Eric and Wendy Schmidt purchased and donated the “remarkably complete” skull of Pachycephalosaurus, a dinosaur the Smithsonian said is famed for its domed head.
Left lateral view of catalog number USNM PAL 803273, a Pachycephalosaurus skull, from the Late Cretaceous Period, Maastrichtian stage (approximately 68 to 66 million years ago), Hell Creek Formation, Perkins County, South Dakota. The skull is largely complete with missing areas restored, while the lower jaw – not photographed – is reconstructed. This specimen is from the Department of Paleobiology collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.(Courtesy Smithsonian Institution)
Left lateral view of catalog number USNM PAL 803273, a Pachycephalosaurus skull, from the Late Cretaceous Period, Maastrichtian stage (approximately 68 to 66 million years ago), Hell Creek Formation, Perkins County, South Dakota. The skull is largely complete with missing areas restored, while the lower jaw – not photographed – is reconstructed. This specimen is from the Department of Paleobiology collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.(Courtesy Smithsonian Institution)
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has received a gift that will be hard to outdo this holiday season — a nearly complete dinosaur skull.
It’s a gift that will keep on giving, as the public has a chance to see the approximately 67-million-year-old fossil from Dec. 22 to Dec. 28 (minus Christmas Day, when the museum is closed).
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and his wife Wendy purchased and donated the “remarkably complete” skull of Pachycephalosaurus, a dinosaur the Smithsonian said is famed for its domed head. The species roamed the earth alongside the most renowned dinosaurs, such as the Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The skull will make its temporary debut at the museum before it joins the permanent fossil exhibition in the coming years, the Smithsonian said in a news release.
“This skull is by far the most spectacular specimen of this type of dinosaur that we have at the museum,” paleontologist Matthew Carrano, the museum’s curator of Dinosauria, said in the release. “We almost never get to see the animal’s face or the teeth or other parts of the head because they usually have broken away.”
Researchers unearthed the skull in South Dakota in 2024, before the Schmidts purchased it at auction and donated it to the museum. According to Carrano, it’s one of very few known Pachycephalosaurus skulls that’s nearly complete and it probably represents a dinosaur that was not quite fully grown when it died.
“Examining this skull and comparing it to other pachycephalosaur skulls will provide insights into how these dinosaurs changed as they grew,” the museum said in its news release.
The scientific name Pachycephalosaurus means “thickheaded lizard.” The animals grew up to 15 feet in length.
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Phillips’s New York Evening Sale closed at $67.3 million—a 24 percent increase from last November. Photo: Jean Bourbon
The auction results of the past few years have confirmed it: dinosaurs are on trend. And not just as prehistoric relics or tools of scientific inquiry, but as symbols of timelessness and taste. More and more, fossil skeletons are being treated as investments—something that is, in some cases, more emotionally and symbolically resonant than contemporary art with which it might share the auction block. Is it the return of Jurassic Park? Or perhaps simply that most of us are captivated by dinosaurs in childhood? In any case, as nostalgia increasingly drives purchasing decisions across collectibles markets, dinos are unquestionably riding the wave.
Phillips has been strategically attuned to this shift—likely thanks to a younger cohort of specialists in its ranks. Instead of competing head-to-head with Sotheby’s and Christie’s single-owner sale narratives, the house has leaned into a different storytelling and marketing strategy, enhancing the symbolic power of artworks not through tales of glamorous collectors but by connecting the works to deep time.
Last night, CERA—a juvenile Triceratops skeleton dated to 66 million years ago and the first of its species ever to appear at auction—fetched $5,377,000 in the Out of This World auction (a specially curated section of the house’s November Modern & Contemporary sales). While that figure may seem modest when measured against the marquee masterpieces of the season, spirited bidding pushed it far beyond its $2,500,000-3,500,000 estimate and confirmed demand for this type of collectible. It also brought Phillips an audience that may never have engaged with the auction house otherwise; representatives confirmed that the skeleton sold to a private American collector new to the house, though global interest had poured in ahead of the sale from both private buyers and international institutions.
