Tag: Paleontology

Paleontology news for April 2020.

As you know the science of paleontology is about origins, where did life on this planet come from and how did it find its wandering way to us? Well the big story this month fills in a rather large piece to that puzzle. Fossil hunters in Australia think that they may have discovered evidence of the first animal!

As you may guess the first animal evolved during the time of the very first multi-cellular life, a period now known as the Ediacaran period some 550 to 570 million years ago, see my posts of 16June2018, 15August2018 and 22January2020. Fossils of creatures from the Ediacaran were first unearthed back in 1946 but even from the beginning evolutionary biologists had problems connecting them to later, better understood groups of animals.

The Ediacaran creature Dickinsonia costata. Is that an animal, plant or what? (Credit: Wikipedia)

In fact analysis of the Ediacaran fossils indicates that these creatures were constructed in a manner totally unlike that of any life form that exists today. One example of this is the complete lack of anything resembling a mouth, anus or digestive tract in the Ediacaran fossils leaving scientists to wonder how the creatures consumed their food and excreted their waste.

Artists illustration of life during the Ediacaran period. Very different from the animal life of today! (Credit: Science Photo Library)

Additionally the very body shape of the Ediacaran fauna is strange, paleontologists often describing them as having a ‘quilted’ pattern, something like an air mattress. Another way in which the Ediacaran creatures differ from all modern animals is that, although at first glance they may appear to possess right-left symmetry a closer inspection reveals that in fact they are not bilaterally symmetric.

Bilateral symmetry is one of the cardinal features that connects all modern animals together. While it is true that individuals are rarely right-left mirror images, you may have a small mole on your right cheek for example. In general however people have as many moles on their left sides as their right. As a species we, and other animals are strongly bilaterally symmetric.

Bilateral Symmetry is a defining factor amongst almost all living animals. (Credit: Study.com)

Looking at the image below of a member of the Ediacaran genus Dickinsonia you might say that the creature’s segments are also bilaterally symmetric. However, taking a look at the second figure below, which is a blowup of the area where the right and left segments come together, we can see that the segments are actually offset from each other in a fashion known to mathematicians as glide reflection.

Dickinsonia and how it grew! Not like any animal alive today! (Credit: Wikipedia)
Closeup of the center line of Dickinsonia. Notice how the segments do not match up but are offset from each other. This pattern is called glide reflection and is unlike anything alive today! (Credit: Wikipedia)

Glide reflection shows up in a number of Ediacaran creatures such as Spriggina, Andiva and Yorgia. For glide reflection to be so prevalent among the Ediacaran creatures is also a clear sign that the manner in which they grew must have been very different from the way modern animals grow.

A fossil of Andiva ivantsovi. It’s little wonder that paleontologists have problems trying to connect creatures like this with our modern forms. (Credit: Wikipedia)

So if the best known fossil creatures from 550 to 570 million years ago were not related to modern animals then where was our ancestor? Well in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) Professor Mary Droser and lead author Scott Evans, a recent Doctoral graduate, both from the University of California Riverside claim to have found crucial evidence of our early ancestor in rocks from the original Ediacaran region of southern Australia. Recognizing that the first animal would certainly lack hard parts that could fossilize easily, otherwise it would have been discovered by now, they searched for small impressions in the rocks that might remain after the creature had died and decayed.

What they found were numerous rice grain sized depressions, 2 to7 millimeters in length and 1 and 2.5 in width, that showed hardly any clear indication of what the creature that made them looked like. Modern technology to the rescue however as the researchers used 3D laser scanning to precisely measure the outlines of the depressions. Based on those measurements the creature that made the depressions was basically tube shaped, bilateral, and was thicker at one end, presumably the front. In other words it was basically built like us. It was an animal. See image below.

Those little depressions inside the chalk square are all that remain of the first animal. (Credit: Albany Herald)
Result of Laser scan of an impression left by Ikaria wariootia. (Credit: Geology Page)

The paleontologists gave their new species the name Ikaria wariootia where Ikara means ‘meeting place’ in the local Adnyamathanha language and Warioota is the name of a creek that runs through the Ediacaran region. The laser measurements were so precise that Evans and Droser could even make out the faint body curves made by I wariootia’s muscles which bore a distinct resemblance to those of a modern earthworm indicating both how the creature moved as well as its mode of life.

Artists impression of Ikaria warioota. (Credit: University of California Riverside)

According to Doctor Droser. “This is what evolutionary biologists predicted. It’s really exciting that what we have found lines up so neatly with their prediction.”

The evidence is growing that the best known creatures from the Ediacaran period, Spriggina, Dickinsonia and their relatives, were evolutionary dead ends leaving no descendents in our modern world. Instead the future belonged to little worm-like Ikaria wariootia, and millions of years later to us.

Hundreds of new Species from the time of the Dinosaurs are being discovered in Burmese amber, and why that may not be a good thing!

Ever since prehistoric times amber has been treasured as a rare and beautiful gemstone that we know was used in some of the earliest pieces of jewelry ever made. Amber isn’t actually a stone however; it’s just fossilized tree sap. That is, sap that has dripped down the side of a tree, dried out and become petrified over thousands or more likely millions of years.

