All posts tagged: fossils

65-foot-long octopuses ruled ancient oceans

65-foot-long octopuses ruled ancient oceans

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Around 100 million years ago, real kraken-like creatures stalked Earth’s prehistoric oceans. According to a study published today in the journal Science, some of the planet’s oldest known octopuses measured nearly 65-feet-long and ruled their underwater domains. “Our findings suggest that the earliest octopuses were gigantic predators that occupied the top of the marine food chain in the Cretaceous,” Yasuhiro Iba, a study co-author and marine paleontologist at Hokkaido University in Japan, explained in a statement, adding that they “may have surpassed the size of large marine reptiles of the same age.” Invertebrates like these are notorious for leaving little trace of their existence. Without bones, there simply isn’t much material to fossilize or preserve for millions of years. But as with today’s cephalopods, the huge octopuses of the Cretaceous Period featured powerful, beak-like jaws used to devour their prey. Unlike the rest of their bodies, these appendages frequently become excellent fossil specimens after coming to rest on the …

450-million year old jellyfish ancestor looks like a flailing carwash tubeman

450-million year old jellyfish ancestor looks like a flailing carwash tubeman

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Jellyfish are delicate, almost ghostly creatures. But under just the right circumstances, these spectral invertebrates can still tell stories long after their death. Not far from Quebec City, Canada marine paleontologists have discovered a new species of invertebrate that swayed in Paleozoic ocean currents over 450 million years ago. Paleocanna tentaculum may not look much like its living descendants, but according to a team of researchers writing in the Journal of Paleontology, the tubular polyp is more closely related to today’s jellyfish than its other ancient cousins. The geological record contains far more examples of vertebrate fossils than invertebrates, or animals without a backbone. Given how few invertebrate samples there are in the fossil record, the study’s authors were particularly excited to finally examine a collection of unique specimens housed at Montreal’s Musée de paléontologie et de l’évolution (MPE). The specimens were first uncovered during a 2010 dig at the Upper Neuville Formation in the Saint Lawrence Lowlands—about 31 …

New megafauna looked like spiky, 30-pound hamster

New megafauna looked like spiky, 30-pound hamster

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In the latest episode of old museum collections revealing new discoveries, two researchers in Australia have solved a paleontological mystery with an Ice Age fossil first discovered over  100 years ago. The fossil was found in  the underground Foul Air Cave in Buchan, Victoria, Australia. It’s the partial skull of an Owen’s giant echidna (Megalibgwilia owenii), a now-extinct giant echidna that weighed 33.1 pounds and grew up to 3.3 feet-long. The genus name, Megalibgwilia, consists of “mega” (great or mighty in Ancient Greek) and “libgwil” (the Wemba Wemba word for echidna).  “The apparent absence of the extinct large-bodied Owen’s Giant Echidna Megalibgwilia owenii from Victoria is unusual in light of its wide distribution across the continent’s southeast including Tasmania,” the researchers write in a paper recently published in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology. “It is the first example of Megalibgwilia identified from Victoria, and reconciles the taxon’s otherwise disjunct southern distribution across mainland Australia.” Though the …

Hidden fossils reveal secrets of oceans before major mass extinction

Hidden fossils reveal secrets of oceans before major mass extinction

Published by skeptic

One of the radiolarian fossils found inside the rock sample Courtesy of Jonathan Aitchison A tiny pellet of ancient rock, a mere half the size of a grain of rice, has yielded 20 microscopic fossils representing eight different species, including one that is entirely new to science. The discovery will enhance our understanding of the second-largest known mass extinction. It also shows how new analytical techniques are unlocking parts of the fossil record that have previously gone overlooked. Jonathan Aitchison at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues extracted the pellet from a rock that was collected in late 2018 from the Sichuan basin in China, about 300 kilometres south of Xian. The rock is445 million years old, which means it formed just before the Late Ordovician mass extinction – the second most severe to have occurred over the past 500 million years. Inside the pellet, they found eight different species of radiolarians, which are single-celled plankton that make their shells from silica. Radiolarians are still found throughout the oceans today. The fossils found …

Proto-mammals laid eggs, paleontologists finally confirm

Proto-mammals laid eggs, paleontologists finally confirm

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Every mammal gives birth to live young, except for a handful of egg-laying monotremes like the platypus. But did the earliest ancestors of mammals also reproduce through eggs? It’s a question that’s stumped evolutionary biologists for decades, but researchers finally have a definitive answer. Published on April 9 in the journal PLOS One, their findings rely on a 250-million-year-old fossilized egg, sophisticated technological advances, and a lot of patience. Paleontologists discovered the specimen in question almost 17 years ago during an excavation in South Africa’s Karoo Basin. The arid region located over 200 miles northeast of Cape Town is particularly well known for its vast troves of ancient fossils. “My preparator and exceptional fossil finder, John Nyaphuli, identified a small nodule that at first revealed only tiny flecks of bone. As he carefully prepared the specimen, it became clear that it was a perfectly curled-up Lystrosaurus hatchling,” University of the Witwatersrand paleobiologist Jennifer Botha said in a statement.  The …

289-million-year-old mummified reptile reveals how bodies evolved to breath and move

