Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Illuminating Darwin's 'Abominable Mystery'— Vast DNA Tree of Life for Plants Revealed
April 26, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) The flowering plant tree of life, much like our own family tree, allows us to understand how different species are related to each other. The tree of life is revealed by comparing DNA sequences between different species to identify changes (mutations) that accumulate over time like a molecular fossil record. Our understanding of the tree of life is rapidly improving due to advances in DNA sequencing technology.

A vast DNA tree of life brings open access DNA sequences of more than 9,500 flowering plants was recently achieved by scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, together with collaborators from the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and around the globe, this invaluable resource lets us answer key questions about modern plant life and look back in time to its origins. Their study was recently published in Nature.

A key advantage of the approach is that it can be used to sequence a wide range of plant material, old and new, even when the DNA is badly damaged. The vast treasure troves of dried plant material in the world’s herbarium collections, which include nearly 400 million scientific plant specimens, can now be studied genetically.

Using such specimens, the researchers sequenced a sandwort specimen (Arenaria globiflora) collected nearly 200 years ago in Nepal and, despite the poor quality of its DNA, were able to place it in the tree of life. They even analyzed extinct plants, such as the Guadalupe Island olive (Hesperelaea palmeri), which has not been seen alive since 1875. In fact, 511 of the species sequenced are already threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, including three more like Hesperelaea that are already extinct.

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1042650

For results of the study as presented in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07324

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Giant raptor dinosaur had legs taller than you
By Michael Irving
April 29, 2024

The six-foot-tall raptors in the Jurassic Park movies were terrifying enough, but now scientists have described a giant new raptor species whose legs alone were that tall.

Raptors were a diverse group of dinosaurs that more or less looked like the movie monsters, scaled up or down. They had that same basic body shape, a barrely snout full of teeth you wouldn’t want to mess with, and long, slender bird-like legs that ended with that iconic, curved claw on one toe. But ironically, they were probably showier than their Hollywood depictions – it’s believed that most, if not all, raptor species were covered in feathers.

Now, scientists have discovered a previously unknown species of raptor, and it was one of the biggest. They’ve named the species Fujianipus yingliangi, after the Fujian province of China where it was found. This new dinosaur is estimated to have measured 5 m (16.4 ft) long and stood 1.8 m (6 ft) tall at the hip, so of course it was even taller than that. Basically, picture Big Bird armed with a scythed foot and a vicious disposition, and you’re probably not far off.

https://newatlas.com/biology/giant-rapt ... ootprints/

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What Is the Largest Mammal Ever to Walk the Earth?
by Maddy Chapman
May 1, 2024

Introduction:

(IFL Science) Since the demise of the dinosaurs, mammals have thrived. Without their scaly peers around, their numbers exploded, they diversified, and they got bigger – but just how big?

We know that the blue whale is the largest mammal ever – heck, it’s also the most massive animal to ever live – measuring around 30 meters (98 feet) and weighing up to 200 tons. But what about mammals that walked the Earth?

Currently, the African elephant is considered the largest living land mammal (and also animal) in the world. Coming in at 7 meters (23 feet) long and 3.7 meters (12 feet) tall, these extant giants typically weigh 4 to 7 tonnes and also have the heaviest brain and nose of any terrestrial mammal. Not bad – but they're no contest for the largest land mammal ever.

That crown goes to the now-extinct Paraceratherium – a massive hornless rhino with a giraffe-like long neck. Found mostly in Asia, in China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan during the early to late Oligocene epoch (34–23 million years ago), these behemoths dwarf the biggest rhino we have today – the southern white rhino, which can reach 4.2 meters (13.8 feet) long, 1.85 meters (6 feet) tall, and weighs 3.6 tonnes.

Paraceratherium, meanwhile, is thought to have had a total length of 7.4 meters (24 feet) and a shoulder height of 4.8 meters (15.7 feet), making it the most massive mammal to ever walk the Earth. The prehistoric goliath is also believed to have weighed around 17 tonnes – almost five times as much as its extant counterpart – based on estimates from a partially reconstructed skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/what-is-the ... rth-74013

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Spiny legged 308-million-year-old arachnid discovered in the Mazon Creek locality
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-spiny-leg ... chnid.html
by University of Kansas

More than 300 million years ago, all sorts of arachnids crawled around the Carboniferous coal forests of North America and Europe. These included familiar ones we'd recognize, such as spiders, harvestmen and scorpions—as well as exotic animals that now occur in warmer regions like whip spiders and whip scorpions.

But there were also quite bizarre arachnids in these habitats belonging to now extinct groups. Even among these strange species now lost to time, one might have stood out for its up-armored legs.

The ancient critter was recently described in a new paper published in the Journal of Paleontology, co-written by Paul Selden from the University of Kansas and the Natural History Museum of London and Jason Dunlop from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.

"Douglassarachne acanthopoda comes from the famous Mazon Creek locality in Illinois and is about 308 million years old," said lead author Selden. "This compact arachnid had a body length of about 1.5 centimeters and is characterized by its remarkably robust and spiny legs—such that it is quite unlike any other arachnid known, living or extinct."