Sometimes that tree sap can even capture a small living creature within it before it becomes hard, insects and spiders are the most common victims. And as the sap fossilizes the animal with it can be exquisitely preserved creating some of the best specimens of ancient life known to paleontology. This preservation in amber was even the main plot device in the ‘Jurassic Park’ movies where scientists obtain dino DNA from mosquitoes that have been preserved in amber.

In the Movie ‘Jurassic Park’ the top of Richard Attenborough’s staff was a piece of amber with a mosquito trapped in it (Credit: Daily Mail)

So it’s hardly surprising that paleontologists are always searching for new sources of amber that could contain unknown species from the past. In recent years the best, most interesting fossil amber has come from mines in the province of Kachin in the northeast of the country of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. See map below.

Location of Amber Mines in Kachin Myanmar (Credit: Science)

I have already written a post about one of the most interesting finds discovered in Burmese amber, the tail of a very small dinosaur, with feathers on it. See my post of 16 December 2016 and the image below. Certainly the odds of something so rare happening must be enormous but given millions of years of past history even something that seems next to impossible will eventually occur.

Feathered Tail of a baby Dinosaur found in Burmese Amber (Credit: National Geographic)

The same could be said for a more recent find, the shell of an extinct sea creature known as an ammonite. See image below.

Ammonite shell (lower right) and a lot of other stuff found in Burmese amber (Credit: The Independent)

How could the shell of a creature of the ocean ever get trapped inside the sap from a land tree? Well one clue is that it is only the shell of the animal, all of the soft tissue had decayed before it was encased. Probably the shell was washed up on the shore, perhaps during a storm so that the waves could have could have pushed it fairly far inland, far enough to wind up at the base of a tree that was dripping sap. A one in a billion chance that; again if you wait long enough will happen.

Fossils in amber are also known from other sites around the world such as the Baltic or the Dominican Republic but the amber from Myanmar is both older and for some reason not yet understood, the sap occasionally seems to have trapped larger, stronger, more active creatures such as snakes, lizards and even a few birds. Because of these factors paleontologists are rushing to acquire as much of the Burmese amber as they can.

A few more interesting finds from Burmese amber (Credit: Science)

There is blood on the amber coming from Myanmar however, for the province of Kachin is a conflict zone and the amber mines are controlled by rebels who call themselves the Kachin Independence Army and who are fighting the central government. The situation in Myanmar is very similar to that of the blood-diamonds from Africa in the 1990s where militant insurgents would exploit natural resources in the regions they control in order to fund their rebel armies.

The mines from where Burmese amber comes are dangerous, low paying places to work (Credit: Science)

The same is now happening to the Burmese amber, which is smuggled into nearby China and sold in the markets of cities like Tengchong in Yunnan province. It’s there that paleontologists have to search in order to obtain the scientifically important specimens before they are sold to someone interested only in amber for jewelry.

Buying Burmese Amber that has been smuggled into China (Credit: Science)

In fact no paleontologist or geologist has ever been able to visit one of the amber mines in order to actually determine the precise age of the strata from which the amber comes. Present estimates of 99 million year old are based upon the study of the animals found in the amber and many scientists feel that the amber really has a range of dates.

Obviously this is not a good way to do science. A lot of information about the animal encased in the amber is lost when proper records are not kept. Paleontology is about more than just discovering and describing extinct lifeforms; it’s also about understanding the conditions in which they lived and with what other creatures. All that data is lost when a specimen is smuggled out of a war zone into another country and sold in an open market.

In the years to come I have no doubt that many more fascinating creatures from the age of the dinosaurs will be found in the Burmese amber. How much more could we learn however if scientists could obtain access to the source of the amber and do a proper job of excavation?

 

 

A newly discovered Fossil site in China may rival the famous Burgess Shale as a window into the beginnings of multi-cellular life.

If you make a visit to your local natural history museum you may notice that the fossil remains of ancient life on display invariably consist of the hard parts of the long-dead animals. Whether it be the bones of dinosaurs or the shells of ammonites, or even the carapaces of insects paleontologists usually have to figure out what the entire creature was like from just the hard parts. We shouldn’t complain, after a couple of million years, or a couple of hundred million years in some cases we’re actually lucky that anything remains. Those rare fossil sites where the soft anatomy of extinct animals are preserved are treated like gold mines and have been given the title ‘Lagerstätte’ which is German for place of storage.

The Solnhofen Site in Germany where the famous Archaeopteryx fossils come from is a example of a Lagerstatte (Credit: PD)

Paleontologists working in the Hubei province of China along the Qingjiang River have recently discovered a new Lagerstätte that is proving to be a treasure trove of exquisitely preserved fossils dated to about 520 million years ago. Since this is approximately the same geologic time period as the famous Burgess Shale these sites together provide a window into a very early geologic period known as the Cambrian.

