500-million-year old worm ‘superhighway’ discovered in Canada
Prehistoric worms populated the sea bed 500 million years ago — evidence that life was active in an environment thought uninhabitable until now, research by the University of Saskatchewan (USask) shows.
The sea bed in the deep ocean during the Cambrian period was thought to have been inhospitable to animal life because it lacked enough oxygen to sustain it.
But research published in the scientific journal Geology reveals the existence of fossilized worm tunnels dating back to the Cambrian period — 270 million years before the evolution of dinosaurs.
The discovery, by USask professor Brian Pratt, suggests that animal life in the sediment at that time was more widespread than previously thought.
The worm tunnels — borrows where worms lived and munched through the sediment — are invisible to the naked eye. But Pratt “had a hunch” and sliced the rocks and scanned them to see whether they revealed signs of ancient life.
The rocks came from an area in the remote Mackenzie Mountains of the Northwest Territories in Canada which Pratt found 35 years ago.
Pratt then digitally enhanced images of the rock surfaces so he could examine them more closely. Only then did the hidden ‘superhighway’ of burrows made by several different sizes and types of prehistoric worm emerge in the rock.
Some were barely a millimetre in size and others as large as a finger. The smaller ones were probably made by simple polychaetes — or bristle worms — but one of the large forms was a predator that attacked unsuspecting arthropods and surface-dwelling worms.
Pratt said he was “surprised” by the unexpected discovery.
“For the first time, we saw evidence of large populations of worms living in the sediment — which was thought to be barren,” he said. “There were cryptic worm tunnels — burrows — in the mud on the continental shelf 500 million years ago, and more animals reworking, or bioturbating, the sea bed than anyone ever thought.”
Pratt, a geologist and paleontologist and Fellow of the Geological Society of America, found the tunnels in sedimentary rocks that are similar to the Burgess Shale, a famous fossil-bearing deposit in the Canadian Rockies.
The discovery may prompt a rethink of the level of oxygenation in ancient oceans and continental shelves.
The Cambrian period saw an explosion of life on Earth in the oceans and the development of multi-cellular organisms including prehistoric worms, clams, snails and ancestors of crabs and lobsters. Previously the seas had been inhabited by simple, single-celled microbes and algae.
It has always been assumed that the creatures in the Burgess Shale — known for the richness of its fossils — had been preserved so immaculately because the lack of oxygen at the bottom of the sea stopped decay, and because no animals lived in the mud to eat the carcasses.
Pratt’s discovery, with co-author Julien Kimmig, now of the University of Kansas, shows there was enough oxygen to sustain various kinds of worms in the sea bed.
“Serendipity is a common aspect to my kind of research,” Pratt said. “I found these unusual rocks quite by accident all those years ago. On a hunch I prepared a bunch of samples and when I enhanced the images I was genuinely surprised by what I found,” he said.
“This has a lot of implications which will now need to be investigated, not just in Cambrian shales but in younger rocks as well. People should try the same technique to see if it reveals signs of life in their samples.”
The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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Amoebae diversified at least 750 million years ago, far earlier than expected
Brazilian researchers have reconstructed the evolutionary history of amoebae and demonstrated that at the end of the Precambrian period, at least 750 million years ago, life on Earth was much more diverse than suggested by classic theory.
The study, which was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation — FAPESP, revealed eight new ancestral lineages of Thecamoebae, the largest group in Amoebozoa. Thecamoebians are known as testates because of their hard outer carapace or shell.
Interpretations of the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere and climate change are also affected by the discovery that amoebae are more diverse than previously thought.
In this study, published in the journal Current Biology, researchers affiliated with the University of São Paulo’s Bioscience Institute (IB-USP) in Brazil, in partnership with colleagues at the Mississippi State University in the United States, used innovative techniques to reconstruct the phylogenetic (evolutionary) tree of Thecamoeba, which belongs to the order Arcellinida.
The new phylogenetic tree was created using mathematical algorithms and the transcriptomes of 19 arcellinids found in nature today. The researchers also established the morphology and composition of the hypothetical ancestors of this group of amoebae and compared them with the fossil record.
The results showed that at least 750 million years ago, ancestors of the thecamoebians were already evolving. This finding indicates that the late Precambrian was more diverse than previously thought.