According to Miety Heiden, Phillips’ chairman for private sales, the result is a powerful testament to collectors’ evolving tastes. “More than ever, we’re seeing a desire for works that spark curiosity and transcend traditional categories. People are looking for objects that bring wonder and dialogue into a collection,” she said. “This result underscores the appetite for rare and extraordinary pieces that challenge convention and expand the boundaries of what collecting can be.”
At this year’s Frieze Masters—the only segment of the global brand typically reserved for million-dollar modernist and Old Masters works—two of the opening day’s first sales were paleontological. David Aaron placed a Triceratops head from the Late Cretaceous (circa 68 million years ago) within the first hour, followed later by a complete saber-toothed Nimravidae skeleton from the Oligocene (circa 33.7-23.8 million years ago), which sold for a strong six-figure sum. And no one has forgotten the Stegosaurus Apex, which shattered records at Sotheby’s in July 2024, hammering at $44.6 million—more than seven times its $4-6 million estimate—to billionaire Ken Griffin.
Phillips’s Evening Sale on November 19 achieved $67,307,850 across 33 lots, with a robust 94 percent sold by lot (only two passed) and 97 percent sold by value. It was a strong result, particularly considering the momentum already shown by Sotheby’s and Christie’s earlier in the week.
Leaving behind the cutting-edge but highly speculative ultra-contemporary works that once dominated its auction offerings, the evening’s turnout—up 24 percent from last November—was driven by a pairing of institutionally recognized blue-chip artists of the past century with recent market consolidations, presented for the first time alongside natural history highlights under the Out of This World label. The top lot was the highly anticipated Francis BaconStudy for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer (1967), which sold for $16,015,000—neatly within its $13-18 million estimate. Just after came Joan Mitchell’s monumental Untitled (1957-1958), a densely gestural canopy of color from her New York years, which brought in $14,290,000.
Another high-profile lot, Jackson Pollock’s dynamic 1947 work on paper, sold for $3,486,000—just below its high estimate. Mark Tansey’s Revelever (2012) sparked a competitive seven-minute bidding war that carried it to $4,645,000 against its $2,500,000-3,500,000 estimate. The hypnotic, conceptually loaded composition creates an optical push-pull that immerses viewers in a moment of driving toward a mountainous horizon, almost tasting the crisp air in its ultramarine haze.
Meanwhile, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Exercise (1984), a loosely composed, surreal tangle of hallucination and paint, achieved $3,852,000 after a $3-4 million estimate. Another Basquiat from 1982 followed close behind, selling for $1,225,500. Camille Pissarro’s late Impressionist Le pré et la maison d’Éragny, femme jardinant, printemps (1901) surpassed its high estimate, closing at $1,900,000. Max Ernst’s Dans les rues d’Athènes (1960) doubled its expectations with a $1,534,000 result, riding the continued momentum for Surrealism. Rising Colombian artist Olga de Amaral also saw strong results. Her luminous golden textile Alquimia 62 (1987) soared to $748,200, well above its $300,000-500,000 estimate. A few lots later, a red composition from the same series met its estimate midpoint, hammering at $516,000.
Firelei Báez set a new auction record—if only briefly. Her Daughter of Revolutions brought in $645,000 over a $300,000-500,000 estimate before being surpassed by a $1,111,250 result at Christie’s later that evening.
Women artists once again delivered some of the evening’s most compelling results. Amid growing recognition for Alma Thomas, her Untitled collage from 1968—a blueprint for her signature mosaic-like abstractions—sold for $477,300 over a $250,000-350,000 estimate. Ruth Asawa’s Untitled (S.230, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form) opened the sale with a burst of energy, doubling its $400,000-600,000 estimate to achieve $1,006,200 as her MoMA retrospective opened. Others performed well too: a Martha Jungwirth fetched $516,000 (estimate $200,000-300,000), and Lucy Bull’s Light Rain (2019) exceeded its high estimate at $490,200.
One of the night’s more surprising passed lots was a vivid 2022 abstraction by record-setting enfant prodige Jadé Fadojutimi, whose $800,000-1,200,000 estimate may have been too ambitious. Also unsold, despite its uniqueness and luxuriousness, was The Thunderbolt, the longest gold nugget ever discovered. Weighing 3,565 grams and measuring 50 centimeters, the 114.6-troy-ounce gold formation was estimated at $1.25-1.5 million but failed to find a buyer. Dug up by accident at Hogan’s Find in Western Australia, the rare natural formation was revealed by sheer chance.
