Tag: Paleontology News September 2021

Paleontology News for September 2021: A new large arthropod species discovered in the famous Burgess Shale. Plus a little pre-paleontology caused by Climate Change.

The main pursuit of paleontology is to learn the pathways by which Earth’s first creatures evolved into the species we see today, to study evolution in the field. In this month’s post I’ll be discussing stories that illustrate evolution from both the beginnings of multi-cellular life to observations of evolution in action today.

Of course the most familiar illustration of evolution is all about us! (Credit: History.com)

For most of life’s time here on Earth it consisted of nothing but single celled organisms. Then, about 600 million years ago the first simple multi-celled creatures came into being, creatures that have become known as the Ediacaran fauna. Because these first plants and animals had nothing in the way of hard parts however fossils of them are exceptionally rare and don’t reveal much about their anatomy.

The first multi-cellular living creatures had no hard parts so the fossil remains are very rare and don’t tell us a whole lot about the creatures. (Credit: Laidlaw Scholarships University of St. Andrews)

Animals with hard parts first appeared about 550 million years ago during the early Cambrian period and some of the best fossils from the Cambrian period are found in British Columbia in the world famous Burgess Shale and nearby fossil sites. The remarkable preservation of the fossils from the Burgess Shale is due to both the fine grained particles making up the shale as well as the fact that the animals that were fossilized seemed to have been buried intact in mudslides before their remains could be eaten by scavengers.

The most common fossil species found in the Burgess Shale is Marella splendens also known as the ‘Lace Crab’. This specimen is simply a beautiful fossil. (Credit: Smithsonian Institute)

As might be expected the creatures found in the Burgess Shale were mainly small, the size of a finger being rather common. After all multi-cellular life was brand new and it takes a while to go from being microscopic to the size of a human being let alone that of a whale.

Trilobites were amoung the largest and most advanced creatures during the Cambrian period. Today they would be considered small and primitive. (Credit: West Coast Traveler)

Size has its advantages however, particularly if you want to catch and eat other creatures. So it’s no surprise that the biggest animal yet discovered in the Burgess Shale, a creature known as Anomalocaris, was a predator about one meter in length. Despite its strangeness, the size of Anomalocaris made it the Tyrannosaurus rex of its day.

Considered the largest and fiercest predatory during the Cambrian, Anomalocaris was still only about a meter in length. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Now another large and equally strange creature has been discovered by paleontologists associated with the Royal Ontario Museum in an outcrop of shale near the Burgess Shale site in British Columbia and of the same age. Given the name Titanokorys gainesi the fossil belongs to a group of arthropods characterized by having a large, three part carapace covering most of their bodies that made them look almost like living heads.

With a head shield the covers more than half its body Titanokorys gainesi is related to Anomalocaris and appears to have lived by using it broad head as a plow to dig out food from the sand at the bottom of the ocean. (Credit: Sci-news.com)

T gainesi in particular had a broad, flat carapace about a half-meter in length along with multifaceted eyes and two spiny claws to grab food and bring it to a mouth shaped like a slice of pineapple. The paleontologists who described T gainesi speculate that the creature may have used its large carapace like a plow to stir up the muddy ocean bottom so that its claws could capture worms and other small animals.

As you might guess most of the fossil specimens of T gainesi discovered so far are of the creatures large head shield. (Credit: The Times of Israel)

T gainesi is yet another example of how, half a billion years ago evolution was experimenting to find solutions to the problems of how to survive in a hostile world. That same problem is still being faced by the life forms of today’s world but modern animals have the additional difficulty of having to adapt to a rapidly warming planet due to human induced climate change. In order to survive in this new environment Earth’s creatures must do what they have always done, adapt and evolve.

As usual Darwin got it right. It’s all about adapting! (Credit: Gihan Perera)

Now a new study by ornithologist Sara Ryding of Deakin University in Australia has described some of the changes that are already taking place in warm-blooded animals. Published in the journal ‘Trends in Ecology and Evolution’ the research details the anatomical changes, ‘shapeshifting’ that have been measured in a large number of bird and mammalian species.

The ancient myths about shapeshifters was all about adapting in order to survive. Maybe those ancient peoples weren’t as dumb as we think they were. (Credit: Deep Trance Now)

For example several species of Australian parrot have been found to be growing beaks that are 10% larger when compared to preserved specimens from 100 years ago. The same increase in beak size has also been found in North American dark-eyed juncos, a variety of songbird. In both cases the increase in bill size correlates positively with a measured increase in average temperature in the areas populated by the birds.

In order to better regulate their body temperature in a warming world Australian Parrots are growing bigger beaks! (Credit: ABC News)

In mammals such as wood mice and masked shrews a similar 10% increase has been measured in tail length and leg size. All of these adaptations have one thing in common, they provide the animal with a larger surface area to radiate heat and cool their body temperature. Again there is a clear connection for the larger body parts to rising temperatures in the animal’s habitat.

Several species of small mammals have also been discovered to be increasing the size of their tails and legs in order to increase surface area to aid in cooling their bodies in a warmer climate. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The fact that some species are evolving in response to global warming shouldn’t be taking as a sign that those animals are solving the problem of climate change however. As Doctor Ryding puts it, “shapeshifting does not mean that animals are coping with climate change and that all is ‘fine’. It just means that they are evolving to survive it. But we’re not sure what the other ecological consequences are, or indeed that all species are capable of changing and surviving.”