“We reached our conclusions using a combination of two major scientific areas — paleontology and phylogenetic systematics, the field within biology that reconstructs evolutionary history and studies the patterns of relationships among organisms. In this way, we were able to untangle one of the knots in evolutionary theory about life on the planet,” said Daniel Lahr, a professor at IB-USP and lead author of the article.
Reclassification of Amoebozoa
The researchers completely dismantled the previous classification of thecamoebians. “We succeeded in developing a robust structure and for the first time, discovered eight deep lineages [from 750 million years ago] of arcellinids about which nothing was known,” Lahr told.
The old thecamoebian classification was based on shell composition. “They were divided into agglutinate and organic. However, from our molecular reconstruction, we discovered that the classification is actually determined by shell shape rather than composition,” Lahr said.
The old classification, he added, had been questioned for several years, but more evidence was needed to demolish it. Previous genetic research has shown that the classification was unsustainable, but not enough data were available to justify a new classification.
“The scientific community suspected that the arcellinid testate amoebae had emerged and evolved sufficiently to diversify some 750 million years ago. We’ve now succeeded in demonstrating this hypothesis,” he said.
Past and future
According to Lahr, the study presents a different view of how microorganisms evolved on the planet. The late Precambrian was considered a period of low biotic diversity, with only a few species of bacteria and some protists.
“It was in this period 800 million years ago that the oceans became oxygenated. For a long time, oxygenation was assumed to have led to diversification of the eukaryotes, unicellular and multicellular organisms in which the cell’s nucleus is isolated by a membrane, culminating in the diversification of macroorganisms millions of years later in the Cambrian,” Lahr said.
The study published in Current Biology, he added, focuses on a detail of this question. “We show that diversification apparently already existed in the Precambrian and that it probably occurred at the same time as ocean oxygenation. What’s more, geophysicists are discovering that this process was slow and may have lasted 100 million years or so,” he said.
However, scientists do not know what pressure triggered this oxygenation. “Regardless of the cause, oxygenation eventually led to more niches, the eukaryotes diversified, and there was more competition for niches. One way to resolve the competition was for some lineages to become larger and hence multicellular,” Lahr said.
The study has also contributed to a better understanding of today’s climate change. “We began to understand in more depth how this microbial life affected the planet in several ways,” Lahr said. “The climate changed in fundamental ways during the period, which saw the occurrence of the Sturtian glaciation some 717 million years ago. This was one of the largest glaciation events ever.”
According to Lahr, these changes may have had biological origins. “By increasing the resolution of how life evolved in the very remote past, we can understand a little better how life affects the planet’s climate and even its geology. That will help us understand the climate changes we’re currently experiencing,” he said.
In rock
In addition to the discovery of greater diversity in the Precambrian, the study also innovates by reconstructing the morphology of the ancestors of thecamoebians to establish that the vase-shaped microfossils (VSMs) found in various parts of the world already existed in the Precambrian and even in the major ice ages that occurred during this era.
VSMs are presumed to be fossils of testate amoebae. They are unicellular and eukaryotic and have an external skeleton. Significant diversity of VSMs has been documented for the Neoproterozoic Era, which spanned between 1 billion and 541 million years ago, and was the terminal era of the Precambrian.
“The study constitutes a very different vision of how microorganisms evolved on the planet. Although the fossils do not contain genetic information, it is possible to obtain morphological and compositional information and to verify whether they are organic or silica-based. So it’s possible to compare their shape and chemical composition, which in this case are especially well preserved, with those of current thecamoebians reconstituted by big data,” said Luana Morais, a postdoctoral researcher with a scholarship from FAPESP and coauthor of the article.
Innovative techniques
In addition to the lack of DNA-containing fossils, the researchers faced another obstacle in reconstructing the phylogenetic tree: thecamoebians cannot be cultured in the laboratory, and genetic sequencing by conventional means is therefore ruled out.
The solution to this problem was to use the single-cell transcriptome technique to analyze phylogenetics (instead of gene expression, its normal application). “We sequenced whole transcriptomes of arcellinid amoebae using live samples,” Lahr explained. “This yielded several thousand genes and some 100,000 amino acid sites, or 100,000 datapoints giving us the phylogenetic tree, which had never been seen before.”
The researchers used transcriptome-based methodology to capture all messenger RNAs from each individual cell and convert them into a sequenceable complementary DNA library.
