, it was the finding that the pups of these pikas weaned at very large size, or that analyzing the incidence of osteoarthirtic diseases in them, the values were very high pointing to an ageing populations.

In the final section, I highlighted the importance to study the past species and their evolution, and how the long term datasets that paleontologists elaborate (information for example about biological shifts related to climate change) can be important for the conservation of the present species.

I was an absolute pleasure to talk about my research, and I would like to thanks to the Creswell Crags curator, Angharad Jones, for inviting me and let met to have this amazing experience!