Site along the Qingjiang River Where a Cambrian Lagerstatte has been Located (Credit: Phys.Org)

The Cambrian period is so important in understanding the history of life because prior to the Cambrian the evidence for multi-cellular life is very scarce, both in terms of numbers and diversity. However during the Cambrian hundreds of different types of living creatures burst onto the scene almost simultaneously. The causes of this ‘Cambrian Explosion’ are still being hotly debated and any new fossils that could help to shed light on what was happening during the Cambrian are extremely valuable.

And the fossils from Hubei could shed a lot of light. First of all there appears to simply be an enormous number of fossils to study, 30,000 have been collected so far. In addition the rock formation containing the fossils is widespread along the Qingjiang River meaning there could be several equally valuable sites waiting to be explored. That could mean a lot more fossils to come.

Just a few of the Fossils found at the Qingjiang site (Credit: Fu et al, Science)

So far half of the specimens from Qingjiang that have been examined by paleontologists belong to species that are entirely new to science giving us a much more complete look into this critical period in Earth’s history. Just as importantly the condition of the fossils is exquisite, even such fine appendages as antenna and the soft tentacles of jellyfish are preserved in detail. In some cases even internal organs can be discerned allowing a more detailed description of how the anatomy of these creatures worked.

Just Look at the incredible fine detail of the antenna on this Arthropod (Credit: Fu et al, Science)

The Qingjiang fossils also differ from those from the Burgess shale in one very interesting way. For some unknown reason the Burgess shale fossils are made up entirely of adults, no remains of larva or juvenals have been discovered there. The Qingjiang fossils however do contain juvenal specimens, which is very important for understanding the life cycle of many species that undergo metamorphosis or molting.

Some more Fossils from Qingjiang (Credit: Fu et al, Science)

The Cambrian explosion has been a puzzle to evolutionary biologists since the days of Charles Darwin. He regarded what he called ‘the lower Silurian layers’ (the name Cambrian hadn’t been established yet) as one of biggest problems with his theory of natural selection. With the discovery of the Qingjiang fossils we now have a lot more data to use in figuring out the solution to that problem.

 

Paleontology News for February 2019.

There are several items of interest from the world of paleontology for this month; several newly discovered species of early life to discuss. I think I’ll start with the most ancient and work my way forward in time.

250 million years ago life on Earth suffered its greatest mass extinction event. The Permian extinction as it’s known wiped out more than 90% of the species of plants and animals, far more than were killed by the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Paleontologists are intensively interested not only in what caused the Permian extinction, there are many theories, but also how quickly did the Earth’s ecology recover from such a terrible blow.

Today Antarctica may be mostly an icy desert but 250 million years ago it was a warm, lush forest and a new species of reptile from Antarctica is now providing us with a glimpse into that period of recovery. The creature has been given the name Antarctanax shackletoni, the first name means Antarctic King in Greek while the second honours the Antarctic explorer Ernst Shackleton. A shackletoni was a kind of reptile known as an archosaur, a group who are considered to be the ancestor to both the dinosaurs and the crocodiles. About the size of a modern iguana, A shackletoni probably fed on insects and other small prey.

Artists Impression of Antacrtanax shackletoni (Credit: Sci-News.com)

The remains of A shackletoni were discovered in rocks dating to only 2 million years after the Permian extinction indicating that life recovered more quickly than had been previously thought. One theory that is being discussed amongst paleontologists is the idea that extinction events may actually open up ecological niches, spurring evolution to generate entirely new types of living creatures. As an ancestor to both the dinosaurs and crocodiles A shackletoni is strong evidence for that theory.

Fossil Remains of A shackletoni (Credit: Bobr Times)

 

My second story deals with the discovery of a new species of dinosaur proper, although a very strange looking one. We’re all familiar with the largest of the dinosaurs, the long necked, long tailed sauropods along with the stegosaurs, those dinosaurs who had bony plates along their back for protection. See images below.

The Sauropod Dinosaur Diplodocus (Credit: NicePNG.com)

A Typical Stegosaurus (Credit: Cmstudio)

Well how would you like a sauropod with a set of sharp spikes running down its back? That’s just what a team of paleontologists working in the Patagonia region of Argentina has discovered. It’s being called Bajadasaurus pronuspinax; the name means downhill lizard with bent over forward spines and it lived during the lower early Cretaceous period some 140 million years ago. See image below.

Artists impression of Bajadasaurus pronuspinax (Credit: Jorge A. Gonzalez)

Judging from its skull B pronuspinax resembled the more familiar Diplodocus but based on the size of the discovered skeleton B pronuspinax was only some ten meters in length, less than half the size of its enormous relative. According to Pablo Gallina of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina and lead author of the paper the bony spines must have been reinforced in some fashion, “We think that had they just been bone structures or covered only by skin, they could have been easily broken or fractured…they probably were covered by a keratin sheath, in a similar way to the horns of mammals such as antelopes.” Either way I’m sure that B pronuspinax would have been a fascinating creature to see.

The Actual Fossil Spines of B pronuspinax (credit: Science Alert)

For my final story I’d like to discuss a type of animal that still exists and with which we are all quite familiar, the kangaroo and when did it evolve its distinctive hop. Now researchers studying fossils of kangaroo ancestors have concluded that 20 million years ago those ancestors could hop, walk on four legs and even climb trees!

