Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

[weatheriscool]

240 million-year-old fossil of salamander-like creature with 'gnarly teeth' unearthed in rocks for garden wall
News

A retired chicken farmer found the rocks in the mid-1990s and donated it to the Australian Museum, where researchers have now named the newfound species Arenaerpeton supinatus.

https://www.livescience.com/animals/ext ... arden-wall

[Powers]

240 million-year-old fossil of salamander-like creature with 'gnarly teeth' unearthed in rocks for garden wall
News

A retired chicken farmer found the rocks in the mid-1990s and donated it to the Australian Museum, where researchers have now named the newfound species Arenaerpeton supinatus.

https://www.livescience.com/animals/ext ... arden-wall

The rock preserved the entire skeleton and even the outlines of the creature's skin. (Image credit: UNSW Sydney/Richard Freeman)

[wjfox]

An asteroid impact origin of the Hirnantian (end-Ordovician) glaciation and mass extinction

Volume 118, June 2023, Pages 153-159

The buried ∼520 km-diameter Deniliquin multiple-ring impact structure (DMS), southeastern Australia, is regarded as likely to have triggered the ∼ 1.4 million years-long Late Ordovician (Hirnantian) glaciation and mass extinction event (445.2 and 443.8 Ma), which eliminated about 85% of species. The Hirnantian, second in severity relative to the Permian-Triassic boundary extinction (251 Ma) and almost twice as severe as the K–T impact and extinction event (66 Ma), is considered likely to represent the consequence of the Deniliquin mega-impact event. The geophysical evidence for a deep-seated impact origin of the DMS includes its distinct symmetric multiple-ring pattern (Fig. 1), a central magnetically quiet TMI core, radial faults and an underlying mantle dome about 10 km shallower than the regional MOHO. The magnitude of the DMS is consistent with the scale of the Hirnantian glacial and extinction events and much larger than Cambrian extinction events, which occurred on a smaller scale, suggesting the DMS is likely to represent the trigger for Hirnantian glacial and extinction events. A search for impact-deformation effects in proximal and distal Ordovician strata around the Deniliquin mega-impact structure is required to further test this suggestion.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 7X23000655

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

First ever remains of a dicraeosaurid sauropod unearthed in India
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-dicraeosa ... india.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of archaeologists from the Indian Institute of Technology and the Geological Survey of India, has unearthed the first ever remains of a dicraeosaurid sauropod in India. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes the fossil, its condition and where it fits in with other dinosaurs of the Middle Jurassic.

The fossil (a partial dorsal vertebra) was dug up at a site in the Thar Desert near the city of Jaisalmer, in the state of Rajasthan. Prior research has shown that during the Mesozoic Era, the area was a shoreline along the Tethys Ocean. The newly found fossil has been dated to approximately 167 million years ago and identified as a member of the dicraeosaurids, which were a group of dinosaurs with long necks that fed on vegetation. It is the first member of the group to have ever been found in India—and the oldest in the world.

[caltrek]

New Ancient Ape from Türkiye Challenges the Story of Human Origins
August 23, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) A new fossil ape from an 8.7-million-year-old site in Türkiye is challenging long-accepted ideas of human origins and adding weight to the theory that the ancestors of African apes and humans evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa between nine and seven million years ago.

Analysis of a newly identified ape named Anadoluvius turkae recovered from the Çorakyerler fossil locality near Çankırı with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Türkiye, shows Mediterranean fossil apes are diverse and are part of the first known radiation of early hominines – the group that includes African apes (chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas), humans and their fossil ancestors.

The findings are described in a study published today in Communications Biology co-authored by an international team of researchers led by Professor David Begun at the University of Toronto (U of T) and Professor Ayla Sevim Erol at Ankara University.

“Our findings further suggest that hominines not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over five million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa, probably as a consequence of changing environments and diminishing forests,” said Begun, professor in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T. “The members of this radiation to which Anadoluvius belongs are currently only identified in Europe and Anatolia.”

The conclusion is based on analysis of a significantly well-preserved partial cranium uncovered at the site in 2015, which includes most of the facial structure and the front part of the brain case.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/999392

[wjfox]

If a time machine took me back to the late Carboniferous period, could I find safe food, water and shelter to survive the remainder of my life?

T. Barczuk
Updated Jul 3

Ladies and gentlemen. Please fasten your seatbelts. We are about to depart to the end of the Carboniferous period, 359 - 299 million years ago. Our current time travel technology can only take us there one way. There is no going back.

