Paleontology news

Hardening of the arteries has been detected in Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, suggesting that the factors causing heart attack and stroke are not only modern ones; they afflicted ancient people, too. Study results are appearing in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are being presented Nov. 17 at the Scientific Session of the American Heart Association at Orlando, Fla.

"Atherosclerosis is ubiquitous among modern day humans and, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, we found that it was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socioeconomic status living as much as three millennia ago," says UC Irvine clinical professor of cardiology Dr. Gregory Thomas, a co-principal investigator on the study. "The findings suggest that we may have to look beyond modern risk factors to fully understand the disease."

The nameplate of the Pharaoh Merenptah (c. 1213-1203 BC) in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities reads that, when he died at approximately age 60, he was afflicted with atherosclerosis, arthritis, and dental decay. Intrigued that atherosclerosis may have been widespread among ancient Egyptians, Thomas and a team of U.S. and Egyptian cardiologists, joined by experts in Egyptology and preservation, selected 20 mummies on display and in the basement of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities for scanning on a Siemens 6 slice CT scanner during the week of Feb. 8, 2009.

The mummies underwent whole body scanning with special attention to the cardiovascular system. The researchers found that 9 of the 16 mummies who had identifiable arteries or hearts left in their bodies after the mummification process had calcification either clearly seen in the wall of the artery or in the path were the artery should have been. Some mummies had calcification in up to 6 different arteries.

Using skeletal analysis, the Egyptology and preservationist team was able to estimate the age at death for all the mummies and the names and occupations in the majority. Of the mummies who had died when they were older than 45, 7 of 8 had calcification and thus atherosclerosis while only 2 of 8 of those dying at an earlier age had calcification. Atherosclerosis did not spare women; vascular calcifications were observed in both male and female mummies.

The most ancient Egyptian afflicted with atherosclerosis was Lady Rai, who lived to an estimated age of 30 to 40 years around 1530 BC and had been the nursemaid to Queen Ahmose Nefertiri. To put this in context, Lady Rai lived about 300 years prior to the time of Moses and 200 prior to King Tutankhamun (Tut).

In those mummies whose identities could be determined, all were of high socioeconomic status, generally serving in the court of the Pharaoh or as priests or priestess. While the diet of any one mummy could not be determined, eating meat in the form of cattle, ducks and geese was not uncommon during these times.

"While we do not know whether atherosclerosis caused the demise of any of the mummies in the study, we can confirm that the disease was present in many," Thomas says.

credited to University of California - Irvine

Researchers have discovered a fossil skeleton that appears to link the earliest dinosaurs with the large plant-eating sauropods.

This could help to bridge an evolutionary gap between the two-legged common ancestors of dinosaurs and the four-legged giants, such as diplodocus.

The remarkably complete skeleton shows that the creature was bipedal but occasionally walked on all four legs.

The team reports its discovery in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

"What we have is a big, short-footed, barrel-chested, long-necked, small-headed dinosaur," explained Adam Yates, the scientist from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who led the research.

"The earliest ancestral dinosaur - the great grand-daddy of all dinosaurs - walked on two legs. This [one] is intermediate between those bipedal forms and the true gigantic sauropods."

The skeleton was discovered at a site in the Senekal district of South Africa.

Dr Yates explained that features of its feet and jaw, as well as its size, gave away its significance.

The dinosaur, Aardonyx celestae was a heavy, slow-moving animal.

"It had a lot of features we see on sauropods," explained Dr Yates. "Short, broad feet and a big, broad gut, so it was clearly a plant-eater that was bulk-feeding.

"And the anatomy of the jaw shows it had a wide gape - to stuff more food in."

It also had, he said, "sauropod-like front feet".

"Its toe bones were very robust and solid, so its weight was being born on the inside of the foot. It was still bipedal, but it may have been going down on to all fours to browse."

'Living fossil'

The dinosaur dates from the early Jurassic period - about 200 million years ago.

"Although structurally it's intermediate, it lived too late to be an actual ancestor, because true sauropods already existed [then].

"So, at the time, it was a living fossil - the transition must have happened much earlier."

Dr Yates stressed that the site where the fossil was discovered provided an abundance of valuable knowledge about dinosaur evolution.

"If you want to study how the dinosaurs became giants," he said. "You have to come to South Africa."

Dr Paul Barrett - a palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum in London said that the discovery of Aardonyx helped "fill a marked gap in our knowledge of sauropod evolution".

"[It shows] how a primarily two-legged animal could start to acquire the specific features necessary for a life spent on all fours.

