James Fodor

speaker

3,084 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Aug

James Fodor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Science of Everything Podcast · Episode 162: Human Evolution · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

Again, that's not seen in uh earlier R synapsid and earlier uh reptile doors, which are just the teeth really just adapted to biting and and tearing, not really for chewing.

Another related adaptation was loss of the continual lifetime replacement of teeth, which are still seen in many reptiles.

Again, this doesn't really make sense if you are uh adapted for dental occlusion because the teeth need to be uh sort of specialized to fit into each other's grooves and to um interface well for uh most efficient chewing.

Uh that that doesn't really work with continual.

Continual teeth replacement throughout the life.

Continual teeth replacement is great if you don't need the teeth to fit together very carefully and you just use them for.

biting and tearing, uh but when you need

highly specialized interfacing teeth uh for chewing, then the continual teeth replacement becomes a problem and so that was lost.

So instead in uh cynodonts and then also in contemporary mammals, you only have two sets of teeth.

So the the baby teeth and then the adult teeth that come in later.

The uh

transition to two sets of teeth is also associated with uh it's not entirely clear when this evolved, but it's also associated with the um evolution of mammary glands and um the um feeding of uh milk to the young, which obviously is is easier when you don't have teeth.

Now one of the really interesting adaptations that again occurred progressively over the Triassic and uh

and uh into the Mesozoic as well, uh o of cynodonts showing the transition from

the early reptile-like synapsed forms to the mammalian-like forms by the by the Cretaceous, um, is the development of mammalian ear.

So I didn't know this until recently, but reptiles don't have ears, or at least they don't have external ears in the same way that mammals do.

I think I mentioned this in the previous episode.

They can hear, but the external hearing apparatus is different, and in particular the inner bones of the ear

uh mammals having three uh bones in the inner ear.

A different the reptiles only have one uh bone in the inner ear.

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