Tag: Paleontology

2.9-million-year-old butchery site reopens case of who made first stone tools

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Newswise — Along the shores of Africa’s Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, according to new research led by scientists with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Queens College, CUNY, as well as the National Museums of Kenya, Liverpool John Moores University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

The study, published today, Feb. 9, in the journal Science, presents what are likely to be the oldest examples of a hugely important stone-age innovation known to scientists as the Oldowan toolkit, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals. Though multiple lines of evidence suggest the artifacts are likely to be about 2.9 million years old, the artifacts can be more conservatively dated to between 2.6 and 3 million years old, said lead study author Thomas Plummer of Queens College, research associate in the scientific team of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program.

Excavations at the site, named Nyayanga and located on the Homa Peninsula in western Kenya, also produced a pair of massive molars belonging to the human species’ close evolutionary relative Paranthropus. The teeth are the oldest fossilized Paranthropus remains yet found, and their presence at a site loaded with stone tools raises intriguing questions about which human ancestor made those tools, said Rick Potts, senior author of the study and the National Museum of Natural History’s Peter Buck Chair of Human Origins.

“The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools,” Potts said. “But finding Paranthropus alongside these stone tools opens up a fascinating whodunnit.”

Whichever hominin lineage was responsible for the tools, they were found more than 800 miles from the previously known oldest examples of Oldowan stone tools—2.6-million-year-old tools unearthed in Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia. This greatly expands the area associated with Oldowan technology’s earliest origins. Further, the stone tools from the site in Ethiopia could not be tied to any particular function or use, leading to speculation about what the Oldowan toolkit’s earliest uses might have been.

Through analysis of the wear patterns on the stone tools and animal bones discovered at Nyayanga, Kenya, the team behind this latest discovery shows that these stone tools were used by early human ancestors to process a wide range of materials and foods, including plants, meat and even bone marrow.

The Oldowan toolkit includes three types of stone tools: hammerstones, cores and flakes. Hammerstones can be used for hitting other rocks to create tools or for pounding other materials. Cores typically have an angular or oval shape, and when struck at an angle with a hammerstone, the core splits off a piece, or flake, that can be used as a cutting or scraping edge or further refined using a hammerstone.

“With these tools you can crush better than an elephant’s molar can and cut better than a lion’s canine can,” Potts said. “Oldowan technology was like suddenly evolving a brand-new set of teeth outside your body, and it opened up a new variety of foods on the African savannah to our ancestors.”

Potts and Plummer were first drawn to the Homa Peninsula in Kenya by reports of large numbers of fossilized baboon-like monkeys named Theropithecus oswaldi, which are often found alongside evidence of human ancestors. After many visits to the peninsula, a local man named Peter Onyango working with the team suggested they check out fossils and stone tools eroding from a nearby site that was ultimately named Nyayanga after an adjacent beach.

Beginning in 2015, a series of excavations at Nyayanga returned a trove of 330 artifacts, 1,776 animal bones and the two hominin molars identified as belonging to Paranthropus. The artifacts, Plummer said, were clearly part of the stone-age technological breakthrough that was the Oldowan toolkit.

Compared to the only other stone tools known to have preceded them—a set of 3.3-million-year-old artifacts unearthed at a site called Lomekwi 3, just west of Lake Turkana in Kenya—Oldowan tools were a significant upgrade in sophistication. Oldowan tools were systematically produced and often fashioned using what is known as “freehand percussion,” meaning the core was held in one hand and then struck with a hammerstone being wielded by the opposing hand at just the right angle to produce a flake—a technique that requires significant dexterity and skill.

By contrast, most of the artifacts from Lomekwi 3 were created by using large stationary rocks as anvils, with the toolmaker either banging a core against the flat anvil stone to create flakes or by setting the core down on the anvil and striking it with a hammerstone. These more rudimentary modes of fabrication resulted in larger, cruder and more haphazard-looking tools.

Over time, the Oldowan toolkit spread all the way across Africa and even as far as modern-day Georgia and China, and it was not meaningfully replaced or amended until some 1.7 million years ago when the hand-axes of the Acheulean first appeared.

As part of their study, the researchers conducted microscopic analysis of wear patterns on the stone tools to determine how they were used, and they examined any bones seen to exhibit potential cut marks or other kinds of damage that might have come from stone tools.

The site featured at least three individual hippos. Two of these incomplete skeletons included bones that showed signs of butchery. The team found a deep cut mark on one hippo’s rib fragment and a series of four short, parallel cuts on the shin bone of another. Plummer said they also found antelope bones that showed evidence of hominins slicing away flesh with stone flakes or of having been crushed by hammerstones to extract marrow.

The analysis of wear patterns on 30 of the stone tools found at the site showed that they had been used to cut, scrape and pound both animals and plants. Because fire would not be harnessed by hominins for another 2 million years or so, these stone toolmakers would have eaten everything raw, perhaps pounding the meat into something like a hippo tartare to make it easier to chew.

Using a combination of dating techniques, including the rate of decay of radioactive elements, reversals of Earth’s magnetic field and the presence of certain fossil animals whose timing in the fossil record is well established, the research team was able to date the items recovered from Nyayanga to between 2.58 and 3 million years old.

“This is one of the oldest if not the oldest example of Oldowan technology,” Plummer said. “This shows the toolkit was more widely distributed at an earlier date than people realized, and that it was used to process a wide variety of plant and animal tissues. We don’t know for sure what the adaptive significance was but the variety of uses suggests it was important to these hominins.”

The discovery of teeth from the muscular-jawed Paranthropus alongside these stone tools begs the question of whether it might have been that lineage rather than the Homo genus that was the architect of the earliest Oldowan stone tools, or perhaps even that multiple lineages were making these tools at roughly the same time.

The excavations behind this study offer a snapshot of the world humans’ ancestors inhabited and help illustrate the ways that stone technology allowed these early hominins to adapt to different environments and, ultimately, give rise to the human species.

“East Africa wasn’t a stable cradle for our species’ ancestors,” Potts said. “It was more of a boiling cauldron of environmental change, with downpours and droughts and a diverse, ever-changing menu of foods. Oldowan stone tools could have cut and pounded through it all and helped early toolmakers adapt to new places and new opportunities, whether it’s a dead hippo or a starchy root.”

This research was supported by funding from the Smithsonian, the Leakey Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the City University of New York, the Donner Foundation and the Peter Buck Fund for Human Origins Research.

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February 9, 2023
Evolution of wheat spikes since the Neolithic revolution

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Newswise — Around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution radically changed the economy, diet and structure of the first human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. With the beginning of the cultivation of cereals —such as wheat and barley— and the domestication of animals, the first cities emerged in a new social context marked by a productive economy. Now, a study published in the journal Trends in Plant Science and co-led by the University of Barcelona, the Agrotecnio centre and the University of Lleida, analyses the evolution of wheat spikes since its cultivation began by the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia —the cradle of agriculture in the world— between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The authors of the study are Rut Sánchez-Bragado and Josep Lluís Araus-Ortega, from the UB Faculty of Biology and Agrotecnio-UdL; Gustavo A. Slafer, ICREA researcher at the UdL School of Agrifood and Forestry Science and Engineering, and Gemma Molero, from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, currently a researcher at KWS Seeds Inc.

A cereal that changed human history

The cultivation of wheat —a grass that became basic food— represented a turning point in the progress of human civilisation. Today it is the world’s most important crop in terms of food security, but EU data warn that the impact of climate change could significantly increase its price and modify its production process in certain areas of the world.

Throughout the domestication process of wheat, the plant phenotype has undergone both rapid (within a few hundred years) and slow (thousands of years) changes, such as the weakening of the rachis, the increase in seed size, and the reduction or disappearance of the awns. In particular, awned and awnless wheat varieties are found all over the world, although the latter tend to be abundant in regions with arid climates, especially during the final stages of cultivation in late spring, a condition typical of Mediterranean environments.

