The Great London [Search results for Palaeontology] 

An international research partnership is revealing the first mosasaur fossil of its kind to be discovered in Japan. Not only does the 72-million-year-old marine reptile fossil fill a biogeographical gap between the Middle East and the eastern Pacific, but also it holds new revelations because of its superior preservation. This unique swimming lizard, now believed to have hunted on glowing fish and squids at night, is detailed in an article led by Takuya Konishi, a University of Cincinnati assistant professor of biological sciences. The article is published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, a publication of the Natural History Museum in London.

The fossil marine reptile, Phosphorosaurus ponpetelegans (a phosphorus lizard from an elegant creek), existed during the Late Cretaceous Period just before the last of the dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops. Compared with some of their mosasaur cousins that could grow as large as 40 feet, this species is relatively small, about 3 meters, or 10 feet long. This unique discovery in a creek in the town of Mukawa in northern Japan reveals that they were able to colonize throughout the northern hemisphere.

"Previous discoveries of this particular rare mosasaur have occurred along the East Coast of North America, the Pacific Coast of North America, Europe and North Africa, but this is the first to fill the gap between the Middle East and the Eastern Pacific," explains Konishi, a member of the research team that also was represented by the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (Canada), University of Alberta, Brandon University, Hobetsu Museum (Japan), Fukuoka University and the town of Mukawa.

Because the fossil was so well preserved, the creature revealed it had binocular vision -- its eyes were on the front of the face, providing depth perception. This was a new discovery for this fossil species. The discovery reveals that the eye structure of these smaller mosasaurs was different from their larger cousins, whose eyes were on either side of their large heads, such as the eye structure of a horse. The eyes and heads of the larger mosasaurs were shaped to enhance streamlined swimming after prey that included fish, turtles and even small mosasaurs.

"The forward-facing eyes on Phosphorosaurus provide depth perception to vision, and it's common in birds of prey and other predatory mammals that dwell among us today," says Konishi. "But we knew already that most mosasaurs were pursuit predators based on what we know they preyed upon -- swimming animals. Paradoxically, these small mosasaurs like Phosphorosaurus were not as adept swimmers as their larger contemporaries because their flippers and tailfins weren't as well developed."

As a result, Konishi says it's believed these smaller marine reptiles hunted at night, much like the owl does compared with the daytime birds of prey such as eagles. The binocular vision in nocturnal animals doubles the number of photoreceptors to detect light. And, much like owls with their very large eyes to power those light receptors, the smaller mosasaur revealed very large eye sockets.

Also, because fossils of lantern fish and squid-like animals have been found from the Late Cretaceous Period in northern Japan, and because their modern counterparts are bioluminescent, the researchers believe that Phosphorosaurus may have specifically targeted those glowing fish and squids at night while their larger underwater cousins hunted in daytime.

"If this new mosasaur was a sit-and-wait hunter in the darkness of the sea and able to detect the light of these other animals, that would have been the perfect niche to coexist with the more established mosasaurs," says Konishi.

Painstaking Preservation

The fossil, enclosed in a rock matrix, was first discovered in 2009, in a small creek in northern Japan. Revealing what was inside the matrix while protecting the fossil was a painstaking process that took place at the Hobetsu Museum in Mukawa. The calcareous nodule would be dipped at night in a special acid wash, and then carefully rinsed the next day, as the two-year process freed the bones from the matrix. To further protect the fossil, special casts were made of the bones so that the researchers could piece together the remains without damaging the fossil.

"It's so unusually well-preserved that, upon separating jumbled skull bones from one another, we were able to build a perfect skull with the exception of the anterior third of the snout," says Konishi. "This is not a virtual reality reconstruction using computer software. It's a physical reconstruction that came back to life to show astounding detail and beautiful, undistorted condition."

Future Research

Konishi says future research will examine how this new mosasaur fits in the evolutionary family tree of mosasaurs.

Author: Dawn Fuller | Source: University of Cincinnati [December 08, 2015]

The discovery of a tiny, 170-million-year-old fossil on the Isle of Skye, off the north-west coast of the UK, has led Oxford University researchers to conclude that three previously recognised species are in fact just one.

