Paleontology news

It was Rudkin who first recognised its scientific significance: "This nifty little specimen first came to my notice when I received a letter from an amateur fossil collector in Nepean, Ontario. In prospecting for fossils in rock from a temporary building excavation he had turned up a small block containing a complete trilobite, but next to it was something else and he sent me a slightly fuzzy but very intriguing photo. The mystery fossil was clearly not another trilobite, and I although couldn't be certain, I thought it might be some sort of annelid worm with broad, flattened scales. James, the collector, generously agreed to lend me the specimen and I realised immediately it was a complete, fully articulated machaeridian! The first I had ever seen."

At that time it was not known that machaeridians were annelids. "James was happy to donate the specimen to the Royal Ontario Museum, in exchange for a promise that I'd someday publish his discovery."

It was not until 2008 that Rudkin's hunch was confirmed, when a team of palaeontologists, including Jakob Vinther, decribed new machaeridian fossils from remote mountain localities in Morocco, revealing their relationship to annelid worms. Rudkin and Vinther agreed to work together to interpret the Ottawa specimen, and it is the results of that collaboration that are published in the current Palaeontology.

Plumulitid machaeridians look like modern bristleworms, with stout walking limbs bearing long bundles of bristles, but on their back they carried a set of mineralized plates. According to Vinther, "the plates themselves were rigid, but they could move relative to one other, providing plumulitids with a protective body armour very similar to the flexible metal armour invented by humans 450 million years later. Machaeridian body armour is unique among annelids, and probably helped them to succeed as ubiquitous components of marine ecosystems for more than 200 million years."

With the publication of this paper Rudkin is finally able to make good on his promise "It's great to be able to acknowledge the collector", says Rudkin, but there is a twist to this tale: the man who found the specimen has now gone missing. "Regrettably, I lost contact with James and numerous enquiries as to his whereabouts have come up empty. I hope he somehow gets wind of all this."

Wiley-Blackwell

Salado pottery dates from the 13th to 15th centuries in which there was major political and cultural conflict in the American Southwest. Brutal executions and possible cannibalism forced thousands of people to abandon their native regions and move to areas of Arizona and New Mexico. Another source of conflict appeared after the female refugees and their children arrived in their new homelands.

"Conflict was defused through the direct action of women who sought to decrease the tensions that threatened to destroy their communities," VanPool said. "The rise of the Salado tradition allowed threatened communities to stabilize over much of modern-day Arizona and new Mexico, altering the course of Southwestern prehistory. Given that the Salado system lasted from 1275 to around 1450, it was most certainly successful."

University of Missouri-Columbia

"Earth's habitable zone extends to depths of hundreds or thousands of meters," Katrina Edwards, a microbiologist at the University of Southern California, told a December conference of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. "The organisms that live in this environment may collectively have a mass equivalent to that of all of Earth's surface dwellers and may provide keys to solving major environmental, agricultural and industrial problems."

For example, geologists are considering whether to store some of the world's excess carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, in a worldwide network of crevices below the seafloor.

Scientists say research on "intraterrestrial life" complements astronomers' hunt for "extraterrestrial life" around other stars and planets. The search for E.T. starts at home.

"Much that we do in our work to discover and understand the deep biosphere has relevance to the origin and search for life elsewhere in the universe," Edwards said by e-mail. "Fundamentally, this is all about life detection. ... Our inner space is a natural testing ground for outer space."

To advance their understanding of subsurface life, marine geologists are about to launch three drill ship expeditions to punch holes in the seafloor and implant long-term scientific "observatories" linked by cable and satellite to onshore laboratories.

"We'll be sitting in front of a fire hose of data," said Andrew Fisher, a geophysicist at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Dyed fluids will be pumped into selected places so scientists can follow the flow of water and microbes through a maze of subsurface "plumbing." These deep oceanic aquifers are thought to contain as much water as all the rivers on Earth.

"It'll be like determining how your home plumbing works by sampling the water at the taps," Fisher said.

Subsurface biosphere research may shed light on the origin of life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets.