According to Robert Manley, Phillips’s chairman for modern and contemporary art, the success of the evening was due in part to the house’s new priority bidding system, which helped secure early commitments and interest on most lots. That contributed to 91 percent of works selling within or above estimate. “The enthusiasm was made especially clear by the fact that we had 27 times the number of early selling bids for this sale as we had last November, partly a result of our introduction of Priority Bidding,” he told Observer. The results, he said, confirmed not only the enduring draw of blue-chip artists but also the market’s resilience and ongoing global demand. “With strong participation from collectors worldwide and competitive bidding across Impressionist, Postwar, Contemporary and Natural History offerings, tonight’s outcome reaffirms confidence in the long-term strength of this market.”
In the badlands of eastern Wyoming, the Lance Formation is a trove of prehistoric fossils. And one area in particular — a region less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) across — has provided scientists with at least half a dozen remarkably well-preserved dinosaur specimens complete with details of scaly skin, hooves and spikes.The paleontologist Dr. Paul Sereno and his colleagues dub it “the mummy zone” in a new study that aims to explain why this particular area has given rise to so many amazing finds and define exactly what a dinosaur “mummy” is.In the early 1900s, a fossil hunter named Charles Sternberg found two specimens of a large duck-billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens, in the Lance Formation. The skeletons were so pristine that Sternberg, along with H.F. Osborn, a paleontologist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, could make out what appeared to be large swaths of skin with discernible scales and a fleshy crest that seemed to run along the reptile’s neck.Sereno, lead study author and a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, described the initial discovery as “the greatest dinosaur mummy — until maybe the juvenile that we found” in the year 2000.Separated by nearly a century, Sereno and his team’s find shared common traits with Sternberg’s: The skeletons were preserved in three-dimensional poses and showed clear evidence of skin and other attributes that don’t usually survive 66 million years in the ground. “Osborn said in 1912 he knew that it wasn’t actual, dehydrated skin, like in Egyptian mummies,” Sereno said. “But what was it?”Whatever it was, “we actually didn’t know how it was preserved,” he said. “It was a mystery.”The new research puts that mystery to rest and can help paleontologists find, recognize and analyze future mummy finds for tiny clues into how giant dinosaurs really looked.A dinosaur death cast in claySereno and his collaborators used CT scanning, 3D imaging, electron microscopy and X-ray spectroscopy to analyze two Edmontosaurus mummies they discovered in the Lance Formation in 2000 and 2001 — a juvenile and a young adult. “We looked and we looked and we looked, we sampled and we tested, and we didn’t find any” remnants of soft tissue, Sereno said.What the team found instead was a thin layer of clay, less than one-hundredth of an inch thick, which had formed on top of the animals’ skin. “It’s so real-looking, it’s unbelievable,” he said.Whereas Sternberg and Osborn referred to the “impression” of skin in their specimens, Sereno’s paper proposes an alternate term — “rendering” — which he argues is more precise.The study lays out the conditions that would produce such a rendering. In the Late Cretaceous Period, when Edmontosaurus roamed what is now the American West, the climate cycled between drought and monsoon rains. Drought has been determined to have been the cause of death of the original mummy found by Sternberg and described by Osborn, and of other animals whose fossils were found nearby. Assuming the same is true of the new specimens, the carcasses would have dried in the sun in a week or two.Then, a flash flood buried the bodies in sediment. The decaying carcasses would have been covered by a film of bacteria, which can electrostatically attract clay found in the surrounding sediment. The wafer-thin coating of clay remained long after the underlying tissues decayed completely, retaining their detailed morphology and forming a perfect clay mask.“Clay minerals have a way of attracting to and sticking onto biological surfaces, ensuring a molding that can faithfully reproduce the outermost surfaces of a body, such as skin and other soft tissues,” said Dr. Anthony Martin, professor of practice in the department of environmental sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved in the research. “So it makes sense that these clays would have formed such fine portraits of dinosaurs’ scales, spikes and hooves.”Dr. Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who also was not involved in the study, is an expert in taphonomy, which she described as “the study of everything that happens to an organism from when it dies until when we find it.” She is particularly interested in how these fossils formed.“Dinosaur mummies have been known for over one hundred years, but there has definitely been more emphasis on describing their skin and less on understanding how they fossilized in the first place,” she said via email. “If we can understand how and why these fossils form, we can better target where to look to potentially find more of them.”A detailed portrait of a duck-billed dinosaurTogether, the two more recently unearthed mummies allowed Sereno and his team to create a detailed update of what Edmontosaurus probably looked like.According to their analyses, the dinosaur, which could grow to over 12 meters (40 feet) long, had a fleshy crest along the neck and back and a row of spikes running down the tail. The creature’s skin was thin enough to produce delicate wrinkles over the rib cage and was dotted with small, pebble-like scales.The clay mask revealed that the animal had hooves, a trait previously preserved only in mammals. That makes it the oldest land animal proven to have hooves and the first known example of a hoofed reptile, Sereno said. “Sorry, mammals, you didn’t invent it,” he joked. “Did we suspect it? Yeah, we suspected it had a hoof from the footprints, but seeing it is believing.”
