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[CaaC (John)]

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Ancient Britons bedevilled by belly bugs

Analysis of skeletons bridging the Roman to the Victorian eras show ancients (unsurprisingly) carried parasitic stomach bugs, but patterns changed with the advent of sanitation.

It may come as no surprise to you that ancient humans played host to a smorgasbord of bugs and diseases, but science, as a rule, likes to tease out the details in the data. 

So, in that spirit of curiosity, researchers from the University of Oxford have investigated the history of parasitic worm infections in Britons who lived between the Roman and Victorian eras – and the results aren’t pretty.

Humans are infected with roundworms and whipworms through contact with contaminated faecal matter. In a society with poor hygiene practices, then, these nefarious critters can thrive on a virtual parade of poop that spreads, in tiny increments, from person to person. Other parasitic infections, like tapeworm, can come from eating undercooked meat or fish.

To test the prevalence of these infections over time, the research team analysed 464 human burials from 17 sites, dating from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution. To identify the trace presence of parasitic worms in these long-degraded burials, the researchers hunted for worm eggs in the soil near the pelvises of the skeletons.

According to the results of the study, published today in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, people in the Roman and Late Medieval periods fared the worst, with the highest rates of parasitic worm infections of the time period studied. But, as the Industrial period dawned, worm infection rates – while still high – began to show spatial patterns of variation. 

Some sites showed scarce evidence of parasitic eggs, while in others these orbs of intestinal doom were rampant. The researchers believe these patterns are linked to changes in sanitation and hygiene in some areas, during what’s known as the Victorian “Sanitary Revolution”. 

“Defining the patterns of infection with intestinal worms can help us to understand the health, diet and habits of past populations,” write the authors. “More than that, defining the factors that led to changes in infection levels (without modern drugs) can provide support for approaches to control these infections in modern populations.”

Next, the team plan to use their array of parasite-based approaches to investigate other infections in the past, including larger-scale analyses.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/parasitic-worms-ancient-britons/

 

 

[CaaC (John)]

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New discovery sheds light on the peopling of the Pacific

An epic migration story is revealed through a piece of pottery.

Scientists think they may have found the smoking gun that explains why humans colonised the thousands of scattered islands of the South Pacific – and it lies in a sherd of pottery found hidden on a small island in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

The peopling of the Pacific islands is one of humanity’s most epic migration stories. In just three millennia, an ancestral cultural group called the Lapita spanned a third of the Earth’s surface, reaching some of the most isolated landmasses on the planet.

As they moved, these ancestral Pacific Islanders are thought to have brought with them Austronesian languages, new domestic animals species like pigs, dogs and chickens, and a distinctive kind of pottery.

“For a long time it was thought Lapita groups avoided most of Papua New Guinea because people were already living there,” says Ben Shaw, lead researcher of the new study published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution. But, as this new research shows, that wasn’t always the case.

Brooker Island is a small finger of land that juts out into the sea near the southern tip of PNG, an early step in the chain of islands that makes up the South Pacific. 

The Gutunka archaeological site nestles in a north-facing bay at the edge of an epic lagoon on the island that is, according to researchers, one of the most biodiverse marine ecosystems in the world.

Painstakingly excavated in 2018 and 2019, the earliest layers of the site contained the bones of a menagerie of introduced species, including pigs and dogs, and rats. As described in a new study in Nature Ecology and Evolution, later layers revealed a rich complex of pottery and tools unique to the Lapita culture, including foreign-source obsidian, blades consistent with tattooing, and the distinctive pots. 

The researchers believe the Lapita people may have initially arrived as sporadic, occasional visitors, before establishing a more permanent base in the bay, as evidenced by more complex material culture and the more intensive harvesting of sea turtles for food. 

“Lapita cultural groups were the first people to reach the remote Pacific islands such as Vanuatu around 3,000 years ago,” says Shaw. “But in Papua New Guinea, where people have lived for at least 50,000 years, the timing and extent of Lapita dispersals are poorly understood.”

Shaw says the new discovery explains why the Lapita people colonised the Pacific islands 3,000 years ago: he suggests that contact with Indigenous people on PNG may have influenced migration pathways and led to island-hopping, as populations met, interacted and possibly butted heads.

“It is one of the greatest migrations in human history and finally we have evidence to help explain why the migration might have occurred and why it took place when it did,” he says.

The discovery, Shaw says, was a massive stroke of luck.

“We had no indication this would be a site of significance, and a lot of the time we were flying blind with the areas we surveyed, so it is very much like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.”

But Shaw notes cooperation with local populations was key to the discovery, which is why the Brooker Island community is listed as a senior author on the paper.

“A lot of our good fortune was because of the cultural knowledge, and we built a strong relationship with the locals based on honesty and transparency about our research on their traditional lands,” he says. “Without their express permission, this kind of work would simply not be possible.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/pacific-islands-migration-new-discovery-png/

 

[CaaC (John)]

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Microscopic algae may have helped preserve 22.5-million-year-old spider fossils

Sticky sulphurous secretions thought to be behind rare fossils of non-mineralised structures.

Tiny creatures known as diatoms may have helped preserve rare spider fossils over 22 million years old, according to a new paper by US-based researchers.

Fossils are crucial to understanding the history of our planet, but some things get fossilised more often than others. To understand why, let’s briefly recap how fossils form.

Mineralised structures like bones and teeth are most likely to be fossilised; when animals die, their soft tissues are usually eaten or rot away, leaving the more durable mineralised structures behind. If a skeleton is buried in sediment, it may become fossilised as minerals from groundwater gradually seep into the bone, crystallise, and turn to stone in the exact same shape as the skeleton. This is known as “petrification”, which literally means “turned to rock”.  

However, arthropods like insects and spiders don’t have bones. Instead, they have a tough exoskeleton made of a carbonaceous polymer called chitin – which is actually a type of sugar. This sort of non-mineralised structure is less likely to be preserved in the fossil record – and we don’t have such a good understanding of their fossilisation process as we do for skeletons.

One place where rare arthropod fossils can be found is a geological formation near Aix-en-Provence in France. That’s where the scientists who worked on the new paper – led by Alison Olcott of the University of Kansas, and her then-graduate student Matthew Downen – found the spider fossils that led to their new discovery.

“Matt was working on describing these fossils, and we decided – more or less on a whim – to stick them under the fluorescent microscope to see what happened,” recalls Olcott.

“To our surprise, they glowed, and so we got very interested in what the chemistry of these fossils was that made them glow.”

Olcott and colleagues found that the spider fossils contained a black polymer made of carbon and sulphur, and were surrounded and covered by microscopic algae called diatoms. Diatoms secrete a sticky substance called extracellular polysaccharide, or EPS.

“These microalgae make the sticky, viscous gloop — that’s how they stick together,” Olcott explains.

“I hypothesised that the chemistry of those microalgae, and the stuff they were extruding, actually made it possible for this chemical reaction to preserve the spiders.”

The researchers proposed that a chemical reaction between the chitin in the spider exoskeleton and the sulphur in the EPS allowed the fossils to be preserved. The process is similar to vulcanisation, an industrial treatment that uses sulphur and heat to make rubber in car tyres and other products more durable.

“Sulphurisation takes carbon and cross-links it with sulphur and stabilises the carbon, which is why we do it to rubber to make it last longer,” Olcott says.

“What I think happened here chemically is the spider exoskeleton is chitin, which is composed of long polymers with carbon units near each other, and it’s a perfect environment to have the sulphur bridges come in and really stabilise things.”

She wants to see if this hypothesised preservation process is supported by evidence from other fossil sites containing diatoms.