During a fossil-hunting expedition in Scotland last year, a team of researchers from the University's Department of Earth Sciences discovered the fossilised remains of a mouse-sized mammal dating back around 170 million years to the Middle Jurassic period. The new find -- a tiny lower jaw bearing 11 teeth -- shows that that three species previously described on the basis of individual fossilised teeth actually belong to just one species.

The United Kingdom has yielded many important mammalian fossils from the Middle Jurassic, a period dating between 176 and 161 million years ago, with most being found in the Scottish Isles and around Oxfordshire. Indeed, specimens obtained from Kirtlington Quarry -- just 10 miles north of Oxford -- have provided some of the richest Middle Jurassic mammal records to date. Included among those are a large number of teeth, each found in isolation, that had been thought to include at least three distinct species of what are known as 'stem therians' -- ancient relatives of many modern mammals, including rodents and marsupials.

Now, though, the team from Oxford has discovered a fossil which refutes those claims. The team found the 10 millimetre-long fossilised jaw at a site on the west coast of the Isle of Skye. 'We spent five days exploring the locality, finding nothing especially exciting, and were walking back along the beach to the house where we were staying,' recalls Dr Roger Close, the lead author of the study. 'Then, by chance, we spotted this specimen on the surface of a boulder.'

After carefully removing the specimen -- a complete left lower jaw of a small mammal -- the team carried out a series of analyses to determine its origins. First, they performed a high-resolution x-ray CT scan at the Natural History Museum in London, providing an incredibly detailed 3D model of the fossil that allowed the researchers to glean much more information about its anatomy than could ever be possible by visual inspection. 'Over half of the fossil is still buried in the rock,' explains Dr Close. 'The CT scan allows us to virtually remove this, and explore the whole specimen in exquisite detail.'

From there, they systematically compared the shape of each and every tooth present in the jaw to those found in all similar specimens discovered in the past. They were surprised to find that the new jaw resembled not one species, but three: Palaeoxonodon ooliticus, Palaeoxonodon freemani and Kennetheridium leesi, all known from isolated teeth preserved in rocks of the same age from Oxfordshire.

Differences in tooth shape that had been thought to distinguish three different species were in fact all present in the single lower jaw found on the Isle of Skye. 'In effect, we've "undiscovered" two species,' explains Dr Close. 'The new find shows that we should be cautious about naming new types of animals on the basis of individual teeth.' In a paper published in Palaeontology, the team identifies their find as Palaeoxonodon ooliticus -- the name given to the first of the three species to be described back in the late 1970s.

Palaeoxonodon has long been recognised as an important species for understanding the evolution of molar teeth in modern mammals, and this latest discovery sheds more light on the subject. The species appears to show an intermediate step in the evolution of what are known as 'tribosphenic' molars -- a kind of pestle-and-mortar geometry that is particularly well suited to processing food.

'Towards the front, three sharp cusps allow the animal to slice up the food, while at the back a flatter, grinding surface crushes it,' explains Dr Close. 'It's an evolutionary innovation that allowed much more versatile ways of feeding to evolve, and it may well have contributed to the long-term success of this group of mammals.'

Source: University of Oxford [November 13, 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]

An international team of scientists led by the University of Leicester has discovered a new species of fossil in England -- and identified it as an ancient parasitic intruder.

The fossil species found in 425-million year old rocks in Herefordshire, in the Welsh borderland, is described as 'exceptionally well preserved.' The specimens range from about 1 to 4 millimeters long.

The fossil species -- a 'tongue worm', which has a worm-like body and a head and two pairs of limbs -- is actually a parasite whose representatives today live internally in the respiratory system of a host, which it enters when it is eaten.

The new fossil, which was originally entirely soft-bodied, is the first fossil tongue worm species to be found associated with its host, which in this case is a species of ostracod -- a group of micro-arthropods (crabs, spiders and insects are also arthropods) with two shells that are joined at a hinge.

Professor David Siveter, of the Department of Geology at the University of Leicester made the discovery working alongside researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Imperial College London and Yale, USA. Their research is published in the journal Current Biology and was supported by The Natural Environmental Research Council, together with the Leverhulme Trust, the John Fell Oxford University Press (OUP) Research Fund and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Professor Siveter said: "This discovery is important not only because examples of parasites are exceptionally rare in the fossil record, but also because the possible host of fossil tongue worms -- and the origin of the lifestyle of tongue worms -- has been the subject of much debate.