In the badlands of eastern Wyoming, the Lance Formation is a trove of prehistoric fossils. And one area in particular — a region less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) across — has provided scientists with at least half a dozen remarkably well-preserved dinosaur specimens complete with details of scaly skin, hooves and spikes.
The paleontologist Dr. Paul Sereno and his colleagues dub it “the mummy zone” in a new study that aims to explain why this particular area has given rise to so many amazing finds and define exactly what a dinosaur “mummy” is.
In the early 1900s, a fossil hunter named Charles Sternberg found two specimens of a large duck-billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens, in the Lance Formation. The skeletons were so pristine that Sternberg, along with H.F. Osborn, a paleontologist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, could make out what appeared to be large swaths of skin with discernible scales and a fleshy crest that seemed to run along the reptile’s neck.
Sereno, lead study author and a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, described the initial discovery as “the greatest dinosaur mummy — until maybe the juvenile that we found” in the year 2000.
Separated by nearly a century, Sereno and his team’s find shared common traits with Sternberg’s: The skeletons were preserved in three-dimensional poses and showed clear evidence of skin and other attributes that don’t usually survive 66 million years in the ground. “Osborn said in 1912 he knew that it wasn’t actual, dehydrated skin, like in Egyptian mummies,” Sereno said. “But what was it?”
Whatever it was, “we actually didn’t know how it was preserved,” he said. “It was a mystery.”
The new research puts that mystery to rest and can help paleontologists find, recognize and analyze future mummy finds for tiny clues into how giant dinosaurs really looked.
A dinosaur death cast in clay
Sereno and his collaborators used CT scanning, 3D imaging, electron microscopy and X-ray spectroscopy to analyze two Edmontosaurus mummies they discovered in the Lance Formation in 2000 and 2001 — a juvenile and a young adult. “We looked and we looked and we looked, we sampled and we tested, and we didn’t find any” remnants of soft tissue, Sereno said.
What the team found instead was a thin layer of clay, less than one-hundredth of an inch thick, which had formed on top of the animals’ skin. “It’s so real-looking, it’s unbelievable,” he said.
Whereas Sternberg and Osborn referred to the “impression” of skin in their specimens, Sereno’s paper proposes an alternate term — “rendering” — which he argues is more precise.
The study lays out the conditions that would produce such a rendering. In the Late Cretaceous Period, when Edmontosaurus roamed what is now the American West, the climate cycled between drought and monsoon rains. Drought has been determined to have been the cause of death of the original mummy found by Sternberg and described by Osborn, and of other animals whose fossils were found nearby. Assuming the same is true of the new specimens, the carcasses would have dried in the sun in a week or two.
Then, a flash flood buried the bodies in sediment. The decaying carcasses would have been covered by a film of bacteria, which can electrostatically attract clay found in the surrounding sediment. The wafer-thin coating of clay remained long after the underlying tissues decayed completely, retaining their detailed morphology and forming a perfect clay mask.
