Researchers have for the first time detected chemical traces of red pigment in an ancient fossil — an exceptionally well-preserved mouse, not unlike today’s field mice, that roamed the fields of what is now the German village of Willershausen around 3 million years ago.

The study revealed that the extinct creature, affectionately nicknamed “mighty mouse” by the authors, was dressed in brown to reddish fur on its back and sides and had a tiny white tummy. The results were published today in Nature Communications.

The international collaboration, led by researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K., used X-ray spectroscopy and multiple imaging techniques to detect the delicate chemical signature of pigments in this long-extinct mouse.

“Life on Earth has littered the fossil record with a wealth of information that has only recently been accessible to science,” says Phil Manning, a professor at Manchester who co-led the study. “A suite of new imaging techniques can now be deployed, which permit us to peer deep into the chemical history of a fossil organism and the processes that preserved its tissues. Where once we saw simply minerals, now we gently unpick the ‘biochemical ghosts’ of long extinct species.”

The research team, which includes scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, used X-ray beams from SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and the Diamond Light Source (DLS) in the U.K.

Painting a picture of the past

Color plays a vital role in the selective processes that have steered evolution for hundreds of millions of years. But until recently, techniques used to study fossils weren’t capable of exploring the pigmentation of ancient animals, which is pivotal when reconstructing what they looked like.

This most recent paper marks a breakthrough in the ability to resolve fossilized color pigments in long-gone species by mapping key elements associated with the pigment melanin, the dominant pigment in animals. In the form of eumelanin, the pigment gives a black or dark brown color, but in the form of pheomelanin, it produces a reddish or yellow color.

Building the foundation

Until recently, the researchers had focused on the traces of elements known to be associated with eumelanin, which in previous experiments revealed dark and light patterns in the feathers of the first birds, including Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that first offered a clear link between dinosaurs and birds.

In 2016, co-author Nick Edwards, scientist at SLAC, led a study that demonstrated the potential to differentiate between eumelanin and pheomelanin in modern bird feathers. That work provided a chemical benchmark for this most recent paper, which for the first time showed it’s possible to detect the elusive red pigment, which is far less stable over geological time, in ancient fossils.

“We had to build up a strong foundation using modern animal tissue before we could apply the technique to these ancient animals,” Edwards said. “It was really a tipping point in using chemical signatures to crack the coloring of ancient animals with soft tissue fossils.”

To reveal the fossil patterns in the mighty mouse, the Manchester team used SSRL and DLS to bathe the fossils in intense X-rays. The interaction of those X-rays with trace metals found in pigments allowed the team to reconstruct the reddish coloring in the mouse’s fur.

“The fossils used in this study preserve amazing structural detail, but our work emphasizes that such exceptional preservation may also lead to extraordinary chemical detail that changes our understanding of what is possible to resolve in fossils,” said Manchester professor of geochemistry Roy Wogelius, who co-led the study. “Along the way we learned so much more about the chemistry of pigmentation throughout the animal kingdom”

Adding a new dimension

The key to their work was determining that trace metals were incorporated into the fossilized mouse fur in exactly the same way that they bond to pigments in animals with high concentrations of red pigment in their tissue.

“As you do research in a particular area, the scope of your techniques might evolve,” says Uwe Bergmann, co-author and a distinguished staff scientist at SLAC who led the development of the X-ray fluorescence imaging used in this research. “The hope is that you can develop a tool that will become part of the standard arsenal when something new is studied, and I believe the application to fossils is a good example.”

The effort, which involved physics, paleontology, organic chemistry and geochemistry, informs the scientists what to look for in the future.

“Our hope is that these results will mean that we can become more confident in reconstructing extinct animals and thereby add another dimension to the study of evolution,” Wogelius says.

The team also included researchers from the Fujita Health University in Japan; the Stanford PULSE Institute; the College of Charleston in South Carolina; the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis; the University of Southampton in the U.K.; and the Joint Paleontology Foundation in Spain. The fossils were made available to the study by the University of Göttingen in Germany.

SSRL is a DOE Office of Science user facility. Funding was provided by the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council.