Ancestors of the Kangaroos (Credit: Peter Shouten)

The fossils that led to this conclusion come from the northwest region of the state of Queensland near the town of Riversleigh. Most importantly the finds include very rare specimens of the feet of the kangaroo ancestors, see image below, giving clear evidence of their mode of locomotion.

Foot Bones of the 20 Million Year Old Kangaroo Nambaroo gillespieae (Credit: Benjamin Kear)

The long held view was that the hopping motion of kangaroos occurred in the more recent past as a change in climate led to widespread grasslands typical of modern Australia. However these new fossil finds indicate that kangaroo ancestors were hopping very efficiently while most of Australia was still forested. According to Dr. Benjamin Kear of Uppsala University in Sweden and a member of the study, “It all points to an extremely successful animal, that’s superbly adapted to its environment and a whole range of ecosystems and it’s why kangaroos are so successful today.”

So there we have it, three more examples of the fascinating diversity of life here on Earth!

Paleontology News for December 2018.

There have been quite a few dino discoveries the past few weeks. I have four stories to cover so let’s get to it.

I’ll start with the discovery of a new species of ‘horned dinosaur’ formally known as a Ceratopsian and related to the well-known Triceratops. The new species, see image below, is named Crittendenceratops krzyzanowskii and is based on the re-evaluation of bones that were discovered almost 20 years ago in 73 million year old rocks southeast of Tucson Arizona. A team of researchers from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNH) carried out the re-examination finding “morphological features right away in the material of Crittendenceratops to establish a new species,” according to Sebastian Dalman the team leader.

Artists Impression of Crittendenceratops (Credit: Live Science)

According to the researchers, C krzyzanowskii was approximately 3-4 meters in length and likely weighted 700-800 kilos. The 73 million year age of Crittendenceratops puts it very close to the end Cretaceous period, making it probably one of the last species of ‘horned dinosaur’ to walk the Earth.

 

One of the big debates going on presently in the paleontological community concerns exactly when it was that the first feathers developed and how many different types of animals had them. Not too many years ago the very idea of a dinosaur having feathers would have been shocking. Now however it is well established that some dinosaurs worn feathers as insulation to help keep them warm. Perhaps even the mighty T rex himself was covered with a warm layer of fuzzy feathers.

Now an analysis of two fossils may push the origins of feathers back another 70 millions years and spread their occurrence to another entire group of extinct reptiles. A team of paleontologists from Nanjing University in China have found what they believe to be short, fuzzy, thread like structures on specimens of pterosaurs, the bat like flying reptiles that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, but which were not dinosaurs. The fact that many of these thread like structures, see image below, split at their ends in a fashion similar to the development of feathers leads the researchers, lead by Professor Baoyu Jiang, to conclude that they are in fact the earliest fossil evidence of feathers.

Feathers on Pteranodon Fossils. Splitting at the ends indicates they are Feathers rather than Hair (Credit: Michael Benton / Nature Ecology and Evolution)

Pteranodon with Feathers (Credit: Yuan Zhang / Nature Ecology and Evolution)

The spread of feathers 70 million years further backward in time and to another entire group of extinct reptiles not only illustrates how wondrous the past history of life truly is, but also how piece by piece we are slowly uncovering it.

 

The very first dinosaur specimens to be scientifically described came from the United Kingdom. In fact the very word Dinosaur (Terrible Lizard) was coined by the British naturalist Sir Richard Owen. The paleontology of the UK has been studied for so long, and so thoroughly that you might think that there couldn’t be much left to discover. Erosion can often be a paleontologist’s friend however, revealing treasures that were hidden beneath layers of uninteresting rock.

This is what has happened in the Ashdown Formation in the English county of East Sussex. In the sandstone cliffs along the shore 85 dinosaur footprints have been recently discovered. Not only that but the prints are from as many as 13 different species, giving scientists a glimpse into what the quiet English countryside was like 100-140 million years ago. See image of a print below.

Theropod Dinosaur Footprint from Sussex UK (Credit: University of Cambridge)

The prints include many from well known dinosaurs, the Iguanodon, the Ankylosaurus, a possible Stegosaur as well as several Sauropods and Theropods (Basically that’s all of the dinosaurs you learned about when you were a kid!). Some of the prints are so well preserved that the texture of the animals skin can easily be seen, and therefore studied. See image below. Finds like these give paleontologists a wealth of information about the ecology of the ancient world, showing us how different, and yet how similar the world was so long ago.

Impressions of the Dinosaur’s Skin on Footprint (Credit: University of Cambridge)

 

My final story today may not be the most important scientifically but it is almost certainly the most spectacular. At least it has the coolest picture, see image below.

Artist’s Impression of a Shark attacking a Pteranodon (Credit: Mark Witton)

Researchers at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum have been cleaning and preparing a well-preserved skeleton of a Pteranodon, a large species of those flying reptiles I mentioned above. As the researchers were cleaning the area of the fossil’s neck they noticed something stuck in between two vertebra, a shark’s tooth! See image below.

