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

500 million years old fossilized embryos found

April 11th, 2014

Riffin

The Cambrian Period is a time when most phyla of marine invertebrates first appeared in the fossil record. Also dubbed the “Cambrian explosion,” fossilized records from this time provide glimpses into evolutionary biology when the world’s ecosystems rapidly changed and diversified. Most fossils show the organisms’ skeletal structure, which may or may not give researchers accurate pictures of these prehistoric organisms. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found rare, fossilized embryos they believe were undiscovered previously. Their methods of study may help with future interpretation of evolutionary history.

Cambrian embryo fossil exposed by acid etching on rock surface. Polygonal structure on surface indicative of blastula-stage of development. Credit: Broce et al.

“Before the Ediacaran and Cambrian Periods, organisms were unicellular and simple,” said James Schiffbauer, assistant professor of geological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. “The Cambrian Period, which occurred between 540 million and 485 million years ago, ushered in the advent of shells. Over time, shells and exoskeletons can be fossilized, giving scientists clues into how organisms existed millions of years ago. This adaptation provided protection and structural integrity for organisms. My work focuses on those harder-to-find, soft-tissue organisms that weren’t preserved quite as easily and aren’t quite as plentiful.”

Schiffbauer and his team, including Jesse Broce, a Huggins Scholar doctoral student in the Department of Geological Sciences at MU, now are studying fossilized embryos in rocks that provide rare opportunities to study the origins and developmental biology of early animals during the Cambrian explosion.

Broce collected fossils from the lower Cambrian Shuijingtuo Formation in the Hubei Province of South China and analyzed samples to determine the chemical makeup of the rocks. Soft tissue fossils have different chemical patterns than harder, skeletal remains, helping researchers identify the processes that contributed to their preservation. It is important to understand how the fossils were preserved, because their chemical makeups can also offer clues about the nature of the organisms’ original tissues, Schiffbauer said.

“Something obviously went wrong in these fossils,” Schiffbauer said. “Our Earth has a pretty good way of cleaning up after things die. Here, the cells’ self-destructive mechanisms didn’t happen, and these soft tissues could be preserved. While studying the fossils we collected, we found over 140 spherically shaped fossils, some of which include features that are reminiscent of division stage embryos, essentially frozen in time.”

The fossilized embryos the researchers found were significantly smaller than other fossil embryos from the same time period, suggesting they represent a yet undescribed organism. Additional research will focus on identifying the parents of these embryos, and their evolutionary position.

Schiffbauer and his colleagues published this and related research in a volume of the Journal of Paleontology which he co-edited.

The abstract to this article can be found online at: http://www.psjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1666/13-062

First image of protein residue in 50-million-year-old reptile skin

April 10th, 2014

Riffin

The organic compounds surviving in 50-million-year-old fossilized reptile skin can be seen for the first time, thanks to a stunning infrared image produced by University of Manchester palaeontologists and geochemists. Published in the journal Royal Society Proceedings B: Biology, the brightly-coloured image shows the presence of amides — organic compounds that serve as building blocks of life — in the ancient skin of a reptile, found in the 50-million-year-old rocks of the Green River Formation in Utah. This image had never been seen by the human eye, until a team led by Dr Roy Wogelius and Dr Phil Manning used state-of-the-art infrared technology at The University of Manchester to reveal and map the fossilized soft tissue of a beautifully-preserved reptile.

Above: 50-million-year-old reptile skin from the Green River Formation, Utah. A team of researchers led by the University of Manchester in the UK have used modern infrared technology to show that protein residue has survived within the remarkably preserved skin. The small sample is about 8 cm long.
Credit: N. P. Edwards

