Paleontology news

The history of ice cream is rooted in ancient Asia, namely, China and Arabia. It was admired by Alexander of Macedonia, Napoleon, and George Washington, and patented by several people.

There are references stating that cooled juices were very popular in the palace of the legendary King Solomon, and that the famous ancient Greek physician Hippocrates recommended ice cream for a better tonus and health improvement. Alexander Makedonsky was treated with ice cream during his trips to India and Persia.

Snow and ice were used in ancient Rome to prepare fruit drinks, for example, for the Roman emperor Nero (A.D. 37-68) who ordered ice to be brought from the mountains. Large ice cellars were built to preserve the frozen treat for extended periods of time.

There are a few interesting facts in ancient records in reference to ice cream. In 780 A.D., caliph al-Mahdi managed to deliver a supply of snow to Mecca using a train of camels. A Persian traveler Nassiri Khosrau mentioned in his writings that in 1040, the snow for beverages and ice cream was delivered to the table of the Cairo Sultan daily from the mountain regions of Syria.

Marco Polo, who traveled to China and tasted the icy dessert, is thought to have brought ice cream to Europe. When he came back to Italy from his trip, he shared some of the recipes with local chefs. In the middle of the 16th century, ice cream conquered France when Ekaterina Medici fell in love with this dessert. She treated her guests with ice cream at formal dinners and fed it to her son, Henry III.

Soon enough, ice cream migrated from Versailles to the households of French nobility despite strict prohibitions on recipe disclosure.

Many new varieties of ice cream were invented in France during the reign of Anne of Austria, Queen of France. In the middle of the 17th century, ice cream became available to ordinary mortals, and ice cream and ice beverages vendors flooded the streets of Paris. Later, Napoleon himself became an ice cream enthusiast.

Ice cream recipe came to the US in the 18th century along with the English immigrants. In 1700, Governor Bladen of Maryland, who was from England, served fruit ice cream and cooled beverages to his guests. Many US Presidents were fond of the cold dessert. George Washington himself used to prepare ice cream at his Mount Vernon estate.

Phillip Lenzi, an entrepreneur and chef, posted an ad in New York newspapers saying he brought recipes of different desserts from London, including the ice cream recipe. Soon ice cream acquired popularity among the residents of the East Coast.

With time, technologies of ice cream manufacturing were perfected. Ice cream cups were invented in France during the reign of Napoleon III (1852 — 1870). Assorted ice cream was first created in Italy, and chocolate was first added to the treat in Austria. In 1866, the guests at the Chinese ambassador reception in Paris were served an “omelet with surprise” designed by German chefs - an omelet with ginger ice cream inside. New ice cream varieties created for special occasions were later mass produced, especially in the US. The first ice cream factory was built in Baltimore, and soon similar factories appeared in New York, Washington, and Chicago.

Cooling equipment was also developing. A French engineer Ferdinand Carre invented the ammonia vapor-compression system in 1859. Mass production of refrigerators began in the second half of the 19th century. Later, special equipment for production and storage of ice was invented, which allowed for easier processing and lower price of ice cream.

In 1919, a teacher from Iowa designed a recipe and production technology of new ice cream variety covered with chocolate. On January 24, 1922 he was granted a patent for famous ice cream bar on a stick. The novelty was first called Eskimo pie, but later reduced to Eskimo. Meanwhile, the French claimed that this type of ice cream was created by one of their own in 1919. According to French sources, the name of this treat was created by accident in a movie theatre. One of the movie goers had too much ice cream while watching a film about Eskimos, and called the dessert “Eskimo.”

In Russia, since the old times people made their own version of milk-based ice cream. In Kievan Rus’, people enjoyed chipped frozen milk, and for the Pancake week they prepared a mixture of frozen cottage cheese, sugar, raisins and sour cream.

Ice cream is now enjoyed by people all over the world, and is sold in nearly every grocery store. There are thousands of varieties of this cold, five thousand-year-old dessert.

Maksim Kondratyev

"We therefore suggest that feathers first arose as agents for colour display and only later in their evolutionary history did they become useful for flight and insulation."

The team of palaeontologists from the University of Bristol, UK, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, University College Dublin and the Open University report two kinds of melanosomes found in the feathers of numerous birds and dinosaurs from the world-famous Jehol beds of NE China.

Melanosomes are colour-bearing organelles buried within the structure of feathers and hair in modern birds and mammals, giving black, grey, and rufous tones such as orange and brown. Because melanosomes are an integral part of the tough protein structure of the feather, they survive when a feather survives, even for hundreds of millions of years.

This is the first report of melanosomes found in the feathers of dinosaurs and early birds. It is also the first report of phaeomelanosomes in fossil feathers, the organelles that provide rufous and brown colours.