Shark’s Tooth, red arrow, Embedded in the neck of a Pteranodon Fossil (Credit: Stephanie Abramowicz, David Hone, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum)

Now the researchers do not believe that the shark, the tooth identifies it as a species known as Cretoxyrhina mantelli, leapt out of the water in order to attack the Pteranodon in mid flight. Rather they speculate that the flying reptile was floating on the surface of the ocean when the shark ambushed it from below. Even today sharks are known to attack seabirds in this manner, I’ve actually witnessed such an attack myself. So have sharks been feeding for millions of years off of flying animals who are foolish enough think that the ocean is a nice, quiet place to rest for a few minutes? By the way, this fossil Pteranodon was actually  discovered back in the 1960s. Another example of how a re-examination can make new finds.

The fossils found by the researchers in California give us a small window into a past event that is both dramatic and fascinating. With each such window we gain a better picture of the history of life on Earth.

Back From the Field Night at The Academy of Natural Sciences.

Last night, 8November2018, I was privileged as a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philadelphia to attend their annual ‘Back From the Field’ night where the Academy’s scientists present an overview of their research accomplishments during the past year. The whole affair is informal however with scientists and members mingling together while discussing the scientific results. (See my post of 4February2017 for more about the Academy)

Logo of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (Credit: ANSP)

Since the Academy resides here in Philadelphia it’s not surprising that many of its scientists concentrate their work in an around the Delaware River valley, studying the health of our local environment and all of the species of life that call it home. At least an equal number however are world travelers, visiting lands as diverse as Cuba, the Philippines, Mongolia and even Antarctica.

The gathering was held in the Academy’s hall of dinosaurs which displays, along with other dino specimens, the bones of Hadrosaurus foulkii, the first dinosaur skeleton discovered in the western hemisphere. While many of the specimens on display last night were even older than the dinosaurs just as many were of species living today.

The First Dinosaur Skeleton Discovered in the USA, Hadrosaurus foulkii at the Academy (Credit: ANSP)

Doctor Dane Ward of Drexel University’s Department of Biodiversity even brought a special treat with him. You see Dr. Ward spent several months over the summer studying a species of small, sting less honeybee found only in Cuba. According to Dr. Ward the honey produced by this Cuban bee is far superior to that of the common European honeybee.

Dr. Ward gave a sample of this honey to the bartender so that he could make a mixed drink unknown out side of Cuba called the Canchanchara. Needless to say I had to give the canchanchara a try and it certainly was quite tasty.

Made with Honey from Cuban Bees the Canchanchara is quite tasty (Credit: Cubatrotter)

The amount of scientific research being carried out by these scientists was too large for me to give more than a brief mention here. There was a team of ichthyologists, scientists who study fish, who are using aerial drones to obtain a census of sea lamprey nests along the banks of the Delaware River. Then there was the team of entomologists; they study insects, who had discovered several new species of grasshopper.

The Sea Lamprey is an ancient, jawless fish that comes into Rivers to Spawn (credit: Holyoke Gas & Electric)

Still another team was studying snails in the Philippines. This research could prove to be very import because remember the Philippines are hundreds of islands. The distribution of snails across all of these islands is very complex with some species of snail inhabiting only a single island while another species can be spread across a dozen or more. The work of trying to work out that puzzle may tell us a great deal about exactly how the forces of evolution split single populations into separate species.

As you can see there was plenty of worth while science to sample but I don’t think that I’ll be surprising any of my regular readers if I tell you that I spent most of my time talking to the paleontologists. Both Doctors Ted Daeschler of Drexel University and Jason Downs of Delaware Valley University are doing their research on fishes of the Devonian. Dr. Downs has been searching for specimens in the cold northern reaches of Canada and has discovered two new species of ancient fish.

Bothriolepis rex is a new species of Ancient Fish discovered by Dr. Downs (Credit: Wikipedia)

Funny thing is though, that area in Canada was originally surveyed for fossils by a team that was co-lead by Dr. Daeschler, in fact it’s the same area where Dr. Daeschler discovered Tiktaalik, a ‘missing link’ between fish and land vertebrates. Dr. Daeschler may no longer be working in Canada but he must like cold weather because in three weeks time he’s headed for the Antarctic to conduct a more thorough survey of some Devonian outcrops he discovered just last year.

Tiktaalik, the ‘Missing Link’ between Fish and Land Vertebrates (Credit: NPR)

I hope that the things I’ve been discussing have served to whet your appetite for learning more about science. I know that here in Philadelphia I have access to a large number of different centers of science but every large city has its own science museums. O’k so maybe you don’t live in a large city, well many national wildlife refuges or state parks will have a nature center and the people who are working there to help save many threatened species would love to tell you all about it.

Learning about science, about how science is done and who are the people doing it is important for anyone who wants to be an informed citizen but more than that it just fun. That’s right, as far as I’m concerned learning about something new is just about the best time a person can have. What don’t you give it a try?  I leave you today with a link to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, take at look at what they have to offer!

https://www.ansp.org/

People often confuse Archaeology and Paleontology. Here are a couple of News Stories that can Illustrate the Difference.