"The conditions we see in the sub-seafloor are similar to what conditions may have been on the early Earth," Fisher said. Similar conditions may exist or have existed on Mars or the moons of Jupiter.

"It is highly likely that if Mars supports life, it will also be in a deep biosphere where temperatures are high enough to allow liquid water," John Parnell, a geologist at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, told a conference of planetary scientists last week in The Woodlands, Texas.

Steven D'Hondt, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, will lead the expedition to the South Pacific Gyre. The JOIDES Resolution will drive seven holes in the seafloor to study microbial life there.

One objective will be to determine whether deep sea chemicals, such as hydrogen and sulfur, that don't depend on energy from the sun on Earth's surface can nourish subsurface microbes.

American scholar Prof. William Albright, a leading archaeologist, proposed associating Neta'im with Khirbet En-Nuweiti', which is also located near the Elah Valley, based on the phonological similarity between the two names. Archaeological surveys at Khirbet En-Nuweiti', however, revealed that it was only inhabited during Hellenistic and Roman-Byzantine times, and not during the Iron Age.

Prof. Galil's identification of Khirbet Qeiyafa with Neta'im is based on the proximity of Khirbet Qeiyafa to biblical Gederah/Khirbet Ğudraya; on the archaeological findings – including impressive fortifications - dating from the time of King David's rule and indicating that this was an administrative center; and on the preserved name of nearby Khirbet En-Nuweiti'.

"The archeological findings at this site, the discovery of the earliest and most important Hebrew inscription to be found to date, and the understanding, based on the biblical text, that members of the Tribe of Judah inhabited the town and worked in the king's service, testify to Khirbet Qeiyafa – Neta'im – being an important administrative center in the border region of the Kingdom of Israel during the time of King David's reign. The existence of this fortified administrative center relatively far from the center of the kingdom testifies to a conflict that broke out between the Israelites the Philistines after David was victorious over the House of Saul and all of the Tribes of Israel were unified under his leadership. It is further proof of a large and powerful kingdom during the days of King David," Prof. Galil concludes.

University of Haifa

Until now, paleontologists have generally believed that the closest relatives of dinosaurs possibly looked a little smaller in size, walked on two legs and were carnivorous. However, a research team including Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology at the Utah Museum of Natural History and assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah has made a recent discovery to dispel this hypothesis. The team announced the discovery of a proto-dinosaur (dinosaur-like animal) — a new species called Asilisaurus kongwe (a-SEE-lee-SOAR-us KONG-way), derived from asili (Swahili for ancestor or foundation), sauros (Greek for lizard), and kongwe (Swahili for ancient). The first bones of Asilisaurus were discovered in 2007, and it is the first proto-dinosaur recovered from the Triassic Period in Africa. Asilisaurus shares many characteristics with dinosaurs but falls just outside of the dinosaur family tree—living approximately 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinosaurs.

Fossil bones of at least 14 individuals were recovered from a single bone bed in southern Tanzania making it possible to reconstruct nearly the entire skeleton, except portions of the skull and hand. The individuals stood about 1.5 to 3 feet (0.5 to 1 meter) tall at the hips and were 3 to 10 feet (1 to 3 meters) long. They weighed about 22 to 66 pounds (10 to 30 kilograms), walked on four legs, and most likely ate plants or a combination of plants and meat.

"The crazy thing about this new dinosaur discovery is that it is so very different from what we all were expecting, especially the fact that it is herbivorous and walked on four legs, said Irmis, who was involved in the researching the discovery over the past three years.

Asilisaurus kongwe is part of a newly recognized group known as silesaurs. "We knew that there were a number of species from the Triassic that were similar to Asilisaurus," said Irmis, "but we were only able to recognize that they formed this group called silesaurs with the new anatomical information from Asilisaurus." Members of the silesaur group were distributed across the globe during the Triassic, when all of the continents were together in a supercontinent called Pangaea.

