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Giant prehistoric elephant skull from India belongs to mysterious extinct species

An imposing fully-grown male Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus wandering the Kashmir Valley, 400 thousand years ago, towering over a herd of Central Asian red deer traversing by. In the distance, a small band of prehistoric humans set up campfire to cook their meal. Credit: Chen Yu, University of Helsinki
An imposing fully-grown male Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus wandering the Kashmir Valley, 400 thousand years ago, towering over a herd of Central Asian red deer traversing by. In the distance, a small band of prehistoric humans set up campfire to cook their meal. Credit: Chen Yu, University of Helsinki

The giant fossil skull of an extinct elephant, discovered in northern India’s Kashmir Valley in 2000, sheds light on a poorly known episode in elephant evolutionary history.

The elephant skull was buried with 87 stone tools used by prehistoric humans, and all the materials were excavated under the leadership of Dr. Ghulam Bhat at the University of Jammu.

Recently, an international team of scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History, the British Museum, the University of York, and the Natural History Museum (London), along with the University of Helsinki’s Dr. Steven Zhang, studied the Kashmir skull to uncover the age and evolutionary context of this megaherbivore. The paper is published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“From the general shape of the skull, it’s quite apparent that the elephant belonged to Palaeoloxodon, or straight-tusked elephants, among the largest land mammals that ever lived. Full-grown adults easily stood around 4m tall at the shoulder and weighed 9–10 tonnes,” says Zhang, a paleontologist from the University’s Department of Geosciences and Geography.

“Yet what’s puzzled experts for some time is that the Kashmir skull lacks a thickened, forward-projecting crest at the skull roof which typifies other Palaeoloxodon skulls found in India.”

Over recent decades, whether the developmental extent of this crest could tell apart different species of Palaeoloxodon and the relative position of these species on the evolutionary tree of elephants has remained controversial. However, recent research concluded that the skull crest in these extinct elephants became more prominent with developmental and sexual maturity. This means that, once specimens can be aged by examining their teeth, it would be possible to compare skulls from individuals with similar levels of maturity.

“From the size, the wisdom teeth and a few other telltale features of the skull, it is evident that the animal was a majestic bull elephant in the prime of its life, but the lack of a well-developed skull crest, particularly in comparison with other mature male skulls from Europe and from India, tells us we have a different species on our hands here,” Zhang explained.

Instead, the research team noticed how the Kashmir skull’s features conform best with another obscure skull from Turkmenistan studied in the 1950s, which was proposed to represent a distinct species, Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus.

“What’s always been puzzling about the Turkmen skull is that, besides the lack of a prominent crest at the skull roof, its other features are highly similar to the already well-known European species, P. antiquus. And this led a number of experts to suggest that the Turkmen specimen is simply an aberrant individual of the European species,” says Zhang.

“But with the Kashmir skull added to the mix, it becomes clear now that the two specimens can be theorized to represent a distinct species that we previously knew very little about, with a broad distribution from Central Asia to the northern Indian Subcontinent,” added Dr. Advait Jukar, the study’s lead author, currently based at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

By measuring protein decomposition in the tooth enamel of the Kashmir Palaeoloxodon skull, and examining stone tools buried alongside the elephant remains, the team concluded that the Kashmir skull dates to the Middle Pleistocene period 300,000–400,000 years ago, very similar to the estimated age of the Turkmen skull. This supports the belief that the two skulls represent a species distinct from other Eurasian Palaeoloxodon.

Palaeoloxodon first evolved in Africa around 1 million years ago; this early African form had a narrow, convex forehead and underdevelopment of the skull crest. Later Palaeoloxodon, best-known from fossils discovered in Europe and India, have very wide, flattened forehead often associated with a thick crest that juts forward from the roof of the skull.

The team thus concluded that with a wide, flat forehead with only the faintest trace of a skull crest, P. turkmenicus may represent a poorly-known missing link that fills a gap in our understanding of how these prodigious prehistoric megaherbivores evolved.

Reference:
Advait M. Jukar et al, A remarkable Palaeoloxodon (Mammalia, Proboscidea) skull from the intermontane Kashmir Valley, India, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (2024). DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2396821

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Helsinki.

Extremely well-preserved fossil sawfly sheds new light on co-evolution of insects and toxic plants

The fossil is believed to be between 11 and 16 million years old, from the Miocene Period. Credit: Michael Frese, University of Canberra
The fossil is believed to be between 11 and 16 million years old, from the Miocene Period. Credit: Michael Frese, University of Canberra

A team of Australian researchers has described a new species of now-extinct sawfly from an extremely well-preserved fossil found in central NSW.

This fossilised sawfly, which is between 11 and 16 million years old from the Miocene Period, was the first of its kind discovered in Australia and only the second discovered in the world. It was found by a team of palaeontologists in 2018 who were exploring McGraths Flat, a fossil site in central NSW that has since yielded many other detailed fossils.

Despite the name, sawflies are not flies but a type of wasp, with spitfires the most widely recognised group of sawfly species in Australia. They are called sawflies because they have a saw-like ovipositor that is used to lay eggs, and they could be mistaken as flies because they lack a typical ‘wasp waist’.

With the approval of the Mudgee Local Aboriginal Land Council, Wiradjuri words were used to name the newly described species of sawfly Baladi warru. ‘Baladi’ means ‘saw’ and ‘warru’ means ‘wasp’. This name honours the Traditional Owners of the lands on which the fossil was located.

Researchers from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, the University of Canberra, Australian Museum and Queensland Museum have analysed the sawfly’s wing venation and other features preserved in the fossil and determined its taxonomic (scientific naming) placement within sawflies. This allowed them to describe it as a new species.

CSIRO research scientist, Dr Juanita Rodriguez, helped describe the new sawfly species.

“We looked at the fossil and its morphology and then put this information together with molecular and morphological data from a wide sample of current sawfly species. This helped us decipher the fossil’s placement in the sawfly tree of life,” Dr Rodriguez said.

“We used the fossil’s age and its placement to establish that sawflies originated in the Cretaceous Period, around 100 million years ago, which means their ancient ancestors lived in Gondwana. When this supercontinent split up, sawflies ended up distributed in Australia and South America.

“When we examined the fossil, we identified pollen grains on the sawfly’s head which revealed it had visited a flowering Quintinia plant. This helped our team trace complex species interactions in the palaeoenvironment of McGraths Flat.”

University of Canberra palaeontologist and CSIRO visiting scientist, Dr Michael Frese, who found the fossil sawfly, said this discovery would help researchers track evolution and distribution of sawflies.

“In particular, this find has helped us in understanding the incredible ability of sawflies to feed on toxic plants,” Dr Frese said.

“They eat the leaves of Myrtaceae – a family of woody plants that includes eucalypts – because they have mouthparts with which they can separate toxic oils or a chemical detoxification system inside their gut when feeding on myrtaceous leaves. This enables the larvae, sometimes called spitfires, to use the oils as a defensive weapon.

“In terms of the bigger picture, our work is helping researchers make sense of their current distribution across Australia and the Americas.

“Although this particular species, Baladi warru, has been extinct for millions of years, it provides information on native pollinators so we can understand their evolution and impact in the present.”

Reference:
Juanita Rodriguez et al, A new exceptionally preserved sawfly fossil (Hymenoptera: Pergidae) and an evaluation of its utility for divergence time estimation and biogeography, Systematic Entomology (2024). DOI: 10.1111/syen.12653

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by CSIRO.

Golden bugs: Spectacular new fossil arthropods preserved in fool’s gold

The holotype specimen of Lomankus edgecombei. Photograph at left, other images at right are 3D models from CT scanning. Credit: Luke Parry (photograph), Yu Liu, Ruixin Ran (3D models).
The holotype specimen of Lomankus edgecombei. Photograph at left, other images at right are 3D models from CT scanning. Credit: Luke Parry (photograph), Yu Liu, Ruixin Ran (3D models).

A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Luke Parry, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, have unveiled a spectacular new 450-million-year-old fossil arthropod (the group that contains spiders, centipedes, and insects). Besides being an extraordinary-looking new scientific species, the specimens are entirely preserved by fool’s gold.

The work is published in the journal Current Biology.

Associate Professor Parry said, “As well as having their beautiful and striking golden color, these fossils are spectacularly preserved. They look as if they could just get up and scuttle away.”

The new fossil, named Lomankus edgecombei, after arthropod expert Greg Edgecombe of London’s Natural History Museum, belongs to a group called megacheirans, an iconic group of arthropods with a large, modified leg (called a “great appendage”) at the front of their bodies that was used to capture prey.

Megacheirans like Lomankus were very diverse during the Cambrian Period (538–485 million years ago) but were thought to be largely extinct by the Ordovician Period (485–443 million years ago).

This discovery offers important new clues towards solving the long-standing riddle of how arthropods evolved the appendages on their heads: one or more pairs of legs at the front of their bodies modified for specialized functions like sensing the environment and capturing prey. Such appendages include the antennae of insects and crustaceans, and the pincers and fangs of spiders and scorpions.

“Today, there are more species of arthropod than any other group of animals on Earth. Part of the key to this success is their highly adaptable head and its appendages, that has adapted to various challenges like a biological Swiss army knife,” Associate Professor Parry continued.

While other megacheirans used their large first appendage for capturing prey, in Lomankus the typical claws are much reduced, with three long and flexible whip-like flagella at their end. This suggests that Lomankus was using this frontal appendage to sense the environment, rather than to capture prey, indicating it lived a very different lifestyle to its more ancient relatives in the Cambrian Period.

Unlike other megacheirans, Lomankus seems to lack eyes, suggesting that it relied on its frontal appendage to sense and search for food in the dark, low-oxygen environment in which it lived.

