The Great London:
Fossils

The diversity of mammals on Earth exploded straight after the dinosaur extinction event, according to UCL researchers. New analysis of the fossil record shows that placental mammals, the group that today includes nearly 5000 species including humans, became more varied in anatomy during the Paleocene epoch - the 10 million years immediately following the event.

Senior author, Dr Anjali Goswami (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), said: "When dinosaurs went extinct, a lot of competitors and predators of mammals disappeared, meaning that a great deal of the pressure limiting what mammals could do ecologically was removed. They clearly took advantage of that opportunity, as we can see by their rapid increases in body size and ecological diversity. Mammals evolved a greater variety of forms in the first few million years after the dinosaurs went extinct than in the previous 160 million years of mammal evolution under the rule of dinosaurs."

The Natural Environment Research Council-funded research, published today in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, studied the early evolution of placental mammals, the group including elephants, sloths, cats, dolphins and humans. The scientists gained a deeper understanding of how the diversity of the mammals that roamed the Earth before and after the dinosaur extinction changed as a result of that event.

Placental mammal fossils from this period have been previously overlooked as they were hard to place in the mammal tree of life because they lack many features that help to classify the living groups of placental mammals. Through recent work by the same team at UCL, this issue was resolved by creating a new tree of life for placental mammals, including these early forms, which was described in a study published in Biological Reviews yesterday.

First author of both papers, Dr Thomas Halliday (UCL Earth Sciences and Genetics, Evolution & Environment), said: "The mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is traditionally acknowledged as the start of the 'Age of Mammals' because several types of mammal appear for the first time immediately afterwards.

"Many recent studies suggest that little changed in mammal evolution during the Paleocene but these analyses don't include fossils from that time. When we look at the mammals that were present, we find a burst of evolution into new forms, followed by specialisation that finally resulted in the groups of mammals we see today. The earliest placental mammal fossils appear only a few hundred thousand years after the mass extinction, suggesting the event played a key role in diversification of the mammal group to which we belong."

The team studied the bones and teeth of 904 placental fossils to measure the anatomical differences between species. This information was used to build an updated tree of life containing 177 species within Eutheria (the group of mammals including all species more closely related to us than to kangaroos) including 94 from the Paleocene - making it the tree with the largest representation from Paleocene mammals to date. The new tree was analysed in time sections from 140 million years ago to present day, revealing the change in the variety of species.

Three different methods were used by the team to investigate the range and variation of the mammals present and all showed an explosion in mammal diversity after the dinosaur extinction. This is consistent with theories that mammals flourished when dinosaurs were no longer hunting them or competing with them for resources.

Dr Anjali Goswami (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), added: "Extinctions are obviously terrible for the groups that go extinct, non-avian dinosaurs in this case, but they can create great opportunities for the species that survive, such as placental mammals, and the descendants of dinosaurs: birds."

Professor Paul Upchurch (UCL Earth Sciences), co-author of the Biological Reviews study, added: "Several previous methodological studies have shown that it is important to include as many species in an evolutionary tree as possible: this generally improves the accuracy of the tree. By producing such a large data set, we hope that our evolutionary tree for Paleocene mammals is more robust and reliable than any of the previous ones. Moreover, such large trees are very useful for future studies of large-scale evolutionary patterns, such as how early placental mammals dispersed across the continents via land bridges that no longer exist today."

The team are now investigating rates of evolution in these mammals, as well as looking at body size more specifically. Further work will involve building data from DNA into these analyses, to extend these studies to modern mammals.

Source: University College London [December 21, 2015]

Scientists have found the oldest fossils of the familiar pine tree that dominates Northern Hemisphere forests today.

Scientists from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London have found the oldest fossils of the familiar pine tree that dominates Northern Hemisphere forests today.

The 140-million-year-old fossils (dating from the Cretaceous 'Age of the Dinosaurs') are exquisitely preserved as charcoal, the result of burning in wildfires. The fossils suggest that pines co-evolved with fire at a time when oxygen levels in the atmosphere were much higher and forests were especially flammable.

Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from Royal Holloway, University of London) discovered the fossils in Nova Scotia, Canada. He said: "Pines are well adapted to fire today. The fossils show that wildfires raged through the earliest pine forests and probably shaped the evolution of this important tree." Modern pines store flammable resin-rich deadwood on the tree making them prone to lethal fires. However, they also produce huge numbers of cones that will only germinate after a fire, ensuring a new cohort of trees is seeded after the fire has passed by."

