Paleontology news

Kirk French, an archaeologist, and his colleague Christopher Duffy, a hydrologist, both from Pennsylvania State University, detailed their findings this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

According to their studies, the ancient Mayans had the skills and ability not only to pull running water into their villages, but to have created fountains and toilets by controlling water flow.

Scientists have uncovered elaborate subterranean aqueducts built to take advantage of the spring-fed streams at the ancient Mexican city of Palenque

Evidence of sophisticated, human behavior has been discovered by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers as early as 750,000 years ago – some half a million years earlier than has previously been estimated by archaeologists. The discovery was made in the course of excavations at the prehistoric Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site, located along the Dead Sea rift in the southern Hula Valley of northern Israel, by a team from the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. Analysis of the spatial distribution of the findings there reveals a pattern of specific areas in which various activities were carried out. This kind of designation indicates a formalized conceptualization of living space, requiring social organization and communication between group members. Such organizational skills are thought to be unique to modern humans.

The new Hebrew University study, a report on which is published this week in Science magazine, describes an Acheulian (an early stone tools culture) layer at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov that has been dated to about 750,000 years ago. The evidence found there consists of numerous stone tools, animal bones and a rich collection of botanical remains.

Analyses of the spatial distribution of all these finds revealed two activity areas in the layer: the first area is characterized by abundant evidence of flint tool manufacturing. A high density of fish remains in this area also suggests that the processing and consumption of many fish were carried out in this area -- one of the earliest evidences for fish consumption by prehistoric people anywhere.

In the second area, identified evidence indicates a greater variation of activities – all of which took place in the vicinity of a hearth. The many wood pieces found in this area were used as fuel for the fire. Processing of basalt and limestone was spatially restricted to the hearth area, where activities indicate the use of large stone tools such as hand axes, chopping tools, scrapers, and awls. The presence of stone hammers, and in particular of pitted anvils (used as nutting stones), suggest that nut processing was carried out near the hearth and may have involved the use of nut roasting. In addition, fish and crabs were probably consumed near the hearth.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

A group of University of Kansas researchers working with Chinese colleagues have discovered a venomous, birdlike raptor that thrived some 128 million years ago in China. This is the first report of venom in the lineage that leads to modern birds. "This thing is a venomous bird for all intents and purposes," said Larry Martin, KU professor and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Institute. "It was a real shock to us and we made a special trip to China to work on this."

"We think it's going to make a big splash," said Martin.

The article's authors are Enpu Gong, geology department at Northeastern University in Shenyang, China, and researchers Martin, David Burnham and Amanda Falk at the KU Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Institute.

The dromaeosaur or raptor, Sinornithosaurus (Chinese-bird-lizard), is a close relative to Velociraptor. It lived in prehistoric forests of northeastern China that were filled with a diverse assemblage of animals including other primitive birds and dinosaurs.

"This is an animal about the size of a turkey," said Martin. "It's a specialized predator of small dinosaurs and birds. It was almost certainly feathered. It's a very close relative of the four-winged glider called Microraptor."

The venom most likely sent the victim into rapid shock, shrinking the odds of retaliation, escape or piracy from other predators while the raptor manipulated its prey.

"You wouldn't have seen it coming," said Burnham. "It would have swooped down behind you from a low-hanging tree branch and attacked from the back. It wanted to get its jaws around you. Once the teeth were embedded in your skin the venom could seep into the wound. The prey would rapidly go into shock, but it would still be living, and it might have seen itself being slowly devoured by this raptor."

The genus had special depressions on the side of its face thought by the investigators to have housed a poison gland, connected by a long lateral depression above the tooth row that delivered venom to a series of long, grooved teeth on the upper jaw. This arrangement is similar to the venom-delivery system in modern rear-fanged snakes and lizards. The researchers believe it to be specialized for predation on birds.

"When we were looking at Sinornithosaurus, we realized that its teeth were unusual, and then we began to look at the whole structure of the teeth and jaw, and at that point, we realized it was similar to modern-day snakes," Martin said.