“Rather than representing a ‘dead end,’ Lomankus shows us that megacheirans continued to diversify and evolve long after the Cambrian, with the formerly fearsome great appendage now performing a totally different function,” Associate Professor Parry continued.

The fossil offers new clues towards solving the highly-debated question of what the equivalent of the great appendage of megacheirans is in living species.

Co-corresponding author Professor Yu Liu (Yunnan University) said, “These beautiful new fossils show a very clear plate on the underside of the head, associated with the mouth and flanked by the great appendages. This is a very similar arrangement to the head of megacheirans from the early Cambrian of China except for the lack of eyes, suggesting that Lomankus probably lived in a deeper and darker niche than its Cambrian relatives.”

This arrangement of features on the head is similar to living arthropods, suggesting the great appendage is the equivalent of the antenna of insects and the chelicera (mouthparts) of spiders and scorpions.

The fossil was found at a site in New York State, U.S. that contains the famous “Beecher’s Trilobite Bed”; a layer of rock containing multiple trilobites with incredible preservation. Aside from trilobites, other kinds of organisms are much less common at this site, reflecting the rarity of this find.

The animals preserved in Beecher’s Trilobite Bed lived in a hostile, low oxygen environment that allowed pyrite, commonly known as fool’s gold, to replace parts of their bodies after they were buried in sediment, resulting in spectacular golden 3D fossils. Pyrite is a very dense mineral, and so fossils from this layer can be CT scanned to reveal hidden details of their anatomy.

This technique involves rotating the specimen while taking thousands of X-ray images, allowing the fossils to be reconstructed in three dimensions.

Professor Derek Briggs, a co-author of the study at Yale University said, “These remarkable fossils show how rapid replacement of delicate anatomical features in pyrite before they decay, which is a signature feature of Beecher’s Trilobite Bed, preserves critical evidence of the evolution of life in the oceans 450 million years ago.”

Reference:
A pyritized Ordovician leanchoiliid arthropod, Current Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.013.

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Oxford.

This ancient tadpole fossil is the oldest ever discovered

This image provided by Mariana Chuliver shows the oldest-known tadpole fossil found in Patagonia, Argentina. Credit: Mariana Chuliver via AP
This image provided by Mariana Chuliver shows the oldest-known tadpole fossil found in Patagonia, Argentina. Credit: Mariana Chuliver via AP

Scientists have discovered the oldest-known fossil of a giant tadpole that wriggled around over 160 million years ago.

The new fossil, found in Argentina, surpasses the previous ancient record holder by about 20 million years.

Imprinted in a slab of sandstone are parts of the tadpole’s skull and backbone, along with impressions of its eyes and nerves.

“It’s not only the oldest tadpole known, but also the most exquisitely preserved,” said study author Mariana Chuliver, a biologist at Buenos Aires’ Maimonides University.

Researchers know frogs were hopping around as far back as 217 million years ago. But exactly how and when they evolved to begin as tadpoles remains unclear.

This new discovery adds some clarity to that timeline. At about a half foot (16 centimeters) long, the tadpole is a younger version of an extinct giant frog.

“It’s starting to help narrow the timeframe in which a frog becomes a frog,” said Ben Kligman, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the research.

The results were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The fossil is strikingly similar to the tadpoles of today—even containing remnants of a gill scaffold system that modern-day tadpoles use to sift food particles from water.

That means the amphibians’ survival strategy has stayed tried and true for millions of years, helping them outlast several mass extinctions, Kligman said.

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

New fossil reveals the evolution of flying reptiles

Life restoration of two Skiphosoura bavarica in flight. Credit: Gabriel Ugueto.
Life restoration of two Skiphosoura bavarica in flight. Credit: Gabriel Ugueto.

The pterosaurs are extinct flying reptiles that lived alongside their close relatives, the dinosaurs. The largest of these reached 10 m in wingspan, but early forms were generally limited to around 2 m. In a new paper today, a team led by palaeontologist Dr David Hone of Queen Mary University of London and published in the journal Current Biology describes a new species of pterosaur that helps to explain this important transition.

They named the animal Skiphosoura bavarica meaning ‘sword tail from Bavaria’ because it comes from southern Germany and has a very unusual short, but stiff and pointed tail. The specimen is complete with nearly every single bone preserved and unusually, it is preserved in three dimensions, where most pterosaurs tend to be crushed flat. In life it would have been about 2 m in wingspan, similar to that of large birds like the golden eagle.

For two hundred years, palaeontologists split the pterosaurs into two major groups, the early non-pterodactyloids and the later and much larger pterodactyloids. The early pterosaurs had short heads on short necks, a short bone in the wrist of the wing, a long 5th toe on the foot and long tails, and the pterodactyloids had the opposite: large heads on long necks, a long wrist, short 5th toe and short tail. But which parts of their body changed when between these groups was not known.

In the 2010s, a series of intermediate species called darwinopterans were found that revealed that the head and neck had changed first before the rest of the body. It was a great example of an intermediate that bridged an evolutionary gap. But it also meant we did not really know what was going on before or after these changes.

Skiphosoura reveals these changes. Evolutionarily it sits between these earlier darwinopterans and the pterodactyloids. It retains a very pterodactyloid-like head and neck, but also shows a longer wrist, and a shorter toe and tail than earlier darwinopterans but these are not as extreme as those seen in the pterodactyloids. With the study also comes a new reconstruction of the evolutionary family tree for pterosaurs. In addition to showing the intermediate position of Skiphosoura, it also shows that a Scottish pterosaur, Dearc, as fitting in the mirror position between the early pterosaurs and the first darwinopterans.

In other words, we now have a complete sequence of evolution from early pterosaurs to Dearc, to the first darwinopterans to Skiphosoura, to the pterodactyloids. While not every specimen is complete, we can now trace the increase in size of the head and neck, the elongating wrist, shrinking toe and tail and other features step-by-step across multiple groups. It’s a superb illustration of the evolution of a group for which the transition has been far from clear before.

Both Dearc and Skiphosoura are unusually large for their time also suggesting that the changes that enabled the pterodactlyoids to reach enormous sizes were appearing even in these transitional species.

Dr David Hone, from Queen Mary University of London, said: “This is an incredible find. It really helps us piece together how these amazing flying animals lived and evolved. Hopefully this study will be the basis for more work in the future on this important evolutionary transition”.

Adam Fitch, from the University of Wisconsin-Maddison, said: “Pterosaurs have long been symbols of the unique life of the past. Skiphosoura represents an important new form for working out pterosaur evolutionary relationships and by extension how this lineage arose and changed.”

René Lauer of the Lauer Foundation said: “The specimen was disarticulated with bones of varying quality often overlaid upon one another. Digital photography of the specimen taken in both visible and UV light significantly aided in the process to identify these elements and to better analyze finer details that were not discernible in normal daylight alone” and Bruce Lauer of the Lauer Foundation said: “The Lauer Foundation is proud to have the opportunity to bring this important specimen to science and further the understanding of pterosaur evolution”.

Stefan Selzer an author on the project who prepared the specimen said: “As a preparator I have worked on more than 60 pterosaur specimens from Solnhofen limestone. I recognized during the final prep this specimen showed features that combined characteristics of both major groups of pterosaurs, with the shortened tail as the most important diagnostic feature.”

Reference:
David William Elliott Hone, Adam Fitch, Stefan Selzer, René Lauer, Bruce Lauer. A new and large monofenestratan reveals the evolutionary transition to the pterodactyloid pterosaurs. Current Biology, 2024; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.023

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Queen Mary University of London.

Paleontologists discover Saskatchewan’s first Centrosaurus and Citipes elegans fossils

Paleontologists and students from McGill University have documented Saskatchewan's first confirmed fossil specimens
Paleontologists and students from McGill University have documented Saskatchewan’s first confirmed fossil specimens

Paleontologists and students from McGill University have documented Saskatchewan’s first confirmed fossil specimens of Centrosaurus, a horned dinosaur species closely related to Triceratops.

The search, conducted in Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park along the South Saskatchewan River, also unearthed a rare mix of dinosaur and marine fossils, shedding light on a dinosaur fauna that existed on the edge of an ancient sea at a time of rising sea levels long before humans roamed the earth.

The findings by biology professor Hans Larsson’s field team were published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. They shed new light on the habitat range of Centrosaurus and the unique Late Cretaceous coastal ecosystem of ancient Saskatchewan.

“We document the largest collection of fossil specimens assigned to Centrosaurus in Saskatchewan,” said Alexandre Demers-Potvin, corresponding author of the study who just defended his Ph.D. in the Department of Biology and wrote the paper for his thesis.

“It appeared to live near a shallow sea with several marine vertebrates, like sharks, which really confirms that the ancient range of this extinct species now extends all the way to the eastern coast of an ancient continent that included western North America.”

The discovery site, dubbed the Lake Diefenbaker Bonebed, reveals an environment unlike any previously documented in Canada. Approximately 75 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, North America was divided by an inland sea. While Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta has long provided insight into inland ecosystems, this new site provides the first look at a coastal habitat, showing how large terrestrial dinosaurs like Centrosaurus shared space with marine animals in a mosaic of estuaries and barrier islands.

“Centrosaurus was only definitely known from sites of similar age in Alberta,” said Demers-Potvin. “Now we report fossils that unequivocally belong to this species from Saskatchewan for the first time. It was always very likely to be found nearby, but the presence of Citipes elegans, a small, parrot-beaked dinosaur, was more unexpected.”

The discovery of Citipes elegans, previously only known from Alberta, is the first of its kind in Saskatchewan and points to a broader diversity of small dinosaur species in the region.

“This entire ecosystem can help us understand how animals and plants adapted to that kind of environmental change without human interference and on a longer time scale,” said Larsson.

