All posts tagged: Fossil

Megalodon’s legendary life revealed by fossil rediscovery

Megalodon’s legendary life revealed by fossil rediscovery

Published by skeptic

Museums are supposed to be havens for the collective cultural and scientific heritage of the planet, but specimens sometimes go missing. Happily, they can also be rediscovered, as a new study shows, with the vertebrae of the legendary predatory shark known to the world under its old name of Megalodon (now properly Otodus megalodon) turning up on a museum shelf decades after they were seemingly lost. The new paper takes another look at the size and growth of this giant shark that lived between 15 and 3.5 million years ago. The study confirms previous estimates that these animals might have been longer than 24 metres. To put that in context, even the most unnaturally exaggerated sharks in the Jaws franchise topped out at 10.5 metres. These were seriously big fish. The work is based on an analysis of several 11-million-year-old vertebrae from one animal, found in Denmark. Apart from the jaws and teeth, shark skeletons are mostly cartilage, so vertebrae are rare and important. Compared to a tooth, they give a much better indication of …

New Triassic fossil reveals bird-like reptile related to crocodiles

New Triassic fossil reveals bird-like reptile related to crocodiles

Published by Jenni Sidey

More than 200 million years ago, life on Earth was experimenting with new forms. The Triassic period gave rise to animals that look oddly familiar today, yet belonged to very different lineages. A newly described species by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Labrujasuchus expectatus, captures that moment of evolutionary trial and error. The fossil reveals a creature that walked on two legs, had short arms, and a toothless beak. At first glance, it resembled later bird-like dinosaurs. Yet it belonged to a branch of archosaurs that would eventually lead to crocodiles. This unexpected mix of traits highlights how unusual the Triassic world truly was. It also shows how evolution often follows surprising paths. A Discovery From A Legendary Site The fossil emerged from Ghost Ranch, a region known for preserving ancient life in remarkable detail. The site has produced thousands of fossils over decades of research. Labrujasuchus lived around 212 million years ago during the Triassic. (CREDIT: Natural History Museums of LA County) The new species name reflects both its location and …

Mislabeled saber-toothed cat fossil spent over 50 years hidden in a drawer

Mislabeled saber-toothed cat fossil spent over 50 years hidden in a drawer

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. A mislabelled fossil, forgotten and sitting in a museum drawer for decades is actually more special than previously thought. The skull fossil belongs to an ancient species of saber-toothed cat that roamed across western North America about five million years ago.   In 2022, Narimane Chatar was a graduate student in paleontology, visiting the collections of museums around the world with her surface scanner for her research on saber-toothed cats. She was combing through the drawers of the American Museum of Natural History in New York when she stumbled upon something unusual.  “I saw this cranium that was labelled Pseudaelurus,” she tells Popular Science.  This genus name (Pseudaelurus) has typically been used to describe anything that looks like a cat, but whose lineage cannot …

Millions of fossil whale bones found in deep-ocean ‘necropolis’

Millions of fossil whale bones found in deep-ocean ‘necropolis’

Published by skeptic

Fossils including possible baleen-whale ribs found at a depth of 5656 metres in the Indian Ocean Global TREnD, IDSSE The world’s deepest known whale graveyard has been discovered in the southern Indian Ocean at a depth of 7 kilometres. The remains found there include a new species of extinct beaked whale and other fossils that are over 5 million years old. In early 2023, Peng Zhou at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues undertook 32 dives in a crewed submersible along 1200 kilometres of the seafloor, in an area known as the Diamantina Zone. The expedition was part of the Global Hadal Exploration Programme, an effort led by Chinese scientists to explore all the deepest parts of the planet’s oceans, which range from 6000 to 11,000 metres below the surface. At these depths there is no light, and life must survive on what falls from the surface or generate its own energy from chemicals – known as chemosynthesis. The first fossil whales were found at a depth of 7002 metres in a part …

Fossil discovery solves 500-million-year-old mystery about the dawn of animal life

Fossil discovery solves 500-million-year-old mystery about the dawn of animal life