Sinornithosaurus is represented by at least two species. These specimens have features consistent with a primitive venom-delivery system. The KU-China research team said it was a low-pressure system similar to the modern Beaded lizard, Heloderma, however the prehistoric Sinornithosaurus had longer teeth to break through layers of feathers on its bird victims.

The discovery of features thought to be associated with a venom-delivery system in Sinornithosaurus stemmed from a study of the anatomy and ecology of Microraptor by the joint Chinese-KU team. They now are seeking to discover if Microraptor may have possessed a similar poison-delivery system.

University of Kansas

Based on further research on the finds and where they were located, Kaptijn succeeded in working out the extent of habitation in the Zerqa Valley in Jordan over the past millennia. The area where she undertook her research is also called the Zerqa Triangle; it is bounded by the River Zerqa and forms part of the Jordan Valley. The area covers roughly 72 square kilometres. Kaptijn discovered that the triangle had been inhabited, on and off, for thousands of years, but that this habitation was always highly dependent on the irrigation methods used by those who lived there. While the soil in the valley is very rich, there was usually not enough rainfall to cultivate plants without some additional irrigation.

Irrigation shapes the community

The irrigation methods exerted a major influence on the people who lived in the valley; power was often dependent on controlling the allocation of water. Kaptijn discovered that the type of irrigation system could result in a community of internally egalitarian tribes, with these tribes being linked to each other in a strict, hierarchical order. At other times, the valley was actually dominated by a large-scale, almost capitalist cultivation of sugar cane. Eva Kaptijn's research is part of the multi-disciplinary project Settling the Steppe. The Archaeology of changing societies in Syro-Palestinian drylands during the Bronze and Iron Ages. This project is funded by the NWO's Open Competition scheme.

Arne Wosskink received his doctorate within the same project on 28 October 2009.

Seas were nearly 10 metres higher than now in previous interglacial period.

Robert Kopp, a palaeoclimatologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and his colleagues examined sea level rise during the most recent previous interglacial stage, about 125,000 years ago. It was a time when the climate was similar to that predicted for our future, with average polar temperatures about 3-5°C warmer than now.

Other studies have looked at this era, but most focused on sea level changes in only a few locales and local changes may not fully reflect global changes. Sea level can rise, for example, if the land is subsiding. It can also be affected by changes in the mass distribution of Earth. For example, says Kopp, ice-age glaciers have enough gravity to pull water slightly polewards. When the glaciers melt, water moves back towards the Equator. To adjust for such effects, Kopp's team compiled sea-level data from over 30 sites across the globe.

"We could go to a lot of different places and look at coral reefs or intertidal sediments or beaches that are now stranded above sea level, and build a reasonably large database of sea-level indicators," says Kopp.

The team reports in Nature today that the sea probably rose about 6.6–9.4 metres above present-day levels during the previous period between ice ages. When it was at roughly its present level, the average rate of rise was probably 56–92 centimetres a century. "[That is] faster than the current rate of sea level rise by a factor of about two or three," Kopp says, warning that if the poles warm as expected, a similar accelleration in sea-level rise might occur in future.

Climate meltdown

The study is "very sophisticated", says Peter Clark, a geologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. "A lot more of the existing ice sheets at the time must have melted than was thought to be the case," he says, such as parts of Greenland and Antarctica.

The implications are disconcerting, says Clark. If the world warms up to levels comparable to those 125,000 years ago, "we can expect a large fraction of the Greenland ice sheet and some part of the Antarctic ice sheet, mostly likely West Antarctica, to melt. That's clearly in sight with where we're heading."

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson agrees. "Earth's polar ice sheets may be more vulnerable to climate change than commonly believed," he says.

Furthermore, even if global warming causes seas to start rising toward the levels seen 125,000 years ago, there is no reason to presume that it will proceed at the relatively sedate rate of 6-9 millimeters a year seen by Kopp's study. In part, that's because his study didn't have the resolution to spot changes on a year-by-year basis, so there's nothing to say that the rise during the last interglacial didn't occur in shorter, faster spurts, undetectable in Kopp's data.

