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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]

Working closely with the U.S. Forest Service and the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, an international team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation has begun to piece together an archaeological and historical narrative of how the crew of the wrecked 19th century Russian-American Company sailing ship Neva survived the harsh subarctic winter.

"The items left behind by survivors provide a unique snapshot-in-time for January 1813, and might help us to understand the adaptations that allowed them to await rescue in a frigid, unfamiliar environment for almost a month," said Dave McMahan of the Sitka Historical Society.

McMahan is the principal investigator for the NSF award, which was made by the Arctic Sciences Section in NSF's Division of Polar Programs.

The wreck of the frigate Neva, which occurred near the city of Sitka, has been surrounded by stories and legends for two centuries. Although survivors eventually were rescued and taken to Sitka, few accounts of their experience were collected or published. No official records relating to the wreck and its aftermath have been discovered.

The researchers are seeking to verify the wreck location and confirm the site of a survivor camp. They also hope that Tlingit oral history will add to the story and help to place the wreck in a broader context.

The NSF-funded work stems from a 2012 survey project by the U.S. Forest Service, the Alaska Office of History and Archaeology and the Sitka Historical Society. At that time, archaeologists discovered caches of Russian axes at a location they predicted to be the survivor camp.

The archaeological team--which includes members from Russia, the U.S. and Canada--believes articles they found over the past two years represent the everyday tools used by 26 shipwrecked members of the Neva's crew. Those crewmembers survived for almost a month in the winter of 1813 by foraging and gathering materials that washed ashore from the wreck.

In July, researchers discovered at the campsite a series of hearths with early 19th century artifacts such as gun flints, musket balls, pieces of modified sheet copper, iron and copper spikes, a Russian axe, and a fishhook fashioned from copper. Well-preserved food middens--or refuse heaps--will allow reconstruction of the foraging strategies the sailors used to survive.

Gun flints found at the site appeared to have been used by survivors to used start fires, by striking them against steel. Historical accounts credit a firearm used in this manner with helping save the crew from hypothermia. Physical evidence indicates the survivors tried to whittle down musket balls to fit a smaller caliber weapon, such as a flintlock--most likely the same firearm mentioned in the historical accounts. Some of the copper spikes recovered by archaeologists had been broken through shear stress, such as a wreck would produce. The researchers believe one copper or brass artifact is part of a set of a navigator's dividers, saved by a crewman as the ship violently broke apart over rocks.

The nature of the artifacts seems to strongly indicate that survivors of the shipwreck were active in ensuring their own survival. They modified wreckage in desperation, but with ingenuity.

"Collectively, the artifacts reflect improvisation in a survival situation, and do not include ceramics, glass and other materials that would be associated with a settlement," McMahan said.

Because the wreck occurred in an area of profound cultural significance to the Tlingit people of Sitka, the team did not search for--nor did it inadvertently discover--any graves of those who perished.

A famed vessel

Before its Arctic demise, the Neva was famous as one of two vessels that completed the first Russian circumnavigation of the globe from 1803-1807. The ship later fought in the 1804 Battle of Sitka, a pivotal engagement in the Russian struggle for control over what was then the Alaska territory. After 1808, the ship was in the exclusive service of the Russian-American Company, which Tsar Paul I chartered to establish new settlements in Russian America, primarily Alaska, and carry out a program of colonization.

The Neva came to grief after leaving the Siberian port of Okhotsk for Sitka in late August of 1812, McMahan said. During a grueling three-month voyage, those on board endured water shortages and sickness. Fierce storms damaged the ship's rigging. In mid-November the weakened sailors finally found shelter in Alaska's Prince William Sound and, after much debate, made a desperate attempt to reach Sitka.

In favorable weather, they almost reached their destination before wrecking off Kruzof Island. The wreck killed 32; another 15 had already died at sea. Of the 28 who made it to shore, 26 survived for almost a month before their rescue.

McMahan said the team hopes to continue the investigation next year with a smaller field effort at the camp. The terrestrial archaeology is only one component of research, which also includes underwater work and archival research, he said. Thick kelp that obscured the sea floor and interfered with sonar hampered an underwater survey this season. McMahan and Evguenia Anitchenko, the project's archival coordinator, conducted research in St. Petersburg last September, and plan to do the same later this year in London, where the Neva was built.

In an effort to put together the most complete story possible, McMahan is also encouraging anyone with information or oral history pertaining to the Neva to contact him through the Sitka Historical Society. "One goal of the research is to replace some of the myths and 'lore of the sea' with scientific findings," he said.

Longer-range plans for the project include a "virtual museum" with 3-D scans of artifacts, along with a short film that can be used in local educational curricula.

Source: National Science Foundation [September 10, 2015]

Arctic sea ice has reached its lowest winter point since satellite observations began in the late 1970s, raising concerns about faster ice melt and rising seas due to global warming, US officials said Thursday.