"Evolution of this quadrapedal gait was key in allowing the late sauropods to adopt their enormous body sizes."

credited to bbc.co.uk

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA…An international team of paleontologists has discovered a new species of mammal that lived 123 million years ago in what is now the Liaoning Province in northeastern China. The newly discovered animal, Maotherium asiaticus, comes from famous fossil-rich beds of the Yixian Formation. This new remarkably well preserved fossil, as reported in the October 9 issue of the prestigious journal Science, offers an important insight into how the mammalian middle ear evolved. The discoveries of such exquisite dinosaur-age mammals from China provide developmental biologists and paleontologists with evidence of how developmental mechanisms have impacted the morphological (body-structure) evolution of the earliest mammals and sheds light on how complex structures can arise in evolution because of changes in developmental pathways. "What is most surprising, and thus scientifically interesting, is this animal's ear," says Dr. Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of vertebrate paleontology and associate director of science and research at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. "Mammals have highly sensitive hearing, far better than the hearing capacity of all other vertebrates, and hearing is fundamental to the mammalian way of life. The mammalian ear evolution is important for understanding the origins of key mammalian adaptations."

Thanks to their intricate middle ear structure, mammals (including humans) have more sensitive hearing, discerning a wider range of sounds than other vertebrates. This sensitive hearing was a crucial adaptation, allowing mammals to be active in the darkness of the night and to survive in the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic.

Mammalian hearing adaptation is made possible by a sophisticated middle ear of three tiny bones, known as the hammer (malleus), the anvil (incus), and the stirrup (stapes), plus a bony ring for the eardrum (tympanic membrane). These mammal middle ear bones evolved from the bones of the jaw hinge in their reptilian relatives. Paleontologists have long attempted to understand the evolutionary pathway via which these precursor jawbones became separated from the jaw and moved into the middle ear of modern mammals.

To evolutionary biologists, an understanding of how the sophisticated and highly sensitive mammalian ear evolved may illuminate how a new and complex structure transforms through evolution. According to the Chinese and American scientists who studied this new mammal, the middle ear bones of Maotherium are partly similar to those of modern mammals; but Maotherium's middle ear has an unusual connection to the lower jaw that is unlike that of adult modern mammals. This middle ear connection, also known as the ossified Meckel's cartilage, resembles the embryonic condition of living mammals and the primitive middle ear of pre-mammalian ancestors.

Because Maotherium asiaticus is preserved three-dimensionally, paleontologists were able to reconstruct how the middle ear attached to the jaw. This can be a new evolutionary feature. Or, it can be interpreted as having a "secondarily reversal to the ancestral condition," meaning that the adaptation is the caused by changes in development. (See graphics of mammalian ear evolution, as represented by Maotherium).

Modern developmental biology has shown that developmental genes and their gene network can trigger the development of unusual middle ear structures, such as "re-appearance" of the Meckel's cartilage in modern mice. The middle ear morphology in fossil mammal Maotherium of the Cretaceous (145-65 million years ago) is very similar to the mutant morphology in the middle ear of the mice with mutant genes. The scientific team studying the fossil suggests that the unusual middle ear structure, such as the ossified Meckel's cartilage, is actually the manifestation of developmental gene mutations in the deep times of Mesozoic mammal evolution.

Maotherium asiaticus is a symmetrodont, meaning that it has teeth with symmetrically arranged cusps specialized for feeding on insects and worms. It lived on the ground and had a body 15 cm (5 inches) long and weighing approximately 70 to 80 grams (.15 to .17 lbs). By studying all features in this exquisitely preserved fossil, researchers believe Maotherium to be more closely related to marsupials and placentals than to monotremes—primitive egg-laying mammals of Australia and New Guinea such as the platypus.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History

In time for Halloween, a beer bottle-turned-talisman against malicious spirits has been found buried near a former pub in England, archaeologists say.

The newfound 17th-century witch bottle (pictured)—originally made in Germany to hold other kinds of spirits—was discovered during a September archaeological dig in the county of Staffordshire.

"It's not an everyday find," said excavation manager Andrew Norton of Oxford Archaeology, a U.K. archaeological-services company. "Most of what we find are broken bits of pots and people's rubbish."

In the 17th and 18th centuries in Britain, the supposedly cursed often put their toenails and fingernails, urine, and hair into the witch bottles.

These jugs, usually buried near a house or building, were meant to keep evildoers at bay.

An x-ray of the newfound artifact revealed no such bodily bits, but it's possible that whatever was stored inside had long since decayed, Norton said.

The salt-glazed stone bottle is also stamped with the face of a grimacing man, possibly a likeness of the strongly anti-Protestant Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine (1542 to 1621).

Legend holds that Protestants smashed the jugs to defile the Catholic leader.

An engraving of a crowned lion, toward the base of the bottle, is likely the bottlemaker's trademark, he added.

Despite their name, witch bottles were more often intended as all-purpose lucky charms against bad luck, Norton said—"a modern equivalent of hanging a horseshoe on your door."

The superstitious also stuck children's shoes inside walls or buried horse skulls by doors—animals were believed to be able to see spirits, he said.

And though belief in magic has plummeted since the 1600s, there are still a few witches about. Some of them, Norton said, have found the bottle's discovery irresistible fodder for discussion in a few of the darker corners of Facebook.

credited to link