“It is important to conduct studies that show which wheat varieties are best adapted to different environmental growing conditions, especially in a context of climate change. Studying the past retrospectively can give us an idea of the evolution of wheat cultivation over the millennia since agriculture appeared in ancient Mesopotamia”, says Rut Sánchez-Bragado, first author of the study, who got a PhD at the UB.

“Awns are organs of the spike that have traditionally been associated with the plant’s adaptations to drought conditions”, says Josep Lluís Araus, professor at the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology.

“However, archaeological and historical records show that the wheat spike has existed predominantly with awns for more than ten millennia after the domestication of wheat. It is not until the last millennium that evidence shows in many cases the absence of awns, indicating a selection by farmers —probably in an undirected way— against this organ”, stresses Araus, one of the most cited authors in the world according to Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researchers (2022).

“The role of wheat awns in their performance remains controversial despite decades of studies”, says researcher Gustavo A. Slafer, corresponding author of the study.

Spike awns: beneficial for the plant?

Is the presence of awns on the spike beneficial for the plant and the crops? Although there is no scientific consensus, “everything suggests that in conditions where the plant does not suffer from water stress, the extra photosynthetic capacity of the awns does not compensate for other potential negative effects (reduced susceptibility to fungal diseases, limitation in the total number of large ones that an ear supports, etc.)”, says Araus.

“However, in wetter climates the awns accumulate moisture and can promote the spread of diseases”, says Rut Sánchez-Bragado. “So, as the world’s population is continuously growing, it is necessary to investigate the role of the awned spikes in the changing conditions of our climate in order to meet the world’s demand for a primary food commodity such as wheat”.

In arid conditions, the spikes —including the awns— “have better physiological characteristics than the leaves. In addition, the awns allow the light captured by the crop to be more diffused, which facilitates a better distribution of light energy and allows the crop to photosynthesise more. Therefore, in arid conditions, the awns can still be beneficial for the crop, or at most, neutral”, concludes Professor Josep Lluís Araus.

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Universidad De Barcelona

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February 2, 2023
Tying past mass extinctions with low atmospheric CO2 is false

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Newswise — Attempts to discredit human-caused climate change by touting graphs of prehistoric atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature changes are not something new. Peter Clack, an out-spoken climate change skeptic has once again tried to make a point that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are comparatively low compared to past eras. In this recent tweet, shared by thousands, Clack includes a graph from the work of Chris Scotese, an American geologist and paleogeographer, which shows that current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are relatively low compared to past events and that the only other time CO2 levels were this low was during the early Permian geological era, which spans 47 million years from the end of the Carboniferous Period 298.9 million years ago, to the beginning of the Triassic Period 251.9 million years ago. Clack mentions the “greatest extinction event in world history,” also known as the Permian Extinction as if this happened despite the low atmospheric CO2 recorded. However, most geological scientists contend that the Permian extinction occurred over the course of 15 million years during the latter part of the Permian Period (299 million to 252 million years ago).* Does this at all negate human-caused climate change that is happening in our own era? Of course not. In fact, this observation only backs the belief that a rise in global temperatures (and a sharp rise in CO2) impacts the living species on the planet. The main difference is that today’s fast rise in global temperatures can be prevented by the de-escalation of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Permian extinction was characterized by the elimination of about 90 percent of the species on Earth. Although the exact cause of the mass extinction event has been debated in the past, a recent study from 2018 showed that the Permian mass extinction in the oceans was most likely caused by global warming that left animals unable to breathe. In fact, there was a steep rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the late Permian era, as the Scotese graph shows. Scientists believe that this was caused by considerable volcanic activity in present-day Siberia (tied to the dismantling of the supercontinent of Pangaea). This event points to rising CO2 and temperatures drastically affecting the biosphere.

Chris Cramer, chief research officer at Underwriters Laboratories explains…

The first and second graphs in this Tweet show that the first claim (600 million year minimum) and second claim (lowest global temperatures) are demonstrably false.

Any relationship between the Permian extinction event and a local minimum in CO2 (relative to prior higher levels) simply shows how catastrophic it can be to living organisms when there is a significant change in CO2 levels, and associated temperatures, just as is happening right now with human activity driving CO2 above 400 ppm for the first time in millennia.

Andrew Dessler, director of Texas Center for Climate Studies and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M also chimes in…

So what’s wrong with this claim? It suggests that low CO2 is the cause of the extinction. I am not an expert on this, but I think the extinction has actually been linked to extensive volcanism that was occurring at about that same time. In addition, 250 years ago the Earth had 280 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and the biosphere was doing just fine. In fact, during the ice age (20,000 years ago), atmospheric CO2 was 180 ppm and the biosphere did OK.

*https://www.britannica.com/science/Permian-extinction/Alteration-of-the-carbon-cycle

Note to Journalists/Editors: The expert quotes are free to use in your relevant articles on this topic. Please attribute them to their proper sources.

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Newswise

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January 31, 2023
Family tree secrets: Island tree populations older, more diverse than expected

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Newswise — Tsukuba, Japan—It’s often assumed that island plant and animal populations are just the simple, fragile cousins of those on the mainland. But now, researchers from Japan have discovered that island populations may be a lot tougher and more complex than previously thought.

In a recently published study, a research group led by the University of Tsukuba has revealed that the northernmost island populations of Siebold’s beech, Fagus crenata, are older and genetically more diverse than expected.

Island and mainland populations often differ as a result of islands’ geographical isolation, which is often assumed to restrict the genetic diversity of their populations. However, a number of studies on land plants have shown that island populations have considerable genetic diversity despite their remoteness, indicating that the processes underlying their diversity are more complex than previously thought.

“Although many island populations have existed for thousands of years or longer, the origins of some of them are still unknown,” says Professor Yoshiaki Tsuda, the main author of the study. “This includes Japan’s northernmost island populations of the native species F. crenata.”

The research group investigated populations of F. crenata on Okushiri Island in the Japan Sea, which is thought to have broken away from the mainland in the Middle Pleistocene (the Ice Age, which occurred 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago), and remained separate ever since. The northward spread of this species began on the mainland approximately 6,000 years ago, after the last glacial maximum (LGM). The researchers studied the genetics of the island’s populations and those of nearby regions, and found that the island’s populations had high genetic diversity, and may not have arisen from a single colonization event.

The Okushiri Island populations had a comparable number of private alleles (genetic sequences that are present in a single population and essentially absent in other populations) to the populations studied on nearby Hokkaido, which points to the existence of relict populations on Okushiri Island. A relict is a population of organisms that was more widespread or more diverse in the past in a restricted area.

Taken together with palaeoecological and vegetation studies, as well as the island’s geology, these results indicate that F. crenata persisted in cryptic refugia (places where climatically sensitive species can survive regardless of incompatibility with the regional climate) on the island.

“Our evidence indicates that populations of this species already existed on Okushiri Island prior to the LGM, and persisted there for longer than previously thought,” explains Professor Tsuda. The results of this study contribute to a growing body of evidence that island plant populations are more genetically diverse than previously estimated, which has implications for research and management of island species conservation, and the study of gene flow between island and mainland populations.

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This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (JP17K07852 and JP20K06152) and Core-to-Core Program (Asia-Africa Science Platforms: JPJSCCB20220007) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the 27th Pro Natura Fund Grant Program from the Pro Natura Foundation Japan.

_{Original Paper}

The article, “Possible northern persistence of Siebold’s beech, Fagus crenata, at its northernmost distribution limit on an island in Japan Sea: Okushiri Island, Hokkaido,” was published in Frontiers in Plant Science at DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2022.990927

_{Correspondence}

Associate Professor TSUDA Yoshiaki
Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba

_{Related Link}

Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences
Sugadaira Research Station, Mountain Science Center

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University of Tsukuba

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January 20, 2023
Unusual dinosaur fossil discovery made in India | CNN

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CNN
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Paleontologists working in central India have made a rare discovery — a fossilized dinosaur hatchery with 92 nests and 256 eggs belonging to colonies of giant plant-eating titanosaurs.

A study of the nests and their bowling ball-size eggs has revealed intimate details about the lives of the colossal, long-necked sauropods that lumbered across what’s now central India more than 66 million years ago.