"This discovery affirms that tongue worms were 'external' parasites on marine invertebrate animals at least 425 million years ago; it also suggests that tongue worms likely found their way into land-based environments and associated hosts in parallel with the movement of vertebrates onto the land by some 125 million years later."

Professor Siveter said tongue worms -- technically termed pentastomids -- are in fact not worms at all; they are an unusual group of tiny and widespread parasitic arthropods. Their fossils are exceptionally rare and until now are known only from a handful of isolated juvenile specimens.

Today they are known from about 140 species, nearly all of which are parasitic on vertebrate animals, particularly reptiles and including humans. Some of the fossil tongue worm specimens occur inside the shell, near the eggs of the ostracod; others are attached to the external surface of its shell, a unique position for any fossil or living tongue worm.

Professor Siveter added: "The tongue worm and its host lived in a sea that 425 million years ago -- during the Silurian period of geological time -- covered much of southern Britain, which was positioned then in warm southerly subtropical latitudes. The animals died and were preserved when a volcanic ash rained down upon them. The new species has been named Invavita piratica, which means an 'ancient intruder' and 'piracy', referring to its parasitic lifestyle in the sea."

The fossils have been reconstructed as virtual fossils by 3D computer modelling.

Source: University of Leicester [May 21, 2015]

When the Black Death swept through Europe in 1347, it was one of the deadliest disease outbreaks in human history, eventually killing between a third and half of Europeans.

Prior work by investigators has traced the cause to plague-carrying fleas borne by rats that jumped ship in trading ports. In addition, historical researchers believe that famine in northern Europe before the plague came ashore may have weakened the population there and set the stage for its devastation.

Now, new research using a unique combination of ice-core data and written historical records indicates that the cool, wet weather blamed for the northern European famine actually affected a much wider area over a much longer period. The work, which researchers say is preliminary, paints a picture of a deep, prolonged food shortage in the years leading to the Black Death.

“The evidence indicates that the famine was a broader phenomenon, geographically and chronologically,” said Alexander More, a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard History Department and a lecturer in the History of Science Department.

A widespread famine that weakened the population over decades could help explain the Black Death’s particularly high mortality. Over four or five years after arriving in Europe in 1347, the pandemic surged through the continent in waves that killed millions.

The ice-core data is part of a unique program linking traditional historical research with scientific data-collecting techniques. The program, called the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard (SoHP), is headed by Michael McCormick, the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History. SoHP’s ice-core project is being conducted in collaboration with the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute and researchers at Heidelberg University. The project’s approach puts it at the juncture of environmental science, archaeology, and history. It is supported by the Arcadia Fund of London.

More presented his findings at a conference in November arranged to discuss the project. Joining him was Harvard junior Matthew Luongo, an Earth sciences and environmental engineering concentrator from Dunster House, who discussed the discovery of volcanic tephra in the ice core. Tephra, microscopic airborne volcanic particles, are generally believed absent from cores in European glaciers, make Luongo’s assumption-puncturing discovery potentially significant.

Luongo spent several days at the Climate Change Institute last summer performing chemical analyses and examining the volcanic bits through a scanning electron microscope. Each volcanic eruption has a slightly different chemical fingerprint, so he was able to trace the tephra to the 1875 Askja eruption in Iceland, one of the largest eruptions there in history.

Since many eruptions were written about contemporaneously, the ice core’s volcanic traces can be used to align ice-core data with written records, providing greater certainty in dating other chemical traces in the ice, such as those from human activities like lead from Roman-era smelting.

“I think it was a really important project,” Luongo said.

McCormick said that the advanced technologies scientists used to understand areas like the human genome and climate change are increasingly being applied to the humanities, and opening new avenues of investigation.

McCormick was part of a team that in 2011 used tree-ring data to reconstruct European climate over the last 2,500 years, showing that the period before the fall of the Roman Empire was marked by wide climactic variability. In November, McCormick summed up the use of climate data in historical research as reading history “from the environment itself.”