“Our research drew fundamentally on single-cell transcriptomics, in which our lab is one of the worldwide pioneers,” Lahr said. “It’s a revolutionary technique in this field because it enables us to find a single [unicellular] amoeba, isolate and clean it, and perform all the laboratory procedures to sequence the whole transcriptome.”
In this study, the researchers selected 250 genes to construct the phylogenetic tree. “It’s no good looking at only one cell when you’re studying gene expression, because the resolution will be insufficient,” Lahr said. “In an evolutionary study, however, this doesn’t matter. You need to obtain the sequence, not the number of times a gene is expressed. So it’s possible to use this technique, which was originally developed for tumor cells, and adapt it, with the advantage that an amoeba cell is much larger than a tumor cell.”
Before the technique was developed, only organisms grown in the laboratory could be sequenced. “It extends the range of my research in this field by enabling me to obtain genetic information from organisms I’ve only found once. It’s estimated that only 1% or less of all biodiversity is cultivable,” Lahr said.
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New species of tiny tyrannosaur foreshadows rise of T. rex
A newly discovered, diminutive — by T. rexstandards — relative of the tyrant king of dinosaurs reveals crucial new information about when and how T. rex came to rule the North American roost.
Meet Moros intrepidus, a small tyrannosaur who lived about 96 million years ago in the lush, deltaic environment of what is now Utah during the Cretaceous period. The tyrannosaur, whose name means “harbinger of doom,” is the oldest Cretaceous tyrannosaur species yet discovered in North America, narrowing a 70-million-year gap in the fossil record of tyrant dinosaurs on the continent.
“With a lethal combination of bone-crunching bite forces, stereoscopic vision, rapid growth rates, and colossal size, tyrant dinosaurs reigned uncontested for 15 million years leading up to the end-Cretaceous extinction — but it wasn’t always that way,” says Lindsay Zanno, paleontologist at North Carolina State University, head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Sciences and lead author of a paper describing the research. “Early in their evolution, tyrannosaurs hunted in the shadows of archaic lineages such as allosaurs that were already established at the top of the food chain.”
Medium-sized, primitive tyrannosaurs have been found in North America dating from the Jurassic (around 150 million years ago). By the Cretaceous — around 81 million years ago — North American tyrannosaurs had become the enormous, iconic apex predators we know and love. The fossil record between these time periods has been a blank slate, preventing scientists from piecing together the story behind the ascent of tyrannosaurs in North America. “When and how quickly tyrannosaurs went from wallflower to prom king has been vexing paleontologists for a long time,” says Zanno. “The only way to attack this problem was to get out there and find more data on these rare animals.”
That’s exactly what Zanno and her team did. A decade spent hunting for dinosaur remains within rocks deposited at the dawn of the Late Cretaceous finally yielded teeth and a hind limb from the new tyrannosaur. In fact, the lower leg bones of Moros were discovered in the same area where Zanno had previously found Siats meekerorum, a giant meat-eating carcharodontosaur that lived during the same period. Moros is tiny by comparison — standing only three or four feet tall at the hip, about the size of a modern mule deer. Zanno estimates that the Moros was over seven years old when it died, and that it was nearly full-grown.
But don’t let the size fool you. “Moros was lightweight and exceptionally fast,” Zanno says. “These adaptations, together with advanced sensory capabilities, are the mark of a formidable predator. It could easily have run down prey, while avoiding confrontation with the top predators of the day.
“Although the earliest Cretaceous tyrannosaurs were small, their predatory specializations meant that they were primed to take advantage of new opportunities when warming temperatures, rising sea-level and shrinking ranges restructured ecosystems at the beginning of the Late Cretaceous,” Zanno says. “We now know it took them less than 15 million years to rise to power.”
The bones of Moros also revealed the origin of T. rex’s lineage on the North American continent. When the scientists placed Moroswithin the family tree of tyrannosaurs they discovered that its closest relatives were from Asia. “T. rex and its famous contemporaries such as Triceratops may be among our most beloved cultural icons, but we owe their existence to their intrepid ancestors who migrated here from Asia at least 30 million years prior,” Zanno says. “Moros signals the establishment of the iconic Late Cretaceous ecosystems of North America.”
