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Cambridge University Botanic Garden's 'Newton's apple tree' falls in storm

 

 

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Pterosaur fossil from Scotland is largest Jurassic flier ever found

A 170-million-year-old pterosaur found on the Isle of Skye off the north-west coast of Scotland had a wingspan of about 2.5 metres, making it the largest known winged reptile from the Jurassic

An exceptionally well-preserved pterosaur fossil, unearthed on a Scottish island, represents the largest flying reptile ever discovered from the Jurassic Period.

With a wingspan of approximately 2.5 metres, an aerodynamic head and upper and lower teeth that criss-crossed each other like the stiff hairs on the leaf of a Venus flytrap, the new species provides evidence that pterosaurs started getting larger at a much earlier point in prehistory than previously thought.

The newly named 170-million-year-old Dearc sgiathanach was about the size of a modern albatross, says Natalia Jagielska at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

“This is the first time in the very long history [of UK pterosaur research] that we have found a skull and the body attached, and especially representing a species and a time period that’s so poorly understood,” says Jagielska. “So it’s super, super exciting to be making history in terms of research.”

Pterosaurs evolved 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period as small, flying reptiles. But by the Cretaceous Period – when popular terrestrial dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops roamed – pterosaurs such as Quetzalcoatlus had grown to the size of modern fighter jets with 12-metre-wide wingspans.

“In between, there is just this lack of information,” says Jagielska, referring specifically to the Middle Jurassic, around 174 million to 164 million years ago. Few pterosaur fossils from this time are left worldwide – probably because climatic conditions weren’t favourable for their preservation. Scientists had generally assumed that pterosaurs remained small at this time, with wingspans of no more than 1.8 metres, before becoming larger at the very end of the Jurassic and into the Cretaceous, she says.

D. sgiathanach suggests a rethink is in order. In 2017, Amelia Penny, now at the University of St Andrews, UK, recognised the shape of a pterosaur skull protruding from a limestone layer on a tidal platform on the Isle of Skye off the north-west coast of Scotland, UK, where she and her colleagues were looking for dinosaur footprints. Researchers then used diamond-tipped saws to cut through the limestone and extract the fossil in between tides, says Jagielska.

Close visual inspection, along with X-ray computed microtomography, revealed a remarkably well-preserved skeleton with bones “still articulated as they would have been in real life” embedded in the limestone slabs, she says.

Jagielska and her colleagues determined that the pterosaur was a growing juvenile with yet-unfused bones in its head and back and rapid-growth bone microstructures. Despite its young age, it had longer limb bones and a longer skull – and hence a larger estimated total wingspan – than any other known Jurassic pterosaur. The largest members of the species might have measured 3.8 metres from wingtip to wingtip.

The animal had sharp upper and lower teeth that criss-crossed each other outside the mouth, which would have been ideal for catching fish, says Jagielska. Like lots of other pterosaurs, it had a short neck and a long tail. But unlike many pterosaurs, this individual didn’t seem to have any kind of head crest – although the top of the skull had been damaged by exposure to tidal waters, leaving room for doubt, she says.

The team named the species Dearc sgiathanach (pronounced jark ski-an-ach), which references its status as a winged reptile from Skye, an island that is known as An t-Eilean Sgitheanach in Scottish Gaelic

.https://www.newscientist.com/article/2309151-pterosaur-fossil-from-scotland-is-largest-jurassic-flier-ever-found/

 

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For dinosaurs, a spring without renewal

Researchers say spring was the season that the dinosaur-destroying Chicxulub asteroid struck.

Sixty-six million years ago, an estuary in what is now the US state of North Dakota was shaken by a violent earthquake – so strong it caused multi-metre-high walls of water to slosh up and downstream, stirring up massive amounts of sediment. Simultaneously, BB-sized (4–5 millimetre) glass spherules were raining from the sky. Within minutes, uncounted numbers of fish were buried alive.

For the fish it was a tragedy. But for palaeontologists, it’s a goldmine, because the earthquake and the glassy rain were caused by an asteroid strike 3,500 kilometres away in what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula: the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs.

And because the North Dakota fish all died within minutes of the strike, scientists have made an amazing discovery: the asteroid hit in the northern hemisphere spring.

The discovery began in 2017, when a young vertebrate palaeontologist named Melanie During, now at Uppsala University, Sweden, got a chance to visit the site.