Most fossils in this study were excavated by McGill students participating in Larsson’s vertebrate paleontology field course. These fossils were prepared and curated at McGill’s Redpath Museum over the past decade on loan from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina.

Reference:
Alexandre V. Demers-Potvin et al, Occurrence of Centrosaurus apertus (Ceratopsidae: Centrosaurinae) in Saskatchewan, Canada, and expanded dinosaur diversity in the easternmost exposure of the Late Cretaceous (Campanian) Dinosaur Park Formation, Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1139/cjes-2023-0125

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by McGill University.

Fossil amphibians found in burrows where they waited for the next rainy season

Fossil skull of the newly described amphibian. Credit: David Lovelace
Fossil skull of the newly described amphibian. Credit: David Lovelace

Two hundred and thirty million years ago, in what’s now Wyoming, the seasons were dramatic. Torrential rain would pelt the region for months on end, and when the mega-monsoon ended, the region became extremely dry. This weather would have been challenging for amphibians that need to keep their skin moist, but one group of salamander-like creatures found a solution, as evidenced by their bizarre fossils.

In a new study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers describe a new species of fossil amphibian, preserved in torpedo-shaped burrows where they waited out the dry season.

“Based on how the rocks in the area formed and what they’re made of, we can tell that Wyoming experienced some of the most drastic seasonal effects of the mega-monsoon that affected the whole supercontinent of Pangea,” says Cal So, the study’s lead author and an incoming postdoctoral scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago.

“So how did these animals stay moist and prevent themselves from drying out during the hot and dry season that lasted several months? This is the cool thing. We find these fossils inside these cylindrical structures up to 12 inches long, which we’ve interpreted as burrows.”

Cal So, who recently obtained their Ph.D. from George Washington University, first encountered the strange fossil burrows as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, while working with Research Scientist David Lovelace of the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum.

In 2014, Lovelace was searching for fossils in Wyoming, in an area stewarded by the Bureau of Land Management in a rock layer he would eventually call the Serendipity Beds.

“One of my passions is ichnology—the hidden biodiversity that can be shown through tracks of animals or traces of other living organisms,” says Lovelace.

He spotted a small cylindrical structure, and several larger ones that looked “like a Pringle can,” made of rock. Lovelace recognized the structures as in-filled burrows made by an animal long ago, but a small one stood out.

“It was tiny, it was so cute,” he says. He collected several of the cylinders for his research.

Back in the lab, Lovelace took a hammer to one of the preserved burrows to see if there were any fossils inside, and he found a tiny, toothy skull.

“I saw sharp, pointy teeth, and my first thought was that it was a baby crocodile,” Lovelace says. “But when we put it all together and prepared it, we realized it was some sort of amphibian.”

Lovelace reached out to Jason Pardo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum who specializes in fossil amphibians, who created high-resolution CT scans of another of the fossil burrows and revealed a tiny skeleton inside.

“At this point, we were like, ‘Oh my god, we have something really cool,'” says Lovelace. “I went back to put together the geological story of the site, and then we were just finding these burrows everywhere. We couldn’t not find them; the site was ridiculously loaded.”

On one of his return trips, he dispatched So, who was then an undergraduate, to collect more of the burrows. Ultimately, the team gathered around 80 fossil burrows, most of which contained skulls and bones of the ancient amphibians. These bones contained clues to the animals’ lifestyles. No complete skeletons have been found, but based on the partial remains, they were probably about a foot long. They had tiny, underdeveloped arms, but the researchers think they had another way to dig their burrows.

“Their skulls have kind of a scoop shape, so we think they used the head to scoop their way underground at the bottom of a riverbed and go through a period of having a lower metabolic rate so that they could survive the dry season. That’s similar to what some modern-day salamanders and fish do,” says So.

Essentially, the ancient, aquatic amphibians spent the rainy part of the year swimming in rivers, but when those rivers dried up, they dug head-first into the muddy riverbed. They spent the dry season underground, in a state somewhat similar to hibernation, until the monsoon returned a few months later and the rainwater replenished the rivers.

The fossils found by So and Lovelace just happened to be unlucky in that the rivers’ paths changed from year to year. The spots where these animals buried themselves were no longer kept moist, so the animals never emerged and instead died in their burrows.

The ancient amphibians lived in what’s now the ancestral lands of the Eastern Shoshone people, with whom the researchers have an ongoing collaborative relationship.

“Our interest is in education, so we met with the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Eastern Shoshone, and he connected us with the schools,” says Lovelace. “It was a great multi-generational collaboration. We invited seventh-grade students from Fort Washakie School, their teachers and elders into the field with us. The elders told us about their understanding of the rocks and their history on the land, and the students got to find burrows and bones.”

The middle school students are learning the Shoshone language, and they worked with the elders to create a name for the fossil amphibian in Shoshone: Ninumbeehan dookoodukah.

In their paper, the researchers explained, “‘Ninumbee’ is the name for the mountain-dwelling Little People who hold an important place in Shoshone culture (among others), -han is the possessive affix indicating an affiliation with the Ninumbee, ‘dookoo’ means ‘flesh’ and ‘dukah’ means ‘eater.’ Altogether, ‘Ninumbeehan dookoodukah’ means ‘Little People’s flesh eater,’ honoring the Little People and referencing the sharp teeth of the fossil. Our intent is to pay tribute to the Eastern Shoshone people, their language and the land to which they belong.”

“The collaboration between our school district (Fremont County School District # 21) and Dr. Lovelace and his team illustrates reciprocity in action and the long-term, transformational impacts that can occur through authentic relationship building between researchers and communities,” says Amanda LeClair-Diaz, Office of Indian Education Coordinator and a co-author of the paper.

“This process of scientists, community members, educators, middle school students, and Eastern Shoshone elders coming together to learn about these fossils and choosing a Shoshone name for the fossil, Ninumbeehan dookoodukah, solidifies the intergenerational connection we as Shoshone people have to our homeland and the beings that exist within this environment.”

Ninumbeehan offers scientists a tantalizing clue about what life was like in Wyoming 230 million years ago. “Small amphibians are really rare in the Triassic, and we don’t know why that is,” says Pardo. “We find some big ones, but these small ones are really quite challenging to find.”

The newly described amphibians also could shed some light on how modern amphibians might fare in the extreme weather conditions brought on by the climate crisis.

“Modern amphibian diversity is under substantial threat, and climate change is a huge part of that,” says Pardo. “But the way that Ninumbeehan could slow down its metabolism to wait out the dry weather indicates that some lineages of modern amphibians that have similar seasonal behavior might allow for greater survivorship than some of the models suggest. It’s a little glimmer of hope.”

Reference:
Calvin So et al, Fossil amphibian offers insights into the interplay between monsoons and amphibian evolution in palaeoequatorial Late Triassic systems, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2024.1041

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Field Museum.

World’s Largest Worm Lizard Fossil Discovered

The newly discovered worm lizard species is the largest in the world. Presumably, the animals fed mainly on snails 50 million years ago. Credit: Jaime Chirinos
The newly discovered worm lizard species is the largest in the world. Presumably, the animals fed mainly on snails 50 million years ago. Credit: Jaime Chirinos

An international team of researchers has discovered a new fossil worm lizard species in Tunisia. Terastiodontosaurus marcelosanchezi is the largest known species of the Amphisbaenia group, with a skull length of over five centimeters.

The work is published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Unlike today’s predominantly subterranean worm lizards, this species may also have been a surface dweller. The fossil shows extreme dental features, including strong jaws and a specialized tooth enamel, which indicate that it fed on snails—a diet that has persisted for over 56 million years.

The worm lizards (Amphisbaenia) are aptly named, since at first glance these scaly reptiles resemble a worm with a head at both ends. However, what recalls a creature from Greek mythology is actually an evolutionary trick: worm lizards can crawl both forwards and backwards with their blunt, rounded tail ends.

Among other things, they use their body shape, which is reminiscent of an earthworm, to wriggle through narrow passages in the ground that they dig themselves.

An international team led by Prof. Dr. Georgios L. Georgalis from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakow, with researchers from the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, the Institut des Sciences de l’Évolution de Montpellier, the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, and the National Office of Mines in Tunis, has now described a previously unknown fossil species from the group of worm lizards in a new study.

“Our discovery from Tunisia, with an estimated skull length exceeding five centimeters, is the largest known worm lizard species,” explains Georgalis. “All evidence indicates that the new species is related to the modern-day checkerboard worm lizard.”

Unlike the recent Amphisbaenia, which are adapted to a subterranean lifestyle, the new species Terastiodontosaurus marcelosanchezi was probably too large to live exclusively in burrows. The researchers therefore assume that the animal also spent a significant amount of time on the surface.

Co-author PD Dr. Krister Smith from the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt adds, “If worm lizards could grow as large as snakes, then the new species would be comparable to the Titanoboa, which is up to 13 meters long—in other words, significantly larger than its closest relatives. We think that the unusual body size is related to the higher temperatures in this period of the Earth’s history.”

Using micro-computed tomography, the research team documented the particular anatomy of the new species, which dates back to the Eocene. The worm lizard is characterized by an extreme dental morphology—including a massive tooth in the upper jaw, flat molars, and a number of other features—which distinguishes it from all other Amphisbaenia.

“Visually, you can imagine the animal as a ‘sandworm’ from the ‘Dune’ science fiction novels and their movie adaptation. Based on the tooth structure and the unusually thick enamel, we can deduce that the animals had enormous muscle strength in their jaws,” explains Georgalis.

“We know that today’s checkerboard worm lizards like to eat snails by breaking open their shells. We can now assume that this lineage specialized in feeding on snails over 56 million years ago and could crack them open effortlessly with their powerful jaws. This feeding strategy is therefore extremely consistent—it has defied all environmental changes and accompanies the lineage to this day,” adds Smith.