The research is published in the journal Geological Society of America.

Source: University of Royal Holloway London [March 10, 2016]

Molecular-based moisture indicators, remains of midges and climate simulations have provided climate scientists with the final piece to one of the most enduring puzzles of the last Ice Age.

For years, researchers have struggled to reconcile climate models of the Earth, 13,000 years ago, with the prevailing theory that a catastrophic freshwater flood from the melting North American ice sheets plunged the planet into a sudden and final cold snap, just before entering the present warm interglacial.

Now, an international team of scientists, led by Swedish researchers from Stockholm University and in partnership with UK researchers from the Natural History Museum (NHM) London, and Plymouth University, has found evidence in the sediments of an ancient Swedish lake that it was the melting of the Scandinavian ice sheet that provides the missing link to what occurred at the end of the last Ice Age. The study, published in Nature Communications, today, examined moisture and temperature records for the region and compared these with climate model simulations.

Francesco Muschitiello, a PhD researcher at Stockholm University and lead author of the study, said: "Moisture-sensitive molecules extracted from the lake's sediments show that climate conditions in Northern Europe became much drier around 13,000 years ago."

Steve Brooks, Researcher at the NHM, added: "The remains of midges, contained in the lake sediments, reveal a great deal about the past climate. The assemblage of species, when compared with modern records, enable us to track how, after an initial warming of up to 4° Centigrade at the end of the last Ice Age, summer temperatures plummeted by 5°C over the next 400 years."

Dr Nicola Whitehouse, Associate Professor in Physical Geography at Plymouth University, explained: "The onset of much drier, cooler summer temperatures, was probably a consequence of drier air masses driven by more persistent summer sea-ice in the Nordic Seas."

According to Francesco Muschitiello the observed colder and drier climate conditions were likely driven by increasingly stronger melting of the Scandinavian ice sheet in response to warming at the end of the last Ice Age; this led to an expansion of summer sea ice and to changes in sea-ice distribution in the eastern region of the North Atlantic, causing abrupt climate change. Francesco Muschitiello added: "The melting of the Scandinavian ice sheet is the missing link to understanding current inconsistencies between climate models and reconstructions, and our understanding of the response of the North Atlantic system to climate change."

Dr Francesco Pausata, postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University, explained: "When forcing climate models with freshwater from the Scandinavian Ice Sheet, the associated climate shifts are consistent with our climate reconstructions."

The project leader, Professor Barbara Wohlfarth from Stockholm University, concluded: "The Scandinavian ice sheet definitely played a much more significant role in the onset of this final cold period than previously thought. Our teamwork highlights the importance of paleoclimate studies, not least in respect to the ongoing global warming debate."

Source: University of Plymouth [November 17, 2015]

The Mesozoic played host to some of the most dangerous predators to ever swim the Earth's oceans. Among these, pliosaurs were lethal hunters, and some of the largest predators ever on this planet. They were the shorter-necked cousins of the plesiosaurs, which are often spoken of in reference to their superficial similarity to the Loch Ness Monster, which we're definitely not going to do here. Together, pliosaurs and plesiosaurs form a group known as Sauropterygia, which existed in the oceans from the Triassic right until the end of the Cretaceous, when they went extinct along with the non-avian dinosaurs and other vertebrate groups. This actually makes sauropterygians the longest living group of marine-adapted tetrapods (animals with four limbs), which is quite an impressive feat!

New discoveries show that perhaps this evolutionary success can be attributed to the ecological diversity that this group possessed, and in particular an ability to adapt to different feeding styles.

Valentin Fischer from the University of Oxford and an international team of researchers have discovered a new pliosaur from western Russia, named Makhaira rossica. The name dreives from the Latinized Ancient Greek word 'mákhaira', which describes a blade with a curved outline, as well as the Latin word 'rossica', which means Russian. The specimen comprises a fragmentary skeleton of a sub-adult animal, found within a series of limestone nodules along the banks of the Volga River.

Makhaira comes from a period in Earth's geological history, known as the earliest part of the Cretaceous, where our knowledge of vertebrate life is relatively poor due to the way in which fossils are differentially preserved through time. Sadly, this lack of knowledge means that our understanding of how faunas changed from the latest part of the Jurassic period into the first part of the Cretaceous is relatively poor compared to other important geological boundaries.