“Of all the other exceptional fossil preservation sites in the world in the Cenozoic Era, something like 80% of them are found in association with these microalgae,” she points out.

The intriguing new discovery might be one of the few upsides to the COVID-19 pandemic. Locked down with her family in 2020, Olcott had to change her approach to research.

“I honestly think this study is partially a result of pandemic science,” she says.

“I spent a lot of time with these images and these chemical maps and really explored them in a way that probably wouldn’t have happened if all the labs were open and we could have gone in and done more conventional work,” she says.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/spider-fossils-microalgae/

 

[CaaC (John)]

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Baby dinosaur fossil Australia’s smallest sauropod – at 4.2 tonnes!

The 95-million-year-old juvenile weighed as much as an elephant.

A dinosaur discovered in Queensland is the smallest sauropod found in Australia. The 95-million-year-old “baby” has been nicknamed “Ollie” and is the first juvenile sauropod found in the country. Though still a child when he died, Ollie would have measured 11 metres in length and weighed an estimated 4.2 tonnes – as much as an adult elephant!

Sauropods were long-necked dinosaurs and are among the largest land animals of all time. Ollie is the third Diamantinasaurus matildae individual found and his species was part of a group of sauropods called titanosaurs found mostly in Africa, South America and Australia. Though adult Diamantinasuarus would have reached about 15m and weighed 15 to 20 tonnes, other titanosaurs are thought to have grown to more than 35m and been as much as 100 tonnes in weight.

The announcement of Ollie as Australia’s smallest sauropod comes less than a year after researchers declared they had found Australia’s largest. That specimen, “Cooper,” found about 400km south of Ollie, was an Australotitan cooperensis which would have been 30m long, 6m high at the hip, and weighed up to 70 tonnes – more than 16 times Ollie’s size.

Ollie was discovered in 2012 by a sheep grazier near the western-Queensland town of Winton. The Winton Formation where Ollie was found is made up of sandstones, siltstones and claystones formed during the late Cretaceous period. What is now sheep and cattle grazing country, 90 million years ago would have been a dinosaur habitat made up of rivers, freshwater pools, swamps and coastal estuaries.

Diamantinasaurus like Ollie may have eaten conifers, angiosperms, ginkgoes, cycads, ferns and horsetails.

Samantha Rigby, a palaeontologist and masters student at Swinburne University in Melbourne, is the lead author of a paper published about Ollie this month in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“Even though we’re talking about a little baby, he’s not actually that small,” Rigby told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). While an exact cause of death is unknown, researchers believe it is likely Ollie became stuck in mud near a watering hole and sank, leaving the fossils below the mud well preserved.

Dozens of fossils were excavated, including vertebrae, ribs, a scapula, a humerus, a thumb claw and a femur.

Ollie’s dorsal vertebra. Source: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

“Some of the bones in his body weren’t fused, so we know that (Ollie) was a juvenile,” Rigby says. “I spent a really long time comparing Ollie with all of the adult specimens here in Winton and we found that Ollie is not an exact copy of the adult.”

The find provides evidence for the unsurprising, but nonetheless important, fact that juvenile dinosaurs were not just small versions of adults. Like humans and other modern animals, their bodies would have changed as they grew.

“The limb bones of this juvenile titanosaur grew at a more rapid rate than its back and shoulder bones. The bones are also narrower in width when compared with the robust limb bones of an adult Diamantinasaurus. Ollie’s limbs were a lot more overgrown and as he grew up, he grew into his limbs. He would have looked a bit weird with really long legs and a small body,” she adds.

In other palaeontology news, giant dolphin-like marine reptiles which swam in oceans 200 million years ago while dinosaurs roamed the Earth have been found 2800m above sea level.

A paper released in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology today, examines the fossils unearthed in the Swiss Alps between 1976 and 1990. Over millions of years, the rising of the Alps has raised the ancient ocean floors to surprising heights, revealing three new ichthyosaur species in the new study.

The fossils include the largest ichthyosaur tooth ever found. The width of the tooth root is twice as large as any known aquatic reptile. The previous largest belonged to a 15m-long ichthyosaur. The new animal could have been more than 20m in length and weighed 80 tonnes, rivalling a sperm whale in size, researchers believe. “The tooth is particularly exciting,” explains lead author and Professor at the University of Bonn, Martin Sander. “Because this is huge by ichthyosaur standards: Its root was 60 millimetres in diameter – the largest specimen still in a complete skull to date was 20mm and came from an ichthyosaur that was nearly 18m long.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/australia-small-sauropod/

 

Edited April 30, 2022 by CaaC (John)

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New species of tiny frog

Six new species of tiny frogs from Mexico

Scientists have identified six new species of frog the size of a thumbnail from the forests of Mexico, with one earning the distinction of Mexico’s smallest frog.

All six species are smaller than an Australian five cent coin, around only 15mm long when fully grown, according to a new study published in Herpetological Monographs.

The newly discovered species are known as ‘direct-developing’ frogs: rather than hatching from eggs into tadpoles like most frogs, they emerge from the eggs as perfect miniature frogs.

Researchers studied 500 frog specimens that had originally been collected in Mexico but were gathered from museums around the world.

They used DNA sequencing to sort the frogs into groups based on how similar their genes were, then CT-scans were used to create 3D models of the frogs’ skeletons, so that physical details could be compared.

The six new species are all from the same genus Craugastor.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/tiny-frog-hibernation-exocomet/

 

 

Edited May 4, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Fossil DNA shows effect of ancient climate change on eastern moa

                                   

The New Zealand extinct eastern moa has given scientists new insights into how species react to climate change, with a recent study finding that during the last Ice Age these large flightless birds changed their distribution as the climate heated and cooled.

Geneticists analysed ancient DNA from moa fossils and found that while the species had been spread across the eastern and southern South Island during the prior warmer Holocene period, their range reduced to just the south during the height of the last Ice Age (25,000 years ago).

“The eastern moa’s response had consequences for its population size and genetic diversity – the last Ice Age led to a pronounced genetic bottleneck which meant it ended up with lower genetic diversity than other moa living in the same areas,” says lead author Dr Alex Verry, a researcher in the Otago Paleogenetics Laboratory at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

The findings are reported in the journal Biology Letters.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2022.0013

 

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Cue the Laos Cobra cave tooth, first clue in the Denisovan hunt down under

The Denisovan chain to PNG and Australia gets another link.

Denisovans, the mysterious archaic humans first identified in a cave in Siberia, also lived down under. We know that because indigenous Papuans and Australians carry their DNA – around 4% was bequeathed by a Denisovan ancestor.

Since that discovery in 2010, the race has been on to find the actual remains of a Denisovan in this part of the world. Now an international team may have found them in the form of a 160,000–130,000-year-old tooth unearthed from Cobra cave in the remote Annamite mountains of northern Laos.

“We have essentially found the ’smoking gun’ – this Denisovan tooth shows they were once present this far south,” says geoarchaeologist Mike Morley, a team member from Flinders University, in Adelaide.

“It’s incredibly exciting; we’ve never seen them in a warm climate before,” says geochronologist Kira Westaway, a team member from Macquarie University, Sydney.

Outside the research team, some remain circumspect about the tooth’s identity. “The authors have done a great job in describing and dating it, but I’d prefer to say it’s a putative Denisovan fossil,” says seasoned anthropologist Chris Stringer, the research leader in human origins at the British Natural History Museum.

Denisovans are the only archaic humans ever to have been identified by DNA alone. The first clue came from a finger bone fragment, one of the middle bones of a pinky, found in a jumble of bone fragments in Denisova Cave near the border of Siberia and China. The pinky bone looked like it came from a human. But its DNA showed that, while human-like, it was not from a modern human or a Neanderthal but something quite distinct.