The eggs, which ranged between 15 centimeters and 17 centimeters (6 inches and 6.7 inches) in diameter, likely belonged to a number of titanosaur species. The number of eggs in each nest ranged from one to 20, said lead study author Guntupalli Prasad, a paleontologist in the department of geology at the University of Delhi. Many of the nests were found close together.

The findings suggested titanosaurs, among the largest dinosaurs to have lived, were not always the most attentive parents, Prasad said.

“Since titanosaurs were huge in size, closely spaced nests would not have allowed them to visit the nests to maneuver and incubate the eggs or feed the hatchlings … as the parents would step on the eggs and trample them.”

Finding a very large number of dinosaur nests is unusual, as preservation conditions have to be “just so” to have turned all the delicate eggs to fossils, said Dr. Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor of dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Calgary in Canada, who studies dinosaur eggs. Zelenitsky was not involved in the research.

The first dinosaur eggs in the region were discovered in the 1990s, but the latest study focused on a nesting site in Dhar district in the state of Madhya Pradesh, where excavations and fieldwork took place in 2017, 2018 and 2020.

The eggs discovered there were so well preserved that the team was able to detect degraded protein fragments from the eggshells.

Titanosaurs’ nesting behaviors shared characteristics with that of today’s birds and crocodiles, the research suggested.

From the close proximity of the nests, researchers inferred the dinosaurs laid eggs together in colonies or rookeries, as many birds do in the present day.

“Such nesting colonies would have been a sight to see back in the Cretaceous where the landscape would have been dotted by a huge number of large dinosaur nests,” Zelenitsky said.

Prasad said one particular egg — known as an ovum-in-ovo, or egg-in-egg — the team had studied showed birdlike reproductive behavior and indicated that, similar to birds, some dinosaurs may have laid eggs sequentially. Ovum-in-ovo forms happen in birds when an egg becomes embedded in another egg still in the process of forming before they are laid.

“Sequential laying is the release of eggs one by one with some time gap in between two laying events. This is seen in birds. Modern reptiles, for example turtles and crocodiles, on the other hand, lay all eggs together as a clutch,” he said.

The eggs would have been laid in marshy flatlands and buried in shallow pits, akin to the nesting sites of modern-day crocodiles, Prasad said. Similar to crocodile hatcheries, nesting close to water may have been important to prevent the eggs from drying out and offspring dying prior to hatching, Zelenitsky added.

But unlike birds and crocodiles, which both incubate their eggs, Prasad said that, based on the physical characteristics of the nests, titanosaurs likely laid their eggs and then left the baby dinos to fend for themselves — although more data is needed to be sure.

Other dinosaurs were thought to be more attentive parents. A dinosaur was discovered in Mongolia in the 1920s, for example, lying near a nest of eggs thought to belong to a rival. Paleontologists at the time assumed the animal had died while attempting to plunder the nest — and named the creature oviraptor, or “egg thief.”

The so-called dinosaur thief’s reputation wasn’t restored until the 1990s, when another discovery revealed the eggs were, in fact, its own and that the creature likely sat upon them in a neatly arranged nest.

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January 18, 2023
9-year-old Maryland girl discovers ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ megalodon tooth | CNN

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CNN
—

A 9-year-old aspiring paleontologist found the find of a lifetime on Christmas morning: a massive 5-inch tooth from a prehistoric megalodon.

Molly Sampson, a fourth grader from Prince Frederick, Maryland, made the astonishing find on Calvert Beach.

Molly told CNN that she has spent years combing Maryland’s beaches for shark teeth, inspired by her father’s love of fossils.

“They’re just cool because they’re really old,” she said.

Molly’s mother Alicia Sampson added that her daughter has long harbored a love of exploring the outdoors. “She loves treasure hunting,” she explained.

Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs State Park is known as a hotspot for fossil finding, Alicia Sampson added.

For Christmas, Molly asked her parents for cold-water waders so that she could hunt for shark teeth and other fossils in the Chesapeake Bay. Equipped with her new gear, she set out at 9:30 a.m. to search for the remnants of ancient predators.

“I saw something big, and it looked like a shark tooth,” she said. “We were about knee deep in the water.”

She explained that she tried to grab the tooth with a sifting tool, but it was too big. She was “amazed” when she realized just how large the tooth was. “I was so excited and surprised.”

The Sampsons took their exciting find to the Calvert Marine Museum, where paleontology curator Stephen Godfrey confirmed their suspicions: It was indeed the tooth of a megalodon, the massive sharks that lived more than 23 million years ago.

Godfrey told CNN that there are usually only five or six megalodon teeth comparable in size to Molly’s find discovered along Calvert Cliffs each year.

“There are people that can spend a lifetime and not find a tooth the size Molly found,” he said.

“This is like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of find.”

Amateur fossil hunters typically find around 100 megalodon teeth on Calvert Cliffs per year, he added. But most of them are much smaller than Molly’s huge tooth. The largest megalodon teeth ever found have been just over 7 inches.

The size of the tooth indicates that this particular megalodon was between 45 and 50 feet long.

Godfrey explained that millions of years ago, the waters off Calvert Cliffs would have been home to whales and dolphins that would have served as bountiful prey for megalodons looking to eat. Because sharks replace their teeth over the course of their lives and because the teeth are made up of hardy enamel, they are “by far the most abundant vertebrate fossil.”

Megalodons hold a particular fascination for humans because they served as the “apex predator on Earth” for millions of years, he said.

Both Godfrey and Alicia Sampson said they hope Molly’s find helps inspire other children, especially girls, to pursue their scientific interests.

“This will inspire people of all ages, children included, to pursue their natural inclination in nature, art music, there’s so many possibilities that are available to us today,” said Godfrey.

Alicia Sampson said children around the globe have sent letters to Molly sharing their excitement at her discovery. She set up an Instagram page to share her daughters’ outdoor adventures.

“We really want to reach other kids and get them excited about like being outside,” she said.

Molly said she hopes to display the huge tooth in a shadowbox in her room – and one day hopes to become a paleontologist.

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January 15, 2023
New biography of famous palaeontologist Mary Anning unearthed from University of Bristol archives

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Newswise — A short biography of pioneering scientist Mary Anning, written in the final ten years of her life, has been made public for the very first time.

Penned by George Roberts (1804–1860), who ran a private school opposite Anning’s fossil shop in Lyme Regis, and preserved in the Special Collections of the University of Bristol Library, the work has been published by Dr Michael Taylor of National Museums Scotland and University of Leicester and Professor Michael Benton of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences.

Mary Anning (1799–1847) of Lyme Regis has been the subject of recent books and films, such as Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, and Ammonite, in which she was portrayed by Kate Winslet, because of her importance in the early days of palaeontology. She collected some of the first marine reptiles – ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs – from the Jurassic period of the Dorset coast. Noted professors relied on her work to provide insights into the life of the past.

Mary Anning has become an icon of the often-forgotten contributions of women to science, and the campaign to get children, especially girls, interested in geology. But, in her day, she was a curiosity, another poor person in the Regency seaside resort of Lyme Regis.

“When the Library sent me a copy of the four-page manuscript, I found that it was based partly on a passage in Roberts’s history of Lyme Regis,” said Dr Taylor. “Roberts wrote books like ‘The Beauties of Lyme Regis’ for tourists, and he collected interesting pieces of information. We were able to confirm Anning expert Hugh Torrens’s suggestion that it was by Roberts, by identifying Roberts’s handwriting, and comparing the corrections and even a mistake with a particular date which Roberts had handwritten into his own copy of his history. So, it wasn’t just someone else copying from his book. It looks as if it was written as a dictionary entry or a section for a future book.”

“This memoir is valuable,” said Prof Benton. “One or two visitors to Lyme Regis mentioned Mary Anning and her little fossil shop, and she was obviously widely known to natural scientists in London, Bristol, Oxford, and Cambridge. But normally they would not enquire into her life in any detail. Admittedly though, when she died at the relatively young age of 48, she had obituaries in various papers and scientific journals.”