These infrared maps are backed up by the first ever element-specific maps of organic material in fossil skin generated using X-rays at the Stanford synchrotron in the USA, also by the Manchester researchers. Chemical details are clear enough that the scientists, from the School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, are even able to propose how this exceptional preservation occurs. When the original compounds in the skin begin to break down they can form chemical bonds with trace metals, and under exceptional conditions these trace metals act like a ‘bridge’ to minerals in the sediments. This protects the skin material from being washed away or decomposing further. Geochemist Roy Wogelius said: “The mapped distributions of organic compounds and trace metals in 50 million year old skin look so much like maps we’ve made of modern lizard skin as a check on our work, it is sometimes hard to tell which is the fossil and which is fresh.” “These new infrared and X-ray methods reveal intricate chemical patterns that have been overlooked by traditional methods for decades.” The new images are compelling, and represent the next step in the academics’ research programme to use modern analytical chemistry and 21st century techniques to understand how such remarkable preservation occurs, and ultimately to discover the chemistry of ancient life. These new results imply that trace metal inventories and patterns in ancient reptile skin, even after fossilisation, can indeed be compared to modern reptiles.

The infrared light causes vibrations in the fossilized skin, and a map of where these vibrations occur can be obtained from a fossil by using a trick: a tiny crystal (like an old phonograph record stylus) which moves from point-to-point in a programmable grid across the surface. At each point where the tiny crystal touches the fossil, an infrared beam that shines through the crystal reflects off of the crystal base, but a small amount of the beam probes beyond the interface- and if organic compounds are present, they absorb portions of the beam and change the reflected signal. This allows the team to non-destructively map large fossils which do not themselves transmit or reflect the beam — a revolutionary process for paleontologists. Nick Edwards, first author on the publication, said: “The ability to chemically analyse rare and precious fossils such as these without the need to remove material and destroy them is an important and long overdue addition to field of palaeontology. “Hopefully this will provide future opportunities to unlock the information stored in other similarly preserved specimens.” Dr Manning said: “Here physics, palaeontology and chemistry have collided to yield incredible insight to the building blocks of fossilized soft tissue. “The results of this study have wider implications, such as understanding what happens to buried wastes over long periods of time. The fossil record provides us with a long-running experiment, from which we can learn in order to help resolve current problems.”

WFS Profiles: Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)

April 9th, 2014

Riffin

Georges Cuvier was one of the most influential figures in science during the early nineteenth century. A self-appointed referee of proper science from his stronghold in the elite Académie des Sciences, Cuvier was as successful in creating his own image as a great man of science as he was in the many areas of science he studied.

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), leader of elite French science.

Cuvier was born on 23 August 1769, at Montbéliard, a French-speaking community in the Jura Mountains then rule by the Duke of Württemberg. Cuvier went to school at the Carolinian Academy in Stuttgart from 1784 to 1788. He was then a tutor for a noble family in Normandy. Here he first began to establish a reputation as a naturalist. In 1795 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire invited Cuvier to come to Paris. Cuvier was first appointed an assistant and later a professor of animal anatomy at the post-French revolution Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle. When Napoleon came to power Cuvier was appointed to several government positions, including State Councillor and Inspector-General of public education. After the restoration of the monarchy Cuvier still managed to preserve his status. In 1831 he was made Baron and a Peer of France. Cuvier had a deep abhorrence against a popularization or democratization of scientific knowledge.

Statue of Cuvier on the rear wall of the Royal Academy, London

Cuvier’s scientific achievements are difficult to overestimate. It was widely recounted that he could reconstruct a skeleton based on a single bone. His work is considered the foundation of vertebrate palaeontology. Cuvier expanded Linneaun taxonomy by grouping classes into phyla. Cuvier arranged both fossils and living species in this taxonomy. Cuvier convinced his contemporaries that extinction was a fact- what had been a controversial speculation before. Cuvier strongly opposed Geoffroy’s theory that all organisms were based on a basic plan or archetype and that they blended gradually one into another. Cuvier argued instead that life was divided into four distinct embranchements (life-vertebrates, molluscs, articulates (insects & crustaceans), and radiates). For Cuvier, it was function- not hypothetical relationships, that should form the basis of classification. This issue, which obviously could support or contradict a theory of evolution, was part of the famous Cuvier/Geoffroy debate in 1830. The debate has often been interpreted in the retrospect of a post-Darwin age as a debate over evolution. However the debate mostly revolved around the number of archetypes necessary to categorize all organisms. In his Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813) Cuvier proposed that new species were created after periodic catastrophic floods. His study of the Paris basin with Alexandre Brongniart established the basic principles of biostratigraphy.