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Imagine finding that in your bread.

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Abelisauroid, a dinosaur with very tiny arms, identified in Argentina
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-abelisaur ... ntina.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of paleontologists from Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, has identified a new species of abelisauroid dinosaur. They have named it Koleken inakayali.

The work is published in the journal Cladistics.

The fossilized remains were found in the La Colonia Formation, a geological formation located in what is now modern Argentina. The dig site there is being excavated as part of a project funded by the National Geographic Society called, "The Age of Dinosaurs." The remains of the K. inakayali have been dated to approximately 70 million years ago.

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Australian scientists discover ancient 'echidnapus'

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Scientists have discovered a bizarre creature dubbed the "echidnapus" which they believe roamed Australia in prehistoric times.

Fossilised pieces of the animal's jaw bone were found in opal fields in northern New South Wales, alongside evidence of several other ancient and now extinct monotreme species.

Officially named Opalios splendens, the new species has been nicknamed for its resemblance to the platypus and echidna - which are the only egg-laying mammals in the world today.

The team behind the research say it indicates that Australia once had an "age of monotremes" - in which the incredibly rare order of animals were abundant and dominant.

"It’s like discovering a whole new civilisation,” lead author Professor Tim Flannery said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw88ewqjxd1o

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Scientists Uncover a Multibillion-year Epic Written Into the Chemistry of Life
May 28, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) The origin of life on Earth has long been a mystery that has eluded scientists. A key question is how much of the history of life on Earth is lost to time. It is quite common for a single species to "phase out" using a biochemical reaction, and if this happens across enough species, such reactions could effectively be "forgotten" by life on Earth. But if the history of biochemistry is rife with forgotten reactions, would there be any way to tell? This question inspired researchers from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in the USA. They reasoned that forgotten chemistry would appear as discontinuities or "breaks" in the path that chemistry takes from simple geochemical molecules to complex biological molecules.

The early Earth was rich in simple compounds such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and carbon dioxide – molecules not usually associated with sustaining life. But, billions of years ago, early life relied on these simple molecules as a raw material source. As life evolved, biochemical processes gradually transformed these precursors into compounds still found today. These processes represent the earliest metabolic pathways.

In order to model the history of biochemistry, ELSI researchers – Specially Appointed Associate Professor Harrison B. Smith, Specially Appointed Associate Professor Liam M. Longo and Associate Professor Shawn Erin McGlynn, in collaboration with Research Scientist Joshua Goldford from CalTech – needed an inventory of all known biochemical reactions, to understand what types of chemistry life is able to perform. They turned to the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes database, which has catalogued more than 12,000 biochemical reactions. With reactions in hand, they began to model the stepwise development of metabolism.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1045545

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Origins of Welsh Dragons Finally Exposed by Experts
May 30, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) A large fossil discovery has helped shed light on the history of dinosaurs in Wales.

Until recently, the land of the dragon didn’t have any dinosaurs. However, in the last ten years, several dinosaurs have been reported, but their life conditions were not well known. In a new study by a team from the University of Bristol and published in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, important details have been revealed for the first time.

They found that early Welsh dinosaurs from over 200 million year ago lived on a tropical lowland beside the sea. Dinosaur trackways are known from Barry and other sites nearby, showing that dinosaurs had walked across the warm lowlands.

The discovery was made at Lavernock Point, close to Cardiff and Penarth, where the cliffs of dark-coloured shales and limestones document ancient shallow seas. At several levels, there are accumulations of bones, including the remains of fish, sharks, marine reptiles and occasionally, dinosaurs.
Former student of the Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology Owain Evans led the study. He explained: “The bone bed paints the picture of a tropical archipelago, which was subjected to frequent storms, that washed material from around the surrounding area, both in land and out at sea, into a tidal zone. This means that from just one fossil horizon, we can reconstruct a complex ecological system, with a diverse array of marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and placodonts in the water, and dinosaurs on land.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1046497

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World's oldest skin preserved in extraordinarily rare fossil find
By Michael Irving
June 01, 2024

https://newatlas.com/biology/worlds-old ... -dinosaur/
Scientists have discovered the oldest known skin fossils, dating back long before the dinosaurs. The samples, found in a cave in Oklahoma, USA, show that reptile scales haven’t changed much in the last 286 million years.

The majority of fossils we see in museums are skeletons, and the reason is pretty simple: bones don’t decompose very quickly, so they have more time to fossilize. Soft tissues like skin, muscle and organs usually rot away or are eaten by scavengers soon after death, so we don’t find those often.

But under the right circumstances, it can happen. Bury it quickly enough in just the right medium and you can end up with a feathered dinosaur tail preserved in amber, a 133-million-year-old brain pickled in a bog, and a nodosaur still sporting skin and scales that looks like it’s just taking a nap.

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New vestiges of the first life on Earth discovered in Saudi Arabia
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-vestiges- ... rabia.html
by Arianna Soldati, Geological Society of America

Stromatolites are the earliest geological record of life on Earth. These curious biotic structures are made of algae carpets growing toward the light and precipitating carbonates. After their first appearance 3.48 Ga ago, stromatolites dominated the planet as the sole living carbonate factory for almost three billion years.