Dr Taylor said: “These short obituaries were often copied from one written by George Roberts. George Roberts lived in Lyme Regis and met her many times. He describes how she was struck by lightning as a baby, and then how at the age of about ten she began collecting fossils, and how she sold her first find, an ammonite to a passing lady in the street for half a crown.”

There are further details of her discoveries of fossil reptiles, including the first ichthyosaur fossil studied by scientists. It was described by Sir Everard Home in 1818. Mary Anning was granted a government annuity of £25 per year in 1836 thanks to an intervention by Fellows of the Geological Society of London, and she died of breast cancer in 1847.

“We dated the manuscript as written some time in 1837–47,” added Dr Taylor, “because there is an ‘1837’ watermark in the paper, and Anning was described as a ‘living worthy’. Later, Roberts took the manuscript, deleted mention of Anning as alive, and added information on her death to make it into an obituary, presumably just after she died. But it seems never to have been published at its full length.”

Prof Benton concluded: “We are very pleased that we are able to publish the document in full.

“In the paper, we show detailed photographs of all four pages of the document, as well as our reading of the various versions and modifications. George Roberts was the locally-based author who reported the news from Lyme Regis to various newspapers and wrote his own books, so it makes complete sense that he would have written about Mary Anning as a well-known celebrity of the town.”

Paper:

‘The life of Mary Anning, fossil collector of Lyme Regis: a contemporary biographical memoir by George Roberts’ by Michael A. Taylor and Michael J. Benton in Journal of the Geological Society.

Notes to Editors

The memoir (DM Ref SCUBL DM1186/5/1) is in the collection of books and manuscripts in the history of geology made by Joan M. Eyles (1907–1986) and Victor A. Eyles (1895–1978) and donated by Joan Eyles to the University of Bristol Library.

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January 11, 2023
New Research Finds Satellite Imagery Could Improve Fossil-Hunting at Remote Sites

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Paleontologists discover satellite imagery could help paleontologists spot promising fossil sites before trekking into remote places.

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University of Oregon

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January 9, 2023
Climate change played key role in dinosaur success story

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Newswise — Climate change, rather than competition, played a key role in the ascendancy of dinosaurs through the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods.

According to new research, changes in global climate associated with the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction – which wiped out many large terrestrial vertebrates such as the giant armadillo-like aetosaurs – actually benefitted the earliest dinosaurs.

In particular, sauropod-like dinosaurs, which became the giant herbivore species of the later Jurassic like Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, were able to thrive and expand across new territories as the planet warmed up after the extinction event, 201 million years ago.

The new evidence is published in Current Biology, by an international team of palaeontologists led by the Universities of Birmingham and Bristol, in the UK, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), in Germany, and the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

The team compared computer models of prehistoric global climate conditions such as temperature and rainfall with data on the different locations of dinosaurs taken from sources such as the Paleobiology Database. They showed how the sauropods, and sauropod-like animals, with their long tails and necks and small heads, were the runaway success story of a turbulent period of evolution.

Dr Emma Dunne, now a lecturer in palaeontology at FAU, carried out the research while at the University of Birmingham. She said: “What we see in the data suggests that instead of dinosaurs being outcompeted by other large vertebrates, it was variations in climate conditions that were restricting their diversity. But once these conditions changed across the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, they were able to flourish.

“The results were somewhat surprising, because it turns out that sauropods were really fussy from the get-go: later in their evolution they continue to stay in warmer areas and avoid polar regions.”

Co-author on the paper, Professor Richard Butler, at the University of Birmingham, said: “Climate change appears to have been really important in driving the evolution of early dinosaurs. What we want to do next is use the same techniques to understand the role of climate in the next 120 million years of the dinosaur story”.

The research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the European Research Council.

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December 16, 2022
Scientists discover what was on the menu of the first dinosaurs

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Newswise — The earliest dinosaurs included carnivorous, omnivorous and herbivorous species, according to a team of University of Bristol palaeobiologists.

By looking at the tooth shapes of the earliest dinosaurs and simulating their tooth function with computational modelling, experts were able to compare them to living reptiles and their diets. Their findings, published today in Science Advances, show that many groups of plant-eating dinosaurs were ancestrally omnivorous and that the ancestors of our famous long-necked herbivores, such as Diplodocus, ate meat. This ability to diversify their diets early in their evolution likely explains their evolutionary and ecological success.

The earliest dinosaurs are enigmatic: they were much smaller than their later relatives and for most of the Triassic they were in the shadow of the crocodile-like reptiles. It is unknown how diverse they were in terms of diets and ecology, but scientists know something must have happened in the Triassic that allowed dinosaurs to endure the Triassic–Jurassic mass extinction and adapt in its aftermath, becoming the dominant group for the rest of the Mesozoic.

Lead author Dr. Antonio Ballell from the University of Bristol said “Soon after their origin, dinosaurs start to show an interesting diversity of skull and tooth shapes. For decades, this has made palaeontologists suspect that different species were already experimenting with different kinds of diets. They have compared them to modern lizard species and tried to infer what they ate based on the similarities in their teeth.

“We investigated this by applying a set of computational methods to quantify the shape and function of the teeth of early dinosaurs and compare them to living reptiles that have different diets. This included mathematically modelling their tooth shapes and simulating their mechanical responses to biting forces with engineering software.”

Professor Mike Benton, co-author of the study, said: “With this battery of methods, we were able to numerically quantify how similar early dinosaurs were to modern animals, providing solid evidence for our inferences of diets. Theropod dinosaurs have pointy, curved and blade-like teeth with tiny serrations, which behaved like those of modern monitor lizards. In contrast, the denticulated teeth of ornithischians and sauropodomorphs are more similar to modern omnivores and herbivores, like iguanas.”

The study is also innovative in using machine learning models to classify the earliest dinosaurs in different diet categories based on their tooth shape and mechanics. For instance, Thecodontosaurus, the Bristol dinosaur, had teeth well adapted for a diet of plants.

Professor Emily Rayfield, senior co-author, said: “Our analyses reveal that ornithischians – the group that includes many plant-eating species like the horned dinosaurs, the armoured ankylosaurs and the duck-billed dinosaurs – started off as omnivores. And another interesting finding is that the earliest sauropodomorphs, ancestors of the veggie long-necked sauropods like Diplodocus, were carnivores. This shows that herbivory was not ancestral for any of these two lineages, countering traditional hypotheses, and that the diets of early dinosaurs were quite diverse.”

Dr. Ballell concluded: “It seems that one of the things that made the first dinosaurs special is that they evolved different diets throughout the Triassic, and we think this might have been key for their evolutionary and ecological success.”

Dinosaurs dominated the land during the Mesozoic era until their extinction 66 million years ago. They included giant veggie groups like the long-necked sauropods and meat-eating species like Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives. However, their origins were much humbler and date back to the Triassic period, with the first definitive dinosaurs appearing approximately 235 million years ago.

Paper:

‘Dental form and function in the early feeding diversification of dinosaurs’ by Antonio Ballell, Michael J. Benton and Emily J. Rayfield in Science Advances.

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq5201

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December 16, 2022
Smilodon’s sabre teeth

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Newswise — A team of researchers led by Narimane Chatar, a doctoral student at the EDDyLab of the University of Liège (Belgium), has tested the biting efficiency of Smilodon, an extinct species of carnivore close to the extant felines. Using high-precision 3D scans and simulation methods, the team has just revealed how these animals managed to bite despite the impressive length of their teeth.

Ancient carnivorous mammals developed a wide range of skull and tooth shapes throughout their evolution. However, few of these evolutions have yet matched those of the iconic sabre-toothed felid Smilodon. Other groups of mammals, such as the now extinct nimravids, have also evolved a similar morphology, with species having sabre teeth but also much shorter canines, similar to those of the lions, tigers, caracals, domestic cats, etc. that we know today. This phenomenon of similar morphologies appearing in different groups of organisms is known as convergent evolution; felids and nimravids being an amazing example of convergence. As there are no modern equivalents of animals with such sabre-shaped teeth, the hunting method of Smilodon and similar species has remained obscure and hotly debated. It was first suggested that all sabre-toothed species hunted in the same way, regardless of the length of their canines, a hypothesis that is now controversial. So the question remained … how did this variety of ‘sabre-toothed cat’ hunt?

