You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

This is the BBC.

Hello and welcome to the podcast of the This is the BBC.

Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Jemalke Lili and my mission is to interview the most fascinating and important scientists alive today

and to find out what makes them tick.

My guest today specialises in time travel on an epic scale. He regularly travels back in time, at least in his mind, to the Triassic, a geological period that started 250 million years ago.

A crazily inventive period in our evolutionary history,

after the Permian mass extinction and before the dinosaurs were in charge.

Wherever there are ancient Triassic creatures buried underground, Nick Fraser, currently head of natural sciences at the National Museums of Scotland, is likely to be there.

And his fossil first approach to life has been richly rewarded.

In 2002 he unearthed a new species of gliding reptile in Virginia, USA.

In southern China, in May last year, he identified the remains of a creature so utterly odd that the paleontologist 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 rocks in the Scottish borders that are over 350 million years old.

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