Cuvier was a strong opponent of his colleague Lamarck‘s theory of evolution. (See Cuvier’s Elegy of Lamarck) Cuvier believed there was no evidence for the evolution of organic forms but rather evidence for successive creations after catastrophic extinction events. Some of Cuvier’s most influential followers were Louis Agassiz on the continent and in America, and Richard Owen in Britain.

Online texts by Cuvier

Cuvier. Elegy of Lamarck.

Cuvier, & Pierre A. Latreille. Le Règne Animal Distribué d’après son Organisation, pour Servir de Base à l’Histoire Naturelle des Animaux et d’Introduction à l’Anatomie Comparée. Tome I. L’Introduction, Les Mammifères et Les Oiseaux. Paris, 1817.

Cuvier. Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe, et sur les changemens qu’elles ont produits dans le règne animal 3rd French edn 1825.

Cuvier. Discourse on the revolutionary upheavals on the surface of the globe and on the changes which they have produced in the animal kingdom. 1825.

Anon. Review of Essay on the Theory of the Earth, The British Review and London Critical Journal, vol. v, 1813.

Anon. Review of Essay on the Theory of the Earth, Edinburgh Review, January 1814.

More Earthquakes for Chile? Seismic gap has not been closed

April 6th, 2014

Riffin

After the strong earthquake that struck Chile on April 2 (CEST), numerous aftershocks, some of them of a considerable magnitude, have struck the region around Iquique. Seismologists from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences doubt that the strong earthquake closed the local seismic gap and decreased the risk of a large earthquake. On the contrary, initial studies of the rupture process and the aftershocks show that only about a third of the vulnerable zone broke.

This vulnerable area is referred to as the seismic gap of Iquique and a strong earthquake is expected to strike here. The Pacific Nazca plate meets the South American plate at South America’s west coast. “In a subsea trench along the coast, the Pacific Ocean floor submerges beneath the continent building up tension that is released in earthquakes,” explains Professor Onno Oncken of the GFZ. “In the course of about 150 years the entire plate boundary from Patagonia in the South to Panama in the North breaks completely with a segmented series of strong earthquakes.” This cycle has been completed except for a last segment west of Iquique in northern Chile. As expected, the strong earthquake of April 2 took place exactly at this seismic gap.

No All-Clear

Initial analyses conducted by GFZ seismologists have shown that there is no sign that tension in the earth’ crust has significantly decreased: “So far tension has been released only in the central section of this vulnerable zone,” Oncken further explains. The series of earthquakes began on March 16 with a 6.7-magnitude earthquake. Although the main earthquake with a magnitude of 8.1 broke the central section of the seismic gap of a length of some 100 kilometres, two large segments further north and south remain intact, and these segments are able to cause strong earthquakes with a high risk of ground shaking and tsunamis.Oncken: “This means that the risk of one or even several earthquakes with a magnitude clearly above 8 still exists.” Furthermore, the location and magnitude of the aftershocks suggest such a scenario.

GPS measurements of the displacement vectors.
Credit: GFZ

Since the main quake struck, hundreds of aftershocks have been registered, the strongest that of April 2 (CEST) of a magnitude of 7.6. This earthquake struck about 100 kilometres south of the main earthquake’s epicentre. Together with the its associated aftershocks, it forms a second rupture zone.

Scientists getting ready for a field trip

For such extreme events, the GFZ has a task force called HART (Hazard and Risk Team) that will travel to the area affected to conduct further studies. The assignment aims at gaining a better and more detailed understanding of the rupture process based on the aftershocks, and defining the rupture surface more precisely based on the distribution of the aftershocks. Currently 25 seismometers are being prepared for air transport. Early next week a team of eight GFZ scientists will fly to Chile. The 25 portable seismometers will be used to expand the existing observatory network IPOC (Integrated Plate Boundary Observatory Chile) in order to be able to determine the earthquake epicentres more precisely. In addition highly precise surface displacements will be measured at 50 GPS measuring points. Two new additional continuous GPS stations will be installed to determine how the earthquake has deformed the earth’ crust.

The Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Geomar in Kiel intends to support the measuring campaign. Ocean floor seismometers will supplement land-based seismic data by providing measurements of the aftershocks on the seafloor.

The Plate Boundary Observatory IPOC in Chile

The GFZ initiated the setup of an observatory directly within the seismic gap in northern Chile in order to be able to precisely measure and capture tectonic processes before, during and after the expected strong earthquake. The observatory called Integrated Plate Boundary Observatory Chile (IPOC) is a European-American network of institutions and scientists. Together with several Chilean and German universities, German, French, Chilean and American non-university research institutions operate a decentralized instrumentation system located at Chile’s convergent plate boundary to gather data on earthquakes, deformations, magmatism, and surface processes.

The mission succeeded in the case of the April 2 earthquake: “All our instruments survived the quake and aftershocks unscathed. We now have a set of data that is unique in the world,” says GFZ seismologist Günter Asch with a smile, who was responsible for checking the instruments on site right after the earthquake and who is once again on his way to the region. “We believe that these data will help us understand the entire earthquake process — from the phase that tension builds up to the actual rupture, and also during the post-seismic phase.” This understanding will provide insights into earthquake risks in this part of the world as well as elsewhere.

The IPOC will further expand. To this day more than 20 multi-parameter stations have been set up. They comprise broadband seismographs, accelerometers, continuous GPS receivers, magneto-telluric probes, expansion measuring devices and climate sensors. Their data is transferred to Potsdam in real time. The European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal is now also part of the observatory network.

Source: Helmholtz Centre Potsdam – GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. “More Earthquakes for Chile? Seismic gap has not been closed.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 4 April 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140404140035.htm>.

Extinctions reduce speciation

April 5th, 2014

Riffin

The same factors that increase the risk of species extinctions also reduce the chance that new species are formed. This is concluded by two biologists at Umeå University. Their findings are published in the April issue of the scientific journal Evolution.

We often see alarming reports about the global biodiversity crisis through the extinction of species. The reasons why species become extinct is much discussed, particularly the consequences of human activities. Less often discussed is how environmental changes affect the chances that new species are formed.

New species arise when groups of individuals within a species successively become so different that they eventually are recognized as separate species, usually defined as inability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Differences can arise in several ways. Groups could become isolated from each other on either side of barriers, for example a mountain range, or they can adapt to different conditions by natural selection. How often new species form varies dramatically among organism groups and regions. Researchers have, so far, attributed this variation to differences in the strength of the forces that cause the differences.

Now, Umeå researchers Mats Dynesius and Roland Jansson argue that there is another very important reason for the variation in speciation probability: The groups within a species that may eventually become separate species must persist over long periods of time.

“If they die out or mix with other groups before they become separate species, there will be no speciation,” says Mats Dynesius, Associate Professor at the Department of Ecology and Environmental Science. “The risk that they do not survive long enough as separate groups is generally large, but varies among groups. The differences in risk depend on the organism’s characteristics and on the environment they live in.”

One of the researchers’ conclusions is that the characteristics of the species and their environment that increase their risk of dying out also results in fewer new species being formed. Another conclusion is that certain factors, which increase the chance that groups become more different and eventually evolve into separate species, can simultaneously increase the risk that the groups go extinct. One such factor is poor dispersal ability.

The new approach could change the way scientists look at how characteristics of organisms and environments affect species’ tendency to multiply.

“Studies on speciation should take into account the factors that influence the longevity of the groups within a species, which could ultimately become separate species,” says Roland Jansson, Associate Professor at the Department of Ecology and Environmental Science. “I think that would lead to a much better understanding of how Earth’s biodiversity was built and why there are so many species in certain groups of organisms and in some regions and so few in others.”