So distinctive was the DNA, that geneticists could pick out traces of it in modern human populations. The DNA of nearby Eurasians carried only 0.1% but on the other side of the world, the DNA of indigenous Papuans and Australians carried 4%.

The DNA story said the Denisovans most likely interbred with modern people somewhere in South East Asia. So where were their physical remains?

The only other Denisovan remains to date were identified in 2019, when an oversized human-like jaw with huge teeth, originally found by a meditating monk in a Tibetan cave, turned out to be Denisovan. The identification was made after researchers extracted collagen protein from the very large teeth and found it was a match to that predicted by the Denisovan DNA sequence. Denisova Cave later also yield three large Denisovan teeth.

• First complex ecosystems formed in Ediacaran – millions of years earlier than thought

To find Denisovan fossils down under, most pundits placed their bets on the islands that serve as stepping stones between the Asian mainland and Australia/Papua New Guinea. The Annamite mountains were not on the radar of Denisovan hunters. But they were for Fabrice Demeter, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the new study. He had gone there to answer a different question: how did modern humans travel from Africa through Asia? Laos turned out to be an important part of the route: in 2012 the ‘cave of monkeys’ aka Tam Pa Ling Cave, delivered the oldest remains of modern humans on mainland southeast Asia, with one jaw dating to around 70,000 years ago.

But adventurous climbers had also found another promising cave nearby, the Cobra cave, or Tam Ngu Hao 2.

Unlike the cave of monkeys it was not habitable. But it served, as limestone caves do, as a trap for fossils swept from surrounding hillsides during floods. Inside, a cemented gravelly deposit turned out to be a treasure trove of fossilised bones, mostly teeth of giant herbivores such as ancient bison, elephants and rhinos. Amidst them was a prize gem: one archaic-looking human molar.

How old was it? Archaeology is plagued by arguments about dates so the researchers deployed independent approaches. Kira Westaway from Macquarie dated the cemented gravel deposit using infra-red stimulated luminescence dating. Jian-Xin Zhao from University of Queensland dated the flowstones above the gravel using a uranium series. Renaud Joannes-Boyau from Southern Cross University, in Lismore, dated the co-cemented animal teeth using a combined uranium series and electron spin resonance technique (the hominin tooth was too precious to drill into).

Finally Mike Morley from Flinders examined hair-thin slices of the cemented deposits under the microscope to check the integrity of the structure. Were the baubles in this cement cake all baked in at the same time, or had some fallen in later, perhaps when a tree root pierced the layer?

The forensic analyses all agreed: the layer was intact and had been deposited between 164,000 and 131,000 years ago. The minimum age for the tooth then, was 131,000 years old. It did not belong to a modern human.

Had the cave been in the northern hemisphere, the key suspect would be a Neanderthal but their kind had never been found this far south. Could it be, at last, a remnant of the long-sought southern Denisovan?

The tooth did not yield any DNA for an ID; no surprise since the tropics are unkind to DNA preservation. So Clément Zanolli, an expert at identifying hominin teeth at the University of Bordeaux, in France, was brought in to adjudicate. His method is akin to the time-honoured approach of identifying species from the molar cusp pattern, but with a high-tech advance. Instead of scanning the outer cusps, which may be worn or broken, he uses a miniature CT scanner to look at the pristine pattern just underneath the enamel layer, the so-called enamel-dentine junction, or EDJ.

Zanolli has used his technique to look at the EDJ of diverse members of the South East Asian archaic human family – including Indonesian Homo erectus and the diminutive Homo luzoneniensis (found on the island of Luzon, in the Philippines) and Homo floresiensis (found on the Indonesian island of Flores). His analysis placed the tooth closest to that of the Denisovan teeth found in the Tibetan cave and Denisova Cave.

Protein traces from the tooth enamel also suggested the owner was a young woman, because no male-specific version of the amelogenin protein was detected.

But to close the case on whether or not she really was a tropical Denisovan, more of her kind will need to be found. Watch this space. There’s surely more to come!

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/denisovan-tooth-found-in-laos/

Edited May 19, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Stunning restoration 

 

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First Pompeiian human genome sequenced from a man who died in the Mt Vesuvius eruption

Study shows that he may have had tuberculosis.

The ancient Italian city of Pompeii was destroyed by an eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 AD. More than 2,000 people died as a direct consequence of the eruption, and the city was buried under four to six metres of volcanic ash and pumice and seemingly lost to time.

Pompeii was rediscovered in 1748, and human remains have since been excavated from the archaeological dig site.  Now, for the first time, the genome of one of these individuals has been sequenced in full, according to a new study in Scientific Reports.

Scientists have examined the skeletal remains of two humans from the city’s Casa del Fabbro (House of the Craftsman) and extracted their ancient DNA. One set of remains belonged to a male, aged between 35 and 40 years old at the time of his death, and the other belonged to a female over 50 years of age.

Due to the position and orientation of the human remains, the authors suggest they probably died instantly due to the approach of the high-temperature volcanic ash cloud.

They team analysed the ancient DNA extracted from the petrous bone – a wedge-shaped mass of bone within the cranial cavity – and while there were gaps in the sequences recovered from the female’s remains, they were able to sequence the entire genome of the male.

Before now, only short stretches of mitochondrial DNA from human and animal remains had been sequenced from Pompeii, since exposure to high temperatures reduces the quality and quantity of recoverable DNA.

But the authors speculate that the pyroclastic materials – the fast-moving flow of solidified lava pieces, volcanic ash and hot gases – that covered the remains may have also shielded them from environmental factors, such as atmospheric oxygen, that degrade DNA over the years.

They compared the male individual’s DNA with DNA from 1,030 other ancient humans (from Upper Palaeolithic to Medieval periods) and 471 modern western Eurasian individuals and found that his DNA shared the most similarities with modern central Italians and those who lived in Italy during the Roman Imperial age (27 BCE to 476 AD), as you might expect.

Interestingly, his mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA, in particular, also contains groups of genes that are commonly found in people from the island of Sardinia, but not among other individuals who lived in Italy during the Roman Imperial age.

This suggests there may have been high levels of genetic diversity across the Italian Peninsula during this time.

Further analysis also identified lesions in one of his vertebra, as well as DNA sequences commonly found in the group of bacteria to which Mycobacterium tuberculosis – the pathogen that causes tuberculosis – belongs.

This suggests that the man may have been affected by spinal tuberculosis (Pott’s disease) prior to his death.

According to the researchers, these findings “provide a foundation to promote an intensive analysis of well-preserved Pompeiian individuals” to gain more insight into the genetic history and lives of this population.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/first-human-genome-sequenced-pompeii/

 

 

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Mystery solved as strange fish-like fossil finally identified

Scans of the 390 million-year-old creature’s fossil shows it may have been closely related to the first four-limbed vertebrates.

All four-limbed vertebrates, including humans, are descended from the first organisms which transitioned from Earth’s ancient oceans to land. New research on a 390 million-year-old fish-like creature which has puzzled palaeontologists for 130 years might finally answer the question of where it fits in the evolutionary tree, and how it relates to the evolution of four-limbed animals.

Palaeospondylus gunni was a 5cm-long fish-like creature with a body similar to an eel. In a study published in Nature, an international team used powerful X-ray technology to scan the animal’s fossilised skull – squashed under nearly 400 million years worth of sediment. The team argues their results provide evidence to suggest Palaeospondylus was closely related to the animals which eventually left Earth’s early oceans to become the first land-dwelling vertebrates.

