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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.