“Our approach will also make it easier to preserve opportunities for new species to arise in the future,” says Mats Dynesius. For example, scientists have recently drawn attention to how the impact of humans on the Galapagos Islands may have caused different groups of finches, which could have become new species, have instead mixed with each other.”

Source: Mats Dynesius, Roland Jansson. PERSISTENCE OF WITHIN-SPECIES LINEAGES: A NEGLECTED CONTROL OF SPECIATION RATES. Evolution, 2014; 68 (4): 923 DOI: 10.1111/evo.12316

Dinosaur ‘Chase’ Reconstructed in 3D

April 4th, 2014

Riffin

About 112 million years ago, a long-necked sauropod dinosaur traversed some intertidal flats near what is now Glen Rose, Texas. Coming after it — perhaps hours or days later, or perhaps hot on its tail in a dinosaur chase scene — a meat-eating theropod followed, overlaying some of the sauropod’s footprints with its own.

This snippet of the Cretaceous ended up frozen in rock, and paleontologists discovered the prints as early as 1917. But an excavation in 1940 led to a third of the trackway vanishing. Now, researchers have reconstructed the entire trackway, all 148 feet (45 meters) of it, using old photography and new technology.

“It’s great to get so many stride lengths, so many depths and impressions,” said study researcher Peter Falkingham, a research fellow at Royal Veterinary College in London. “There’s all this data you can get from an animal moving over quite a long distance.” [Video: ‘Fly’ Through the Cretaceous Dinosaur Chase]

Lost footprints

The dinosaur footprints come from a larger site full of tracks called the Paluxy River Trackway. The sauropod and theropod prints comprise one of the most famous sequences from the site. In 1940, fossil collector Roland T. Bird excavated the tracks. A third of the sequence went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York; another third went to the Texas Memorial Museum, and a final third was lost.

“It’s entirely possible that there are some parts of it in a garage somewhere,” Falkingham told Live Science. Portions of the fossil could have been sent to other institutions and lost, or perhaps left at the site and eroded away by the river, he said.

Bird did carefully document the site, however. Falkingham and his colleagues analyzed Bird’s 70-year-old photos with a technique called photogrammetry, which allows researchers to determine where the camera was when the photo was taken. By melding views from different camera angles, the team created a digital model of the trackway, with three-dimensional depth, just as the viewpoint from two different eyes gives people depth perception.

Tracks reconstructed

The resulting image is fuzzy at the north end, where the photographs were less comprehensive, but detailed enough that the dinosaurs’ toe prints can be seen at the south end of the trackway.

The 3D reconstruction has already solved one long-running mystery. When Bird excavated the tracks, he drew two maps of the prints, one showing a fairly straight path, and the other with a slight curve to the left. By overlaying the reconstruction with the maps, Falkingham and his colleagues showed the left-curving map was the more accurate one.

A 3D reconstruction of a dinosaur trackway from Texas shows a sauropod followed by a theropod — though it’s not clear that the theropod was really right on the first dinosaur’s tail.

“We’ll be pulling this into a larger study of the tracks in the area,” Falkingham said. The 3D model allows researchers to study depth and weight distribution for each of the dinosaurs, which helps determine how the animals walked and how fast they were going.

The researchers report their findings in the journal PLOS ONE.

Great earthquakes, water under pressure, high risk: Research reveals interactions between plate tectonics, fluids and quakes

April 3rd, 2014

Riffin

The largest earthquakes occur where oceanic plates move beneath continents. Obviously, water trapped in the boundary between both plates has a dominant influence on the earthquake rupture process. Analyzing the great Chile earthquake of February, 27th, 2010, a group of scientists from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and from Liverpool University found that the water pressure in the pores of the rocks making up the plate boundary zone takes the key role.