• Time travel is only the first temporal effect that the traveler would experience. His circadian rhythm would be severely disrupted and affect their life because the day length was only about 22 hours in the Carboniferous period. There could be insomnia, immune system dysfunction, increased risk of cancer, problems with the heart, and even early death from all the above combined during a multi-decade stay. On a short visit, it should be fine.

• An additional factor that would shorten the life span of travelers would be the increased oxygen level in the atmosphere. It was about 28% at the beginning of the Carboniferous period, it dropped to about 24% in the middle and rose again to about 27% at the end. Over the lifetime, if it was a long lifetime, so much oxygen would damage the tissues and increase the speed of aging of humans not adapted to these levels and cause early wrinkly skin and health problems that would cause premature death.

• Another weird temporal effect would be noticed after landing. Animals would seem slower, more sluggish than us. At the time, they might have perceived reality in fewer frames per second than us on average. We do it at 60Hz after additional hundreds of millions of years of evolution of vertebrate animals. There were no warm-blooded creatures at the time yet, so there were no very active animals. They only had sprawling legs while walking, which made them slower. All of this lead to slower reaction times sufficient for survival. Insects might have been faster, but even they only just evolved relatively recently. They weren’t as great at what they did at the time yet.

• The air was filled with copious amounts of spores of various plants. Breathing after some time might even result in death from an extreme allergic reaction, or anaphylaxis in some susceptible individuals. We are more adapted to pollen, which didn’t exist in the Carboniferous period.

• This also means that there were no fruits, and we need Vitamin C to survive. We would need to eat leaves, make teas from bark or eat buds of leaves of ferns, the fiddleheads.

• The good news is that animals shouldn’t be that dangerous at the time, and it might be easy to hunt them for food, at least on dry land. They weren’t that big, fast, or even smart yet. Although, many formidable crocodile-like and crocodile-size temnospondyl amphibians with massive teeth existed in aquatic habitats and widespread swamps. There were also giant, 2.5 m/8 feet millipedes. It’s hard to tell how dangerous they were, but I’m learning they weren’t. They were outcompeted by reptiles soon and died out anyways. Large, flying, 0.7 m/2 feet insects similar to dragonflies shouldn’t have been dangerous to humans. A more significant danger might be venomous tiny animals like scorpions or spiders.

• Another good news is that there might be less danger from diseases. It’s unlikely that many would affect mammals like humans. But who knows? There might be an odd outlier that could infect us. Maybe some mysterious virus. For bacteria, we should take a lot of antibiotics with us.

If we traveled in a time machine back to the late Carboniferous period, it should be possible to build shelter from trees, which evolved recently. Water should not be a problem. There would be an issue with obtaining a balanced diet because there were no fruits, which evolved less than 180 million years ago. The lifespan of the travelers would be severely shortened from all the issues described above.

https://www.quora.com/If-a-time-machine ... of-my-life

[weatheriscool]

Fossil of oldest-known koala relative unearthed in central Australia
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-fossil-ol ... ntral.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A small team of evolutionary biologists at Flinders University, in Australia, working with one colleague from the University of Salford in the U.K. and another from the University of California, Los Angeles, has found fossilized evidence of the oldest-known koala relative in a central part of Australia. In their paper, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes the fossil, where it was found and how it fits into the history of marsupial evolution in Australia.

The fossil was excavated in Pwerte Marnte Marnte in Australia's Northern Territory. The study suggests the animal was approximately the size of a modern housecat and that it likely ate soft leaves. Fossils at the site have been dated back approximately 25 million years, during the Oligocene epoch. It was promptly named Lumakoala blackae. The find is considered important because it helps to clarify the history of mammalian evolution in Australia, particularly during a 30-million-year gap in the fossil record.

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

Isle of Wight fossil suggests Europe had its own family of small herbivorous dinosaurs
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-isle-wigh ... amily.html
by University of Bath

Scientists have discovered a new species of small plant-eating dinosaur on the Isle of Wight in southern England (UK). The new species, Vectidromeus insularis, is the second member of the hypsilophodont family to be found on the island, suggesting that Europe had its own family of small herbivorous dinosaurs, distinct from those found in Asia and North America.

Hypsilophodonts were a group of nimble, bipedal herbivores that lived around 125 million years ago. The animals lived alongside early tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs, and Iguanodon. The new fossil represents an animal about the size of a chicken but was a juvenile and may have grown much larger.