These discoveries confirm the substantial body of evidence that suggests birds evolved through a long line of theropod (flesh-eating) dinosaurs. It also demonstrates that the unique assemblage of characters that make a modern bird – feathers, wings, lightweight skeleton, enhanced metabolic system, enlarged brain and visual systems – evolved step-by-step over some 50 million years of dinosaur evolution, through the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

"These discoveries open up a whole new area of research", said Benton, "allowing us to explore aspects of the life and behaviour of dinosaurs and early birds that lived over 100 million years ago.

"Furthermore, we now know that the simplest feathers in dinosaurs such as Sinosauropteryx were only present over limited parts of its body – for example, as a crest down the midline of the back and round the tail – and so they would have had only a limited function in thermoregulation.

"Feathers are key to the success of birds and we can now dissect their evolutionary history in detail and see how each feather type – and the fine detail of feather structure – was acquired through time. This will link with current work on how the genome controls feather development."

University of Bristol

Part of an ancient Roman law code previously thought to have been lost forever has been discovered by researchers at UCL's Department of History. Simon Corcoran and Benet Salway made the breakthrough after piecing together 17 fragments of previously incomprehensible parchment. The fragments were being studied at UCL as part of the Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded "Projet Volterra" – a ten year study of Roman law in its full social, legal and political context. Corcoran and Salway found that the text belonged to the Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, a collection of laws by emperors from Hadrian (AD 117-138) to Diocletian (AD 284-305), which was published circa AD 300. Little was known about the codex's original form and there were, until now, no known copies in existence.

"The fragments contain a collection of responses by a series of Roman emperors to questions on legal matters submitted by members of the public," continued Dr Salway. "The responses are arranged chronologically and grouped into thematic chapters under highlighted headings, with corrections and readers' annotations between the lines. The notes show that this particular copy received intensive use."

The surviving fragments belong to sections on appeal procedures and the statute of limitations on an as yet unidentified matter. The content is consistent with what was already known about the Gregorian Code from quotations of it in other documents, but the fragments also contain new material that has not been seen in modern times.

"These fragments are the first direct evidence of the original version of the Gregorian Code," said Dr Corcoran. "Our preliminary study confirms that it was the pioneer of a long tradition that has extended down into the modern era and it is ultimately from the title of this work, and its companion volume the Codex Hermogenianus, that we use the term 'code' in the sense of 'legal rulings'."

This particular manuscript may originate from Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and it is hoped that further work on the script and on the ancient annotations will illuminate more of its history.

University College London

This new evidence therefore puts at five millennia the duration of the Iberian Neanderthal refugium, and counters speculations that Neanderthal populations could have remained in the Gibraltar area until 28,000 years ago.

These findings have important implications for the understanding of the archaic features found in the anatomy of a 30,000 year old child unearthed at Lagar Velho, Portugal. With the last of the Iberian Neanderthals dating to many millennia before the child was born, 'freak' crossbreeding between immediate ancestors drawn from distinct 'modern' and 'Neanderthal' gene pools cannot be a viable explanation. The skeleton's archaic features must therefore represent evolutionarily significant admixture at the time of contact, as suggested by the team who excavated and studied the fossil.

Professor Zilhão said: "I believe the 'Ebro frontier' pattern was generated by both climatic and demographic factors, as it coincides with a period of globally milder climate during which oak and pine woodlands expanded significantly along the west façade of Iberia.

"Population decrease and a break-up of interaction networks probably occurred as a result of the expansion of such tree-covered landscapes, favouring the creation and persistence of population refugia.

"Then, as environments opened up again for large herbivore herds and their hunters as a result of the return to colder conditions, interaction and movement across the previous boundary must have ensued, and the last of the Neanderthals underwent the same processes of assimilation or replacement that underpin their demise elsewhere in Europe five millennia earlier."

The dating was undertaken by experts at the University of Vienna (VERA laboratory) led by Professor Eva Maria Wild, and at the University of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.

Professor Wild, head of the 14C program at VERA (Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator) said: "Accurate 14C dating was crucial for this study. For layer 2 of the cave sediment we achieved this by selecting teeth for 14C dating and by comparing the 14C results of the same sample after different, elaborate sample pre-treatments. Agreement between the results obtained with different methods provides a proof for accurate dating."

University of Bristol

A species of bird, which has only been observed alive on three previous occasions since it was first discovered in 1867, has been rediscovered in a remote land corridor in north-eastern Afghanistan. The discovery was made as part of an international collaboration, which included researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. During the summer of 2008, the American ornithologist Robert J Timmins was commissioned by the American aid organisation USAID to compile an inventory of bird species in the Badakshan province in north-eastern Afghanistan. He managed to record the call of a species of bird that was as yet unknown.