Reference:
Georgios L Georgalis et al, The world’s largest worm lizard: a new giant trogonophid (Squamata: Amphisbaenia) with extreme dental adaptations from the Eocene of Chambi, Tunisia, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society (2024). DOI: 10.1093/zoolinnean/zlae133

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum

The Parasaurolophus’ pipes: Modeling the dinosaur’s crest to study its sound

A 3D-printed model of the Parasaurolophus skulls at a 1:3 scale to the original fossil. The white model is the nasal passages inside the skull. Credit: Hongjun Lin
A 3D-printed model of the Parasaurolophus skulls at a 1:3 scale to the original fossil. The white model is the nasal passages inside the skull. Credit: Hongjun Lin

Fossils might give a good image of what dinosaurs looked like, but they can also teach scientists what they sounded like.

The Parasaurolophus is a duck-billed dinosaur with a unique crest that lived 70 million to 80 million years ago.

It stood around 16 feet tall and is estimated to have weighed 6,000 to 8,000 pounds.

Hongjun Lin from New York University will present results on the acoustic characteristics of a physical model of the Parasaurolophus’ crest Thursday, Nov.

21 as part of the virtual 187th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, running Nov.

18-22, 2024.

“I’ve been fascinated by giant animals ever since I was a kid. I’d spend hours reading books, watching movies, and imagining what it would be like if dinosaurs were still around today,” said Lin.

“It wasn’t until college that I realized the sounds we hear in movies and shows — while mesmerizing — are completely fabricated using sounds from modern animals. That’s when I decided to dive deeper and explore what dinosaurs might have actually sounded like.”

Lin created a physical setup made of tubes to represent a mathematical model that will allow researchers to discover what was happening acoustically inside the Parasaurolophus crest.

The physical model, inspired by resonance chambers, was suspended by cotton threads and excited by a small speaker, and a microphone was used to collect frequency data.

While it isn’t a perfect replication of the Parasaurolophus, the pipes — nicknamed the “Linophone,” after the researcher — will serve as a verification of the mathematical framework.

“I wanted something simplified and accessible for both modeling and building a physical device,” Lin explained.

Lin’s initial results indicate that the Parasaurolophus’ crest was used for resonance, similar to the crests of birds we see today.

The mathematical model is still in progress, but Lin hopes it will be useful for studying animals with similar vocal structures.

He is also planning to create an accessible plug-in for people to experiment with and even add dinosaur sounds to music.

“Once we have a working model, we’ll move toward using fossil scans,” Lin said. “My ultimate goal is to re-create the sound of the Parasaurolophus.”

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Acoustical Society of America.

Thanksgiving special: Dinosaur drumsticks and the story of the turkey trot

The new dinosaur is called Tralkasaurus, which means "thunder reptile" in the indigenous Mapuche language common in Patagonia. In this file photo, a boy in Melbourne, Australia inspects the teeth of a theropod dinosaur
Representative image

Wings may be the obvious choice when studying the connection between dinosaurs and birds, but a pair of Yale paleontologists prefer drumsticks. That part of the leg, they say, is where fibular reduction among some dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago helped make it possible for peacocks to strut, penguins to waddle, and turkeys to trot.

“A good way to understand this is to take a look at drumsticks, like the ones people eat on Thanksgiving,” said Armita Manafzadeh, lead author of a new study in Nature. She is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, the Department of Earth & Planetary Science, and the Yale Peabody Museum.

“Under the meat of a drumstick, you’ll find two bones — the tibia, which is long and thick, and the fibula, which is much shorter and thinner,” Manafzadeh explained. “This shortened fibula is what allows birds to twist and turn around when they’re not in flight. And to understand its evolutionary story, we have to look at dinosaurs.”

Yet the fibula had been largely overlooked by paleontologists and other scientists, often viewed as merely a small remnant of a once-larger physiological feature. The idea that the shortened fibula had a distinct evolutionary benefit was relatively unexplored.

“The fibula is, in general, the more diminutive of the two lower leg bones, and often neglected in the study of vertebrate form and function,” said Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, associate curator at the Yale Peabody Museum, and co-author of the study. “But evolution acts on all parts of the body, great and small. Structures and regions that have been ignored are often gold mines for new insights and untold tales.”

For the study, the researchers used X-ray videos of a present-day bird — a helmeted guineafowl — to precisely measure the knee-joint poses of the bird. Using cutting-edge computer animation software, they combined the videos with 3D models to visualize how the bird’s bone surfaces fit together geometrically and how those joints appeared in motion.

They also collected X-ray videos from an iguana and an alligator and examined the shapes of leg bones in other birds, including a penguin, an ostrich, an owl, and a crane.

The researchers found that in birds, the tibial joint surfaces have curved arcs, and the shortened fibula is able to roll within the bird’s drumstick for about its length relative to the tibia. Taken together, these features enable the knee bones to maintain smooth contact, even when the joint twists by more than 100 degrees.

“You can see that the fibula of birds is moving completely differently from that of other living reptiles,” Manafzadeh said. “It’s why their knees are uniquely able to spin, allowing them to navigate their world more effectively. They use that mobility to turn and maneuver on the ground, but we suspect they’re also using it in mating displays, prey gathering, and moving about tree branches.”

Next, the researchers searched for the evolutionary origins of the shortened fibula in birds — and found their answer in certain species of dinosaurs.

While many dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex, had straightened tibial surfaces and stiffened drumsticks that only allowed for hinge-like knees, certain avian ancestors, including Rahonavis ostromi and Ichthyornis dispar, showed indications of curved tibial surfaces and a shortened, thinner fibula that was free to move on its own.

“We found that the very features that appeared in early dinosaurs to stiffen the leg ended up being co-opted in birds and their close relatives to mobilize the knee joint in a unique and extreme way,” Bhullar said. “Over and again, we see that evolution operates by repurposing existing structures and functions, often in surprising and unpredictable ways.”

The researchers said several well-known Yale Peabody Museum fossils were pivotal in the work, including Allosaurus, the giant Jurassic predator discovered by O.C. Marsh (which had a stiffened dinosaurian knee); Deinonychus, the “velociraptor” of the “Jurassic Park” films (which had an early form of the birdlike knee joint); and Ichthyornis, whose proto-beak was the subject of an earlier study by Bhullar (and which had a fully modern, avian knee).

The new study is part of Bhullar and Manafzadeh’s ongoing research into the evolution of animal motion, based on their novel method for visualizing how ancient animals moved by comparing their joints with those of modern animals.

Reference:
Armita R. Manafzadeh, Stephen M. Gatesy, John A. Nyakatura, Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar. Fibular reduction and the evolution of theropod locomotion. Nature, 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08251-w

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Yale University. Original written by Jim Shelton.

Sliding seeds can provide insight into devastating landslides and rock avalanches

Sliding Champatis, the seeds of the Lapsi tree, can provide insight into devastating landslides and rock avalanches. Credit: Pudasaini et al.
Sliding Champatis, the seeds of the Lapsi tree, can provide insight into devastating landslides and rock avalanches. Credit: Pudasaini et al.

Champatis, the seeds of the Lapsi tree, are valued in Nepal for their medical, economic, social, and cultural significance. They are also popular among children as simple playthings. But for a group of physicists, these unique seeds — and the way they bounce and roll down slopes — could help them better understand landslides and avalanches, leading to research that could save lives.

In a study published this week in Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, a team at the Technical University of Munich, the Kathmandu Institute of Complex Flows, and Tribhuvan University studied how Champatis roll and bounce down inclines.

They suggested these seeds could serve as an analogue in the study of geological flow, particularly in a region prone to landslides and avalanches.

The Champati has a very complex structure. The wide head and narrow oval tail create a slope for each grain, leading to spin and rolling motion when sliding down slopes.

This creates interesting dynamics that drew the attention of the research team.

“We are primarily interested in the scientific question of the dynamics and deposition of Champati slide: how it flows, where it goes, how far, and with what force,” said author Shiva Pudasaini from Kathmandu.

The authors released a heap of the seeds down an inclined plane while a camera recorded their descent to analyze their speed and the dynamics of their movement.

The unique physical and geometrical properties of the supergrain led to previously unobserved dynamics as they slid down slopes.

The team’s findings showed a unique property: The grains start to spread out slowly, then decrease quickly as they move downstream, akin to rock avalanches.

“Soon after the mass hits the ground, the behavior is unprecedented and appears to be highly unpredictable,” Pudasaini said.

This research may provide valuable insights into geological flows, including hyperspreading of rock avalanches, and could contribute to resolving challenges in this area.

Additionally, findings may have significant implications for industrial process engineering.

Currently, the advanced mechanical, geotechnical, and imaging technologies needed for further study of the Champati seeds are not fully available in Kathmandu.

To address this, the research team is expanding their measurement facilities and collaborating with well-equipped research institutions abroad.

However, while the initial results offer promising insights into fragmented rock avalanches, further investigation into the structural, mechanical, and dynamic properties of these grains is essential to fully understand their relevance to earth science and engineering.

Reference:
Shiva P. Pudasaini, Bekha R. Dangol, Chet N. Tiwari, Jeevan Kafle, Puskar R. Pokhrel, Parameshwari Kattel. The Champati Slide. Physics of Fluids, 2024; 36 (11) DOI: 10.1063/5.0230878

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by American Institute of Physics

How 70% of the Mediterranean Sea was lost 5.5 million years ago

The two accumulation phases of the Mediterranean salt layer during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. In the first phase, salt accumulated in a Mediterranean Basin filled with brine; in the second phase, salt accumulated in a Mediterranean completely isolated from the Atlantic Ocean, as a result of the significant drop in sea level in the western and eastern Mediterranean sub-basins. © Giovanni Aloisi
The two accumulation phases of the Mediterranean salt layer during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. In the first phase, salt accumulated in a Mediterranean Basin filled with brine; in the second phase, salt accumulated in a Mediterranean completely isolated from the Atlantic Ocean, as a result of the significant drop in sea level in the western and eastern Mediterranean sub-basins. © Giovanni Aloisi

Mediterranean Sea dropped during the Messinian Salinity Crisis — a major geological event that transformed the Mediterranean into a gigantic salt basin between 5.97 and 5.33 million years ago.