Reference:
Phillip L. Manning, Nicholas P. Edwards, Uwe Bergmann, Jennifer Anné, William I. Sellers, Arjen van Veelen, Dimosthenis Sokaras, Victoria M. Egerton, Roberto Alonso-Mori, Konstantin Ignatyev, Bart E. van Dongen, Kazumasa Wakamatsu, Shosuke Ito, Fabien Knoll, Roy A. Wogelius. Pheomelanin pigment remnants mapped in fossils of an extinct mammal. Nature Communications, 2019; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10087-2

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Original written by Ali Sundermier.

When the bones of an ancient heron were unearthed at a North Florida fossil site, the find wasn’t made by researchers but by two Florida Museum of Natural History volunteers.

A previously unknown genus and species, the heron has been named Taphophoyx hodgei (TAFF’-oh-foy-ks HAHJ’-ee-eye) in honor of landowner Eddie Hodge, who has allowed Florida Museum researchers and volunteers to excavate the site on his property near Williston since his granddaughter first discovered fossils there in 2015.

Nearly 700 volunteers have worked at the Montbrook fossil site, collectively digging more than 12,000 hours.

“You couldn’t have a better group of people,” Hodge said. “There’s a lot of negativity when we get home and turn on the television, but it does you good to be out here seeing volunteers get excited and be positive about something.”

The bones used to identify the new heron were found by volunteers Toni-Ann Benjamin and Sharon Shears.

Taphophoyx hodgei — whose genus name means “buried heron” in Greek and Latin — is the first new species to be described from Montbrook. Many other new species from the fossil-rich site await publication.

“It’s invigorated the local fossil community,” said David Steadman, Florida Museum curator of ornithology and lead author of the description of T. hodgei. “One of the greatest values of Montbrook is that it’s been such a collaborative learning tool.”

Because Montbrook is such an intensively worked fossil site, processing the finds takes the teamwork of scientists and amateurs. Hodge oversees much of the land management that Montbrook requires, including moving dirt and managing drainage. In addition to working outdoors at the site, volunteers prepare and catalog specimens in the Florida Museum’s vertebrate paleontology lab.

A good day of digging requires between 10 and 20 days to process in the lab, said Jonathan Bloch, Florida Museum curator of vertebrate paleontology and a coordinator of the fossil dig.

“We simply couldn’t do all this work without help from the public,” Bloch said. “Volunteers are not only the backbone of the dig, they’re actively contributing to scientific discoveries.”

Steadman and then-master’s student Oona Takano used the characteristics of the bird’s scapula and coracoid, two bones that intersect to support the bird’s shoulder, to determine the relationship between this ancient heron and modern lineages.

They believe T. hodgei is most closely related to today’s tiger-herons, which live in Mexico and Central and South America. They have given the new species the common name “Hodge’s tiger-heron.”

“This heron adds to this big suite of aquatic birds we’re finding at Montbrook,” Steadman said. “We’re seeing the same families of birds you’d see around wetlands today, but they’re all extinct species. The fun challenge is finding out how closely related any given species at Montbrook is to the birds that we see flying and swimming around Florida today. Even after three and a half years, we’re nowhere near diminishing returns.”

Takano, now a University of New Mexico Ph.D. student, said that bird fossils are prized finds, particularly at a site like Montbrook where the majority of fossils belong to young gomphotheres, extinct elephant-like mammals.

“In general, bird bones don’t fossilize well because they’re hollow,” she said. “It’s relatively rare to find well-preserved bird bones at all and even rarer to find articulated bones,” referring to bones that would have locked together in the bird’s body.

Most Florida fossil sites are limestone sinkholes or pitfall traps created by ancient predators to capture their prey. At Montbrook, researchers have been able to glimpse a different type of ancient environment: the riverine ecosystem. Five million years ago, T. hodgei would have lived alongside saber-toothed cats, rhinoceroses and horses that frequented a river that likely weaved through a grassland, Steadman said.

Researchers believe the ancient river’s current scattered decomposing animal remains, making this find of two intersecting bones even more significant. Steadman said naming the species after Hodge was a natural choice.

“Through the kindness of his heart and being interested — just wanting to know what’s in the ground on his land — Eddie let us in and one thing led to another.” Steadman said. “Naming this heron after Eddie is a minor part of treating him right because he’s been treating us right.”

“He’s genuinely interested in the fossils we’re finding,” Takano added.

The Florida Museum recruits volunteers for the Montbrook dig in fall and spring and regularly encourages volunteers and students to become involved, often resulting in meaningful fossil discoveries. Finds are shared on the Florida Museum Montbrook Fossil Dig Blog.

