WFS

Formation of sedimentary layers of white clay, Tamilnadu, India

Fossil site for wood fossils, Tamilnadu, India

Fossil site in Kerala, India

Fossil wood park maintained by geological survey of India at Tamilnadu

Cretaceous fossil sites india

Fossils in rack:-Cyad

Fossils in rack:-echiniderms

Fossils in rack:-Rastellum sp

Pre-historic seabed, Cretaceous period

WFS News: Carbon concentration increases with depth of melting in Earth’s upper mantle

August 21st, 2021

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@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

Carbon concentration increases with depth of melting in Earth’s upper mantle

Aiuppa, A., Casetta, F., Coltorti, M. et al. Nat. Geosci. (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00797-y

Carbon in the upper mantle controls incipient melting of carbonated peridotite and so acts as a critical driver of plate tectonics. The carbon-rich melts that form control the rate of volatile outflux from the Earth’s interior, contributing to climate evolution over geological times. However, attempts to constrain the carbon concentrations of the mantle source beneath oceanic islands and continental rifts is complicated by pre-eruptive volatile loss from magmas. Here, we compile literature data on magmatic gases, as a surface expression of the pre-eruptive volatile loss, from 12 oceanic island and continental rift volcanoes. We find that the levels of carbon enrichment in magmatic gases correlate with the trace element signatures of the corresponding volcanic rocks, implying a mantle source control. We use this global association to estimate that the mean carbon concentration in the upper mantle, down to 200 km depth, is approximately 350 ppm (range 117–669 ppm). We interpret carbon mantle heterogeneities to reflect variable extents of mantle metasomatism from carbonated silicate melts. Finally, we find that the extent of carbon enrichment in the upper mantle positively correlates with the depth at which melting starts. Our results imply a major role of carbon in driving melt formation in the upper mantle.

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

WFS News: A billion years missing from geologic record: Where it may have gone.

August 20th, 2021

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@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

The geologic record is exactly that: a record. The strata of rock tell scientists about past environments, much like pages in an encyclopedia. Except this reference book has more pages missing than it has remaining. So geologists are tasked not only with understanding what is there, but also with figuring out what’s not, and where it went.

One omission in particular has puzzled scientists for well over a century. First noticed by John Wesley Powell in 1869 in the layers of the Grand Canyon, the Great Unconformity, as it’s known, accounts for more than one billion years of missing rock in certain places.

Scientists have developed several hypotheses to explain how, and when, this staggering amount of material may have been eroded. Now, UC Santa Barbara geologist Francis Macdonald and his colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at Colorado College believe they may have ruled out one of the more popular of these. Their study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There are unconformities all through the rock record,” explained Macdonald, a professor in the Department of Earth Science. “Unconformities are just gaps in time within the rock record. This one’s called the Great Unconformity because it was thought to be a particularly large gap, maybe a global gap.”

Hypothesized exhumation histories below the Great Unconformity. Orange bars depict geological constraints from Colorado. Hypothesis 1 (H1) depicts major erosion of the continents associated with assembly of the supercontinent Rodinia and mantle upwelling below it (14, 17). Hypothesis 2 (H2) depicts major erosion associated with the early breakup of Rodinia (10⇓⇓–13, 15, 16). Hypothesis 3 (H3) depicts an association with the Cryogenian Snowball Earth glaciations (18⇓⇓⇓–22). Hypothesis 4 (H4) depicts major erosion associated with the Cambrian transgressive buzzsaw and subsequent burial (4, 5), later rifting of Laurentian margins (23, 24), or the Pan-African orogeny and Transantarctic orogenies and construction of the supercontinent Pannotia (25, 26). An alternative hypothesis is that there are multiple Great Unconformities representing diachronous regional phenomena, and these features developed predominantly on Laurentia and its conjugate rifted margins.