There, she was amazed to find the fossil fish lying in layers, one layer pointing downstream as they fought a surge coming upriver, and the next pointing upstream as they fought a return surge. Some had even been hurled around so hard that their bodies were wrapped around tree branches. “It looks like the worst car crash you have ever seen, frozen in place,” she says.

During dug up six fossil fishes and took them back to Europe for examination.

One thing evident from the start was that the spherules had clogged the gills of the fish, but had not been ingested into their digestive systems.

That, During says, means the fish died before they’d had time to accidentally swallow any of the spherules, meaning that they died very soon after the deadly rainfall began. Since that would have been within 15 to 30 minutes of the impact (about the same time it would have taken for the earthquake shockwave to have travelled 3,500 km from Mexico), it puts their time of death to very soon after the impact. “It has to be within the hour,” During says.

Furthermore, it was very clear that it was the dino-killing impact that had created the catastrophe: draped right over the top of the deposit was an iridium-enriched layer that is known to be one of the signatures of that event. “So, we are very sure about the time constraint of this deposit,” says During’s colleague, Jeroen van der Lubbe, a palaeontologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Some of that had been known before. But in a paper in today’s issue of Nature, During’s team carried it further by examining fin bones of these fish, looking for growth cycles similar to the growth rings of trees.

The fish, which were akin to modern paddlefish and sturgeon, are known to have grown bones in annual cycles: slowly in the winter and more quickly in the summer.

One way to detect these cycles is by taking tiny slices of the preserved bone material and looking at the ratio of carbon and oxygen isotopes in its minerals, which also vary with the availability of the fish’s primary food supply, plankton. These ratios, van der Lubbe says, show that peak plankton availability hadn’t yet happened when the fish died – meaning it was spring, not full summer.

But it’s also possible to look at the bones on a cell-by-cell level by using high-energy radiation from a particle accelerator to do something akin to 3D microscopy. Not that the cells are still there, says Dennis Voeten, the vertebrate palaeontologist at Uppsala who led this work, “[but] we can see the holes in which bone cells were once located.” Big cells mean fast growth (as in summer), small cells mean slow growth (as in winter).

Because the fish collected by During were about seven years old, the team was able to trace seven years of annual cycles, finding that the fish died just as they were starting to move into the next year’s faster growth cycle. Not late winter, and not full summer, but somewhere in the middle. “My guess is April,” During says. “Definitely not summer.”

It’s not just a cool discovery but an important one, because ever since the 1980 explosive eruption of America’s Mount St. Helens, ecologists have realised that when it comes to the effects of a cataclysm, timing can be everything. In the case of Mount St. Helens, it was in May, when patches of mountain snow were still on the ground, protecting the underlying plants from incineration.

In the case of the dino-killing impact (which also exterminated about three-quarters of all other animal species alive at the time), the timing may have played a major role in why the northern hemisphere appears to have been harder hit than the southern hemisphere.

That’s because spring would have been a particularly vulnerable time for northern hemisphere animals, just emerging from winter. Surviving animals’ food chains would also have been particularly vulnerable at that time of year, because the impact blew massive amounts of dust and smoke into the air, blocking sunlight and causing temperatures to plummet, severely affecting plant growth.

“I think we all know how certain plants can be extremely sensitive to sudden night frosts when just starting up,” During says. “They are so much more vulnerable [then] than [in autumn] when everything is shutting down.”

In the southern hemisphere it would have been the reverse. Not only would many plants have already been preparing for winter, but many animals would also have been doing so. Some might even have been hibernating, or preparing for it.

Not that survival would have been easy in any case, which is probably why the impact took out all of the dinosaurs. “But in order to survive [the climate change], you need to be able to survive the impact,” During says. “So, anybody in the southern hemisphere already sheltering had a much better chance.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/dinosaurs-spring/

 

Edited February 26, 2022 by CaaC (John)

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The Tyrant Lizard King, Queen and Emperor: the T-rex might actually be three species

New analysis of old bones suggests it’s time make way for more members of the dinosaur royal family.

Everyone loves a new dinosaur. We unearth previously unidentified specimens on a semi-regular basis, and the excitement that greets each discovery speaks to the wonder we find in these ancient animals.

But what if there were new species hiding right under our noses?

Taking a close look at collections of Tyrannosaurus fossils, researchers from the College of Charleston, US, believe that we’ve been unwittingly lumping three closely related species of this most famous dinosaur into the one basket, and that it’s time to recognise not just the tyrant lizard king, but the queen and emperor too.