The stress build-up before an earthquake and the magnitude of subsequent seismic energy release are substantially controlled by the mechanical coupling between both plates. Studies of recent great earthquakes have revealed that the lateral extent of the rupture and magnitude of these events are fundamentally controlled by the stress build-up along the subduction plate interface. Stress build-up and its lateral distribution in turn are dependent on the distribution and pressure of fluids along the plate interface.

“We combined observations of several geoscience disciplines — geodesy, seismology, petrology. In addition, we have a unique opportunity in Chile that our natural observatory there provides us with long time series of data,” says Onno Oncken, director of the GFZ-Department “Geodynamics and Geomaterials.” Earth observation (Geodesy) using GPS technology and radar interferometry today allows a detailed mapping of mechanical coupling at the plate boundary from the Earth’s surface. A complementary image of the rock properties at depth is provided by seismology. Earthquake data yield a high resolution three-dimensional image of seismic wave speeds and their variations in the plate interface region. Data on fluid pressure and rock properties, on the other hand, are available from laboratory measurements. All these data had been acquired shortly before the great Chile earthquake of February 2010 struck with a magnitude of 8.8.

Earthquake history of Chile.
Credit: Manuela Dziggel, GFZ

“For the first time, our results allow us to map the spatial distribution of the fluid pressure with unprecedented resolution showing how they control mechanical locking and subsequent seismic energy release,” explains Professor Oncken. “Zones of changed seismic wave speeds reflect zones of reduced mechanical coupling between plates.” This state supports creep along the plate interface. In turn, high mechanical locking is promoted in lower pore fluid pressure domains. It is these locked domains that subsequently ruptured during the Chile earthquake releasing most seismic energy causing destruction at Earth’s surface and tsunami waves. The authors suggest the spatial pore fluid pressure variations to be related to oceanic water accumulated in an altered oceanic fracture zone within the Pacific oceanic plate. Upon subduction of the latter beneath South America the fluid volumes are released and trapped along the overlying plate interface, leading to increasing pore fluid pressures. This study provides a powerful tool to monitor the physical state of a plate interface and to forecast its seismic potential.

Earthquake 8.2 mag.strikes off Chile, Tsunami warning ….

April 2nd, 2014

Riffin

A powerful earthquake measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale struck off northern Chile Tuesday night, setting off a small tsunami that forced evacuations along the country’s entire Pacific coast and much of Latin America.

Chile’s interior minister has confirmed five people are dead after the earthquake, which struck at 8.46pm local time and several others are seriously injured. Officials said the dead included people who were crushed by collapsing walls or were killed by heart attacks.

While it appears the area escaped major damage and casualties, landslides blocked roads, power failed for thousands, an airport was damaged and several businesses caught fire.

About 300 inmates escaped from a women’s prison in the city of Iquique. About 16 of the women were soon recaptured, Chile’s investigative police said. Chile’s military sent a planeload of special forces to the area to guard against looting.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the quake generated a large tsunami with the biggest wave reported at 2.3 meters. The Chilean navy said the first big wave hit the coast within 45 minutes.

In the city of Arica, 86 miles (139 kilometers) from the quake’s epicenter, hospitals were treating minor injuries, and some homes made of adobe were destroyed while 90 percent of customers were without power, authorities said.

The quake also shook modern buildings in nearby Peru and in Bolivia’s high altitude capital of La Paz.

Location: The earthquake struck near the coastal city of Iquique, in the northern region of Chile

Hours later, tsunami warnings or watches remained in effect for the coasts of Peru and Chile, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.

Shortly before midnight, Chile’s Emergency Office said its tsunami watch would remain in effect for six more hours, meaning hundreds of thousands of people along the coast would not sleep in their beds.

The U.S. Geological Survey initially reported the quake at 8.0, but later upgraded the magnitude. It said the quake struck 61 miles (99 kilometers) northwest of Iquique at 8:46 p.m., hitting a region that has been rocked by numerous quakes over the past two weeks.

Psychiatrist Ricardo Yevenes said he was with a patient in Arica when the quake hit. ‘It quickly began to move the entire office, things were falling,’ he told local television. ‘Almost the whole city is in darkness.’