Until now, the process by which a million cubic kilometres of salt accumulated in the Mediterranean basin over such a short period of time remained unknown.

Thanks to analysis of the chlorine isotopes contained in salt extracted from the Mediterranean seabed, scientists have been able to identify the two phases of this extreme evaporation event.

During the first phase, lasting approximately 35 thousand years, salt deposition occurred only in the eastern Mediterranean, triggered by the restriction of Mediterranean outflow to the Atlantic, in an otherwise brine-filled Mediterranean basin.

During the second phase, salt accumulation occurred across the entire Mediterranean, driven by a rapid (< 10 thousand years) evaporative drawdown event during which sea-level dropped 1.7-2.1 km and ~0.85 km in the eastern and western Mediterranean, respectively.

As a result, the Mediterranean Basin lost up to 70% of its water volume.

This spectacular fall in sea level is thought to have had consequences for both terrestrial fauna and the Mediterranean landscape — triggering localised volcanic eruptions due to unloading of Earth’s crust, as well as generating global climatic effects due to the huge depression caused by the sea-level drawdown.

These results, published in Nature Communications on November 18, provide a better understanding of past extreme geological phenomena, the evolution of the Mediterranean region and successive global repercussions.

This work was supported by the European Union and the CNRS.

Notes :

  1. From the French research institute Institut de physique du globe de Paris (CNRS/Université Paris Cité/Institut de physique du globe de Paris).
  2. This exceptional event covered the floor of the Mediterranean Sea with a layer of salt up to 3 km thick. Understanding the causes, consequences and environmental changes undergone by the Mediterranean region in response to the Messinian Salinity Crisis is a challenge that has mobilised the scientific community for decades.
  3. Analysis of the two stable chlorine isotopes (³⁷Cl and ³⁵Cl) made it possible to estimate the rate of salt accumulation and detect the drop in sea level.

Reference:
G. Aloisi, J. Moneron, L. Guibourdenche, A. Camerlenghi, I. Gavrieli, G. Bardoux, P. Agrinier, R. Ebner, Z. Gvirtzman. Chlorine isotopes constrain a major drawdown of the Mediterranean Sea during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. Nature Communications, 2024; 15 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-53781-6

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by CNRS.

New research explores volcanic caves, advancing the search for life on Mars

White microbial-like colonies on the lava tube substrate.
White microbial-like colonies on the lava tube substrate.

Through the intricate study of lava tubes — caves formed following volcanic eruptions when lava cools down — an international team of researchers has uncovered clues about Earth’s ancient environments that could be significant in the search for life on Mars.

Bogdan P. Onac, professor in the USF School of Geosciences, collaborated with researchers from Portugal, Spain and Italy to shed light on how lava tubes may serve as valuable analogs for Martian caves and the search for extraterrestrial life.

On the Spanish island of Lanzarote, just west of North Africa, the team explored six lava tubes to gather mineral deposits.

Some of the tubes are so large, they are used to host underground concerts.

“While the lava tubes on Lanzarote were discovered several years ago, we are the first to complete such a detailed study of minerals and microorganisms,” Onac said.

In the study, published in Communications Earth & Environment, Onac and the team used a range of advanced molecular, isotopic and mineralogical techniques to examine the deposits and create a comprehensive understanding of the minerals they held.

They learned the volcanic rock in the lava tubes created a protective environment that helped shield the minerals and organic compounds from weathering, ultimately preserving the minerals as records of past ecosystems.

The team found preserved biosignatures, including calcium and sodium sulfates.

This discovery indicates microbial activity and microorganisms, such as bacteria, were once active in the caves.

“This study adds to our understanding of geological and environmental changes on Earth and highlights lava tubes as potential refuges for microbial life, holding significant implications for astrobiology, particularly in identifying biosignatures on Mars and other celestial bodies,” Onac said.

Given that Martian lava tubes are similarly shielded and likely contain sulfate-rich minerals, they may also hold signs of past microbial life, giving us clues about potential life beyond Earth.

The findings may significantly impact the way scientists approach planetary exploration, particularly for upcoming missions aimed at studying the habitability of Mars.

The team will publish several additional studies on these lava tubes in the coming months and they are also planning to examine newly formed lava tubes in Iceland.

Reference:
Vera Palma, José María De la Rosa, Bogdan Petroniu Onac, Francesco Sauro, Jesús Martínez-Frías, Ana Teresa Caldeira, José Antonio González-Pérez, Nicasio Tomás Jiménez-Morillo, Ana Zélia Miller. Decoding organic compounds in lava tube sulfates to understand potential biomarkers in the Martian subsurface. Communications Earth & Environment, 2024; 5 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s43247-024-01673-4

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of South Florida. Original written by Cassidy Delamarter.

Scientists compile library for evaluating exoplanet water

A polarized microscope photo of basaltic rock. Credit: Esteban Gazel Lab/Provided
A polarized microscope photo of basaltic rock. Credit: Esteban Gazel Lab/Provided

By probing chemical processes observed in the Earth’s hot mantle, Cornell scientists have started developing a library of basalt-based spectral signatures that not only will help reveal the composition of planets outside of our solar system but could demonstrate evidence of water on those exoplanets.

“When the Earth’s mantle melts, it produces basalts,” said Esteban Gazel, professor of engineering. Basalt, a gray-black volcanic rock found throughout the solar system, are key recorders of geologic history, he said.

“When the Martian mantle melted, it also produced basalts. The moon is mostly basaltic,” he said. “We’re testing basaltic materials here on Earth to eventually elucidate the composition of exoplanets through the James Webb Space Telescope data.”

Gazel and Emily First, a former Cornell postdoctoral researcher and now an assistant professor at Macalester College in Minnesota, are authors of “Mid-infrared Spectra for Basaltic Rocky Exoplanets,” on November 14 in Nature Astronomy.

Understanding how minerals record the processes that created these rocks, and their spectroscopic signatures is the first step in developing their library, Gazel said.

“We know that the majority of exoplanets will produce basalts, given that their host star metallicity will result in mantle minerals (iron-magnesium silicates) so that when they melt, phase equilibria (equilibrium between two states of matter) predicts that the resulting lavas will be basaltic,” Gazel said. “It will be prevalent not only in our solar system, but throughout the galaxy, too.”

First measured the emissivity — the extent to which a surface radiates the energy it encounters — of 15 basaltic samples for spectral signatures of what the space telescope’s mid-infrared spectrometer may detect.

Once basaltic melts erupt on an exoplanet and cool down, the basalts harden into solid rock, known on Earth as lava. This rock can interact with water, if present, which forms new hydrated minerals easy to spot in the infrared spectra. These altered minerals could become amphibole (a hydrous silicate) or serpentine (another hydrous silicate, which looks like a snake’s skin).

By examining small spectral differences between the basalt samples, scientists can in theory determine whether an exoplanet once had running surface water or water in its interior, said Gazel.

Proof of water does not emerge instantly, and further work is needed before this type of detection can be employed. It would take the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — about 1 million miles from Earth — dozens to hundreds of hours to focus on one system light-years away, then more time to analyze the data.

The research group — in looking for a rocky exoplanet to simulate its hypotheses and consider the 15 different signatures — used data from the super Earth exoplanet LHS 3844b, which orbits a red dwarf a little more than 48 light-years away.

Ishan Mishra, working in the laboratory of Nikole Lewis, associate professor of astronomy, wrote computer code modeling First’s spectral data to simulate how differing exoplanet surfaces might appear to the JWST.

Lewis said that modeling tools were first used for other applications. “Ishan’s coding tools were used originally for studying icy moons in the solar system,” she said. “We are now finally trying to translate what we’ve learned of the solar system into exoplanets.”

“The goal was not to assess planet LHS 3844b specifically,” First said, “but rather to consider a plausible range of basaltic rocky exoplanets that could be observed by JWST and other observatories in the coming years.”

In terms of exoplanets, the researchers said exploration of rocky surfaces has been mostly limited to single data points — finding evidence of only type of chemical — in the scientific literature, but that is changing to multiple components as observers make use of the JWST.

By trying to tease out signatures related to mineralogy and bulk chemical composition — for example, how much silicon, aluminum and magnesium are in a rock — the geologists can tell a little more about the conditions under which the rock formed, the geologists said.

“On Earth, if you have basaltic rocks erupting from mid-ocean ridges deep on the ocean floor, versus those erupting at ocean islands like Hawaii,” First said, “you will notice some differences in the bulk chemistry. But even rocks of similar bulk chemistry can contain different minerals, so these are both important characteristics to examine.”

In addition to First, Gazel, Lewis and Mishra, co-authors are Jonathan Letai ’23, Northeastern University; and physicist Leonard Hanssen, Ph.D. ’85, recently retired from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Lewis is a faculty fellow in Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute.

The National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Heising-Simons Foundation/51 Pegasi b Fellowship supported this research.

Reference:
Emily C. First, Ishan Mishra, Esteban Gazel, Nikole K. Lewis, Jonathan Letai, Leonard Hanssen. Potential for observing geological diversity from mid-infrared spectra of rocky exoplanets. Nature Astronomy, 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02412-7

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Cornell University. Original written by Blaine Friedlander, Cornell Chronicle.