Dr Yuhzi (Daisy) Hu, co-author of the paper while she was at the Australian National University, spoke with Cosmos. Despite Palaeospondylus fossils being quite abundant, she says the creature’s small size and poor quality of its fossils have made it quite difficult to study. “Placing this specimen in the evolutionary tree has been quite difficult after the discovery of the first one in 1890. So, it is a question that hasn’t been answered in over 100 years.”

Hu helps paint a picture of what the world looked like when Palaeospondylus was alive.

Palaeospondylus lived in a period of geological time known as the Devonian, often referred to as the “Age of Fishes”. The Devonian saw the appearance of the first vascular plants, increased diversity and complexity of marine life, and mass extinction events that saw the demise of brachiopods, trilobites and conodonts.

The late Devonian was hot and humid. Towering above the land were forests made up not of trees, but giant mosses. The first roots, leaves and seeds began evolving toward the end of the period. On the forest floor, arthropods dominated the land.

Shallow water reefs of rugose corals and encrusting red algae were abuzz with life. A time known as the “Devonian explosion” saw a rapid diversification of vertebrate marine life. Jawless and armoured fish, known as placoderms, are common. The first jawed fish also appear. “We also have the rise of the first sarcopterygians, lobe-finned fish, which eventually produced the first tetrapods just before the end of the Devonian,” Hu adds.

In the Palaeospondylus scans, Hu says they found three semicircular canals, which indicate the inner ear morphology of jawed vertebrates. “This resolves an issue which previous studies were not able to identify.”

Previous studies suggested that the animal was related to primitive jawless vertebrates. But the key cranial features observed in the new study suggests that Palaeospondylus beplaced into the tetrapodomorpha – four-limbed animals. “So, it was more closely related to limbed tetrapods than to many other known tetrapod morphs that still retained fins,” says Hu.

Unlike tetrapodomorphs in general, teeth, dermal bones and paired appendages have never been associated with Palaeospondylus. These features are readily found in fossils of other animals that lived around the same time and place. “Whether these features were evolutionarily lost or whether normal development froze halfway in fossils might never be known,” says the paper’s lead author Tatsuya Hirasawa of the University of Tokyo. “Nevertheless, this heterochronic evolution might have facilitated the development of new features like limbs.”

But the most exciting aspect of the study, according to Hu, is “the chance to propose its evolutionary position and be able to identify the cranial skeleton boundaries. That’s actually the key to us.” This was made possible because this specimen is quite well preserved, and the modern technology allowed them to study it in more detail.

“Finding a perfect, or even well-preserved, fossil specimen is already quite hard,” Hu says. “We were literally talking about winning the lottery or even harder. Those two samples that were selected in this study, I think they were out of 2,000 fossils. So, a lot of time has been used in the beginning, before you even dig into studying the animal.”

Once specimens were chosen, the researchers used the extremely powerful RIKEN SPring-8 synchrotron in Japan to generate high-resolution micro-CT scans using X-rays. Unusually, the team used fossil skulls completely embedded in the rock. “Choosing the best specimens for the micro-CT scans and carefully trimming away the rock surrounding the fossilised skull allowed us to improve the resolution of the scans,” says Hirasawa. “Although not quite cutting-edge technology, these preparations were certainly keys to our achievement.”

Hu says that the aim of the paper is to help answer the question: what was Palaeospondylus? “I think we’re a step closer towards that answer. But I don’t think we achieved the answer yet. It’s basically a pixel puzzle that we want to resolve, and it obviously contributes to our curiosity as human beings. That’s usually what fundamental science can do. But there’s a certain distance that we need to go to achieve full 100% certainty.”

Hu believes the team won’t limit their study to early vertebrate evolution in the fossil record. “I think they will decide to use molecular biology and genetics to study developing embryos of key modern vertebrates, such as our Australian lungfish. The strange morphology of Palaeospondylus is comparable to that of tetrapod larvae. So it’s very interesting from a developmental genetic point of view.” The plan is, Hu says, to “study the water-to-land transition in vertebrate history with the help of Palaeospondylus and all the other developmental biology stuff that the team has got.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/fish-like-fossil-palaeospondylus/

 

Edited May 30, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Ancient humans used Spanish cave for rock art for more than 50,000 years

New research paints a picture of the symbolic value of the cave for prehistoric human culture.

Cueva de Ardales in Málaga, Spain, is a famous site containing more than 1,000 prehistoric cave paintings and engravings. It also includes artefacts and human remains. But since its discovery in 1821, after an earthquake unearthed the entrance, the way ancient humans used the cave has been a mystery.

New research, published in PLoS ONE, on items from the first excavation have shed light on prehistoric Iberia’s human inhabitants.

Archaeologists from Spain, Germany and Denmark collaborated to analyse the paintings, relics and human bones from the cave.

Combining radiometric dating – measuring the presence of radioactive elements such as carbon-14 to determine the age of remains – with other analysis of artefacts from the site, the researchers have determined the first occupants of Cueva de Ardales, arriving more than 65,000 years ago, were likely Neanderthals.

Modern humans came to use the cave around 30,000 years later. This timeframe coincides with the disappearance of Homo neanderthalensis some 40,000 years ago. Homo sapiens used the cave sporadically until as recently as the beginning of the Copper Age, around 7,000 years ago.

Rock art is believed to be an indication of humankind’s first attempts to understand, rationalise and abstract the external world. Our ability to imagine and communicate through language, writing, science, art and abstractions are likely consequences of such leaps in ancient human culture.

• More on archaeology: First Pompeiian human genome sequenced from a man who died in the Mt Vesuvius eruption

The authors write: “Our research presents a well-stratified series of more than 50 radiometric dates in Cueva de Ardales that confirm the antiquity of Palaeolithic art from over 58,000 years ago. It also confirms that the cave was a place of special activities linked to art, as numerous fragments of ochre were discovered in the Middle Palaeolithic levels.”

The oldest examples of cave art in the Málaga site include abstract signs such as dots, finger tips and hand stencils created with red pigment. Later artwork involves more complex paintings and figures such as animals.

Human remains indicate the use of the cave as a burial place in the Holocene – the period of geological time since the end of the last major glacial epoch, or “ice age”, around 12,000 years ago.

There is limited evidence of domestic activities at Cueva de Ardales, suggesting humans were not residing in the cave.

The team’s findings confirm that Cueva de Ardales is a site of immense symbolic value.

The Iberian Peninsula holds more than 30 other caves with similar rock art, making the region a key locality for investigating the history and culture of ancient humans in Europe.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/spanish-cave-art-prehistoric/

 

Edited June 3, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Giraffe evolution mystery solved by bizarre fossil

Giraffes’ long necks may have evolved through the males’ violent courtship rituals rather than access to food.

Before Charles Darwin identified natural selection as the process by which species evolved, French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck put forward his own theory of evolution. Lamarck suggested that acquired characteristics were inheritable.

Lamarck famously cited giraffes as an example. Giraffes stretched their necks to browse higher in trees, posited Lamarck, and the continuation of that habit resulted in a gradual lengthening of the limbs and neck – traits which would then be passed on to the next generation. And voila! Long necks on giraffes.

Conversely – and more correctly – Darwinian evolution proposes that giraffe ancestors would have had slight variations in neck length. Those with longer necks may have been more successful in getting food, hence the attribute is “selected” through the more long-lived, healthier, longer-necked giraffes.

End of story.

But discussions about Lamarckism vs Darwinism aside, we’re still learning about giraffe evolution. And new research published in Science suggests that long necks may have more to do with courtship than obtaining a meal.