“All these things are happening in the sciences and spilling over into the humanities,” McCormick said. “Twenty years ago, if you’d have told me that climate could have caused the collapse of the Roman Empire and that we would have the means to test that, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

The new data emerging from the ice core could be the first of a flood of information about the last millennium and beyond. McCormick’s University of Maine colleagues, led by Paul Mayewski, have developed a laser-based method of ice analysis. It requires far smaller samples of ice and can take 50,000 samples in a one-meter ice core, compared with just 100 in the previous method. The new technology allows much higher resolution analysis of even very thin ice layers — to the specific year and potentially to individual storms — and can go back farther than the 1500 A.D. limit of this glacier with previous techniques.

The ice core was the first ever taken specifically for historical research, McCormick said, and was drilled in 2013 from the Colle Gnifetti glacier, high in the Alps near the Swiss-Italian border. It was divided between partner organizations, with the portion allocated to the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past and the Climate Change Institute being held at the University of Maine.

The findings about the period preceding the Black Death described by More continue to fill in an emerging and newly complex picture of a key period in human history. Recent research has traced the genesis of the European plague to animal groups in Asia and climate-related outbreaks that traveled along Silk Road trade routes.

McCormick said this application of scientific methods opens new avenues of inquiry, akin to discovering colossal collections of historical records, whether read directly from the DNA of ancient people, from the trees that grew at the time, or from the ice deposited in ancient storms.

“It’s a gigantic set of archives that document the least-documented part of [history],” McCormick said. “It’s kind of a renaissance of history.”

Author: Alvin Powell | Source: Harvard University [January 07, 2016]

Various specimens of Africa’s earliest coelacanth have been found in a 360 million year-old fossil estuary near Grahamstown, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

More than 30 complete specimens of the new fossil species, Serenichthys kowiensis, were collected from the famous Late Devonian aged Waterloo Farm locality, by palaeontologist Dr Robert Gess and described by him in collaboration with Professor Michael Coates of the University of Chicago.

Gess did the research whilst he was completing his PhD at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. An article describing the new species will be published in the in the prestigious Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London on Monday, 21 August.

“Remarkably, all of the delicate whole fish impressions represent juveniles. This suggests that Serenichthys was using a shallow, waterweed-filled embayment of the estuary as a nursery, as many fish do today,” says Gess.

The fossils come from black shales originally disturbed by road works at Waterloo Farm. These shales are the petrified compacted remains of mud, which was deposited in the quiet reaches of an estuary not unlike some of those along the Eastern Cape coast today.

“This earliest known record of a coelacanth nursery foreshadows a much younger counterpart, known from the 300 million year old Mazon Creek beds of Illinois in the United States,” says Gess.

“This glimpse into the early life history of ancient coelacanths raises further questions about the life history of the modern coelacanth, Latimeria, which is known to bear live young, but whether they, too, are clustered in nurseries remains unknown,” explains Coates.

360 million years ago, Africa was part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, made up of Africa, India, Australia, Antarctica and South America. At that time, the rocks of Waterloo Farm were forming along the shores of the semi-enclosed Agulhas Sea, not far from the South Pole.

Gess originally identified coelacanth remains from the locality whilst carrying out excavations at Waterloo Farm in the mid-1990s under the supervision of Dr Norton Hiller, of the Rhodes University Geology Department. These fossils were not, however, well enough preserved to be reconstructed and described. His painstaking excavation of tons of shale salvaged during subsequent roadworks has now shed light on dozens more specimens, a few of which are preserved in exquisite detail.

These were prepared under a microscope and have allowed the species to be reconstructed in minute detail. They prove to be a new genus and species.

Coelacanths are believed to have arisen during the Devonian Period (about 419.2 ± 3.2 million years ago), however only five species of reconstructable Devonian coelacanths have previously been described, in addition to a number of very fragmentary remains. None of these came from Africa, but rather from North America, Europe, China and Australia. The new species gives important additional information on the early evolution of coelacanths.

“According to our evolutionary analysis (conducted by Gess and Coates), it is the Devonian species that most closely resembles the line leading to modern coelacanths,” says Gess.

