Primordial precipitation

They may not look it, but these are the most remarkable trace fossils I have learned of yet. They are the fossilized craters of raindrops that fell as much as 500 million years ago when the Earth's sun was only 70% as strong as it is now and the atmosphere was denser.

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Fossil frond

"The specimen is so well preserved that it is as if someone had nipped back in a time machine into the Eocene and got it," remarks senior botanist Martin Cheek of Kew Gardens in London about the leaves of a 35- to 47-million-year-old carnivorous plant preserved in Baltic amber. The fronds were discovered in the Jantarny amber mine near Kaliningrad, Russia, by researchers from the University of Göttingen in Germany. It caught its prey using the long, sticky hairs that are still present. The carnivore appears to be a member of the Roridulaceae genus and as such would have developed a symbiotic relationship with an insect to digest the captured prey, consume it, and fertilize the plant with its poop. Lead researcher Eva-Maria Sadowski exclaims, "We were all so excited when we discovered it because it's very beautiful and striking. It's amazing to look at something so old, yet so well preserved."

 

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Haramiyid hamadryads

The first complete fossil of a 160 million-year-old chisel-toothed, squirrel-sized tree-dweller known as the haramiyid shows that these were well-adapted animals with grasping hands and feet and prehensile tails. They could walk, swim, dig burrows, and glide from branch to branch. Study co-author Jin Meng, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, declares, "The picture that Mesozoic mammals were shrew-like insectivores that lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs needs to be repainted."

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Algae elders

By slicing them in ultra-thin sheets and illuminating them like stained glass (ABOVE AND HERE), researchers were able to microscopically examine 600 million-year-old fossilized algal life forms from southern China, the makeup of which are too complex and differentiated to be single-celled organisms. The strange fossils – called Megasphaera, and measuring a mere .03" (.7 mm) across – may in fact be embryos, although no adult specimens have ever been found. Geobiologist Shuhai Xiao of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S., points out, "The real value of these fossils is that we now have some direct evidence about how this transition from single-celled organisms to things like animals and plants occurred in the evolutionary past."

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Mighty mite

When tree sap enveloped an ant, it also enveloped the mesostigmatid mite attached to its head. Some 45 million years later, the fossilized specimen provides the oldest evidence of a mite attacking a social insect. The eyeless parasites are rare in the fossil record because they lived in soil and leaf litter and were often gobbled up after they died. Evolutionary biologist Jason Dunlop of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin and his colleagues discovered this example in amber, probably Baltic in origin, in the natural history collection of German paleontologist Joerg Wunderlich. For the study, the mite was invaluable, but Dunlop observes, "For the ant, however, these mites are presumably a nuisance, and perhaps even dangerous. This ancient ant was almost certainly not enjoying carrying the mite around with it.”

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Big bird

After the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, giant birds took to the skies and were extant until a few million years ago. The seabirds, found on every continent, were characterized by their large size, highly modified wing bones, and beaks lined with bony tooth-like spikes (IMAGE ABOVE, MORE IMAGES HERE). North Carolina State University paleontologist Daniel Ksepka has studied the remains of a species discovered when the Charleston, N.C., U.S., airport added a new terminal to determine how the ungainly creature could fly. He compares its flight to the albatross and declares the Pelagornis sandersi – with a wingspan of up to 24' (6.4 m) – to have been the largest volant (flying) bird. Ksepka describes, "Anyone with a beating heart would have been struck with awe. This bird would have just blotted out the sun as it swooped overhead. Up close, it may have called to mind a dragon."

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Cuckoo about coprolites

These are 50,000-year–old human fecal deposits – the oldest yet found – from a cave in southern Spain, excavated by a team led by an MIT geoarchaeologist.