“Volunteers are fascinated by this stuff — it’s really their passion,” Hodge said. “There’s a satisfaction in being able to provide something like this for people interested in higher learning, and you don’t get the chance to do that very often. You never know what you can find. Just the next little spoonful of dirt, brush it back and there it is.”

Reference:
David W. Steadman, Oona M. Takano. A new genus and species of heron (Aves: Ardeidae) from the late Miocene of Florida. Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History, 2019; 55 (9): 174-186 [link]

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Florida Museum of Natural History. Original written by Halle Marchese.

Bedbugs — some of the most unwanted human bed-mates — have been parasitic companions with other species aside from humans for more than 100 million years, walking the earth at the same time as dinosaurs.

Work by an international team of scientists, including the University of Sheffield, compared the DNA of dozens of bedbug species in order to understand the evolutionary relationships within the group as well as their relationship with humans.

The team discovered that bedbugs are older than bats — a mammal that people had previously believed to be their first host 50-60 million years ago. Bedbugs in fact evolved around 50 million years earlier.

Bedbugs rank high among the list of most unwanted human bedfellows but until now, little was known about when they first originated.

Experts have now discovered that the evolutionary history of bed bugs is far more complex than previously thought and the critters were actually in existence during the time of dinosaurs. More research is needed to find out what their host was at that time, although current understanding suggests it’s unlikely they fed on the blood of dinosaurs. This is because bed bugs and all their relatives feed on animals that have a “home” — such as a bird’s nest, an owl’s burrow, a bat’s roost or a human’s bed — a mode of life that dinosaurs don’t seem to have adopted.

The team spent 15 years collecting samples from wild sites and museums around the world, dodging bats and buffaloes in African caves infected with Ebola and climbing cliffs to collect from bird nests in South East Asia.

Professor Mike Siva-Jothy from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, who was part of the team, said: “To think that the pests that live in our beds today evolved more than 100 million years ago and were walking the earth side by side with dinosaurs, was a revelation. It shows that the evolutionary history of bed bugs is far more complex than we previously thought.”

Dr Steffen Roth from the University Museum Bergen in Norway, who led the study, added: “The first big surprise we found was that bedbugs are much older than bats, which everyone assumed to be their first host. It was also unexpected to see that evolutionary older bedbugs were already specialised on a single host type, even though we don’t know what the host was at the time when T. rex walked the earth.”

The study also reveals that a new species of bedbug conquers humans about every half a million years: moreover that when bedbugs changed hosts, they didn’t always become specialised on that new host and maintained the ability to jump back to their original host. This demonstrates that while some bedbugs become specialised, some remain generalists, jumping from host to host.

Professor Klaus Reinhardt, a bedbug researcher from Dresden University in Germany, who co-led the study, said: “These species are the ones we can reasonably expect to be the next ones drinking our blood, and it may not even take half a million years, given that many more humans, livestock and pets that live on earth now provide lots more opportunities.”

The team also found that the two major bedbug pests of humans — the common and the tropical bedbug — are much older than humans. This contrasts with other evidence that the evolution of ancient humans caused the split of other human parasites into new species.

Professor Mike Siva-Jothy from the University of Sheffield, added: “These findings will help us better understand how bedbugs evolved the traits that make them effective pests — that will also help us find new ways of controlling them.”

The researchers hope the findings will help create an evolutionary history of an important group of insects, allowing us to understand how other insects become carriers of disease, how they evolve to use different hosts and how they develop novel traits. The aim is to help control insects effectively and prevent the transmission of insect-vectored disease.

The research has been published in Current Biology.

Reference:
Steffen Roth, Ondřej Balvín, Michael T. Siva-Jothy, Osvaldo Di Iorio, Petr Benda, Omar Calva, Eduardo I. Faundez, Faisal Ali Anwarali Khan, Mary McFadzen, Margie P. Lehnert, Richard Naylor, Nikolay Simov, Edward H. Morrow, Endre Willassen, Klaus Reinhardt. Bedbugs Evolved before Their Bat Hosts and Did Not Co-speciate with Ancient Humans. Current Biology, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.04.048

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

An international team of paleontologists has united to study important fossil footprints recently discovered in a remote location within Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. A large sandstone boulder contains several exceptionally well-preserved trackways of primitive tetrapods (four-footed animals) which inhabited an ancient desert environment. The 280-million-year-old fossil tracks date to almost the beginning of the Permian Period, prior to the appearance of the earliest dinosaurs.