In mating rituals, rival male giraffes swing their long necks, hurling their heavy skulls at competitors. Bulls target weak spots on their opponents with their cranial weaponry – ossicones (the skin-covered bone structure atop a giraffe’s head) and osteomas (bony growths on the animal’s skull).

A longer neck means greater force and damage to the rival.

Researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences studied fossils of strange early giraffoid Discokeryx xiezhi.

Fossils, including a full skull and four cervical vertebrae, belonging to Discokeryx xiezhi were analysed. The 17 million-year-old fossils were found in the Junggar Basin in Xinjiang, China.

Discokeryx xiezhi lived in the Miocene geological epoch which spanned 23 to around 5 million years ago. The Miocene saw the emergence of the first kelp forests and grasslands.

Beginning over 40 million years after the extinction of the large dinosaurs, the age of mammals was in full swing. The first dogs, bears, hyenas and sabre-toothed cats in Smilodon’s family appeared. Primitive antelope, deer, elephants and giraffes appeared.

“Discokeryx xiezhi featured many unique characteristics among mammals, including the development of a disc-like large ossicone in the middle of its head,” says co-author of the paper Professor Deng Tao from IVPP. Deng said the single ossicone resembles that of the xiezhi, a one-horned creature from ancient Chinese mythology which gives its name to the ancient mammal.

The researchers say the animal’s joints between its head and neck, and between the very stout cervical vertebrae, are the most complex of any mammal. These articulations, the team found, were adaptations to high-speed head-to-head impact. They found this structure was far more effective than even that of extant animals who engage in head-on combat, such as musk oxen. In fact, Discokeryx xiezhi may have been the best adapted vertebrate to utilise head impact of all time.

“Both living giraffes and Discokeryx xiezhi belong to the Giraffoidea, a superfamily. Although their skull and neck morphologies differ greatly, both are associated with male courtship struggles and both have evolved in an extreme direction,” says lead author Wang Shiqi.

Comparing the horns of giraffoids, cattle, sheep, deer and pronghorns, the team found greater diversity among giraffes. They also found greater extremes in Giraffoidea, indicating more intense courtship struggles.

“Stable isotopes of tooth enamel have indicated that Discokeryx xiezhi was living in open grasslands and may have migrated seasonally,” says co-author Men Jin. The researchers suggest that the less habitable grasslands may have pushed animals like Discokeryx xiezhi to engage in fighting behaviour as a survival-related stress caused by the environment. The genus Giraffa, to which the modern giraffe belongs, emerged around 7 million years ago in similar environments. The authors suggest that similar extreme struggle and sexual selection is what led to the rapid elongation of giraffe necks.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/giraffe-neck-evolution-courtship/

 

Edited June 4, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna31424

Ancient city discovered in Iraq after Tigris river drought 

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Stone Age “Swiss Army knife” reveals early humans’ connections

Strong social networks allowed early populations to prosper in southern Africa.

Early humans across southern Africa around 65,000 years ago made a particular type of stone tool – called a backed artefact – in the same shape, indicating that the populations must have been in contact with each other, finds a new study in Scientific Reports.

Archaeologists have found that the backed artefact, dubbed the “stone Swiss army knife” of prehistory, was made to look the same in enormous numbers across great distances and multiple biomes.

This indicates that the humans making them must have been sharing information and communicating with one another, and the findings suggest that these strong social networks are what would have allowed early human populations to prosper.

“People have walked out of Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, and we have evidence for early Homo sapiens in Greece and the Levant from around 200,000 years ago. But these earlier exits were overprinted by the big exit around 60-70,000 years ago, which involved the ancestors of all modern people who live outside of Africa today,” says lead author Dr Amy Way, an archaeologist at the Australian Museum and the University of Sydney.

“Why was this exodus so successful where the earlier excursions were not? The main theory is that social networks were stronger at this time. This analysis shows for the first time that these social connections were in place in southern Africa just before the big exodus,” explains Way.

The “Swiss army knife” of early human stone tools

The backed artefact – small, sharp blades likely used as insets in composite tools – has been associated with many different domestic activities, such as cutting and scraping, and with hunting activities as part of projectiles.

These types of tools have been made independently by many different groups of people across the world, including here in Australia.

The particular tools studied in this research are known as Howiesons Poort backed artefacts – named after the stone tool technology period that lasted between 60-65,000 years ago in southern Africa.

Southern Africa and backed artefacts. Credit: Dr Amy Way

Though such tools had been made for thousands of years before, a phenomenal increase in their production occurred during this period. The researchers were interested in whether this dramatic shift could have been due to a social response to changing environmental conditions in early humans.

They investigated this by studying 459 backed artefacts from seven southern African Middle Stone Age sites and comparing them to an Australian outgroup of the same type of tool to determine whether the similarities between the sites were due to randomness or cultural connections.

The Australian outgroup consisted of 95 artefacts from a late-Holocene site in Lake George, New South Wales.

“I compared some of the Australian shapes from 5,000 years ago with the African shapes 65,000 years ago (as they can’t possibly be related), to show the southern African tools all cluster within a much larger range of possible shapes,” explains Way.

“While the making of the stone tool was not particularly difficult, the hafting of the stone to the handle through the use of glue and adhesives was hard, which highlights that they were sharing and communicating complex information with each other,” says co-author Dr Paloma de la Peña, a senior research associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, UK.

Changing environment may have triggered a social response in early humans

They also analysed evidence of changing climate conditions during the time by looking at both global and local (from Sibudu Cave, one of the archaeological sites) environmental data, to see whether there was a correlation between the incidence of backed artefacts and climatic conditions.

“What was also striking was that the abundance of tools made in the same shape coincided with great changes in the climatic conditions. We believe that this is a social response to the changing environment across southern Africa,” adds de la Peña.

In particular, there was a correlation between the numbers of backed artefacts and environmental shifts towards drier and colder conditions.

“Examining why early human populations were successful is critical to understanding our evolutionary path,” adds Professor Kristofer Helgen, chief scientist and director at the Australian Museum.

“This research provides new insights into our understanding of those social networks and how they contributed to the expansion of modern humans across Eurasia.”

The Australian outgroup consisted of 95 artefacts from a late-Holocene site in Lake George, New South Wales.

“I compared some of the Australian shapes from 5,000 years ago with the African shapes 65,000 years ago (as they can’t possibly be related), to show the southern African tools all cluster within a much larger range of possible shapes,” explains Way.

“While the making of the stone tool was not particularly difficult, the hafting of the stone to the handle through the use of glue and adhesives was hard, which highlights that they were sharing and communicating complex information with each other,” says co-author Dr Paloma de la Peña, a senior research associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, UK.

Changing environment may have triggered a social response in early humans

They also analysed evidence of changing climate conditions during the time by looking at both global and local (from Sibudu Cave, one of the archaeological sites) environmental data, to see whether there was a correlation between the incidence of backed artefacts and climatic conditions.

“What was also striking was that the abundance of tools made in the same shape coincided with great changes in the climatic conditions. We believe that this is a social response to the changing environment across southern Africa,” adds de la Peña.

In particular, there was a correlation between the numbers of backed artefacts and environmental shifts towards drier and colder conditions.

“Examining why early human populations were successful is critical to understanding our evolutionary path,” adds Professor Kristofer Helgen, chief scientist and director at the Australian Museum.

“This research provides new insights into our understanding of those social networks and how they contributed to the expansion of modern humans across Eurasia.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/early-humans-backed-artefact-tools/

 

Edited June 9, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Europe's 'largest ever' predator dinosaur found on Isle of Wight

Remains of Europe's largest ever land-based predator dinosaur have been discovered on the Isle of Wight, scientists say.