Watching or reading the news you will occasionally come across stories where even a well educated journalist seems to be baffled about whether the topic of the story is Paleontology or Archaeology. After all, both sciences deal with the past, both dig up their evidence from the ground and it seems like much of that evidence consists of bones. Not only that, but there is without doubt a small but very important region of overlap between the two disciplines. So it’s easy to understand how non-experts can get confused.

The big difference between the two sciences is us, human beings. Archaeology deals with the human past, not only human remains but the remains of our activity. Material objects, anything from small tools to entire buildings are just as important to Archaeology as are human bones.

Unfortunately this is most people’s idea of an Archaeologist (Credit: Paramount Pictures)

The subjects of Paleontology on the other hand are all of the creatures that ever lived on this Earth, right back to the very earliest living cell. In some sense therefore Archaeology is a subset of Paleontology. We are still living creatures after all. However the enormous range of material objects left by humans is so large and so unlike the remains of other living things that the two sciences operate in two completely different ways.

The first story I’d like to discuss illustrates this difference by showing how much archaeologists can learn from an ‘artifact’, a tool made thousands of years ago. In this case the tool is a stone spear point made by the earliest inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in the region now known as Texas.

Pre-Clovis Spear Point found at the Friedkin Site (Credit: Sci News)

The Debra L. Friedkin archaeological site outside of Salado Texas has been excavated by researchers from Texas A&M University for more than a dozen years now. The remains here are some of the earliest evidence of human habitation in the Americas dating back some 15,500 years. These remains predate the classic Clovis remains first found in nearby New Mexico.

Some of the Stone Tools found at the Friedkin Site (Credit: Texas A&M University)

That makes the Friedkin site very important because for decades the Clovis culture, first described in the 1920s from digs outside of the town of Clovis New Mexico, were thought to be the remains of original people who came to the Americas about 13,000 years ago. In the years that followed numerous sites in both North and South America were found that produced artifacts consistent with Clovis culture.

Over the last twenty years however a few sites have been discovered that date several thousand years older than the Clovis sites. So far however these sites have only produced a small number of artifacts, making it difficult to determine whether or not these people were earlier examples of the Clovis culture, or do they represent an entirely new, unknown people.

Texas A&M Professor Michael Waters thinks that the Friedkin site can provide that answer, and in his opinion they are an entirely new people. The artifacts discovered by Professor Waters and his team even include the earliest known stone spearheads, see image above.

“The dream has always been to find diagnostic artifacts such as projectile points that can be recognized as older than Clovis and this is what we have at the Friedkin site.” Waters says. Whether or not other Archaeologists will accept Professor Waters’s conclusions remains to be seen but with each piece of evidence the answer becomes clearer.

Now in that story we were only talking about artifacts, that is objects manufactured by human beings. In this next story the evidence will consist solely of the actual remains of living creatures. So that means this story comes from the science of Paleontology. Also, where the story from Texas dealt with evidence that was fifteen thousand years old, the evidence in this story is over 400 million years old!

Unfortunately this is most people’s idea of a Paleontologist (Credit: Universal Pictures)

The first animals to possess a backbone and an internal skeleton, the first vertebrates that is were fish, although very strange looking fish they were. The earliest fossils date from about 480 million years ago but such fossils are few in number and show little diversity. Vertebrates were a small, not very successful group of animals. About 60 million years later however the fossil record explodes with numerous new species of fish suddenly appearing.

Cephalaspis lyelli, an early jawless fish (Credit: Art.com)

In their search for the explanation of how this explosion of vertebrates happened Paleontologists have looked to find out where this explosion happened. That is, did the diversification of fishes occur in the open ocean or perhaps it occurred around the ancient coral reefs of that period.

Now a new study proposes a different solution. Paleontologists Lauren Sallan of the University of Pennsylvania and Ivan J. Sansom of the University of Birmingham have generated a database of 2,728 specimens of fossil fish from around 420 million years ago. In particular the database records the environmental conditions of where the fossil animal lived.

“The Nice thing about the fossil record,” according to Sallan. “Is that we often find fishes in the context of where they lived. The rock that holds them tells us what their environment looked like, whether it was reef, shallow water, deep water, a riverbed or a lake.”

What Professors Sallan and Sansom have found is that the explosion of fish species occurred in the shallow waters right up near the shore, between the reefs and the beach. In this environment these early fish acquired adaptations, such as bottom dwelling, that later enabled them to fit into niches in both the coral reefs and deeper more open waters.

Living near the shoreline also allowed fishes to adapt to freshwater more quickly and more successfully than other major groups of animals such as the arthropods and mollusks. And there was one more adaptation that that occurred at this time which gave these early vertebrates a distinct advantage. This was when fish first acquired jaws!

Jaws gave fish a big advantage. Osteolepis, and early jawed fish. (Credit: Pininterest)

So there you have it. Two examples of new research, one from the science of Archaeology, the study of humanity’s past, the other Paleontology, the study of life’s past.

Paleontology News for August 2018.

