The origin of the domestic fowl is more recent than previously thought, but it may have taken them thousands of years to become food.
Tag Archives: Fossils
Giraffes May Be Long-Necked for Fights, Not Just Food
Evolutionary theories said giraffes developed their height to get to better eats, but ancestors may have gained the advantage through head-butting battles.
Megalodon Extinction May Have Been Driven by Hungry Great White Sharks
The largest shark that ever lived may have vanished in part because the comparatively smaller great white had a taste for the same prey.
Dinosaurs Started Out Hot, Then Some of Them Turned Cold
Scientists directly measured the metabolic rate of extinct animals, which revealed that some giant dinosaurs became coldblooded.
The (fossil) eyes have it: Evidence that an ancient owl hunted in daylight
An extraordinarily well-preserved fossil owl was described in PNAS this past March. Owls are not new to the fossil record; evidence of their existence has been found in scattered limbs and fragments from the Pleistocene to the Paleocene (approximately 11,700 years to 65 million years ago). What makes this fossil unique is not only the rare preservation of its near-complete articulated skeleton but that it provides the first evidence of diurnal behavior millions of years earlier than previously thought.
In other words, this ancient owl didn’t stalk its prey under the cloak of darkness. Instead, the bird was active under the rays of the Miocene sun.
Seeing the light
Its eye socket was key to making this determination. Dr. Zhiheng Li is lead author on the paper and a vertebrate paleontologist who focuses on fossil birds at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in China. He explained in an email that the large bones around the eyes of birds (but not mammals) known as the scleral ossicles offer information about the size of the pupil they surround. In this case, the pupils of this fossil owl were small. And if the pupil is small, he wrote, it “means they can obtain good vision with a smaller eye opening.”
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Tooth of an Ancient Girl Fills Gap in Human Family Tree
A molar discovered in a cave in Laos shows where the enigmatic Denisovans could have interbred with the ancestors of modern humans.
Started Out as a Fish. How Did It End Up Like This?
A meme about the transitional fossil Tiktaalik argues that although we did emerge from the sea, we aren’t doing just fine.
The ‘Ultimate Bird’ Once Prowled the Seas of a Young Japan
Researchers described Annakacygna, a family of flightless ancient swans that were filter-feeders.
Scientists solve mystery of why these rare spider fossils were preserved
Enlarge / Fossilized spider from the Aix-en-Provence formation in France seen in hand sample overlain with fluorescent microscopy image of the same fossil. UV illumination causes the fossil to glow brightly, revealing more details about its preservation. (credit: Olcott et al., 2022)
Scientists have long puzzled over the exceptional preservation of certain fossils of Cenozoic-era biota, including plants, fish, amphibians, spiders, and other insects. The secret: The presence of mats comprised of single-celled microalgae (diatoms) created an anaerobic environment for fossilization and chemically reacted with the spiders’ organic polymers to turn them into thin carbon-rich films. The process is similar to a common industrial treatment to preserve rubber, according to a recent paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
Most fossils are basically mineralized body parts: shells, bones, and teeth. But softer tissues are far more likely to decay than fossilize, including chitinous exoskeletons, skin, and feathers. Soft-tissue organisms tend to be under-represented among fossils, except for unusual deposits (called Fossil-Lagerstätten) that boast rich arrays of such fossils in remarkable preservation.
“Most life doesn’t become a fossil,” said Alison Olcott, a geologist at the University of Kansas. “It’s hard to become a fossil. You have to die under very specific circumstances, and one of the easiest ways to become a fossil is to have hard parts like bones, horns, and teeth. So, our record of soft-body life and terrestrial life, like spiders, is spotty—but we have these periods of exceptional preservation when all circumstances were harmonious for preservation to happen.”
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Titanosaur nesting spot found in Brazil
Enlarge (credit: Júlia d’Oliveira)
They were the largest land creatures the Earth has ever known. But what survived millions of years of fossilization in one specific area of the Ponte Alta region of Brazil was not their massive bones, rather, it was their rare and relatively tiny eggs. And many of them! The first titanosaur nesting site in the country was recently announced in a paper published in Scientific Reports.