A leading thought is that glaciers scoured away kilometers of rock around 720 to 635 million years ago, during a time known as Snowball Earth, when the planet was completely covered by ice. This hypothesis even has the benefit of helping to explain the rapid emergence of complex organisms shortly thereafter, in the Cambrian explosion, since all this eroded material could have seeded the oceans with tremendous amounts of nutrients.

Macdonald was skeptical of this reasoning. Although analogues of the Great Unconformity appear throughout the world — with similar amounts of rock missing from similar stretches of time — they don’t line up perfectly. This casts doubt as to whether they were truly eroded by a global event like Snowball Earth.

Part of the challenge of investigating the Great Unconformity is that it happened so long ago, and the Earth is a messy system. “These rocks have been buried and eroded multiple times through their history,” Macdonald said.

Fortunately, the team was able to test this hypothesis using a technique called thermochronology. A few kilometers below the Earth’s surface, the temperature begins to rise as you get closer to the planet’s hot mantle. This creates a temperature gradient of roughly 50 degrees Celsius for every kilometer of depth. And this temperature regime can become imprinted in certain minerals.

As certain radioactive elements in rocks break down, Helium-4 is produced. In fact helium is constantly being generated, but the fraction retained in different minerals is a function of temperature. As a result, scientists can use the ratio of helium to thorium and uranium in certain minerals as a paleo-thermometer. This phenomenon enabled Macdonald and his coauthors to track how rock moved in the crust as it was buried and eroded through the ages.

“These unconformities are forming again and again through tectonic processes,” Macdonald said. “What’s really new is we can now access this much older history.”

The team took samples from granite just below the boundary of the Great Unconformity at Pikes Peak in Colorado. They extracted grains of a particularly resilient mineral, zircon, from the stone and analyzed the radio nucleotides of helium contained inside. The technique revealed that several kilometers of rock had been eroded from above this granite between 1,000 and 720 million years ago.

Importantly, this stretch of time definitively came before the Snowball Earth episodes. In fact, it lines up much better with the periods in which the supercontinent Rodinia was forming and breaking apart. This offers a clue to the processes that may have stricken these years from the geologic record.

“The basic hypothesis is that this large-scale erosion was driven by the formation and separation of supercontinents,” Macdonald said.

The Earth’s cycle of supercontinent formation and separation uplifts and erodes incredible extents of rock over long periods of time. And because supercontinent processes, by definition, involve a lot of land, their effects can appear fairly synchronous across the geologic record.

However, these processes don’t happen simultaneously, as they would in a global event like Snowball Earth. “It’s a messy process,” Macdonald said. “There are differences, and now we have the ability to perhaps resolve those differences and pull that record out.”

While Macdonald’s results are consistent with a tectonic origin for these great unconformities, they don’t end the debate. Geologists will need to complement this work with similar studies in other regions of the world in order to better constrain these events.

The mystery of the Great Unconformity is inherently tied to two of geology’s other great enigmas: the rise and fall of Snowball Earth and the sudden emergence of complex life in the Ediacaran and Cambrian. Progress in any one could help researchers finally crack the lot.

“The Cambrian explosion was Darwin’s dilemma,” Macdonald remarked. “This is a 200-year old question. If we can solve that, we would definitely be rock stars.”

Journal Reference:

Rebecca M. Flowers, Francis A. Macdonald, Christine S. Siddoway, Rachel Havranek. Diachronous development of Great Unconformities before Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; 201913131 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1913131117

University of California – Santa Barbara. “A billion years missing from geologic record: Where it may have gone.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 7 May 2020. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200507130704.htm>.

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

WFS News: Prehistoric Bat Fossil Discovered

July 18th, 2021

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@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

A new paper appearing in Biology Letters describes the oldest-known fragmentary bat fossils from Asia, pushing back the evolutionary record for bats on that continent to the dawn of the Eocene and boosting the possibility that the bat family’s “mysterious” origins someday might be traced to Asia.

A team based at the University of Kansas and China performed the fieldwork in the Junggar Basin — a very remote sedimentary basin in northwest China — to discover two fossil teeth belonging to two separate specimens of the bat, dubbed Altaynycteris aurora.