Published by Jenni Sidey

Tiny honeycomb-like colonies from southern China have opened a long-running gap in the story of animal life. For decades, bryozoans seemed oddly absent from the Cambrian explosion, the burst of diversification that filled ancient seas with most major animal groups. These fossils suggest they were there all along. The new material comes from the early Cambrian Xiannüdong Formation in Shaanxi Province and dates to about 520 million years ago. In Nature, an international team describes new specimens of Protomelission gatehousei and a newly named species, Dayingomelission hexaclitia, preserved in unusual detail. That matters because bryozoans, tiny filter-feeding invertebrates that live in colonies, have long posed an evolutionary problem. Their fossil record seemed to begin much later, in the Ordovician, even though molecular analyses had pointed to a much earlier origin. Nearly every other major animal phylum had a Cambrian representative. Bryozoans appeared to be the exception. “Bryozoa has been the elephant in the room of Cambrian palaeontology for a long time.” said co-author Dr Timothy Topper of Northwest University and the Swedish Museum of Natural …

500-million-year-old fossil rewrites a missing chapter of Earth’s history

500-million-year-old fossil rewrites a missing chapter of Earth’s history

Published by Jenni Sidey

A remarkable fossil hidden in a museum collection for decades is helping scientists rethink one of the biggest mysteries in early animal evolution. The discovery of a 500-million-year-old arthropod in eastern Canada suggests that a period once thought to be marked by declining biodiversity may have been far richer and more complex than researchers believed. The newly described species, named Magnicornaspis garwoodi, comes from the late Cambrian Period and belongs to a rare group of extinct arthropods known as corcoraniids. These ancient creatures are considered important relatives of the lineage that eventually gave rise to modern chelicerates, a group that includes spiders, scorpions and horseshoe crabs. Researchers say the fossil provides valuable evidence from a poorly understood interval known as the Furongian, a period spanning roughly 497 million to 485 million years ago. For decades, paleontologists have puzzled over why relatively few fossils appeared to come from this time. The new findings suggest the apparent shortage may not reflect a true collapse in life on Earth. Instead, it may reveal gaps in where scientists have …

Triassic fossil reveals a beaked, bipedal reptile that looked like an ostrich dinosaur

Triassic fossil reveals a beaked, bipedal reptile that looked like an ostrich dinosaur

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Late Triassic was full of animals that look almost familiar, right up until you place them on the evolutionary tree. One of the newest examples is Labrujasuchus expectatus, a lightly built, two-legged reptile with tiny forelimbs and a toothless beak, an animal that would not have looked out of place beside the ostrich-like dinosaurs of a much later age. Instead, Labrujasuchus belonged to the crocodile line of archosaurs, the branch that eventually gave rise to crocodilians. That makes it one of the stranger cases yet of Triassic convergence, when unrelated reptiles repeatedly stumbled into body plans that later became more familiar in dinosaurs, birds, and modern animals. Described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the animal comes from Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, a fossil-rich landscape already famous for preserving some of the era’s most unusual creatures. The new species adds another member to Shuvosauridae, a small group of bipedal, toothless pseudosuchians whose overall form strongly recalls ornithomimosaurs, the fast-running theropods of the Cretaceous. Video and 3D model. (CREDIT: Jorge Gonzalez) “We see …

Fossil study finds dinosaur parents fed their young special diets

Fossil study finds dinosaur parents fed their young special diets

Published by Jenni Sidey

Maiasaura dinosaur teeth carry a quiet clue: babies were not eating what adults ate. Tiny wear marks suggest young duck-bills got softer, richer food, adding fresh weight to the idea that some dinosaurs cared for offspring in surprisingly bird-like ways. Tiny scratches on fossilized dinosaur teeth are giving scientists a rare glimpse into family life from nearly 80 million years ago. A new study suggests that baby duck-billed dinosaurs may have eaten softer, richer and more nutritious foods than the adults that cared for them. The findings come from a close examination of Maiasaura peeblesorum, a plant-eating dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous period. Paleontologists discovered that young Maiasaura had very different tooth wear patterns than adults. Those differences suggest the juveniles likely consumed low-fiber foods such as fruits, buds or other tender plant material, while adults mostly ate tougher vegetation. The study adds new evidence to a long-running idea that Maiasaura were unusually attentive parents. Researchers say the feeding behavior may resemble the way many modern birds feed their young today. “The urge …