Near future warming will also be driven by potentially faster-moving processes than those of the last interglacial. "The driver of [climate change during the last interglacial period] was slow changes in Earth's orbit, happening over thousands of years," says Stefan Rahmstorf, an ocean scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "We're now set to cause several degrees of global warming within just a century. I would expect this to drive a much faster sea level rise."

Some scientists think that we may already be committed to a future with higher seas than had been expected. "There could be a global warming tipping point beyond which many metres of sea level rise is inevitable unless global greenhouse-gas emissions are cut dramatically, and soon," warns Overpeck.

A 40,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth specimen found on Russia's Yamal Peninsula is being insured for 1 million euros ($1.47 million) before going on an international museum tour, AlfaStrakhovanie Group said on Monday.

Lyuba is usually on display at the regional museum in Salekhard in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area, where she was discovered by reindeer herders in 2007. The unique specimen is currently undergoing preservation works at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg that will allow her to be displayed without refrigeration.

Scientists estimate the baby mammal was about a month old when she died after getting stuck in mud on a riverbank. The carcass was remarkably well-preserved, with eyes and trunk almost intact and even some fur remaining on its skin.

Mammoths, giant mammals known for their furry coats, huge tusks and massive bulk, are thought to have appeared some 4.8 million years ago and be close relatives of modern-day elephants.

While most woolly mammoths died out approximately 12,000 years ago, its dwarf version survived on Russia's Wrangel Island, located in the Arctic Ocean, up until 1700 BC.

Well-preserved mammoth remains have been found all across Siberia.

RIA Novosti

In 2006, a team of Spanish and American researchers found the fossil remains of a whale, 4.5 million years old, in Bonares, Huelva. Now they have published, for the first time, the results of the decay and fossilisation process that started with the death of the young cetacean, possibly a baleen whale from the Mysticeti group. This is not the first discovery of the partial fossil remains of a whale from the Lower Pliocene (five million years ago) in the Huelva Sands sedimentary formation, but it is the first time that the results of the processes of fossilisation and fossil deposition following the death of a whale have been published.

"Once the whale was dead, its body was at the mercy of scavengers such as sharks, and we know that one of these voracious attacks resulted in one of its fins being pulled off and moved about ten metres. It remained in this position in the deposit studied", Fernando Muñiz, one of the study's authors and a researcher in the University of Huelva's "Tectonics and Paleontology" research group, currently working as a palaeontologist for the City Council of Lepe, in Huelva, tells SINC.

The researchers have described the fossil remains discovered in Bonares, Huelva, at an altitude of 80 metres above sea level and 24 kilometres from the sea, and have studied the main taxonomic characteristics and associated fauna. The team also created a paleoenvironmental model to explain how the skeleton – which is incomplete apart from some pieces such as its three-metre-long hemimandibular jaw bones – was deposited.

The results show that these remains came from a "juvenile whale that died and became buried on the sea floor, at a depth of around 30-50 metres, and were subject to intense activity by invertebrate and vertebrate scavengers (as can be seen from the presence of numerous shark teeth associated with the bones)", says Muñiz. Based on the remains studied, it is hard for the researchers to say whether the cause of death was illness, old age, or attack by a larger predator.

In terms of its taxonomic description, the researchers say this is "difficult", although the morphology of the scapula (shoulder blade) suggests it is "from the Balaenopteridae (rorqual) family, belonging to the group of baleen whales from the Mysticeti sub-order", says the paleontologist.

Dead bodies as a source of nutrients

The occasional presence of a cetacean corpse on the sea floor represents an exceptional provision of nutrients for various ecological communities. According to recent studies of current-day phenomena, four ecological phases associated with whales have been recognised "that can be partially recognised in the fossil record" – the presence of mobile scavengers (sharks and bony fish), opportunists (especially polychaetes and crustaceans), sulphophilic extremophiles (micro organisms) and hard coral.

Once the bones deposited on the sea floor, free of organic material, were exposed, bivalve molluscs of the species Neopycnodonte cochlear colonised them. The presence of these bivalves suggests that the process to transform the biological remains after death was "relatively lengthy before it was definitively buried", explains the researcher.

