Dr Emily Bamforth

speaker

92 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Dr Emily Bamforth’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 Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Science Show · Fossil graveyards an archive of past climate and ecology · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

It's like we went back in a time machine, we opened the door on the late Cretaceous and we're looking at that herd.

So we can study things like what the adults look like, what the juveniles look like, what the babies look like, and we can establish a growth series.

So we understand what they look like when they were babies and what they look like when they were adults and how they changed over time.

which seems pretty standard if you think of a modern animal, but it's actually very difficult to do for a group of animals that really have no modern equivalent.

We get a good sense of what's called individual variation, so what makes one dinosaur of a species different from a dinosaur of the same species, which again is something we can really rarely do in the fossil record.

So for example, Pachyrhinosaurus has got horns on the edge of its frill.

And we know from Pipestone Creek that they vary a lot from individual to individual.

So this is what really makes Pipestone Creek paleontological gold.

We believe that these animals were on a seasonal migration.

It's speculation, but we think that these pachyrhinosaurs may have lived in dispersed herds for most of the year, and they came together to form a mega herd to migrate.

So similar to something that caribou do today.

And our leading hypothesis right now was that these animals died in a flash flood.

So if there was a storm in the mountains, for example, that water would have fallen in the mountains, rushed down onto this coastal lowland, basically filled all the rivers and the streams.

The pachyrhinosaurs, there was a huge dead city of them.

They weren't able to get out of the way.

They were probably moving through an area of lower elevation.

So they would have panicked.

There would have been a stampede.

And unfortunately for the dinosaurs, most of them would have drowned.

I said, unfortunately for the dinosaurs, because it was actually really good for us.

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