All posts tagged: paleontology

Massive Titanosaurs roamed Antarctica over 80 million years ago

Massive Titanosaurs roamed Antarctica over 80 million years ago

Published by Jenni Sidey

A small tail vertebra picked up on a windswept Antarctic island in 1985 did not look like much. For decades, it was treated as the remains of a marine reptile. Now that same bone has been reidentified as something far rarer, the first dinosaur bone ever discovered on Antarctica. The fossil came from James Ross Island, off the northeastern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Today the region is cold, rocky, and icebound. However, around 82.6 million years ago, during the early Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, it belonged to a very different world. That world had forests, rivers, and a wider range of dinosaurs than the continent’s sparse fossil record has so far revealed. In a paper published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, researchers identified the specimen, cataloged as BAS D.8621.25, as a partial anterior tail vertebra from a non-saltasaurine eutitanosaurian sauropod. In plainer terms, it belonged to a titanosaur relative. This group included some of the largest land animals ever to live. “Believe it or not, this is the first bit of dinosaur ever …

Pterosaurs had far more diverse wing shapes than scientists previously knew

Pterosaurs had far more diverse wing shapes than scientists previously knew

Published by Jenni Sidey

Pterosaurs ruled the air long before birds did, and over more than 100 million years they grew into everything from small fliers to giants with wingspans above 10 meters. That range should have produced a striking variety of wing designs. Instead, modern scientific reconstructions often make them look oddly alike. That mismatch sits at the center of a new study led by the University of Bristol, published in Paleobiology. The analysis argues that commonly published pterosaur wing reconstructions capture far less diversity than would be expected for animals that varied so much in size, ecology, and flight style. No pterosaur fossil preserves a perfectly clear, undistorted full wing shape, which helps explain the problem. Some fossils preserve parts of the flight membrane, but none show the whole wing spread out in a way that settles the debate. As a result, scientists have had to build reconstructions from bones, limited soft-tissue evidence, and educated judgment about where membranes attached to the body and legs. That has left major room for disagreement. Pterosaurs were the first group …

Ancient crocodile-like predators rewrite current knowledge of how animals adapted to the land

Ancient crocodile-like predators rewrite current knowledge of how animals adapted to the land

Published by Jenni Sidey

The first four-legged vertebrates did not grow up like tadpoles after all. That idea has shaped the story of life on land for decades. Early tetrapods, the ancient animals that gave rise to mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians, were widely thought to begin life much like modern amphibians. They were believed to hatch into a larval stage and later transform into adult bodies through metamorphosis. But newly described fossils of baby tetrapods suggest that picture is wrong. Writing in Science, researchers report that some of the earliest known hatchlings from the fish-to-tetrapod transition lacked the hallmark features of amphibian larvae, especially external gills. Instead of passing through a frog-like tadpole stage, these animals appear to have developed more directly. “When a lot of us were in high school, we were taught this simplified story of evolution: that some fish evolved into amphibians, and some of those amphibians evolved into reptiles, and some of those reptiles evolved into mammals. And our study shows that this basic underlying premise, that the first four-legged vertebrates grew up like …

574 million-year-old fossils reveal a lack of sex delayed evolution for millions of years

574 million-year-old fossils reveal a lack of sex delayed evolution for millions of years

Published by Jenni Sidey

Fern-like bodies once covered the seafloor, some stretching as tall as a person. Yet for millions of years, the animal world barely seemed to budge. That long pause has puzzled paleontologists for decades. The first large animals appeared during the Ediacaran Period. Early communities changed slowly, despite the arrival of multicellular life after billions of years dominated by microbes. However, a new analysis argues that part of the answer lies in how those early animals reproduced. It also points to how that reproductive strategy kept competition low. Researchers from the University of Cambridge say many of Earth’s earliest animals spread asexually, sending out connected clones by runner-like structures called stolons. In stable deep-water environments, that strategy worked well. But it also appears to have limited dispersal, softened competition, and slowed the pressures that usually drive evolution. “Life was pretty nice during the Ediacaran, so the need for sex was rather limited,” said lead author Dr Emily Mitchell from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. “There was relatively little competition, so there was no real pressure to change …