The research appears in Communications Biology, and was supported in part by Canyonlands Natural History Association. Lecturer Terry Gates, postdoctoral research scholar Aurore Canoville and graduate student Haviv Avrahami from NC State, as well as the Field Museum’s Peter Makovicky and Ryan Tucker from Stellenbosch University, contributed to the work.
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Half-a-billion-year-old weird wonder worm finally gets its place in the tree of life
Amiskwia was originally described by the famous palaeontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927) in 1911 who compared it to the modern arrow worms (chaetognaths) — a group of ocean-dwelling worms that are fierce predators, equipped with an array of spines on their head for grasping small prey.
Such organisms are found world-wide at sites like the famous Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies, where their soft bodies are preserved intact.
The strange anatomies exhibited by these animals led the American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) to speculate that these organisms represented extinct body plans that are no longer seen today and that if we were to wind back the clocks to the Cambrian, more than 500-million-years-ago, and re-run the tape of life, then perhaps the animals alive today would look very different.
More than 50 years after Doolittle Walcott came up with his theory about Amiskwia, scientists investigated its affinities and rejected his interpretation as they could not find evidence of the canonical grasping spines.
Instead, they suggested it could be a ribbon worm, or its own distinct lineage only distantly related to anything that resembles it today.
When Dr Jakob Vinther from the University of Bristol’s Schools of Earth Sciences and Biological Sciences and Luke Parry, now at Yale University, studied specimens of Amiskwia, kept at the Smithsonian Institution they found something that had been missed before.
Dr Vinther said: “I coated the specimen with ammonium chloride smoke to make the relief of the fossil stand out and then I could see that in the head was a pair of robust elements.”
Interpreting these structures as a set of jaws, their resemblance led him to think of a group of animals, called gnathiferans, which include rotifers, gnathostomulids and micrognathozoans. These animals are microscopic worms, with a distinctive internal jaw apparatus.
The scientists realised that Amiskwia suddenly had a jaw of a gnathiferan, but a body of an arrow worm.
Dr Vinther said: “The bizarre combination of anatomy seemed altogether alien back in 2012.
“Some people have proposed that there could be a relationship between arrow worms and gnathiferans based on their shared possession of a jaw apparatus, both made of a substance called chitin.
“However, there was little other evidence to suggest a relationship, such as evidence from phylogenetic analyses of DNA.”
Luke Parry added: “It altogether seemed like heresy to propose that gnathiferans and arrow worms may be related back then so we held off publishing our intriguing results out of fear of criticism from our peers.
“However, new DNA studies have since emerged that found arrow worms to be more and more closely affiliated to the Gnathifera in the Tree of Life.
“In particular, some researchers found that arrow worms share a duplication of the important Hox genes with a gnathiferan, the rotifers. We suddenly felt no more in a deadlock situation.”
Now the authors have published their findings in the journal Current Biology. The study follows a new phylogenetic study, which finds robust support for arrow worms forming an evolutionary group with gnathiferans.
Luke Parry said: “We were excited to see that these researchers found a relationship between arrow worms and rotifers.
“Our phylogenetic analysis, based on anatomical features, strongly suggest a relationship between these two groups of animals as well.”
The researchers find that Amiskwia is a stem lineage to arrow worms that possess the jaw apparatus seen in gnathiferan worms.
This jaw evolved into the fearsome grasping spines in living arrow worms, which now is an important link in the marine food chain. Small crustacean larvae have evolved long protective spines to protect themselves from being swallowed by arrow worms.
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Marsupial lived among Arctic dinosaurs
A research team has discovered a previously unknown species of marsupial that lived in Alaska’s Arctic during the era of dinosaurs, adding a vivid new detail to a complex ancient landscape.
The thumb-sized animal, named Unnuakomys hutchisoni, lived in the Arctic about 69 million years ago during the late Cretaceous Period. Its discovery, led by scientists from the University of Colorado and University of Alaska Fairbanks, is outlined in an article published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.
The discovery adds to the picture of an environment that scientists say was surprisingly diverse. The tiny animal, which is the northernmost marsupial ever discovered, lived among a unique variety of dinosaurs, plants and other animals.
Alaska’s North Slope, which was at about 80 degrees north latitude when U. hutchisoni lived there, was once thought to be a barren environment during the late Cretaceous. That perception has gradually changed since dinosaurs were discovered along the Colville River in the 1980s, with new evidence showing the region was home to a diverse collection of unique species that didn’t exist anywhere else.
