Paleontology news

If a Tiger's feet were built the same way as a mongoose's feet, they'd have to be about the size of a hippo's feet to support the big cat's weight. But they're not. For decades, researchers have been looking at how different-sized legs and feet are put together across the four-legged animal kingdom, but until now they overlooked the "shoes," those soft pads on the bottom of the foot that bear the brunt of the animal's walking and running.

A genetic study has found that small domestic dogs probably originated in the Middle East more than 12,000 years ago. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology traced the evolutionary history of the IGF1 gene, finding that the version of the gene that is a major determinant of small size probably originated as a result of the domestication of the Middle Eastern gray wolf. Melissa Gray and Robert Wayne, from the University of California, Los Angeles, led a team of researchers who surveyed a large sample of gray wolf populations. She said, "The mutation for small body size post-dates the domestication of dogs. However, because all small dogs possess this variant of IGF1, it probably arose early in their history. Our results show that the version of the IGF1 gene found in small dogs is closely related to that found in Middle Eastern wolves and is consistent with an ancient origin in this region of small domestic dogs".

A team of paleontologists has discovered a new dinosaur species they're calling Abydosaurus, which belongs to the group of gigantic, long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged, plant-eating dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus. In a rare twist, they recovered four heads – two still fully intact – from a quarry in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah. Complete skulls have been recovered for only eight of more than 120 known varieties of sauropod.

In recent years, DNA evidence has added important new tools for scientists studying the human past. Now, a collection of reviews published by Cell Press in a special issue of Current Biology published online on February 22nd offers a timely update on how new genetic evidence, together with archaeological and linguistic evidence, has enriched our understanding of human history on earth. "To understand what it is to be human, it is essential to understand the human past," says Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge, who first coined the term "archaeogenetics" and is the author of a guest editorial in the special issue. "Nearly all civilizations have their own origin or creation myth. Now we can use archaeogenetics to tell a global story that is robust and applicable to all human communities everywhere."

A new paper by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Otago in New Zealand shows a strong link between the diversity of organisms at the bottom of the food chain and the diversity of mammals at the top. Mark D. Uhen, a geologist at Mason, says that throughout the last 30 million years, changes in the diversity of whale species living at any given time period correlates with the evolution and diversification of diatoms, tiny, abundant algae that live in the ocean. In the paper "Climate, Critters, and Cetaceans: Cenozoic Drivers of the Evolution of Modern Whales," which was published in the latest issue of Science, Uhen and co-author Felix G. Mark of Otago show that the more kinds of diatoms living in a time period, the more kinds of whales there are.

A study led by University of Pittsburgh researchers could finally lay to rest the millennia-old conjecture that the ancient empire of Carthage regularly sacrificed its youngest citizens. An examination of the remains of Carthaginian children revealed that most infants perished prenatally or very shortly after birth and were unlikely to have lived long enough to be sacrificed, according to a Feb. 17 report in PLoS ONE. The findings—based on the first published analysis of the skeletal remains found in Carthaginian burial urns—refute claims from as early as the 3rd century BCE of systematic infant sacrifice at Carthage that remain a subject of debate among biblical scholars and archaeologists, said lead researcher Jeffrey H. Schwartz, a professor of anthropology and history and philosophy of science in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences and president of the World Academy of Art and Science. Schwartz and his colleagues present the more benign interpretation that very young Punic children were cremated and interred in burial urns regardless of how they died.

The putative skull of Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden that has been kept in a shrine in Vadstena Abbey is probably not authentic. A new study conducted at Uppsala University reveals that the two skulls, believed to be from Saint Bridget and her daughter Catherine (Katarina), is not from maternally related individuals. Furthermore, dating show that the skulls are not from the time period when Bridget and Catherine lived. The findings are published in the journal PLoS ONE. Vadstena parish assigned Associate Professor Marie Allen's research group at Uppsala University's Department of Genetics and Pathology the task of examining DNA of both skulls, in order to confirm kinship and authenticity. A sensitive method based on analysis of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was used to analyse the skulls. This method makes it possible to examine very small amounts of DNA, and it is often a successful analysis on aged and degraded material.

Using several scientific methods, including analyzing DNA from royal mummies, research findings suggest that malaria and bone abnormalities appear to have contributed to the death of Egyptian pharaoh King Tutankhamun, with other results appearing to identify members of the royal family, including King Tut's father and mother, according to a study in the February 17 issue of JAMA. The 18th dynasty (circa 1550-1295 B.C.) of the New Kingdom was one of the most powerful royal houses of ancient Egypt, and included the reign of Tutankhamun, probably the most famous of all pharaohs, although his tenure was brief. He died in the ninth year of his reign, circa 1324 B.C., at age 19 years. "Little was known of Tutankhamun and his ancestry prior to Howard Carter's discovery of his intact tomb (KV62) in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, but his mummy and the priceless treasures buried with him, along with other important archeological discoveries of the 20th century, have provided significant information about the boy pharaoh's life and family," the authors write.

Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.

A team of chemists from the University of Valencia (UV) has confirmed that the substance used to hermetically seal an amphora found among remains at Lixus, in Morocco, was pine resin. The scientists also studied the metallic fragments inside the 2,000-year-old vessel, which could be fragments of material used for iron-working. In 2005, a group of archaeologists from the UV discovered a sealed amphora among the remains at Lixus, an ancient settlement founded by the Phoenicians near Larache, in Morocco. Since then, researchers from the Department of Analytical Chemistry at this university have been carrying out various studies into it components.