The maximum extent of sea ice observed was 5.6 million square miles (14.5 million square kilometers) on February 25, earlier than scientists had expected, said the report by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

"It is also the lowest in the satellite record," the NSIDC said.

Below-average ice conditions were observed everywhere except in the Labrador Sea and Davis Strait.

The sea ice was about 425,000 square miles below the average from 1981 to 2010, a loss equal to more than twice the size of Sweden.

It was also 50,200 square miles below the previous lowest maximum that occurred in 2011.

Environmentalists said the report offered more evidence of worsening global warming, and urged action to curb the burning of fossil fuels that send greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"This is further evidence that global warming and its impacts have not stopped despite the inaccurate and misleading claims of climate change 'skeptics,'" said Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

"The gradual disappearance of ice is having profound consequences for people, animals and plants in the polar regions, as well as around the world, through sea level rise."

The World Wildlife Fund said the loss of sea ice means trouble for a vast web of life that depends on it, from polar bears to marine creatures.

"Today's chilling news from the Arctic should be a wakeup call for all of us," said Samantha Smith, leader of the WWF Global Climate and Energy Initiative.

"Climate change won't stop at the Arctic Circle. Unless we make dramatic cuts in polluting gases, we will end up with a climate that is unrecognizable, unpredictable and damaging for natural systems and people."

The NSIDC said much of the ice loss could be attributed to an unusually warm February in parts of Russia and Alaska, and that it was still possible that a late-season surge of ice growth could occur.

A detailed analysis of the winter sea ice from 2014 to 2015 is due to be released in early April.

Source: AFP [March 19, 2015]

A single entry of the plague bacterium into Europe was responsible for the Black Plague of the mid-14th century. This same strain sparked recurrent outbreaks on the continent over the following four centuries before spreading to China, where it triggered the third plague pandemic in the late 19th century. The wave of plague that traveled to Asia later became the source population for modern-day epidemics around the globe. The bacterium's routes over time were revealed by genome analyses published in >Cell Host & Microbe.

"Our study is the first to provide genetic support for plague's travel from Europe into Asia after the Black Death, and it establishes a link between the Black Death in the mid-14th century and modern plague," says first author Maria Spyrou of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

The plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, is one of the deadliest pathogens in human history, sparking three major pandemics: the Plague of Justinian, which struck the Roman Empire during the 6th and 8th centuries; the second plague pandemic, which first erupted in Europe in the mid-14th-century Black Death and continued to strike the continent in recurrent outbreaks until the mid-18th century; and the third plague pandemic, which emerged in China during the late 19th century.

Evidence based on ancient DNA samples and historical climate patterns has suggested that the recurrent outbreaks of the second pandemic were caused by multiple reintroductions of Yersinia pestis into Europe, most likely from Asia. Moreover, some scientists have recently suggested that the plague bacterium migrated from Europe to Asia after the Black Death, later giving rise to the third pandemic. But until now, genomic evidence to support this model was missing.

To shed light on the origin and path of the second pandemic, Spyrou and co-senior study authors Alexander Herbig, Kirsten Bos, and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History collected samples from plague-infected individuals buried in mass grave sites in Barcelona, Spain, and Ellwangen, Germany, as well as a single grave in Bolgar City, Russia.

"The mass burials where our samples come from often represent events where hundreds of people died of plague during a single outbreak," Herbig says. "This gives us an impression about how significant the impact of this disease was during medieval times."

The Bolgar City site was dated to the second half of the 14th century using coin artifacts known to have been minted after 1362. Radiocarbon dates from bone fragments and tooth roots were estimated at 1300-1420 for Barcelona, 1298-1388 for Bolgar City, and 1486-1627 for Ellwangen.

After analyzing DNA extracts from the teeth of 178 individuals, the researchers identified Y. pestis DNA in extracts from 32 individuals. Three individuals from Barcelona, Bolgar City, and Ellwangen had sufficient Y. pestis DNA for genome-level analysis. The researchers sequenced the genomes of these three ancient Y. pestis strains and compared them to 148 previously sequenced ancient and modern strains to reconstruct the Y. pestis phylogenetic tree.

The phylogenetic analysis revealed no differences between their Black Death strain from Barcelona and previously genotyped strains from mid-14th-century London. The simultaneous presence of the same strain in both southern and northern Europe suggests that Y. pestis entered the continent in a single wave rather than through multiple pulses during the Black Death.

These Black Death strains from London and Barcelona gave rise to a branch containing the Ellwangen strain and previously sequenced 18th-century strains from the Great Plague of Marseille in France. Moreover, all three newly reconstructed genomes and previously sequenced genomes from the second plague grouped together in the same branch on the phylogenetic tree. Taken together, these findings suggest that a single Y. pestis lineage was responsible for the Black Death and subsequent second pandemic outbreaks throughout Europe.