Analysis of the evolutionary placement of this new species places it as the most basal member of a group known as Brachaucheninae, which survived through the Cretaceous. However, the new species is different in being a little smaller than some of its more advanced relatives.

The weirdest feature of the new beasty has to be the teeth. The teeth occur in pairs, and have a trihedral form, meaning they had three peaks on each alveolus, and the edges of the teeth were adorned with wicked serrations. They were also very large, similar even to some teeth from theropod dinosaurs roaming the lands at the time!

The morphology of these teeth suggest that they were equipped just for one thing – devouring other large animals! This form of feeding is known as macrophagy, and was a common form of predation at the time for giant marine crocodyliforms (the ancestors of modern crocodiles) called metriorhynchids. Importantly, this feeding style previously seemed to have been lost in the early evolution of other brachauchenine pliosaurs, but now appears to have been present in at least one species from this group. This shows that Early Cretaceous pliosaurs were still well adapted to hypercarnivory, and retained a high feeding diversity at the beginning of the Cretaceous, and not lost from their Jurassic ancestors.

Recently, Alessandro Chiarenza, a colleague of mine at Imperial College London, reported on what appeared to be the oldest metriorhynchid remains currently known, from a fossil site in Sicily. Based on a single fossilised tooth from a period known as the Aptian, later on in the Cretaceous than when Makhaira was found, these remains extended the duration of metriorhynchids, and their eventual extinction, by several millions of years.

However, the morphology of the teeth of Makhaira wasn't known at the time of publishing the crocodyliform fossils, and it seems that it is actually impossible to distinguish between these and the teeth of some metriorhynchids. This means that the Sicilian tooth cannot be referred unequivocally to either a metriorhynchid or a pliosaur – the teeth of some species is just too similar to say for certain! What does this imply though? Well, it seems that the fate of metriorhynchids is still a mystery concealed by the fossil record, and is only something that future study of these fossils, their other monstrous counterparts, and discovery of new fossils can hope to solve!

The findings are published in the >Royal Society Open Science journal.

Author: Victoria Costello | Source: Public Library of Science [January 16, 2016]

The Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum today announced the naming of Savannasaurus elliottorum, a new genus and species of dinosaur from western Queensland, Australia. The bones come from the Winton Formation, a geological deposit approximately 95 million years old.

Savannasaurus was discovered by David Elliott, co-founder of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, while mustering sheep in early 2005. As Elliott recalled yesterday, "I was nearly home with the mob -- only about a kilometre from the yards -- when I spotted a small pile of fossil bone fragments on the ground. I was particularly excited at the time as there were two pieces of a relatively small limb bone and I was hoping it might be a meat-eating theropod dinosaur." Mr Elliott returned to the site later that day to collect the bone fragments with his wife Judy, who 'clicked' two pieces together to reveal a complete toe bone from a plant-eating sauropod. The Elliotts marked the site and made arrangements to hold a dig later that year.

The site was excavated in September 2005 by a joint Australian Age of Dinosaurs (AAOD) Museum and Queensland Museum team and 17 pallets of bones encased in rock were recovered. After almost ten years of painstaking work by staff and volunteers at the AAOD Museum, the hard siltstone concretion around the bones was finally removed to reveal one of the most complete sauropod dinosaur skeletons ever found in Australia. More excitingly, it belonged to a completely new type of dinosaur.

The new discovery was nicknamed Wade in honour of prominent Australian palaeontologist Dr Mary Wade. "Mary was a very close friend of ours and she passed away while we were digging at the site," said Mr Elliott. "We couldn't think of a better way to honour her than to name the new dinosaur after her."

"Before today we have only been able to refer to this dinosaur by its nickname," said Dr Stephen Poropat, Research Associate at the AAOD Museum and lead author of the study. "Now that our study is published we can refer to Wade by its formal name, Savannasaurus elliottorum," Dr Poropat said. "The name references the savannah country of western Queensland in which it was found, and honours the Elliott family for their ongoing commitment to Australian palaeontology."

In the same publication, Dr Poropat and colleagues announced the first sauropod skull ever found in Australia. This skull, and the partial skeleton with which it was associated, has been assigned to Diamantinasaurus matildae -- a sauropod dinosaur named in 2009 on the basis of its nickname Matilda. "This new Diamantinasaurus specimen has helped to fill several gaps in our knowledge of this dinosaur's skeletal anatomy," said Poropat. "The braincase in particular has allowed us to refine Diamantinasaurus' position on the sauropod family tree."