The new species was discovered a mere 100km from the mouth of the Chalumna River, off which the type specimen of Latimeria chalumnae (the first discovered modern coelacanth) was caught in 1938.

Furthermore, the Geology Department at Rhodes, where Gess was based when he found his first fossil coelacanth, is on the site of the former Chemistry Department where Latimeria was first described. In keeping with the naming of its living relative (after an Eastern Cape river), the species name of the new fossil form, kowiensis, is after the Kowie River which rises among the hills where it was found, and the genus name, Serenichthys, honours Serena Gess, who provided land for the storage of more than 70 tons of black shale rescued from roadworks for ongoing research – in which all the new material was found.

All specimens have been deposited in the palaeontological collection of the Albany Natural History Museum, in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.

Source: University of the Witwatersrand [September 21, 2015]

Researchers have identified the first known example of fossilised brain tissue in a dinosaur from Sussex. The tissues resemble those seen in modern crocodiles and birds.

An unassuming brown pebble, found more than a decade ago by a fossil hunter in Sussex, has been confirmed as the first example of fossilised brain tissue from a dinosaur.

The fossil, most likely from a species closely related to Iguanodon, displays distinct similarities to the brains of modern-day crocodiles and birds. Meninges -- the tough tissues surrounding the actual brain -- as well as tiny capillaries and portions of adjacent cortical tissues have been preserved as mineralised 'ghosts'.

The results are reported in a >Special Publication of the Geological Society of London, published in tribute to Professor Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford, who died in 2014. Brasier and Dr David Norman from the University of Cambridge co-ordinated the research into this particular fossil during the years prior to Brasier's untimely death in a road traffic accident.

The fossilised brain, found by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks near Bexhill in Sussex in 2004, is most likely from a species similar to Iguanodon: a large herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous Period, about 133 million years ago.

Finding fossilised soft tissue, especially brain tissue, is very rare, which makes understanding the evolutionary history of such tissue difficult. "The chances of preserving brain tissue are incredibly small, so the discovery of this specimen is astonishing," said co-author Dr Alex Liu of Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, who was one of Brasier's PhD students in Oxford at the time that studies of the fossil began.

According to the researchers, the reason this particular piece of brain tissue has been so well-preserved is that the dinosaur's brain was essentially 'pickled' in a highly acidic and low-oxygen body of water -- similar to a bog or swamp -- shortly after its death. This allowed the soft tissues to become mineralised before they decayed away completely, so that they could be preserved.

"What we think happened is that this particular dinosaur died in or near a body of water, and its head ended up partially buried in the sediment at the bottom," said Norman. "Since the water had little oxygen and was very acidic, the soft tissues of the brain were likely preserved and cast before the rest of its body was buried in the sediment."

Working with colleagues from the University of Western Australia, the researchers used scanning electron microscope (SEM) techniques in order to identify the tough membranes, or meninges, that surrounded the brain itself, as well as strands of collagen and blood vessels. Structures that could represent tissues from the brain cortex (its outer layer of neural tissue), interwoven with delicate capillaries, also appear to be present. The structure of the fossilised brain, and in particular that of the meninges, shows similarities with the brains of modern-day descendants of dinosaurs, namely birds and crocodiles.

In typical reptiles, the brain has the shape of a sausage, surrounded by a dense region of blood vessels and thin-walled vascular chambers (sinuses) that serve as a blood drainage system. The brain itself only takes up about half of the space within the cranial cavity.

In contrast, the tissue in the fossilised brain appears to have been pressed directly against the skull, raising the possibility that some dinosaurs had large brains which filled much more of the cranial cavity. However, the researchers caution against drawing any conclusions about the intelligence of dinosaurs from this particular fossil, and say that it is most likely that during death and burial the head of this dinosaur became overturned, so that as the brain decayed, gravity caused it to collapse and become pressed against the bony roof of the cavity.

"As we can't see the lobes of the brain itself, we can't say for sure how big this dinosaur's brain was," said Norman. "Of course, it's entirely possible that dinosaurs had bigger brains than we give them credit for, but we can't tell from this specimen alone. What's truly remarkable is that conditions were just right in order to allow preservation of the brain tissue -- hopefully this is the first of many such discoveries."