Paleontology is in a very real sense the study of origins, of beginnings. Paleontologists study the history of life in order to discover when and how different kinds of living creatures came into being. This month I’d like to discuss two such origin stories. In one case the discovery of the earliest known Pterosaur, those flying reptiles who shared the ancient Earth with the dinosaurs but first some new discoveries about the very beginnings of all the animals on Earth, including you and me!

Today pretty much everybody knows that more than a billion years ago the first living creatures here on Earth were tiny, microscopic single-celled organisms like bacteria and amoeba. Sometime in the distant past some of these single celled creatures learned to live together in groups like those in a sponge. In time, although still many millions of years ago, some of the cells began to perform one function, like digesting food while other cells performed other functions like motion or grabbing food.

Groups like this, where different cells concentrated on different functions to the mutual benefit of all the cells were the first multi-cellular organisms. It is from these creatures that all of the living things see every day have evolved.

The earliest fossils we have of multi-cellular life are collectively known as the Ediacaran Biota because they were first discovered in the Ediacara region of Australia. Since their first discovery Ediacaran fossils have been found throughout the world and have been dated to between 635 and 541 million years ago.

Because these creatures lived before the evolution of hard parts like bones or bark or shell they do not fossilize well and can be very difficult to study. In some cases paleontologists cannot even tell whether a specimen is a plant or an animal. The images below show several different types of Ediacaran creatures.

Dickinsonia costata from the Ediacaran Period (Credit: Alamy)

Spriggina a fossil from the Ediacaran Period (Credit: NetMassimo)

Tribrachidium heraldicum from the Ediacaran (Credit: Yale News)

A new study published in the journal ‘Paleontology’ seeks to clear away some of the mystery in the Ediacaran Biota and definitively identify the earliest known animal. The study, co-authored by Jennifer F. Hoyal Cuthill of Cambridge University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, boy I wouldn’t want her commute between jobs, and Jian Han of the Shaanxi Key Laboratory of early life at Northwest University in Xi’an China has provided an evolutionary link between several species in the Ediacaran period to a later species of animal in the Cambrian period (540-485 Million years ago).

The animals in question certainly look more like plants; see artist’s impression below. Known collective as the Petalonamae because of their petal like branches only close examination of the anatomic details in the fossil remains show that the animals are in fact more highly evolved relatives of the sponges. The image below shows a fossil from the Ediacaran period on the right while the fossil  that belongs to the Cambrian is on the left.

reconstruction of a Petalonamae(Credit: Jennifer H. Cuthill)

Ediacaran Fossil (r) compared to Cambrian descendent (l) (Credit: Jennifer H. Cuthill)

The results of the study by Doctors Cuthill and Han reveal some of the details of how the animal kingdom itself came into being. A rather important chapter in the history of life.

 

Another chapter in the history of life deals with those flying reptiles, the pterosaurs who filled the sky during the time of the dinosaurs. Now a new species has been identified in fossils unearthed in the state of Utah. At an estimated age of 210 million years old the new pterosaur is some 65 million years older than the previous oldest known flying reptile.

The new species has been named Caelestiventus hanseni by its discoverer Professor Brooks Britt of Brigham Young University. While the specimen was not yet fully grown it already had a wingspan of a meter and a half. The images below show first the almost perfectly preserved skull of C. hanseni and below that an artist’s impression of what the pterosaur might have looked like.

Skull of Caelestiventus hanseni (credit: Nate Edwards)

Caelestiventus hanseni (Credit: Michael Skrepnick)

Thanks to the work of dedicated researchers like Doctors Cuthill, Han and Professor Britt we are slowly, bit by bit filling in the missing pages to the story of life on Earth.

Paleontology News for July 2018

Since my last post (11July18) was a review of the new dinosaur movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom I thought this might be a good time to discuss several items of interest in the field of paleontology. Since T-rex is one of the heroes of the Jurassic Park franchise, well at least to me, I’ll start with a recent discover about them.

The word dinosaur itself means ‘terrible lizard’ and the first scientists who studied their fossil bones did actually think of them as simply enormous lizards. Over the last two hundred years we’ve learned a great deal about just how different dinosaurs are from other types of reptiles and now a new study takes us another step further by examining dinosaur’s tongues.

Most representations of dinosaurs, including those in Jurassic Park, show dinosaurs as having tongues similar to those of lizards, long, only attached at the back and therefore able to stick out, pretty much the way ours do, see image below.

Old View of the Dinosaur Tongue (Credit: Spencer Wright)

According to Julia Clarke, professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study however dinosaurs probably had a tongue more like those of the crocodiles and alligators. A tongue that was firmly attached to the bottom of the mouth along its entire length and one would be completely unable to stick outside of the mouth, see image below.

Dinosaur Tongue were actually more like those of a Crocodile (Credit: Shutterstock)

Since the soft parts of dinosaurs, such as tongues rarely survive the study based the study’s conclusions are based on an examination of the bones in the mouths of dinosaurs, in particular the hyoid bones that anchor and support the tongue. What the researchers found was that the short hyoid bones of dinosaurs more closely resembled the hyoid bones of the crocodilians rather than the hyoid bones of the lizards. So it turns out that we may have still been incorrectly thinking of dinosaurs as just big lizards.