Finding a new marsupial species in the far north adds a new layer to that evolving view, said Patrick Druckenmiller, the director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North.
“Northern Alaska was not only inhabited by a wide variety of dinosaurs, but in fact we’re finding there were also new species of mammals that helped to fill out the ecology,” said Druckenmiller, who has studied dinosaurs in the region for more than a decade. “With every new species, we paint a new picture of this ancient polar landscape.”
Marsupials are a type of mammal that carries underdeveloped offspring in a pouch. Kangaroos and koalas are the best-known modern marsupials. Ancient relatives were much smaller during the late Cretaceous, Druckenmiller said. Unnuakomys hutchisoniwas probably more like a tiny opossum, feeding on insects and plants while surviving in darkness for as many as four months each winter.
The research team, whose project was funded with a National Science Foundation grant, identified the new marsupial using a painstaking process. With the help of numerous graduate and undergraduate students, they collected, washed and screened ancient river sediment collected on the North Slope and then carefully inspected it under a microscope. Over many years, they were able to locate numerous fossilized teeth roughly the size of a grain of sand.
“I liken it to searching for proverbial needles in haystacks — more rocks than fossils,” said Florida State University paleobiologist Gregory Erickson, who contributed to the paper.
Jaelyn Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, led the effort to examine those teeth and a few tiny jawbones. Their analysis revealed a new species and genus of marsupial.
Mammal teeth have unique cusps that differ from species to species, making them a bit like fingerprints for long-dead organisms, said Eberle, the lead author of the study.
“If I were to go down to the Denver Zoo and crank open the mouth of a lion and look in — which I don’t recommend — I could tell you its genus and probably its species based only on its cheek teeth,” Eberle said.
The name Unnuakomys hutchisoni combines the Iñupiaq word for “night” and the Greek word “mys” for mouse, a reference to the dark winters the animal endured, and a tribute to J. Howard Hutchison, a paleontologist who discovered the fossil-rich site where its teeth were eventually found.
Other co-authors of the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology paper include William Clemens, of the University of California, Berkeley; Paul McCarthy, of UAF; and Anthony Fiorillo, of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.
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Neanderthal footprints found in Gibraltar
The international journal Quaternary Science Reviews has just published a paper which has involved the participation of Gibraltarian scientists from The Gibraltar National Museum alongside colleagues from Spain, Portugal and Japan. The results which have been published come from an area of the Catalan Bay Sand Dune.
This work started ten years ago, when the first dates using the OSL method were obtained. It is then that the first traces of footprints left by vertebrates were found. In subsequent years the successive natural collapse of sand has revealed further material and has permitted a detailed study including new dates.
The sand sheets in the rampant dunes above Catalan Bay are a relic of the last glaciation, when sea level was up to 120 metres below present levels and a great field of dunes extended eastwards from the base of the Rock. The identified footprints correspond to species which are known, from fossil material, to have inhabited Gibraltar. The identified footprints correspond to Red Deer, Ibex, Aurochs, Leopard and Straight-tusked Elephant. In addition the scientists have found the footprint of a young human (106-126 cm in height), possibly Neanderthal, which dates to around 29 thousand years ago. It would coincide with late Neanderthal dates from Gorham’s Cave.
If confirmed to be Neanderthal, these dunes would become only the second site in the world with footprints attributed to these humans, the other being Vartop Cave in Romania. These findings add further international importance to the Gibraltar Pleistocene heritage, declared of World Heritage Value in 2016.
The research was supported by HM Government of Gibraltar under the Gibraltar Caves Project and the annual excavations in the Gibraltar Caves, with additional support to the external scientists from the Spanish EU project MICINN-FEDER: CGL2010-15810/BTE.
Minister for Heritage John Cortes MP commented, “This is extraordinary research and gives us an incredible insight into the wildlife community of Gibraltar’s past. We should all take a moment to imagine the scene when these animals walked across our landscape. It helps us understand the importance of looking after our heritage. I congratulate the research team on uncovering this fascinating, hidden evidence of our Rock’s past.”
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New dinosaur with heart-shaped tail provides evolutionary clues for African continent
A new dinosaur that wears its “heart” on its tail provides new clues to how ecosystems evolved on the African continent during the Cretaceous period according to researchers at Ohio University.