The enormous canines of the extinct sabre-toothed cat Smilodon imply that this animal had to open its jaw extremely wide, 110° according to some authors, in order to use them effectively,” explains Prof. Valentin Fischer, director of the EDDyLab at ULiège. However, the mechanical feasibility and efficiency of Smilodon and its relatives to bite at such a large angle is unknown, leaving a gap in our understanding of this very fundamental question about sabre-toothed predators.” Using high-precision 3D scanners and analytical methods derived from engineering, an international team of Belgian and North American scientists has just revealed how these animals probably used their impressive weapons.

Narimane Chatar, a PhD student at the EDDyLab of the University of Liege and lead author of the study, collected a large amount of three-dimensional data. She first scanned and modelled the skulls, mandibles and muscles of numerous extinct and extant species of felids and nimravids. “Each species was analysed in several scenarios: a bite was simulated on each tooth at three different biting angles: 30°, as commonly seen in extant felids, but also larger angles (60° and 90°). In total, we carried out 1,074 bite simulations to cover all the possibilities,” explains Narimane Chatar. To do this, the young researcher used the finite element method. This is an exciting application of the finite element approach, which allows palaeontologists to modify and computationally simulate different bite angles and to subject skull models to virtual stresses without damaging the precious fossil specimens,” says Prof. Jack Tseng, Professor and Curator of Palaeontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the study. Our comprehensive analyses provide the most detailed insight to date into the diversity and nuances of sabre tooth bite mechanics.”

One of the results obtained by the team is the understanding of the distribution of stress (pressure) on the mandible during biting. This stress shows a continuum across the animals analysed, with the highest values measured in species with the shortest upper canines and the lowest stress values measured in the most extreme sabre-toothed species. The researchers also noted that stress decreased with increasing bite angle, but only in sabre-toothed species. However, the way in which these animals transmitted force to the bite point and the deformation of the mandible resulting from the bite were remarkably similar across the dataset, indicating comparable effectiveness regardless of canine length.

“The results show both the possibilities and the limits of evolution; animals facing similar problems in their respective ecosystems often end up looking alike through convergent evolution. However, Narimane Chatar’s results also show that there can be several ways to be an effective killer, whether you are sabre-toothed or not,” concludes Valentin Fischer. This phenomenon, called ’many-to-one’ systems, means that distinct morphologies can result in a similar function, such as the fact that bears and cats are both efficient fishers. This multiplicity of morphologies indicates that there is no single optimal form of sabre-toothed predator.

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December 8, 2022
Oldest DNA reveals life in Greenland 2 million years ago

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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.

———

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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December 7, 2022
Fossil discovery in storeroom cupboard shifts origin of modern lizard back 35 million years

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Newswise — A specimen retrieved from a cupboard of the Natural History Museum in London has shown that modern lizards originated in the Late Triassic and not the Middle Jurassic as previously thought.

This fossilised relative of living lizards such as monitor lizards, gila monsters and slow worms was identified in a stored museum collection from the 1950s, including specimens from a quarry near Tortworth in Gloucestershire, South West England. The technology didn’t exist then to expose its contemporary features.

As a modern-type lizard, the new fossil impacts all estimates of the origin of lizards and snakes, together called the Squamata, and affects assumptions about their rates of evolution, and even the key trigger for the origin of the group.

The team, led by Dr David Whiteside of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, have named their incredible discovery Cryptovaranoides microlanius meaning ‘small butcher’ in tribute to its jaws that were filled with sharp-edged slicing teeth.

Dr Whiteside explained: “I first spotted the specimen in a cupboard full of Clevosaurus fossils in the storerooms of the Natural History Museum in London where I am a Scientific Associate. This was a common enough fossil reptile, a close relative of the New Zealand Tuatara that is the only survivor of the group, the Rhynchocephalia, that split from the squamates over 240 million years ago.

“Our specimen was simply labelled ‘Clevosaurus and one other reptile.’ As we continued to investigate the specimen, we became more and more convinced that it was actually more closely related to modern day lizards than the Tuatara group.

“We made X-ray scans of the fossils at the University, and this enabled us to reconstruct the fossil in three dimensions, and to see all the tiny bones that were hidden inside the rock.”

Cryptovaranoides is clearly a squamate as it differs from the Rhynchocephalia in the braincase, in the neck vertebrae, in the shoulder region, in the presence of a median upper tooth in the front of the mouth, the way the teeth are set on a shelf in the jaws (rather than fused to the crest of the jaws) and in the skull architecture such as the lack of a lower temporal bar. There is only one major primitive feature not found in modern squamates, an opening on one side of the end of the upper arm bone, the humerus, where an artery and nerve pass through. Cryptovaranoides does have some other, apparently primitive characters such as a few rows of teeth on the bones of the roof of the mouth, but experts have observed the same in the living European Glass lizard and many snakes such as Boas and Pythons have multiple rows of large teeth in the same area. Despite this, it is advanced like most living lizards in its braincase and the bone connections in the skull suggest that it was flexible.

“In terms of significance, our fossil shifts the origin and diversification of squamates back from the Middle Jurassic to the Late Triassic,” says co-author Professor Mike Benton. “This was a time of major restructuring of ecosystems on land, with origins of new plant groups, especially modern-type conifers, as well as new kinds of insects, and some of the first of modern groups such as turtles, crocodilians, dinosaurs, and mammals.

“Adding the oldest modern squamates then completes the picture. It seems these new plants and animals came on the scene as part of a major rebuilding of life on Earth after the end-Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago, and especially the Carnian Pluvial Episode, 232 million years ago when climates fluctuated between wet and dry and caused great perturbation to life.”

PhD research student Sofia Chambi-Trowell commented: “The name of the new animal, Cryptovaranoides microlanius, reflects the hidden nature of the beast in a drawer but also in its likely lifestyle, living in cracks in the limestone on small islands that existed around Bristol at the time. The species name, meaning ‘small butcher,’ refers to its jaws that were filled with sharp-edged slicing teeth and it would have preyed on arthropods and small vertebrates.”

Dr Whiteside concluded: “This is a very special fossil and likely to become one of the most important found in the last few decades. It is fortunate to be held in a National Collection, in this case the Natural History Museum, London. We would like to thank the late Pamela L. Robinson who recovered the fossils from the quarry and did a lot of preparation work on the type specimen and associated bones. It was such a pity she did not have access to CT scanning technology to help her observe all the detail of the specimen.”

The paper:

‘A Triassic crown clade squamate’ by Whiteside, D. I., Chambi-Trowell, S. A. V., and Benton, M J. Science Advances 8, eabq8274.

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University of Bristol

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December 2, 2022
Ancient giant sea turtle with never-before-seen features found in Europe, scientists say | CNN

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Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.

CNN
—

Long ago, gigantic marine turtles swam the Earth’s seas. Until recently, these prehistoric giants, reaching lengths of over 3 meters (10 feet) from head to tail, had been thought to be found only in waters surrounding North America.

Now, scientists have discovered a previously unknown species — the largest European sea turtle ever to be identified.

Initially found by a hiker who stumbled upon the remains in 2016 in the Pyrenees mountains of northern Spain, the species has been given the name Leviathanochelys aenigmatica. “Leviathan” is the biblical term for a sea monster, an allusion to the creature’s large body size, while “chelys” translates to turtle and “aenigmatica” translates to enigma — in reference to the turtle’s peculiar characteristics, wrote the authors of a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The unusual animal’s presence in this part of the prehistoric world revealed that giant turtles were more common than previously thought, according to the study.

Before the discovery, the largest European species measured at just 1.5 meters (5 feet) in length, similar to today’s leatherback sea turtles, which weigh an average of 300 to 500 kilograms (660 to 1,100 pounds) and measure 1 to 2 meters (or between 3 and 6.5 feet), according to the Smithsonian Institute.

