50-Million-Year-Old Insect Trove Found in Indian Amber

A collection of amber deposits unearthed in northwest India has opened a spectacular window into insect life some 50 million years ago.  Amber is the geological name for fossilized tree resin, which often preserves insects that get stuck in it.

Although the new amber didn’t yield bizarre new species, it’s still loaded with fossil treasures. More than 700 insect species representing 55 families of insects have been identified inside. Among them are ancient bees, termites and ants — highly social insects that form some of the world’s most complex societies.

In the years to come, scientists will compare these ancient specimens to modern forms and develop a deeper understanding of how these creatures have evolved.

Original article here.

Scientists find oldest record of life on Earth

Fossils from Australia show life on Earth began at least 650 million years ago, 70 million years earlier than previous estimates, according to a recent report.

Scientists came upon the fossils while researching a massive ice age, known as the “snowball effect,” that left much of the planet covered in ice 635 million years ago. Scientists had thought life could not have survived that ice age. But as they inspected a glacial deposit in south Australia, they found the fossils of the sponge-like ocean reef animals.

The researchers call the animals sponge-like because the fossil record shows them to have a network of internal canals, likely for filtering food from seawater as sponges do. The earliest fossilized record of sponges had been 520 million years ago. The earliest fossils of hard-bodies animals date to 550 million years ago.

The scientists published their findings in the August 17 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

Original article here.

Preserved 165-million Year Old Spider Fossible Found

Scientists have unearthed an almost perfectly preserved spider fossil in China dating back to the middle Jurassic era, 165 million years ago.

The fossils were found at a site called Daohugou in Northern China that is filled with fossilized salamanders, small primitive mammals, insects, and water crustaceans. During the Jurassic era, the fossil bed was part of a lake in a volcanic region.

Spider fossils from this period are rare, because the arachnids’ soft bodies don’t preserve well. The pristine fossil pictured in these photos was probably created when the spider was trapped in volcanic ash. The ultra-fine clay particles squashed the spider without breaking up the animals’ delicate cuticle as more coarse sediment would.

Original article here.

Fossils Push Back Earliest Complex Animals 40 Million Years

A series of fossils unearthed in southwestern China has revealed the origins of complex life in unprecedented detail, and pushed its beginning back by at least 40 million years.

The specimens come from the Doushantuo formation, a layer of sediments deposited about 590 million years ago, just before the Ediacaran period’s primordial fauna gave way to the complex creatures of the Cambrian explosion.

During the Ediacaran, even the most structurally complicated animals had flat bodies with simple symmetry, like living quilts or mattresses. It was only during the Cambrian that animals developed what’s known as bilateral symmetry — a distinct front and back, top and bottom.

The Doushantuo fossils date to the cusp of this transition, and are so finely preserved that scientists can distinguish the structures of individual cells. The latest fossils aren’t even fully formed animals, but embryos.

Using synchrotron radiation microtomography — a microscopy technique that combines thousands of of X-rays taken from different angles — researchers reconstructed the embryos in three-dimensional detail. They found that the embryos were bilaterally symmetrical, and were organized so differently that they belonged to two distinct taxonomic groups. For those groups to be so different, bilateral symmetry must have been around for a while.

Original article here.

Whale Fossil Found in Limestone Kitchen Counter

Feathers Predated Flight in Dinosaur-Bird Hybrid

A part-bird, part-dinosaur described in the journal Nature didn't have feathers for flying, but did possess ornamental plumage, including four tailfeathers three times longer than its pigeon-sized body.

Epidexipteryx lived during the middle-to-late Jurassic, predating the famed Archaeoptryx, and represents an alternative evolutionary pathway from dinosaurs to birds.

The discovery by the Chinese Academy of Sciences adds complexity to the presumed road from T-rex to turkey vulture because the creature looks like a mythological chimera. And that, in the words of the authors of the paper, is "bizarre".

Original article here.