"The fat and other elements resulting from the decomposition of the organic material would have enriched the sediment around and above the body, and this can be seen in the numerous burrowing structures in this sediment, created by endobiotic organisms, such as crustaceans and polychaete annelids", adds Muñíz. The bones were also "used", not only as a base to which these could attach themselves, but also as food.

According to the paleontologists, the presence of bioerosion structures indicates that the contents of the bones were used as an extraordinary source of nutrients, possibly by decapod crustaceans. This would be the first known evidence in the fossil record of a whale bone being consumed by decapod crustaceans with osteophagic feeding habits. The material is currently undergoing in-depth analysis by the authors of the study.

credited to FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

A University of Manchester scientist, working as part of an international team, has uncovered an unexpectedly rich trove of relicts from the ancient cosmos.

Comets are thought to be repositories of primitive, unaltered matter left over from the formation of the solar system. While the planets in the inner solar system, such as Earth or Mars, once experienced harsh conditions and have changed substantially over the past 4.5 billion years, comets are believed to store the original material of the early Solar System, acting as ‘supersized refrigerators’.

The interplanetary dust particles, which are only a few thousands of a millimetre in diameter, were analysed by an international collaboration from the UK, the US and Germany.

Scientists in the Cosmochemistry research group in the School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences have also been involved in analysing small fragments of material from the Wild 2 comet, which was brought back to earth by NASA's Stardust space mission.

The Stardust mission was launched into space in early February 1999 and encountered Comet Wild 2 in 2004, while nearly 242 million miles from earth.

The NASA mission returned particles captured from the comet in 2006 - the first grains of cometary dust ever returned to earth.

credited to physorg.com

T. hallae was discovered in 2004 when hikers stumbled across a few bits of bone at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. An initial excavation by Alex Downs of the Ruth Hall Museum of Paleontology uncovered limbs and vertebrae that he showed to the other authors. They immediately knew that it was something new from North America's Late Triassic, according to Nesbitt. Nesbitt and colleagues began a full-scale excavation in 2006, part of which was captured during the filming of the IMAX Dinosaurs Alive! "Coincidently, the excavation of what became the holotype is in the film," says Nesbitt.

But more than the holotype (a specimen used to describe a species) was found at Ghost Ranch's Hayden Quarry. The team uncovered five to seven partially articulated individuals buried together in a relatively small pocket (about 2.5 meters by 2.5 meters) among a jumble of tens of thousands of other fossils. T. hallae was in very good condition, allowing a fairly complete reconstruction of a new species of carnivorous biped, and dated to about 215 million years old.

"Finding dinosaurs this old and this complete in an area that has been prospected for over a hundred years is surprising," says Mark Norell, Curator and Division Chair of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. "This is near the site of the dinosaur 'graveyard' where early dinosaurs like Coelophysis have been found since 1947. Now we have more bones from what was early in dinosaur evolution."

In their current paper, the team not only describes T. hallae but fits it in the evolutionary tree with other known theropods. Looking at 15 other theropods and about 300 morphological characteristics, the least complicated, more parsimonious phylogenetic tree now places South American fossils Herrerasaurus and Eoraptor at the base. T. hallae and two other North American species, Chindesaurus and Ceolophysis, both have South American theropods as their closest relatives. This means that there were several waves of theropod migration from South America into North America. This movement correlates with the fossils from many other groups of animals, including crocodylomorphs, aetosaurs, and shuvosaurids, that are found on both land masses. However, another group of saurischian dinosaurs, the sauropods, have not been found in the North America during the Triassic.

"Our biogeographic analyses show that dispersal of early dinosaurs was prevalent during the Triassic, with the multiple theropods from the Hayden Quarry, clearly demonstrating this pattern," says Alan Turner, research associate at the Museum and an assistant professor at Stony Brook University. "We propose that early dinosaurs from South American got into North America at least three separate times. We don't know why sauropods were not in North America, but it looks increasing likely that sauropods were getting here but something was preventing them from staying."