Meanwhile, the Bolgar City strain shared similarities with the Black Death London strain as well as all modern strains. This finding supports the idea that one Y. pestis lineage traveled from Europe to Asia after the Black Death, later sparking the third pandemic and modern-day epidemics worldwide.

"Our most significant finding revealed a link between the Black Death and modern plague," Krause says. "Though several plague lineages exist in China today, only the lineage that caused the Black Death several centuries earlier left Southeast Asia in the late 19th century pandemic and rapidly achieved a near worldwide distribution."

In future studies, the researchers plan to gain additional insights into the entry and end points of the Black Death in Europe. They hope to expand their sample range and explore these regions further to better understand the route traveled by the disease, the evolutionary changes it acquired at different stages, and the toll it had on the human population.

"We hope that our findings will highlight the importance for more extensive sampling and sequencing of both ancient and modern plague isolates around the world, and open up new research themes regarding the role played by Europe and West Asia in plague's evolution and ecology," Bos says.

Source: Cell Press [June 09, 2016]

Scientists from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London together with colleagues from the USA, Russia and China, have discovered that forest fires across the globe were more common between 300 and 250 million years ago than they are today. This is thought to be due to higher level of oxygen in the atmosphere at that time.

The study which was published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science, found that peats that were to become coal contained high levels of charcoal that could only be explained by the high levels of fire activity.

The team used the data from charcoal in coal to propose that the development of fire systems through this interval was controlled predominantly by the elevated atmospheric oxygen concentration (p(O2)) that mass balance models predict prevailed. At higher levels of p(O2), increased fire activity would have rendered vegetation with high moisture contents more susceptible to ignition and would have facilitated continued combustion.

In the study they examine the environmental and ecological factors that would have impacted fire activity and conclude that of these factors p(O2) played the largest role in promoting fires in Late Paleozoic peat-forming environments and, by inference, ecosystems generally, when compared with their prevalence in the modern world.

Professor Andrew Scott, one of the lead authors, said: "High oxygen levels in the atmosphere at this time has been proposed for some time and may be why there were giant insects and arthropods at this time but our research indicates that there was a significant impact on the prevalence and scale of wildfires across the globe and this would have affected not only the ecology of the plants and animals but also their evolution."

Professor Scott and his colleagues and students at Royal Holloway have pioneered the study of fire in Earth's deep past. Professor Scott, added: "We have been able to show that wildfire was an important element in Earth System many hundreds of millions of years before the arrival of humans."

Source: University of Royal Holloway London [October 27, 2015]

The Italian mafia is selling assault rifles to Islamic State leaders in Libya in return for looted archaeological treasures, according to an Italian newspaper.

The feared ‘Ndrangheta gangsters sell on the priceless artefacts to Russian and Asian collectors.

La Stampa reports that the Calabrian network, which dominates Europe’s drug trade, works with the Camorra in Naples to buy Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers smuggled out of Ukraine and Moldova by the Russian mafia.

The armaments are then traded in return for ancient Roman and Greek statues that Isis fighters have dug up illegally in Libya, which was a colony of the two ancient cultures. Isis has ruled over swathes of the country for months.

A journalist from La Stampa posed as a collector to be taken to a salami factory in southern Italy by a member of an ‘Ndrangheta clan from Lamezia in Calabria. For $87,000 he was offered the marble head of a Roman sculpture looted from Libya.

The Mafioso also showed photographs of a larger head from a Greek statue, for sale at $1.2 million.

Antiquities are brought from Libya to the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro by Chinese-operated cargo ships, it is claimed. The treasures are sold on to collectors from Russia, China, Japan and the Gulf. After expanding into Libya, Isis has been pinned back by local militias. The jihadists, however, are believed to have tried to profit from trafficking in artefacts, as they have done in Iraq and Syria.

Libyan archaeologists working to protect the country’s five UNESCO-listed sites have received death threats.

Italian investigators have long suspected the mafia of selling guns to Isis. “In Naples, Islamic militias and the Camorra have been trading guns and drugs since the 1990s,” a veteran investigator said yesterday (Sunday).

The gangsters have also been involved in the wholesale looting of Etruscan Roman tombs in Italy. Trading guns for artefacts with Isis is a natural evolution of its business. The widespread excavation and selling of Greek and Roman treasures boomed in Libya after the death in 2011 of Colonel Gaddafi, well before the arrival of Isis.

A rare 4ft marble statue believed to have been dug up in the ancient city of Cyrene in 2011 and worth $3.2 million was found in a west London warehouse two years after the uprising.

Susan Kane, a Libyan expert at Oberlin College in Ohio, said: “There was a major land grab after the revolution and more earth has been moved since 2011 than in the preceding centuries. Antiquities are turning up and there is a great synergy between trafficking them, drugs and arms.”

Author: Tom Kington | Source: The Times [October 17, 2016]