Bird brain from the age of dinosaurs reveals roots of avian intelligence

Artist’s impression of Navaornis. Credit: Júlia D’Oliveira
Artist’s impression of Navaornis. Credit: Júlia D’Oliveira

A ‘one of a kind’ fossil discovery could transform our understanding of how the unique brains and intelligence of modern birds evolved, one of the most enduring mysteries of vertebrate evolution.

Researchers have identified a remarkably well-preserved fossil bird, roughly the size of a starling, from the Mesozoic Era. The complete skull has been preserved almost intact: a rarity for any fossil bird, but particularly for one so ancient, making this one of the most significant finds of its kind.

The extraordinary three-dimensional preservation of the skull allowed the researchers, led by the University of Cambridge and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, to digitally reconstruct the brain of the bird, which they have named Navaornis hestiae. Navaornis lived approximately 80 million years ago in what is now Brazil, before the mass extinction event that killed all non-avian dinosaurs.

The researchers say their discovery, reported in the journal Nature, could be a sort of ‘Rosetta Stone’ for determining the evolutionary origins of the modern avian brain. The fossil fills a 70-million-year gap in our understanding of how the brains of birds evolved: between the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird-like dinosaur, and birds living today.

Navaornis had a larger cerebrum than Archaeopteryx, suggesting it had more advanced cognitive capabilities than the earliest bird-like dinosaurs. However, most areas of its brain, like the cerebellum, were less developed, suggesting that it hadn’t yet evolved the complex flight control mechanisms of modern birds.

“The brain structure of Navaornis is almost exactly intermediate between Archaeopteryx and modern birds — it was one of these moments in which the missing piece fits absolutely perfectly,” said co-lead author Dr Guillermo Navalón from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.

Navaornis is named after William Nava, director of the Museu de Paleontologia de Marília in Brazil’s São Paolo State, who discovered the fossil in 2016 at a site in the neighbouring locality of Presidente Prudente. Tens of millions of years ago, this site was likely a dry area with slow-flowing creeks, which enabled the fossil’s exquisite preservation. This preservation allowed the researchers to use advanced micro-CT scanning technology to reconstruct the bird’s skull and brain in remarkable detail.

“This fossil is truly so one-of-a-kind that I was awestruck from the moment I first saw it to the moment I finished assembling all the skull bones and the brain, which lets us fully appreciate the anatomy of this early bird,” said Navalón.

“Modern birds have some of the most advanced cognitive capabilities in the animal kingdom, comparable only with mammals,” said Professor Daniel Field from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, senior author of the research. “But scientists have struggled to understand how and when the unique brains and remarkable intelligence of birds evolved — the field has been awaiting the discovery of a fossil exactly like this one.”

Before this discovery, knowledge of the evolutionary transition between the brains of Archaeopteryx and modern birds was practically non-existent. “This represents nearly 70 million years of avian evolution in which all the major lineages of Mesozoic birds originated — including the first representatives of the birds that live today,” said Navalón. “Navaornis sits right in the middle of this 70-million-year gap and informs us about what happened between these two evolutionary points.”

While the skull of Navaornis somewhat resembles that of a small pigeon at first glance, closer inspection reveals that it is not a modern bird at all but instead a member of a group of early birds named enantiornithines, or the ‘opposite birds.’

‘Opposite birds’ diverged from modern birds more than 130 million years ago, but had complex feathers and were likely competent flyers like modern birds. However, the brain anatomy of Navaornis poses a new question: how did opposite birds control their flight without the full suite of brain features observed in living birds, including an expanded cerebellum, which is a living bird’s spatial control centre?

“This fossil represents a species at the midpoint along the evolutionary journey of bird cognition,” said Field, who is also the Strickland Curator of Ornithology at Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology. “Its cognitive abilities may have given Navaornis an advantage when it came to finding food or shelter, and it may have been capable of elaborate mating displays or other complex social behaviour.”

“This discovery shows that some of the birds flying over the heads of dinosaurs already had a fully modern skull geometry more than 80 million years ago,” said co-lead author Dr Luis Chiappe from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

While Navaornis is one of the best-preserved bird fossils ever found from the Mesozoic Era, the researchers believe many more finds from the Brazilian site where it was found could offer further insights into bird evolution.

“This might be just one fossil, but it’s a key piece in the puzzle of bird brain evolution,” said Field. “With Navaornis, we’ve got a clearer view of the evolutionary changes that occurred between Archaeopteryx and today’s intelligent, behaviourally complex birds like crows and parrots.”

While the discovery is a significant breakthrough, the researchers say it is only the first step in understanding the evolution of bird intelligence. Future studies may reveal how Navaornis interacted with its environment, helping to answer broader questions about the evolution of bird cognition over time.

Navaornis is the most recent in a quartet of Mesozoic fossil birds described by Field’s research group since 2018, joining Ichthyornis, Asteriornis (the ‘Wonderchicken’), and Janavis. The group’s work on new fossil discoveries combined with advanced visualisation and analytical techniques have revealed fundamental insights into the origins of birds, the most diverse group of living vertebrate animals.

The research was supported in part by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Daniel Field is a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Luis M. Chiappe, Guillermo Navalón, Agustín G. Martinelli, Ismar de Souza Carvalho, Rodrigo Miloni Santucci, Yun-Hsin Wu, Daniel J. Field. Cretaceous bird from Brazil informs the evolution of the avian skull and brain. Nature, 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08114-4

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Cambridge. Original written by Sarah Collins. The original text of this story is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Did the world’s best-preserved dinosaurs really die in ‘Pompeii-type’ events?

Two perfectly articulated skeletons of the sheep-size dinosaur Psittacosaurus, found in China’s Yixian Formation. New research suggests they died in burrow collapses, not via volcanism, as previously thought. (Jun Liu, Institute of Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Two perfectly articulated skeletons of the sheep-size dinosaur Psittacosaurus, found in China’s Yixian Formation. New research suggests they died in burrow collapses, not via volcanism, as previously thought. (Jun Liu, Institute of Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Between about 120 million and 130 million years ago, during the age of dinosaurs, temperate forests and lakes hosted a lively ecosystem in what is now northeast China. Diverse fossils from that time remained pretty much undisturbed until the 1980s, when villagers started finding exceptionally preserved creatures, which fetched high prices from collectors and museums. This started a fossil gold rush. Both locals and scientists have now dug so much, their work can be seen from space — perhaps the most extensive paleontological excavations anywhere.

By the 1990s, it was clear that the so-called Yixian Formation contained uniquely well preserved remains of dinosaurs, birds, mammals, insects, frogs, turtles and other creatures. Unlike the skeletal and often fragmentary fossils unearthed in most other places, many animals came complete with internal organs, feathers, scales, fur and stomach contents. It suggested some kind of sudden, unusual preservation process at work. The finds even included a cat-size mammal and a small dinosaur locked in mortal combat, stopped in mid-action when they died. The world’s first known non-avian feathered dinosaurs showed up — some so intact that scientists worked out the feathers’ colors. The discoveries revolutionized paleontology, clarifying the evolution of feathered dinosaurs, and proving without a doubt that modern birds are descended from them.

How did these fossils come to be so perfect? The leading hypothesis up to now has been sudden burial by volcanism, perhaps like the waves of hot ash from Mt. Vesuvius that entombed many citizens of Pompeii in A.D. 79. The Yixian deposits have been popularly dubbed the “Chinese Pompeii.”

A new study says the Pompeii idea is highly appealing — and totally wrong. Instead, the creatures were preserved by more mundane events including collapses of burrows and rainy periods that built up sediments that buried the dead in oxygen-free pockets. Earlier studies have suggested that multiple Pompeii-type events took place in pulses over about a million years. The current study uses newly sophisticated technology to date the fossils to a compact period of less than 93,000 years when nothing particular happened.

The study was just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“These are probably the most important dinosaur discoveries of the last 120 years,” said study coauthor Paul Olsen, a paleontologist at the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “But what was said about their method of preservation highlights an important human bias. That is, to ascribe extraordinary causes, i.e. miracles, to ordinary events when we don’t understand their origins. These [fossils] are just a snapshot of everyday deaths in normal conditions over a relatively brief time.”

The Yixian Formation fossils come in two basic varieties: intact, perfectly articulated 3D skeletons from deposits formed mainly on land, and flattened but highly detailed carcasses found in lake sediments, some containing soft tissues.

To come up with fossil ages, the study’s lead author, Scott MacLennan of South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand, analyzed tiny grains of the mineral zircon, taken from both surrounding rocks and the fossils themselves. Within these, he measured ratios of radioactive uranium against lead, using a new, extremely precise method called chemical abrasion isotope dilution thermal ionization mass spectroscopy, or CA-ID-TIMS. The fossils and surrounding material consistently dated to 125.8 million years ago, centered around a period of less than 93,000 years, though the exact number is not clear.

Further calculations showed that this timeframe contained three periods controlled by variations in the Earth’s orbit when the weather was relatively wet. This caused sediments to build up in lakes and on land far more rapidly than previously had been thought. Many deceased creatures were quickly buried, and oxygen that normally would fuel decomposition was sealed out. The sealing effect was fastest in lakes, resulting in the preservation of soft tissues.

The researchers rule out volcanism on multiple counts. Some previous studies have suggested that creatures were encased by lahars, fast-moving concrete-like slurries of mud that flow off volcanoes following eruptions. But lahars are extremely violent, said Olsen, and apt to rip apart any living or dead thing they encounter, so this explanation does not work.