T. hallae is also redefining the history of a very important feature found in many dinosaurs and today's birds, pneumatization of bone, or cavities filled with air. These air sacks often extend into the brain case and ear area. Because T. hallae has an indentation in the bone in the anterior tympanic part of the braincase, this species probably had air sacks filled with air near its ears. This means that this feature is much more primitive that previously assumed. T. hallae also shows evidence of pneumatization along the vertebral column, perhaps to lighten the skeleton.

"T. hallae shows us that some traits go further back in the evolutionary tree," says Norell. "The discovery of fossils of such primitive dinosaurs allows us to link the South American and North American theropod faunas for the first time. Now we can evaluate an entirely new set of biogeographic questions."

credited to American Museum of Natural History

The restoration team working on an old Antarctic hut have discovered two blocks of well preserved Kiwi butter, believed to be the oldest in the world.

The Kiwi butter was found frozen in the stable area adjacent to Robert Falcon Scott's hut.

"I think the butter was absolutely a treasure find," says Lizzie Meek, Antarctic Heritage Trust.

Until recently much of the hut was surrounded by snow and ice. A restoration team were working on the adjoining stables when they made the discovery, near a pile of empty butter boxes.

"Oh just tremendous! It looked like an old wrinkly bag and you look inside and saw the wonderful Silver Fern logo," says Meek.

The two-block butter is believed to be the oldest in the world.

"What's amazing is how strong that smells. Nearly a 100 years - very very strong, possibly a bit too strong?" Meek says.

The butter will now be carefully restored.

"(It's) very exciting because there's such a strong connection with New Zealand. And a lot of supplies were given to the expedition by NZ companies and New Zealand people. But it's great to find one with that instantly recognisable Silver Fern and in such great condition relatively speaking," says Meek.

The staff are eager to know where it came from. The label says CCCDC, which is understood to stand for the Canterbury Central Co-operative Dairy Company. The company is thought to have formed in the 1890's and was based in Christchurch.

The big question now is where they are going to keep it as it hardly ever gets above minus ten in the Antarctic stables. The plan is to put the block back where they found it. If it does not deteriorate, they will leave it for another 100 years.

"I hope it'll look pretty similar, perhaps a little dustier but pretty much exactly the same," says Meek.

credited to stuff.co.nz

ACAD Director Professor Alan Cooper says despite an excellent fossil record of the Equidae, there are still many gaps in our evolutionary knowledge. "Our results change both the basic picture of recent equid evolution, and ideas about the number and nature of extinct species."

The study used bones from caves to identify new horse species in Eurasia and South America, and reveal that the Cape zebra, an extinct giant species from South Africa, were simply large variants of the modern Plains zebra. The Cape zebra weighed up to 400 kilograms and stood up to 150 centimetres at the shoulder blades.

"The Plains zebra group once included the famous extinct quagga, so our results confirm that this group was highly variable in both coat colour and size."

Lead author of the paper, Dr Ludovic Orlando from the University of Lyon, says the group discovered a new species of the distinct, small hippidion horse in South America.

"Previous fossil records suggested this group was part of an ancient lineage from North America but the DNA showed these unusual forms were part of the modern radiation of equid species," Dr Orlando says.

A new species of ass was also detected on the Russian Plains and appears to be related to European fossils dating back more than 1.5 million years. Carbon dates on the bones reveal that this species was alive as recently as 50,000 years ago.

"Overall, the new genetic results suggest that we have under-estimated how much a single species can vary over time and space, and mistakenly assumed more diversity among extinct species of megafauna," Professor Cooper says.

"This has important implications for our understanding of human evolution, where a large number of species are currently recognised from a relatively fragmentary fossil record.

"It also implies that the loss of species diversity that occurred during the megafaunal extinctions at the end of the last Ice Age may not have been as extensive as previously thought.

In contrast, ancient DNA studies have revealed that the loss of genetic diversity in many surviving species appears to have been extremely severe," Professor Cooper says. "This has serious implications for biodiversity and the future impacts of climate change."

credited to University of Adelaide

Paleontologists, aided by amateur volunteers, have unearthed a previously unknown meat-eating dinosaur from a fossil bone bed in northern New Mexico, settling a debate about early dinosaur evolution, revealing a period of explosive diversification and hinting at how dinosaurs spread across the supercontinent Pangaea. A live embargoed webcast with the scientists will be held in advance of publication for credentialed reporters on Dec. 9. See details below.