Upper molars of Altaynycteris aurora. IVPP V27157, holotype right M1, in buccal (a), occlusal (b) and lingual view (c); IVPP V27158, right M3, in buccal (d), occlusal (e) and lingual view (f). Metaconule indicated with (M) and postparaconule crista indicated with (P). Scale bar is 0.5 mm.

The new fossil specimens help scientists better understand bat evolution and geographic distribution and better grasp how mammals developed in general.

“Bats show up in the fossil record out of the blue about 55-ish million years ago — and they’re already scattered on different parts of the globe,” said lead author Matthew Jones, a doctoral student at the KU Biodiversity Institute and Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. “Before this, the earliest bats are known from a couple of places in Europe — Portugal and southern France — and Australia. So, when they show up early in the fossil record as these fragmentary fossils they’re already effectively worldwide. By the time we get their earliest known full skeletons, they look modern — they can fly, and most of them are able to echolocate. But we don’t really know anything about this transitional period from non-bats to bats. We don’t even really know what their closest living relatives are among mammals. It’s a really big evolutionary mystery where bats came from and how they evolved and became so specialized.”

Jones’ co-authors were K. Christopher Beard, senior curator at the KU Biodiversity Institute and Foundation Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at KU; and Qiang Li and Xijun Ni of the Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Center for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The ancient bat teeth were discovered through painstaking fieldwork in the Junggar Basin, where the KU researchers worked at an isolated field site established by their Chinese colleagues, one of two sites in the region the team hope will continue yielding interesting fossils.

“This was concerted effort over a long period of time by our Chinese colleagues,” Jones said.

“They suspected that there were fossiliferous deposits from the Paleocene and Eocene, and they spent several years going out there, identifying where to find fossils. Chris was a part of several seasons of fieldwork there. I was a part of one season of fieldwork there. What we did was collect a bunch of sediment to screen wash, which is sort of like panning for gold. You pour a bunch of sediment into a sievelike apparatus and let all the dirt and everything fall out, and you’re only left with particles of a certain size, but also fossils.”

Beard said the fieldwork was an outgrowth of long-standing relationships between the KU team and its Chinese counterparts.

“We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to host our Chinese colleagues here in Lawrence for extended research visits, and they’ve more than reciprocated by hosting us for research and fieldwork in China. This work in the Junggar Basin is really trailblazing work because the fossil record in this part of China is only just barely beginning to emerge, and this area is very removed and isolated. It’s just a giant empty place. There are some camels, some snakes and lizards, but you don’t see many people there. That remoteness makes the logistics to do fieldwork there quite difficult and expensive because you’ve got to bring in all your food and water from far outside — all of that hindered research in this area previously.”

Following the challenging fieldwork, the residue left behind from the screen washing at the site was sorted at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.

“In 2017, after we got back from the field, Xijun said. ‘Hey, one of the technicians picking through this sediment thinks they found a bat,'” Jones said. “Knowing I was interested in bats, they showed it to me. The next year, the other tooth was found — so there’s two teeth.”

Through meticulous morphological analysis of the teeth, along with biostratigraphy — or analyzing the position of layers of fossil remains in the deposits — the authors were able to date the specimens to the advent of the Eocene, the earliest period when bat fossils have been found anywhere on Earth. Indeed, the presence of these ancient bat fossils in Asia bolsters a theory that bats could have emerged from there in the first place, then distributed themselves worldwide when they later developed flight.

More fieldwork in the area is ongoing, and Jones and Beard said they were hopeful to find even older specimens, perhaps even dating to the Paleocene, the epoch before the Eocene, when researchers believe bats probably originated. Yet the particulars of Altaynycteris aurora remain hazy — for instance, it’s impossible to say from teeth fragments if the animal could fly or echolocate.