The quake was so strong that the shaking experienced in Bolivia’s capital about 290 miles (470 kilometers) away was the equivalent of a 4.5-magnitude tremor, authorities there said.

Quake: A shakemap shows the location of the powerful magnitude earthquake, around 61 miles from the city of Iquique

More than 10 strong aftershocks followed in the first few hours, including a 6.2 tremor. More aftershocks and even a larger quake could not be ruled out, said seismologist Mario Pardo at the University of Chile.

Chilean Interior Minister Rodrigo Penailillo said President Michelle Bachelet was closely watching the situation and was ready to take ‘any measures’ to ensure people’s safety. Hundreds of soldiers were being deployed in the quake zone, and a flight would be leaving soon with 100 special forces on board, he added.

‘We have taken action to ensure public order in the case of Iquique, where we’ve had a massive escape of more than 300 female prisoners from the Iquique jail, so that the armed forces and police can coordinate and provide tranquility and security to the residents,’ he said.

Frightened residents in some towns posted videos and pictures on Twitter as they spilled out of their homes following the quake to head for safer areas inland.

Far reaching: The effects of the powerful quake were noted by a seismic station in Alaska

world’s smallest fossil, is an ancient mite less than two tenths of a millimetre long

March 29th, 2014

Riffin

Scientists at the University of Manchester have discovered what is believed to be the smallest fossil ever found.

A 50-million-year-old parasite – hitching a ride on a not-much-bigger spider – was discovered during a scan of Baltic amber.

Published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, the find was made using a computed tomography (CT) scan, which builds up a 3-D image from multiple flat scans.

So small you mite miss it: The microspopic arthropod can be seen riding on the spider’s back in this detailed scan

Biologist Dr David Penney wrote in the paper that the arthropod fossil was extremely small – less than two tenths of a millimetre long – and ‘extremely rare’.

Dr Penney wrote that the Faculty of Life Sciences teams would not have been able to identify the mite without the CT scan.

He told the BBC: ‘CT allowed us to digitally dissect the mite off the spider in order to reveal the important features on the underside required for identification.

‘The specimen, which is extremely rare in the fossil record, is potentially the oldest record of the living family Histiostomatidae.

Spider scan: The larger scan of the arachnid shows how tiny the little mite is

‘Most amber fossils consist of individual insects or several insects together, but without unequivocal demonstrable evidence of direct interaction.

‘The remarkable specimen we describe in this paper is the kind of find that occurs only once in, say, a hundred thousand specimens.’

Fellow biologist Dr Richard Prezoisi added that the team could now date how long species such as the mite had been using larger organisms for transportation.

He said it would give ‘important clues as to how far back in geological time such behaviours evolved’.Baltic amber is itself the the fossilised resin of trees from the area around the Baltic Sea.

As the resin oozed from the tree and down its branches and trunk, insects, arachnids and other prehistoric crustaceans were caught and preserved within it.

Instead of decaying and leaving fossilised bones, the creatures are protected intact within the amber.

Mite Mite Digitally dissected: The CT scan allowed scientest to ‘remove’ it from the spider’s back and study it from all angles

Detailed study: With such a fine scan available, scientists are more easily able to identify and classify each specimen

Normal view: Even under the microscope, the mite is barely visible – making identification impossible

Paleontologists assemble giant turtle bone from fossil discoveries made centuries apart

March 28th, 2014

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“As soon as those two halves came together, like puzzle pieces, you knew it,” said Ted Daeschler, PhD, associate curator of vertebrate zoology and vice president for collections at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.

That surprising puzzle assembly occurred in the fall of 2012, when Jason Schein, assistant curator of natural history at the New Jersey State Museum, visited the Academy’s research collections to better identify and describe a recently-unearthed fossil. The discovery linked scientists from both museums to their predecessors from the 19th century, while setting the stage to advance science today.