The recording found its way to the Swedish ornithologist Lars Svensson, who was quick to note that the recorded birdsong did not resemble that of any known species of bird. But from Timmins' description of the species, he soon began to suspect what kind of bird was on the recording.

Ornithological sensation

Lars Svensson and Urban Olsson at the Department of Zoology, University of Gothenburg, had in fact shown in a previous study that about a dozen stuffed birds in museum collections all around the world had been incorrectly classified: they were not of the common species of reed warbler the curators had assumed, but rather a far rarer species known as the Large-billed Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus orinus) - observed on just three documented occasions since 1867. In their previous study Svensson, Olsson and co-workers had pinpointed North-Eastern Afghanistan as an area where the Large-billed Reed Warbler probably bred in the 1930s. When both the Swedish colleagues heard the recording of the mysterious birdsong they realised that they were on the trail of an ornithological sensation.

World's least known bird

A year later, in June 2009, the Afghan ornithologists Naqeebullah Mostafawi, Ali Madad Rajabi and Hafizullah Noori from the Wildlife Conservation Society Afghanistan managed to travel to the Badakshan region, despite the war and ongoing clan conflicts. They used nets to capture 15 individuals of the mysterious species of bird. They sent photographs and feather samples to Lars Svensson and Urban Olsson, who used DNA analyses to confirm that after 142 years of searching, the breeding site of perhaps the world's least known bird had been found.

Under acute threat

News of the find was published this week in the journal Birding Asia and has aroused huge interest in ornithological circles. The Large-billed Reed Warbler is not hunted, but is regarded as being under acute threat since its breeding sites are being deforested by the local population in their hunt for fuel. "That's why it's vital that we protect both the species and its habitat now," says Urban Olsson.

University of Gothenburg

The consumption of wild cereals among prehistoric hunters and gatherers appears to be far more ancient than previously thought, according to a University of Calgary archaeologist who has found the oldest example of extensive reliance on cereal and root staples in the diet of early Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago. Julio Mercader, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Tropical Archaeology in the U of C's Department of Archaeology, recovered dozens of stone tools from a deep cave in Mozambique showing that wild sorghum, the ancestor of the chief cereal consumed today in sub-Saharan Africa for flours, breads, porridges and alcoholic beverages, was in Homo sapiens' pantry along with the African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges and the African "potato." This is the earliest direct evidence of humans using pre-domesticated cereals anywhere in the world. Mercader's findings are published in the December 18 issue of the prestigious research journal Science.

In 2007, Mercader and colleagues from Mozambique's University of Eduardo Mondlane excavated a limestone cave near Lake Niassa that was used intermittently by ancient foragers over the course of more than 60,000 years. Deep in this cave, they uncovered dozens of stone tools, animal bones and plant remains indicative of prehistoric dietary practices. The discovery of several thousand starch grains on the excavated plant grinders and scrapers showed that wild sorghum was being brought to the cave and processed systematically.

"It has been hypothesized that starch use represents a critical step in human evolution by improving the quality of the diet in the African savannas and woodlands where the modern human line first evolved. This could be considered one of the earliest examples of this dietary transformation," Mercader said. "The inclusion of cereals in our diet is considered an important step in human evolution because of the technical complexity and the culinary manipulation that are required to turn grains into staples."

Mercader said the evidence is on par with grass seed use by hunter-gatherers in many parts of the world during the closing stages of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago. In this case, the trend dates back to the beginnings of the Ice Age, some 90,000 years earlier.

University of Calgary

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.

FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

Extinct woolly mammoths and ancient American horses may have been grazing the North American steppe for several thousand years longer than previously thought. After plucking ancient DNA from frozen soil in central Alaska, a team of researchers used cutting-edge techniques to uncover "genetic fossils" of both species locked in permafrost samples dated to between 7,600 and 10,500 calendar years. This new evidence suggests that at least one population of these now-extinct mammals endured longer in the continental interior, challenging the conventional view that these and other large species, or megafauna, disappeared from the Americas about 12,000 years ago. "We don't know how long it takes to pinch out a species," says Ross MacPhee, Curator of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History. "Extinctions often seem dramatic and sudden in fossil records, but our study provides an idea of what an extinction event might look like in real time, with imperiled species surviving in smaller and smaller numbers until eventually disappearing completely."

But hard remains of animals are rarely preserved, difficult to find, and laborious to accurately date because of physical degradation. Because of this, MacPhee and co-authors Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, Richard Roberts of the University of Wollongong in Australia, and Duane Froese of the University of Alberta in Canada decided to tackle the problem by dating the "last survivors" through dirt. Frozen sediments from the far north of Siberia and Canada can preserve small fragments of animal and plant DNA exceptionally well, even in the complete absence of any visible organic remains, such as bone or wood.