The OHIO team identified and named the new species of dinosaur in an article published this week in PLOS ONE. The new dinosaur, the third now described from southwestern Tanzania by the NSF-funded team, is yet another member of the large, long-necked titanosaur sauropods. The partial skeleton was recovered from Cretaceous-age (~100 million years ago) rocks exposed in a cliff surface in the western branch of the great East African Rift System.
The new dinosaur is named Mnyamawamtuka moyowamkia (Mm-nya-ma-wah-mm-too-ka mm-oh-yo-wa-mm-key-ah), a name derived from Swahili for “animal of the Mtuka (with) a heart-shaped tail” in reference to the name of the riverbed (Mtuka) in which it was discovered and due to the unique shape of its tail bones.
The initial discovery of Mnyamawamtuka took place in 2004, when part of the skeleton was discovered high in a cliff wall overlooking the seasonally dry Mtuka riverbed, with annual excavations continuing through 2008. “Although titanosaurs became one of the most successful dinosaur groups before the infamous mass extinction capping the Age of Dinosaurs, their early evolutionary history remains obscure, and Mnyamawamtuka helps tell those beginnings, especially for their African-side of the story,” said lead author Dr. Eric Gorscak, a recent Ph.D. graduate of Ohio University, current research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) and new assistant professor at the Midwestern University in Downers Grove, just outside of Chicago. “The wealth of information from the skeleton indicates it was distantly related to other known African titanosaurs, except for some interesting similarities with another dinosaur, Malawisaurus, from just across the Tanzania-Malawi border,” noted Dr. Gorscak.
Titanosaurs are best known from Cretaceous-age rocks in South America, but other efforts by the team include new species discovered in Tanzania, Egypt, and other parts of the African continent that reveal a more complex picture of dinosaurian evolution on the planet. “The discovery of dinosaurs like Mnyamawamtuka and others we have recently discovered is like doing a four-dimensional connect the dots,” said Dr. Patrick O’Connor, professor of anatomy at Ohio University and Gorscak’s advisor during his Ph.D. research. “Each new discovery adds a bit more detail to the picture of what ecosystems on continental Africa were like during the Cretaceous, allowing us to assemble a more holistic view of biotic change in the past.”
The excavation process spanned multiple years, and included field teams suspended by ropes and large-scale mechanical excavators to recover one of the more complete specimens from this part of the sauropod dinosaur family tree. “Without the dedication of several field teams, including some whose members donned climbing gear for the early excavations, the skeleton would have eroded away into the river during quite intense wet seasons in this part of the East African Rift System,” added O’Connor.
“This latest discovery is yet another fine example of how Ohio University researchers work the world over in their pursuit of scientific research,” Ohio University President M. Duane Nellis said. “This team has turned out a number of notable discoveries which collectively contribute significantly to our understanding of the natural world.”
Mnyamawamtuka and the other Tanzanian titanosaurs are not the only animals discovered by the research team. Remains of bizarre relatives of early crocodiles, the oldest evidence for “insect farming,” and tantalizing clues about the early evolution of monkeys and apes have been discovered in recent years. Such findings from the East African Rift provide a crucial glimpse into ancient ecosystems of Africa and provide the impetus for future work elsewhere on the continent.
“This new dinosaur gives us important information about African fauna during a time of evolutionary change,” said Judy Skog, a program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. “The discovery offers insights into paleogeography during the Cretaceous. It’s also timely information about an animal with heart-shaped tail bones during this week of Valentine’s Day.”
Recent findings by the research team in the Rukwa Rift Basin include:
“The Tanzanian story is far from over but we know enough to start asking what paleontological and geological similarities and dissimilarities there are with nearby rock units. Revisiting Malawi is my top priority to address these broader, regional questions,” said Gorscak, who also participates in ongoing projects in Egypt and Kenya. “With Mnyamawamtuka and other discoveries, I’m not sure to view it as writing or reading the next chapters in the paleontological book of Africa. I’m just excited to see where this story is going to take us.”
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Science Newsfrom research organizations Earliest known seed-eating perching bird discovered in Fossil Lake, Wyoming
Most of the birds you’ve ever seen — sparrows, finches, robins, crows — have one crucial thing in common: they’re all what scientists refer to as perching birds, or “passerines.” The passerines make up about 6,500 of the 10,000 bird species alive today. But while they’re everywhere now, they were once rare, and scientists are still learning about their origins. In a new paper in Current Biology, researchers have announced the discovery of one of the earliest known passerine birds, from 52 million years ago.