“Clay minerals have a way of attracting to and sticking onto biological surfaces, ensuring a molding that can faithfully reproduce the outermost surfaces of a body, such as skin and other soft tissues,” said Dr. Anthony Martin, professor of practice in the department of environmental sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved in the research. “So it makes sense that these clays would have formed such fine portraits of dinosaurs’ scales, spikes and hooves.”
Dr. Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who also was not involved in the study, is an expert in taphonomy, which she described as “the study of everything that happens to an organism from when it dies until when we find it.” She is particularly interested in how these fossils formed.
“Dinosaur mummies have been known for over one hundred years, but there has definitely been more emphasis on describing their skin and less on understanding how they fossilized in the first place,” she said via email. “If we can understand how and why these fossils form, we can better target where to look to potentially find more of them.”
A detailed portrait of a duck-billed dinosaur
Together, the two more recently unearthed mummies allowed Sereno and his team to create a detailed update of what Edmontosaurus probably looked like.
According to their analyses, the dinosaur, which could grow to over 12 meters (40 feet) long, had a fleshy crest along the neck and back and a row of spikes running down the tail. The creature’s skin was thin enough to produce delicate wrinkles over the rib cage and was dotted with small, pebble-like scales.
The clay mask revealed that the animal had hooves, a trait previously preserved only in mammals. That makes it the oldest land animal proven to have hooves and the first known example of a hoofed reptile, Sereno said. “Sorry, mammals, you didn’t invent it,” he joked. “Did we suspect it? Yeah, we suspected it had a hoof from the footprints, but seeing it is believing.”
In today’s episode of “Matt About Town,” WTOP’s Matt Kaufax hiked over to the Kalorama area with a can of Play-Doh and some plastic wrap, where he not only uncovered some of D.C.’s coolest hidden fossils, but also got a chance to mold his own ancient souvenirs.
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Discover some of DC’s coolest hidden fossils (and make your own) in Mitchell Park
There’s not usually much activity in Northwest D.C.’s serene Mitchell Park. But did you know the rocky exterior wall holding the park’s hill in place at the corner of 23rd and S streets used to be teeming with prehistoric life?
In today’s episode of “Matt About Town,” WTOP’s Matt Kaufax hiked near the Kalorama neighborhood with a can of Play-Doh and some plastic wrap, where he not only uncovered some of D.C.’s coolest hidden fossils, but also got a chance to mold his own ancient souvenirs.
It’s Matt’s latest adventure in a series of fantastic journeys with D.C.’s resident “Fossil Hunter,” Chris Barr.
A lawyer by day for a big D.C. firm, Barr also has a background in geology and dabbles in paleontology, in his quest to uncover all of the locations of what he calls “D.C.’s accidental museum of paleontology.”
Barr started cataloging all the hidden fossil locations of D.C. on his website back in the early 2000s. Although he shut down his blog a few years ago, you can still find an archived version of the website (and detailed descriptions of D.C.’s secret fossil spots) online.
Previously on “Matt About Town,” Matt and Chris have explored:
Come along on this journey, where Matt and Chris explore some of the most visually stunning public fossils of this miniseries yet!
Hear “Matt About Town” first every Tuesday and Thursday on 103.5 FM!
If you have a story idea you’d like Matt to cover, email him, or chat with him on Instagram and TikTok.
In the latest edition of Matt About Town, WTOP’s Matt Kaufax slithered over to the Smithsonian National Zoo, where he found more than meets the eye at the Reptile House.
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Dinosaurs at the Zoo? Come fossil hunting among some scaly friends!
Did you know there are hidden fossils from the time of the dinosaurs buried at the Smithsonian National Zoo?
In today’s episode of “Matt About Town,” WTOP’s Matt Kaufax slithered over to the zoo — where he found there is more than meets the eye at the Reptile House.
The fossils at the zoo aren’t a part of any planned exhibit. They don’t have signs indicating where they are located. In fact, not many people (including some who work at the zoo itself) have any idea they’re there!
Built in 1931, a uniquely ornate portico marks the entrance to the zoo’s Reptile House. Above the door, a stegosaurus dinosaur mural welcomes guests as they enter through the building’s domed archway.
That’s where, if you look to your left or right, you might see pillars made of a certain red limestone — which hold prehistoric remains … if you look closely enough.