Publishing their analysis in Evolutionary Biology, the researchers point to physical differences in the femur and dental structures of 37 Tyrannosaurus specimens, saying that the observed variation in morphologies doesn’t fit with patterns expected through mere sex differences.

The authors used measures of the length and circumference of the femur bones to calculate their robustness, finding a distinct split between specimens with more robust or more gracile bones. The two femur types weren’t evenly split across the collection of specimens, suggesting they weren’t associated with sex. They also didn’t correlate with overall size – juveniles presented with the same discrepancies in femur thickness as adults.

Tyrannosaurus teeth also held clues – some had two slender incisor teeth on each side of the front end of the jaw, while others had only one. Although only 12 of the studied specimens had both femur and teeth present, this limited dataset nonetheless suggested that a single incisor tooth correlates with more gracile bones.

As final corroboration, the authors fit their findings to a geological timeline. Of the 37 specimens studied, 29 were unearthed in the Lancian upper Maastrichtian formations in North America, in sediments dating to between 67.5 and 66 million years ago. The distinctly banded sediment layers at this fossil site allowed researchers to arrange their specimens chronologically, with those found in the lowest layers representing the most ancient of the collection.

Importantly, the more gracile femurs were entirely absent from the lower layers. Instead, the femurs in this layer showed only the normal degree of variation that is expected in any population. The researchers believe that at the time these lower layers of sediment were deposited, only a single Tyrannosaurus species roamed the Earth.

The first gracile femur makes its appearance in the middle layer, followed by five in the upper layer – a distinct increase in prevalence through time. In these most recent layers, the level of variation in these bones is no longer within the bounds of normal population differences, instead painting a picture of the emergence of distinct body forms, or “morphotypes”.

“We propose that the changes in the femur may have evolved over time from a common ancestor who displayed more robust femurs to become more gracile in later species,” says Gregory Paul, lead author and palaeoartist. “The differences in femur robustness across layers of sediment may be considered distinct enough that the specimens could potentially be considered separate species.”

Why three new species, and not two?

The authors believe that the oldest of their specimens, equipped with robust femurs and two incisors, represents one species. But even though robust femurs were also found in the more recent sediment layers, they were more likely to be accompanied by a single tooth in these newer specimens, indicating a likely second species. Add in the specimens with the slender forearms, and suddenly we have a collection of three where before there was only one.

So which one retains the title of Tyrannosaurus rex – the tyrant lizard king?

The researchers were able to clearly recognise the king of lizards in the bones of more recent specimens, matching them to the established phenotype of this thoroughly documented dinosaur – so these specimens will retain the famous moniker.

The researchers propose that T. rex’s gracile cousin, found in the same sediment layers, should be dubbed “Tyrannosaurus regina” – the tyrant lizard queen.

The most ancient specimens, with their robust forearms and double incisors, likely retained their features from an earlier tyrannosaurid ancestor. The team proposes bestowing it with the title of emperor, “Tyrannosaurus imperator”.

But this expansion of the Tyrannosaur royal family may not be without contest. While confident in their proposed new species, the authors acknowledge that assigning fossil vertebrates to new species is fraught with challenges. The observed variation could yet prove to be an example of extreme individual differences, or atypical sexual dimorphism.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/tyrannosaurus-rex-might-be-three-species/

 

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Arizona find links tuatara to 190-million-year-old fossils

Distant fossil find helps unravel the evolution of the New Zealand reptile.

The skeletal structure of the tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus), a reptile species found only in New Zealand, may have evolved 190 million years ago and has hardly changed since, according to a new study.

Researchers have studied a nearly complete articulated skeleton, and dozens of upper and lower jaws, of a species of ancient sphenodontian reptile – whose single surviving species today are tuatara – found in Arizona, USA.

The specimens were collected during the 1982–1983 field seasons and remained undescribed for decades in the vertebrate paleontology collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.

“The discovery of the nearly complete sphenodontid fossil from North America is a WOW moment in palaeontology, the stuff cover images are made of,” says Dr Nic Rawlence, Director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory and senior lecturer in ancient DNA in the Department of Zoology, University of Otago, New Zealand.

Previously, little has been known about the tuatara’s origins because fossils have been highly fragmented. This fossil collection forms the most complete series in the sphenodontid fossil record.