The bone fragments of this newly identified species, however, have led scientists to estimate that Leviathanochelys had a 3.7-meter-long body (12.1 feet), almost as big as an average sedan.

“We never thought it was possible to find something like this. After quite a long study of the bone fragments, we realized that there were some features that were totally different, not present in any other fossil of a turtle species discovered so far,” said Albert Sellés, coauthor of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Spain.

Originally, researchers believed the bones belonged to a different kind of animal, according to Sellés.

“It is quite common to find bone fragments, a lot of them. But most of them are uninformative,” Sellés said. “It is quite rare to discover something that really tells you a little bit of the life of the past.”

A local museum and Catalonia’s Ministry of Culture had originally collected the bone specimens, but they remained unstudied for nearly five years. When Sellés and the other researchers began their work studying the bones in 2021, they realized they were looking at a species of marine turtle completely new to science, and quickly went back to the Pyrenees site to perform more excavations.

There, more fragments of the specimen, including pieces of the turtle’s pelvis and carapace — the part of the shell that covered the creature’s back — were discovered. With these finds, the scientists observed more features not previously seen in any living or dead turtle species.

“The main differences of this new fossil are related to the pelvic region. More specifically, to a couple of bony bumps present in the anterior part of the pelvis, which we suspect are related to some kind of muscle that controls the movement of the abdominal region of the turtle,” Sellés said.

This feature or muscle most likely impacted the turtles’ breathing capacity, allowing them to hold their breath longer than other turtle species, in order to swim deep in the ocean to find food or escape predators, according to Sellés.

The research team estimated the ancient animal lived during the Campanian Age of the Late Cretaceous Epoch, making it at least 72 million years old.

The largest turtle on record, called Archelon, lived some 70 million years ago and grew to be about 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. Before this recent discovery, all prehistoric giant marine turtle discoveries were part of the same lineage as Archelon.

“We’re proving that turtles could achieve really gigantic proportions in different times, and also in different families,” Sellés said. “For the first time, we found a (giant) turtle that doesn’t belong to this family.”

The researchers hope to return to the fossil site again to look for more bones, as they are not certain that all fragments from this specimen have been discovered, according to Sellés.

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November 29, 2022
FSU researchers find decrease in crucial trace element preceded ancient mass extinction

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Newswise — A decline in the element molybdenum across the planet’s oceans preceded a significant extinction event approximately 183 million years ago, new research from Florida State University shows.

The decrease may have contributed to the mass extinction, in which up to 90% of species in the oceans perished, and it suggests that much more organic carbon was buried in the extinction event — the Early Jurassic mass extinction — than had been previously estimated. The work is published in AGU Advances.

“This research tells us more about what was happening with molybdenum during this extinction event, but we also take it a step further,” said Jeremy Owens, an associate professor in FSU’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science and a paper co-author. “Our findings help us understand how much carbon was cycling through the system, and it’s much larger than previously thought — potentially on the scale of modern atmospheric and oceanic increases due to human activities.”

Previous research showed decreases in molybdenum during the main phase of the ancient mass extinction, but it was unclear how widespread the decrease was, how early it started or how long it lasted.

To answer those questions, the researchers analyzed rocks from three sites in Alberta, Canada, which had been part of a massive ocean that surrounded the ancient continent of Pangea. Because the site was connected to that global ocean, the researchers were able to infer conditions across the entire globe, instead of only a single basin.

They found new estimates for the start and duration of the molybdenum drawdown and the initial phase of deoxygenation. Their research showed that the decrease preceded the start of the extinction by about one million years, and it lasted about two million years in total, which is much longer than scientists had previously estimated.

The decrease in molybdenum also implies a massive increase in organic carbon burial in the ocean that may have been several times larger than previous calculations. Those calculations were based on estimations of carbon dioxide released from volcanic activity, implying that carbon dioxide release from volcanoes was actually much higher, which would be necessary to balance global carbon reservoirs.

Just like 183 million years ago, more and more carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth system today, which could reduce marine trace metals such as molybdenum that many organisms rely on for survival as the oceans lose oxygen and bury more organic carbon. After the ancient extinction event, global conditions gradually became more hospitable to life, but that process took hundreds of thousands of years.

“The uniqueness of the study sites has allowed us to take a deep look into how the chemistry of the global ocean changed across millions of years, which reconciles much of the current scientific debates that are focused on the local versus global aspects of this time interval,” said Theodore Them, a former postdoctoral fellow at FSU who is now an assistant professor at the College of Charleston.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology, Western Michigan University, Utrecht University, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University were co-authors in this study.

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Sloan Foundation.

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November 22, 2022
New pterosaur species found in sub-Saharan Africa

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Newswise — DALLAS (SMU) – With wings spanning nearly 16 feet, a new species of pterosaurs has been identified from the Atlantic coast of Angola.

An international team, including two vertebrate paleontologists from SMU, named the new genus and species Epapatelo otyikokolo. This flying reptile of the dinosaur age was found in the same region of Angola as fossils from large marine animals currently on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Pterosaur fossils that date back to the Late Cretaceous are extremely rare in sub-Saharan Africa, said team member Michael J. Polcyn, research associate in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences and senior research fellow, ISEM at SMU (Southern Methodist University).

“This new discovery gives us a much better understanding of the ecological role of the creatures that were flying above the waves of Bentiaba, on the west coast of Africa, approximately 71.5 million years ago,” Polcyn said.

Renowned paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, SMU professor emeritus of earth sciences and president of ISEM, an interdisciplinary institute at the university, also collaborated on the research. The team’s findings were published in the journal Diversity.

Epapatelo otyikokolo is believed to have been a fish-eating pterosaur that behaved similarly to large modern-day seabirds.

“They likely spent time flying above open-water environments and diving to feed, like gannets and brown pelicans do today,” Jacobs said. “Epapatelo otyikokolo was not a small animal, and its wingspan was approximately 4.8 m, or nearly 16 feet.”

But fossils discovered since the study suggest that some of the newly identified pterosaur species could have been even larger creatures, Polcyn said. Pterosaurs were impressive creatures, with some of the largest species having wingspans of nearly 35 feet.

The genus name ‘Epapatelo’ is the translation of the word from the Angolan Nhaneca dialect meaning “wing”, and the species name “otyikokolo” is the translation of ‘lizard.’ The Nhaneca or Nyaneka people are an Indigenous group from Angola’s Namibe Province, the region where the fossils were found.

The lead author of the study was Alexandra E. Fernandes, of Museu da Lourinhã, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and The Bavarian State Collection for Paleontology and Geology. Other co-authors include Octávio Mateus of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and Museu da Lourinhã; Brian Andres of the University of Sheffield; Anne S. Schulp of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Utrecht University in the Netherlands; and Antonio Olímpio Gonçalves of the Universidade Agostinho Neto in Angola.

Jacobs and Polcyn forged the Projecto PaleoAngola partnership with collaborators in Angola, Portugal, and the Netherlands to explore and excavate Angola’s rich fossil history, and began laying the groundwork for returning the fossils to the West African nation. Back in Dallas, Jacobs, Polcyn, and research associate Diana Vineyard went to work over a period of 13 years with a small army of SMU students to prepare the fossils excavated by Projecto PaleoAngola.

This international team discovered and collected the fourteen bones from Epapatelo otyikokolo in Bentiaba, Angola, starting in 2005. Bentiaba is located on a section of Angola coastline that Jacobs has called a “museum in the ground” because so many fossils have been found in the rocks there.

Many of those fossils are currently on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History “Sea Monsters Unearthed” exhibit, which was co-produced with SMU. It features large marine reptiles from the Cretaceous Period — mosasaurs, turtles, and plesiosaurs.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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November 11, 2022
Old bone links lost American parrot to ancient Indigenous bird trade

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Newswise — For centuries, Indigenous communities in the American Southwest imported colorful parrots from Mexico. But according to a study led by The University of Texas at Austin, some parrots may have been captured locally and not brought from afar.