Vectidromeus is a close relative of Hypsilophodon foxii, a dinosaur originally described in the Victorian era, and one of the first dinosaurs to be described from relatively complete remains. Small and with gracile, with bird-like hindlimbs, hypsilophodonts were used by famous scientist Thomas Henry Huxley as evidence that birds were related to dinosaurs.

[weatheriscool]

150 Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Had Uniquely Long Legs Never Seen Before

Leggy, bouffant, and serving cloaca.

RACHAEL FUNNELL

A uniquely leggy dinosaur dating back 150 million years may have adapted to swamp life by evolving to have a lower leg twice as long as its thigh. The trait has never been seen in dinosaurs before and indicates this new-to-science species was either an extremely fast runner or used to wade through swampy environments hunting for turtles and fish.

The bizarre species was described following the discovery of a fossil retrieved from from Zhenghe County, Fujian Province, and has been named Fujianvenator prodigiosus. “Fujian” derives from the Mandarin for where the holotype was found, “venator” from the Latin for hunter, and “prodigiosus” is in honor of its unique and peculiar legs, being Latin for bizarre.

It sits within the Avialae clade that’s comprised of all modern birds – but not Deinonychus or Troodon – and dates back to the Jurassic, an era from which we have a limited diversity of fossils to work from. This makes our bizarre leggy dino a valuable fossil, as it can provide new insights into the evolution of the avialan body plan, and it’s already provided some surprises.

"Our comparative analyses show that marked changes in body plan occurred along the early avialan line, which is largely driven by the forelimb, eventually giving rise to the typical bird limb proportion," said Dr Wang Min from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, lead and corresponding author of the study, in a statement. "However, Fujianvenator is an odd species that diverged from this main trajectory and evolved bizarre hindlimb architecture."

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/150-million- ... fore-70577

[weatheriscool]

Scientists Discover Skull of Giant Predator Long Before The Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs have a reputation for being the most terrifying prehistoric predators, but a newly discovered skull sheds light on a fearsome beast that dominated 40 million years before the first 'terrible lizards' walked the Earth.

The 265-million-year-old fossil found in Brazil reveals the largest meat eater of its time, one that prowled the jungles searching for unlucky critters to chomp on.

"This animal was a gnarly-looking beast, and it must have evoked sheer dread in anything that crossed its path," says Harvard University paleontologist Stephanie Pierce.

An almost-complete fossilized skull of Pampaphoneus biccai measuring almost 36 cm (14.2 inches) was discovered along with skeletal bones near São Gabriel in Southern Brazil.

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists ... -dinosaurs

[wjfox]

New Simulations Shed Light on Origins of Saturn’s Rings and Icy Moons

Sep 26, 2023

On a clear night, with a decent amateur telescope, Saturn and its series of remarkable rings can be seen from Earth’s surface. But how did those rings come to be? And what can they tell us about Saturn and its moons, one of the potential locations NASA hopes to search for life? A new series of supercomputer simulations has offered an answer to the mystery of the rings’ origins – one that involves a massive collision, back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

According to new research by NASA and its partners, Saturn’s rings could have evolved from the debris of two icy moons that collided and shattered a few hundred million years ago. Debris that didn’t end up in the rings could also have contributed to the formation of some of Saturn’s present-day moons.

“There’s so much we still don’t know about the Saturn system, including its moons that host environments that might be suitable for life,” said Jacob Kegerreis, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “So, it’s exciting to use big simulations like these to explore in detail how they could have evolved.”

NASA’s Cassini mission helped scientists understand just how young – astronomically speaking – Saturn’s rings and probably some of its moons are. And that knowledge opened up new questions about how they formed.

To learn more, the research team turned to the Durham University location of the Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC) supercomputing facility in the United Kingdom. They modeled what different collisions between precursor moons might have looked like. These simulations were conducted at a resolution more than 100 times higher than previous such studies, using the open-source simulation code, SWIFT, and giving scientists their best insights into the Saturn system’s history.

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/new-s ... icy-moons/

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Fossilized skulls reveal relatives of today's rhinos had no horn and died out 5 million years ago
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-fossilize ... hinos.html
by University of Tübingen

Paleontologists from Tübingen have redefined a rhinoceros genus that had fallen into oblivion: Eochilotherium lived more than 5 million years ago and did not have a horn on its nose. Hornless rhinos were known to be ancestors of today's species.