“These teeth look intermediate, in between what we would expect a bat ancestor to look like — and in fact, what a lot of early Cenozoic insectivorous mammals to do look like — and what true bat looks like,” Jones said. “So, they have some features that are characteristic of bats that we can point to and say, ‘These are bats.’ But then they have some features that we can call for simplicity’s sake ‘primitive.'”

The researchers said the new fossils help fill in a gap to understanding the evolution of bats, which remains a puzzle to experts — and could teach us more about mammals in general.

“I can think of two mammal groups that are alive today that are really weird,” Beard said. “One of them is bats, because they fly — and that’s just ridiculous. The other one is whales, because they’re completely adapted to life in the ocean, they can swim, obviously, and they do a little bit of sonar echolocation themselves. We know a lot about transitional fossils for whales. There are fossils from places like Pakistan that were quadrupedal mammals that looked vaguely doglike. We have a whole sequence of fossils linking these things that were clearly terrestrial animals walking around on land, through almost every kind of transitional phase you can imagine, to a modern whale. This isn’t true for bats. For bats, literally you’ve got a normal mammal and then you’ve got bats — and anytime you’ve got a fossil record that’s a giant vacuum, we need work that can fill partly that. This paper is at least a step along that path.”

Matthew F. Jones, Qiang Li, Xijun Ni, K. Christopher Beard. The earliest Asian bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera) address major gaps in bat evolution. Biology Letters, 2021; 17 (6): 20210185 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2021.0185

Citation :University of Kansas. “Researchers detail the most ancient bat fossil ever discovered in Asia.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 7 July 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210707112556.htm>.

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WFS News: Evidence of preserved collagen in an Early Jurassic sauropodomorph dinosaur revealed by synchrotron FTIR microspectroscopy

July 17th, 2021

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@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

Evidence of preserved collagen in an Early Jurassic sauropodomorph dinosaur revealed by synchrotron FTIR microspectroscopy

Lee, YC., Chiang, CC., Huang, PY. et al.

Nat Commun 8, 14220 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14220

New research from scientists at the University of Toronto and researchers in China and Taiwan provides the first evidence that proteins have been preserved within the 195-million-year-old rib of the sauropodomorph dinosaur Lufengosaurus. The study appears in the Jan. 31 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

“These dinosaur proteins are more than 100 million years older than anything previously discovered,” says Professor Robert Reisz, a specialist in vertebrate paleontology in the department of biology at U of T Mississauga. “These proteins are the building blocks of animal soft tissues, and it’s exciting to understand how they have been preserved.”

The Canada-Taiwan research team, led by Reisz, used the synchrotron at the Taiwanese National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre to find the substance in place, known as collagen type I, preserved within the tiny vascular canals of the rib where blood vessels and blood would be in the living dinosaur.

(a) Rib before sectioning, (b) transverse section of the rib, small black circles are the central vascular canals in the osteons, (c) longitudinal section of the rib showing distribution of infilled vascular canals, (d–h) close ups of preserved collagen-infilling materials within the vascular canals of the rib; flat transparent preserved protein fragments that were washed out from the cut canals, as explained in the main text, are indicated by red arrows, f,h are the dark-field images of e,g, respectively, (i) SR-TXM image of microcrystals of haematite within the vascular canal, indicated by red squares, (j) microcrystal of haematite inside the vascular canal, (k) tomographic images of haematite crystal in different views, (l) lacuna within the bone matrix and (m) tomographic images of lacunae in different views.

The collagen was found together with lots of small, spherical hematite particles. Hematite is a mineral that can be formed from the iron in hemoglobin, the oxygen-transport protein in red blood cells. The chemical bond between iron and oxygen is what gives blood cells their red colour.

Reisz and his colleagues believe that these hematite particles were derived from the original blood of the dinosaur, and that they acted as the catalyst for preserving the protein in the vascular canals of the bone. These collagen pieces are probably remnants of the blood vessels that supplied blood to the bone cells in the living dinosaur.

