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

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weatheriscool
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Millipedes 'as big as cars' once roamed Northern England, fossil find reveals
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-millipede ... thern.html
by University of Cambridge
The largest-ever fossil of a giant millipede—as big as a car—has been found on a beach in the north of England.

The fossil—the remains of a creature called Arthropleura—dates from the Carboniferous Period, about 326 million years ago, over 100 million years before the Age of Dinosaurs. The fossil reveals that Arthropleura was the largest-known invertebrate animal of all time, larger than the ancient sea scorpions that were the previous record holders.

The specimen, found on a Northumberland beach about 40 miles north of Newcastle, is made up of multiple articulated exoskeleton segments, broadly similar in form to modern millipedes. It is just the third such fossil ever found. It is also the oldest and largest: the segment is about 75 centimeters long, while the original creature is estimated to have measured around 2.7 meters long and weighed around 50 kilograms. The results are reported in the Journal of the Geological Society.

The fossil was discovered in January 2018 in a large block of sandstone that had fallen from a cliff to the beach at Howick Bay in Northumberland. "It was a complete fluke of a discovery," said Dr. Neil Davies from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, the paper's lead author. "The way the boulder had fallen, it had cracked open and perfectly exposed the fossil, which one of our former Ph.D. students happened to spot when walking by."
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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A perfectly preserved dinosaur egg highlights link to modern birds
A 66-million-year-old fossil of a complete baby dinosaur in its egg, apparently just a few days before it would hatch, shows the remarkable similarities between theropod dinosaurs and the birds they would evolve into, according to a study published Tuesday.

The fossilized bones of the embryo, named “Baby Yingliang” after the museum in southern China where it was discovered, can be seen curled-up inside its 6-inch elongated eggshell and looking almost exactly like a modern bird at that stage, although it has tiny arms and claws rather than wings.

Fion Waisum Ma, a paleontologist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, said the head is particularly striking in its similarity to the head of a newly hatched bird — a resemblance heightened by a beak that was a feature of this dinosaur species, called an oviraptorosaur. Ma is one of the lead authors of the fossil study published in the journal iScience. Scientists from China, Canada and elsewhere in the U.K. were also involved.
Image
Photo of the oviraptorosaur embryo ‘Baby Yingliang’. It is one of the best-preserved dinosaur embryos ever reported. Courtesy Xing et al., 2021
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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caltrek
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Scientists Discover an Ancient Oceanic Reptile that Evolved Exceedingly Fast
by Tara Yarlagadda
December 23, 2021

https://www.inverse.com/science/ancient ... -evolution

Introduction:
(Inverse) SCIENTISTS UNEARTHED A skull from a fossil-rich area of northern Nevada that reveals striking answers about ocean life — both past and present.

WHAT’S NEW — In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers identified a new species of ichthyosaur — an enormous fish-shaped marine reptile that emerged 250 million years ago not long after the Permian mass extinction wiped out most of life on Earth.

The new species is dubbed Cymbospondylus youngorum — a massive creature comparable in size to the largest animal on Earth today: the blue whale.

The researchers’ findings tease a fascinating insight into the rapid evolution of ichthyosaurs’ enormous bodies compared to similarly large cetaceans — a class of marine animals that includes whales.

“We have discovered that ichthyosaurs and whales, two iconic groups of giant ocean predators that both evolved from land-living ancestors, evolved gigantism in very different ways,” Lars Schmitz, a co-author on the study and an associate professor of biology at Claremont McKenna, tells Inverse.
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caltrek
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Life in the "Dead" Heart of Australia
January 8, 2022

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/939009

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) A team of Australian and international scientists led by Australian Museum (AM) and University of New South Wales (UNSW) palaeontologist Dr Matthew McCurry and Dr Michael Frese of the University of Canberra have discovered and investigated an important new fossil site in New South Wales, Australia, containing superb examples of fossilised animals and plants from the Miocene epoch. The team’s findings were published today in Science Advances.

The new fossil site (named McGraths Flat), located in the Central Tablelands, NSW near the town of Gulgong, represents one of only a handful of fossil sites in Australia that can be classified as a ‘Lagerstätte’– a site that contains fossils of exceptional quality.

Over the last three years a team of researchers has been secretly excavating the site, discovering thousands of specimens including rainforest plants, insects, spiders, fish and a bird feather.

Dr McCurry said the fossils formed between 11 and 16 million years ago and are important for understanding the history of the Australian continent.

“The fossils we have found prove that the area was once a temperate, mesic rainforest and that life was rich and abundant here in the Central Tablelands, NSW,” McCurry said.
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caltrek
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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A Newly Discovered Fossil Could Be the Answer to Darwin's 'Abominable' Mystery
by Carly Cassella
January 16, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/researcher ... fossil-yet

Introduction:
(Science Alert) Scientists in China say they have found the oldest flower bud in the fossil record, finally aligning the fossil evidence with the genetic data suggesting flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved tens of millions of years earlier than we initially thought.

The team hopes their discovery will help "ease the pain" around a nagging, centuries-old mystery that Charles Darwin once called "abominable".