“This is one of the earliest known perching birds. It’s fascinating because passerines today make up most of all bird species, but they were extremely rare back then. This particular piece is just exquisite,” says Field Museum Neguanee Distinguished Service Curator Lance Grande, an author of the paper. “It is a complete skeleton with the feathers still attached, which is extremely rare in the fossil record of birds.”
The paper describes two new fossil bird species — one from Germany that lived 47 million years ago, and another that lived in what’s now Wyoming 52 million years ago, a period known as the Early Eocene. The Wyoming bird, Eofringillirostrum boudreauxi, is the earliest example of a bird with a finch-like beak, similar to today’s sparrows and finches. This legacy is reflected in its name; Eofringilllirostrum means “dawn finch beak.” (Meanwhile, boudreauxi is a nod to Terry and Gail Boudreaux, longtime supporters of science at the Field Museum.)”
The fossil birds’ finch-like, thick beaks hint at their diet. “These bills are particularly well-suited for consuming small, hard seeds,” says Daniel Ksepka, the paper’s lead author, curator at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Anyone with a birdfeeder knows that lots of birds are nuts for seeds, but seed-eating is a fairly recent biological phenomenon. “The earliest birds probably ate insects and fish, some may have been eating small lizards,” says Grande. “Until this discovery, we did not know much about the ecology of early passerines. E. boudreauxi gives us an important look at this.”
“We were able to show that a comparable diversity of bill types already developed in the Eocene in very early ancestors of passerines,” says co-author Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt. “The great distance between the two fossil sites implies that these birds were widespread during the Eocene, while the scarcity of known fossils suggests a rather low number of individuals,” adds Ksepka.
While passerine birds were rare 52 million years ago, E. boudreauxi had the good luck to live and die near Fossil Lake, a site famous for perfect fossilization conditions.
“Fossil Lake is a really graphic picture of an entire community locked in stone — it has everything from fishes and crocs to insects, pollen, reptiles, birds, and early mammals,” says Grande. “We have spent so much time excavating this locality, that we have a record of even the very rare things.”
Grande notes that Fossil Lake provides a unique look at the ancient world — one of the most detailed pictures of life on Earth after the extinction of the dinosaurs (minus the birds) 65 million years ago. “Knowing what happened in the past gives us a better understanding of the present and may help us figure out where we are going for the future.”
With that in mind, Grande plans to continue his exploration of the locale. “I’ve been going to Fossil Lake every year for the last 35 years, and finding this bird is one of the reasons I keep going back. It’s so rich,” says Grande. “We keep finding things that no one’s ever seen before.”
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Ancient Mongolian skull is the earliest modern human yet found in the region
A much debated ancient human skull from Mongolia has been dated and genetically analysed, showing that it is the earliest modern human yet found in the region, according to new research from the University of Oxford. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis have revealed that the only Pleistocene hominin fossil discovered in Mongolia, initially called Mongolanthropus, is in reality a modern human who lived approximately 34,000 to 35,000 years ago.
The skullcap, found in the Salkhit Valley northeast Mongolia is, to date, the only Pleistocene hominin fossil found in the country.
The skullcap is mostly complete and includes the brow ridges and nasal bones. The presence of archaic or ancient features have led in the past to the specimen being linked with uncharacterized archaic hominin species, such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Previous research suggested ages for the specimen ranging from the Early Middle Pleistocene to the terminal Late Pleistocene.
The Oxford team re-dated the specimen to 34,950 — 33,900 years ago. This is around 8,000 years older than the initial radiocarbon dates obtained on the same specimen.
To make this discovery, the Oxford team employed a new optimised technique for radiocarbon dating of heavily contaminated bones. This method relies on extracting just one of the amino acids from the collagen present in the bone. The amino acid hydroxyproline (HYP), which accounts for 13% of the carbon in mammalian collagen, was targeted by the researchers. Dating this amino acid allows for the drastic improvement in the removal of modern contaminants from the specimens.
The new and reliable radiocarbon date obtained for the specimen shows that this individual dates to the same period as the Early Upper Palaeolithic stone tool industry in Mongolia, which is usually associated with modern humans. The age is later than the earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans in greater Eurasia, which could be in excess of 100,000 years in China according to some researchers.