Silesaurs are the closest relatives of dinosaurs, analogous to the close relationship of humans and chimps. Even though the oldest dinosaurs discovered so far are only 230 million years old, the presence of their closest relatives 10 million to 15 million years earlier implies that silesaurs and the dinosaur lineage had already diverged from a common ancestor by 245 million years ago. Silesaurs continued to live side by side with early dinosaurs throughout much of the Triassic Period (between about 250 million and 200 million years ago). The researchers conclude that other relatives of dinosaurs, such as pterosaurs (flying reptiles) and small forms called lagerpetids, might have also originated much earlier than previously thought.

Silesaurs have triangular teeth and a lower jaw with a beak-like tip, suggesting that they were specialized for an omnivorous and/or herbivorous diet. These same traits evolved independently in at least two dinosaur lineages (ornithischians and sauropodomorphs). In all three cases, the features evolved in animals that were originally meat-eaters. Although difficult to prove, it's possible that this shift conferred an evolutionary advantage. The researchers conclude that the ability to shift diets may have lead to the evolutionary success of these groups.

"The research suggests that at least three times in the evolution of dinosaurs and their closest relatives, meat-eating animals evolved into animals with diets that included plants," said Irmis. "These shifts all occurred in less than 10 million years, a relatively short time by geological standards, so we think that the lineage leading to silesaurs and dinosaurs might have had a greater flexibility in diet, and that this could be a reason for their success."

This new species (Asilisaurus) is found along with a number of primitive crocodilian relatives in the same fossil beds in southern Tanzania. The presence of these animals together at the same time and place suggests that the diversification of the relatives of crocodilians and dinosaurs was rapid, and happened earlier than previously suggested. It sheds light on a group of animals that later came to dominate terrestrial ecosystems throughout the Mesozoic Era (250 million to 65 million years ago).

"This new research suggests that there are more groups of animals yet to be discovered in this early period of dinosaur relatives," said Irmis. "It's very exciting because the more we learn about the Triassic Period, the more we learn about the origin of the dinosaurs and other groups."

University of Utah

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, paleoceanographer Richard Norris is one of 41 scientists presenting evidence that an asteroid impact really did kill off dinosaurs and myriad other organisms 30 years after the theory was first proposed. The researchers are authors of a review paper being released Friday in the journal Science that represents a new salvo in an ongoing controversy over the cause of the mass extinction. Norris' contribution to the paper was evidence in seafloor sediment records that indicate how deep-sea life was profoundly reshaped by the impact.

In that year, father and son researchers Luis and Walter Alvarez first proposed the notion that an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs. They had discovered that high levels of iridium, an element rare on Earth but common on extraterrestrial objects like meteors, were uniformly present in sedimentary samples that could be dated back to the extinction event, which marked the transition between two geologic periods.

At the time, they did not know where on Earth that impact might have taken place. It would be another 11 years before researchers Alan Hildebrand and Glen Penfield suggested that a crater left behind by an asteroid impact was buried on the Yucatan peninsula. With the crater nearly 200 kilometers (125 miles) in diameter, the impact was one large enough to have caused the mass extinction in agreement with the Alvarez hypothesis.

The force of the impact itself — there is evidence of giant earthquakes and tsunami waves more than 1,000 feet tall being generated in the immediate aftermath — and the following profound atmospheric changes combined to make the planet uninhabitable for between 40 and 70 percent of all life forms on Earth.

But rival explanations, though outside the mainstream, have continued to proliferate in high-profile fashion. One theory that has gained widespread attention attributes the mass extinction to a volcanic event in India that took place at roughly the same time as the impact. Another faction of researchers acknowledges that the asteroid did strike but that its effects were not enough to cause the mass extinction.

Norris notes that an inspection of ancient layers of seafloor sediment around the world show a clear record of the event contained in a red or green band composed of materials ejected from the blast. These include pieces of rock like those on the Yucatan, glassy droplets that represent melted rock, microscopic diamonds made under the very high pressures produced by the impact and meteoric debris.

"There are also monster submarine landslides along the entire East Coast of the U.S. from the massive earthquake triggered by the impact," he said.