Baseline-corrected and normalized characteristic infrared band assignment for preserved collagen within the central vascular canals shown in red, and the peaks were assigned for methyl group (sCH3 and as CH3) and methylene (sCH2 and as CH2) in the spectral range of 3,000–2,800 cm−1 as shown in the blue inset, collagen type I from extant calf skin dispersed in 0.1% acetic acid solution in green, preserved protein remains in flat fragments found in and near the central canals of the fossil bone in blue, bone matrix in brown, extant bacteria biofilm in black and epoxy resin in pink. It is evident that the spectra of preserved collagen and extant collagen type I are closely matched. The extant bacterial biofilm showed significant differences from fossil or extant collagen in the range of 3,100–3,600 cm−1 region (sOH).

“Interestingly, there was no evidence of preservation of organic remains in the main mass of the bone, only in the small vascular canals that ran along the length of the rib, where hematite was also present” says Reisz.

“Our localized search, in areas of the bone that are likely to preserve remnants of the original soft tissues, is more likely to succeed than previously used methods. This approach has great future potential, because localized searches will yield important results even when the amount of organic remains is miniscule.”

Previous evidence of preserved collagen date back to the Late Cretaceous Period — more than 100 million years younger than this discovery — but those studies extracted the organic remains by dissolving away all other parts of the fossil, without a clear understanding of the precise origins of the collagen.

This research allowed the scientists to find the collagen in place without dissolving the rest of the fossil, and it has helped them understand how the organic remains were preserved. Reisz believes that future explorations for even older proteins will be possible if this technique is used.

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WFS News: Molecular and Paleontological Evidence for a Post-Cretaceous Origin of Rodents

July 16th, 2021

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@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

Molecular and Paleontological Evidence for a Post-Cretaceous Origin of Rodents

Citation: Wu S, Wu W, Zhang F, Ye J, Ni X, Sun J, et al. (2012) Molecular and Paleontological Evidence for a Post-Cretaceous Origin of Rodents. PLoS ONE 7(10): e46445. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0046445

Editor: Alistair Robert Evans, Monash University, Australia

The timing of the origin and diversification of rodents remains controversial, due to conflicting results from molecular clocks and paleontological data. The fossil record tends to support an early Cenozoic origin of crown-group rodents. In contrast, most molecular studies place the origin and initial diversification of crown-Rodentia deep in the Cretaceous, although some molecular analyses have recovered estimated divergence times that are more compatible with the fossil record. Here we attempt to resolve this conflict by carrying out a molecular clock investigation based on a nine-gene sequence dataset and a novel set of seven fossil constraints, including two new rodent records (the earliest known representatives of Cardiocraniinae and Dipodinae). Our results indicate that rodents originated around 61.7–62.4 Ma, shortly after the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary, and diversified at the intraordinal level around 57.7–58.9 Ma. These estimates are broadly consistent with the paleontological record, but challenge previous molecular studies that place the origin and early diversification of rodents in the Cretaceous. This study demonstrates that, with reliable fossil constraints, the incompatibility between paleontological and molecular estimates of rodent divergence times can be eliminated using currently available tools and genetic markers. Similar conflicts between molecular and paleontological evidence bedevil attempts to establish the origination times of other placental groups. The example of the present study suggests that more reliable fossil calibration points may represent the key to resolving these controversies.

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WFS News: Evidence of a belemnite’s “killer”

July 14th, 2021

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@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T sajeev

During the early Jurassic period, a squid-like creature was in the midst of devouring a crustacean, when it was interrupted by another marine beast, possibly a shark, that chomped into its squishy side and killed it, a new study finds.

The shark swam away, but the crustacean and the squid-like animal — a 10-armed and two-finned creature called a belemnite — sank to the bottom of the sea, where they fossilized together over the subsequent eras in what is now Germany.

The resulting 180 million-year-old fossil is “unique,” one of about “10 specimens of belemnites with [well-preserved] soft tissues worldwide,” study lead researcher Christian Klug, curator of the University of Zurich’s Palaeontological Museum and a professor at its Palaeontological Institute, told Live Science in an email.

