Question: What sort of work did you do in the lab?

Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 17 Jun 2010:

I did some pretty gruesome work in my lab but it didn’t hurt the creatures I worked with- I promise. I watched the embryos of a number of different marine animals (molluscs, sea-quirts, jellyfish) decay after they had died. I did this to see if I could identify any similar patterns in the fossil embryos I work on to try to work out just how they became fossilised and if their forms changed much through decaying (all tissues decay when they stop living).

I also spent a lot of time picking the tiny fossils out of the other mulch and sediment they were in at a microscope.