The fossils, which date back to the Early Jurassic period, have a remarkably similar skeletal structure and jaw to modern tuatara. The species has been named Navajosphenodon sani.

The genus name comes from a combination of “Navajo” in honour of the native people from North America that inhabit the Colorado Plateau where the specimens were found, and “sphenodon,” in reference to the modern tuatara. Fittingly, the species epithet “sani,” means “old age” in the Navajo language.

The name tuatara comes from the Maori language and means “peaks on the back”, referring to the spiny crest along the reptiles’ backs, which are especially pronounced in males. Looks can be deceiving because although tuatara might resemble lizards, they aren’t.

The only surviving member of sphenodontian reptiles – an extremely old evolutionary lineage – tuataras are, however, the closest living relatives to squamates (lizards and snakes), which they diverged from some 250 million years ago.

• The Venus of Willendorf travelled hundreds of kilometres

Sphenodontids were globally distributed and more diverse than squamates during the first half of their evolutionary history, and fossils have been recovered from various locations in the UK, USA, Germany, Brazil, Argentina and Zimbabwe.

However, most of their fossils are highly fragmentary, especially within sphenodontines – the group that includes the tuatara – which has severely hindered the development of our understanding of its origin.

Until now.

Using high-resolution micro-CT scanning – a 3D imaging technique that uses X-rays to see inside an object, slice by slice – they were able to unambiguously place this species as one of the earliest evolving and oldest-known sphenodontids.

“By comparing the new fossil to tuatara they have shown that the body form of tuatara has been conserved for at least 190 million years… a great example of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” says Rawlence. “This is remarkable and fits with what scientists know of slow rates of genome evolution in tuatara.

“There is still a lot to discover about the evolution of tuatara but this is a first step,” adds Rawlence. “New fossil discoveries will shed further light on this remarkable animal, whether they are collected in the field or have been hiding in museum collections for 30 years like Navajosphenodon sani.”

The research was published in Communications Biology.

Originally published by Cosmos as Arizona find links tuatara to 190-million-year-old fossils

 

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In pictures: 'Magical bowls' among relics seized in Jerusalem

Hundreds of ancient artefacts, including bowls decorated with "spells", have been found by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Israeli police in a raid on the home of a suspected illegal dealer in Jerusalem.

FULL REPORT & MORE PHOTOS

 

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What a mouthful – new sabre-tooth predator named

Early felid ancestor offers insight into the evolution of meat-eaters.

Palaeontologists have described a new species of sabre-toothed mammal (Diegoaelurus vanvalkenburghae) from a sabre-toothed jaw-bone fossil originally unearthed in 1988. Dating to the Eocene Epoch, it was alive 42 million years ago – preceding modern cats by millions of years.

This new discovery, published in PeerJ, gives us insight into the behaviour and evolution of some of the first mammals to have an exclusively meat-based diet. The specimen includes a lower jaw and well-preserved teeth and is the earliest known cat-like predator in North America.

“Today the ability to eat an all-meat diet, also called hypercarnivory, isn’t uncommon,” says co-author Dr Ashley Poust, researcher from the San Diego Natural History Museum (The Nat) in the U.S. “Tigers do it, polar bears can do it. If you have a house cat, you may even have a hypercarnivore at home.

“But 42 million years ago, mammals were only just figuring out how to survive on meat alone. One big advance was to evolve specialized teeth for slicing flesh—which is something we see in this newly described specimen.”

The fossil comes from a location first discovered in the 1980s by a 12-year-old boy in San Diego County, southern California, USA. Since then, “Jeff’s Discovery Site” has become an important fossil bed within a larger group of rocks called the Santiago Formation. The sabre-toothed jawbone fossil, which you is available for interest and study online as an interactive 3D model, has been in The Nat’s collection since 1988 but was only recently described.

D. vanvalkenburghae would have been a powerful and relatively new kind of hunter about the size of a modern-day bobcat, with a downturned bony chin to protect its long upper sabre-teeth.

“Nothing like this had existed in mammals before,” says Poust. “A few mammal ancestors had long fangs, but Diegoaelurus and its few relatives represent the first cat-like approach to an all-meat diet, with sabre-teeth in front and slicing scissor teeth – called carnassials – in the back.

“It’s a potent combination that several animal groups have independently evolved in the millions of years since.”