An international research team from Germany, Greece, Bulgaria and South Africa shows, in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, that these animals were more diverse than previously thought. Panagiotis Kampouridis of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen re-examined the fossil skulls of hornless rhinos.

[Time_Traveller]

Scientists finally discover 'lost continent' thought to have vanished without a trace

about 4 hours ago

The mystery of what happened to a lost continent that seemingly vanished 155 million years ago may have finally been solved, after scientists unearthed evidence of the landmass and retraced its steps.

It turns out the lost continent, known as Argoland, had a messy divorce from western Australia. It disintegrated as tectonic forces stretched the landmass out and drove it away from the rest of the continent, before scattering it across Southeast Asia, a new study has found.

Researchers have long known that a landmass rifted from Australia 155 million years ago, thanks to clues left in the geology of a deep ocean basin known as the Argo Abyssal Plain off the country's northwest coast.

But unlike India, which broke off the ancient supercontinent Gondwana 120 million years ago and still forms an intact landmass today, Argoland splintered into fragments. And until now, scientists were left scratching their heads as to where those continental fragments ended up.

"We knew it had to be somewhere north of Australia, so we expected to find it in Southeast Asia," lead study author Eldert Advokaat, a researcher in the department of Earth sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Live Science.

https://www.space.com/lost-continent-fi ... CueojB79AA

[wjfox]

Scientists finally discover 'lost continent' thought to have vanished without a trace



https://www.space.com/lost-continent-fi ... CueojB79AA

Fascinating!

[wjfox]

4.5 billion years ago, another planet crashed into Earth. We may have found its leftovers.

A Mars-size object called Theia smashed into Earth, and the debris coalesced into the moon. Now scientists believe they may have identified pieces of Theia at the bottom of Earth’s mantle.

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 1, 2023

Some 4.5 billion years ago, the solar system was a giant game of cosmic pinball. During those early ages, a planetary body the size of Mars slammed into the still-forming Earth. The collision was so powerful, it broke apart that impacting protoplanet, nicknamed Theia, and sent huge amounts of material into orbit around Earth—material that eventually coalesced into the moon.

A new study suggests that during this impact, Theia left some of its material at the surface of the still-forming Earth, and that debris sank into our planet. Published in the journal Nature, the study finds that today, material from Theia may account for two enormous, dense chunks in Earth’s mantle.

Earth scientists have known for decades that continent-size blobs of denser material exist toward the base of the mantle near the boundary with the core. This new study, by Caltech geophysicist Qian Yuan and colleagues, uses simulations of the moon-forming impact as well as the evolution of Earth’s interior to address where the impactor’s leftovers may be hiding, and how they may have changed over time.

“It's a very exciting and provocative result,” says planetary scientist Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who was not part of the study. “It would mean that we have material that can tell us more about Theia and help us better understand … the moon-forming impact.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... rth-mantle



ILLUSTRATION BY HONGPING DENG, HANGZHOU SPHERE STUDIO

[weatheriscool]

Recent fossil discovery suggests the first dinosaur egg was leathery
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-fossil-di ... thery.html
by Li Yuan, Chinese Academy of Sciences

The discovery of several exceptionally preserved reproduction-related dinosaur specimens over the last three decades has improved our knowledge of dinosaur reproductive biology. Nevertheless, due to limited fossil evidence and a lack of quantitative analysis on a broad phylogenetic scale, much about dinosaur reproduction remained unclear, especially pre-Cretaceous evolutionary history.

[caltrek]

Scientists Just Recreated the Chemical Reaction That May Have Led to Life on Earth
by Quoc Phuong Tran
November 15, 2023

Introduction:

(Science Alert) How did life begin? How did chemical reactions on the early Earth create complex, self-replicating structures that developed into living things as we know them?

According to one school of thought, before the current era of DNA-based life, there was a kind of molecule called RNA (or ribonucleic acid). RNA – which is still a crucial component of life today – can replicate itself and catalyse other chemical reactions.

But RNA molecules themselves are made from smaller components called ribonucleotides. How would these building blocks have formed on the early Earth, and then combined into RNA?

Chemists like me are trying to recreate the chain of reactions required to form RNA at the dawn of life, but it's a challenging task. We know whatever chemical reaction created ribonucleotides must have been able to happen in the messy, complicated environment found on our planet billions of years ago.

I have been studying whether "autocatalytic" reactions may have played a part. These are reactions that produce chemicals that encourage the same reaction to happen again, which means they can sustain themselves in a wide range of circumstances.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientist ... on-earth