The partial fossil bone that Schein had brought to the Academy was a recent discovery by amateur paleontologist Gregory Harpel. Harpel thought the bone seemed strange and out of place when he noticed it on a grassy embankment, a bit upstream from his usual fossil-hunting haunt at a brook in Monmouth County, N.J. Visiting the brook to search for fossil shark teeth is a weekend hobby for Harpel, an analytical chemist from Oreland, Pa. “I picked it up and thought it was a rock at first — it was heavy,” Harpel said.

When he realized it was indeed a fossil, certainly much larger and possibly a lot more scientifically significant than shark teeth, he took it to the experts at the New Jersey State Museum, to which he ultimately donated his find.

Now that paleontologists have assembled a complete humerus bone from the sea turtle Atlantochelys mortoni, they have more information about the species and its overall size. Prior to the discovery of the bone’s missing half, the partial limb in the collections of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University was the only known fossil specimen of its genus and species. Based on the complete limb, they calculated the animal’s overall size to be about 10 feet from tip to tail, making it one of the largest sea turtles ever known. It may have resembled modern loggerhead turtles. In this illustration, it is depicted with the outline of a human diver to indicate scale. The turtle lived 70 to 75 million years ago.
Credit: Jason Poole, Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

Schein and David Parris, the museum’s curator of natural history, immediately recognized the fossil as a humerus — the large upper arm bone — from a turtle, but its shaft was broken so that only the distal end, or end nearest to the elbow, remained.Parris also thought the fossil looked extremely familiar. He joked with Schein that perhaps it was the missing half of a different large, partial turtle limb housed in the collections at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. That bone also had a broken shaft, but only its proximal end, nearest to the shoulder, remained. The coincidence was striking.

“I didn’t think there was any chance in the world they would actually fit,” Schein said.

That’s because the Academy’s piece of the puzzle was much too old, according to the conventional wisdom of paleontology. Paleontologists expect that fossils found in exposed strata of rock will break down from exposure to the elements if they aren’t collected and preserved, at least within a few years– decades at the most. There was no reason to think a lost half of the same old bone would survive, intact and exposed, in a New Jersey streambed from at least the time of the old bone’s first scientific description in 1849, until Harpel found it in 2012.

The Academy’s older bone was also without a match of any kind, making a perfect match seem even more farfetched: It was originally named and described by famed 19th-century naturalist Louis Agassiz as the first, or type specimen, of its genus and species, Atlantochelys mortoni. In the intervening years, it remained the only known fossil specimen from that genus and species.

It remained so until that fateful day when Schein carried the “new” New Jersey fossil to the Academy in Philadelphia, connecting the two halves. The perfect fit between the fossils left little space for doubt. Stunned by the implications, Schein and Academy paleontology staffers Jason Poole and Ned Gilmore, who had assembled the puzzle together, called Daeschler into the room.

“Sure enough, you have two halves of the same bone, the same individual of this giant sea turtle,” said Daeschler. “One half was collected at least 162 years before the other half.”

Now, the scientists are revising their conventional wisdom to say that, sometimes, exposed fossils can survive longer than previously thought. They report their remarkable discovery in the forthcoming 2014 issue of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

“The astounding confluence of events that had to have happened for this to be true is just unbelievable, and probably completely unprecedented in paleontology,” said Schein.

The fully assembled A. mortoni humerus now gives the scientists more information about the massive sea turtle it came from as well. With a complete limb, they have calculated the animal’s overall size — about 10 feet from tip to tail, making it one of the largest sea turtles ever known. The species may have resembled modern loggerhead turtles, but was much larger than any sea turtle species alive today.

The scientists believe that the entire unbroken bone was originally embedded in sediment during the Cretaceous Period, 70 to 75 million years ago, when the turtle lived and died. Then those sediments eroded and the bone fractured millions of years later during the Pleistocene or Holocene, before the bone pieces became embedded in sediments and protected from further deterioration for perhaps a few thousand more years until their discovery.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ORrJCt-2KA

Drexel University. “Paleontologists assemble giant turtle bone from fossil discoveries made centuries apart.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 March 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140325095822.htm>.