D. vanvalkenburghae is part of a mysterious group of now extinct animals called Machaeroidines – the oldest known saber-toothed mammalian carnivore – which are poorly understood due to their very limited fossil record. They are part of the family Felidae (true cats), and although they are not the ancestors of modern-day cats they do share a common ancestor.

Another example of a slightly more famous Machaeroidine is Smilodon (sabre-toothed tiger) that evolved roughly 40 million years after D. vanvalkenburghae went extinct.

“We know so little about Machaeroidines, so every new discovery greatly expands our picture of them,” says co-author Dr Shawn Zack, of the University of Arizona College of Medicine, USA. “This relatively complete, well-preserved Diegoaelurus fossil is especially useful because the teeth let us infer the diet and start to understand how Machaeroidines are related to each other.”

Because there are only a handful of machaeroidine fossil specimens – unearthed in the U.S. and China – scientists previously weren’t even sure if there were multiple species living within the same time period.

“This fossil finding shows that machaeroidines were more diverse than we thought,” says Zack. “We already knew there was a large form, Apataelurus, which lived in eastern Utah. Now we have this smaller form, and it lived at approximately the same time.

“It raises the possibility that there may more out there to find.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/new-sabre-tooth-predator/

 

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First Americans: no ice-free entry

It’s long been thought that the first humans accessed the Americas through an ‘ice-free corridor’ in the eastern Canadian Rocky Mountains. Not so, says a new study.

Thousands of years ago, scientists believe, the first peoples migrated across a broad land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska. From there, they spread southward throughout the Americas.

But how, during the height of the Ice Age, did they get from Alaska to points south? The land bridge between Siberia and Alaska (often called Beringia, because much of it is now beneath the Bering Sea) was ice free. But to the south was a giant wall of ice, spreading all the way across Canada. 

This icy barrier, however, had a weak link, a seam between its eastern and western ice sheets that was known to have “unzipped” late in the Ice Age, creating an “ice-free corridor” through which archaeologists presumed ancient peoples could have migrated down the east side of the Canadian Rockies.

A study in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, appears to put the kibosh on that theory. 

The ice-free corridor, reports a team led by Jorie Clark, a geologist at Oregon State University, US, didn’t open up until 13,800 years ago – 1,800 years before archaeologists believe people were living south of the ice, in Idaho. The only way they could have gotten there via the ice-free corridor would have been with the help of a time machine. 

The find came by measuring the amount of beryllium-10 in boulders that had been ripped from their bedrock by the glaciers, then dropped on the surface when the ice melted. 

Called glacial erratics, these rocks would have been sheltered from cosmic rays during the time they were entombed in the ice. But once the ice melted, cosmic rays – a type of high-energy radiation coming in from outer space – would have begun to pelt them.

Cosmic rays penetrate quartz grains in the boulder and produce beryllium-10, so the longer the boulder has been exposed, the greater the number of these elements. “We measure the concentration of these elements in the laboratory,” Clark said. “Since we know how many new elements are produced every year, then we can calculate the time since the boulder was first exposed by retreat of the ice sheet.”

Other scientists applaud the finding. “I think it’s really important because there have been conflicting views on when the ice-free corridor was available for people to travel through,” says Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas, US, and author of Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, who was not part of the study team. 

Frank Hoffecker, an archeologist and paleoanthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder (also not part of the study team) agrees. “I think cosmogenic beryllium-10 dating is the way to go,” he says. “It looks as though it will finally put the ‘ice-free corridor’ to rest as a credible route for the early sites in mid-latitude North America.”

But if the first Americans didn’t come down the ice-free corridor, how did they get there? 

Most likely they came down the Pacific coast. This would have required boats, for which archaeologists have yet to find traces. But, Raff says, if the peopling of the Americas happened at about that time, the only way would have been down the coast. 

But, there’s that little word “if.” As in “if” it occurred 15,600 years or so ago, when people are known to have been in Idaho, that’s not the only option. Maybe the first people came here far earlier, before the glaciers slammed shut the overland route. If so, they wouldn’t have needed boats… but would have been on the continent 10,000 years or more before archaeologists are sure they were.

“That’s one of the main outstanding questions in the field,” Raff says: “whether or not people were in the Americas before the height of the glacial maximum.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/first-americans-no-ice-free-entry/

 

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Historic England have released up to 400,000 aerial pictures taken over the last 100 years, some being digitised.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-60824486

It's quite fascinating looking at what places used to look like in a previous era/generation. 