The research challenges the assumption that all parrot remains found in American Southwest archaeological sites have their origins in Mexico. It also presents an important reminder: The ecology of the past can be very different from what we see today.

“When we deal with natural history, we can constrain ourselves by relying on the present too much,” said the study’s author, John Moretti, a doctoral candidate at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “These bones can give us kind of a baseline view of the animal life of the ecosystems that surrounded us before huge fundamental changes that continue today began.”

The study was published in print in the September issue of The Wilson Journal of Ornithology.

Parrots are not an uncommon find in southwestern archaeological sites dating as far back as the 7th or 8th centuries. Their remains have been found in elaborate graves and buried in trash heaps. But no matter the condition, when archaeologists have discovered parrot bones, they usually assumed the animals were imports, said Moretti.

There’s good reason for that. Scarlet macaws — the parrot most commonly found in the archaeological sites — live in rainforest and savannahs, which are not part of the local landscape. And researchers have discovered the remains of ancient parrot breeding facilities in Mexico that point to a thriving parrot trade.

But there is more to parrots than macaws. In 2018, Moretti found a lone ankle bone belonging to a species known as the thick-billed parrot. It was part of an unsorted bone collection recovered during an archaeological dig in the 1950s in New Mexico.

“There was a lot of deer and rabbit, and then this kind of anomalous parrot bone,” said Moretti, a student in the Jackson School’s Department of Geological Sciences. “Once I realized that nobody had already described this, I really thought there was a story there.”

Thick-billed parrots are an endangered species and do not live in the United States today due to habitat loss and hunting. But that was not the case even a relatively short time ago. As recently as the 1930s, their range stretched from Arizona and New Mexico to northern Mexico, where they live today. The boisterous, lime-green birds are also very particular about their habitat. They dwell only in mountainous old-growth pine forests, where they nest in tree hollows and dine almost exclusively on pine cones.

With that in mind, Moretti decided to investigate the connection between pine forests in New Mexico and Arizona and the remains of thick-billed parrots found at archaeological sites. He found that of the 10 total archaeological sites with positively identified thick-billed parrot remains, all contained buildings made of pine timber, with one settlement requiring an estimated 50,000 trees. And for half the sites, suitable pine forests were within 7 miles of the settlement.

Moretti said that with people entering parrot habitat, it’s plausible to think they captured parrots when gathering timber and brought them home.

“This paper makes the hypothesis that these [parrots] were not trade items,” Moretti said. “They were animals living in this region that were caught and captured and brought home just like squirrels and other animals that lived in these mountains.”

Moretti relied on thick-billed parrot bones from the United States and Mexico permanently archived in collections at The University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and the Smithsonian Institution to conclusively identify the lone bone that sparked the research. Mark Robbins, an evolutionary biologist and the collection manager of the ornithological collections at The University of Kansas, said this study shows the value of natural history collections and the innumerable ways they assist with research.

“The scientists who originally collected those specimens, they had no idea they would be used in this fashion,” Robbins said. “You can revisit old questions or formulate new questions based on these specimens.”

The research was funded by the Museum of Texas Tech University, where Moretti earned a master’s degree.

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University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin)

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November 8, 2022
Human Expansion 1,000 Years Ago Linked to Madagascar’s Loss of Large Vertebrates

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Newswise — The island of Madagascar—one of the last large land masses colonized by humans—sits about 250 miles (400 kilometers) off the coast of East Africa. While it’s still regarded as a place of unique biodiversity, Madagascar long ago lost all its large-bodied vertebrates, including giant lemurs, elephant birds, turtles, and hippopotami. A human genetic study reported in the journal Current Biology on November 4 links these losses in time with the first major expansion of humans on the island, around 1,000 years ago.

“This human demographic expansion was simultaneous with a cultural and ecological transition on the island,” says Denis Pierron, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) researcher in Toulouse, France. “Around the same period, cities appeared in Madagascar and all the vertebrates of more than 10 kilograms disappeared.”

The origins of humans in Madagascar has long been an enigma, Pierron explained. Madagascar is home to 25 million people who speak an Asian language despite the island’s proximity to East Africa. Other groups who speak similar languages live more than 4,000 miles away. The people that live on Madagascar are known to trace their roots back to two small populations: one Bantu-speaking from Africa and another Austronesian-speaking from Asia. But, beyond that, the history remained rather murky.

To retrace the history and understand more about the origin of Malagasy people, a multi-disciplinary consortium launched in 2007 a project known as Madagascar Genetic and Ethnolinguistic (MAGE). Over a 10-year period, Malagasy and international researchers visited more than 250 villages across the country to sample the cultural and genetic human diversity.

In the new study, Pierron and his colleagues took a close look at the human genetic evidence. More specifically, they closely studied how various segments of human chromosomes were shared together with local ancestry information and computer-simulated genetic data. Together, they’ve inferred that the Malagasy ancestral Asian population was isolated on the island for more than 1,000 years with an effective population size of just a few hundred individuals.

Their isolation ended about 1,000 years ago when a small group of Bantu-speaking African people came to Madagascar. Afterwards, the population continued to expand rapidly over generations. The growing human population led to extensive changes to the Madagascar landscape and the loss of all large-bodied vertebrates that once lived there, they suggest.

The findings have important implications that may now be applied to studies of other human populations. For instance, it shows it’s possible to untangle the demographic history of ancient populations even well after two or more groups have mixed, by using genetic data and computer simulations to test the likelihood of different scenarios. The findings also offer new insights into how past changes in human populations led to changes in whole ecosystems.

“Our study supports the theory that it was not directly the arrival of humans on the island that caused the disappearance of the megafauna, but rather a change in lifestyle that caused both a human population expansion and a reduction in biodiversity in Madagascar,” Pierron says.

While these efforts have led to much better understanding of Madagascar’s history, many intriguing questions remain. For instance, Pierron asks, “If the ancestral Asian population was isolated for more than a millennium before mixing with the African population, where was this population? Already in Madagascar or in Asia? Why did the Asian population isolate itself over 2,000 years ago? Around 1,000 years ago, what triggered the observed cultural and demographic transition?”

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This work was supported by the Région Aquitaine “Project MAGE” (Madagascar Genétique et Ethnolinguistique) and the French National Research Agency (ANR) Grants “MADEOGEN.”

Current Biology, Alva et al. “The loss of biodiversity in Madagascar is contemporaneous with major demographic events.” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01602-5

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit http://www.cell.com/current-biology.

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November 4, 2022
New Scottish Fossil Sheds Light on the Origins of Lizards

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Newswise — A fossil discovery from Scotland has provided new information on the early evolution of lizards, during the time of the dinosaurs.

The tiny skeleton discovered on the Isle of Skye, called Bellairsia gracilis, is only 6 cm long and dates from the Middle Jurassic, 166 million years ago. The exceptional new fossil comprises a near-complete skeleton in life-like articulation, missing only the snout and tail. This makes it the most complete fossil lizard of this age anywhere in the world.

Bellairsia has a mixture of ancestral and modern features in its skeleton, providing evidence of what the ancestor of today’s lizards (which are part of the wider animal group known as ‘squamates’) might have looked like.

The research, a joint project between researchers at the universities of Warsaw, Oxford and UCL, is reported in the journal Nature. First author Dr Mateusz Tałanda (University of Warsaw and UCL) said: ‘This little fossil lets us see evolution in action. In palaeontology you rarely have the opportunity to work with such complete, well-preserved fossils coming from a time about which we know so little.’

The fossil was found in 2016 by a team led by Oxford University and National Museums Scotland. It is one of several new fossil discoveries from the island, including early amphibians and mammals, which are revealing evolution of important animal groups that persist to the present day.

Dr Tałanda commented: ‘Bellairsia has some modern lizard features, like traits related to cranial kinesis – that’s the movement of the skull bones in relation to one another. This is an important functional feature of many living squamates.’