Sauropods, a group of long-necked herbivores, were a diverse type of dinosaur that lived from the Jurassic era through the Cretaceous, a period spanning from 201 million years to 66 million years ago. Titanosaurs were a clade of sauropod—a group with a common ancestor—that was the last of this lineage to exist on this planet in the Late Cretaceous. While their name justifiably implies an enormous size, not all of them were huge.
South America is well-known for its titanosaur fossils, particularly in Argentina, home to some of the world’s most spectacular titanosaur nesting sites and embryonic remains. Titanosaur eggshells and egg fragments are known in Uruguay, Peru, and Brazil, but a fossilized egg here and there doesn’t provide evidence of a nesting site. Several egg clutches, numerous eggs and egg fragments in more than one layer of sediment, does.
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Shards of Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs May Have Been Found in Fossil Site
In a North Dakota deposit far from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, remains of the rock from space were preserved within amber, a paleontologist says.
‘Big John,’ a High-Profile Triceratops, Locked Horns With Its Own Kind, Study Suggests
A team of Italian scientists describe what they believe is a gaping scar from one of these ancient battles on the neck frill of the Triceratops.
Fossil Holds Clues to How Some Owls Evolved Into Daytime Hunters
The bird, which sought prey in a part of China 6 million years ago, had eyes shaped in a way that suggest it was not nocturnal like most owls living today.
Trilobite Fossils Suggest Cannibalism Is Older Than Once Thought
The “king” of the trilobites was snacking on whatever it could eat some 514 million years ago in the Cambrian era, even shelled creatures of its own species.
Mystery Solved: Stan, the T. Rex, Went to Abu Dhabi
A Tyrannosaurus rex fossil known as “Stan” that drew a record price at auction in 2020 — $31.8 million — will be part of a new natural history museum in the United Arab Emirates.
This extinct ten-armed fossil may be earliest known ancestor of vampire squid
Enlarge / An artistic reconstruction of the newly described 328-million-year-old vampyropod, Syllipsimopodi bideni. (credit: K. Whalen/Christopher Whalen)
Paleontologists believe they have discovered a new genus and species of extinct cephalopod with ten functional arms, similar to a vampire squid. The 328-million-year-old fossil is the earliest known example of a vampyropod (ancient soft-bodied cephalopods) to date, pushing back the earliest evidence by 82 million years, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Other paleontologists aren’t so sure, believing the specimen might represent a different known species of ancient cephalopods and calling for a full chemical analysis to confirm the species one way or the other.
The fossil was excavated from Bear Gulch Limestone in Montana. The fossils found there tend to be exceptionally well-preserved—sometimes even showing vascularization—thanks to the impact of seasonal monsoons. That heavy rainfall rapidly deposited sediments and other biological matter into the bay, in turn feeding algal blooms. Those algal blooms resulted in temporary oxygen-deprived zones, while the sudden infusion of fresh water from the rain would have lowered saline levels, according to the authors.
The fossil was donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in 1988, and there it sat, unnoticed for decades, until co-author Christopher Whalen, a postdoc in paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, was perusing the collection and spotted the arms. When he looked at the specimen more closely under the microscope, he noticed small suckers on those arms, making this an incredibly rare find, since suckers are typically not preserved.
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Fossil of Vampire Squid’s Oldest Ancestor Is Named for Biden
Scientists describe a new species of vampyropod from a 328-million-year-old, 10-armed fossil found in Montana.
Fossil Reveals Secrets of One of Nature’s Most Mysterious Reptiles
The specimen shows that modern tuataras found in New Zealand are little changed from ancestors that lived 190 million years.
They Want to Break T. Rex Into 3 Species. Paleontologists Aren’t Pleased.
The premise, put forth in a new paper, highlights an assortment of tensions in dinosaur paleontology, including how subjective the naming of species can be.
An asteroid killed dinosaurs in spring—which might explain why mammals survived
An international team of scientists used synchrotron radiation to image and analyze fossilized fish from the Tanis deposit in North Dakota.
Some 66 million years ago, a catastrophic event wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. The puzzle of why so many species perished while others survived has long intrigued scientists.
