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 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

And two of these bones, the two extra ones that mammals have, the malleus and the incus, they actually originated from two jaw bones in in reptiles or in

ancestor synapsids, which are

Ancestral, so the two bones are also found in reptiles.

Uh but they gradually um evolved into uh much smaller bones that then became part of the mammalian inner ear.

What what what happened, and this is documented in progressive um skulls that have been found for for different organisms, the jaw joint moved in in terms of which bones were uh at the base of the joint.

So primitive cynodont forms still have

the reptilian jaw joint, and more derived forms actually have double-jointed jaw.

And then when once you get to mammals, you see the uh loss of the older

jaw joint and then the conversion of the associated bones into the mammalian bones of the ear.

So that's a very interesting uh sequence of adaptations which which sort of showcases the

transition from the early reptile like synapsed forms right up to the through the cynodonts and up to the to the mammals.

So these are some of the annotations and and developments that were taking place uh during late Permian through the Triassic and also the Mesozoic, but a lot of this happened uh roughly around the Triassic.

By the early Triassic there were only two clades left of the Cynodonts, um

Many of them ha went extinct at the end of the Permian, some of them survived uh part way into the Triassic, but many of them went extinct before the end.

So by the sort of early middle Triassic, there were only two clades of cynodonts left.

There were the mammaliaforms, which is basically mammals plus a few closely related uh species that aren't technically mammals, and one other clade called the the tritodonts.

So the tritododonts are quite interesting.

They're an extinct family of small, specialized, mammal-like cynodonts.

They're fairly closely related to the mammals, but uh distinct enough to

but to warrant their own clade.

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