Dr Poropat collaborated with British sauropod experts Dr Philip Mannion (Imperial College, London) and Professor Paul Upchurch (University College, London), among others, to work out the position of Savannasaurus (and refine that of Diamantinasaurus) on the sauropod family tree. "Both Savannasaurus and Diamantinasaurus belong to a group of sauropods called titanosaurs. This group of sauropods includes the largest land-living animals of all time," said Dr Mannion. "Savannasaurus and the new Diamantinasaurus specimen have helped us to demonstrate that titanosaurs were living worldwide by 100 million years ago."

Poropat and his colleagues suggest that the arrangement of the continents, and the global climate during the middle part of the Cretaceous Period, enabled titanosaurs to spread worldwide.

"Australia and South America were connected to Antarctica throughout much of the Cretaceous," said Professor Upchurch. "Ninety-five million years ago, at the time that Savannasaurus was alive, global average temperatures were warmer than they are today. However, it was quite cool at the poles at certain times, which seems to have restricted the movement of sauropods at polar latitudes. We suspect that the ancestor of Savannasaurus was from South America, but that it could not and did not enter Australia until approximately 105 million years ago. At this time global average temperatures increased allowing sauropods to traverse landmasses at polar latitudes."

Savannasaurus was a medium-sized titanosaur, approximately half the length of a basketball court, with a long neck and a relatively short tail. "With hips at least one metre wide and a huge barrel-like ribcage, Savannasaurus is the most rotund sauropod we have found so far -- even more so than the somewhat hippopotamus-like Diamantinasaurus," said Dr Poropat. "It lived alongside at least two other types of sauropod (Diamantinasaurus and Wintonotitan), as well as other dinosaurs including ornithopods, armoured ankylosaurs, and the carnivorous theropod Australovenator."

Mr Elliott is relieved that Wade can now join "Matilda" and the other new dinosaur species on display in the Museum's Holotype Room. "That this dinosaur specimen can now be displayed for our visitors is a testament to the efforts of numerous volunteers who have worked at the Museum on the fossils over the past decade," he said. Mr Elliott and Dr Poropat agree that the naming of Savannasaurus, the fourth new species published by the AAOD Museum, is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to the potential for new dinosaur species in western Queensland.

"The Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum has a massive collection of dinosaur fossils awaiting preparation and the number of specimens collected is easily outpacing the number being prepared by volunteers and staff in our Laboratory," Mr Elliott said. "The Museum already has the world's largest collection of bones from Australia's biggest dinosaurs and there is enough new material to keep us working for several decades."

The paper naming the new dinosaur was published in >Scientific Reports.

Source: Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History [October 20, 2016]

A study, carried out by Professor Andrew C. Scott of the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London and Professor Sue Rimmer from Southern Illinois University, reveals widespread fire occurred on Earth more than 80 million years after plants first invaded the land.

The findings, published in the American Journal of Science, indicate that although plants were first detected on land more than 440 million years ago there is only scant evidence of fire at that time.

Professor Scott, said: "What surprised us was that many of these early extensive fires were surface fires burning the undergrowth, as we can see the anatomy of the plants being burned through scanning electron microscope studies of larger pieces of the fossil charcoal."

He added: "This may be because plants were small and were limited in their distribution but over the following 50 million years they diversified and spread across the globe and some of the plants were trees and could have provided a good fuel to burn. Extensive forest fires soon followed, however and we see widespread charcoal deposits throughout the Lower Carboniferous (Mississippian) Period 358-323 million years ago."

Professor Scott and Professor Rimmer made the discovery after analysing charcoal which was washed in to an ocean that lay across what is now part of present day North America.

The team believes that it was not fuel availability that prevented widespread fire, or climate, but that the atmospheric oxygen levels were too low. It had been suggested that only when oxygen levels rose to above 17% (it is 21% today) that widespread fires would be found. This new data suggests that it was at around 360 million years ago, in the latest Devonian Period, that this threshold was reached and probably never went below this level for the rest of geological history.

This time period defines a new phase of the evolution of Earth System and regular wildfire would have played an important role in the evolution of both animals and plants.