Norris points to several pieces of evidence from the deep sea that support a tight link between the impact and the mass extinction. In most places in the deep ocean, the impact debris layer is associated with an abrupt decrease in the size of fossils — the appearance of a dwarfed "disaster" fauna. Abrupt environmental changes throughout history such as the impact tend to favor smaller organisms that have more rapid lifecycles and fewer resource needs than larger organisms. Biological productivity plummets in many parts of the oceans immediately after the impact. The drop in productivity is partly reflected by a change in the color of deep-sea sediments — from creamy white to brown or grey — as light-colored fossil shells abruptly decreased in number.

Individually, the decrease in fossil size, the appearance of a "disaster fauna" and the plummet in ocean productivity are unusual, and together with an impact debris layer, are unique in the deep-sea sediment record.

"This is not a 'smoking gun,'" said Norris, "it's a 'smoking cannon.'"

University of California - San Diego

Asilisaurus is part of a sister group to dinosaurs known as silesaurs. Silesaurs are considered dinosaur-like because they share many dinosaur characteristics but still lack key characteristics all dinosaurs share. The relationship between silesaurs and dinosaurs is analogous to the close relationship of humans and chimps. Even though the oldest dinosaurs discovered so far are only 230 million years old, the presence of their closest relatives 10 million years earlier implies that silesaurs and the dinosaur lineage had already diverged from common ancestors by 240 million years ago. Silesaurs continued to live side by side with early dinosaurs throughout much of the Triassic Period (between about 250 and 200 million years ago).

This is the first dinosaur-like animal recovered by archaeologists from the Triassic Period in Africa.

Fossil bones of at least 14 individuals were recovered from a single bone bed in southern Tanzania making it possible to reconstruct a nearly entire skeleton, except portions of the skull and hand. The individuals stood about 0.5 to 1 meter (1.5 to 3 feet) tall at the hips and were 1 to 3 meters (3 to 10 feet) long. They weighed about 10 to 30 kilograms (22 to 66 pounds). Asilisaurus walked on four legs and most likely ate plants or a combination of plants and meat. They lived about 240 million years ago.

Silesaurs have triangular teeth and a lower jaw with a beak like tip which suggest that they were specialized for an omnivorous and/or herbivorous diet. These same traits evolved independently in at least two dinosaur lineages. In all three cases, the features evolved in animals that were originally meat-eaters. Although difficult to prove, it's possible that this shift conferred an evolutionary advantage. An ecosystem can support far more plant eaters than meat eaters. So being able to eat plants might have opened up a broader range of habitats. Not counting modern birds, dinosaurs survived for about 180 million years.

This new species is found along with a number of primitive crocodilian relatives in the same fossil bed in southern Tanzania. The presence of these animals together at the same time and place suggests that the diversification of the relatives of crocodilians and birds was rapid and happened earlier than previously suggested. It sheds light on a group of animals that later came to dominate the terrestrial ecosystem throughout the Mesozoic (250 to 65 million years ago).

"Everyone loves dinosaurs," said Nesbitt. "But this new evidence suggests that they were really only one of several large and distinct groups of animals that exploded in diversity in the Triassic, including silesaurs, pterosaurs, and several groups of crocodilian relatives."

Silesaurus, the first known member of the silesaur group was discovered in 2003. In just 7 short years, specimens of 8 other members have been unearthed from Triassic rocks across the globe.

"This goes to show that there are whole groups of animals out there that we've never even found evidence of that were very abundant during the Triassic," said Nesbitt. "It's exciting because it means there is still so much chance for discovery."

The name Asilisaurus kongwe is derived from asili (Swahili for ancestor or foundation), sauros (Greek for lizard), and kongwe (Swahili for ancient).

University of Texas at Austin

"Many lines of evidence indicate that Darwinius has nothing at all to do with human evolution," says Chris Kirk, associate professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin. "Every year, scientists describe new fossils that contribute to our understanding of primate evolution. What's amazing about Darwinius is, despite the fact that it's nearly complete, it tells us very little that we didn't already know from fossils of closely related species."

His co-authors are anthropologists Blythe Williams and Richard Kay of Duke and evolutionary biologist Callum Ross of the University of Chicago. Williams, Kay and Kirk also collaborated on a related article about to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that reviews the early fossil record and anatomical features of anthropoids – the primate group that includes monkeys, apes, and humans.