Those who cannot adapt become extinct, it’s as simple as that. The question then becomes, will we humans adapt to save our world or perish as a part of a new mass extinction? (Credit: National Geographic Society)

  Paleontologists have recognized at least six separate ‘mass extinctions’ in the fossil record. Some of these extinctions appear to have been caused by asteroid or comets impacting the Earth while others may have been due to massive volcanic eruptions. Right now our planet is experiencing another extinction event and there’s little doubt as to its cause, human beings!

Paleontology News for September 2021: Some Exciting new Fossil Discoveries from around the world.

As I have mentioned several times in these posts, 99% of the fossils that paleontologists, and amateurs like me find are the hard parts, the shells or bones of ancient animals. Soft tissue like muscles or internal organs are rarely preserved and even then they usually distorted in shape because of the enormous pressure they were under for millions of years. So it’s not surprising therefore that paleontologists got pretty excited recently by the discovery of a very well preserved 310 million year old brain.

Fossil Horseshoe Crab (L) showing its brain, closeup of the brain (C) and an illustration of how the brain would fit inside a living crab (R). (Credit: Phys.org)

The brain in question belonged to a specimen of a species of horseshoe crab called Euproops danae and was found at the Mazon Creek fossil site in Illinois. The Mazon Creek site is famous for its excellent preservation of fossils from the Pennsylvania period some 310 million years ago. Many completely soft bodied species have been discovered in the iron concretions at Mazon Creek and are known only from that site.

The Mazon Creek fossil location in the state of Illinois. The fossils at Mazon Creek are so well preserved that the locale is considered a ‘mother load’ by paleontologists and amateurs alike. (Credit: Field Museum)
A well preserved specimen of the enigmatic ‘Tully Monster’, the most famous creature found at Mazon Creek. (Credit: UCMP Berkeley)

The specimen of horseshoe crab was discovered and studied by a team of paleontologists from the University of New England in Australia, Harvard University in Massachusetts and Pomona College in California with the results published in the journal Geology. The identification of the preserved organ as the animal’s brain was made certain by comparing it to the brain of modern horseshoe crabs. So close is the resemblance that the fossil brain illustrates how little the horseshoe crabs have evolved in the last 300 million years, making them true ‘living fossils’.

A living fossil. Horseshoe crabs have changed very little over the last 400 million years, a true testament to a body design that fits in perfectly with its environment. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

So it seems that even some of the softest organs and even whole animals from the past can be preserved and studied, all that’s required to find one is patience and a lot of fossils to examine. But for those of us who associate fossils with big animals like dinosaurs it’s nice that big means big bones, bones that are more easily fossilized.

Let’s be honest, when most people think of fossils they think of bones because they are nice and large and hard. Because of that they fossilize well. (Credit: Wikipedia)

And the biggest of all the dinosaurs were the sauropods; those long necked and long tailed monsters like the Diplodocus and wrongly named Brontosaurus, whose scientifically accepted name is really Apatasaurus. Both Diplodocus and Apatasaurus were discovered more than a century ago in North America but sauropods have now been discovered on every continent. Recently new fossils from the early Cretaceous period, 120-130 million years ago in China are adding two new species of giants to that well-known group.

Rivaling whales as the largest of all living creatures, sauropod dinosaurs lived for more than 100 million years on every continent. (Credit: Amazon.com)

 The fossils were discovered in the Turpan-Hami Basin in the province of Xinjiang China and were described in an article published in the journal Science Reports. One specimen detailed in the study consisted of seven vertebra from the neck of a new species of sauropod that has been christened Silutitan sinensis and is estimated to have been some 20m in length. The second specimen is made up of seven vertebra from the tail of a different individual and is also described as a new species, which they have named Hamititan xinjiangensis. The researchers estimate the length of H xinjiangensis as being more than 17m.

Artists illustration of Hamititan xinjiangensis (L) and Silutitan sinensis (R) the largest dinosaurs known to have inhabited China. (Credit: ABC News)

The third specimen consists of only a few vertebra and rib fragments that the paleontologists have been unable to identify for certain as either a known or new species but are confident that they do come from a sauropod. These new species of sauropod not only add to the ever growing number of known dinosaur species but help to round out our knowledge of the cretaceous period in the far east.

Another part of the world whose Mesozoic past is also being uncovered is Australia where a new species of pterosaur has been described in an article published in the journal Vertebrate Paleontology, and it’s also a monster. The fossil skull of the flying reptile, pterosaurs are not dinosaurs, was discovered by a longtime amateur fossil hunter Len Shaw and has been given the name Thapunngaka shawi, which means ‘Shaw’s Spear Mouth’ in the local indigenous language.

The Skull of Thapunngaka shawi. Pterosaur bones are lighter than those of most animals, necessary for flying creatures, and therefore they don’t fossilize as well as a sauropod’s bones would. (Credit: Everything Dinosaur Blog)

The skull measures a little over a meter in length and would have contained about 40 sharp spiky teeth. By comparing it to related species researchers estimate that T shawi would have had a wingspan of about seven meters. The researchers speculate that T shawi probably flew above the vast inland sea that covered much of Australia back in the early cretaceous catching fish in much the same way as a modern pelican does.

Artists impression of T shawi in flight. With a wingspan of perhaps seven meters T shawi would have been a flying dragon indeed. (Credit: Bif Think)

In order to be able to fly the bones of pterosaurs were mostly hollow and easily broken. This makes fossils finds of pterosaurs rare and valuable, in fact the skull of T shawi is only the 20th pterosaur fossil to be found in Australia over the last 50 years. Nevertheless T shawi, like the sauropod species from China, does help to complete our picture of the living creatures who inhabited these parts of the world more than 100 million years ago.