Giant prehistoric geese the size of small plane

Scientists have discovered that giant prehistoric geese the size of small aircraft once flew over Britain.

Dasornis, which had a 16 ft wingspan and sharp teeth, lived 50 million years ago and was related to present-day ducks and geese. Once it skimmed the waters which covered what is now London, Essex and Kent, snapping up fish and squid with its bony-toothed beak. Scientists announced the discovery of one of the best preserved Dasornis fossil skulls buried in clay on the Isle of Sheppey.

Dasornis was in many ways similar to the modern albatross, which has the largest wingspan of any living bird, but research has shown that its closest cousins are ducks and geese. Perhaps the strangest thing about them is that they had sharp, tooth-like projections along the cutting edges of the beak.

No living birds have true teeth - which are made of enamel and dentine - because their distant ancestors did away with them more than 100 million years ago, probably to save weight and make flying easier. But the bony-toothed birds, like Dasornis, are unique among birds in that they reinvented tooth-like structures by evolving these bony spikes. These spikes would have enabled them to skim across the surface of the sea while snapping up fish and squid.

Original article here.

World's Oldest Rocks Found, with Signs of Life

Earth's most ancient rocks, with an age of 4.28 billion years, have been found on the shore of Hudson Bay, Canada. The sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone is 250 million years older than any rocks known.

It may even hold evidence of activity by ancient life forms. If so, it would be the earliest evidence of life on Earth.

The rocks contain geological structures which might only have been formed if early life forms were present on the planet. The material displays a banded iron formation - fine ribbon-like bands of alternating magnetite and quartz. This feature is typical of rock precipitated in deep sea hydrothermal vents - which have been touted as potential habitats for early life on Earth. These ribbons could imply that that 4.3 billion years ago Earth had an ocean with hydrothermal circulation. Some scientists believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria. If true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life.

Original article here.

More Giant Rodents!

Paleontologists have discovered a fossil of a 1-ton rodent in Uruguay. The fossil (called Josephoartigasia monesi) is around 2 million years old. The rodent's 21-inch skull was discovered in a broken boulder. By comparing the skull's dimensions to the body sizes of existing rodents, the researchers determined that its owner probably weighed about 2200 pounds, making it the world's largest known rodent.

However, unlike today's rodents, the relatively small size of the animal's teeth suggests it did not have a great deal of chewing power and might have fed on soft vegetables and fruit.

The discovery displaces Phoberomys pattersoni, a 1500 pound cousin of the guinea pig that roamed the Orinoco delta in Northern Venezuela some 8 million years ago (see picture below and article here).

Man-sized Sea Scorpion claw found

Scientists have discovered an immense fossilized claw of an 8-foot sea scorpion. The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a German quarry.

The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp. The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.

The eurypterids (sea scorpions) are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of modern land scorpions and possibly all arachnids (the class of animals that also includes spiders).

Baby Mammoth Found in Permafrost

The discovery of a baby mammoth preserved in the Russian permafrost gives researchers their best chance yet to build a genetic map of a species extinct since the Ice Age. The mammoth, a female who died at the age of six months, was named "Lyuba." She had been lying in the frozen ground for up to 40,000 years. Weighing 110 pounds and measuring 85 centimeters high and 130 centimeters from trunk to tail, Lyuba is roughly the same size as a large dog.

The fact the mammoth was so remarkably well-preserved -- its shaggy coat was gone but otherwise it looked as though it had only recently died -- meant it was a potential treasure trove for scientists. Its skin condition protects all the internal organs from modern microbes and micro-organisms.

World's largest fossil forest found in Illinois coal mine

Illinois geologists have discovered the remains of one of the world's oldest tropical rainforests, preserved in the ceiling of a coal mine 250 feet below the surface. The fossil forest encompasses four square miles, which is the largest find ever.

Plant fossils are common in coal beds, as coal is the compacted result of peaty plant material. But scientists are surprised by the size of this fossil bed, which they suspect came about because of a freak event: an earthquake that flooded and buried the forest. The vast extent of the fossil forest, which existed in a swampy time of giant dragonflies and tree ferns, has allowed the scientists to infer subtle ecological changes across the ancient landscape.

These are the remnants of extinct plants from a geological period 300 million years ago, called the Carboniferous, when the world was covered in a riot of green. Illinois was near the equator and much warmer and wetter. It was also a time before flowering plants had evolved, and so the plants would seem bizarre to modern eyes.

Giant tree ferns would have formed a lower canopy 30 feet high. Poking up through the ferns would have been 100-foot-tall clubmosses — asparagus-like poles that sprouted crowns full of spores. It was the age of insects, with 6-foot-long millipedes and dragonflies with yard-long wingspans.

When the ancient earthquake hit, a sudden flooding in the submerged block killed the rainforest. Mud and silt rushed into the depression, preserving the stumps and logs in a layer that eventually became shale.

New Zealand Fossil Challenges Scientific Theory

A team of scientists has discovered a unique, primitive type of land mammal that lived at least 16 million years ago in New Zealand. The discovery of tiny fossilized bones of a mouse-like creature in the Central Otago region is the first hard evidence that New Zealand once had its own indigenous land mammals. The finding could prompt a major rewrite of pre-history textbooks.

Scientists have long believed that New Zealand had an unusual avian biota that lived on the ground because there were no mammals to impede or compete with birds. It appears that this little mouselike animal was part of the fauna on the ancient Gondwana supercontinent and it got stuck on New Zealand when it separated from the continent more than 80 million years ago. The discovery also challenges geological claims that New Zealand was entirely submerged beneath the sea from 25 to 30 million years ago and re-colonized by plant and animal species from nearby land masses like Australia once it re-emerged.

Flying Mammal From 125 Million Years Ago

Scientists have discovered an extinct animal the size of a small squirrel that lived in China at least 125 million years ago and soared among the trees. It is the earliest known example of gliding flight by mammals, and the scientists say it shows that mammals experimented with aerial life about the same time birds first took to the skies, perhaps even earlier.

From an analysis of the fossil, the researchers concluded that this gliding mammal was unrelated to the modern flying squirrel and unlike any other animal in the Mesozoic, the period best known for dinosaurs living in the company of small mammals. They announced today that the species qualified as a member of an entirely new order of mammals.

Until now, the earliest identified gliding mammal was a 30-million-year-old extinct rodent. The first known modern bat, which is capable of powered flight, dates to 51 million years ago, but it is assumed that early bats were probably gliding much earlier.

Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, lived about 145 million years ago, though scientists are not sure if it could flap its feathered wings in fully powered flight. But it lived about the time birds did take off in flight.

The discovery of the new flying mammal was made last year in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China. Farmers found the delicate fossil embedded in sandstone.

Dolphin with "Remains of Legs"

Researchers in Japan captured a bottlenose dolphin that has an extra set of fins that could be the remains of back legs (see picture). This discovery may provide further evidence that dolphins once lived on land.

Fossil remains show dolphins and whales were four-footed land animals about 50 million years ago and share the same common ancestor as hippos and deer. Scientists believe they later transitioned to an aquatic lifestyle and their hind limbs disappeared.

Though odd-shaped protrusions have been found near the tails of dolphins and whales captured in the past, researchers say this was the first time one had been found with well-developed, symmetrical fins.

Ten-Foot Terror Bird!

The fossil of a giant carnivorous bird (2) has been found in Patagonia. It is the largest known avian skull to have ever been found.

The 10ft-tall extinct phorusrhacids (or "Terror Birds") were vicious flightless birds able to snap up dog-sized creatures that flourished in South America between 60 million and two million years ago. The find suggests that these monstrous birds, which are thought to have weighed up to half a ton, were probably more agile and less portly than previously thought.