Researchers at Queen's University have helped produce a new archaeological tool which could answer key questions in human evolution. The new calibration curve, which extends back 50,000 years is a major landmark in radiocarbon dating-- the method used by archaeologists and geoscientists to establish the age of carbon-based materials.

With the help of an ancient mosaic map, Israeli archaeologists said Wednesday they have unearthed a section of an old stone-flagged street in Jerusalem that provides important new evidence about the city's commercial life 1,500 years ago.

Contradictions and puzzles surround the giant fossil Prototaxites. The fossils resemble tree trunks, and yet they are from a time before trees existed. The stable carbon isotope values are similar to those of fungi, but the fossils do not display structures usually found in fungi. Plant-like polymers have been found in the fossils, but nutritional evidence supports heterotrophy, which is not commonly found in plants. These are a few of the confounding factors surrounding the identification of Prototaxites fossils. Since the first fossil of Prototaxites was described in 1859, researchers have hypothesized that these organisms were giant algae, fungi, or lichens. A recent study by Dr. Linda Graham and her colleagues published evidence in the February issue of the American Journal of Botany that they believe resolves this long-standing mystery (http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/content/full/97/2/268).

Picture a dinosaur. Huge, menacing creatures, they ruled the Earth for nearly 200 million years, striking fear with every ground-shaking stride. Yet these great beasts were no match for a 6-mile wide meteor that struck near modern-day Mexico 65 million years ago, incinerating everything in its path. This catastrophic impact -- called the Cretaceous-Tertiary or K/T extinction event -- spelled doom for the dinosaurs and many other species. Some animals, however, including many small mammals, managed to survive.

A century after Amedeo Modigliani painted the Portrait of Maud Abrantes, the mystery behind the painting might be solved. Ofra Rimon, Director and Curator of the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa, discovered that hidden in the painting is the portrait of another woman. "Modigliani was probably not happy with that painting and decided to paint over it in favor of a portrait of Maud," she claims. In 1908 Modigliani painted the Portrait of Maud Abrantes on the same canvas as he had painted Nude with a Hat earlier that year. Like many painters with limited means during that period, he turned the canvas over to use the other side. But unlike common practice, he also turned it upside down. Even though this was such an irregular act, and despite the fact that the two paintings are central to most Modigliani exhibitions over recent years, art researchers have not given their attention to this oddity.

A new model for primate origins is presented in Zoologica Scripta, published by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The paper argues that the distributions of the major primate groups are correlated with Mesozoic tectonic features and that their respective ranges are congruent with each evolving locally from a widespread ancestor on the supercontinent of Pangea about 185 million years ago. Michael Heads, a Research Associate of the Buffalo Museum of Science, arrived at these conclusions by incorporating, for the first time, spatial patterns of primate diversity and distribution as historical evidence for primate evolution. Models had previously been limited to interpretations of the fossil record and molecular clocks.

Ancient human teeth are telling secrets that may relate to modern-day health: Some stressful events that occurred early in development are linked to shorter life spans. "Prehistoric remains are providing strong, physical evidence that people who acquired tooth enamel defects while in the womb or early childhood tended to die earlier, even if they survived to adulthood," says Emory University anthropologist George Armelagos.

Deciphering microscopic clues hidden within fossils, scientists have uncovered the vibrant colors that adorned a feathered dinosaur extinct for 150 million years, a Yale University-led research team reports online Feb. 4 in the journal Science. Unlike recently published work from China that inferred the existence of two types of melanin pigments in various species of feathered dinosaurs, the Science study analyzed color-imparting structures called melanosomes from an entire fossil of a single animal, a feat which enabled researchers to reveal rich color patterns of the entire animal.

Can you imagine living your whole life in summer? In one of the most spectacular wildlife migrations on the planet, millions of shorebirds do exactly this by making a 20,000km round trip from their Arctic breeding grounds to wetlands in the southern hemisphere and then migrating north again each year.

A 60-million-year-old relative of crocodiles described this week by University of Florida researchers in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was likely a food source for Titanoboa, the largest snake the world has ever known. Working with scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, paleontologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus found fossils of the new species of ancient crocodile in the Cerrejon Formation in northern Colombia. The site, one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines, also yielded skeletons of the giant, boa constrictor-like Titanoboa, which measured up to 45 feet long. The study is the first report of a fossil crocodyliform from the same site.

Researchers excavating an ancient Roman cemetery made a surprising discovery when they extracted ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the skeletons buried at the site: the 2,000-year-old bones revealed a maternal East Asian ancestry. The results will be presented at the Roman Archeology Conference at Oxford, England, in March, and published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

Migrating birds can and do keep their travel dates flexible, a new study published online on January 28th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveals. But in the case of pied flycatchers, at least, an earlier takeoff hasn't necessarily translated into an earlier arrival at their destination. It appears the problem is travel delays the birds are experiencing as a result of harsh weather conditions on the final leg of their journey through Europe. The discovery may in a sense be good news as far as birds' potential to cope under climate change, but it also highlights the vulnerability of long-distance migrants to environmental conditions in general.