To find these fossils, Matt enlisted the help of D.C.’s resident “fossil hunter,” Christopher Barr.
By day, Barr is a lawyer at a firm in the District. But at night, he dons his Indiana Jones-style fedora and explores what he calls “D.C.’s accidental museum of paleontology.”
Barr’s background in paleontology and geology from his time in school is what fuels his side hobby. From the early 2000s, he’s been documenting hidden fossils in the D.C. area, and has amassed an entire fossil library on his online blog.
While his website has been inactive for a few years, Barr is in the process of getting things back up and running with updated locations. In the meantime, you can find the archived site with all of Barr’s work (and all of DC’s hidden fossil spots) here.
Matt and Chris’ journey over to the National Zoo was their fourth adventure fossil hunting together in D.C. You can watch previous installments of Matt’s “Fossil Hunters” mini series below, where he and Chris explored:
The National Museum of Brazil hopes to reopen by 2026. Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images
Burkhard Pohl, the Swiss-German owner of one of the world’s biggest collections of private fossils, is making a major gift to help rebuild the holdings of the National Museum of Brazil. Located in Rio de Janeiro, the 200-year-old institution lost the majority of its 20 million artifacts in a devastating 2018 fire.
In accepting Pohl’s donation of more than 1,100 fossils that include dinosaurs, turtles, plants, insects and flying reptiles, the museum is kickstarting a campaign ahead of its planned 2026 reopening to restore what was lost. The National Museum of Brazil will partner with Pohl’s fossil and gem-mining company Interprospekt Group and the arts nonprofit group Instituto Inclusaritz to rally collectors and the scientific community to help replenish its collection. “We hope this will serve as an example for others, especially individuals, to participate in the reconstruction of the main museum of natural history and anthropology in South America,” said Alexander Kellner, the museum’s director, in a statement.
Burkhard Pohl (left), Alexander Kellner (right) and Frances Reynolds (center), founder of Instituto Inclusaritz. Diogo Vasconcellos/Courtesy National Museum of Brazil
Pohl comes from a long line of prominent collectors. The art holdings of his grandfather Karl Stroeher formed the basis of Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art, while his mother Erika Pohl-Stroeher owned Europe’s largest collection of minerals and gems. Pohl, meanwhile, has spent the past five decades amassing fossils. He’s even co-founded two museums—the Wyoming Dinosaur Center and China’s Sino-German Paleontological Museum—dedicated to the field.
A lucrative market for paleontological material
The Swiss-German entrepreneur isn’t the only prominent enthusiast of fossils, which have fetched staggering sums at auction in recent years with a tyrannosaurus rex selling for $31.8 million at Sotheby’s in 2020 and another dinosaur skeleton fetching $12.4 million in 2022. Mauricio Fernández Garza, the former mayor of Mexico’s San Pedro Garza Garcia, oversees a $120 million collection of fossils, artifacts and artwork, while German investor Christian Angermayer’s wide-ranging collection includes a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton and triceratops head.
Even celebrities like Nicholas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio have gotten involved in fossil sales. Cage outbid DiCaprio to acquire a rare dinosaur skull for $276,000 in 2007, although the actor later agreed to return the fossil to Mongolia after discovering it had been looted.
The donation includes the well-preserved skull of a pterosaur. Handerson Oliveira/Courtesy National Museum of Brazil
Pohl’s gift to the National Museum of Brazil includes rare fossils like those of two dinosaurs that have never been previously described in scientific literature and two unstudied pterosaur skulls. The 1,104 fossils also include an example of the Tetrapodophis, which is possibly the earliest snake fossil.
Much of the donated collection comes from Brazil’s Araripe Basin, located between the states of Ceará, Pernambuco and Piauí. The region contains the Crato and Romualdo units, two formations that date back to 115 million and 110 million years ago respectively and are treasure troves for paleontological fossils.
The museum tragically lost much of its collection in a 2018 fire. Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty Images
The museum, which is associated with the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), is Brazil’s oldest scientific institution. After a fire triggered by a faulty air conditioning unit set its main building ablaze in 2018, it lost 85 percent of its entire collection and the majority of its entomology holdings and displays of Egyptian and South American mummies. While the National Museum of Brazil currently has around 2,000 objects ready for exhibition, it hopes to gather 10,000 more in the next two years, Kellner told the Guardian.