Quigley is a blogger by whom weird news is prized.
With it, she keeps her readers surprised.
She goes for the scoop
When the subject is poop,
But only when the B.M.s are fossilized…

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Unhatched eggs

"We found a lot of pterosaur bones which belong to different individuals in the sites, with five eggs," understates paleontologist Xiaolin Wang of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Emerging from a 2005 excavation in the Turpan-Hami Basin south of Xinjiang in northwestern China, after more than 100 million years, are 5 three-dimensionally preserved eggs of a new genus and species (Hamipterus tianshanensis) of these ancient winged reptiles. Scantily represented in the fossil record, only 4 pterosaur eggs have previously been discovered and all of them were flattened. These are described as soft and pliable, with a thin, hard outer shell and a thick, soft inner membrane similar to the eggs of some snakes. Found near the eggs were 40 adult specimens, the gender of which are determined by the differences in the size and shape of their head crests (RECREATION WITH PHOTO INSET ABOVE, MORE PHOTOS HERE). The scientists suggest that the newly uncovered pterosaurs likely perished in a storm during the Early Cretaceous period.

 

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Bachelor party bonus

A group of young men, one of whom was soon to be married, were hiking through Elephant Butte Lake State Park, some 150 miles (240 km) outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. They stumbled across a tusk sticking out of the ground and when they began to dig the sand away, thought they may have discovered the remains of a prehistoric mammoth. They contacted the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and paleontologist Gary Morgan tentatively identified the creature as not a mammoth, but a mastodon, specifically a stegomastodon that roamed North America 3 million years ago. The beast stood 9' (2.7 m) tall and weighed 13,000 pounds (5900 kg). The skull the bachelors found (IMAGES HERE) is itself nearly 1,000 pounds (454 kg) because it is filled with sand, but will soon be excavated, studied, and placed on display at the museum. Morgan believes it to be nearly 100% complete and one of the discoverers, Antonia Gradillas, comments, "This is the coolest thing ever. Some people with Ph.D.s in this field might not even have this kind of opportunity. We were so lucky."

 

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Amber answer

A tick preserved in 15-20 million-year-old amber from the Dominican Republic offers the oldest fossil evidence of the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, the often misdiagnosed disease that was only recognized by the medical community about 40 years ago. The bacteria, which has survived since before humans walked the Earth, was the subject of a study and a published paper by researchers at Oregon State University. Author George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus in OSU's Department of Integrative Biology, has documented the ancient presence of diseases including malaria and rickets, and suggests that humans have been sickened by tick-borne bacteria from our beginnings. The oldest case discovered so far is that of the 5,300-year-old Tyrolean iceman. Poinar points out, "Before he was frozen in the glacier, the iceman was probably already in misery from Lyme disease. He had a lot of health problems and was really a mess."

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Petrified pollinator

Yet another amazing fossil has emerged from Germany's Messel Pit: the remains of a tiny bird 3" (8 cm) long. Although hummingbirds date back only 30 million to 34 million years, this even older bird – an extinct species known as Pumiliornis tessellatus – was also a pollinator. The bird was discovered and studied by a team led by ornithologist Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute of Frankfurt, and was equipped with feet built for clinging to branches and a long, slender beak with a large opening. The fossil offers the oldest direct evidence of bird pollination because he found hundreds of grains of flower pollen in its little belly. Paleobotanist David Dilcher of Indiana University calls it a "handshake…across the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom...from 47 million years ago."

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Seed shrimp seed

Phosphorus in bat droppings in a cave in Queensland, Australia, is responsible for petrifying tiny crustaceans known as ostracods, or seed shrimp. Paleontologist Mike Archer of the University of New South Wales took a scanning electron microscope to one of them (IMAGE ABOVE) and was surprised at what he found inside the intact reproductive organs. He describes, "This is the oldest sperm in the world. We get used to fossil bones and teeth but we did not expect the soft tissues would also preserve for 17 million years."