Co-author Dr Elsa Panciroli (Oxford University Museum of Natural History and National Museums Scotland) who discovered the fossil, said: ‘It was one of the first fossils I found when I began working on Skye. The little black skull was poking out from the pale limestone, but it was so small I was lucky to spot it. Looking closer I saw the tiny teeth, and realised I’d found something important, but we had no idea until later that almost the whole skeleton was in there.’

Squamates are the living group that includes lizards and snakes, and comprises more than 10,000 species today, making them one of the most species-rich living vertebrate animal groups. They include animals as diverse as snakes, chameleons, and geckos, found around the world. The group is characterised by numerous specialised features of the skull and rest of the skeleton.

Although we know the earliest origins of squamates lie 240 million years ago in the Triassic, a lack of fossils from the Triassic and Jurassic has made their early evolution and anatomy difficult to trace.

Analysing the new fossil alongside living and extinct fossil squamates confirms Bellairsia belongs to the ‘stem’ of the squamate family tree. This means that it split from other lizards just before the origin of modern groups. The research also supports the finding that geckos are a very early branching lineage, and that the enigmatic fossil Oculudentavis, previously suggested to be a dinosaur, is also a stem squamate.

To study the specimen, the team used X-ray computed tomography (CT) which, like medical CT, allows for non-invasive 3D imaging. This allowed the researchers to image the entire fossil, even though most of the specimen is still hidden by surrounding rock. Whereas medical scanners work at the millimetre scale, the Oxford University CT scanner revealed details down to a few tens of micrometres.

Parts of the skeleton were then imaged in even greater detail, including the skull, hindlimbs and pelvis, at the European Synchrotron (ESRF, Grenoble, France). The intensity of the synchrotron beam permits a resolution of 4 micrometres, revealing details of the smallest bones in the skeleton.

Co-author Professor Roger Benson (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford), said: ‘Fossils like this Bellairsia specimen have huge value in filling gaps in our understanding of evolution and the history of life on Earth. It used to be almost impossible to study such tiny fossils like this, but this study shows the power of new techniques including CT scanning to image these non-destructively and in great detail.’

Co-author Professor Susan Evans (UCL), who first described and named Bellairsia from a few jaw and skull bones from Oxfordshire 25 years ago, added: ‘It is wonderful to have a complete specimen of this tantalising little lizard, and to see where it fits in the evolutionary tree. Through fossils like Bellairsia we are gaining a better understanding of early lizard anatomy. Angus Bellairs, the lizard embryologist after which Bellairsia was originally named, would have been delighted.’

The study was led by Dr Mateusz Tałanda (University of Warsaw) and involved researchers from the University of Oxford’s Earth Sciences Department, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, UCL (University College London), the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, the Natural History Museum in London and National Museums of Scotland.

Funding was provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland. The John Muir Trust provided access to the Elgol Coast Site of Special Scientific Interest, and NatureScot granted permits for fossil collection.

Notes to Editors

The study will be published in Nature. The DOI number for this paper will be 10.1038/s41586-022-05332-6. Once the paper has been published online, it will be available at the following URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05332-6

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The Natural History Museum is both a world-leading science research centre and the most-visited indoor attraction in the UK last year. With a vision of a future in which both people and the planet thrive, it is uniquely positioned to be a powerful champion for balancing humanity’s needs with those of the natural world. It is custodian of one of the world’s most important scientific collections comprising over 80 million specimens accessed by researchers from all over the world both in person and via over 30 billion digital data downloads to date. The Museum’s 350 scientists are finding solutions to the planetary emergency from biodiversity loss through to the sustainable extraction of natural resources. The Museum uses its global reach and influence to meet its mission to create advocates for the planet – to inform, inspire and empower everyone to make a difference for nature. We welcome millions of visitors through our doors each year, our website has had 17 million visits in the last year and our touring exhibitions have been seen by around 20 million people in the last 10 years.

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October 26, 2022
What caused the holes in SUE the T. rex’s jaw? Probably not an infection

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Newswise — SUE the T. rex is one of the most complete, best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found. That level of preservation helps reveal details about SUE’s life. For instance, SUE lived to a ripe old age of about thirty-three, and in those years, suffered their fair share of injuries. SUE’s most mysterious ailment might be the holes in their jawbone. These holes, some the diameter of a golf ball, dot the back half of the left lower jaw. It’s not clear what caused them, but similar injuries have been found in other T. rex fossils. In a new study published in Cretaceous Research, scientists showed that one of the popular theories– that SUE had suffered an infection from a protozoan parasite– couldn’t be true.

“These holes in SUE’s jaw have been a mystery for decades,” says Jingmai O’Connor, the associate curator of fossil reptiles at Chicago’s Field Museum and a co-author of the study. “Nobody knows how they formed, and there have been lots of guesses.”

One early hypothesis was that SUE suffered from a fungus-like bacterial infection, but that was later shown to be unlikely. It was re-hypothesized that SUE had a protozoan infection. Protozoans are microbes with more complex cell structures than bacteria. There are lots of protozoan-caused maladies out there; one common such disease is called trichomoniasis, caused by a microbe called Trichomonas vaginalis. Humans can get infected with trichomoniasis as an STD, but other animals can catch it too.

“Trichomoniasis is found in birds, and there’s a falcon specimen with damage to its jaw, so some paleontologists thought that a Trichomonas-like protozoan might have caused similar damage to SUE,” says O’Connor. “So for this study, we wanted to compare the damage in SUE’s jaw with Trichomonas damage in other animals to see if the hypothesis fit.”

Bruce Rothschild, a medical doctor whose application of scientific medical approaches to paleontology earned him a role as a research associate at the Carnegie Museum, enlisted O’Connor’s assistance in analyzing SUE’s injuries. In March of 2021, O’Connor took high-resolution photos of the holes in SUE’s jaw, and the researchers analyzed them for signs of bone regrowth.

“This was the first time I’ve worked on a T. rex. I usually work on smaller fossil birds, and I have to admit, I was pretty excited,” says O’Connor. “It really is an incredible animal.”

The researchers compared the holes in SUE’s jaw to healed breaks in other fossil skeletons. In collaboration with Field Museum bioarcheologist Stacy Drake and co-author anthropologist María Cecilia Lozada from the University of Chicago, O’Connor and Rothschild also examined the healed bones around trepanation holes made in skulls by Inca surgeons and healers in ancient Peru.

“We found that SUE’s injuries were consistent with these other examples of bone injury and healing. There are similar little spurs of bone reforming,” says O’Connor. “Whatever caused these holes didn’t kill SUE, and the animal survived long enough for the bones to begin repairing themselves.”

O’Connor then worked with Field Museum assistant collections manager of birds Mary Hennen to find a bird skeleton in the Field’s collections with history of trichomoniasis. “She found me one, and you don’t see jaw holes,” says O’Connor. “You do see signs of infection, and they are in the back of the throat, but there aren’t holes bored through the jaw like we see in SUE.” Trichomonas, or a similar protozoan, doesn’t seem to fit.

So what did cause these holes, if not an infection? “We still don’t know. My co-author Bruce Rothschild thinks they’re bite or more likely claw marks, but I don’t think that makes sense,” says O’Connor. “The holes are only found in the back of the jaw. So if they are bite marks, why are there not also holes at the front of the jaw? And you don’t see rows of holes, or indentations, like you’d see from a row of teeth, even a row where the teeth are different heights. They’re just random, all over the place.”

Rothschild’s hypothesis suggests that the claw marks are the result of courtship behavior, possibly even between two male T. rex specimens. Scientists don’t know SUE’s sex, but the fossil’s size makes some paleontologists think SUE was male, and there are lots of examples of homosexual activity in nature. “The ‘gay T. rex’ hypothesis is fun, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence to support it one way or the other,” says O’Connor.

But if bite or claw marks (love bites or otherwise) are off the table, O’Connor says there are lots of possibilities remaining to explain the holes– some of which we maybe haven’t thought of yet. But she’s keen to help figure it out.

“The more I started learning about these jaw holes, the more I was like, ‘This is really weird,’” says O’Connor. “What I love about paleontology is trying to solve mysteries, so my interest is definitely piqued.”

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September 30, 2022