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34 minutes ago, Stan said:

Historic England have released up to 400,000 aerial pictures taken over the last 100 years, some being digitised.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-60824486

It's quite fascinating looking at what places used to look like in a previous era/generation. 

Brilliant reading and photos that, I do have an addiction if you can call it that of old black & white photos of time gone by, they haunt me in a funny way, seeing those photos from 1934 and the rest gave me the shudders of time gone by and lucky enough we are still all here after the Carnage of WWll.

Edited March 22, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Research sheds new light on ancient bones found at Cramond

New analysis of ancient human remains found near Edinburgh has shown some of them travelled widely across Scotland.

The skeletal remains of nine adults and five infants were found in Cramond in 1975 during a Roman bathhouse excavation.

The bones and teeth were later dated back to the 6th Century.

Work led by the University of Aberdeen has now revealed that one of them grew up on the west coast before making Cramond her home.

Another male member of the group appears to have travelled from the Southern Uplands, Southern Highlands or Loch Lomond.

The remains were discovered when work on a new car park unearthed the former bathhouse of the Roman fort at Cramond.

Previous research had suggested they belonged to different generations of a noble family from the Dark Ages, and at least one of them had suffered a violent death.

• New light cast on crypt mystery

Using isotope analyses, researchers have now been to look at the diet and origins of each of the adults in the group.

Prof Kate Britton, senior author of the study, said they were surprised to discover that despite being buried in close proximity to each other, two of them were brought up hundreds of miles away.

"Food and water consumed during life leave a specific signature in the body which can be traced back to their input source, evidencing diet and mobility patterns," she said.

"Tooth enamel, particularly from teeth which form between around three and six years of age, act like little time capsules containing chemical information about where a person grew up.

"When we examined the remains, we found six of them to bear chemical signatures consistent with what we would expect from individuals growing up in the area local to Cramond but two - those of a man and a woman - were very different.

"This suggests that they spent their childhoods somewhere else, with the analysis of the female placing her origins on the west coast."

The remains of a man had an isotopic signature more typical of the Southern Uplands, Southern Highlands or Loch Lomond area.

Fellow researcher Dr Orsolya Czére added: "It is often assumed that travel in this period would have been limited without roads like we have today and given the political divides of the time.

"The analysis of the burials from Cramond, along with other early medieval burial sites in Scotland, are revealing that it was not unusual to be buried far from where you had originally grown up."

The findings have been published in the Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences journal.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-60861932

 

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Archaeologists around the world have declared a universal consensus, stating that all archaeological records can give us a consistent understanding of the past.

In a shock move, every single archaeologist has co-signed the same agreement.

No longer will there be disputes about how much meat ancient humans ate, whether they migrated across ice, or what the oldest Homo sapiens remains are – the leading researchers in the field, and also every other researcher in the field, have finally come to the same conclusion.

“There’s enough discord and disagreement in the world as it is. We don’t need to add more rigorous academic debate,” says Professor Helen Hoakes, deputy head of archaeology at the University of Eastern Australia.

“Archaeologists are famous for putting forward different and conflicting theories about what their evidence suggests,” explains Dennis Ovan, director of the Johannesburg Old Knowledge Institute for Excellence in Skulls (JOKIES).

“But when we finally sat down and talked, we realised that almost all of these arguments stemmed from petty disputes on field trips.

“Limited and competitive funding, massive ideological differences, the publish-or-perish world of academia – all of that can be smoothed over by apologising for waking up a whole tent one time, even though you said you weren’t a snorer.”

The centrepiece of the agreement is a comprehensive and universal primer on archaeological ethics, detailing the most ethical way to do archaeological research.

“It turns out that the ethics of archaeology was the easiest to solve of all,” says Dr Anna-Indie Jones, an ethicist at the Centre of Innovation for Dusty Stuff we Thought Looked Important.

“Everyone in the world places exactly the same cultural and spiritual significance in the past, and they all have the same codes for dealing with historic artefacts and ancient human remains.”

Jones would not provide any examples of these codes, saying “it’s all in the agreement” while gently edging out the door of the lab.

The agreement was signed at an international online meeting, at a time that was convenient for every time zone.

Hoakes says that the internet, and the isolation brought on by COVID-19, was an important catalyst for this agreement.

“Social media is a wonderful tool for delivering nuance,” she says. “It invites you to consider other views thoughtfully and promotes agreement between wildly differing groups.