"I have always believed I had something special. I noticed there was something odd about the preservation, and soft tissue preservation did go through my mind. Martin realised its potential significance right at the beginning, but it wasn't until years later that its true significance came to be realised," said paper co-author Jamie Hiscocks, the man who discovered the specimen. "In his initial email to me, Martin asked if I'd ever heard of dinosaur brain cells being preserved in the fossil record. I knew exactly what he was getting at. I was amazed to hear this coming from a world renowned expert like him."

Source: University of Cambridge [October 27, 2016]

Scientists have discovered macabre fossil evidence suggesting that 300 million-year-old sharks ate their own young, as fossil poop of adult Orthacanthus sharks contained the tiny teeth of juveniles. These fearsome marine predators used protected coastal lagoons to rear their babies, but it seems they also resorted to cannibalising them when other food sources became scarce.

Three hundred million years ago, Europe and North America lay on the equator and were covered by steamy jungles (the remains of which are now compacted into coal seams). The top predators of these so-called "Coal Forests" were not land animals, but huge sharks that hunted in the oily waters of coastal swamps.

The fossil evidence for shark cannibalism comes from distinctive spiral-shaped coprolites (fossil poop) found in the Minto Coalfield of New Brunswick, Canada. The poop is known to have been excreted by Orthacanthus because this shark had a special corkscrew rectum that makes identification easy. The poop is packed full of the teeth of juvenile Orthacanthus, confirming that these sharks fed on their own babies. This is called "fillial cannibalism".

PhD candidate in the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Aodhan O Gogain, made the extraordinary discovery. His findings have just been >published in the journal Palaeontology. He said: "Orthacanthus was a three-metre-long xenacanth shark with a dorsal spine, an eel-like body, and tricusped teeth. There is already evidence from fossilised stomach contents that ancient sharks like Orthacanthus preyed on amphibians and other fish, but this is the first evidence that these sharks also ate the young of their own species."

Professor Mike Benton, University of Bristol, is a co-author of the study. He said: "As palaeontologists cannot observe predator-prey relationships directly in the way that a zoologist can, they have to use other methods to interpret ancient food webs. One method is by probing the contents of coprolites [fossil poop] as we have done here."

Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, Royal Holloway University of London is another co-author. He said: "We don't know why Orthacanthus resorted to eating its own young. However, the Carboniferous Period was a time when marine fishes were starting to colonise freshwater swamps in large numbers. It's possible that Orthacanthus used inland waterways as protected nurseries to rear its babies, but then consumed them as food when other resources became scarce."

Aodhan O Gogain added: "Orthacanthus was probably a bit like the modern day bull shark, in that it was able to migrate backwards and forwards between coastal swamps and shallow seas. This unusual ecological adaptation may have played an important role in the colonisation of inland freshwater environments."

The Minto Coalfield in Canada, where the fossils were discovered, is of considerable historical importance, being the first place in North America where settlers mined coal in the early 17th Century.

Source: University of Bristol [August 11, 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]

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]

Analysis of the first fossil bee nest from the Plio-Pleistocene of South Africa suggests that the human ancestor Australopithecus africanus lived in a dry savannah environment, according a study published in the >open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jennifer Parker from University College London, United Kingdom, and colleagues.

Little paleoecological information is available for the site in South Africa where the first Au. africanus fossil—the 'Taung Child'—was discovered. However, insect-related fossils, abundant at the discovery site, can yield insights into the paleoenvironment. Bees, for example, tend to build characteristic nests in characteristic conditions. Parker and colleagues analyzed CT scans of a fossil bee nest that was discovered near the Taung Child site to determine its internal structure and thus the kinds of bees that built it.

The fossil nest was exceptionally well preserved, and the structure of its cells and tunnels suggested that it was made by a ground-nesting solitary bee. These bees typically nest on bare, light, dry soil that is exposed to the sun, which bolsters other recent evidence that Au. africanus lived in dry savannahs. Insect-related fossils are common but largely overlooked at sites where human ancestors lived, the researchers said, and their work underscores the contribution such fossils can make to understanding the environments where human ancestors lived.