Palaeontologists at the University of Southampton identified the remains, which measured more than 32ft (10m) long and lived 125 million years ago.

The prehistoric bones belonged to a two-legged, crocodile-faced, predatory spinosaurid dinosaur.

PhD student Chris Barker, who led the research, said it was a "huge animal".

The remains, which include pelvic and tail vertebrae, were discovered on the south-west coast of the Isle of Wight.

The carnivore has been dubbed the "white rock spinosaurid", after the geological layer in which the remains were found.

FULL REPORT

 

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Giant predatory dinosaur fossils discovered in Egypt

The new fossil expand the list of large meat-eating dinosaurs that roamed around 100 million years ago.

White Rock spinosaurid’s colossal cousin, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, was discovered in the early 20^th century in the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert. While the original fossils of the sail-backed fish-eater were destroyed in World War II, the scant remains of the animal have sparked imaginations and debates ever since. The site is also home to one of the largest land animals ever, the long-necked herbivorous sauropod Paralatitan.

Now, US and Egyptian researchers have published in Royal Society Open Science their discovery of a smaller predatory dinosaur that would have lived alongside Spinosaurus.

Found in the same celebrated fossil site in the Sahara Desert, the bones were unearthed in 2016 from the 98 million-year-old Bahariya Formation, placing the dinosaur in the middle Cretaceous.

“This bone is just the first of many important new dinosaur fossils from the Bahariya Oasis,” says Sanaa El-Sayed, who co-led the 2016 expedition.

The new dinosaur is a still unnamed species of abelisaurid – the first found in Bahariya Formation. Abelisaurids are short-faced meat eaters with small teeth, stocky hind limbs, and likely vestigial forelimbs. Commonly found in Europe and southern hemisphere continents, the most famous of the group is the demonic-looking Carnotaurus, which has distinctive horns on each brow.

Identified by a well-preserved neck vertebra, the new abelisaurid would have been roughly six metres long. Despite the single vertebra being found, it is virtually identical to vertebrae found from other abelisaurids, making it easy to identify the new creature as a member of the group.

Along with Spinosaurus, the 13 metre-long Carcharodontosaurus and the 11 metre-long Bahariasaurus, the new abelisaurid fossil adds yet another species to the cadre of large predatory dinosaurs that roamed what is now the Egyptian Sahara in the middle Cretaceous. The area was also home to giant crocodiles.

“During the mid-Cretaceous, the Bahariya Oasis would’ve been one of the most terrifying places on the planet,” says study leader Belal Salem, from Ohio University in the US. “How all these huge predators managed to coexist remains a mystery, though it’s probably related to their having eaten different things, their having adapted to hunt different prey.”

The researchers believe the new find has implications for the biodiversity of Cretaceous dinosaurs in Egypt and the entirety of northern Africa. It is the oldest known fossil of Abelisauridae from north-eastern Africa, and shows that, during the mid-Cretaceous, these carnivorous dinosaurs ranged across much of the northern part of the continent, east to west, from present day Egypt to Morocco, to as far south as Niger and potentially beyond.

“In terms of Egyptian dinosaurs, we’ve really just scratched the surface,” notes study co-author Hesham Sallam. “Who knows what else might be out there?”

Recently, Professor Sallam and others have ensured students from Egypt play lead roles in the research process. Both the field expedition that uncovered the new abelisaurid and the follow-up laboratory work were led by students and contributing authors on the paper from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Palaeontology Centre (MUVP) in Mansoura, Egypt. “Working with MUVP and its faculty and students, like Belal Salem, continues to inspire me, as I see the next generation of palaeontologists taking a prominent role in sharing their views on the history of our planet,” says team member and Ohio University biomedical sciences professor Patrick O’Connor.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/new-dinosaurs-england-egypt/

 

Edited June 13, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Massive public database of over 2,000 languages created to study linguistic diversity and evolution

Linguists, computational scientists and psychologists collaborate to publish the repository.

Apart from their compilation of stories – which have become a pillar of Western culture – the brothers Grimm (Wilhelm and Jacob) were intensely interested in linguistics. Jacob in particular made a significant contribution in his book Deutsche Grammatik, published in 1819, in which he documented the relationships among Indo-European languages.

The similarities between languages have raised the possibility that we might follow the links between linguistic families down the language tree all the way to some root language (see the 1989 essay “Grimm’s Greatest Tale” by Stephen Jay Gould for further discussion). Other questions surround the possible parallel evolution of languages and their diversity.

Now, a team of linguists, computational scientists and psychologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany have created a massive public database to study these and other questions about the evolution and diversity of language.

They present their research in a paper published in the Scientific Data journa

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“When our Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution was founded in 2014, I presented my colleagues with an ambitious goal. There are more than 7,000 languages in the world: create databases with the most extensive documentation of the linguistic diversity as possible,” says the paper’s co-author and Max Planck director Russell Gray.

“Our inspiration came from Genbank – a large genetic database where biologists from all over the world have deposited genomic data,” Gray continues. “Genbank was a game changer. The large amount of freely available sequence data revolutionised the ways we can analyse biological diversity. We hope that the first of our global linguistic databases, Lexibank, will start to revolutionise our knowledge of linguistic diversity in a similar way.”

Lexibank stores data in the form of standardised wordlists for more than 2,000 language varieties.

“The work on Lexibank coincided with a push towards more consistent data formats in linguistic databases. Thus, Lexibank can serve both as a large-scale example of the benefits of standardisation and a catalyst for further standardisation,” reports co-author Robert Forkel, who led the computational part of the data collection. “We decided to create our own standards, called Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, which have now been used successfully in a multitude of projects in which our department is involved.”

“We have designed new computer-assisted workflows that enable existing language datasets to be made comparable,” says co-author Johann-Mattis List, who led the practical data curation. “With these workflows, we have dramatically increased the efficiency of data standardisation and data curation.”

Using new computational techniques, the team showed how languages are alike or differ according to 60 different criteria.

“Thanks to our standardised representation of language data, it is now easy to check how many languages use words like ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ for ‘mother’ and ‘father’,” says List.

“It turns out that this pattern can indeed be found in many languages of the world and in very different regions,” adds Simon J. Greenhill, one of the founders of the Lexibank project. “Since all the languages with this pattern are not closely related to each other, it reflects independent parallel evolution, just as the great linguist Roman Jakobson suggested in 1968.”

Other patterns that the dataset and computational tools have found warrant further probing, say the authors.

“When investigating which languages use the same word for ‘arm’ and ‘hand’, we found that these languages typically also use the same word for ‘leg’ and ‘foot’,” List reports. “While this may seem to be a silly coincidence, it shows that the lexicon of human languages is often much more structured than one might assume when investigating one language in isolation.”

The researchers say the next phase of the project will be the expansion of their dataset, and probing further questions on linguistic diversity and language evolution. “Nobody thinks that the analysis must stop with the examples we give in our paper,” says List. “On the contrary, we hope that linguists, psychologists, and evolutionary scientists will feel encouraged to build on our example by expanding the data and developing new methods,” adds Forkel.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/language-database-lexibank/

 

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Were the bones of soldiers that died at the Battle of Waterloo sold as fertiliser? Probably, archaeologists say.

Very few human remains have been found at the site of the conflict despite thousands of soldiers being killed.

Exactly 207 years on from the 19th Century battle that saw the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, researchers from the University of Glasgow have published a study suggesting that the bones of the fallen soldiers were later sold for use as fertiliser.

