Profile

I’m Jordan, I live in Birmingham but I am originally from Nottingham. I work at the University of Birimingham as a post-PhD researcher studying the diets of many groups of extinct reptiles, such as dinosaurs.

Away from work, I like to go bird watching but since I moved to Birmingham last year that has been a bit difficult with Covid and the relative lack of forests! I also like to cook (and especially eat the things I cook) and to play Pokemon – I’m looking forward to the new games that are coming out later this year!

I study the diets of many types of extinct reptiles, including: dinosaurs, pterosaurs (ter-ruh-saws; the reptiles that flew above the heads of the dinosaurs) and mosasaurs (mow-zah-saws: the giant swimming reptile from the Jurassic World films). I do this by studying the miniscule scratches on their teeth which form from the types of foods that the animals ate when they were alive. For example, if you eat a lot of crunchy foods like apples or peanuts, this will create a lot of scratches on your teeth. But if you eat a lot of soft and squishy foods such as Haribo you will not generate many scratches. By comparing the scratches on dinosaur teeth to those of modern reptiles such as crocodiles and lizards where we know what they were eating, we can then get an idea of the types of food that extinct reptiles were eating.

My work has taken me to museums all over the world to study modern and fossil reptiles, including Germany, France, USA, Canada and even China.

This is me in Beijing, China, holding a fossil of a pterosaur called Darwinopterus.

This is me in Chicago, USA, posing with the huge skull of a Nile crocodile. It has quite an impressive set of teeth!

This is me moulding the teeth of a pterosaur called Rhamphorhynchus (ram-four-rin-cus) in Drumheller, Canada. The blue stuff is the same rubber that is used to make fake teeth in people. This has given me the nickname of “palaeo-dentist” among my friends!

I usually get up quite early in the morning before having breakfast, usually either weetabix or shreddies. I then walk to uni and start by answering emails. I then start by planning which museums I need to travel to next to collect more scratch data from reptile teeth. Naturally because of Covid I haven’t been able to travel to any museums for over a year now and I really miss it. So for now I plan the trips that I will do later in the year when the world reopens. In the meantime I also look at the tooth scratches that I have collected from previous visits using a special kind of microscope that produces a big 3D image of the tooth surface. So I place the teeth below one of silver tubes on the right and the image on the left is a tooth surface (the one in this picture is of a modern alligator). In reality this surface is 0.1 mm by 0.1 mm! At the end of the working day I then head home and cook myself something nice such as stir fry, curry or (if it’s a Friday) a really cheesy pasta bake. I then watch a bit of TV (right now I’m watching Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+) and then read for a bit before heading to bed.