Last spring's much-publicized article on Darwinius was released in conjunction with a book, a History Channel documentary, and an exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History. At a news conference attended by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the authors unveiled the nearly complete fossil of a nine-month-old female primate that had been found at the site of Messel in Germany.

But other anthropologists were immediately skeptical of the conclusions and began writing the responses that are being published this month.

"Just because it's a complete and well-preserved fossil doesn't mean it's going to overthrow all our ideas," says Williams, the lead author. "There's this enormous body of literature that has built up over the years. The Darwinius research completely ignored that body of literature."

That literature centers on the evolution of primates, which include haplorhines (apes, monkeys, humans, tarsiers) and strepsirrhines (lemurs, lorises). The two groups split from each other nearly 70 million years ago.

The fossil group to which Darwinius belongs – the adapiforms – have been known since the early 1800s and includes dozens of primate species represented by thousands of fossils recovered in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Some adapiforms, like North American Notharctus, are known from nearly complete skeletons like that of Darwinius. Most analyses of primate evolution over the past two decades have concluded that adapiforms are strepsirrhines, and not direct ancestors of modern humans.

The most recent such analysis, published last year in the journal Nature, concluded that Darwinius is an early strepsirrhine and a close relative of the 39-million-year- old primate Mahgarita stevensi from West Texas.

Nevertheless, the scientists who last year formally described Darwinius concluded that it was an early haplorhine, and even suggested that Darwinius and other adapiform fossils "could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates evolved."

For example, they note that Darwinius has a short snout and a deep jaw – two features that are found in monkeys, apes, and humans.

However, Kirk, Williams and their colleagues point out that short snouts and deep jaws are known to have evolved multiple times among primates, including several times within the lemur/loris lineage. They further argue that Darwinius lacks most of the key anatomical features that could demonstrate a close evolutionary relationship with living haplorhines (apes, monkeys, humans, and tarsiers).

For instance, haplorhines have a middle ear with two chambers and a plate of bone that shields the eyes from the chewing muscles.

"There is no evidence that Darwinius shared these features with living haplorhines," says Kirk. "And if you can't even make that case, you can forget about Darwinius being a close relative of humans or other anthropoids."

University of Texas at Austin

The fossils were first found in 1987 by dinosaur egg expert Dhananjay Mohabey from the Geological Survey of India, in rocks of the Lameta Formation in Gujarat, a state in western India known for its rich fossil record of dinosaurs and their eggs. Originally identified as a hatchling dinosaur, the fossils were recognized to include a snake by dinosaur paleontologist Jeff Wilson from the University of Michigan and Mohabey in 2001.

"I saw the characteristic vertebrae of a snake beside the dinosaur eggshell and larger bones, and I knew it was an extraordinary specimen ... even if I couldn't put the whole story together at that point. I just knew we needed to examine it further," said Wilson. They invited snake specialist Head and geologist Shanan Peters from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to collaborate on the study of the fossils, including field and lab work in India, the U.S.A., and Canada.

Sanajeh indicus, which means "ancient gape from India", is represented by a nearly complete skull and lower jaws along with vertebrae and ribs coiled around a crushed titanosaur egg, next to the remains of a 0.5-metre-long titanosaur hatchling. These dinosaurs, part of a larger group called sauropods, were long-necked, four-legged plant-eaters that grew to weigh up to 100 tonnes, and Wilson says they likely grew quickly in their first year, beyond the reach of predators like Sanajeh.

The findings—along with two other similar snake-egg pairings, suggest that snakes fed on titanosaur hatchlings when they emerged from their eggs. "The eggs were laid in loose sands and covered by a thin layer of sediment. We think that the hatchling had just exited its egg, and its movement attracted the snake," explains Mohabey. "It would have been a smorgasbord," says Head. "Hundreds or thousands of defenseless baby sauropods could have supported an ecosystem of predators during the hatching season."

The remains capture a moment in Cretaceous time. "Burial was rapid and deep," says Peters. "Probably a pulse of slushy sand and mud released during a storm caught them in the act."

University of Toronto