The researchers came to the grisly conclusion after poring over a batch of newly discovered drawings and written descriptions of the battlefield made shortly after Napoleon’s defeat.

In total, these accounts describe the precise locations of three mass graves containing up to 13,000 corpses. However, there is no reliable record of a mass grave ever being found at the site, says lead researcher Prof Tony Pollard.

In fact, only a few remains from the battle have so far been discovered. These include a skeleton found during the building of a museum at the site in 2015 and amputated leg bones found during the excavation of the field hospital in 2019.

As several newspaper articles from the same period mention the gruesome practice of looting human bones from European battlefields to turn into fertiliser, Pollard suspects this may well have happened at Waterloo.

“European battlefields may have provided a convenient source of bone that could be ground down into bone-meal, an effective form of fertiliser. One of the main markets for this raw material was the British Isles,” said Pollard.

“Waterloo attracted visitors almost as soon as the gun smoke cleared. Many came to steal the belongings of the dead, some even stole teeth to make into dentures, while others came to simply observe what had happened.

“It’s likely that an agent of a purveyor of bones would arrive at the battlefield with high expectations of securing their prize.

“Primary targets would be mass graves, as they would have enough bodies in them to merit the effort of digging the bones.”

Pollard now plans to lead an unprecedented geological survey of the area that is likely to last for the next several years.

“The next stage is to head back out to Waterloo, to attempt to plot grave sites resulting from the analysis of early visitor accounts reported here,” he said.

“If human remains have been removed on the scale proposed then there should be, at least in some cases, archaeological evidence of the pits from which they were taken, however truncated and poorly defined these might be.”

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/were-the-bones-of-soldiers-that-died-at-the-battle-of-waterloo-sold-as-fertiliser-probably-archaeologists-say/

 

Edited June 21, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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The Jurassic world of the vampire squid

How these cephalopods survived across two mass extinction events.

When you think Jurassic Park, you probably imagine a chomping T-Rex, or even a giant snapping Mosasaurus leaping out of the ocean. But how about vampire squid?

Though it didn’t make the cut into any blockbuster movie, the vampire squid is one of the most mysterious creatures of the ocean, with a single species still alive to this day. The vampire squid Vampyroteuthis infernalis,of the Order Vampyromorphida, lives in extreme deep ocean environments that often have little oxygen. They don’t want to suck you blood, but get their name from their cloak-like spooky appearance. They actually live off detritus floating around the abyss.

Using modern 3D imaging techniques, exceptionally preserved fossil specimens of an ancient relative Vampyronassa rhodanica have been re-analysed. Unlike the modern-day species, this Jurassic vampire squid revealed it was well adapted to actively hunt, and had suckers that could hold onto its prey.

“Suckers are really useful for the identification of these animals at high taxonomic levels,” says Dr Patrick Smith, one of Australia’s fossil cephalopod experts based at the Australian Museum. “This study gives us a much better resolution of how those suckers were constructed and how they compare to other living and extinct cephalopod groups.”

This creature lived 164 million years ago, had eight arms and two small fins across their small oval-shaped body of around 10 cm in length. Vampyronassa rhodanica had muscular suckers on the tips of two long arms, used to create a watertight seal, which would aid in the manipulation and retention of prey. It also had conical appendages for sensing prey, indicating it was an active hunter.

“This gives us insight into the evolutionary transition of the vampyromorphs,” says Smith. “The modern-day vampire squid is highly specialised for feeding on plankton in deep cold-water environments. Yet in the fossil record, this species seems to be predators of fish and possibly other cephalopods.”

While the fossil species Vampyronassa rhodanica are from Jurassic deposits of La Voulte-sur-Rhône (France), Australia has its own Vampyromorph species in the Eromanga Basin, Queensland, albeit from the slightly younger Cretaceous period. When piecing together this globally spanning record, we can see how vampire squids and other cephalopods groups changed across two major extinction events – the Triassic-Jurassic, around 200 million years ago, and the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, around 66 million years ago.

“We have several groups of Cretaceous cephalopods in Australia. Unfortunately, none of them with soft tissue are preserved quite like the ones from the Jurassic,” says Smith. “We have at least two species of vampyromorphs preserved in the Eromanga basin, which may have reached up to six metres long.”

This research has been published in Scientific Reports. You can also read more about the cephalopods of La Voulte-sur-Rhône (France) and the Eromanga Basin (Australia).

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/jurassic-vampire-squid/

 

Edited June 23, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Megalodon was Earth’s highest-level apex predator – ever

Tooth analysis shows this prehistoric shark ate anything it wanted – including other predators.

Sharks are often described as perfect killing machines. While this sort of negative press certainly doesn’t help conservation efforts today, there is some truth to this lethal impression of these magnificent beasts. And some were far more deadly than others.

In one form or another, sharks have patrolled Earth’s oceans for over 400 million years – since long before even the dinosaurs. The largest predatory shark and biggest fish known to science was megalodon, which ruled the seas until around 3 million years ago.

While its exact size is subject to debate, based on fossil teeth, megalodon may have been 15-18 metres long – three to four times the dimensions of the biggest great white sharks.

These monsters had jaws so wide a human could stand in them. Individual teeth were the size of an adult human hand.

No surprise then that recent research by palaeontologists at Princeton University in the US has shown that megalodon ate whatever it wanted – including other predators. The results of the research, published in Science Advances, indicate this ancient shark was an apex predator with no comparison in all of Earth’s history.

“We’re used to thinking of the largest species – blue whales, whale sharks, even elephants and diplodocuses – as filter feeders or herbivores, not predators,” says the paper’s lead author, geoscientist Emma Kast, now based at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But megalodon and the other megatooth sharks were genuinely enormous carnivores that ate other predators, and Meg went extinct only a few million years ago.”

“If Megalodon existed in the modern ocean, it would thoroughly change humans’ interaction with the marine environment,” adds senior author Danny Sigman, professor of geological and geophysical sciences at Princeton.

Kast and Sigman’s team discovered clear evidence that megalodon and its ancestors occupied the highest rung of the prehistoric food chain – called the highest “trophic level”. So high is their trophic signature that the researchers believe megalodon must have eaten other predators and predators-of-predators in a complicated food web. Helping megalodon on its way to the top of the food web is cannibalism. There is evidence of cannibalism in both megatooth sharks and other prehistoric marine predators.

“Ocean food webs do tend to be longer than the grass-deer-wolf food chain of land animals, because you start with such small organisms,” says Kast. “To reach the trophic levels we’re measuring in these megatooth sharks, we don’t just need to add one trophic level – one apex predator on top of the marine food chain. We need to add several onto the top the modern marine food web.”

The team used a new technique to measure the nitrogen isotopes in fossilised megalodon teeth. The rule of thumb for ecologists is the more nitrogen-15 in an organism, the higher its trophic level. But this is the first time the tiny amounts of nitrogen preserved in these prehistoric teeth have been measured.

“We have a series of shark teeth from different time periods, and we were able to trace their trophic level versus their size,” says co-author Zixuan (Crystal) Rao.

Sometimes, prehistoric food webs can be gauged through bite marks on fossilised bones. But such evidence is scant for extinct sharks. The novel nitrogen isotope method helps paint a picture of an ancient fish-eat-fish world.

“The whole direction of my research team is to look for chemically fresh, but physically protected, organic matter – including nitrogen – in organisms from the distant geologic past,” says Sigman.

Organisms at the bottom of the food web, like plants and algae, absorb nitrogen from the air or water. When other species eat them, the predator species incorporates that nitrogen into their own bodies. But more of nitrogen’s lighter isotope, N-14, gets excreted (sometimes in urine) than the heavier N-15.