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La Brea bees

"I had read some of the big literature that said leafcutter bees aren't really identifiable by their nest cells. But I thought, 'That just can't be true; there's got to be a way,'" thought entomologist Anna Holden of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, California, U.S. She was examining 2 nest cells from their collection, which had been excavated from the La Brea tar pits in 1970 and she was sure they were leafcutters. With the help of her colleagues, she found a way. The researchers analyzed the nest cell architecture and the physical features of the bee pupae using high-resolution micro-computed tomography (CT) scanners. They cross-referenced their data with environmental niche models that predict the geographic distribution of species, and determined that their Ice Age specimens belonged to Megachile gentilis, a bee species that still exists today. The image above compares a modern female leafcutter bee pupa on the left with the scan of the male leafcutter that buzzed around the tar pits 23,000 years ago.

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Cetacean echolocation

"They can 'see' the fish and then they know to swim in that direction to catch it," says anatomist Jonathan Geisler of the New York Institute of Technology about the trait of echolocation in modern whales. Whales that use echolocation produce high-frequency vocalizations– clicks, squeaks, and squeals – through a soft-tissue nasal passage located between the blowhole and skull. These sounds echo off objects in the water, giving the animal a high-resolution audio image of its surroundings. Geisler led a research team that has determined that this trait existed in a species of whale 28 million years ago, suggesting that the sonar evolved shortly after whales split into 2 separate groups, toothed and baleen, and only 15 or 20 million years after the first whales evolved from wolf-sized land-dwellers and entered the ocean. The fossilized remains of Cotylocara macei (SKULL PICTURED ABOVE) were discovered near Summerville, South Carolina, U.S. The whale was 10' to 11' (3 to 3.4 m) in length and probably swam in a shallow ocean environment, feeding on fish and squid. Geisler postulates that this extinct whale already had a melon, the fat-filled organ in the head of modern whales that focuses the sound waves. Referring to a very deep pocket on top of the skull believed to be associated with an air sinus used in echolocation, the whale's genus name Cotylocara means "cavity head."

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Paleo parturition

Study the fossil above for a moment to make sense of it. The complete animal on the lower right is an embryonic 248-million-year-old ichthyosaur. But you will notice a vertebral column above it and a pelvis to the left, which indicates that it is emerging from the mother's womb (SEE COLOR-CODED DIAGRAM HERE). The find came out of recent excavations in south Majiashan, Anhui, China, led by paleontologist Guan-bao Chen of Anhui Geological Museum. The dig yielded more than 80 skeletons of the lizard-like Chaohusaurus, the oldest of Mesozoic marine reptiles but, at 6' (1.8 m) in length, one of the smallest ichthyosaurs. This particular specimen is even more momentous than mites procreating when they were covered by sap 40 million years ago or turtles caught in the act when they were overcome by volcanic gases 47 million years ago. Lead author of the newly published paper in the journal PLoS ONE Ryosuke Motani from the University of California, Davis, explains, “The study reports the oldest vertebrate fossil to capture the ‘moment’ of live-birth, with a baby emerging from the pelvis of its mother. The 248-million-year old fossil of an ichthyosaur suggests that live-bearing evolved on land and not in the sea.”

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Backward birds

The image above shows a young bird with claws on its wings like the extinct archaeopteryx, long believed to be evidence of the evolutionary transition of dinosaurs to birds. Except that the bird in the drawing is alive today – the only bird known to have this trait. The Amazonian hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin) has a number of interesting characteristics, a striking appearance, some interesting nicknames, and some new conclusions about its origins. But the idea that it is a vestige of a bird which lived 150 million years ago is misleading. As Gerald Mayr, curator of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, points out, "Many Archaeopteryx reconstructions were inspired by hoatzins." Meanwhile, scientists attached prosthetic tails to chickens to test theories about the way bipedal dinosaurs moved. Researchers led by Bruno Grossi of the Universidad de Chile write, "These results indicate a shift from the standard bird, knee-driven bipedal locomotion to a more hip-driven locomotion, typical of crocodilians (the only other extant archosaur group), mammals, and hypothetically, bipedal non-avian dinosaurs." Watch the mesmerizing video HERE.