The fossil bones of several individuals were recovered, but the type specimen is a nearly complete skeleton of a juvenile that stood about 28 inches (70 cm) tall at the hips and was about 6 feet (2 meters) long from snout to tail. Its body was about the size of a large dog, but with a much longer tail. It lived about 214 million years ago, plus or minus a million. The specimens are remarkable because they show little sign of being flattened during fossilization.

Tawa is part of a group of dinosaurs known as theropods, which includes T. Rex and Velociraptor. Theropods for the most part ate meat, walked on two legs and had feathers. Though most went extinct by 65 million years ago, some lineages survived to spawn modern birds.

One of Tawa's most important contributions to science has to do with what it says about another dinosaur, Herrerasaurus, the center of a lively debate since its discovery in Argentina in the 1960s. Herrerasaurus had some traits in common with theropods—including large claws, carnivorous teeth and certain pelvic features—but lacked other theropod traits such as pockets in vertebrae for airsacs. Some paleontologists claimed it was so unusual it was outside the evolutionary tree of theropods, or even of dinosaurs. Others placed it among the earliest theropods.

"The question was did those carnivorous traits arise in Herrerasaurus and in theropods independently or were they traits from a recent common ancestor that got passed down," said Nesbitt. "We had so few specimens of early theropods that it was hard to answer that question. But now that we have Tawa, we think we have an answer."

Tawa had a mix of Herrerasaurus-like characteristics (for example, in the pelvis) and features found in firmly established theropod dinosaurs (for example, pockets for airsacs in the backbone). Therefore, the characteristics that Herrerasaurus shares uniquely with theropods such as Tawa confirm the characteristics didn't arise independently and that Herrerasaurus is indeed a theropod.

The firm placement of Herrerasaurus within the theropod lineage points up an interesting fact about dinosaur evolution: once they appeared, they very rapidly diversified into the three main dinosaur lineages that persisted for more than 170 million years. Herrerasaurus was found in a South American rock layer alongside the oldest members of two major lineages—the sauropods and the ornithischians.

"Tawa pulls Herrerasaurus into the theropod lineage, so that means all three lineages are present in South America pretty much as soon as dinosaurs evolved," said Nesbitt. "Without Tawa, you can guess at that, but Tawa helps shore up that argument."

Tawa skeletons were found beside two other theropod dinosaurs from around the same period. Nesbitt noted that each of the three is more closely related to a known dinosaur from South America than they are to each other. This suggests these three species each descended from a separate lineage in South America, rather than all evolving from a local ancestor, and then later dispersed to North America and other parts of the supercontinent Pangaea. It also suggests there were multiple dispersals out of South America.

The first Tawa fossils were discovered in 2004 by volunteers taking a week-long paleontology seminar with experts at the Ruth Hall Museum of Paleontology in Abiquiu, New Mexico. The dig site, known as Hayden Quarry, is in a hillside on Ghost Ranch made famous by the painter Georgia O'Keefe. Alex Downs, an instructor for the course, contacted Nesbitt and a colleague to ask if they'd like to take a look at the fossils. There was a thigh bone, part of a hip and what later turned out to be some unrelated vertebrae.

"When we saw them, our jaws dropped," said Nesbitt. "A lot of these theropods have really hollow bones, so when they get preserved, they get really crunched. But these were in almost perfect condition."

He was also surprised by how much material was preserved at this one site. He and his colleagues began a full-scale excavation in 2006. Every summer since then, they've continued to unearth new material. The fossil bone bed extends for tens of meters along the hillside, promising years of painstaking work and perhaps additional significant discoveries.

credited to University of Texas at Austin

Years of scientific debate over the extinction of ancient species in North America have yielded many theories. However, new findings from J. Tyler Faith, GW Ph.D. candidate in the hominid paleobiology doctoral program, and Todd Surovell, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, reveal that a mass extinction occurred in a geological instant.