So N-15 builds up relative to N-14 as you go up in trophic level.

But there’s an unfortunate drawback. While researchers have had a whale of a time measuring nitrogen levels in animals as old as 15,000 years old, lack of preserved soft tissue in older species has made measuring nitrogen a dead end. Until now.

Luckily, teeth are more easily preserved because they are encased in rock-hard enamel which acts like a barrier to decomposing bacteria. And sharks have a lot of teeth which are constantly being replaced.

“Teeth are designed to be chemically and physically resistant so they can survive in the very chemically reactive environment of the mouth and break apart food that can have hard parts,” Sigman explains. “When you look in the geologic record, one of the most abundant fossil types are shark teeth. And within the teeth, there is a tiny amount of organic matter that was used to build the enamel of the teeth – and is now trapped within that enamel.”

Sigman’s team has been refining methods to measure the tiny amounts of nitrogen in the thin enamel layer of long-extinct sharks to get the ratio of the nitrogen isotopes.

After a bit of work with a dentist drill, cleaning chemicals and microbes turn the nitrogen in the enamel into nitrous oxide to read out the ratio. “This has been a multiple-decades-long quest that I’ve been on, to develop a core method to measure these trace amounts of nitrogen,” Sigman adds.

The team began using their method on microfossils in sediments. From there, they moved on to fossil corals, fish ear bones and shark teeth. “Next, we and our collaborators are applying this to mammalian and dinosaur teeth,” says Sigman.

Kast has built up a record of more than 20,000 marine mammal individuals and more than 5,000 sharks. “Our tool has the potential to decode ancient food webs – what we need now is samples,” she says. “I’d love to find a museum or other archive with a snapshot of an ecosystem – a collection of different kinds of fossils from one time and place, from forams near the very base of the food web to otoliths – inner ear bones – from different kinds of fish, to teeth from marine mammals, plus shark teeth. We could do the same nitrogen isotope analysis and put together the whole story of an ancient ecosystem.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/megalodon-tooth-apex-predator/

 

 

[CaaC (John)]

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Pompeii: Ancient pregnant tortoise surprises archaeologists

When Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago Pompeii's ancient residents were frozen in place by ash.

So too it turns out were the city's flora and fauna - including a pregnant tortoise with her egg.

Archaeologists found the reptile's remains buried under ash and rock where it had lain undiscovered since 79AD.

The tortoise was sheltering beneath an already-destroyed building when volcanic disaster struck.

Archaeologists found the remains while excavating an area of the city that its ancient inhabitants had been rebuilding after an earlier earthquake devastated Pompeii in 62AD.

Around 2,000 years ago the 14cm (5.5in) tortoise had burrowed into a tiny underground lair beneath a shop destroyed in that earlier quake.

Experts say the fact it was found with an egg suggests it was killed while trying to find somewhere peaceful to lay its offspring.

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Human ancestor fossils in South African cave may be a million years older than previously thought

New dating technique of famous fossils may force an evolutionary re-evaluation.

In the early 20th century, our perception of ourselves received a massive shake-up when nwe looked eye-to-eye with the ancient hominins who marked the evolutionary separation between modern humans and the great apes like gorillas and chimps.

Discovering these “missing links” between humans and prehistoric primates not only confirmed the Darwinian thesis that humans evolved from apes but began to paint a picture of how we came to be.

A major milestone in the writing of our human story was the 1936 discovery of the first adult specimen of the genus Australopithecus (southern ape). The fossil of the individual, dubbed TM 1511, was found in the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa.

Since then, the caves have revealed hundreds of australopithecine fossils including several significant finds, like Australopithecus africanus individual “Mrs Ples”, and Australopithecus prometheus specimen “Little Foot”. As such, the Sterkfontein Caves are referred to as the “Cradle of Humankind”.

Sterkfontein is a deep and complex cave system. In its caverns is preserved a long history of hominin activity in the region.

Most of Sterkfontein’s Australopithecus fossils have been excavated from an ancient cave infill called Member 4, which holds the highest density of Australopithecus fossils in the world. Estimates for the age of Member 4 range from about three million years to as young as about two million years ago – younger than the appearance of our genus Homo.

But new research using novel dating techniques suggests that the sediment in which the Australopithecus fossils have been found might be over one million years older, at nearly four million years old. This would place them further back in time than the world’s most well-known Australopithecus specimen, “Dinkinesh”, also known as “Lucy”, of the species afarensis.

The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was directed by Professor Dominic Stratford from South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand.

“The new ages range from 3.4-3.6 million years for Member 4, indicating that the Sterkfontein hominins were contemporaries of other early Australopithecus species, like Australopithecus afarensis, in East Africa,” says Stratford who co-authored the PNAS paper.

Coming up with accurate dates for fossils formed over millions of years is tricky. In East Africa, where many hominin fossils have been found, the volcanic ash in which fossils are encased can be dated. Cave sediments, however, are especially hard to date as rock and bone tumble to the cave floor.

In caves, palaeontologists usually base their dates on other animal fossils found nearby, or flowstone formed by slow-flowing water trickling down the cave walls.

Previous dating of Member 4 was based on calcite flowstone deposits, but recent observations show that the flowstone is actually younger than the cave fill. Thus, previous ages were underestimates.  

“Sterkfontein has more Australopithecus fossils than anywhere else in the world,” says lead author Darryl Granger, professor at Purdue University in the US. “But it’s hard to get a good date on them. People have looked at the animal fossils found near them and compared the ages of cave features like flowstones, and gotten a range of different dates. What our data does is resolve these controversies. It shows that these fossils are old – much older than we originally thought.”

Using a novel technique involving radioactive decay of the rare isotopes aluminum-26 and beryllium-10 in mineral quartz, the research team obtained the new age range for the fossils.

“These radioactive isotopes, known as cosmogenic nuclides, are produced by high-energy cosmic ray reactions near the ground surface, and their radioactive decay dates when the rocks were buried in the cave when they fell in the entrance together with the fossils,” says Granger.

Aluminum-26 is formed when a rock is exposed to cosmic rays at the surface, but not after it has been deeply buried in a cave. Measuring levels of aluminum-26 in tandem with beryllium-10 allows researchers to date the sediment. This method is more accurate as it involves dating the concrete-like breccia in which the fossils are embedded. 

Placed in a mass spectrometer, the amount of each radioactive nuclide in the rocks was determined. This, coupled with geological mapping and a thorough examination of how sediments accumulate in caves, gave Granger and Stratford’s team their age range.

Because the australopithecines found in Sterkfontein are so old, it may force scientists to rewrite the early chapters of human evolution.

“This reassessment of the age of Sterkfontein Member 4 Australopithecus fossils has important implications for the role of South Africa on the hominin evolution stage. Younger hominins, including Paranthropus and our genus Homo, appear between about 2.8 and 2 million years ago. Based on previously suggested dates, the South African Australopithecus species were too young to be their ancestors, so it has been considered more likely that Homo and Paranthropus evolved in East Africa,” says Stratford.

But the new dates place the “Cradle of Humankind” in South Africa front and centre as the likely location of the evolution of early humans.

“This important new dating work pushes the age of some of the most interesting fossils in human evolution research, and one of South Africa’s most iconic fossils, Mrs Ples, back a million years to a time when, in East Africa, we find other iconic early hominins like Lucy,” says Stratford.

“The redating of the Australopithecus-bearing infills at the Sterkfontein Caves will undoubtably re-ignite the debate over the diverse characteristics of Australopithecus at Sterkfontein, and whether there could have been South African ancestors to later hominins,” adds Granger.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/south-africa-cave-fossil/