Rare dinosaur fossils finally returned to Mongolia 20 years after theft

Rare dinosaur fossils finally returned to Mongolia 20 years after theft

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. Mongolia contains some of the most well preserved and diverse fossils in the world, but they attract more than paleontologists. Black market smugglers routinely rob both the East Asian country of its prehistoric heritage and the global scientific community of invaluable knowledge. Thanks to recent international recovery efforts, some of those stolen treasures have finally returned home nearly 20 years after their initial disappearance. According to officials at Mongolia’s new National Museum of Natural History, 29 sets of dinosaur fossils are now back in the capital of Ulaanbaatar—including a half-complete, extremely rare relative of Tyrannosaurus rex. During a recent conference, Ulaanbaatar police spokesperson D. Munkhkhuyag said that smugglers absconded with the remains in 2006, “with the aim of making a profit.” It wasn’t …

Ancient Velociraptor cousin glided on four wings and hunted birds

Ancient Velociraptor cousin glided on four wings and hunted birds

Published by Jenni Sidey

A fossil bed in northwestern China has been telling a strange story for years. Scattered through its rocks are the remains of more than 100 prehistoric birds, some preserved as partial skeletons, others broken into dense clusters of crushed bones that resemble the pellets modern owls cough up after feeding. Those shattered remains suggested that something larger was hunting the birds. Yet despite decades of work at the site, no one had found the likely culprit. Now that may have changed. In a paper published in the Annals of Carnegie Museum, researchers describe a new species of dinosaur from the Changma Basin, a feathered predator called Jian changmaensis. The animal belonged to the dromaeosaurs, a group of bird-like theropod dinosaurs that included Velociraptor, and the team says it is the best candidate yet for the missing predator in this bird-rich fossil bed. Location of the type locality of Jian changmaensis, gen. et sp. nov., in the Changma Basin of northwestern Gansu Province, China. (CREDIT: Annals of Carnegie Museum) “Scientists have found these weird, broken-up clusters …

Velociraptor’s cousin flew like a flying squirrel

Velociraptor’s cousin flew like a flying squirrel

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. The Changma Basin in northwest China’s Gansu province is famous for its many ancient bird fossils. Or, at least, pieces of fossils. Paleontologists have documented over 100 prehistoric avian dinosaur remains buried across the region, many resembling the digestive pellets regurgitated by owls living today. For years, researchers suspected that a similar predator was responsible for the fossil fragments, but lacked a convincing candidate. Experts now have a plausible suspect. According to a study published today in the Annals of Carnegie Museum, a cousin of the fearsome Velociraptor stalked the Changma Basin around 120 million years ago. But with its long feathers and four “wings,” Jian changmaensis didn’t ambush its prey from high in the air like a falcon. Instead, it more likely …

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 …

Robot fish helps explain how real fish learned to move on land

Robot fish helps explain how real fish learned to move on land

Published by Jenni Sidey

Fish stranded on shore often look helpless, all flops and wriggles. But that clumsy scramble may follow a surprisingly consistent plan, one shared by several species separated by large gaps on the evolutionary tree, and one that could help explain a turning point in the history of life. A team led by researchers at the University of Cambridge found that a wide range of walking fish use the same basic pattern to move across land. The motion is simple: the fish braces itself with its front fin or head, then swings and pushes the rest of its body forward with its tail. The researchers call it an “undulating tripod gait,” and they argue that it may be one of the oldest workable answers to a hard problem. How does an animal built for water move across land without legs? “If you’ve got the ability to walk on land and your predator doesn’t, then you can escape and hopefully the predator moves on,” said lead author Dr Michael Ishida, from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “You’ve also …

World’s largest scorpion lived in Britain 415 million years ago

World’s largest scorpion lived in Britain 415 million years ago

Published by Jenni Sidey

A giant predator was stalking what is now Britain roughly 415 million years ago, long before forests spread and before the ancestors of reptiles, birds, and mammals had fully taken to land. Its identity has been argued over for more than a century. Now researchers say the fossil fragments belong to a scorpion, and not just any scorpion, but the largest one yet known. The animal, Praearcturus gigas, is estimated to have exceeded a meter in length. Its pincers alone reached about 16 centimeters, far larger than those of any living scorpion. The new analysis, published in Palaeontology, also folds two other fossil species into the same animal, strengthening the case that these scattered remains all belonged to one outsized predator from Early Devonian England and Wales. That matters because Praearcturus lived at a very different moment in Earth’s history than the giant arthropods people usually picture. The discovery of Eramoscorpius (pictured) finally provided the fossil evidence to prove Praearcturus was a scorpion after all. (CREDIT: Palaeontology) Before forests, before vertebrates, a giant hunter When …