What event or factor could cause such a mass extinction? The many hypotheses that have been developed over the years include: abrupt change in climate, the result of comet impact, human overkill and disease. Some researchers believe that it may be a combination of these factors, one of them, or none.

A particular issue that has also contributed to this debate focuses on the chronology of extinctions. The existing fossil record is incomplete, making it more difficult to tell whether or not the extinctions occurred in a gradual process, or took place as a synchronous event. In addition, it was previously unclear whether species are missing from the terminal Pleistocene because they had already gone extinct or because they simply have not been found yet.

However, new findings from Faith indicate that the extinction is best characterized as a sudden event that took place between 13.8 and 11.4 thousand years ago. Faith's findings support the idea that this mass extinction was due to human overkill, comet impact or other rapid events rather than a slow attrition.

"The massive extinction coincides precisely with human arrival on the continent, abrupt climate change, and a possible extraterrestrial impact event" said Faith. "It remains possible that any one of these or all, contributed to the sudden extinctions. We now have a better understanding of when the extinctions took place and the next step is to figure out why."

George Washington University (2009, November 27). Mass extinction: Why did half of N. America's large mammals disappear 40,000 to 10,000 years ago?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 10, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/11/091127140706.htm

Along with inscriptions at Copán, the new evidence suggests that the site’s first king was born into a ruling family at Caracol, a powerful lowland kingdom in Belize. KYKM probably spent his young adult years as a member of the royal court at Tikal, a Maya kingdom in the central lowlands of Guatemala, before being sent to Copán to found a new dynasty at the settlement there, Price’s team proposes.

“These findings reinforce the notion that the Copán state was founded as part of a colonial expansion,” says archaeologist and study coauthor Robert Sharer of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “They also demonstrate the widespread connections maintained by Maya kings.” This line of investigation aims to unravel how Classic era Maya city-states, which dominated parts of Mexico and Central America from about 200 to 900, originated and developed.

Hieroglyphics at Copán that were deciphered more than 20 years ago refer to KYKM as a foreigner who was inaugurated as king in 426 and arrived the next year. But it has been unclear whether the inscriptions referred to an actual historical event or were a form of royal propaganda. In 2007, archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin noticed that an inscription carved on a Copán stone monument referred to KYKM by a title indicating that he was originally a Caracol lord.

Archaeologists Arlen Chase and Diane Chase of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, who direct excavations at Caracol, consider it plausible that Copán’s first king was a Caracol lord but doubt that he arrived via Tikal. No signs of a political relationship between Caracol and Tikal appear at the time that KYKM took over at Copán, Arlen Chase notes.

Instead, KYKM probably came directly from Caracol, Arlen Chase says. By the year 150, Caracol hosted numerous royal activities and had extensive ties to settlements near Copán. “It would not be surprising for Copán to have coveted a Caracol individual to become their first ruler,” he says.

Sharer led a team that tunneled beneath the remains of the Copán Acropolis, a private royal complex, about a decade ago. Workers discovered three royal tombs containing skeletons, as well as four individuals buried in pits or beneath platforms outside the tombs.

An impressive vaulted chamber called the Hunal Tomb held the remains of a roughly 55-year-old man’, adorned by several large jade objects. The tomb’s construction style and pottery offerings suggested that the man was powerful, with connections to both Tikal and another Early Classic kingdom, Teotihuacan in central Mexico. Sharer’s team regards the tomb as that of KYKM.

Ratios of strontium and oxygen isotopes in teeth from the Hunal skeleton, along with comparable data for commoners buried at Copán and for animals and people living today in Central America, support that scenario. These measurements reflect local water sources and geology where a person grew up. KYKM spent most of his early years in the Tikal region, the study concludes.

Until researchers gather a more representative sample of isotopic ratios from throughout the Maya area, KYKM’s Caracol origins remain tentative, Stuart remarks.

Three other individuals buried under Copán’s Acropolis came from outside the Copán area, the new study concludes. But a woman in one royal tomb, presumably KYKM’s wife, grew up in Copán.

credited to sciencenews.org