Dr. Catherine Hansen

speaker

45 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 9 Apr

Dr. Catherine Hansen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Global News Podcast · Iran: Attacks on Lebanon are 'grave violation' · 9 Apr 2026 podcast

When most people think of fossils, they think of the hard parts of animals.

So bones, teeth and shells.

And that's because when an organism dies, it decays and the hard parts are what remain.

And over millions of years, those turn to stone.

And in some very exceptional environments in the past, decay gets disrupted and soft tissues can actually turn into rock.

So in this example, an animal that has no hard parts, very few hard parts in fact, just sort of a few, like a beak and a few little hooks and things like that, the soft tissues themselves turn to stone and then basically preserved in the rock for 300 million years, which is what we identified.

You can forgive the original assessment that it was an octopus, can you?

You can see... Yeah, absolutely.

I totally get it.

So what is it?

So basically, working on this organism is really, really hard because the soft parts are quite ambiguous.

And in fact, we had to use a very fancy piece of equipment the size of a football field.

And basically, it's a large tube and it fires electrons around it at nearly the speed of light.

And then eventually the electrons travel so fast and then they deviate the electron path and that generates a very bright light.

And that light generates X-rays, which are very, very powerful and can be used to scan things like fossils to look at the chemistry.

It's complicated, isn't it?

It's very complicated.

so what is it so basically these x-rays are so powerful that we were able to look just under the surface of the rock and we were able to identify these tiny little teeth and these teeth tell us that it isn't an octopus but it's actually a nautilus a modern nautilus is a cephalopod that has an external shell they live

in fairly deep water.

You can find them around Mauritius.

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