 

One of the best known types of dinosaurs are the huge sauropods, the long necked, long tailed behemoths who were without doubt the largest animals ever to walk on Earth. Our modern whales may be as large but of course they swim in the ocean. See image of a brachiosaurus below.

The Brachiosaurus (Credit: Todd Marshall)

Now paleontologists working in Argentina have unearthed what they consider to be earliest known member of the sauropod group, and animal that they have named Ingentia prima. As might be expected for a very early member of a group I. prima looks a good bit different, see image below.

The Early Sauropod Igentia prima (Credit: The New York Times)

Comparing I. Prima to the brachiosaurus it’s easy to see that I. prima’s neck is a good bit shorter and while the legs of the brachiosaurus strongly resemble those of an elephant the legs of I. prima look more like those of theropod dinosaurs. To me the rear legs look a bit like the legs of T-rex.

I. prima lived during the Triassic period, about 215 million years ago, not long after the very first recognizable dinosaur evolved. While smaller than its later descents at an estimated ten tons and nearly ten meters in length I. prima was probably the biggest creature in the world at that time.

Paleontologists have long known that the huge sauropods evolved from much smaller, two legged dinosaurs and I. prima still shows some evidence of that two legged past. Researchers hope that further study of I. prima’s bones will give them further insight into how the sauropod group of dinosaurs evolved.

These studies are just two more examples of how, piece by piece, paleontologists are filling in the gaps in our knowledge of the history of life on Earth.

Paleontology News for June 2018.

Two new fossils have been discovered recently of new species that are both very important in our understanding of the evolutionary history of life on our planet. Following the rule of age before beauty I’ll begin by discussing the earliest known ancestor of the group of reptiles known as the lizards.

Most people know lizards as simply any reptile that obviously isn’t either a crocodile or a turtle or a snake but lizards are actually the largest family of reptiles having over 6,000 species. Lizards range in size from tiny geckoes only a couple of centimeters long to the Komodo dragon that can exceed 3m in length.

The ‘new’ species has been named Megachirella wachtleri and the specimen was actually found twenty years ago in the Dolomites region of Northern Italy. As is the case with many recent fossil discoveries it was only when M. wachtleri was re-examined with new, more powerful instruments, a CT scan in the instance, that the features of M. wachtleri that made it important could be seen. The image below shows the fossil of Megachirella wachtleri.

Fossil of Megachirella wachtleri (Credit: Live Science)

 

The study of M. wachtleri was co-authored by Tiago Simoes of the University of Alberta in Canada who had spent more than 400 days visiting over 50 university and museum fossil collections in 17 different countries. Doctor Simoes is one of a number of researchers making important discoveries among the forgotten and misidentified specimens locked away in museum drawers.

Megachirella wachtleri lived some 240 million years ago making it the oldest fossil lizard by about 75 million years. Just as importantly, since M. wachtleri shows so many classic lizard features it probably pushes the common ancestor of lizards and other reptiles back to more than 252 million years.

Why is that important? Well you see 252 million years ago was the Permian / Triassic extinction when more than 95% of all of the different species of living creatures vanished. If the lizards split off from the other reptiles before then that means that at least one species of lizard survived the Permian extinction. The image below shows an artist’s impression of what M. wachtleri looked like.

Artists view of Megachirella wachleri (Credit: Live Science, Davide Bonadonna)

Our second discovery this month comes from a fossil site in the state of Utah and consists of a well preserved skull of an early relative of the mammals from an extinct group known as the haramiyidan. Named Cifelliodon wahkarmoosuch the fossil is thought to be between 139 and 124 million years old. The image below shows the fossil skull.

Skull of Cifelliodon wahkarmoosuch(Credit: Utah Geological Survey)

As I mentioned above the haramiyidan were a group of creatures that broke away from the reptiles at about the same time as the mammals and which share certain characteristics with our ancestors such as hairy fur but which retained other reptilian characteristics like giving birth via eggs. The exact nature of haramiyidans is still largely unknown since the group of animals did not last long and most of what we know comes from fossil teeth. Larger bones and especially skulls are often so smashed that little can be learned from them.

Paleontologists appear to have gotten lucky this time because the skull of C. wahkarmoosuch was well preserved enough to reveal an enormous amount of detail under X-rays and CT scans. Again, we see how newer more sophisticated instruments are leading to ever more discoveries! The excellent preservation of the fossil was despite the fact that the skull of C. wahkarmoosuch was found beneath the foot of a new species of iguanodon type dinosaur named Hippodraco.

C. wahkarmoosuch was a very small animal, less than 15 centimeters in length and weighing little more than a kilo. Based upon an examination of its eye sockets and large olfactory cavities the animal probably had poor eyesight but a very good sense of smell. The image below shows an artist’s impression of what C. wahkarmoosuch may have looked like.

Artist’s Impression of Cifelliodon wahkarmoosuch trying to scare off a dinosaur(Credit: Utah Geological Survey)

With every new discovery we are filling in the details of the tree of life and finding it to be far more complex and detailed than we had ever imagined.