If the oldest unambiguous fossil flower is no older than 130 million years old, then how come angiosperms began to dominate ecosystems just 20 to 30 million years later? How had they evolved such great diversity that quickly?
Further Extract:
In 2018, another fossilized flower was found in China, and this one, called Nanjinganthus, was about 174 million years old. Like a modern flowering plant, its seeds were completely enclosed in an ovary.

Not all botanists, however, are convinced these are true angiosperms. Some argue these plants are too primitive to be considered flowers, while others think their structures are too complex for a gymnosperm, an older type of plant with unenclosed seeds and lacking a flower, like a conifer.
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caltrek
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Fossil Analysis Reveals Struthiosaurus Austriacus to be a Well-Armored Dinosaur Which Was Probably Sluggish and Deaf
by David Nield
January 15, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/fossil-ana ... h-and-deaf

Introduction:
(Science Alert) Reanalyzing fossils can often lead to new discoveries, as has been the case with a study of an 80 million-year-old Late Cretaceous Struthiosaurus austriacus skull. A new analysis reveals the dinosaur was likely sluggish in its movements and was probably largely deaf as well.

Researchers used a high-resolution 3D scan of a partial braincase section – just 50 millimeters (nearly 2 inches) in diameter – of the creature's skull, holding the brain and other brain and neurosensory tissues. Researchers used micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), where X-rays build up a detailed cross-section of an object, to create the scan.

They found signs that the dinosaur probably didn't have the brain capacity to focus on potential predators due to the small flocculus part of the brain that does this job. That suggests that the plates and spikes on the body of the S. austriacus were enough to discourage any other animals looking for a meal.

"In contrast to its North American relative Euoplocephalus, which had a tail club and a clear flocculus on the brain cast, Struthiosaurus austriacus may rather relied on its body armor for protection," says paleontologist Marco Schade, from the University of Greifswald in Germany.

Further digging into the braincase scans revealed the semicircular canals in the inner ear were formed in such a way that suggests the dinosaur wasn't the most agile of its kind: These parts of the ear help control balance movement, and various conclusions can be drawn from them.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Weathering rocks hold clues to Earth's Great Oxidation Event
https://phys.org/news/2022-01-weatherin ... ation.html
by Arizona State University

About 2.4 billion years ago, Earth's atmosphere underwent what is called the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). Prior to the GOE, early Earth had far less molecular oxygen than we have today. After the GOE, molecular oxygen began to increase in abundance, eventually making life like ours possible.

For decades, researchers have tried to understand why and how the GOE occurred.

A team of scientists, led by James Andrew Leong with Tucker Ely, both of whom earned their doctoral degrees from Arizona State University (ASU)'s School of Earth and Space Exploration in 2020, and ASU Professor Everett Shock, has determined that weathering rocks might have contributed to the GOE. Their results were recently published in Nature Communications.

Molecular oxygen is produced by plants and photosynthetic microbes, but molecular oxygen is also consumed by organisms and by the oxidation of iron, sulfur, carbon and other elements in rocks. Molecular oxygen can also be consumed through reaction with reduced gases like hydrogen, which can form during rock weathering.

Scientists studying the early Earth hypothesize that the consumption of oxygen was perhaps more rapid than the production of oxygen by photosynthesis, so oxygen was not able to accumulate in the atmosphere.

"It's like when your bills exceed your income, money can't accumulate in a savings account. This appears to have been the situation on the early Earth," said co-author Shock, of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Molecular Sciences.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Fossils of sauropodomorph ancestor show it walked upright, was quick and agile
https://phys.org/news/2022-01-fossils-s ... quick.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org
A trio of researchers at the University of Bristol has found evidence of an early ancestor of the giant sauropodomorph dinosaurs that walked upright and was also likely quick and agile. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes their study of Thecodontosaurus antiquus—a much smaller member of sauropodomorphs—found at a site in southwest England.

Sauropodomorphs have made the headlines in recent years due to their massive size. Fossils unearthed over the past several years have shown that they were very large herbivorous sauropods. In this new effort, the researchers found a fossil of one of their ancestors that lived approximately 20 million years earlier that was much smaller—just 30 centimeters tall when standing.
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caltrek
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Weird, Extinct Animal Species Identified in First Such Finding in Over 100 Years
by David Nield
February 9, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-ve-just ... -five-eyes

Introduction:
(Science Alert) Peering back hundreds of millions of years into the past can turn up some astonishing findings – as it has with the discovery of a second species of opabiniid, a soft-bodied arthropod with a segmented exoskeleton that lived on the seafloor during the Miaolingian (509-497 million years ago).

The original opadiniid, Opabinia regalis, was first described over a century ago in 1912, and has several notable physical characteristics – not least the five eyes protruding on stalks from its head, a backwards-facing mouth, and its hollow, tubular proboscis.

Now there's another: Opabinia regalis is not as unique a species as first thought, because it's been joined by Utaurora comosa. This creature was previously thought to belong to a different group of animals known as radiodonts, but has now been reclassified as an opabiniid after some extensive research.

"The initial phylogenetic analysis showed it was most closely related to Opabinia," says paleontologist Jo Wolfe from Harvard University.

"We followed up with more tests to interrogate that result using different models of evolution and data sets to visualize the different kinds of relationships this fossil may have had."
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