The first scientific article reporting fossil tracks from the Grand Canyon was published in 1918, just a year before the park was established as a unit of the National Park Service. One hundred years later, during the Centennial Celebration for Grand Canyon National Park, new research on ancient footprints from the park is being presented in a scientific publication released this week. Brazilian paleontologist Dr. Heitor Francischini, from the Laboratory of Vertebrate Paleontology,Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, is the lead author of the new publication, working with scientists from Germany and the United States.

Francischini and Dr. Spencer Lucas, Curator of Paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science in Albuquerque, New Mexico, first visited the Grand Canyon fossil track locality in 2017. The paleontologists immediately recognized the fossil tracks were produced by a long-extinct relative of very early reptiles and were similar to tracks known from Europe referred to as Ichniotherium (ICK-nee-oh-thay-ree-um). This new discovery at Grand Canyon is the first occurrence of Ichniotherium from the Coconino Sandstone and from a desert environment. In addition, these tracks represent the geologically youngest record of this fossil track type from anywhere in the world.

Ichniotherium is a kind of footprint believed to have been made by an enigmatic group of extinct tetrapods known as the diadectomorphs. The diadectomorphs were a primitive group of tetrapods that possessed characteristics of both amphibians and reptiles. The evolutionary relationships and paleobiology of diadectomorphs have long been important and unresolved questions in the science of vertebrate paleontology.

Although the actual track maker for the Grand Canyon footprints may never be known for certain, the Grand Canyon trackways preserve the travel of a very early terrestrial vertebrate. The measurable characteristics of the tracks and trackways indicate a primitive animal with short legs and a massive body. The creature walked on all four legs and each foot possessed five clawless digits.

Another interesting aspect of the new Grand Canyon fossil tracks is the geologic formation in which they are preserved. The Coconino Sandstone is an eolian (wind-deposited) rock formation that exhibits cross-bedding and other sedimentary features indicating a desert / dune environment of deposition. Therefore, the presence of Ichniotherium in the Coconino Sandstone is the earliest evidence of diadectomorphs occupying an arid desert environment.

According to Francischini, “These new fossil tracks discovered in Grand Canyon National Park provide important information about the paleobiology of the diadectomorphs. The diadectomorphs were not expected to live in an arid desert environment, because they supposedly did not have the classic adaptations for being completely independent of water. The group of animals that have such adaptations is named Amniota (extant reptiles, birds and mammals) and diadectomorphs are not one of them.”

Lucas also notes that “paleontologists have long thought that only amniotes could live in the dray and harsh Permian deserts. This discovery shows that tetrapods other than reptiles were living in those deserts, and, surprisingly, were already adapted to life in an environment of limited water.”

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science .

Rhinoceros don’t roam the prairies of Texas today, and some might not even know they once roamed the Great Plains. But one Texas A&M University student knows about rhinos: she’s identified unique specimens from fossilized remains found in the mountains of Tennessee dating back almost 5 million years.

Rachel Short, a doctoral candidate in the department of ecosystem science and management at Texas A&M University, is part of a team that identified a new species of ancient rhinoceros, Teleoceras aepysoma, from the late Hemphillian-aged Gray Fossil Site of eastern Tennessee.

The genus, Teleoceras, has been described as the “pot-bellied rhinos,” though this new, taller species changes that, and the species name, aepysoma, means “high-bodied,” Short said. Longer front legs and the lack of a nasal horn are only a few of the body features that make this rhino different from other species already identified.

Short recently published her findings with co-authors Laura Emmert with the Don Sundquist Center of Excellence in Paleontology, and Dr. Steven Wallace, professor and curator of the Museum of Natural History, both at East Tennessee State University.

Short and Emmert completed their master’s degrees at East Tennessee in 2013, and Wallace was their advisor. Short said she got involved with the project because of an interest in North American rhinoceroses that started when she interned at Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park in northeastern Nebraska.

According to the new rhino research, the occurrence of Teleoceras aepysoma in the Appalachian Mountains is unique within a genus typically found in the Great Plains.