"When Raymond Dart published his description of the 'Taung Child' in 1925 he profoundly changed our understanding of human evolution," says study co-author Philip Hopley. "In the 90 years following his discovery, attention of anthropologists has moved to other African sites and specimens, and research at Taung has been hampered by the complex geology and uncertain dating. New research at Taung is helping to reconstruct the environment in which this enigmatic little hominin lived and died."

Source: Public Library of Science [September 29, 2016]

An unidentified fossilised bone in a museum has revealed the size of a fearsome abelisaur and may have solved a hundred-year old puzzle.

Alessandro Chiarenza, a PhD student from Imperial College London, last year stumbled across a fossilised femur bone, left forgotten in a drawer, during his visit to the Museum of Geology and Palaeontology in Palermo Italy. He and a colleague Andrea Cau, a researcher from the University of Bologna, got permission from the museum to analyse the femur. They discovered that the bone was from a dinosaur called abelisaur, which roamed the Earth around 95 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period.

Abelisauridae were a group of predatory, carnivorous dinosaurs, characterised by extremely small forelimbs, a short deep face, small razor sharp teeth, and powerful muscular hind limbs. Scientists suspect they were also covered in fluffy feathers. The abelisaur in today's study would have lived in North Africa, which at that time was a lush savannah criss-crossed by rivers and mangrove swamps. This ancient tropical world would have provided the abelisaur with an ideal habitat for hunting aquatic animals like turtles, crocodiles, large fish and other dinosaurs.

By studying the bone, the team deduced that this abelisaur may have been nine metres long and weighed between one and two tonnes, making it potentially one of the largest abelisaurs ever found. This is helping researchers to determine the maximum sizes that these dinosaurs may have reached during their peak.

Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, co-author of the study from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said: "Smaller abelisaur fossils have been previously found by palaeontologists, but this find shows how truly huge these flesh eating predators had become. Their appearance may have looked a bit odd as they were probably covered in feathers with tiny, useless forelimbs, but make no mistake they were fearsome killers in their time."

The fossil originated from a sedimentary outcrop in Morocco called the Kem Kem Beds, which are well known for the unusual abundance of giant predatory dinosaur fossils. This phenomenon is called Stromer's Riddle, in honour the German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer, who first identified this abundance in 1912. Since then scientists have been asking how abelisaurs and five other groupings of predatory dinosaurs could have co-existed in this region at the same time, without hunting each other into extinction.

Now the researchers in today's study suggest that these predatory dinosaur groups may not have co-existed so closely together. They believe that the harsh and changing geology of the region mixed the fossil fragment records together, destroying its chronological ordering in the Kem Kem beds, and giving the illusion that the abelisaurs and their predatory cousins shared the same terrain at the same time. Similar studies of fossil beds in nearby Tunisia, for example, show that creatures like abelisaurs were inland hunters, while other predators like the fish eating spinosaurs probably lived near mangroves and rivers.

Chiarenza added: "This fossil find, along with the accumulated wealth of previous studies, is helping to solve the question of whether abelisaurs may have co-existed with a range of other predators in the same region. Rather than sharing the same environment, which the jumbled up fossil records may be leading us to believe, we think these creatures probably lived far away from one another in different types of environments."

Fossilised femora are useful for palaeontologists to study because they can determine the overall size of the dinosaur. This is because femora are attached to the thigh and tail muscles and have scars, or bumps, which tell palaeontologists where the ligaments and muscles were attached to the bone and how big those muscles and ligaments would have been.

Andrea Cau, co-author from the University of Bologna, said: "While palaeontologists usually venture to remote and inaccessible locations, like the deserts of Mongolia or the Badlands of Montana, our study shows how museums still play an important role in preserving specimens of primary scientific value, in which sometimes the most unexpected surprises can be discovered. As Stephen Gould, an influential palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, once said, sometimes the greatest discoveries are made in museum drawers."

The study is published in the journal Peer J. Chiarenza did the underpinning analysis with Cau while at the University of Bologna.

The next step will see the team looking for more complete remains from these predatory dinosaurs trying to better understand their environment and evolutionary history.

Author: Colin Smith | Source: Imperial College London [February 29, 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]