A new paper published in the journal Nature concludes that one reason for this evolutionary selectivity is the timing of the impact. Based on their analysis of fossilized fish killed immediately after the impact, the authors have determined that the extinction event occurred in the spring—at least in the Northern Hemisphere—interrupting the annual reproductive cycles of many species.
As we’ve reported previously, the most widely accepted explanation for what triggered that catastrophic mass extinction is known as the “Alvarez hypothesis,” after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter. In 1980, they proposed that the extinction event may have been caused by a massive asteroid or comet hitting the Earth.
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The Dinosaur Age May Have Ended in Springtime
A new study examining fossils of fish suggests animals were wiped out by a massive meteor at a time when they were just emerging from hibernation and having offspring.
Act of ‘Heresy’ Adds Horseshoe Crabs to Arachnid Family Tree
A team of researchers say that rather than occupying their own branch in the history of life on Earth, horseshoe crabs are in the same group as spiders and scorpions.
This fossilized fish’s skull is filled with feces
Enlarge / View of the fossilized skull of an extinct species of stargazer fish, showing preserved fecal pellets in the brain. (credit: Calvert Marine Museum)
A fossilized cranium of an extinct species of stargazer fish was stuffed with tiny fecal pellets known as coprolites, according to a recent paper published in the journal Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia e Stratigrafia—the first known skull in the fossil record to be completely filled with fecal pellets. This is a joint study by paleontologists at the University of Pisa in Italy, and the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland, who proposed that tiny scavenging worms ate their way into the dead fish’s skull and pooped out the pellets.
It was a 19th century British fossil hunter named Mary Anning (recently portrayed by Kate Winslet in the 2020 film Ammonite) who first noticed the presence of so-called “bezoar stones” in the abdomens of ichthyosaur skeletons around 1824. When she broke open the stones, she often found the fossilized remains of fish bones and scales. A geologist named William Buckland took note of Anning’s observations five years later, suggesting that the stones were actually fossilized feces. He dubbed them coprolites.
Coprolites aren’t quite the same as paleofeces, which retains a lot of organic components that can be reconstituted and analyzed for chemical properties. Coprolites are fossils, so most organic components have been replaced by mineral deposits like silicate and calcium carbonates. It can be challenging to distinguish the smallest coprolites from eggs, for example, or other kinds of inorganic pellets, but they typically boast spiral or annular markings, and, as Anning discovered, often contain undigested fragments of food.
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Dissolving in Toxic Oceans: How an Ancient Extinction Happened
Scientists say rocks on the English coast contain clues of the processes that drove the end-Triassic event that killed as much as a quarter of all life on Earth.
This Ancient Crab Had Unusually Huge Eyes
A study of fossils from Colombia suggests that a prehistoric shellfish hunted prey with remarkably sharp vision.
A Naturalist Stumbled on an Ichthyosaur Skeleton, the Largest in U.K. History
The fossilized remains of the marine reptile, often referred to as a “sea dragon” and believed to be 180 million years old, were discovered at a nature reserve.
Fossils of a Prehistoric Rainforest Hide in Australia’s Rusted Rocks
The find suggests overlooked rocks across the continent may contain more fossilized surprises.
Virtual 3D models of ammonite fossils show their muscles for first time
Enlarge (credit: Lesley Cherns et al.)
Researchers created a highly detailed 3D model of a 365-million-year-old ammonite fossil from the Jurassic period by combining advanced imaging techniques, revealing internal muscles that have never been previously observed, according to a paper published last month in the journal Geology. Another paper published last month in the journal Papers in Paleontology reported on the creation of 3D virtual models of the armored plates from fossilized skeletons of two new species of ancient worms, dating from 400 million years ago.
The ammonite fossil used in the Geology study was discovered in 1998 at the Claydon Pike pit site in Gloucestershire, England, which mostly comprises poorly cemented sands, sandstone, and limestone. Plenty of fragmented mollusk shells are scattered throughout the site, but this particular specimen was remarkably intact, showing no signs of prolonged exposure via scavenging, shell encrustation, or of being exhumed from elsewhere and redeposited. The fossil is currently housed at the National Museum Wales, Cardiff.