Stromatolites are also partially responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event, which drastically changed the composition of our atmosphere by introducing oxygen. That oxygen initially wiped out stromatolites' competition, enabling their prominence in the Archean and early Proterozoic environment. However, as more life forms adapted their metabolism to an oxygenated atmosphere, stromatolites started to decline, popping up in the geologic record only after mass extinctions or in difficult environments.

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New Dinosaur Species Found in Zimbabwe
by Gregory Filiano
June 4, 2024

Introduction:

(Futurity) A completely new sauropodomorph dinosaur has been identified in Zimbabwe. The discovery is only the fourth dinosaur species discovered in that country.

Long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs are known as sauropodomorphs. They were a group of mainly bipedal dinosaurs that lived some 210 million years ago in the Late Triassic.

Kimberley (Kimi) Chapelle, assistant professor in the anatomical sciences department in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, is part of the international team of scientists that discovered and identified the find, named Musankwa sanyatiensis.

The discovery of Musankwa sanyatiensis is particularly significant as it is the first dinosaur to be named from the Mid-Zambezi Basin of northern Zimbabwe in more than 50 years. The fossil follows only these previous dinosaur discoveries in the region: Syntarsus rhodesiensis in 1969, Vulcanodon karibaensis in 1972, and Mbiresaurus raathi in 2022.

Musankwa sanyatiensis is represented by the remains of a single hind leg, including its thigh, shin, and ankle bones.

Read more here: https://www.futurity.org/sauropodomorp ... ource=rss

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246-million-year-old giant sea lizard is oldest to be found in the region
By Bronwyn Thompson
June 18, 2024
https://newatlas.com/biology/nothosaur-sea-reptile/

A single vertebra dug out of a boulder in a stream below a mountain in New Zealand in 1978 has now been found to have belonged to the oldest known sea reptile in the Southern Hemisphere, where no record of these huge beasts had existed until now. It dates back 246 million years, making it the oldest ever found in the region.

Paleontologists from Uppsala University in Sweden, as well as Norway, NZ, Australia and East Timor made this discovery when analyzing a collection of fossils that lacked accurate identification. Through analysis and phylogenic work, the team placed this piece of vertebra as one belonging to a nothosaur, who inhabited the southern polar coast in the super-ocean of Panthalassa.

"The nothosaur found in New Zealand is over 40 million years older than the previously oldest known sauropterygian fossils from the Southern Hemisphere," said Benjamin Kear from The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University and lead author on the study. "We show that these ancient sea reptiles lived in a shallow coastal environment teeming with marine creatures within what was then the southern polar circle."

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508-Million-Year-Old “Pompeii” Trilobite Fossils Show Never-Before-Seen Features
by Rachael Funnel
June 28, 2024

Introduction:

(IFL Science) Trilobites that date back 508 million years have been found preserved in volcanic matter, revealing never-before-seen details in 3D form. Their fossilization was so rapid that tiny shells have been preserved in situ, and soft tissues including mouthparts and internal organs can still be seen.

The trilobites were entombed in pyroclastic flow, which is the hot, dense material that comes hurtling out of volcanoes sometimes reaching speeds as high as 200 meters (656 feet) per second. Typically, it burns up any life in its path, but that can change in a marine setting.

“The surface of the sea on which the ash flowed would have been lethally hot and, yes, would have incinerated animals at the shallowest depths,” study co-author Dr Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum, London, told IFLScience. “The ash would have mixed with seawater as it picked up and entrained the trilobites, which were living on the sea bottom. This mixing through a column of seawater must have cooled the ash sufficiently.”

Collected in the High Atlas of Morocco, the ancient wonders have been nicknamed “Pompeii” trilobites due to their remarkable preservation in the ash. They’re incredibly old, but they aren’t the oldest trilobites ever found.

At around 508 million years old, they’re younger than the oldest trilobites, which date back to about 521 million years old. There are also older trace fossils in the form of burrows, called Rusophycus, that are thought to be the work of trilobites and exceed 528 million years in age.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/508-million ... es-74868

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Giant swamp monster was a top predator before the dinosaurs
By Michael Irving
July 04, 2024
https://newatlas.com/biology/gaiasia-je ... p-monster/

Long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, another giant predator claimed the top spot in its environment. Meet Gaiasia, a huge salamander-like creature that stalked the Permian swamps.

In case you’re picturing a cute little axolotl, Gaiasia jennyae was anything but. This ancient amphibian measured about 2.5 m (8.2 ft) long, and judging by the skull and jaw structure it could have chomped down on even large prey that wandered too close.

“Gaiasia jennyae was considerably larger than a person, and it probably hung out near the bottom of swamps and lakes,” said Jason Pardo, co-lead author of the study. “It’s got a big, flat, toilet seat-shaped head, which allows it to open its mouth and suck in prey. It has these huge fangs, the whole front of the mouth is just giant teeth. It’s a big predator, but potentially also a relatively slow ambush predator.”