Others have said pyroclastic flows — fast-moving waves of searing ash and poisonous gases á la Mt. Vesuvius — were responsible. These struck down residents of Pompeii, then wrapped the bodies in protective layers of material that preserved them as they were at the moment of death. Even when remains decayed, voids in the ashes remained, from which investigators have made lifelike plaster casts. The remains characteristically are curled in so-called pugilistic positions, torturously doubled over and with limbs severely drawn up, as blood boiled and bodies crumpled in the explosive heat. Victims of modern fires exhibit similar poses.

While there are in fact layers of volcanic ash, lava and intrusions of magma in the Yixian Formation, the remains there don’t match those of the unfortunate Pompeiians. For one thing, feathers, fur and everything else would almost certainly have been burned in a pyroclastic flow. For another, the dinosaurs and other animals are not in pugilistic positions; rather, many are found with arms and tails tucked cozily around their bodies, as if they were sleeping, perhaps dreaming dinosaur dreams, when death found them.

The evidence points instead to sudden burrow collapses, say the researchers. Cores of rock surrounding the skeletonized fossils generally consist of coarse grains, but grains immediately around and within the skeletons tend to be much finer. The researchers interpret this to mean that there was enough oxygen around for a while for bacteria or insects to degrade at least the animals’ skin and organs, and as this happened, whatever fine grains were in the surrounding material preferentially seeped in and filled the voids; the more decay-resistant bones remained intact. Even today, burrow collapses are a common cause of death for birds such as penguins, said Olsen. The frozen-in-time mammal-dinosaur battle may well have happened as the mammal invaded the dinosaur’s burrow to try and eat it or its babies, he said.

As to what caused the burrow collapses, this is speculation, he said. One thought: bigger dinosaurs (whose remains don’t appear here but who were almost certainly around) could have squished burrows simply by tromping around. Exceptionally rainy times could have helped destabilize the ground.

Olsen believes the Yixian Formation is not unique. “It’s just that there is no place else where such intense collecting has been done in this kind of environment,” he said. China has tried to limit for-profit fossil sales, but the market is still thriving, and huge government resources are going into development of tourism around the fossil sites.

Olsen’s personal Holy Grail is feathered dinosaurs, but these are exceedingly rare even in the richest deposits, he pointed out. “You have to dig out, say, 100,000 fish to find one feathered dinosaur, and no one is digging on the Yixian scale,” he said. Just in the eastern United States, several places that once had environments similar to the Yixian could yield such fossils, Olsen said. These include a rock quarry straddling the North Carolina-Virginia border where he has found thousands of perfectly preserved insects; sites in Connecticut where small excavations have shown promise; and a former quarry in North Bergen, N.J., now sandwiched between a highway and a strip mall that in the past yielded fabulously preserved fish and reptiles. Systematic excavations of such spots are more or less the size of a bathroom, he said.

“It takes enormous effort, which is expensive. And land is valuable in these areas,” he said. “So no one is doing it. At least not yet.”

The study was coauthored by Sean Kinney and Clara Chang of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, the Institute of Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Princeton University.

Reference:
Scott A. MacLennan, Jingeng Sha, Paul E. Olsen, Sean T. Kinney, Clara Chang, Yanan Fang, Jun Liu, Bennett B. Slibeck, Elaine Chen, Blair Schoene. Extremely rapid, yet noncatastrophic, preservation of the flattened-feathered and 3D dinosaurs of the Early Cretaceous of China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024; 121 (47) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2322875121

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Columbia Climate School. Original written by Kevin Krajick.

White smokers on the lake floor

An individual submarine chimney at a depth of roughly 30 m.Photo: UFZ
An individual submarine chimney at a depth of roughly 30 m.
Photo: UFZ

In an interdisciplinary research project coordinated by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), researchers have discovered meter-high chimneys on the floor of the Dead Sea. These are formed by the spontaneous crystallization of minerals from groundwater with an extremely high salt content flowing up out of the lake floor, they report in journal Science of the Total Environment. Discovered for the first time, these vents are an important early warning indicator for sinkholes. These subsidence craters form in the area surrounding the Dead Sea and pose a significant hazard to the population.

The Dead Sea is a highly dynamic system: Its level has been dropping by roughly one meter per year for more than 50 years, because it is cut off from key tributaries and is losing large quantities of water through evaporation as a result of drought and heat. The surface has thus dropped to roughly 438 meters below sea level. This decline in the lake, which borders Israel, Jordan and the West Bank under Palestinian administration, has significant consequences, especially for the groundwater. The groundwater level is falling, making it increasingly difficult for neighbouring countries to access groundwater resources. For many years, UFZ hydrogeologist Dr. Christian Siebert has been researching how the dynamics of the groundwater system in this region are changing and how aquifers are finding new paths in the rock strata both on land and below the Dead Sea. A team of divers he deployed has now discovered chimney-shaped vents on the lake floor that discharge a shimmering fluid.

“These bear a striking similarity to black smokers in the deep sea, but the system is completely different,” says the UFZ researcher. Scientists from the fields of mineralogy, geochemistry, geology, hydrology, remote sensing, microbiology and isotope chemistry from a total of ten research institutions were involved in investigating and analysing the phenomenon.

While black smokers along the mid-ocean ridge emit hot water containing sulphides at a depth of several thousand metres, the researchers in the Dead Sea discovered that highly saline groundwater flows out through the chimneys at the bottom of the lake. But where is the salt coming from? The explanation: The groundwater from the surrounding aquifers penetrates into the saline lake sediments, leaching out extremely old and thick layers of rock consisting mainly of the mineral halite. It then flows into the lake as brine.

“Because the density of this brine is somewhat lower than that of the water in the Dead Sea, it rises upwards like a jet. It looks like smoke, but it’s a saline fluid,” explains Christian Siebert.

Contact with the lake water causes the dissolved salts, especially the halite, to spontaneously crystallize after emerging from the lake bed, where it forms the vents observed for the first time in the world. These can grow by several centimetres within a single day. Many of the slender chimneys were one to two meters high, but they also include giants more than seven meters high, with a diameter of more than 2-3 meters. Minuscule traces of 36Cl, a radioisotope from space, and the genetic verification of freshwater microbes in the water from the chimneys have shown that the white smokers have their origin in the aquifers in the surrounding area. The salts were thus not absorbed until the last few meters before the water entered the Dead Sea.

These white smokers are especially important because they can serve as an early warning indicator for sinkholes. These are subsidence craters up to 100 meters wide and up to 20 meters deep, thousands of which have formed along the Dead Sea in recent decades. They are formed by karstification of the subsoil, i.e. by the dissolution of massive layers of salt. This forms giant cavities above which the ground can collapse at any time.

“To date, no one can predict where the next sinkholes will occur. They are also life-threatening and pose a threat to agriculture and infrastructure,” says Christian Siebert. The research team was able to show that the chimneys had formed wherever the land surface subsequently collapsed over a large area and the karstification process had apparently been especially efficient.

“This makes the white smokers an outstanding forecasting tool for locating areas that are at risk of collapse in the near future,” he says. Autonomous watercraft equipped with multibeam echosounders or side-scanning sonar systems could be used to map the chimneys to a high degree of precision. “This would be the only method to date, and a highly efficient one, for identifying regions at risk of imminent collapse.”

Reference:
C. Siebert, D. Ionescu, U. Mallast, S. Merchel, B. Merkel, P. Möller, S. Pavetich, T. Pohl, T. Rödiger, Y. Yechieli. A new type of submarine chimneys built of halite. Science of The Total Environment, 2024; 955: 176752 DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.176752

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ.

Was ‘Snowball Earth’ a global event? Study delivers best proof yet

Reddish-brown bands of Tava sandstone cut through other rocks. (Credit: Liam Courtney-Davies)
Reddish-brown bands of Tava sandstone cut through other rocks. (Credit: Liam Courtney-Davies)

Geologists have uncovered strong evidence from Colorado that massive glaciers covered Earth down to the equator hundreds of millions of years ago, transforming the planet into an icicle floating in space.

The study, led by the University of Colorado Boulder, is a coup for proponents of a long-standing theory known as Snowball Earth. It posits that from about 720 to 635 million years ago, and for reasons that are still unclear, a runaway chain of events radically altered the planet’s climate. Temperatures plummeted, and ice sheets that may have been several miles thick crept over every inch of Earth’s surface.

“This study presents the first physical evidence that Snowball Earth reached the heart of continents at the equator,” said Liam Courtney-Davies, lead author of the new study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geological Sciences at CU Boulder.

The team will publish its findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors include Rebecca Flowers, professor of geological sciences at CU Boulder, and researchers from Colorado College, the University of California, Santa Barbara and University of California, Berkeley.

The study zeroes in on the Front Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Here, a series of rocks nicknamed the Tavakaiv, or “Tava,” sandstones hold clues to this frigid period in Earth’s past, Courtney-Davies said.

The researchers used a dating technique called laser ablation mass spectrometry, which zaps minerals with lasers to release some of the atoms inside. They showed that these rocks had been forced underground between about 690 to 660 million years ago — in all likelihood from the weight of huge glaciers pressing down above them.

Courtney-Davies added that the study will help scientists understand a critical phase in not just the planet’s geologic history but also the history of life on Earth. The first multicellular organisms may have emerged in oceans immediately after Snowball Earth thawed.

“You have the climate evolving, and you have life evolving with it. All of these things happened during Snowball Earth upheaval,” he said. “We have to better characterize this entire time period to understand how we and the planet evolved together.”

Searching for snow

The term “Snowball Earth” dates back to a paper published in 1992 by American geologist Joseph Kirschvink.

Despite decades of research, however, scientists are yet to agree whether the entire globe actually froze. Geologists, for example, have discovered the fingerprints of thick ice from this time period along ancient coastal areas, but not within the interior of continents close to the equator.

Which is where Colorado enters the picture. At the time, the region didn’t sit at the northern latitudes where it does today. Instead, Colorado rested over the equator as a landlocked part of the ancient supercontinent Laurentia.