“When I found the fossil, I immediately knew it was something special,” said co-author Neville Hollingworth, public engagement manager at the Science and Technology Facilities Council. “The shell split in two and the body of the fossil fell out revealing what looked like soft tissues. It is wonderful to finally know what these are through the use of state-of-the-art imaging techniques.”
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Richard Leakey, Kenyan Fossil Hunter and Conservationist, Dies at 77
His discoveries of ancient human skulls and skeletons, including the famed “Turkana Boy,” helped cement Africa’s standing as the cradle of humanity.
An Ichthyosaur With a Grand Piano-Size Head and a Big Appetite
Scientists have described a giant new species of ichthyosaur that evolved its 55-foot-long body size only a few million years after the lizards returned to the seas.
A fossil site reveals an ancient sinkhole and its enormous occupant
Enlarge / Rebuilding the lower jaw of the Gray mastodon. (credit: ETSU Gray Fossil Site & Museum)
Something has been discovered in Tennessee—something that only exists in one museum. It’s something enormous, slightly puzzling, and possibly the first of its kind discovered. Five years after its excavation, it remains incomplete.
The mastodon skeleton slowly taking shape in Tennessee is no secret. Pictures and descriptions of its progress have been posted on social media from the beginning, and while those who are aware of it are intrigued, it hasn’t made many headlines. Yet.
Out of the gray
The Gray Fossil Site near Gray, Tennessee, was found by accident during road construction in 2000. Thanks to the efforts of local people and the state government who recognized the importance of the site, construction halted. A museum was erected several years later. Bits of bones and one shattered tusk were all that had been found when the site was preserved, but the area is proving to be voluminous in its fossil content.
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This Dinosaur Found in Chile Had a Battle Ax for a Tail
While ankylosaurs are already known for their armor and club tails, this specimen from South America had a unique way of fighting predators.
Why Was This Ancient Tusk 150 Miles From Land, 10,000 Feet Deep?
A discovery in the Pacific Ocean off California leads to “an ‘Indiana Jones’ mixed with ‘Jurassic Park’ moment.”
Dinosaurs May Have Been Socializing Nearly 200 Million Years Ago
A trove of fossilized eggs and skeletons in Argentina revealed that some dinosaurs likely traveled in herds and socialized by age.
Trapped in amber: Fossilized dinosaur-era crab bridges evolutionary gap
Once upon a time, during the Cretaceous period, a tiny crab wandered out of the water onto land and somehow got trapped in amber, which preserved it for 100 million years. At least that’s what a team of scientists hypothesize might have happened in a new paper announcing their discovery of the oldest known modern-looking crab yet found in the fossil record. The paper was published in the journal Science Advances.
This new type of “true crab” (aka a brachyuran) measures just five millimeters in leg span and has been dubbed Cretapsara athanata. The name is meant to honor the period in which the crab lived and Apsara, a South and Southeast Asian spirit of the clouds and waters. “Athanatos” means “immortal,” a sly reference to the fossilized crab being frozen in time.
It’s rare to find nonmarine crab fossils from this era trapped in amber; most such amber fossils are those of insects. And the previously discovered crabby fossils are incomplete, usually consisting of pieces of claws. This latest find is so complete that it doesn’t seem to be missing even a single hair. The find is of particular interest because it pushes back the time frame for when nonmarine crabs crawled onto land by 25 to 50 million years—consistent with long-standing theories on the genetic history of crabs—and offers new insight into the so-called Cretaceous Crab Revolution, when crabs diversified worldwide.
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4,000-Year-Old Coffin Found in English Golf Course
Workers digging in a pond at the Tetney Golf Club discovered a waterlogged coffin containing the remains of a man who archaeologists said was buried about 4,000 years ago.
‘Spaceship-Shaped’ Fossil Reveals Hungry Predator of Ancient Oceans
Titanokorys gainesi, turned up in the Canadian Rockies, was among the largest known predators 500 million years ago.