Source: University of Royal Holloway London [October 21, 2015]

New research suggests that the dodo, an extinct bird whose name has entered popular culture as a symbol of stupidity, was actually fairly smart. The work, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, finds that the overall size of the dodo's brain in relation to its body size was on par with its closest living relatives: pigeons--birds whose ability to be trained implies a moderate level of intelligence. The researchers also discovered that the dodo had an enlarged olfactory bulb -- the part of the brain responsible for smelling -- an uncharacteristic trait for birds, which usually concentrate their brainpower into eyesight.

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a large, flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. They were last seen in 1662.

"When the island was discovered in the late 1500s, the dodos living there had no fear of humans and they were herded onto boats and used as fresh meat for sailors," said Eugenia Gold, the lead author of the paper, a research associate and recent graduate of the American Museum of Natural History's Richard Gilder Graduate School, and an instructor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. "Because of that behavior and invasive species that were introduced to the island, they disappeared in less than 100 years after humans arrived. Today, they are almost exclusively known for becoming extinct, and I think that's why we've given them this reputation of being dumb."

Even though the birds have become an example of oddity, obsolescence, stupidity, and extinction, and have been featured in popular stories ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Ice Age, most aspects of the dodo's biology are still unknown. This is partly because dodo specimens are extremely rare, having disappeared during the nascent stage of natural history collections.

To examine the brain of the dodo, Gold tracked down a well-preserved skull from the collections of the Natural History Museum, London, and imaged it there with high-resolution computed tomography (CT) scanning. In the American Museum of Natural History's Microscopy and Imaging Facility, she also CT-scanned the skulls of seven species of pigeons -- ranging from the common pigeon found on city streets, Columba livia, to more exotic varieties. Out of these scans, Gold built virtual brain endocasts to determine the overall brain size as well as the size of various structures. Gold's colleagues at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and National Museum of Scotland sent her the endocast for the dodo's closest relative, the extinct island-dwelling bird Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria).

When comparing the size of the birds' brains to their body sizes, Gold and collaborators found that the dodo was "right on the line."

"It's not impressively large or impressively small -- it's exactly the size you would predict it to be for its body size," Gold said. "So if you take brain size as a proxy for intelligence, dodos probably had a similar intelligence level to pigeons. Of course, there's more to intelligence than just overall brain size, but this gives us a basic measure."

The study also revealed that both the dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire, which recently was driven to extinction by human activity, had large and differentiated olfactory bulbs. In general, birds depend much more on sight rather than smell to navigate through their world, and as a result, they tend to have larger optic lobes than olfactory bulbs. The authors suggest that, because dodos and solitaires were ground-dwellers, they relied on smell to find food, which might have included fruit, small land vertebrates, and marine animals like shellfish.

"It is really amazing what new technologies can bring to old museum specimens," said co-author Mark Norell, Macaulay Curator of Paleontology and Chair of the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. "This really underscores the need for the maintenance and growth of natural history collections, because who knows what's next."

The researchers also discovered an unusual curvature of the dodo's semicircular canal -- the balance organs located in the ear. But as of yet, there's not a good hypothesis for this atypical feature.

Source: American Museum of Natural History [February 23, 2016]

A new study published by PeerJ documents injuries inflicted in life and death to a large tyrannosaurine dinosaur. The paper shows that the skull of a genus of tyrannosaur called Daspletosaurus suffered numerous injuries during life, at least some of which were likely inflicted by another Daspletosaurus. It was also bitten after death in an apparent event of scavenging by another tyrannosaur. Thus there's evidence of combat between two large carnivores as well as one feeding on another after death.

Daspletosaurus was a large carnivore that lived in Canada and was only a little smaller than its more famous cousin Tyrannosaurus. Like other tyrannosaurs it was most likely both an active predator and scavenger. The individual in question, from Alberta Canada, was not fully grown and would be considered a 'sub-adult' in dinosaur terms (approximately equivalent to an older teenager in human terms). It would have been just under 6 m long and around 500 kg when it died.

Researchers found numerous injuries on the skull that occurred during life. Although not all of them can be attributed to bites, several are close in shape to the teeth of tyrannosaurs. In particular one bite to the back of the head had broken off part of the skull and left a circular tooth-shaped puncture though the bone. The fact that alterations to the bone's surface indicate healing means that these injuries were not fatal and the animal lived for some time after they were inflicted.

Lead author Dr David Hone from Queen Mary, University of London said "This animal clearly had a tough life suffering numerous injuries across the head including some that must have been quite nasty. The most likely candidate to have done this is another member of the same species, suggesting some serious fights between these animals during their lives."