The specimen also shows how predators sometimes become prey themselves. “Predators tend to be happy when they are eating, forgetting to pay good attention to their surroundings and potential danger,” Klug said. “That might explain why the belemnite got caught, but there is no proof for that.”

The fossil also inspired a new term: pabulite, from the Latin words “pabulum” and “lithos,” which mean “food” and “stone,” respectively. Palubite refers to meal “leftovers” that never enter the predator’s digestive system and later fossilize — in this case, that leftover would be the belemnite, the researchers wrote in the study.

A pabulite can “provide evidence for incomplete predation,” which is likely what happened here, the researchers wrote in the study. In fact, it’s possible that the shark purposefully targeted the belemnite’s squishy parts, rather than its pointy hard tip, known as the rostrum. Vertebrate predators likely learned to avoid the hard-to-digest rostra, and as a result may have “bit off the soft parts, which were poorly protected,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Amataur fossil collector Dieter Weber discovered the specimen in 1970 in a small quarry near Holzmaden, a small village near Stuttgart in southwestern Germany. Study co-researcher Günter Schweigert, curator of Jurassic and Cretaceous invertebrates at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart (SMNS), saw the specimen in 2019 while visiting Weber’s collection, and SMNS purchased it soon after.

The fossilized remains of the belemnite (Passaloteuthis bisulcata) and the crustacean (Proeryon). Notice all the tiny hooks that covered the belemnite’s arms (right). (Image credit: Klug et al. Swiss J Palaeontol (2021); (CC BY 4.0))

Researchers immediately got to work studying the specimen. The belemnite, they discovered, was the well-known species Passaloteuthis laevigata, whose fossilized remains have been found in Europe and Morocco in rocks dating to the Toarcian age (183 million to 174 million years ago). P. laevigata was a small creature, with a nearly 4-inch-long (9.3 centimeters) bullet-shaped rostrum; each of its 10 arms were up to 3.5 inches (9 cm) long and carried double rows of arm-hooks. These hooks, 400 in all, would have helped P. laevigata grip slippery prey, Klug said.

“In this individual, two arms were modified, bearing large hooks,” Klug noted, “We guess that these were used for mating and possibly only males had them, while in females, all 10 arms were similar, but we have no proof for that yet.”

An illustration of the fossilized remains. Notice the belemnite’s rostrum (left) and its large hooks (right). (Image credit: Klug et al. Swiss J Palaeontol (2021); (CC BY 4.0))

Belemnites are now extinct, but fossils reveal that they had an internal shell surrounded by muscles and skin, Klug said. These strong horizontal swimmers actively preyed on sealife, including fish and crustaceans, and in turn were eaten by sharks and dolphin-like predators known as ichthyosaurs, he said.

So, it’s no surprise that this belemnite was chomping on a crustacean from the genus Proeryon, which had a broad and flat lobster-like body and long, slender claws, Klug said. However, the Proeryon was poorly preserved, so “we think that these are remains of an old skin (a molt),” he wrote in the email. “Crayfish remove much of the calcium from the shell before they molt, because they later put it into the new skin.”

Cephalopods (a group that includes octopuses, squid and nautiluses) “do love to eat this old skin,” Klug added. “Much of it is lying really between the arms of the belemnite, quite close to its mouth, so it is likely that the belemnite was actually feeding on it.”

Although parts of the belemnite are well preserved, including its rostrum and arms, much of its body is missing. This is why “we must conclude that a larger predator ate most of the belemnite,” Klug said.

What ate the belemnite?

A prime candidate for the belemnite’s “killer” is the early Jurassic shark Hybodus hauffianus. A previously described H. hauffianus fossil was stuffed with belemnite remains, including dozens of rostra.

That particular H. hauffianus “possibly ran into a swarm of belemnites and got too enthusiastic about it: It ate about 200 of them but forgot to bite off the rostra, thereby clogging its stomach, which eventually killed it,” Klug said.