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Teachable moment

This unassuming boulder has been resting on the grounds of a private K-12 school in Palos Verdes, California, U.S., ever since the school's construction some 80 years ago. Other hunks of the native sedimentary rock, which dates to the Miocene epoch (12 to 20 million years ago), are scattered around campus or incorporated into the buildings, but Martin Byhower, a 7th-grade science teacher at the Chadwick School, noticed something interesting about this one. At one and is the base of an animal skull and at the other end its lower jaw juts out. Byhower alerted paleontologist Howell Thomas of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, who declared it very special within moments of his on-site inspection. He believes it may in fact belong to a new species of extinct sperm whale. The boulder – 32" (81 cm) long, 26" (66 cm) wide, and 14" (36 cm) deep – is being removed to the museum next week for cleaning and analysis. Chipping away the matrix may take a year, but the fossil will be returned to the school to be used for educational purposes. Byhower, who plans to integrate the surprise fossil find into the curriculum, points out, "People have walked by these fossils for decades and never even seen them. Others have seen them but never really wondered."

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Stone spider

Archaeologists did not begin to find Jurassic spider fossils until 1984, but at the turn of the 21st c. a treasure trove turned up in Daohugou, China. A short time ago the fossil beds turned up a large primitive female orb weaver (ABOVE RIGHT). Now researchers from the University of Kansas have identified the male version (ABOVE LEFT) and he is colossal by prehistoric standards. Though his body length is only .65" (1.65 cm), his legs stretch 2.3" (5.82 cm). Invertebrate paleontologist Paul Selden remarks, “First, it is an amazing spider. It’s the largest fossil spider—and great to have both male and female. Second, research into the anatomy reveals details of how it lived and interacted with its insect prey." But it would have been no match for a Carboniferous dragonfly…

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Angiosperm in amber

As usual, when I find a story about something fossilized in amber, I look no further… This time it's an angiosperm (flowering plant) discovered in the amber mines of Burma's Hukawng Valley. German and American scientists claim the newly-described flower (Micropetasos burmensis) is one of the most complete ever found in amber and the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant. In the Cretaceous Period, 100 million years ago, flowers were still quite tiny, but were beginning to change the face of the earth, adding beauty, biodiversity, and food. The specimen (IMAGE ABOVE) includes a cluster of 18 tiny flowers, but - remarkably - captures the moment when 2 grains of pollen were penetrating the receptive part of the female reproductive system, which would lead to seed formation, had the act been completed. Professor emeritus George Poinar, Jr., of Oregon State University's Department of Integrative Biology explains, “In Cretaceous flowers we’ve never before seen a fossil that shows the pollen tube actually entering the stigma. This is the beauty of amber fossils. They are preserved so rapidly after entering the resin that structures such as pollen grains and tubes can be detected with a microscope.”

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From fern to flower

Another remarkable discovery, not in the field but in a museum. As a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, Nathan Jud was examining ancient plant fossils at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. What he thought was a fern turned out to be a series of leaves attached to each other by veins. He realized from its structure that it had reproduced sexually with seeds rather than asexually with spores, as was typical at that time. After dating the plant to the Early Cretaceous through analysis of the chemical makeup of pollen in the surrounding rock and other fossils trapped in the same layer, researchers realized that – at between 115 and 125 million years old – it may have been the earliest flowering plant in North America. The fossil had been excavated in 1971 from beds in Virginia that had originally been exposed by freed slaves employed by Union troops in 1864 to dig a canal. Jud honored that history when giving a name to the species and explains: “Potomac refers to the Potomac Group beds where the fossil was found, capnos is a reference to living poppies that are quite similar to the fossil and apeleutheron is the Greek word for freedmen. So the new plant will be named Potomacapnos apeleutheron: roughly, ‘freedmen’s poppy of the Potomac.’”

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