There is no evidence that the animal died at the hands (or mouth) of another tyrannosaur. However, the preservation of the skull and other bones, and damage to the jaw bones show that after the specimen began to decay, a large tyrannosaur (possibly of the same species) bit into the animal and presumably ate at least part of it.

Combat between large carnivorous dinosaurs is already known and there is already evidence for cannibalism in various groups, including tyrannosaurs. This is however an apparently unique record with evidence of both pre- and post-mortem injuries to a single individual.

Source: PeerJ [April 09, 2015]

Medical scanners and the same software used to assess building strength after the Canterbury earthquakes, have revealed new information about the diet and dining preferences of New Zealand's extinct moa.

Researchers from Canterbury Museum, the University of Auckland, Finders University and the Universities of New England (Australia) and New South Wales have discovered that the nine species of moa were able to co-exist because differences in the structure and strength of each species' skull and bills were influenced by, or dictated by, diet.

The findings are published today in the journal >Proceedings of the Royal Society, in London.

Co-author, Dr Peter Johnston from the University of Auckland's Anatomy and Medical Imaging department, made MRI scans of the mummified moa remains to allow accurate models to be made for the research.

The moa, which roamed New Zealand until the 15th century, were herbivores and some of the largest birds to have ever existed. The largest species, the South Island Giant moa, weighed up to 240 kg whilst the smallest (the upland moa) was the size of a sheep.

Until now scientists had thought that the huge difference in size between the species determined their foraging behaviour as well as what, when and where they ate (ie their ecological niche).

Co-author Professor Paul Scofield from Canterbury Museum says that the team took the most complete skulls of each species of moa from the collections of Canterbury Museum and Te Papa Tongarewa and scanned those using medical CT (Computed Tomography) scanners.

"We then produced highly accurate 3D models of each. This wasn't a simple job as we didn't have a single skull that was perfect so we used sophisticated digital cloning techniques to digitally reconstruct accurate osteological models for each species," Professor Scofield said.

Using the medical MRI scans of the mummified remains, Dr Johnston digitally reconstructed the muscles of each species.

"Each moa species has a characteristic bill shape and the reasons for this have not previously been defined," says Dr Johnston. "Charles Darwin had an easier time investigating a similar situation in Galapagos finches, as the differences are more extreme and the diets are obvious in that group of birds."

Software used by civil engineers after the Canterbury Earthquakes to identify weak or unsound buildings, was used to test the strength and structure of each moa species' bill.

These were compared to each other and to two living relatives, the emu and cassowary. The models simulated the response of the skull to different biting and feeding behaviours including clipping twigs and pulling, twisting or bowing head motions to remove foliage.

The skull mechanics of moa were found to be surprisingly diverse. The little bush moa had a relatively short, sharp-edged bill and was superior among moa at cutting twigs and branches, supporting the proposition that they primarily fed on fibrous material from trees and shrubs.

At the opposite extreme, the coastal moa had a relatively weak skull compared to all other species which may have forced them to travel further than other moa in search of suitable food, such as soft fruit and leaves.

Dr Trevor Worthy (a New Zealander working at Flinders University in Australia) says "until now we have been limited in assessing anatomical function to examining the external aspect of bones. This new technology allows us to bring new life to old bones and to get one step closer to understanding the birds they came from."

"Little has been known about how New Zealand's ecosystem evolved, largely because we know so little about how moa lived and co-existed," says Associate Professor Stephen Wroe, leader of the Function, Evolution and Anatomy Research (FEAR) laboratory at the University of New England (Australia).

"This new research advances our understanding about the feeding behaviours of the moa species and their impact on New Zealand's unique and distinctive flora."

Source: University of Auckland [January 14, 2016]

Scientists have discovered an ancient animal that carried its young in capsules tethered to the parent's body like tiny, swirling kites. They're naming it after "The Kite Runner," the 2003 bestselling novel.

The miniscule creature, Aquilonifer spinosus, was an arthropod that lived about 430 million years ago. It grew to less than half an inch long, and there is only one known fossil of the animal, found in Herefordshire, England. Its name comes from "aquila," which means eagle or kite, and the suffix "fer," which means carry.

Researchers from Yale, Oxford, the University of Leicester, and Imperial College London described the new species in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Modern crustaceans employ a variety of strategies to protect their eggs and embryos from predators -- attaching them to the limbs, holding them under the carapace, or enclosing them within a special pouch until they are old enough to be released -- but this example is unique," said lead author Derek Briggs, Yale's G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. "Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface."