Fossils Seized in Police Raid Demystify a Prehistoric Flying Reptile
Among the 3,000 fossils seized at a Brazilian port in 2013 was an almost complete skeleton from the pterosaur species Tupandactylus navigans, preserved in six limestone slabs.
Was The Tyrannosaurus Rex a Picky Eater?
The jaw of the Tyrannosaurus Rex had sensitive nerves that may have allowed it to differentiate between parts of its prey, a new study found.
This Brain Remained Intact in a 310 Million-Year-Old Fossil
The discovery suggested that horseshoe crab brains haven’t changed much and that there are more ways for soft tissues to be preserved in the fossil record.
Discovery of ‘Dragon Man’ Skull in China May Add Species to Human Family Tree
A laborer discovered the fossil and hid it in a well for 85 years. Scientists say it could help sort out the human family tree and how our species emerged.
Trace fossils, the most inconspicuous bite-sized window into ancient worlds
Enlarge / It may not look like much, but you can actually learn a lot from a fossilized leaf that preserves insect damage. (credit: Donovan et. al.)
He knew what it was as soon as he saw it: the signature sign of a bird landing. He’d seen hundreds of such tracks along the Georgia coast. He’d photographed them, measured them, and drawn them. The difference here? This landing track was approximately 105 million years old.
Dr. Anthony Martin, a popular professor at Emory University, recognized that landing track in Australia in the early 2000s when he passed by a fossil slab in a museum. “Because my eyes had been trained for so long from the Georgia coast seeing those kinds of patterns, that’s how I noticed them,” he said. “Because it literally was out of the corner of my eye. I was walking by the slab, I glanced at it, and then these three-toed impressions popped out at me.”
Impressions of toes may seem to be pretty dull compared to a fully reconstructed skeleton. But many of us yearn for a window into ancient worlds, to actually see how long-extinct creatures looked, lived, and behaved. Paleontology lets us crack open that window; using fossilized remains, scientists glean information about growth rates, diet, diseases, and where species roamed. But there’s a lesser-known branch of paleontology that fully opens the window by exploring what the extinct animals actually did.
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Sharks Nearly Went Extinct 19 Million Years Ago From Mystery Event
Analysis of the fossil record shows a mysterious mass extinction that decimated the diversity of sharks in the world’s oceans, and they’ve never fully recovered.
The world saw a shark-pocalypse 19 million years ago, and we don’t know why
Enlarge (credit: Leah D. Rubin)
Sharks have been swimming and hunting in the world’s oceans for 450 million years, and though their numbers have recently declined because of human activity, they’re still with us. But the world once had many more, and many more varieties of, the large marine predators compared to today. In fact, new research published in Science suggests that 19 million years ago, the vast majority of sharks and shark species died off. We don’t understand why or how this large extinction event occurred.
“Sharks have… weathered a large number of mass extinctions. And this extinction event is probably the biggest one they’ve ever seen. Something big must have happened,” Elizabeth Sibert, one of the authors of the paper, told Ars.
Sibert is a Hutchinson postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Institute for Biospheric Sciences, and she was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows for the initial phases of this research back in 2017.
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Scientists Find a Fossilized Ancestor of ‘Dinosaur Food’
This ancient plant might be even more ancient than paleobotanists once believed.
These Neanderthals Weren’t Cannibals, So Who Ate Them? Stone Age Hyenas.
An archaeological excavation south of Rome uncovered fossil remains of nine Neanderthals, along with the bones of hyenas, elephants and rhinoceroses.
Horse Fossil, Possibly From the Ice Age, Is Found in a Las Vegas Backyard
Workers found the bones, which could be up to 14,000 years old, during the construction of a pool.
Baby Mammoths Were Meals for These Saber-Tooth Cats
Fossils from a Texas site suggest that the predatory felines not only snatched mammoths from their herds, but dragged the remains back to their cave.
How the Largest Animals That Could Ever Fly Supported Giraffe-Like Necks
These pterosaurs had wingspans as long as 33 feet, and scans of fossilized remains reveal a surprise in their anatomy.
Decolonizing the Hunt for Dinosaurs and Other Fossils
Younger paleontologists are working to overcome some historical legacies of their discipline and change how people learn about natural history.