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

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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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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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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 How Plants Evolved to Colonize Land Over 500-million Years Ago
February 16, 2022

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/943723

Introduction:
(EurekaAlert) Scientists analysing one of the largest genomic datasets of plants have discovered how the first plants on Earth evolved the mechanisms used to control water and ‘breathe’ on land hundreds of millions of years ago. The study by the University of Bristol and University of Essex, published in New Phytologist,* has important implications in understanding how plant water transport systems have evolved and how these might adapt in future in response to climate change.

Over the last 500-million years, the evolution of land plants has supported the diversity of life on an increasingly green planet. Throughout their evolution, plants have acquired adaptations such as leaves and roots, allowing them to control water and colonise land. Some of these ‘tools’ evolved in early land plants and today are found in both tiny mosses and giant trees which form complex forest ecosystems.

Researchers from Essex’s School of Life Sciences, and Bristol’s Schools of Biological Sciences and Geographical Sciences first compared the genes of 532 plant species to investigate the role of new and old genes in the genesis of these adaptations. Of these, the team focused on 218 genes which were genes related to major innovations in land plant evolution such as roots and vascular tissues.

They discovered that some early traits essential for land plants, like stomata (pores that plants use to ‘breathe’), are related to the origin of new genes. In contrast, later innovations (e.g. roots, the vascular system) recycle old genes that emerged in the ancestors of land plants and showed that different parts of plant anatomies (stomata, vascular tissue, roots) involved in the transport of water were linked to different methods of gene evolution.

Dr Jordi Paps, joint lead author and Senior Lecturer from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences, explained: “Our analyses shed new light on the genetic basis of the greening of the planet, highlighting the different methods of gene evolution in the diversification of the plant kingdom. Historically it has not been clear if evolutionary innovations are driven by the emergence of new genes or by the repurposing of old ones. Our findings tell us how plants have evolved at distinct moments in their history and how different modes of evolution, the origin of new genes and the recycling of older ones, contributed to the emergence of major innovations key to the greening of the planet.

*https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi ... /nph.17981
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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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New fossil birds discovered near China's Great Wall – one had a movable, sensitive 'chin'
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-fossil-bi ... -wall.html
by Field Museum
Approximately 80 miles from the westernmost reach of China's Great Wall, paleontologists found relics of an even more ancient world. Over the last two decades, teams of researchers unearthed more than 100 specimens of fossil birds that lived approximately 120 million years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs. However, many of these fossils have proved difficult to identify: they're incomplete and sometimes badly crushed. In a new paper published in the Journal of Systematics and Evolution, researchers examined six of these fossils and identified two new species. And as a fun side note, one of those new species had a movable bony appendage at the tip of its lower jaw that may have helped the bird root for food.

"It was a long, painstaking process teasing out what these things were," says Jingmai O'Connor, the study's lead author and the associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at Chicago's Field Museum. "But these new specimens include two new species that increase our knowledge of Cretaceous bird faunas, and we found combinations of dental features that we've never seen in any other dinosaurs."
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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New armless abelisaur dinosaur species discovered in Argentina
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-armless-a ... ntina.html
by James Ashworth, Natural History Museum

A new dinosaur which formed part of an array of 'unusual' creatures has been discovered in Argentina.

The new species, Guemesia ochoai, could be the close relative of the ancestors of an armless group of dinosaurs, which roamed the southern hemisphere over 70 million years ago.

A partially complete skull uncovered in Argentina provides new evidence of a unique ecosystem during the Late Cretaceous.

Guemesia ochoai was a species of abelisaurid, a clade of carnivores which roamed what is now Africa, South America and India. Dating back around 70 million years, the dinosaur may have been a close relative of the entire group's ancestors.

The discovery of Guemesia ochoai's skull offers a valuable insight into an area which has very few abelisaurid fossils, and may go some way to explain why the area gave rise to such unusual animals.

Professor Anjali Goswami, Research Leader at the Museum and co-author, says, "This new dinosaur is quite unusual for its kind. It has several key characteristics that suggest that is a new species, providing important new information about an area of the world which we don't know a lot about.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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New species of spinosaurid dinosaur discovered in Portugal
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-species-s ... tugal.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org
A pair of researchers affiliated with both the NOVA School of Science and Technology and Museu da Lourinhã, has found evidence that suggests a group of fossils found 23 years ago in Portugal are the remains of a new species of Spinosaurus—the type of dinosaur featured prominently in the movie Jurassic Park III. They have named it Iberospinus natarioi. In their paper posted on the open-access site PLOS ONE, Octa´vio Mateus and Darı´o Estraviz-Lo´pez, describe the fossils they studied and explain why they believe they belonged to a separate species of Spinosaurus.

Spinosaurids are believed to be one of the largest living carnivores to have ever walked the earth. They were long with large back legs and small front legs, as well as long tails and large heads that somewhat resembled those of a crocodile. They lived during the Mesozoic in Africa and parts of Britain and Europe, most notably on the Iberian Peninsula. Prior research has suggested that they likely lived most of their lives in the water but were quite capable of chasing down prey on land as well. Estimates of their characteristics are generalized as only a small number of fossils that have been found.