“I think it would be great if we all spent more time on social media and less on research. Maybe if they tweaked some of those algorithms to capture our attention more?”

The archaeologists believe that their agreement is an excellent model for other fields of research – particularly palaeontology, where gaps in the fossil record lead to massive disputes on how to fill them.

“Sure, archaeology is by its very nature a field that’s dependent on patchy evidence,” says Ovan.

“But just because we don’t know something, doesn’t mean we should suggest different theories. Why do we get so hung up on facts? It’s much more important that we all get along and have a happy day.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/archaeologists-declare-consensus/

 

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Mysterious lightning phenomenon recorded in ancient medieval text

Benedictine monk documented the still-mysterious wonder of ball lightning.

British researchers have uncovered what they believe to be the earliest written account in England of a bizarre – and poorly understood – phenomenon known as ‘ball lightning’, chronicled in a medieval text written by a Benedictine monk who lived just under 1000 years ago. 

What is ball lightning?

Usually associated with thunderstorms, ball lightning has been described as a bright spherical object, on average 25 centimetres across but sometimes reaching several metres in diameter.

The phenomenon has mystified humans for centuries, with the previous oldest written account having been found in a 1638 report, which described a ball of fire flying into a church, accompanied by a great peal of thunder.

Scientists don’t really understand what causes ball lightning, and have long been on the hunt for an explanation. One possible answer is that lightning striking the ground vaporises some of the minerals in the soil, which then, floating in the air, react with oxygen and release heat and light to produce an unearthly glow. This explanation seems supported by a 2014 study, which identified trace evidence of silicon, iron and calcium – all abundant in soil – in a flash of ball lightning.

Historical sleuthing uncovers bizarre weather report

Written by the 12th-century Benedictine monk Gervase, the account states that “a marvellous sign descended near London” on 7 June 1195. Gervase described a dense, dark cloud emitting a white substance that grew into a spherical shape, and from which a fiery globe fell towards the river.

The account was uncovered by the unlikely academic pairing of physicist Brian Tanner and historian Giles Gasper, both of Durham University. The team compared Gervase’s text with historic and modern reports of ball lightning and came to the same conclusion: this dramatic event in 1195 was likely the same phenomenon.

“Gervase’s description of a white substance coming out of the dark cloud, falling as a spinning fiery sphere and then having some horizontal motion is very similar to historic and contemporary descriptions of ball lightning,” says Tanner. 

“If Gervase is describing ball lightning, as we believe, then this would be the earliest account of this happening in England that has so far been discovered.”

Gasper says that, from a historian’s perspective, the account is convincing. Gervase recorded the dates and times of solar eclipses remarkably accurately and in vivid detail. 

“The main focus of Gervase’s writings was Christ Church Cathedral Priory in Canterbury,” says Gasper. “But he was also interested in natural phenomena, from celestial events and signs in the sky to floods, famine and earthquakes.”

The findings are published in the Royal Meteorological Society’s journal Weather.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/ancient-text-mysterious-lightning-phenomenon/

 

Edited April 6, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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“Big John” the Triceratops was in bust-up with another trike

Bone injuries on a fossilised Triceratops suggest physical combat was a part of their lives.

In the 1993 dino flick Jurassic Park, paleobotanist Dr Ellie Sattler separates from the group to care for a sick Triceratops. The creature is portrayed as a gentle giant, but as it turns out Triceratops could be aggressive and pugnacious, too.

In fact, palaeontologists have theorised for decades that Triceratops engaged in violent physical combat with one another, based on fossil evidence of traumatic skull injuries. Now, in a new study in Nature Scientific Reports, Italian scientists have unveiled further evidence that trikes lived “by the sword”, engaging in fierce battles and living to tell the tale.

“Big John” was a prodigiously large trike who lived near Hell Creek in what is now Montana, US, during the Upper Cretaceous, more than 66 million years ago. 

His extraordinarily complete fossil skeleton, which sold to a private owner at auction last year for $10 million, was encased in mud when the ancient floodplain he died on periodically overflowed – and there he lay, undisturbed for tens of millions of years, until palaeontologists unearthed him in 2014.

According to this new analysis, Big John’s skull bone displays a keyhole-shaped opening known as a fenestra. The bone surface around this opening is irregular and overlaid with plaque-like deposits, which the authors believe could be a tell-tale sign of infection. Even more fascinating, the researchers analysed samples from the margin of the fenestra which showed that the bone tissue around the hole was porous, and peppered with lots of blood vessels, characteristic of newly formed bone. 