This new result also suggests that there was still a significant amount of unremoved contamination in the sample during the original radiocarbon measurements. Additional analyses performed in collaboration with scientists at the University of Pisa (Italy) confirmed that the sample was heavily contaminated by the resin that had been used to cast the specimen after its discovery.
“The research we have conducted shows again the great benefits of developing improved chemical methods for dating prehistoric material that has been contaminated, either in the site after burial, or in the museum or laboratory for conservation purposes.” said Dr Thibaut Devièse first author on the new paper and leading the method developments in compound specific analysis at the University of Oxford. “Robust sample pretreatment is crucial in order to build reliable chronologies in archaeology.”
DNA analyses were also performed on the hominin bones by Professor Svante Pääbo’s team at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Diyendo Massiliani and colleagues reconstructed the complete mitochondrial genome of the specimen. It falls within a group of modern human mtDNAs (haplogroup N) that is widespread in Eurasia today, confirming the view of some researchers that the cranium is indeed a modern human. Further nuclear DNA work is underway to shed further light on the genetics of the cranium.
‘This enigmatic cranium has puzzled researchers for some time,” said Professor Tom Higham, who leads the PalaeoChron research group at the University of Oxford. “A combination of cutting edge science, including radiocarbon dating and genetics, has now shown that this is the remain of a modern human, and the results fit perfectly within the archaeological record of Mongolia which link moderns to the Early Upper Palaeolithic industry in this part of the world.”
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Journal Reference:
- Thibaut Devièse, Diyendo Massilani, Seonbok Yi, Daniel Comeskey, Sarah Nagel, Birgit Nickel, Erika Ribechini, Jungeun Lee, Damdinsuren Tseveendorj, Byambaa Gunchinsuren, Matthias Meyer, Svante Pääbo, Tom Higham. Compound-specific radiocarbon dating and mitochondrial DNA analysis of the Pleistocene hominin from Salkhit Mongolia. Nature Communications, 2019; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-08018-8
The 210-million-year-old Smok was crushing bones like a hyena
Coprolites, or fossil droppings, of the dinosaur-like archosaur Smok wawelski contain lots of chewed-up bone fragments. This led researchers at Uppsala University to conclude that this top predator was exploiting bones for salt and marrow, a behavior often linked to mammals but seldom to archosaurs.
Most predatory dinosaurs used their blade-like teeth to feed on the flesh of their prey, but they are commonly not thought to be much of bone crushers. The major exception is seen in the large tyrannosaurids, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, that roamed North America toward the end of the age of dinosaurs. The tyrannosaurids are thought to have been osteophagous (voluntarily exploiting bone) based on findings of bone-rich coprolites, bite-marked bones, and their robust teeth being commonly worn.
In a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers from Uppsala University were able to link ten large coprolites to Smok wawelski, a top predator of a Late Triassic (210 million year old) assemblage unearthed in Poland. This bipedal, 5-6 meters long animal lived some 140 million years before the tyrannosaurids of North America and had a T. rex-like appearance, although it is not fully clear whether it was a true dinosaur or a dinosaur-like precursor.
Three of the coprolites were scanned using synchrotron microtomography. This method has just recently been applied to coprolites and works somewhat like a CT scanner in a hospital, with the difference that the energy in the x-ray beams is much stronger. This makes it possible to visualize internal structures in fossils in three dimensions.
The coprolites were shown to contain up to 50 percent of bones from prey animals such as large amphibians and juvenile dicynodonts. Several crushed serrated teeth, probably belonging to the coprolite producer itself, were also found in the coprolites. This means that the teeth were repeatedly crushed against the hard food items (and involuntarily ingested) and replaced by new ones.
Further evidence for a bone-crushing behaviour can also be found in the fossils from the same bone beds in Poland. These include worn teeth and bone-rich fossil regurgitates from Smok wawelski, as well as numerous crushed or bite-marked bones.
Several of the anatomical characters related to osteophagy, such as a massive head and robust body, seem to be shared by S. wawelski and the tyrannosaurids, despite them being distantly related and living 140 million years apart. These large predators therefore seem to provide evidence of similar feeding adaptations being independently acquired at the beginning and end of the age of dinosaurs.
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