In addition to urging other collectors to contribute to rebuilding efforts, the institution’s collaboration with the Interprospekt Group will invite Brazilian researchers to participate in excavations in the U.S. In August of 2023, they hosted their first joint excavation at the Hell Creek Formation in Wyoming and Montana, inviting six Brazilian paleontologists and students in a mission that could bring North American dinosaurs to Brazil for display.
“I look forward to seeing how this collaboration enriches the museum’s offerings and inspires future generations,” said Pohl in a statement. “I hope others will join this important, collective effort to restore Brazil’s natural history collection.”
NEW YORK — Scientists discovered the oldest known DNA and used it to reveal what life was like 2 million years ago in the northern tip of Greenland. Today, it’s a barren Arctic desert, but back then it was a lush landscape of trees and vegetation with an array of animals, even the now extinct mastodon.
“The study opens the door into a past that has basically been lost,” said lead author Kurt Kjær, a geologist and glacier expert at the University of Copenhagen.
With animal fossils hard to come by, the researchers extracted environmental DNA, also known as eDNA, from soil samples. This is the genetic material that organisms shed into their surroundings — for example, through hair, waste, spit or decomposing carcasses.
Studying really old DNA can be a challenge because the genetic material breaks down over time, leaving scientists with only tiny fragments.
But with the latest technology, researchers were able to get genetic information out of the small, damaged bits of DNA, explained senior author Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge. In their study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, they compared the DNA to that of different species, looking for matches.
The samples came from a sediment deposit called the Kap København formation in Peary Land. Today, the area is a polar desert, Kjær said.
But millions of years ago, this region was undergoing a period of intense climate change that sent temperatures up, Willerslev said. Sediment likely built up for tens of thousands of years at the site before the climate cooled and cemented the finds into permafrost.
The cold environment would help preserve the delicate bits of DNA — until scientists came along and drilled the samples out, beginning in 2006.
During the region’s warm period, when average temperatures were 20 to 34 degrees Fahrenheit (11 to 19 degrees Celsius) higher than today, the area was filled with an unusual array of plant and animal life, the researchers reported. The DNA fragments suggest a mix of Arctic plants, like birch trees and willow shrubs, with ones that usually prefer warmer climates, like firs and cedars.
The DNA also showed traces of animals including geese, hares, reindeer and lemmings. Previously, a dung beetle and some hare remains had been the only signs of animal life at the site, Willerslev said.
One big surprise was finding DNA from the mastodon, an extinct species that looks like a mix between an elephant and a mammoth, Kjær said.
Many mastodon fossils have previously been found from temperate forests in North America. That’s an ocean away from Greenland, and much farther south, Willerslev said.
“I wouldn’t have, in a million years, expected to find mastodons in northern Greenland,” said Love Dalen, a researcher in evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University who was not involved in the study.
Because the sediment built up in the mouth of a fjord, researchers were also able to get clues about marine life from this time period. The DNA suggests horseshoe crabs and green algae lived in the area — meaning the nearby waters were likely much warmer back then, Kjær said.
By pulling dozens of species out of just a few sediment samples, the study highlights some of eDNA’s advantages, said Benjamin Vernot, an ancient DNA researcher at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who was not involved in the study.
“You really get a broader picture of the ecosystem at a particular time,” Vernot said. “You don’t have to go and find this piece of wood to study this plant, and this bone to study this mammoth.”
Based on the data available, it’s hard to say for sure whether these species truly lived side by side, or if the DNA was mixed together from different parts of the landscape, said Laura Epp, an eDNA expert at Germany’s University of Konstanz who was not involved in the study.
But Epp said this kind of DNA research is valuable to show “hidden diversity” in ancient landscapes.
Willerslev believes that because these plants and animals survived during a time of dramatic climate change, their DNA could offer a “genetic roadmap” to help us adapt to current warming.
Stockholm University’s Dalen expects ancient DNA research to keep pushing deeper into the past. He worked on the study that previously held the “oldest DNA” record, from a mammoth tooth around a million years old.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you can go at least one or perhaps a few million years further back, assuming you can find the right samples,” Dalen said.
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