Other suspects include large predatory fish, such as Pachycormus and Saurorhynchus, the marine crocodile Steneosaurus, and the ichthyosaur Stenopterygius, whose fossilized stomach remains contain belemnite mega-hooks, the researchers wrote in the study.

The study was published online April 29 in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology.

Originally published on Live Science.

Source: Article By Laura Geggel – Editor , livescience.com

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WFS News: Shingopana, New species of gigantic, long necked dinosaur

July 11th, 2021

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@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

Shingopana roamed the Cretaceous landscape alongside Rukwatitan bisepultus, another titanosaur identified in 2014

Scientists have discovered a new species of long-necked titanosaurian dinosaur in Tanzania that lived about 70 to 100 million years ago.

The new species named Shingopana songwensis is a member of the gigantic, long-necked sauropods. Its fossil was discovered in the Songwe region of the Great Rift Valley in southwestern Tanzania.

“There are anatomical features present only in Shingopana and in several South American titanosaurs, but not in other African titanosaurs,” said Eric Gorscak, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, US.

“Shingopana had siblings in South America, whereas other African titanosaurs were only distant cousins,” Gorscak added.

The team conducted phylogenetic analyses to understand the evolutionary relationships of these and other titanosaurs.

They found that Shingopana was more closely related to titanosaurs of South America than to any of the other species currently known from Africa or elsewhere.

Source : Zee News.com

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WFS News: Evidence of ancient protein?

July 5th, 2021

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@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

Dinosaurs roamed the Earth more than 65 million years ago, and paleontologists and amateur fossil hunters are still unearthing traces of them today. The minerals in fossilized eggs and shell fragments provide snapshots into these creatures’ early lives, as well as their fossilization processes. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry have analyzed the molecular makeup of fossilized dinosaur eggshells from Mexico, finding nine amino acids and evidence of ancient protein structures.

Current research indicates that all dinosaurs laid eggs, though most haven’t survived the test of time. And because whole eggs and shell fragments are very rare fossils, their mineral composition has not been widely investigated. Previously, Abel Moreno and colleagues reported the micro-architectures of eggshells from several species of dinosaurs found in Baja California. Although other teams have shown that some dinosaur eggshells contained calcium carbonate, carbohydrates and other compounds, no one has done similar analyses on the shells of species that Moreno’s team had collected. So, as a next step, these researchers wanted to look at the mineral and organic carbon-based components in fossilized eggshells from species that hatched in the Late Cretaceous.

The researchers collected five fossilized eggshells from dinosaurs in the Theropod (bipedal carnivores) and Hadrosauridae (duck-billed dinosaurs) families and an unidentified ootaxon. They found that calcium carbonate was the primary mineral, with smaller amounts of albite and quartz crystals. Anhydrite, hydroxyapatite and iron oxide impurities were also present in the shells, which the researchers suggest replaced some of the original minerals during fossilization. Then, with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), the team found nine amino acids among the five samples, but only lysine was in all of them. In addition, they identified evidence of secondary protein structures, including turns, ?-helices, ?-sheets and disordered structures, which were preserved for millions of years by being engrained in the minerals. The FT-IR bands corresponding to amino acids and secondary structures could be indicative of ancestral proteins that have not been characterized before, the researchers say.

Nerith Rocío Elejalde-Cadena, José Octavio Estevez, Vicente Torres-Costa, María Dolores Ynsa-Alcalá, Gastón García-López, Abel Moreno. Molecular Analysis of the Mineral Phase and Examination of Possible Intramineral Proteins of Dinosaur Eggshells Collected in El Rosario, Baja California, Mexico. ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, 2021; 5 (6): 1552 DOI: 10.1021/acsearthspacechem.1c00077

Source: www.sciencedaily.com.

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WFS News: Enantiornithes,smallest known prehistoric baby bird

June 28th, 2021

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@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

Image courtesy: University of Manchester

A tiny fossil of a prehistoric baby bird dating back to the Mesozoic Era (250-65 million years ago) has been discovered by scientists, which they feel can help them understand how early avians came into the world in the age of dinosaurs.