289-million-year-old mummified reptile reveals how bodies evolved to breath and move

Published by Jenni Sidey

Clay, oil, and deep time do not usually leave much behind. Skin disappears. Cartilage collapses. Proteins break apart. Yet a small reptile that lived about 289 million years ago has done something rare enough to reset expectations in paleontology. The fossil, identified as Captorhinus and described in Nature, preserves not just bone but skin, cartilage, and protein remnants. It is, according to the study, the oldest known mummified remains of a terrestrial vertebrate. More than that, it preserves the cartilage framework of the animal’s respiratory system, giving researchers an unusually clear look at how some of the earliest reptiles may have breathed and moved on land. “This is an exciting discovery in paleontology with great evolutionary significance,” said University of Toronto Mississauga researcher and lead author Robert Reisz. “This unprecedented preservation of a respiratory system showcases the oldest known complete rib cage for muscle powered inhalation and exhalation.” That matters because one of the biggest turning points in vertebrate history was the move from aquatic and semi-aquatic life to life fully on land. Early anamniotes, …

Bite mechanics of ancient marine predators yields surprising results

Bite mechanics of ancient marine predators yields surprising results

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Western Interior Seaway, which existed roughly 80 million years ago, split North America into North and South. It was a warm, shallow sea teeming with life from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Fish, squid, and marine reptiles—the lizards that hunted them—inhabited this bountiful marine desert. Some of these predators included large-bodied, or sometimes giant-sized, mosasaurs. These semi-aquatic reptiles re-evolved to live in the ocean, along with long-necked polycotylids. To date, how did so many large predators exist and thrive in the same aquatic space without exhausting their food supply? This has been the focus of an international research collaboration, yet only now is there a comprehensive biomechanical answer based on recent 3D scanning, engineering simulation, and experimentation. The results provide clear evidence of the biomechanical differences between mosasaurs and polycotylids. These distinct physiological configurations represent distinct ecologies and prey types rather than direct competitors. Bite performance of North American mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, showing the bite performance as optimal (bright colors) or suboptimal (darker colors). (CREDIT: Université de Liège / F.Della Giustina) …

Humans’ closest invertebrate ancestors date back much further than thought – how we discovered the fossils that show this

Humans’ closest invertebrate ancestors date back much further than thought – how we discovered the fossils that show this

Published by skeptic

Animal life is extraordinarily diverse and complex, having colonised almost all environments on Earth – from hostile hydrothermal vents in the deep sea to the skies across our continents. But the planet was not always teeming with complex animal life. For the first 3.7 billion years after it originated, life was small, simple and largely confined to the oceans. This microbe-dominated world was a tumultuous place, with several major swings in its climate. But all this appears to have changed about 538 million years ago (mya) during the Cambrian period. This critical juncture in the history of life saw animals bursting on to the scene in an event known as the “Cambrian explosion”. All sorts of animals easily recognisable as groups alive today appeared in the fossil record, from echinoderms (starfish, sea cucumbers, urchins) and arthropods (spiders, crustaceans, insects) to various types of worm. This seemingly abrupt appearance of animals in a geological “blink of an eye” has puzzled scientists from Charles Darwin onwards. Many of these new lifeforms belonged to a group of animals …

500-million-year-old spider relative has claws where it shouldn’t

500-million-year-old spider relative has claws where it shouldn’t

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The fossil was completely unremarkable. That’s what Harvard University paleontologist Rudy Lerosey-Aubril initially thought while examining an arthropod fossil dating back to the Cambrian period (538.8 million to 485.4 million years ago).  “As I prepared it, however, it unexpectedly revealed exquisitely preserved limbs—including a pair of frontal claws projecting from the head,” Lerosey-Aubril tells Popular Science. Early arthropod specimens don’t have claws like these. Instead, Cambrian arthropods usually have an antenna in that position. In other words, the claws Lerosey-Aubril was seeing were not supposed to be there.  This unassuming fossil belongs to Megachelicerax cousteaui, a 500-million-year-old sea predator. The fossil was first dug up over 40 years ago in a desert in western Utah and is the oldest known chelicerate—the arthropod group that includes modern spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and sea spiders. This single strange specimen pushes the evolutionary history of chelicerates back by 20 million years and helps explain the evolution of claws. The findings are detailed …

Neanderthals hunted giant elephants in Europe

Neanderthals hunted giant elephants in Europe

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. One day over 120,000 years ago, a resourceful group of Neanderthals took down a 7,700-pound, ancient elephant in present-day Germany. Now, paleoanthropologists studying the area can confirm that the remnants of this kill are the first known scene of its kind, finally solving a nearly 80-year-old mystery. According to their study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, at least some Neanderthals knew how to successfully take down Europe’s largest megafauna, including these elephant ancestors. In 1948, a group of amateur paleontologists led by a local school headmaster were scouring a site in Lehringen, northern Germany. They stumbled upon the remains of a 125,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant. This specimen of Europe’s largest known land mammal was encased in sediment dating back to the last interglacial period. The team also identified more than just bones at the dig. In addition to fossils, the workers located a complete wooden spear that was later determined to be made by Neanderthals. Although a striking …