If glaciers formed here, scientists believe, then they could have formed anywhere.

Going deep

The search for that missing piece of the puzzle brought Courtney-Davies and his colleagues to the Tava sandstones. Today, these features poke up from the ground in a few locations along Colorado’s Front Range, most notably around Pikes Peak. To the untrained eye, they might seem like ordinary-looking yellow-brown rocks running in vertical bands less than an inch to many feet wide.

But for geologists, these features have an unusual history. They likely began as sands at the surface of Colorado at some point in the past. But then forces pushed them underground — like claws digging into the Earth’s crust.

“These are classic geological features called injectites that often form below some ice sheets, including in modern-day Antarctica,” Courtney-Davies said.

He wanted to find out if the Tava sandstones were also connected to ice sheets. To do that, the researchers calculated the ages of mineral veins that sliced through those features. They collected tiny samples of the minerals, which are rich in iron oxide (essentially, rust), then hit them with a laser. In the process, the minerals released small quantities of the radioactive element uranium. Because uranium atoms decay into lead at a constant rate, the team could use them as a sort of timekeeper for the planet’s rocks.

It was a Eureka moment: The group’s findings suggest that the Tava sandstone had been pushed underground at the time of Snowball Earth. The group suspects that, at the time, thick ice sheets formed over Colorado, exposing the sands to intense pressures. Eventually, and with nowhere else to go, they pushed down into the bedrock below.

“We’re excited that we had the opportunity to unravel the story of the only Snowball Earth deposits that have so far been identified in Colorado,” Flowers said.

The researchers aren’t done yet: If such features formed in Colorado during Snowball Earth, they probably formed in other spots around North America, too, Courtney-Davies said:

“We want to get the word out so that others try and find these features and help us build a more complete picture of Snowball Earth.”

Reference:
Liam Courtney-Davies, Rebecca M. Flowers, Christine S. Siddoway, Adrian Tasistro-Hart, Francis A. Macdonald. Hematite U-Pb dating of Snowball Earth meltwater events. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024; 121 (47) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2410759121

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Colorado at Boulder. Original written by Daniel Strain.

When Earth was slushy

The research findings hint at vast rivers of glacial water rushing like a reverse tsunami from the land into the sea, then pooling on top of extra salty, extra dense ocean water. Photo courtesy of AdobeStock.
The research findings hint at vast rivers of glacial water rushing like a reverse tsunami from the land into the sea, then pooling on top of extra salty, extra dense ocean water. Photo courtesy of AdobeStock.

At the end of the last global ice age, the deep-frozen Earth reached a built-in limit of climate change and thawed into a slushy planet.

Results from a Virginia Tech-led study provide the first direct geochemical evidence of the slushy planet — otherwise known as the “plumeworld ocean” era — when sky-high carbon dioxide levels forced the frozen Earth into a massive, rapid melting period.

“Our results have important implications for understanding how Earth’s climate and ocean chemistry changed after the extreme conditions of the last global ice age,” said lead author Tian Gan, a former Virginia Tech postdoctoral researcher. Gan worked with geologist Shuhai Xiao on the study, which was released Nov. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Deep-frozen Earth

The last global ice age took place about 635 million to 650 million years ago, when scientists believe global temperatures dropped and the polar ice caps began to creep around the hemispheres. The growing ice reflected more sunlight away from the Earth, setting off a spiral of plunging temperatures.

“A quarter of the ocean was frozen due to extremely low carbon-dioxide levels,” said Xiao, who recently was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

When the surface ocean sealed, a chain of reactions stuttered to a stop:

  • The water cycle locked up. No evaporation and very little rain or snow.
  • Without water, there was a massive slowdown in a carbon-dioxide consuming process called chemical weathering, where rocks erode and disintegrate.
  • Without weathering and erosion, carbon dioxide began to amass in the atmosphere and trap heat.

“It was just a matter of time until the carbon-dioxide levels were high enough to break the pattern of ice,” Xiao said. “When it ended, it probably ended catastrophically.”

Plume world

Suddenly, heat started to build. The ice caps began to recede, and Earth’s climate backpedaled furiously toward the drippy and soupy. Over a mere 10 million years, average global temperatures swung from minus 50 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 45 to 48 degrees Celsius).

But the ice didn’t melt and remix with seawater at the same time. The research findings paint a very different world than what we can imagine: vast rivers of glacial water rushing like a reverse tsunami from the land into the sea, then pooling on top of extra salty, extra dense ocean water.

The researchers tested this version of the prehistoric world by looking at a set of carbonate rocks that formed as the global ice age was ending.

They analyzed a certain geochemical signature, the relative abundance of lithium isotopes, recorded within the carbonate rocks. According to plumeworld ocean theory, the geochemical signatures of freshwater would be stronger in rocks formed under nearshore meltwater than in the rocks formed offshore, beneath the deep, salty sea — and that’s exactly what the researchers observed.

The findings bring the limit of environmental change into better focus, said Xiao, but they also give researchers additional insight into the frontiers of biology and the resiliency of life under extreme conditions — hot, cold, and slushy.

Study collaborators include:

  • Ben Gill, Virginia Tech associate professor of sedimentary geochemistry
  • Morrison Nolan, former graduate student, now at Denison University
  • Collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Maryland at College Park, University of Munich in Germany, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of Nevada at Las Vegas

Reference:
Tian Gan, Meng Tian, Xi-Kai Wang, Shijie Wang, Xiao-Ming Liu, Ganqing Jiang, Benjamin C. Gill, Morrison Nolan, Alan J. Kaufman, Taiyi Luo, Shuhai Xiao. Lithium isotope evidence for a plumeworld ocean in the aftermath of the Marinoan snowball Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024; 121 (46) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2407419121

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Virginia Tech. Original written by Kelly Izlar.

New trigger proposed for record-smashing 2022 Tonga eruption

The origins of the massive January 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption may have been detected in a seismic wave recorded 750 kilometers from the volcano, according to new research in Geophysical Research Letters. Credit: NASA
The origins of the massive January 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption may have been detected in a seismic wave recorded 750 kilometers from the volcano, according to new research in Geophysical Research Letters. Credit: NASA

Fifteen minutes before the massive January 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, a seismic wave was recorded by two distant seismic stations. Now, researchers argue that similar early signals could be used to warn of other impending eruptions in remote oceanic volcanoes.

The researchers propose that the seismic wave was caused by a fracture in a weak area of oceanic crust beneath the volcano’s caldera wall. That fracture allowed seawater and magma to pour into and mix together in the space above the volcano’s subsurface magma chamber, explosively kickstarting the eruption.

The research was published in Geophysical Research Letters, an open-access AGU journal that publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

The results build on the researchers’ previous work monitoring remote volcanoes. In this case, the Rayleigh wave, a type of seismic wave that moves through the Earth’s surface, was detected 750 kilometers (approximately 466 miles) from the volcano.

“Early warnings are very important for disaster mitigation,” said Mie Ichihara, a volcanologist at the University of Tokyo and one of the study’s coauthors. “Island volcanoes can generate tsunamis, which are a significant hazard.”

Silent precursor to a violent eruption

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai is an oceanic volcano in the western Pacific Ocean in the Kingdom of Tonga. The seamount was created by the subduction of the Pacific Plate underneath the Australian Plate, a process that generates magma and leads to eruptions.

On January 15, 2022, the volcano erupted with record-breaking energy, injecting 58,000 Olympic swimming pools of water vapor into the stratosphere, setting off an unprecedented lightning storm and generating a tsunami. That massive eruption was preceded by a smaller eruption on January 14 and, before that, a month of eruptive activity.

Researchers still debate the exact start time of the eruption, though most agree that the eruption started shortly after 4:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The new study reports a Rayleigh wave that started around 3:45 UTC.

The researchers used seismic data to analyze the Rayleigh wave, which was detected by instruments, but not felt by humans, at seismic stations on the islands of Fiji and Futuna. While Rayleigh waves are a common feature of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, the researchers believe that this wave signified a precursor event and possible cause of the massive eruption.

“Many eruptions are preceded by seismic activity,” said Takuro Horiuchi, a volcanology graduate student at the University of Tokyo and the lead author of the study. “However, such seismic signals are subtle and only detected within several kilometers of the volcano.”

In contrast, this seismic signal traveled a great distance, indicating a huge seismic event. “We believe unusually large movements started at the time of the precursor,” Horiuchi said.

Secrets of the seamount

Scientists may never know exactly what caused the gigantic, “caldera-forming” eruption, but Ichihara believes that the process was not instantaneous. Instead, she thinks that this precursor event was the start of an underground process that ultimately led to the eruption.

But it can be difficult to nail down the origins of these rare, colossal eruptions.

“There are very few observed caldera-forming eruptions, and there are even fewer witnessed caldera-forming eruptions in the ocean,” Ichihara said. “This gives one scenario about the processes leading to caldera formation, but I wouldn’t say that this is the only scenario.”

Regardless, detecting early eruption signals may give island nations and coastal areas more valuable time to prepare when faced with imminent tsunamis — even when the signal cannot be felt on the surface.

“At the time of the eruption, we didn’t think of using this kind of analysis in real-time,” Ichihara said. “But maybe the next time that there is a significant eruption underwater, local observatories can recognize it from their data.”

Reference:
Takuro Horiuchi, Mie Ichihara, Kiwamu Nishida, Takayuki Kaneko. A Seismic Precursor 15 min Before the Giant Eruption of Hunga Tonga‐Hunga Ha’apai Volcano on 15 January 2022. Geophysical Research Letters, 2024; 51 (21) DOI: 10.1029/2024GL111144

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by American Geophysical Union.

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