According to researchers at the University of Manchester in the UK, the fossil is a chick from a group of prehistoric birds called Enantiornithes.

Measuring less than five centimeters – smaller than the little finger on an average human hand – the specimen is amongst the smallest known Mesozoic avian fossils ever discovered. It is made up of a nearly complete skeleton and would have weighed just three ounces when it was alive.

What makes this fossil so important and unique is the fact it died not long after its birth, researchers said. This is a critical stage in a bird’s skeletal formation. That means this bird’s extremely short life has given researchers a rare chance to analyze the species’ bone structure and development.

Source : https://zeenews.india.com.

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WFS News: Fossil pollen ‘sneeze’ caught by research team

June 26th, 2021

Riffin

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev

Like capturing a sneeze, researchers including a University of Guelph scientist have recorded the only known example of prehistoric pollen caught in explosive mid-discharge from a fossil flower.

The team describes this “freeze-frame” fossilized pollen release — preserved in amber more than 20 million years ago — in a paper describing a new genus of fossil nettle plants.

The researchers captured on camera pollen explosions.

The paper is co-authored by Peter Kevan, emeritus professor in the School of Environmental Sciences. It appears in the journal Botany alongside another paper by a second team that also includes the U of G researcher.

That second paper looks at a modern-day plant relative in Latin America that is surprising researchers with its use of explosive pollen release, a fair-weather dispersal method seemingly ill-suited to its home in humid tropical rainforests.

In their fossil paper, Kevan and his co-authors describe a new genus (Ekrixanthera, meaning “explosive anther”) containing two new species of extinct plants related to modern-day nettles.

These fossil plants were preserved during the mid-Tertiary period, said Kevan. By then, dinosaurs were long-extinct and non-human mammals roamed Earth.

The samples came from the Dominican Republic and Mexico.

One Mexican sample has preserved pollen grains caught in mid-discharge from the male plant’s anther.

This pollen burst normally takes less than one-tenth of a second, said Kevan. “It’s remarkable that it was captured. It’s like catching a sneeze.”

He was asked to help identify the plants by lead author George Poinar Jr., an expert on amber fossils at Oregon State University.

“We ended up with the new genus because the flowers do not match those of any modern species,” said Kevan. “This tells us something about how old that group of plants is, and that this pollination mechanism goes back a long way.”

That form of pollen dispersal is also described in the second paper about modern-day tropical nettles. Boehmeria caudata grows from southern North America to northern Argentina.

Explosive pollen release is “something you don’t expect in the rainforest. Pollen blasted into the air is likely to get rained out.”

Most tropical plants rely instead on such creatures as insects, bats and birds rather than wind pollination, said Kevan.

In this group of nettles, the male plant disperses its pollen during short dry periods. Even during the rainy season, short sunny periods of high heat and low humidity trigger pollen release.

Drying causes parts of its stamens to shrink unevenly. Physical tension ruptures the anther to release an explosive burst of pollen.

That quick-release mechanism propels pollen into air currents and allows the male flowers to react to short-term weather conditions.

Kevan’s co-authors are students at the University of Sao Paulo led by Paula Maria Montoya-Pfeiffer. They studied Boehmeria during a pollination course taught in Brazil by Kevan in late 2014.

He and colleagues have taught that course in several Latin American countries for decades.

George Poinar, Peter G. Kevan, Betsy R. Jackes. Fossil species in Boehmerieae (Urticaceae) in Dominican and Mexican amber: a new genus (Ekrixanthera) and two new species with anemophilous pollination by explosive pollen release, and possible lepidopteran herbivory1. Botany, 2016; 94 (8): 599 DOI: 10.1139/cjb-2016-0006

Source: University of Guelph. “Fossil pollen ‘sneeze’ caught by research team.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 30 August 2016. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160830160654.htm>

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev