Large conical shatter cones within the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia, provide visible proof of a meteorite impact 3.5 billion years ago. Credit: Chris Kirkland, Curtin University
Curtin University researchers have discovered the world’s oldest known meteorite impact crater, which could significantly redefine our understanding of the origins of life and how our planet was shaped.
The team from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) investigated rock layers in the North Pole Dome — an area of the Pilbara region of Western Australia — and found evidence of a major meteorite impact 3.5 billion years ago.
Study co-lead Professor Tim Johnson, from Curtin University, said the discovery significantly challenged previous assumptions about our planet’s ancient history.
“Before our discovery, the oldest impact crater was 2.2 billion years old, so this is by far the oldest known crater ever found on Earth,” Professor Johnson said.
Researchers discovered the crater thanks to ‘shatter cones’, distinctive rock formations only formed under the intense pressure of a meteorite strike.
The shatter cones at the site, about 40 kilometres west of Marble Bar in WA’s Pilbara region, were formed when a meteorite slammed into the area at more than 36,000km/h.
This would have been a major planetary event, resulting in a crater more than 100km wide that would have sent debris flying across the globe.
“We know large impacts were common in the early solar system from looking at the Moon,” Professor Johnson said.
“Until now, the absence of any truly ancient craters means they are largely ignored by geologists.
“This study provides a crucial piece of the puzzle of Earth’s impact history and suggests there may be many other ancient craters that could be discovered over time.”
Co-lead author Professor Chris Kirkland, also from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the discovery shed new light on how meteorites shaped Earth’s early environment.
“Uncovering this impact and finding more from the same time period could explain a lot about how life may have got started, as impact craters created environments friendly to microbial life such as hot water pools,” Professor Kirkland said.
“It also radically refines our understanding of crust formation: the tremendous amount of energy from this impact could have played a role in shaping early Earth’s crust by pushing one part of the Earth’s crust under another, or by forcing magma to rise from deep within the Earth’s mantle toward the surface.
“It may have even contributed to the formation of cratons, which are large, stable landmasses that became the foundation of continents.”
Reference:
Christopher L. Kirkland, Tim E. Johnson, Jonas Kaempf, Bruno V. Ribeiro, Andreas Zametzer, R. Hugh Smithies, Brad McDonald. A Paleoarchaean impact crater in the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. Nature Communications, 2025; 16 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57558-3
Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Curtin University. Original written by Samuel Jeremic.
Artistic view of Earth’s interior during mantle solidification in the first hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s history. Gravitational segregation of dense, iron-rich magma (in orange) likely formed a basal magma ocean atop the core, that can explain the present-day structure of the lower mantle.
New research led by a York University professor sheds light on the earliest days of the earth’s formation and potentially calls into question some earlier assumptions in planetary science about the early years of rocky planets. Establishing a direct link between the Earth’s interior dynamics occurring within the first 100 million years of its history and its present-day structure, the work is one of the first in the field to combine fluid mechanics with chemistry to better understand the Earth’s early evolution.
“This study is the first to demonstrate, using a physical model, that the first-order features of Earth’s lower mantle structure were established four billion years ago, very soon after the planet came into existence,” says lead author Faculty of Science Assistant Professor Charles-Édouard Boukaré in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York.
The mantle is the rocky envelopment that surrounds the iron core of rocky planets. The structure and dynamics of the Earth’s lower mantle play a major role throughout Earth’s history as it dictates, among others, the cooling of the Earth’s core where the Earth’s magnetic field is generated.
Boukaré originally from France, worked with research colleagues from Paris on the paper, Solidification of Earth’s mantle led inevitably to a basal magma ocean, published today in Nature.
Boukaré says that while seismology, geodynamics, and petrology have helped answer many questions about the present-day thermochemical structure of Earth’s interior, a key question remained: how old are these structures, and how did they form? Trying to answer this, he says, is much like looking at a person in the form of an adult versus a child and understanding how the energetic conditions will not be the same.
“If you take kids, sometimes they do crazy things because they have a lot of energy, like planets when they are young. When we get older, we don’t do as many crazy things, because our activity or level of energy decreases. So, the dynamic is really different, but there are some things that we do when we are really young that might affect our entire life,” he says “It’s the same thing for planets. There are some aspects of the very early evolution of planets that we can actually see in their structure today.”
To better understand old planets, we must first learn how young planets behave.
Since simulations of the Earth’s mantle focus mostly on present-day solid-state conditions, Boukaré had to develop a novel model to explore the early days of Earth when the mantle was much hotter and substantially molten, work that he has been doing since his PhD.
Boukaré’s model is based on a multiphase flow approach that allows for capturing the dynamics of magma solidification at a planetary scale. Using his model, he studied how the early mantle transitioned from a molten to a solid state. Boukaré and his team were surprised to discover that most of the crystals formed at low pressure, which he says creates a very different chemical signature than what would be produced at depth in a high-pressure environment. This challenges the prevailing assumptions in planetary sciences in how rocky planets solidify.
“Until now, we assumed the geochemistry of the lower mantle was probably governed by high-pressure chemical reactions, and now it seems that we need to account also for their low-pressure counterparts.”
Boukare says this work could also help predict the behaviour of other planets down the line.
“If we know some kind of starting conditions, and we know the main processes of planetary evolution, we can predict how planets will evolve.”
Reference:
Charles-Édouard Boukaré, James Badro, Henri Samuel. Solidification of Earth’s mantle led inevitably to a basal magma ocean. Nature, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08701-z
Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by York University. Original written by Emina Gamulin.
Evan Saitta, the paper’s lead author, with an emperor penguin in the Field Museum’s bird collections. Photographer(s): Kate Golembiewski (c) Field Museum
More than 99% of birds can fly. But that still leaves many species that evolved to be flightless, including penguins, ostriches, and kiwi birds. In a new study in the journal Evolution, researchers compared the feathers and bodies of different species of flightless birds and their closest relatives who can still fly. They were able to determine which features change first when birds evolve to be flightless, versus which traits take more time for evolution to alter. These findings help shed light on the evolution of complex traits that lose their original function, and could even help reveal which fossil birds were flightless.
All of the flightless birds alive today evolved from ancestors who could fly and later lost that ability. “Going from something that can’t fly to flying is quite the engineering challenge, but going from something that can fly to not flying is rather easy,” says Evan Saitta, a research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of the paper.
In general, there are two common reasons why birds evolve flightlessness. When birds land on an island where there aren’t predators (including mammals) that would hunt them or steal their eggs, they sometimes settle there and gradually adapt to living on the ground. Since they don’t experience evolutionary pressure to stay in flying form, they gradually lose some of the features of their skeletons and feathers that help them fly. Meanwhile, some birds’ bodies change when they evolve semi-aquatic lifestyles. Penguins, for instance, can’t fly, but they swim in a way that’s akin to “flying underwater.” Their feathers and skeletons have changed accordingly.
Saitta is a paleontologist who often studies non-avian dinosaurs (the branches of the dinosaur family tree that do not include modern birds). However, when he arrived at the Field Museum for a postdoctoral fellowship, he was struck by the Field’s collections of over half a million birds.
“I suddenly had access to all these modern birds, and it made me wonder, ‘What happens when a bird loses the ability to fly?'” says Saitta. “And because I’m not an ornithologist, I went in and measured as many features of as many different feathers as I could. So it was a highly exploratory study in that sense.”
Saitta examined the preserved skins of thirty species of flightless birds and their closest flighted relatives and measured a variety of the birds’ feathers, including the microscopic branching structures that make up feather plumage. He also examined specimens of other, more distantly related species to represent more of the bird family tree.
Previous research has revealed how long ago different species of flightless birds branched off from their flying relatives. The ancestors of ostriches, for example, lost the ability to fly much longer ago than the ancestors of a flightless South American duck called the Fuegian steamer. Saitta found that these species’ feathers are very different. “Ostriches have been flightless for so long that their feathers are no longer optimized for being aerodynamic,” says Saitta. As a result, their feathers have become so long and shaggy that they’re sometimes used in feather dusters and boas. But even though Fuegian streamers can no longer fly, they lost this ability relatively recently, and their feathers remain similar to those of their flying cousins.
Saitta says he was surprised by how long it seemed to take flightless birds to lose the feather features that would have helped them fly. It didn’t seem to make sense why a flightless species would “waste” energy growing a bunch of feathers optimized for an activity that it no longer did, or why feathers no longer required for flight wouldn’t be freed up to evolve into a wide variety of forms. However, Saitta says, his postdoctoral advisor, Field Museum research associate and former Field curator Peter Makovicky (now at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum), had another perspective.
“Pete pointed out that when trying to understand why a modern bird looks the way it does, you can’t just think about natural selection or relaxation thereof. You have to also consider developmental constraints,” says Saitta. “Feathers are complex structures that have a really well-defined developmental sequence that’s hard to change. And when birds lose flight, those feather features disappear in the opposite order that they first evolved.”
When bird embryos develop feathers, those feathers increase in complexity in the same general order that those feather features first evolved in dinosaurs. After losing the ability to fly, birds lose those feather features in the opposite order that they first evolved. It’s like remodeling a house — it’s faster and easier to change elements that went in last, like the wallpaper, than it is to tear down a load-bearing wall and rebuild it into something new.
Some more recently-evolved feather adaptations, like the asymmetry in the flight feathers that allows birds to fly, are easier to change, and thus disappear relatively quickly once birds no longer need to fly. But overall, the basic feather structure is like those load-bearing walls. It takes a lot of evolutionary time for the underlying development of a standard feather to be transformed into producing something like a plume-y ostrich feather.
Saitta and his colleagues also found that certain larger features changed relatively quickly once a lineage lost the ability to fly. “The first things to change when birds lose flight, possibly even before the flight feathers become symmetrical, is the proportion of their wings and their tails. We therefore see skeletal changes and also a change in overall body mass,” he says.
The reason behind this, says Saitta, may be the comparative “costs” to grow these features. When animals develop, it takes a lot more energy to grow bones than it does to grow feathers — so evolution “prioritizes” changing the skeleton before the majority of the feathers.
“Let’s say a bird species lands on an island where they are able to safely live on the ground and don’t need to fly anymore. The first things to go are going to be these big, expensive bones and muscles, but feathers are cheap, so there’s less active selection to change them,” says Saitta. It’s like how if you auto-paid your $1,500 monthly rent on an old apartment that you no longer live in, that would have a bigger effect on your bank account than forgetting to cancel a $5-a-month subscription. For newly flightless birds, maintaining a flight-friendly skeleton is a bigger unnecessary cost than keeping some of their old feathers around unaltered.
Insights from this research could help scientists trying to determine whether a fossil bird, or a feathered dinosaur that isn’t part of the bird family, was able to fly. “Flight didn’t evolve overnight, and flight, or at least gliding, was possibly lost many times in extinct species, just as in surviving bird lineages. Our paper helps show the order in which birds’ bodies reflect those changes,” says Saitta. “Unless you have a fossil whose ancestors, even older fossils, have been flightless for a very long time, you might not see too many changes in their feathers. You might first want to look for changes in body mass, the relative length of the wings. Those change first, and then you can perhaps see changes in the symmetry of the feathers.”
Saitta’s research corroborates previous studies that have shown that a bird’s flight feathers become more symmetric after flight loss. “The good news is that because I came at this question from a different angle, we got results that are very consistent with a lot of the previous research, but I think maybe a little bit broader than if I had approached the question with a more specific focus,” says Saitta.
Reference:
Evan T Saitta, Lilja Carden, Jonathan S Mitchell, Peter J Makovicky. Feather Evolution Following Flight Loss In Crown Group Birds: Relaxed Selection And Developmental Constraints. Evolution, 2025; DOI: 10.1093/evolut/qpaf020
Detailed highlights of the rock sample at Biloela in Queensland.
A University of Queensland researcher has confirmed a boulder at a regional school contains one of the highest concentrations of dinosaur footprints per square metre ever documented in Australia.
Dr Anthony Romilio from UQ’s Dinosaur Lab has identified 66 fossilised footprints left in the Callide Basin in Central Queensland during the Early Jurassic period, around 200 million years ago.
“The footprints are from 47 individual dinosaurs which passed across a patch of wet, white clay, possibly walking along or crossing a waterway,” Dr Romilio said.
“It’s an unprecedented snapshot of dinosaur abundance, movement and behaviour from a time when no fossilised dinosaur bones have been found in Australia.
“Each footprint has 3 toes, indicating they belong to the ichnospecies Anomoepus scambus.
“These dinosaurs were small, with legs ranging from 15 — 50 cm in length and when they left these marks, they were travelling less than 6 km/hr.
“Evidence from skeletal fossils overseas tells us dinosaurs with feet like these were plant eaters with long legs, a chunky body, short arms, and a small head with a beak.”
The remarkable rock was uncovered 20 years ago at Callide Mine near Biloela and given to the local high school.
Its significance remained unknown until Dr Romilio’s previous work on nearby Mount Morgan footprints prompted the community to contact him.
“Significant fossils like this can sit unnoticed for years, even in plain sight,” Dr Romilio said.
“It’s incredible to think that a piece of history this rich was resting in a schoolyard all this time.
“With advanced 3D imaging and light filters, I was able to reveal hidden details in the footprints.
“Another sample in this study of Callide Basin footprints was also hiding in plain sight — I spotted it being used as a carpark entry delineator at Callide Mine.
“This rock is much larger at around 2-tonnes with 2 distinct footprints left by a slightly larger dinosaur walking on 2 legs around 80cm in length.
“Along with a sample from a third rock that is encased in resin and was being used as a bookend, we have gained new insight into the ancient past in this region.”
High-resolution models of the fossils are available online, allowing anyone to explore these ancient tracks in detail.
Investigation of the rock samples has been supported by Batchfire Resources, Biloela State High School and the Banana Shire Council.
Reference:
Anthony Romilio, Ron Park, Wes Nichols, Owen Jackson. Dinosaur footprints from the Lower Jurassic (Hettangian–Sinemurian) Precipice Sandstone of the Callide Basin, Queensland, Australia. Historical Biology, 2025; 1 DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2025.2472153
Feathers, essential for thermoregulation, flight, and communication in birds, originate from simple appendages known as proto-feathers, which were present in certain dinosaurs.By studying embryonic development of the chicken, two researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have uncovered a key role of a molecular signalling pathway (the Shh pathway) in their formation. This research, published in the journal PLOS Biology, provides new insights into the morphogenetic mechanisms that led to feather diversification throughout evolution.
Feathers are among the most complex cutaneous appendages in the animal kingdom. While their evolutionary origin has been widely debated, paleontological discoveries and developmental biology studies suggest that feathers evolved from simple structures known as proto-feathers. These primitive structures, composed of a single tubular filament, emerged around 200 million years ago in certain dinosaurs. Paleontologists continue to discuss the possibility of their even earlier presence in the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs (the first flying vertebrates with membranous wings) around 240 million years ago.
Proto-feathers are simple, cylindrical filaments. They differ from modern feathers by the absence of barbs and barbules, and by the lack of a follicle — an invagination at their base. The emergence of proto-feathers likely marked the first key step in feather evolution, initially providing thermal insulation and ornamentation before being progressively modified under natural selection to give rise to the more complex structures that enabled flight.
The laboratory of Michel Milinkovitch, professor at the Department of Genetics and Evolution in the Faculty of Science at UNIGE, studies the role of molecular signaling pathways (communication systems that transmit messages within and between cells), such as the Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) pathway, in the embryonic development of scales, hair, and feathers in modern vertebrates. In a previous study, the Swiss scientists stimulated the Shh pathway by injecting an activating molecule into the blood vessels of chicken embryos and observed the complete and permanent transformation of scales into feathers on the bird’s feet.
Recreating the first dinosaur proto-feathers
”Since the Shh pathway plays a crucial role in feather development, we wanted to observe what happens when it is inhibited,” explains Rory Cooper, a postdoctoral researcher in Michel Milinkovitch’s lab and co-author of the study. By injecting a molecule that blocks the Shh signaling pathway on the 9th day of embryonic development — just before feather buds appear on the wings — the two researchers observed the formation of unbranched and non-invaginated buds, resembling the putative early stages of proto-feathers.
However, from the 14th day of embryonic development, feather morphogenesis partially recovered. Furthermore, although the chicks hatched with patches of naked skin, dormant subcutaneous follicles were autonomously reactivated, eventually producing chickens with normal plumage.
”Our experiments show that while a transient disturbance in the development of foot scales can permanently turn them into feathers, it is much harder to permanently disrupt feather development itself,” concludes Michel Milinkovitch. ”Clearly, over the course of evolution, the network of interacting genes has become extremely robust, ensuring the proper development offeathers even under substantial genetic or environmental perturbations. The big challenge now is to understand how genetic interactions evolve to allow for the emergence of morphological novelties such as proto-feathers.”
Reference:
Rory L. Cooper, Michel C. Milinkovitch. In vivo sonic hedgehog pathway antagonism temporarily results in ancestral proto-feather-like structures in the chicken. PLOS Biology, 2025; 23 (3): e3003061 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003061
Dryolestes, a Late Jurassic relative of the Cretaceous therians. Credit: Artist James Brown, courtesy of Pamela Gill
More mammals were living on the ground several million years before the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, new research led by the University of Bristol has revealed.
The study, published today in the journal Palaeontology, provides fresh evidence that many mammals were already shifting toward a more ground-based lifestyle leading up to the asteroid’s impact.
By analysing small-fossilised bone fragments, specifically end of limb bones, from marsupial and placental mammals found in Western North America — the only place with a well-preserved terrestrial fossil record from this time — the team discovered signs that these mammals were adapting to life on the ground.
End of limb bones were analysed as they bear signatures of locomotory habit that can be statistically compared with modern mammals.
Lead author Professor Christine Janis from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences said: “It was already known that plant life changed toward the end of the Cretaceous, with flowering plants, known as angiosperms, creating more diverse habitats on the ground. We also knew that tree dwelling mammals struggled after the asteroid impact. What had not been documented, was whether mammals were becoming more terrestrial, in line with the habitat changes.”
While previous studies used complete skeletons to study ancient mammal movement, this research is one of the first to use small bone elements to track changes within an entire community.
The team have used statistical data from museum collections in New York, California, and Calgary to analyse these tiny fossils.
Professor Janis added: “The vegetational habitat was more important for the course of Cretaceous mammalian evolution than any influence from dinosaurs.”
The evidence was gathered from bone articular fragments of therian mammals, which includes marsupials and placentals.
The team’s methods were not applied to more basal mammals such as multiberculates, which were common at the time, because their bones were different.
Professor Janis said: “We’ve known for a long time that mammalian long bone articular surfaces can carry good information about their mode of locomotion, but I think this is the first study to use such small bone elements to study change within a community, rather than just individual species.”
While this research marks the end of the project, the findings offer new insights into how prehistoric mammals responded to changing environments — a few million years before the asteroid impact reshaped life on Earth.
Reference:
Christine M. Janis, Alberto Martín-Serra, Jessica M. Theodor, Craig S. Scott. Down to earth: therian mammals became more terrestrial towards the end of the Cretaceous. Palaeontology, 2025 DOI: 10.1111/pala.70004
The juvenile vertebra of the pterosaur is seen in comparison to an adult-sized one. The bite occurred some 76 million years ago Credit: University of Reading
The fossilised neck bone of a flying reptile unearthed in Canada shows tell-tale signs of being bitten by a crocodile-like creature 76 million years ago, according to a new study published today [23 January] in the Journal of Palaeontology.
The juvenile pterosaur vertebra, discovered in Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, bears a circular four-millimetre-wide puncture mark from a crocodilian tooth.
Researchers from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (Canada), the University of Reading (UK) and the University of New England (Australia) say this rare evidence provides insight into predator-prey dynamics in the region during the Cretaceous Period.
The discovery was made during an international field course that took place in July 2023, led by Dr Brian Pickles from the University of Reading.
Dr Caleb Brown from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology is the lead author of the paper.
He said: “Pterosaur bones are very delicate — so finding fossils where another animal has clearly taken a bite is exceptionally uncommon. This specimen being a juvenile makes it even more rare.”
Dinosaur Provincial Park has produced some of the most important dinosaur fossil discoveries ever made.
The punctured vertebra belongs to a young Azhdarchid pterosaur (Cryodrakon boreas), with an estimated wingspan of two metres.
Adults of this species would have been as tall as a giraffe with a wingspan in the region of 10m.
The researchers used micro-CT scans and comparisons with other pterosaur bones to confirm the puncture is not a result of damage during fossilisation or excavation, but an actual bite.
Dr Brian Pickles from the University of Reading and co-author of the paper said: “Bite traces help to document species interactions from this period. We can’t say if the pterosaur was alive or dead when it was bitten but the specimen shows that crocodilians occasionally preyed on, or scavenged, juvenile pterosaurs in prehistoric Alberta over 70 million years ago.”
The paper also shows that this new bone documents the first evidence in North America of ancient crocodilians opportunistically feeding on these giant prehistoric flying reptiles. Other examples of Azhdarchid bones with possible crocodilian bites have previously been found in Romania.
Reference:
Caleb M. Brown, Phil R. Bell, Holly Owers, Brian J. Pickles. A juvenile pterosaur vertebra with putative crocodilian bite from the Campanian of Alberta, Canada. Journal of Paleontology, 2025; 1 DOI: 10.1017/jpa.2024.12
An artist’s illustration of Nyasasaurus, which could be the earliest known dinosaur, or else a close relative of early dinosaurs. Credit: Mark Witton/The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
The remains of the earliest dinosaurs may lie undiscovered in the Amazon and other equatorial regions of South America and Africa, suggests a new study led by UCL (University College London) researchers.
Currently, the oldest known dinosaur fossils date back about 230 million years and were unearthed further south in places including Brazil, Argentina and Zimbabwe. But the differences between these fossils suggest dinosaurs had already been evolving for some time, pointing to an origin millions of years earlier.
The new study, published in the journal Current Biology, accounted for gaps in the fossil record and concluded that the earliest dinosaurs likely emerged in a hot equatorial region in what was then the supercontinent Gondwana — an area of land that encompasses the Amazon, Congo basin, and Sahara Desert today.
Lead author and PhD student Joel Heath (UCL Earth Sciences and the Natural History Museum, London) said: “Dinosaurs are well studied but we still don’t really know where they came from. The fossil record has such large gaps that it can’t be taken at face value.
“Our modelling suggests that the earliest dinosaurs might have originated in western, low-latitude Gondwana. This is a hotter and drier environment than previously thought, made up of desert- and savannah-like areas.
“So far, no dinosaur fossils have been found in the regions of Africa and South America that once formed this part of Gondwana. However, this might be because researchers haven’t stumbled across the right rocks yet, due to a mix of inaccessibility and a relative lack of research efforts in these areas.”
The modelling study drew on fossils and evolutionary trees of dinosaurs and their close reptile relatives, as well as the geography of the period. It accounted for gaps in the fossil record by treating areas of the globe where no fossils had been found as missing information rather than areas where no fossils exist.
Initially, early dinosaurs were vastly outnumbered by their reptile cousins.
These included the ancestors of crocodiles, the pseudosuchians (an abundant group including enormous species up to 10 metres long), and pterosaurs, the first animals to evolve powered flight (flying by flapping wings rather than gliding), who grew as big as fighter jets.
By contrast, the earliest dinosaurs were much smaller than their descendants — more the size of a chicken or dog than a Diplodocus. They walked on two legs (were bipedal) and most are thought to have been omnivores.
Dinosaurs became dominant after volcanic eruptions wiped out many of their reptile relatives 201 million years ago.
The new modelling results suggested that dinosaurs as well as other reptiles may have originated in low-latitude Gondwana, before radiating outwards, spreading to southern Gondwana and to Laurasia, the adjacent northern supercontinent that later split into Europe, Asia and North America.
Support for this origin comes from the fact it is a midpoint between where the earliest dinosaurs have been found in southern Gondwana and where the fossils of many of their close relatives have been discovered to the north in Laurasia.
As there is uncertainty about how the most ancient dinosaurs were related to one another and to their close relatives, the researchers ran their model on three proposed evolutionary trees.
They found strongest support for a low-latitude Gondwanan origin of the dinosaurs in the model that counted silesaurids, traditionally regarded as cousins of dinosaurs but not dinosaurs themselves, as ancestors of ornithischian dinosaurs.
Ornithischians, one of the three main dinosaur groups that later included plant eaters Stegosaurus and Triceratops, are mysteriously absent from the fossil record of these early years of the dinosaur era. If silesaurids are the ancestors of ornithischians, this helps to fill in this gap in the evolutionary tree.
Senior author Professor Philip Mannion (UCL Earth Sciences) said: “Our results suggest early dinosaurs may have been well adapted to hot and arid environments. Out of the three main dinosaur groups, one group, sauropods, which includes the Brontosaurus and the Diplodocus, seemed to retain their preference for a warm climate, keeping to Earth’s lower latitudes.
“Evidence suggests the other two groups, theropods and ornithischians, may have developed the ability to generate their own body heat some millions of years later in the Jurassic period, allowing them to thrive in colder regions, including the poles.”
The earliest known dinosaurs include Eoraptor, Herrerasaurus, Coelophysis, and Eodromaeus.
Reference:
Joel A. Heath, Natalie Cooper, Paul Upchurch, Philip D. Mannion. Accounting for sampling heterogeneity suggests a low paleolatitude origin for dinosaurs. Current Biology, 2025; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.12.053
An artist’s rendering shows how Ahvaytum bahndooiveche may have appeared in a habitat dating to around 230 million years ago. Illustration by Gabriel Ugueto
How and when did dinosaurs first emerge and spread across the planet more than 200 million years ago? That question has for decades been a source of debate among paleontologists faced with fragmented fossil records. The mainstream view has held that the reptiles emerged on the southern portion of the ancient supercontinent Pangea called Gondwana millions of years before spreading to the northern half named Laurasia.
But now, a newly described dinosaur whose fossils were uncovered by University of Wisconsin-Madison paleontologists is challenging that narrative, with evidence that the reptiles were present in the northern hemisphere millions of years earlier than previously known.
The UW-Madison team has been analyzing the fossil remains since they were first discovered in 2013 in present-day Wyoming, an area that was near the equator on Laurasia. The creature, named Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, is now the oldest known Laurasian dinosaur, and with fossils estimated to be around 230 million years old, it’s comparable in age to the earliest known Gondwanan dinosaurs.
UW-Madison scientists and their research partners detail their discovery Jan. 8, 2025, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
“We have, with these fossils, the oldest equatorial dinosaur in the world — it’s also North America’s oldest dinosaur,” says Dave Lovelace, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum who co-led the work with graduate student Aaron Kufner.
Discovered in a layer of rock known as the Popo Agie Formation, it took years of careful work by Lovelace and his colleagues to analyze the fossils, establish them as a new dinosaur species and determine their estimated age.
While the team doesn’t have a complete specimen — that’s an exceedingly rare occurrence for early dinosaurs — they did find enough fossils, particularly parts of the species’ legs, to positively identify Ahvaytum bahndooiveche as a dinosaur, and likely as a very early sauropod relative. Sauropods were a group of herbivorous dinosaurs that included some famously gigantic species like those in the aptly named group of titanosaurs. The distantly related Ahvaytum bahndooiveche lived millions of years earlier and was smaller — much smaller.
“It was basically the size of a chicken but with a really long tail,” says Lovelace. “We think of dinosaurs as these giant behemoths, but they didn’t start out that way.”
Indeed, the type specimen of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, which was full-grown but could have been slightly bigger at its maximum age, stood a little over one foot tall and was around three feet long from head to tail. Although scientists haven’t found its skull material, which could help illuminate what it ate, other closely related early sauropod-line dinosaurs were eating meat and would likely have been omnivorous.
The researchers found the few known bones of Ahvaytum in a layer of rock just a little bit above those of a newly described amphibian that they also discovered. The evidence suggests that Ahvaytum bahndooiveche lived in Laurasia during or soon after a period of immense climatic change known as the Carnian pluvial episode that has previously been connected to an early period of diversification of dinosaur species.
The climate during that period, lasting from about 234 to 232 million years ago, was much wetter than it had been previously, transforming large, hot stretches of desert into more hospitable habitats for early dinosaurs.
Lovelace and his colleagues performed high-precision radioisotopic dating of rocks in the formation that held Ahvaytum’s fossils, which revealed that the dinosaur was present in the northern hemisphere around 230 million years ago. The researchers also found an early dinosaur-like track in slightly older rocks, demonstrating that dinosaurs or their cousins were already in the region a few million years prior to Ahvaytum.
“We’re kind of filling in some of this story, and we’re showing that the ideas that we’ve held for so long — ideas that were supported by the fragmented evidence that we had — weren’t quite right,” Lovelace says. “We now have this piece of evidence that shows dinosaurs were here in the northern hemisphere much earlier than we thought.”
While the scientific team is confident they’ve discovered North America’s oldest dinosaur, it’s also the first dinosaur species to be named in the language of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, whose ancestral lands include the site where the fossils were found. Eastern Shoshone tribal elders and middle school students were integral to the naming process. Ahvaytum bahndooiveche broadly translates to “long ago dinosaur” in the Shoshone language.
Several tribal members also partnered with Lovelace and his UW-Madison colleagues as the researchers sought to evolve their field practices and better respect the land by incorporating the knowledge and perspectives of the Indigenous peoples into their work.
“The continuous relationship developed between Dr. Lovelace, his team, our school district, and our community is one of the most important outcomes of the discovery and naming of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche,” says Amanda LeClair-Diaz, a co-author on the paper and a member of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes. LeClair-Diaz is the Indian education coordinator at Fort Washakie school and coordinated the naming process with students and tribal elders — a process that started under her predecessor, Lynette St. Clair.
“Typically, the research process in communities, especially Indigenous communities, has been one sided, with the researchers fully benefiting from studies,” says LeClair-Diaz. “The work we have done with Dr. Lovelace breaks this cycle and creates an opportunity for reciprocity in the research process.”
Reference:
David Lovelace et al. Rethinking dinosaur origins: oldest known equatorial dinosaur-bearing assemblage (mid-late Carnian Popo Agie FM, Wyoming, USA). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2025 DOI: 10.1093/zoolinnean/zlae153
The surface of the Earth’s inner core may be changing, as shown by a new study from USC scientists that detected structural changes near the planet’s center, published today in Nature Geoscience.
The changes of the inner core has long been a topic of debate for scientists. However, most research has been focused on assessing rotation. John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the study, said the researchers “didn’t set out to define the physical nature of the inner core.”
“What we ended up discovering is evidence that the near surface of Earth’s inner core undergoes structural change,” Vidale said. The finding sheds light on the role topographical activity plays in rotational changes in the inner core that have minutely altered the length of a day and may relate to the ongoing slowing of the inner core.
Redefining the inner core
Located 3,000 miles below the Earth’s surface, the inner core is anchored by gravity within the molten liquid outer core. Until now the inner core was widely thought of as a solid sphere.
The original aim of the USC scientists was to further chart the slowing of the inner core. “But as I was analyzing multiple decades’ worth of seismograms, one dataset of seismic waves curiously stood out from the rest,” Vidale said. “Later on, I’d realize I was staring at evidence the inner core is not solid.”
The study utilized seismic waveform data — including 121 repeating earthquakes from 42 locations near Antarctica’s South Sandwich Islands that occurred between 1991 and 2024 — to give a glimpse of what takes place in the inner core. As the researchers analyzed the waveforms from receiver-array stations located near Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Canada, one dataset of seismic waves from the latter station included uncharacteristic properties the team had never seen before.
“At first the dataset confounded me,” Vidale said. It wasn’t until his research team improved the resolution technique did it become clear the seismic waveforms represented additional physical activity of the inner core.
Deformed inner core
The physical activity is best explained as temporal changes in the shape of the inner core. The new study indicates that the near surface of the inner core may undergo viscous deformation, changing its shape and shifting at the inner core’s shallow boundary.
The clearest cause of the structural change is interaction between the inner and outer core. “The molten outer core is widely known to be turbulent, but its turbulence had not been observed to disrupt its neighbor the inner core on a human timescale,” Vidale said. “What we’re observing in this study for the first time is likely the outer core disturbing the inner core.”
Vidale said the discovery opens a door to reveal previously hidden dynamics deep within Earth’s core, and may lead to better understanding of Earth’s thermal and magnetic field.
Reference:
John E. Vidale, Wei Wang, Ruoyan Wang, Guanning Pang, Keith Koper. Annual-scale variability in both the rotation rate and near surface of Earth’s inner core. Nature Geoscience, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-025-01642-2
Schematic representation of the process of subduction of tectonic plates and of a mantle plume rising from an LLSVP. In the latter, the mineral grains are larger than those in the subducted plates.
Deeply hidden in Earth’s mantle there are two huge ‘islands’ with the size of a continent. New research from Utrecht University shows that these regions are not only hotter than the surrounding graveyard of cold sunken tectonic plates, but also that they must be ancient: at least half a billion years old, perhaps even older. These observations contradict the idea of a well-mixed and fast flowing Earth’s mantle, a theory that is becoming more and more questioned. “There is less flow in Earth’s mantle than is commonly thought.” This research will be published on January 22nd, 2025 in Nature.
Large earthquakes make the whole Earth ring like a bell with different tones, just like a musical instrument. Seismologists study Earth’s deep interior by investigating how much these tones are ‘out of tune’, because whole Earth oscillations will sound out of tune or less loud when they encounter anomalies. This way seismologists will be able to make images of the interior of our planet, just like a hospital doctor can ‘see’ through your body with X-rays. At the end of the last century, an analysis of these oscillations showed the existence of two subsurface ‘super-continents’: one under Africa and the other one under the Pacific Ocean, both hidden more than two thousand kilometres below the Earth’s surface. “Nobody knew what they are, and whether they are only a temporary phenomenon, or if they have been sitting there for millions or perhaps even billions of years,” says Arwen Deuss, seismologist and professor of Structure and composition of Earth’s deep interior at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “These two large islands are surrounded by a graveyard of tectonic plates which have been transported there by a process called ‘subduction’, where one tectonic plate dives below another plate and sinks all the way from the Earth’s surface down to a depth of almost three thousand kilometres.”
Slow waves
“We have known for years that these islands are located at the boundary between the Earth’s core and mantle. And we see that seismic waves slow down there.” Earth scientists therefore call these regions ‘Large Low Seismic Velocity Provinces’ or LLSVPs. “The waves slow down because the LLSVPs are hot, just like you can’t run as fast in hot weather as you can when it’s colder.” Deuss and her colleague Sujania Talavera-Soza were keen to find out if they could discover more about these regions. “We added new information, the so-called ‘damping’ of seismic waves, which is the amount of energy that waves lose when they travel through the Earth. In order to do so, we did not only investigate how much the tones where out of tune, we also studied their sound volume.” Talavera-Soza adds: “Against our expectations, we found little damping in the LLSVPs, which made the tones sound very loud there. But we did find a lot of damping in the cold slab graveyard, where the tones sounded very soft. Unlike the upper mantle, where we found exactly what we expected: it is hot, and the waves are damped. Just like when the weather is hot outside and you go for a run, you don’t only slow down but you also get more tired than when it is cold outside.”
Grain size
Their colleague Laura Cobden, who specializes in the minerals that we find deep in the Earth, suggested to study the grain size of the LLSVPs. According to their American colleague Ulrich Faul, temperature alone cannot explain the absence of high damping in the LLSVPs. Deuss: “Grain size is much more important. Subducting tectonic plates that end up in the slab graveyard consist of small grains because they recrystallize on their journey deep into the Earth. A small grain size means a larger number of grains and therefore also a larger number of boundaries between the grains. Due to the large number of grain boundaries between the grains in the slab graveyard, we find more damping, because waves loose energy at each boundary they cross. The fact that the LLSVPs show very little damping, means that they must consist of much larger grains.”
Ancient
Those mineral grains do not grow overnight, which can only mean one thing: LLSVPs are lots and lots older than the surrounding slab graveyards. Even more so: the LLSVPs, with their much larger building blocks, are very rigid. Therefore, they do not take part in mantle convection (the flow in the Earth’s mantle). Thus, contrary to what the geography books teach us, the mantle cannot be well-mixed either. Talavera-Soza clarifies: “After all, the LLSVPs must be able to survive mantle convection one way or another.”
Engine
Knowledge of the Earth’s mantle is essential to understand the evolution of our planet. “And also to understand other phenomena at the Earth’s surface, such as vulcanism and mountain building,” Deuss adds. “The Earth’s mantle is the engine that drives all these phenomena. Take, for example, mantle plumes, which are large bubbles of hot material that rise from the Earth’s deep interior as in a lava lamp.” Once they finally reach the surface, they cause vulcanism, like under Hawaii. “And we think that those mantle plumes originate at the edges of the LLSVPs.”
Large earthquakes
In this type of research, seismologists make good use of oscillations caused by really large earthquakes, preferably quakes that take place at great depths, such as the great Bolivia earthquake of 1994. “It never made it into the newspapers, because it took place at a large depth of 650 km and luckily did not result in any damage or casualties at the Earth’s surface,” Deuss explains. The whole Earth oscillations, or tones, are mathematically described in such a way that we can easily ‘read’ the damping (i.e. how loud the oscillation is) due to a specific structure and separate it from the wave speed (i.e. how much out of tune it is). “Which is impressive, because the damping of the signal is only one-tenth of the total amount of information that we can unravel from these oscillations.” For this type of research, it is not necessary to wait until another earthquake occurs. The data from previous earthquakes is just as useful. “We can go back to 1975, because from that year onwards, seismometers became good enough to give us data of such high quality that they are useful for our research.”
Reference:
Sujania Talavera-Soza, Laura Cobden, Ulrich H. Faul, Arwen Deuss. Global 3D model of mantle attenuation using seismic normal modes. Nature, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08322-y
The underwater volcano Borealis Mud Volcano was discovered in the summer of 2023. Last year, the researchers were back at the volcano. Photo: Jørn Berger-Nyvoll / UiT
One would think that a volcano was not the most hospitable place for living organisms. However, the Borealis Mud Volcano, at 400 m water depth, acts as a sanctuary for a number of marine species.
The underwater volcano Borealis Mud Volcano is located in the Barents Sea and was first discovered by researchers at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in 2023. The discovery received a lot of attention, and images of the volcano circulated around the world. Now researchers from UiT, in collaboration with REV Ocean, have finally published the results from an interdisciplinary investigation showing that Borealis mud volcano has a unique ecological role as a natural sanctuary for several marine species in the Barents Sea.
While some parts of the crater floor of Borealis appear inhospitable to a variety of organisms, the carbonate crusts — a type of mineral formed thousands of years ago — that characterized Borealis provide a suitably hard substrate for species of anemones, serpulids, demosponges, and sparse octocoral colonies.
“Important for maintaining biodiversity”
In addition, the carbonates offer both shelter and feeding opportunities, playing an important role in sustaining the local fish populations. The researchers observed large schools of commercially valuable species like saithe and various demersal species such as spotted wolffish, cod, four-bearded rockling, and redfish (Sebastes spp.) clustering around the jagged carbonate formations.
“The redfish, for instance, is red listed, and we don’t know the consequences if it would disappear. Borealis is an oasis where different species can thrive and flourish. Thus, preserving ecosystems such as the Borealis Mud Volcano is essential for maintaining biodiversity and understanding the interactions between geology, geochemistry and biology in marine environments. We need that understanding, among other things, considering that the Arctic seabed plays an important role in oil and gas extraction activities and the emerging deep-sea mining industry,” says Professor Giuliana Panieri, lead author of the study recently published in Nature Communications.
Methan has leaked out, probably for thousands of years
Onboard the research vessel Kronprins Haakon in May 2024, researchers confirmed the previous discoveries. Using the remotely operated vehicle, ROV Aurora, the research team was able to make a series of observations of the underwater volcano. Among other things, they saw that it warms the surroundings to 11.5 degrees Celsius, while the seabed usually has a temperature of around 4 degrees Celsius.
The researchers also found sediments containing extinct, microscopic marine organisms from up to 2.5 million years ago and that small “mud cones” in the volcanic system are emitting vigorous methane-rich liquids. The fact that the seabed around the volcano is also characterized by extensive carbonate deposits indicates that methane has leaked out, probably for thousands of years.
“The Borealis Mud Volcano is a unique geological and ecological phenomenon that provides a rare insight into the complex interactions between geological processes and marine ecosystems. It is important to preserve these unique habitats, which play a crucial role in maintaining marine biodiversity,” says Panieri.
She reminds that, in the longer term, Norway has committed to the 30×30 target (protecting 30 % of land and sea by 2030) for spatial conservation measures of representative marine ecosystems, including in the deep sea. Protecting large areas of the deep-sea floor along the Norwegian margin may result in seep refugia acting as source populations for wider recolonization and restoration of benthic biological communities.
“The new findings show the power of international cooperation and how such cooperation can contribute to increasing our understanding of the world’s oceans,” says Panieri.
Reference:
Panieri, G., Argentino, C., Savini, A. et al. Sanctuary for vulnerable Arctic species at the Borealis Mud Volcano. Nat Commun, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-55712-x
The Zagros Mountains and sediments that have accumulated over millions of years along the depression at the base of the mountains. Photo: Renas Koshnaw
An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has investigated the influence of the forces exerted by the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region of Iraq on how much the surface of the Earth has bent over the last 20 million years. Their research revealed that in the present day, deep below the Earth’s surface, the Neotethys oceanic plate — the ocean floor that used to be between the Arabian and Eurasian continents — is breaking off horizontally, with a tear progressively lengthening from southeast Turkey to northwest Iran. Their findings show how the evolution of the Earth’s surface is controlled by processes deep within the planet’s interior. The research was published in the journal Solid Earth.
When two continents converge over millions of years, the oceanic floor between them slides to great depths beneath the continents.
Eventually, the continents collide, and masses of rock from their edges are lifted up into towering mountain ranges.
Over millions of years, the immense weight of these mountains causes the Earth’s surface around them to bend downward.
Over time, sediments eroded from the mountains accumulate in this depression, forming plains such as Mesopotamia in the Middle East.
The researchers modelled the downward bend of the Earth’s surfaces based on the Zagros Mountain’s load where the Arabian continent is colliding with Eurasia.
They combined the resulting size of the depression with the computed topography based on the Earth’s mantle to reproduce the unusually deep depression in the southeastern segment of the study area.
The researchers found that the weight of the mountains alone cannot account for the 3-4 km deep depression that has formed and been filled with sediment over the past 15 million years.
“Given the moderate topography in the north-western Zagros area, it was surprising to find out that so much sediment has accumulated in the part of the area we studied. This means the depression of the land is greater than could be caused by the load of the Zagros Mountains,” said Dr Renas Koshnaw, lead author and Postdoctoral Researcher at Göttingen University’s Department of Structural Geology and Geothermics.
Researchers propose that this is caused by the additional load of the sinking oceanic plate that is still attached to the Arabian plate.
Koshnaw adds: “This plate is pulling the region downward from below, making space for more sediment accumulation. Towards Turkey, the sediment-filled depression becomes much shallower, suggesting that the slab has broken off in this area, relieving the downward pull force.”
The geodynamic model developed in this research will benefit other fields as well.
“This research contributes to understanding how the Earth’s rigid outer shell functions,” explains Koshnaw.
Such research can lead to practical applications in the future by providing information for exploring natural resources such as sedimentary ore deposits and geothermal energy, and better characterization of the earthquake risks.
This research was made possible thanks to funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Reference:
Renas I. Koshnaw, Jonas Kley, Fritz Schlunegger. The Miocene subsidence pattern of the NW Zagros foreland basin reflects the southeastward propagating tear of the Neotethys slab. Solid Earth, 2024; 15 (11): 1365 DOI: 10.5194/se-15-1365-2024
QUT synthetic biologists have developed a prototype for an innovative biosensor that can detect rare earth elements and be modified for a range of other applications.
Lanthanides (Lns) are elements used in electronics, electric motors, and batteries.
The problem is that we can’t extract enough of them to meet the growing demand and current extraction methods are expensive and environmentally damaging.
Professor Kirill Alexandrov and colleagues, from the QUT Centre of Agriculture and Bioeconomy and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, engineered proteins to create molecular nanomachines that generate easily detectable signals when they selectively bind to Lns.
Along with Professor Alexandrov, the international research team involved QUT researchers Dr Zhong Guo, Patricia Walden and Dr Zhenling Cui, in collaboration with researchers from CSIRO Advanced Engineering Biology Future Science Platform and Clarkson University (USA).
Publishing their findings in Angewandte Chemie International, the team describe engineering a hybrid protein, or “chimera,” by combining a lanthanide-binding protein, LanM, with an antibiotic degrading enzyme called beta-lactamase.
This hybrid acts like a “switch” that becomes active only when lanthanides are present.
It can be used to detect and quantify Lns in liquids, producing a visible colour change or an electrical signal.
Impressively, bacteria modified with these chimeras were able to survive in the presence of antibiotics that otherwise would kill them — but only when lanthanides were present.
This highlights how precisely the proteins respond to these rare metals.
“This work opens up exciting possibilities for using biology to detect and recover rare earth metals,” Professor Alexandrov said.
“The prototype can also be modified for various biotechnological applications, including construction of living organisms capable of detecting and extracting valuable metals.”
The research team now plan to work on increasing the specificity of the molecular switch to better differentiate between closely related rare earth elements . It also explores the possibility of developing switches for other critical elements.
The team is in active discussions with potential industry partners who are interested in this technology.
“We also want to explore using the tool to engineer microbes that can directly extract rare earth minerals from ocean water,” Professor Alexandrov said.
“This is probably one of the best performing switches made and has given us a lot of insight into the mechanics of protein switches.”
Reference:
Kirill Alexandrov, Zhong Guo, Oleh Smutok, Raquel Aguiar Rocha, Patricia Walden, Evgeny Katz, Colin Scott, Chantal Ronacher, Zhenling Cui, Sergey Mureev. Lanthanide‐controlled protein switches: development and in vitro and in vivo applications. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2025; DOI: 10.1002/anie.202411584
Planetesimal collisions during planet formation in the early solar system Image courtesy: ASU/Kouji Kanba
Understanding where Earth’s essential elements came from — and why some are missing — has long puzzled scientists. Now, a new study reveals a surprising twist in the story of our planet’s formation.
A new study led by Arizona State University’s Assistant Professor Damanveer Grewal from the School of Molecular Sciences and School of Earth and Space Exploration, in collaboration with researchers from Caltech, Rice University, and MIT, challenges traditional theories about why Earth and Mars are depleted in moderately volatile elements (MVEs). MVEs like copper and zinc play a crucial role in planetary chemistry, often accompanying life-essential elements such as water, carbon, and nitrogen.
Understanding their origin provides vital clues about why Earth became a habitable world.
Earth and Mars contain significantly fewer MVEs than primitive meteorites (chondrites), raising fundamental questions about planetary formation.
Published in Science Advances, the study takes a fresh approach by analyzing iron meteorites — remnants of the metallic cores of the earliest planetary building blocks — to uncover new insights.
“We found conclusive evidence that first-generation planetesimals in the inner solar system were unexpectedly rich in these elements,” said Grewal.
“This discovery reshapes our understanding of how planets acquired their ingredients.”
Until now, scientists believed that MVEs were lost either because they never fully condensed in the early solar system or escaped during planetesimal differentiation.
However, this study reveals a different story: many of the first planetesimals held onto their MVEs, suggesting that the building blocks of Earth and Mars lost theirs later — during a period of violent cosmic collisions that shaped their formation.
Surprisingly, the team found that many inner solar system planetesimals retained chondrite-like MVE abundances, showing that they accreted and preserved MVEs despite undergoing differentiation.
This suggests that the progenitors of Earth and Mars did not start out depleted in these elements, but instead, their loss occurred over a prolonged history of collisional growth rather than incomplete condensation in the solar nebula or planetesimal differentiation.
“Our work redefines how we understand the chemical evolution of planets,” Grewal explained. “It shows that the building blocks of Earth and Mars were originally rich in these life-essential elements, but intense collisions during planetary growth caused their depletion.”
Reference:
Damanveer S. Grewal, Surjyendu Bhattacharjee, Bidong Zhang, Nicole X. Nie, Yoshinori Miyazaki. Enrichment of moderately volatile elements in first-generation planetesimals of the inner Solar System. Science Advances, 2025; 11 (6) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adq7848
The magnitude 7.9 Bonin Islands earthquake sequence, which ruptured deep within the earth near the base of the upper mantle, did not include an aftershock that extended to record depths into the lower mantle, according to a study in The Seismic Record.
When Hao Zhang of the University of Southern California and colleagues re-examined the aftershock sequence of the May 2015 earthquake, they did not find evidence for a 751-kilometer-deep aftershock as reported by previous researchers. This aftershock has been called the deepest earthquake ever recorded.
Instead, their study found a distribution of aftershocks that is compatible with a 12-kilometer sliver of a mantle mineral called olivine that could shed light on how deep earthquakes can occur.
The Bonin Islands earthquake, which ruptured 1000 kilometers offshore of Japan in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, is one of the deepest and largest earthquakes ever recorded. The earthquake took place within the Izu-Bonin subduction zone 680 kilometers below the Earth’s surface.
The mechanisms behind deep earthquakes — those occurring 500 kilometers or deeper — are something of a mystery to seismologists. Extremely high pressures and temperatures at these depths make rock more likely to bend or deform plastically, rather than break in the brittle fashion that causes earthquake rupture at shallower depths.
These earthquakes also typically produce few aftershocks, Zhang noted, which could provide useful data to understand how these deep events are generated at subduction zones.
Plastic deformation “limits the formation of extensive fracture networks that would typically generate aftershocks,” he said. “Additionally, the high confining pressures promote efficient redistribution of stress following the mainshock, further reducing the likelihood of subsequent seismic events.”
One previous study of the Bonin Islands earthquake reported a foreshock sequence for the event, while a second study detected a potentially record-breaking deep aftershock in the lower mantle.
“Both findings could significantly advance our understanding of deep earthquakes, if accurate,” said Zhang. “However, these two catalogs are inconsistent, and both have methodological limitations. Therefore, it is essential to re-examine the aftershock sequence using improved techniques.”
To gain a better look at the deep and remote earthquake, Zhang and colleagues turned to data collected by a dense seismic array in Japan called Hi-Net, using a combination of techniques to precisely locate seismic signals coming from the event.
Their new analysis detected no foreshocks but identified 14 aftershocks in the upper mantle within a 150-kilometer radius of the earthquake’s hypocenter. One set of aftershocks aligned with the rupture plane of the earthquake one week after the mainshock, with a second set dispersing over a wider area during the second week.
“While it remains challenging to definitely reject the existence of seismicity initiated in the lower mantle and its associated mechanisms, our results do reject the most compelling lower mantle seismicity claim to date,” the researchers write in their paper.
The aftershock pattern is compatible with the presence of a metastable olivine wedge or MOW, the researchers suggested. In a subducting slab, olivine can delay its transition into other mineral states under high temperature and pressure. “This delayed transformation may generate stress and release energy, potentially triggering deep earthquakes,” Zhang said.
With MOWs as potential earthquake nucleation sites, some researchers have proposed this mechanism of transformational faulting as one of the main ways that deep earthquakes occur, he added.
“Furthermore, MOWs offer insights into the thermal structure and behavior of subducting slabs, with colder slabs being more likely to preserve metastable olivine at greater depths,” Zhang added. “By studying MOWs, we can refine models of deep earthquake generation and improve our understanding of the dynamic processes in Earth’s interior.”
Reference:
Hao Zhang, John E. Vidale, Wei Wang. Aftershocks on the Planar Rupture Surface of the Deep-Focus Mw 7.9 Bonin Islands Earthquake. The Seismic Record, 2025; 5 (1): 35 DOI: 10.1785/0320240035
Eclogite is a dense, mafic metamorphic rock characterized by a striking assemblage of red garnet (pyrope) and green clinopyroxene (omphacite). Its formation occurs under high-pressure and moderate-temperature conditions, typically exceeding 1.2 GPa and ranging between 400–600°C, corresponding to depths greater than 40 kilometers within subduction zones. The Nordfjord region in western Norway is renowned for its well-preserved eclogite exposures, particularly those exhibiting intricate folding patterns. These eclogite folds offer valuable insights into the tectonometamorphic history of the Scandinavian Caledonides and the dynamic processes that have shaped the Earth’s lithosphere.
Geological Formation of Eclogite
Eclogite forms through the metamorphism of basaltic rocks subjected to high-pressure conditions, typically within subduction zones where oceanic crust is forced deep into the mantle. The protoliths of eclogite are often mid-ocean ridge basalts (MORB) or similar mafic compositions. During subduction, these rocks undergo significant mineralogical transformations:
Plagioclase transforms into omphacite (a sodium-rich clinopyroxene).
Pyroxenes and amphiboles recrystallize into garnet (almandine-pyrope series).
This metamorphic process results in the distinctive mineralogy and high density of eclogite, which plays a crucial role in geodynamic processes such as slab pull during subduction.
Tectonic History of the Nordfjord Region
The Nordfjord area is part of the Western Gneiss Region (WGR) of Norway, which experienced significant tectonometamorphic events during the Caledonian orogeny (~490–390 million years ago). This orogeny resulted from the collision between the Laurentian and Baltican continents, leading to the closure of the Iapetus Ocean. The intense compressional forces during this period caused deep subduction of continental and oceanic crust, facilitating the formation of high-pressure and ultrahigh-pressure metamorphic rocks, including eclogite. Subsequent extensional tectonics and exhumation processes brought these deep-seated rocks back to the surface, where they are now exposed in regions like Nordfjord.
Structural Characteristics of Eclogite Folds
In Nordfjord, eclogite bodies often display complex folding patterns indicative of the intense deformation they have undergone. These folds vary in scale from microscopic to several meters and exhibit diverse geometries, including:
Isoclinal folds: Tight folds with parallel limbs.
Chevron folds: Characterized by sharp hinges and straight limbs.
The study of these folds provides insights into the deformation mechanisms, rheological properties of the rocks, and the stress regimes during metamorphism.
Metamorphic Conditions and Facies
Eclogite formation occurs under high-pressure (HP) and ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) conditions, with pressures exceeding 1.2 GPa (equivalent to depths greater than 40 km) and temperatures ranging from 400–800°C. In Nordfjord, eclogite facies metamorphism is a direct result of the deep subduction of the Baltican crust during the Caledonian orogeny.
Key Metamorphic Facies in Nordfjord:
Eclogite Facies: Defined by garnet + omphacite + kyanite mineral assemblages.
Granulite Facies: Represents the transition to lower-pressure, high-temperature conditions during exhumation.
Amphibolite Facies: Marks retrograde metamorphism as the rocks returned to shallower crustal levels.
Petrological studies of eclogites in Nordfjord suggest that these rocks were subjected to pressures as high as 3.0 GPa (equivalent to ~100 km depth) before being rapidly exhumed.
Petrography and Mineralogy of Nordfjord Eclogites
Nordfjord’s eclogites are characterized by their distinctive mineralogy, which provides valuable information on their pressure-temperature (P-T) history.
Primary Minerals in Eclogite:
Garnet (Almandine-Pyrope Series): Forms large, well-developed crystals with inclusion-rich cores.
Omphacite (Clinopyroxene): A Na-rich pyroxene, crucial for defining eclogite facies.
Kyanite: An indicator of high-pressure metamorphism.
Coesite: Found in ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) eclogites, indicating deep burial.
Retrograde Minerals (Lower Pressure Phases):
Amphibole (e.g., hornblende) forms during decompression.
Plagioclase replaces omphacite as pressure decreases.
Chlorite and Epidote are common signs of hydrothermal alteration.
The mineralogy of these eclogites provides crucial evidence of subduction zone processes and crustal recycling in deep Earth environments.
Geochronology and Age Determination of Eclogite Folds
To understand the timing and duration of eclogite metamorphism, geologists use various radiometric dating techniques:
Key Dating Methods:
U-Pb Dating on Zircon & Monazite: Provides precise ages of peak metamorphism.
Lu-Hf and Sm-Nd Isotopic Systems: Used to date garnet growth and determine the duration of high-pressure metamorphism.
Ar-Ar Dating on Micas: Useful for dating retrogression and exhumation.
Age of Eclogite Metamorphism in Nordfjord:
Peak eclogite metamorphism: 430–400 Ma (Caledonian orogeny).
Exhumation to crustal levels: 390–370 Ma.
Final cooling below ~300°C: 350 Ma.
These dates align with the subduction and exhumation cycles of the Baltican continental crust during the closure of the Iapetus Ocean.
Exhumation Processes of High-Pressure Rocks
One of the most intriguing geological questions is: How do eclogites, formed at depths of ~100 km, return to the surface?
In Nordfjord, exhumation occurred through a combination of:
Tectonic Uplift: Driven by buoyancy forces acting on subducted crust.
Extensional Faulting: Linked to the Nordfjord-Sogn Detachment Zone (NSDZ), a major low-angle normal fault that facilitated crustal thinning.
Erosion and Surface Denudation: Helped expose high-pressure rocks at Earth’s surface.
The Nordfjord-Sogn Detachment Zone played a key role in the exhumation of high-pressure metamorphic rocks, allowing geologists to study deep crustal processes in an accessible field setting.
Field Studies and Mapping of Eclogite Folds
Nordfjord is one of the best locations worldwide for studying eclogite folds in situ. Field geologists utilize structural mapping, petrography, and geochemical analysis to understand fold dynamics.
Key Localities for Eclogite Folds in Nordfjord:
Stadtlandet Peninsula: Displays spectacular recumbent folds in eclogite-bearing gneisses.
Hornelen Basin: Features large-scale synclinal and anticlinal folds in high-pressure rocks.
Western Gneiss Region: Contains some of the largest and best-preserved eclogite bodies in the world.
These field exposures provide natural laboratories for studying deep-crustal processes and tectonic evolution.
Geochemical Signatures and Provenance
Geochemical studies of eclogites in Nordfjord help determine their protolith origin and tectonic history.
Key Geochemical Techniques Used:
Major & Trace Element Analysis: Determines the original rock composition.
Isotopic Studies (Sr-Nd-Pb-Hf): Traces the sources of eclogite-forming material.
Rare Earth Element (REE) Patterns: Distinguishes between oceanic and continental sources.
Results indicate that Nordfjord eclogites were originally mafic rocks derived from an oceanic crustal setting, later subducted and metamorphosed during the Caledonian orogeny.
Comparison with Other Eclogite-Bearing Terranes
The Nordfjord eclogite folds are part of a global network of high-pressure terranes. Comparing them to other regions helps geologists understand subduction-exhumation processes worldwide.
World’s largest UHP terrane, with deep subduction evidence
Franciscan Complex, USA
Subduction Zone
Eclogite blocks in a mélange setting
These comparisons show that Nordfjord is unique due to its large-scale fold structures and strong association with extensional detachment faults.
Economic and Industrial Significance of Eclogite
Although not a major economic resource, eclogite has several industrial applications:
Crushed rock for road construction (due to its hardness and durability).
Dimension stone in decorative applications.
Source of garnet for use as an abrasive material.
Additionally, the study of eclogite-hosted mineral deposits can provide insights into deep-seated ore-forming processes.
Environmental and Geohazard Considerations
Eclogite-bearing terrains can present geohazards due to their brittle deformation history. Some key concerns in Nordfjord include:
Rockslides and Slope Instabilities: Due to the presence of highly deformed rocks.
Seismic Activity: Associated with past and present fault movements.
Proper geological assessments are crucial for land use planning and infrastructure development in these regions.
Conservation and Educational Value
Nordfjord’s eclogite folds serve as natural geological archives that should be preserved for scientific research and education. Universities and research institutions frequently conduct field excursions to these sites, allowing students and professionals to study high-pressure metamorphism in a real-world setting.
Future Research Directions in Nordfjord Eclogite Studies
Emerging techniques such as AI-based mineral mapping, high-resolution geochemical analysis, and geodynamic modeling are expected to revolutionize our understanding of eclogite formation and exhumation.
Future research may focus on:
The role of fluids in metamorphic reactions.
The kinematics of eclogite folding using 3D structural analysis.
Deep-Earth drilling to study eclogite-hosted mineral deposits.
The Velodrome Recumbent Fold is a remarkable geological structure that exemplifies the extreme forces acting within the Earth’s crust. It is classified as a recumbent fold, meaning that its axial plane is nearly horizontal, causing its limbs to lie parallel to each other. Such folds are crucial in understanding compressional tectonic environments, where intense horizontal stress deforms rock layers over geological time scales.
This article explores the formation, structure, significance, and implications of the Velodrome Recumbent Fold, providing insights into its role in Earth’s tectonic history and resource potential.
What is a Recumbent Fold?
A recumbent fold is a specific type of fold where the axial plane is nearly horizontal, and the limbs are overturned to an extreme degree. This structure forms under intense compressional forces, which cause rock layers to deform plastically rather than fracturing.
Key Features of Recumbent Folds:
Axial Plane: Nearly horizontal
Fold Limbs: Overturned and lying subparallel
Formation Process: Result of prolonged compression and shearing forces
Common Location: Found in mountain belts and regions of strong tectonic deformation
Recumbent folds are often associated with thrust faulting and nappe structures, where large rock masses are displaced over long distances due to tectonic movement.
The Geological Context of The Velodrome Recumbent Fold
The Velodrome Recumbent Fold is situated in a highly deformed tectonic region, characterized by compressional stress and crustal thickening. The surrounding geology suggests that this fold developed during a major orogenic event, which involved the collision of tectonic plates.
Tectonic Setting:
Found in a convergent plate boundary where subduction and collision occurred.
Associated with high-pressure metamorphic rocks.
Frequently occurs within fold-and-thrust belts.
Structural Characteristics of The Velodrome Recumbent Fold
The Velodrome Recumbent Fold exhibits:
A horizontal axial plane, indicating extreme tectonic stress.
Highly deformed syncline and anticline structures.
A relationship with thrust faults, showing nappe formation.
Field observations and structural analysis reveal that this fold likely formed due to ductile deformation of sedimentary and metamorphic layers, which accommodated the intense pressure without fracturing.
Tectonic Forces Behind The Velodrome Recumbent Fold
The formation of this fold is attributed to:
Plate Convergence: Collision of tectonic plates led to intense crustal shortening.
Shear Stress: Lateral movements of crustal blocks contributed to its recumbent shape.
High-Temperature Deformation: Rocks underwent metamorphism, enhancing their ability to fold rather than break.
Dating and Age Determination
To determine the age of the Velodrome Recumbent Fold, geologists use:
Radiometric dating (U-Pb, Ar-Ar) on minerals such as zircon.
Fossil evidence within folded strata.
Relative dating techniques comparing cross-cutting relationships.
Results indicate that this fold formed during a significant orogenic event, correlating with major tectonic plate interactions.
Economic and Environmental Importance
The Velodrome Recumbent Fold holds geological significance due to:
Rich mineral deposits, including gold, copper, and rare earth elements.
Potential oil and gas reservoirs, trapped within its structural folds.
Environmental considerations, as regions with extreme folds can be prone to landslides and seismic activity.
Conclusion
The Velodrome Recumbent Fold serves as a testament to the powerful forces shaping our planet. Its intricate structure provides valuable insights into tectonics, resource distribution, and geological evolution. As new technologies emerge, further studies will enhance our understanding of such complex geological phenomena.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What causes a recumbent fold?
Extreme compressional forces cause rock layers to fold horizontally.
Where are recumbent folds commonly found?
In orogenic belts, where tectonic collisions have deformed the crust.
What is the significance of the Velodrome Recumbent Fold?
It provides insights into tectonic evolution and resource distribution.
How do geologists study recumbent folds?
Using field mapping, seismic data, and petrographic analysis.
Can recumbent folds lead to earthquakes?
Yes, especially if associated with thrust faults and active tectonic zones.
Reconstruction of the appearance in life of a gorgonopsian in a floodplain of the Permian of Mallorca. Credit: Henry Sutherland Sharpe
An international research team led by the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP) and the Museu Balear de Ciències Naturals (MUCBO | MBCN) have described a fossil animal that lived between 270 and 280 million years ago in present-day Mallorca.
The discovery is exceptional, not only because of the number of fossil remains found, but also because it is the oldest known gorgonopsian on the planet, the lineage of saber-toothed predators that would eventually give rise to mammals. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Gorgonopsians are an extinct group of synapsids that lived during the Permian, between 270 and 250 million years ago. They belong to the evolutionary lineage that would give rise to the first mammals 50 million years later.
They were warm-blooded animals like modern mammals, but, unlike most of them, they laid eggs. They were carnivorous and were the first animals to develop the characteristic saber teeth. They were often the superpredators of the ecosystems in which they lived, and their appearance would be similar to a dog, but without ears or fur.
The remains recovered in Mallorca belong to a small to medium-sized animal, approximately one meter in length, and come from a site located in the municipality of Banyalbufar (Serra de Tramuntana, Mallorca). Excavations were carried out in three different campaigns during which a large quantity of material was recovered.
“The large number of bone remains is surprising. We have found everything from fragments of skull, vertebrae, and ribs to a very well-preserved femur. In fact, when we started this excavation, we never thought we would find so many remains of an animal of this type in Mallorca,” explains Rafel Matamales, curator of the Museu Balear de Ciències Naturals (MUCBO | MBCN), research associate at the ICP, and first author of the article.
Its location in the Balearic Islands is an unusual fact in itself. The known remains of gorgonopsians prior to this discovery belonged to very high latitudes such as Russia or South Africa. Its age has also surprised the researchers who conducted the study.
“It is most likely the oldest gorgonopsian on the planet. The one we found in Mallorca is at least 270 million years old, and the other records of this group worldwide are, at the very least, slightly younger,” points out Josep Fortuny, senior author of the article and head of the Computational Biomechanics and Evolution of Life History group at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP).
Among the excavated fossil remains, a nearly complete leg stands out, which has allowed researchers to study how the animal moved. Unlike reptiles, which have a more ancestral locomotion with their legs more spread out, gorgonopsians had their legs positioned more vertically and, therefore, moved in a way that was intermediate between reptiles and mammals. This system is more efficient for walking and especially for running.
The recovered saber teeth confirm its diet. “We know that this is a carnivorous animal, a characteristic shared by all gorgonopsians worldwide. The saber teeth are a common feature in large predators of ecosystems, and what we have found was likely one in the environment in which it lived,” emphasizes Àngel Galobart, researcher at the ICP and director of the Museu de la Conca Dellà.
When Mallorca was not an island
During the Permian, approximately 270 million years ago, Mallorca was not an island but was part of the supercontinent Pangea. It was located at an equatorial latitude, where countries like Congo or Guinea can be found today. The climate was monsoonal, alternating between wet and very dry seasons.
It has been found that the site where the fossils were found was a floodplain with temporary ponds where gorgonopsians and other fauna drank. Among the animals that cohabited in this ecosystem were moradisaurine captorhinids, an ancient group of herbivorous reptiles to which the Tramuntanasaurus tiai belongs, which may have been part of the gorgonopsians’ diet.
Despite the small area that they occupy, the Balearic Islands have an exceptional fossil record. The most studied and well-known fossils are from the Pleistocene and Holocene.
However, the fossil record from other periods is considerably less known. Nonetheless, remarkable fossils have been found, such as the world’s oldest mosquito, nearly a thousand species of ammonoids (cephalopods related to squids), ancestors of horses and hippos, giant sharks, and large coral reefs.
Reference:
Matamales-Andreu, R., et al. Early–middle Permian Mediterranean gorgonopsian suggests an equatorial origin of therapsids. Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54425-5
An strange, extinct plant once thought to be related to modern ginseng is now considered the lone representative of an unknown family. Credit: Florida Museum of Natural History / Jeff Gage
In 1969, fossilized leaves of the species Othniophyton elongatum—which translates to “alien plant”—were identified in eastern Utah. Initially, scientists theorized the extinct species may have belonged to the ginseng family (Araliaceae). However, a case once closed is now being revisited. New fossil specimens show that Othniophyton elongatum is even stranger than scientists first thought.
Steven Manchester, curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has studied 47-million-year-old fossils from Utah for several years. While visiting the University of California, Berkeley, paleobotany collection, he came across an unidentified and unusually well-preserved plant fossil collected from the same area as the leaves of Othniophyton elongatum.
Manchester is the co-author of a new study in which he and his colleagues showed that the leaves in question belonged to a unique plant, with unusual flowers and fruits. The findings are published in the journal Annals of Botany.
Close observation revealed that the 1969 fossils and those later studied by Manchester at UC Berkeley were from the same plant species. But the leaves, fruits and flowers attached to the woody stem of the Berkeley fossils were nothing like those of the other plants in the ginseng family, to which that species had been originally assigned.
“This fossil is rare in having the twig with attached fruits and leaves. Usually those are found separately,” Manchester said.
The authors extensively analyzed physical features of the old and new fossils, then methodically searched for any living plant family to which they could belong. There are over 400 diverse families of flowering plants alive today, but the authors couldn’t match the fossils’ strange assortment of features with any of them.
Resisting the urge to tidily lump the obscure specimen in with a living group, the team then searched for extinct families it might have belonged to but came up empty-handed once again.
The authors say their results underscore what may be a pervasive problem in paleobotany. In many cases, extinct plants that existed less than 65 million years ago are placed within modern families, or genera—the taxonomic groups directly above the level of individual species. This can create a skewed estimate of biodiversity in ancient ecosystems.
“There are many things for which we have good evidence to put in a modern family or genus, but you can’t always shoehorn these things,” Manchester said.
The species does not belong to any living family or genus
The fossils were discovered in the Green River Formation near the ghost town of Rainbow in eastern Utah. Roughly 47 million years ago, the area was a tectonically active, massive inland lake system that provided the perfect conditions for fossil preservation. Low-oxygen lake sediments and showers of volcanic ash slowed the decomposition of many fish, reptiles, birds, invertebrates and plants, allowing some of them to be preserved in amazing detail.
Researchers who had studied the original leaf fossils of this species had very little to work with. Without flowers, fruits or branches, they were limited to analyzing the shape and vein patterns of the leaves. Based on the arrangement, researchers thought it might be a single leaf made up of multiple smaller leaflets. This type of compound leaf is a defining feature of several plants in the ginseng family.
But the new fossils had leaves that were directly attached to stems, which painted a very different picture of what the plant once looked like.
“The two twigs we found show the same kind of leaf attached, but they’re not compound. They’re simple, which eliminates the possibility of it being anything in that family,” Manchester said.
The fossil’s berries ruled out families like the grasses and magnolias. The flowers did resemble some modern groups, but other features ruled those out, too. Even with such a pristine fossil in their repertoire, researchers were left with more questions than before.
Researchers see the fossil in a new light
Stumped, the team set the fossil aside for several years. Then the Florida Museum hired a curator of artificial intelligence who established a new microscopy workstation. When viewed through the digital microscope’s powerful lens and computer-enhanced shadow effect illumination, the authors could see subtle peculiarities they’d missed during prior observations.
When they focused on the fossil’s minute fruits, they could see micro-impressions left behind by their internal anatomy, including features of the small, developing seeds.
“Normally we don’t expect to see that preserved in these types of fossils, but maybe we’ve been overlooking it because our equipment didn’t pick up that kind of topographic relief,” Manchester said.
One of the plant’s strangest newly seen features was its stamens, the male reproductive organs of the flower. In most plant species, once the flower is fertilized, the stamens detach along with petals and the rest of the flower parts, which are no longer needed for reproduction.
“Usually, stamens will fall away as the fruit develops. And this thing seems unusual in that it’s retaining the stamens at the time it has mature fruits with seeds ready to disperse. We haven’t seen that in anything modern,” Manchester said.
With all modern families ruled out, they compared the traits to extinct families. Once again, there was no match to be found.
Julian Correa-Narvaez, the lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Florida, played a major role in gathering information to identify the fossils. “It’s important because it gives us a little bit of a clue about how these organisms were evolving and adapting in different places,” he said.
Plant families can contain astonishing amounts of diversity. Seemingly disparate plants like poison ivy, cashews and mangoes are all in the same family, along with over 800 other species. It’s unclear how much diversity in this mysterious extinct group has been lost to time.
This isn’t the only enigmatic species that has come out of the Green River Formation. Similar situations have unfolded when plant fossils from the locality surprised researchers, leading to the discovery of other extinct groups. “The book published in 1969 has all these interesting mysteries that remain,” Manchester said.
With digital access to museum specimens through tools like iDigBio, researchers can continue to study and understand the natural history of plant evolution.
Walter Judd of the Florida Museum of Natural History is also a co-author of the study.
Reference:
Steven R Manchester et al, Vegetative and reproductive morphology of Othniophyton elongatum (MacGinitie) gen. et comb. nov., an extinct angiosperm of possible caryophyllalean affinity from the Eocene of Colorado and Utah, USA, Annals of Botany (2024). DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcae196