“Habitat is most likely a major factor in the unique features,” she said. “We suspect the longer forelimbs helped the rhinos browse on shrubs and trees in the oak-hickory forest. It was a forested environment with little grass, and the smaller tapirs would have been browsing on shorter shrubs, so the rhinos would have had to raise their heads higher.”

Short said it was upon the completion of that project and her interest in the unique morphology and habitat of the Gray Fossil Site rhinos that led her to develop questions that turned in to her Texas A&M dissertation.

At Texas A&M, Short works with Dr. Michelle Lawing to investigate trait-environment relationships of hoofed mammals using bones in the ankle and elbow. The shape of these bones is directly tied to the environment in which the animals live, so fossils can be used to understand past environments as well as how animals respond to environmental change.

“We know mammal communities are being severely impacted by environmental changes,” she said. “We can better predict responses to these ongoing changes if we understand the responses that have been preserved in the information-rich fossil record.”

Teleoceras is a widespread Miocene rhinoceros that has been reported in North American faunas from approximately 20 million years ago to approximately 5 million years ago. The Gray Fossil Site represents one of the last known populations of North American rhinoceroses.

In 2000, late Miocene fossils were found during road construction near Gray, Tennessee, and the Gray Fossil Site was established at the location. There, the fossil material at the site is found primarily in an organic-rich clay deposit that filled a large sinkhole. This sinkhole once served as a watering hole for local fauna, including tapirs, red pandas, alligators and turtles, she said.

Fossils from a minimum of six rhinoceroses, including two nearly complete, articulated skeletons, have been unearthed, Short said, and while Wallace knew they were different, they weren’t studied until she started her master’s thesis in 2011. Availability of such complete specimens enabled a thorough bone-by-bone description of the new species.

Excavations are still ongoing, and as more material is uncovered, the understanding of this unique fauna will improve, she said.

Reference:
A New Species of Teleoceras (Mammalia, Rhinocerotidae) from the Late Hemphillian of Tennessee. www.researchgate.net/publicati … hillian_of_Tennessee

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Texas A&M University.

Researchers have used fossilized teeth found near Lake Turkana in northwest Kenya to identify a new monkey species—a discovery that helps fill a 6-million-year gap in primate evolution.

UNLV geoscientist Terry Spell and former master’s student Dawn Reynoso were part of the international research team that discovered the species that lived 22 million years ago. Understanding the evolution of Old World monkeys is important because, along with the great apes and humans, they belong to the anthropoid group of primates—primates that resemble humans.

According to Spell, the monkey fossil discovery grew out of a more extensive study of a section of sedimentary rocks in Kenya that contain a large number of different types of fossils, including several hundred mammal and reptile jaws, limbs, and teeth.

Previous studies had documented the early evolution of Old World monkeys using fossils dated at 19 million and 25 million years old, leaving a 6-million-year gap in the earliest record. However, the new fossil was determined to be 22 million years in age. Isotopic ages on the rocks were obtained in the Nevada Isotope Geochronology Laboratory on the UNLV campus.

“This adds to our understanding of the earliest evolutionary history of Old World monkeys, including changes in their diet with time to include more leaves,” Spell said. “Monkeys originated at a time in the past when Africa and Arabia were together as an island continent. Plate tectonic motions pushed this land mass into the Eurasian land mass at 20 to 24 million years ago, and an exchange of animals and plants occurred. It is unclear if competition with newly introduced species or changing climate conditions drove changes in diet.”

Scientists named the newly discovered monkey species Alophia (“without lophs”) due to the lack of molar crests on its teeth—a phenomenon that sets them apart from geologically younger monkey fossils.

Old World monkeys are the most successful living superfamily of nonhuman primates with a geographic distribution that is surpassed only by humans. The group occupies a wide spectrum of land to tree habitats and have a diverse range of diets. They evolved to develop a signature dental feature—having two molar crests—which to this day allows them to process a wide range of food types found in the varying environments of Africa and Asia.

“Primitive Old World monkey from the earliest Miocene of Kenya and the evolution of cercopithecoid bilophodonty” was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Reference:
D. Tab Rasmussen et al, Primitive Old World monkey from the earliest Miocene of Kenya and the evolution of cercopithecoid bilophodonty, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1815423116

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Most amber inclusions are organisms that lived in the forest. It is very rare to find sea life trapped in amber. However, an international research group led by Prof. Wang Bo from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) reported the first known ammonite trapped in amber in a study in PNAS published on May 13.