"In principle, you can take a pinch of dirt collected under favorable circumstances and uncover an amazing amount of forensic evidence regarding what species were on the landscape at the time," says Willerslev, director of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. "The use of ancient DNA offers the possibility of being able to sample previous life within the last 400,000 years, freeing us from having to rely on skeletal and other macrofossil evidence as the only way to collect information about species that are no longer with us."

In order to prospect for genetic fossils, the team collected soil cores from undisturbed Alaskan permafrost. Wind-blown Stevens Village, situated on the bank of the Yukon River, fit the bill perfectly. Here, sediments were sealed in permafrost soon after deposition. Two independent methods (radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence) were used to date plant remains and individual mineral grains found in the same layers as the DNA.

"With these two techniques, we can be confident that the deposits from which the DNA was recovered haven't been contaminated since these lost giants last passed this way," said Roberts, director of the Centre for Archaeological Science at the University of Wollongong. "It's a genetic graveyard, frozen in time."

Cores collected at Stevens Village offer a clear picture of the local Alaskan fauna at the end of the last ice age. The oldest sediments, dated to about 11,000 years ago, contain remnant DNA of Arctic hare, bison, and moose; all three animals were also found in higher, more recent layers, as would be expected. But one core, deposited between 7,600 and 10,500 years ago, confirmed the presence of both mammoth and horse DNA. To make certain that the integrity of this sample had not been compromised by geologic processes (for example, that ancient DNA had not blown into the surface soils), the team did extensive surface sampling in the vicinity of Stevens Village. No DNA evidence of mammoth, horse, or other extinct species was found in modern samples, a result that supports previous studies which have shown that DNA degrades rapidly when exposed to sunlight and various chemical reactions.

"The fact that we scored with only one layer is not surprising," says MacPhee. "When you start going extinct, there will be fewer and fewer feet on the ground, and thus less and less source material for ancient DNA such as feces, shed dermal tissues, and decaying bodies."

The team also developed a statistical model to show that mammoth and horse populations would have dwindled to a few hundred individuals by 8,000 years ago.

"At this point, mammoths and horses were barely holding on. We may actually be working with the DNA of some of the last members of these species in North America," says permafrost expert Froese, associate professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta. "The Yukon Flats includes large shifting river bars with an abundance of high quality forage where large mammals can and could make a living. There may have been a handful of similar sites in Alaska, hosting small remnant populations," says Froese.

"Dirt DNA has lots of exciting potential to contribute to extinction debates in other parts of the world too, as well as a range of archaeological questions," said Willerslev, who also points out that the approach is not restricted to looking back at the past. "We can also use it to make a list of modern species living in any particular location," he said. "This kind of information is really valuable for studies of animals that are hard to detect, and there are some neat forensic applications too."

American Museum of Natural History

When cultured on human skin cells, the lead-based substances, which contained the mineral laurionite, boosted production of nitric oxide by as much as 240 percent, the scientists wrote in this week's issue of the journal Analytic Chemistry.

Nitric oxide is a signaling agent that strengthens the immune system to fight disease, researcher Christian Amatore and his colleagues wrote of their study. Bacterial eye infections are common in people living around tropical marshes, such as those of the river Nile, Amatore said.

The findings show why ancient Egyptians could have believed the makeup had magical properties, the researchers said.

UPI

When considering the biology of late archaic humans such as the Neanderthals, it is thus common to compare them with living humans and largely ignore the biology of the early modern humans who were close in time to the Neanderthals.

With this in mind, an international team, including Professor Zilhão, reanalysed the dentition of the Lagar Velho child (all of its deciduous – milk – teeth and almost all of its permanent teeth) to see how they compared to the teeth of Neanderthals, later Pleistocene (12,000-year-old) humans and modern humans.

Employing a technique called micro-tomography which uses x-rays to create cross-sections of 3D-objects, the researchers investigated the relative stages of formation of the developing teeth and the proportions of crown enamel, dentin and pulp in the teeth.

They found that, for a given stage of development of the cheek teeth, the front teeth were relatively delayed in their degree of formation. Moreover, the front teeth had a greater volume of dentin and pulp but proportionally less enamel than the teeth of recent humans.

The teeth of the Lagar Velho child thus fit the pattern evident in the preceding Neanderthals, and contrast with the teeth of later Pleistocene (12,000-year-old) humans and living modern humans.

Professor Zilhão said: "This new analysis of the Lagar Velho child joins a growing body of information from other early modern human fossils found across Europe (in Mladeč in the Czech Republic, Peştera cu Oase and Peştera Muierii in Romania, and Les Rois in France) that shows these 'early modern humans' were 'modern' without being 'fully modern'. Human anatomical evolution continued after they lived 30,000 to 40,000 years ago."

University of Bristol