The Kite Runner fossil shows 10 juveniles, at different stages of development, connected to the adult. The researchers interpret this to mean that the adult postponed molting until the juveniles were old enough to hatch; otherwise, the juveniles would have been cast aside with the shed exoskeleton.

The adult specimen's head is eyeless and covered by a shield-like structure, according to the researchers. It lived on the sea floor during the Silurian period with a variety of other animals including sponges, brachiopods, worms, snails and other mollusks, a sea spider, a horseshoe crab, various shrimp-like creatures, and a sea star. The juvenile pouches, attached to the adult by slender, flexible threads, look like flattened lemons.

Briggs said he and his colleagues considered the possibility that the juveniles were parasites feeding off a host, but decided it was unlikely because the attachment position would not be favorable for accessing nutrients.

"We have named it after the novel by Khalid Hosseini due to the fancied resemblance of the juveniles to kites," Briggs said. "As the parent moved around, the juveniles would have looked like decorations or kites attached to it. It shows that arthropods evolved a variety of brooding strategies beyond those around today -- perhaps this strategy was less successful and became extinct."

The researchers were able to describe Aquilonifer spinosus in detail thanks to a virtual reconstruction. They reconstructed the animal and the attached juveniles by stacking digital images of fossil surfaces revealed by grinding away the fossil in tiny increments.

Author: Jim Shelton | Source: Yale University [April 04, 2016]

An international research team is formalizing plans to drill nearly 5,000 feet below the seabed to take core samples from the crater of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The group met last week in Merida, Mexico, a city within the nearly 125-mile-wide impact site, to explain the research plans and put out a call for scientists to join the expedition planned for spring 2016. The roughly $10 million in funding for the expedition has been approved and scheduled by the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) — part of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) — and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP).

Dinosaurs and other reptiles ruled the planet for 135 million years. That all changed 65.5 million years ago when a 9-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the Earth, triggering a series of apocalyptic events that killed most large animals and plants, and wiped out the dinosaurs and large marine reptiles. The event set the stage for mammals — and eventually humans — to take over. Yet, we have few geologic samples of the now buried impact crater.

Sean Gulick, a researcher at The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), and a team of scientists from the U.K. and Mexico are working to change that. The team is planning to take the first offshore core samples from near the center of the impact crater, which is called Chicxulub after the seaside village on the Yucatán Peninsula near the crater’s center.

The team, led by Gulick and Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London, will be sampling the crater’s “peak ring” — an enigmatic ring of topographically elevated rocks that surrounds the crater’s center, rises above its floor and has been buried during the past 65.5 million years by sediments.

A peak ring is a feature that is present in all craters caused by large impacts on rocky planetoids. By sampling the Chicxulub peak ring and analyzing its key features, researchers hope to uncover the impact details that set in motion one of the planet’s most profound extinctions, while also shedding light on the mechanisms of large impacts on Earth and on other rocky planets.

“What are the peaks made of? And what can they tell us about the fundamental processes of impacts, which is this dominant planetary resurfacing phenomena?” said Gulick, who is also a research associate professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. UTIG is a research unit of the Jackson School.

The researchers are also interested in examining traces of life that may have lived inside the peak ring’s rocks. Density readings of the rocks indicate that they probably are heavily broken and porous — features that may have served as protected microenvironments for exotic life that could have thrived in the hot, chemically enriched environment of the crater site after impact. Additionally, the earliest recovery of marine life should be recorded within the sediments that filled in the crater in the millions of years after the impact.

“The sediments that filled in the [crater] should have the record for organisms living on the sea floor and in the water that were there for the first recovery after the mass extinction event,” Gulick said. “The hope is we can watch life come back.”

The expedition will last for two months and involve penetrating nearly 5,000 feet beneath the seabed from an offshore platform. The core will be the first complete sample of the rock layers from near the crater’s center.

Once extracted, the core will be shipped to Germany and split in two. Half will be immediately analyzed by an international team of scientists from the U.S., U.K., Mexico and other nations, and half will be saved at a core repository at Texas A&M University for future research needs by the international community.

The team also includes researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán (CICY). Scientists interested in joining the mission must apply by May 8, 2015. For more information on the mission and the application process, see the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling’s call for applications.

Source: University of Texas at Austin [April 06, 2015]