The ammonite, a kind of sea animal, was trapped in 99-million-year-old amber from northern Myanmar. The amber is 33 mm long, 9.5 mm wide, 29 mm high and weighs 6.08 g. Besides the ammonite, the amber also encases a diverse assemblage of organisms that today live on land or in the sea, including at least 40 individual animals.

Of the terrestrial fauna found in the amber, mites are the most abundant. Also present are spiders, millipedes, cockroaches, beetles, flies and wasps, most of which would have lived on the forest floor.

Of the marine fauna, in addition to the ammonite itself, sea snails and sea slaters are present. The slaters are like those living on the seashore today.

The researchers used X-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) to obtain high-resolution three-dimensional images of the ammonite including its convoluted sutures, which are important for identifying ammonites.

They found that the ammonite is a juvenile Puzosia (Bhimaites) and its presence in the amber supports a late Albian-early Cenomanian age for the amber deposit. This discovery represents a rare example of dating using amber inclusions.

But how on earth did the ammonite, an extinct sea-dwelling relative of squid, get preserved in a piece of amber that also contains land-based animals? The ammonite and sea snail shells offer possible clues.

The shells are all empty with no soft-tissue, so the organisms were long dead by the time they were engulfed by resin. The outer shell of the ammonite is broken away and the entrance of the shell is full of sand. The amber also contains additional sand.

The most likely explanation for the appearance of both marine and terrestrial organisms within the amber is that a sandy beach covered with shells was located close to resin-producing trees. The flying insects were trapped in the resin while it was still on the tree. As the resin flowed down the tree trunk, it trapped organisms that lived near the foot of the tree. Reaching the beach, it entombed shells and trapped the slaters living there.

Reference:
Tingting Yu el al. An ammonite trapped in Burmese amber. PNAS (2019). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821292116

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Archaeopteryx’s throne is tottering. Since the discovery of the first fossil of the primal bird in 1861, it had been considered the only bird from the Jurassic geological period. Today’s birds are thought to be direct descendants of carnivorous dinosaurs, with Archaeopteryx representing the oldest known flying representative of this lineage. All of the specimens that have been found up to now come from the region of the Solnhofen Archipelago, which during the Jurassic era spanned across what is today the Altmühl Valley, in the area between Pappenheim and Regensburg. Archaeopteryx lived here in a landscape of reef islands about 150 million years ago.

A team led by Professor Oliver Rauhut has taxonomically identified a bird unknown until now: Alcmonavis poeschli, the second bird from the era identified as capable of flight. “This suggests that the diversity of birds in the late Jurassic era was greater than previously thought,” says Rauhut, paleontologist at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences as well as the Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology and Geology.

Only a wing of Alcmonavis poeschli was discovered. “At first, we assumed that this was another specimen of Archaeopteryx. There are similarities, but after detailed comparisons with Archaeopteryx and other, geologically younger birds, its fossil remains suggested that we were dealing with a somewhat more derived bird,” says Rauhut. According to the team’s taxonomic studies, which are currently featured in the scientific journal eLife, Alcmonavis poeschli was not merely somewhat larger than Archaeopteryx; apparently it could also fly better. “The wing muscles indicate a greater capacity for flying,” says Rauhut. Alcmonavis poeschli exhibits numerous traits lacking in Archaeopteryx but present in more recent birds. This suggests that it was adapted better to active, flapping flight.

The discovery of Alcmonavis poeschli has implications for the debate over whether active flapping birds arose from gliding birds. “Its adaptation shows that the evolution of flight must have progressed relatively quickly,” says Dr. Christian Foth from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), one of the co-authors of the study.

The bird now being described for the first time derives its name from the old Celtic word for the river Altmühl, Alcmona, and its discoverer Roland Pöschl, who leads the excavation at the Schaudiberg quarry close to Mörnsheim. A fossil of Archaeopteryx was also discovered in the same unit of limestones. The two primal birds thus apparently lived at the same time in what was then a subtropical lagoon landscape in southern Germany.

Reference:
Oliver WM Rauhut, Helmut Tischlinger, Christian Foth. A non-archaeopterygid avialan theropod from the Late Jurassic of southern Germany. eLife, 2019; 8 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.43789

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.