In this new effort, Mateus and Estraviz-Lo´pez suspected that the fossil remains discovered in 1999 close to Cabo Espichel, Portugal had been mistakenly identified. For many years, it was believed that the remains were from a single Spinosaurus known as Baryonyx walkeri—so they were given the label ML1190. The fossils included dorsal vertebra, rib fragments, a pubis shaft, dentary fragments, a partial right scapula, a phalanx bone, a public peduncle, and dorsal neural arches.
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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 Forgotten Continent From 40 Million Years Ago May Have Just Been Rediscovered
by Clare Watson
February 22, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-forgotte ... -years-ago

Introduction:
(Science Alert) A low-lying continent that existed some 40 million years ago and was home to exotic fauna may have "paved the way" for Asian mammals to colonize southern Europe, new research suggests.

Wedged between Europe, Africa and Asia, this forgotten continent – which researchers have dubbed "Balkanatolia" – became a gateway between Asia and Europe when sea levels dropped and a land bridge formed, around 34 million years ago.

"When and how the first wave of Asian mammals made it to south-eastern Europe remains poorly understood," palaeogeologist Alexis Licht and colleagues write in their new study.

But the result was nothing short of dramatic. Around 34 million years ago, at the end of the Eocene epoch, huge numbers of native mammals disappeared from Western Europe as new Asian mammals emerged, in a sudden extinction event now known as the Grande Coupure.

Recent fossil findings in the Balkans, however, have upended that timeline, pointing towards a 'peculiar' bioregion that appears to have enabled Asian mammals to colonize southeastern Europe as much as 5 to 10 million years before the Grande Coupure occurred.
The study was published in Earth Science Review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... via%3Dihub
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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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Giant Impact Crater in Greenland Occurred a Few Million Years After Dinosaurs Went Extinct
March 9, 2022

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/945636

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Danish and Swedish researchers have dated the enormous Hiawatha impact crater, a 31 km-wide meteorite crater buried under a kilometer of Greenlandic ice. The dating ends speculation that the meteorite impacted after the appearance of humans and opens up a new understanding of Earth’s evolution in the post-dinosaur era.

Ever since 2015, when researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s GLOBE Institute discovered the Hiawatha impact crater in northwestern Greenland, uncertainty about the crater’s age has been the subject of considerable speculation. Could the asteroid have slammed into Earth as recently as 13,000 years ago, when humans had long populated the planet? Could its impact have catalyzed a nearly 1,000-year period of global cooling known as the Younger Dryas?

New analyses performed on grains of sand and rocks from the Hiawatha impact crater by the Natural History Museum of Denmark and the GLOBE Institute at the University of Copenhagen, as well as the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, demonstrate that the answer is no. The Hiawatha impact crater is far older. In fact, a new study published in the journal Science Advances today reports its age to be 58 million years old.

"Dating the crater has been a particularly tough nut to crack, so it’s very satisfying that two laboratories in Denmark and Sweden, using different dating methods arrived at the same conclusion. As such, I’m convinced that we’ve determined the crater’s actual age, which is much older than many people once thought," says Michael Storey of the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

"Determining the new age of the crater surprised us all. In the future, it will help us investigate the impact’s possible effect on climate during an important epoch of Earth's history" says Dr. Gavin Kenny of the Swedish Museum of Natural History
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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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Dense bones allowed Spinosaurus to hunt underwater, study shows
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-dense-bon ... water.html
by Field Museum
Spinosaurus is the biggest carnivorous dinosaur ever discovered—even bigger than T. rex—but the way it hunted has been a subject of debate for decades. It's hard to guess the behavior of an animal that we only know from fossils; based on its skeleton, some scientists have proposed that Spinosaurus could swim, but others believe that it just waded in the water like a heron. Since looking at the anatomy of spinosaurid dinosaurs wasn't enough to solve the mystery, a group of paleontologists are publishing a new study in Nature that takes a different approach: examining the density of their bones. By analyzing the density of spinosaurid bones and comparing them to other animals like penguins, hippos, and alligators, the team found that Spinosaurus and its close relative Baryonyx had dense bones that likely would have allowed them to submerge themselves underwater to hunt. Meanwhile, another related dinosaur called Suchomimus had lighter bones that would have made swimming more difficult, so it likely waded instead or spent more time on land like other dinosaurs.

"The fossil record is tricky—among spinosaurids, there are only a handful of partial skeletons, and we don't have any complete skeletons for these dinosaurs," says Matteo Fabbri, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum and the lead author of the study in Nature. "Other studies have focused on interpretation of anatomy, but clearly if there are such opposite interpretations regarding the same bones, this is already a clear signal that maybe those are not the best proxies for us to infer the ecology of extinct animals."
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Snake-like fossil lacking forelimbs but with hind limbs may represent transitional evolution
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-snake-lik ... -hind.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org
A trio of researchers with the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, the University of Calgary and Carleton University, respectively, has found a snake-like fossil that may represent a creature in transition from four legs to none. In their paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, Arjan Mann, Jason Pardo and Hillary Maddin describe the fossil they found and why they believe it helps to explain how animals such as snakes lost their limbs.

Prior research has shown that after animals evolved to walk on land, some of the four-legged creatures evolved in ways that resulted in loss of their limbs—modern snakes are a prime example. In this new effort, the researchers found a fossilized creature that may represent a step in that process.

Dubbed Nagini mazonense, the fossil is believed to represent both a new genus and species belonging to a group known as molgophids. It was approximately 10 centimeters in length and had no forelimbs or even a pectoral girdle. It did have hind legs, feet and four toes, however, which is why the researchers believe it represents a transitional creature.
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