Nick Fraser on Triassic reptiles

The Life Scientific

Nick Fraser regularly travels back in time (at least in his mind) to the Triassic, a crazily inventive period in our evolutionary history that started 250 million years ago. Wherever there are ancient Triassic creatures buried underground, Nick is never far behind; and his 'fossil first' approach to life has been richly rewarded. In 2002, he unearthed a new species of gliding reptile in Virginia, USA. Last year in southern China, he identified the remains of a creature so utterly odd that the paleontologists who studied this species before him had got it all wrong. And earlier this year he was part of a tiny but hugely exciting discovery much closer to home, hidden in the Scottish borders in rocks that are over 350 million years old: an ancient amphibian, imaginatively named Tiny, that is the earliest known example of an animal with a backbone to live on land. It may even have had five fingers.

Producer: Anna Buckley.