Taken together, these signs suggest that Big John sustained a traumatic injury to the skull – and lived to tell the tale. In fact, the injury had likely been healing for months at the time he breathed his last. 

“Considering the healing times of traumatic injuries in modern reptiles, along with the size of the traumatic injury and the amount of bone repair, it is likely that the death of Big John occurred at least six months after this traumatic event,” the authors write.

It’s rare in palaeontology that fossilised remains can tell us a story about how an animal behaved in life, but based on the size and location of the injury, the researchers believe it could only have been made by another triceratops, giving credence to the combat theory. 

Even more tantalising, the study offers clues about how dinosaur bodies healed from trauma.

“Although the physiological and cellular mechanisms underlying the healing process in dinosaurs are still largely unknown, it would appear to be similar to those described in humans and mammals,” the authors write.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/big-john-triceratops-signs-violence/

 

[MUFC]

 

 

[MUFC]

13 hours ago, MUFC said:

 

 

Anyone noticed in these historical videos. How clean the streets were back then?

[MUFC]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

A fossilised Thescelosaurus leg has sparked controversy. Some scientists claim the well-preserved fossil represents an individual killed by the asteroid which caused the end of the geological era dominated by dinosaurs. But not everyone in the scientific community is convinced.

A small, herbivorous non-avian dinosaur, Thescelosaurus lived at the end of the Cretaceous period. The limb, which includes the animal’s skin, was found in a layer of rock just below the distinct boundary between the Cretaceous and the post-dinosaur age. This boundary is made up of the sediment deposited by the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago in what is now the Gulf of Mexico.

The fossil’s location and likely fast preservation are suggestive. However, the lack of a peer-reviewed study published in a scientific journal has led some experts to doubt whether the dinosaur in question was necessarily the victim of cosmic bad luck, falling directly victim to the asteroid.

Found on a dig in Tanis in the US state of North Dakota, the fossil is set to feature among other discoveries from the site in an upcoming BBC documentary. The crew spent three years filming at Tanis, roughly 3,000km from the Chicxulub crater. The documentary, Dinosaurs: The Final Day, hosted by Sir David Attenborough, will be broadcast on BBC One on April 15.

Professor Paul Barrett, a researcher at the UK’s Natural History Museum in London, examined the leg for the BBC program. He told the BBC, “It is a stunning fossil … Skin preservation like this is still relatively rare.”

He added: “While it is plausible that this Thescelosaurus was killed on the day of the strike, it’s also possible it was exhumed by the asteroid impact, and then mixed together with everything else in the aftermath. But the fact that it is so well-preserved suggests to me that even if the animal didn’t die as a result of the events that caused the deposit, it must have died very close in time to it.”

The leader of the Tanis dig, Robert DePalma, a graduate student from the University of Manchester, UK, told the BBC that the Tanis site paints a picture of the dinosaurs’ final days. “We’ve got so many details with this site that tell us what happened moment by moment, it’s almost like watching it play out in the movies,” he said. “You look at the rock column, you look at the fossils there, and it brings you back to that day.”

Other fossils found at Tanis include an extremely well-preserved embryonic pterosaur –flying reptiles which soared over the world of the dinosaurs – and fish with small particles in their gills. Once chemically analysed, it was determined that the particles are molten rock from the asteroid impact breathed in by the fish.

“All the evidence, all of the chemical data, from that study suggests strongly that we’re looking at a piece of the impactor – of the asteroid that ended it for the dinosaurs,” said Professor Phil Manning, DePalma’s PhD supervisor.

Peer-reviewed articles have been published on the site, including a 2019 paper on the glass spherules inhaled by the fish. More are promised. Until then, however, some claims remain open to doubt.

Professor Steve Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, UK, another consultant for the BBC program, is sceptical. For now.

“Those fish with the spherules in their gills, they’re an absolute calling card for the asteroid,” he said. “But for some of the other claims … I’d say they have a lot of circumstantial evidence that hasn’t yet been presented to the jury. “For some of these discoveries, though, does it even matter if they died on the day or years before?” he added. “The pterosaur egg with a pterosaur baby inside is super-rare – there’s nothing else like it from North America. It doesn’t all have to be about the asteroid.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/fossil-dinosaurs-extinct/

 

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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/

 

 

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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/

 

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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)