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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New Discovery of Panda Species Which May Have Been Europe’s Last
August 1, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Lumbering through the forested wetlands of Bulgaria around six million years ago, a new species of panda has been uncovered by scientists who state it is currently the last known and “most evolved” European giant panda.

Unearthed from the bowels of the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History, two fossils of teeth originally found in the eastern European nation in the late 1970s, provide new evidence of a sizable relative of the modern giant panda. Unlike today’s iconic black and white bear however, it was not reliant on purely bamboo.

“Although not a direct ancestor of the modern genus of the giant panda, it is its close relative,” explains the Museum’s Professor Nikolai Spassov, whose findings are today published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/1 ... 21.2054718.

“This discovery shows how little we still know about ancient nature and demonstrates also that historic discoveries in paleontology can lead to unexpected results, even today.”

The upper carnassial tooth, and an upper canine, were originally cataloged by paleontologist Ivan Nikolov, who added them to the museum’s trove of fossilized treasures when they were unearthed in northwestern Bulgaria. This new species is named Agriarctos nikolovi in his honor.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/959877

Edit: CNN also has an article on this: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/01/europe/e ... index.html
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Fossils of 30-foot prehistoric marine lizard unearthed in Texas
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-fossils-f ... izard.html
by Adithi Ramakrishnan

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One sweltering afternoon this spring, Stephen Kruse trekked along a dry creek bed with a backpack full of fossils.

An amateur enthusiast, Kruse has been interested in dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures since he hunted for rocks with his brother as a kid. That afternoon, he was hiking by himself near the North Sulphur River, about 80 miles northeast of Dallas. It's an area he'd combed several times.

He was getting tired. As the day got longer, Kruse searched for a way back to his white Chevy Suburban. He decided to look for a shortcut a quarter mile farther out. "Best decision I ever made," he said.

Just 100 yards down the rocky stream bed, he saw it: a 5- to 6-inch black vertebra, a piece of a prehistoric creature's spine.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Continents on Ancient Earth Were Created by Giant Meteorite Impacts, Scientists Find
by Michele Starr
August 10, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) To date, Earth is the only planet we know of that has continents.

Exactly how they formed and evolved is unclear, but we do know – because the edges of continents thousands of miles apart match up – that, at one time long ago, Earth's landmass was concentrated in one big supercontinent.

Since that's not what the planet looks like today, something must have triggered that supercontinent to break apart. Now, we have new evidence to suggest that giant meteorite impacts played a significant role.

The smoking gun consists of crystals of the mineral zircon, excavated from a craton in Western Australia, a piece of Earth's crust that has remained stable for over a billion years.

Known as the Pilbara Craton, it is the best-preserved chunk of crust on the planet… and the zircon crystals within it contain evidence of ancient meteorite impacts before the continents broke apart.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/the-conti ... e-impacts

My new vocabulary word for the day:
cra·ton
/ˈkrātän/

noun
GEOLOGY
1. a large stable block of the earth's crust forming the nucleus of a continent.
"Although continents were small, they consisted of stable cratons."
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Scientists discover a 5-mile wide undersea crater created as the dinosaurs disappeared

Updated 0248 GMT (1048 HKT) August 18, 2022

An asteroid from space slammed into the Earth's surface 66 million years ago, leaving a massive crater underneath the sea and wreaking havoc with the planet.

No, it's not that asteroid, the one that doomed the dinosaurs to extinction, but a previously unknown crater 248 miles off the coast of West Africa that was created right around the same time. Further study of the Nadir crater, as it's called, could shake up what we know about that cataclysmic moment in natural history.

Uisdean Nicholson, an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, happened on the crater by accident -- he was reviewing seismic survey data for another project on the tectonic split between South America and Africa and found evidence of the crater beneath 400 meters of seabed sediment.

"While interpreting the data, I (came) across this very unusual crater-like feature, unlike anything I had ever seen before," he said.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/17/afri ... index.html


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

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Global Warming Spawned the Age of Reptiles
August 19, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Studying climate change-induced mass extinctions in the deep geological past allows researchers to explore the impact of environmental crises on organismal evolution. One principal example is the Permian-Triassic climatic crises, a series of climatic shifts driven by global warming that occurred between the Middle Permian (265 million years ago) and Middle Triassic (230 million years ago). These climatic shifts caused two of the largest mass extinctions in the history of life at the end of the Permian, the first at 261myo and the other at 252myo, the latter eliminating 86% of all animal species worldwide.

The end-Permian extinctions are important not only because of their magnitude, but also because they mark the onset of a new era in the history of the planet when reptiles became the dominant group of vertebrate animals living on land. During the Permian, vertebrate faunas on land were dominated by synapsids, the ancestors of mammals. After the Permian extinctions, in the Triassic Period (252-200 million years ago), reptiles evolved at rapid rates, creating an explosion of reptile diversity. This expansion was key to the construction of modern ecosystems and many extinct ecosystems. These rapid rates of evolution and diversification were believed by most paleontologists to be due to the extinction of competitors allowing reptiles to take over new habitats and food resources that several synapsid groups had dominated before their extinction.

However, in a new study in Science Advances researchers in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and collaborators reveal the rapid evolution and radiation of reptiles began much earlier, before the end of the Permian, in connection to the steadily increasing global temperatures through a long series of climatic changes that spanned almost 60 million years in the geological record.
Read more of the EurekAlert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/961704

For the lengthier and more technical Science Advances article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq1898
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Scientists discover a 5-mile wide undersea crater created as the dinosaurs disappeared
Source: CNN

Updated 8:30 AM ET, Thu August 18, 2022

(CNN) An asteroid from space slammed into the Earth's surface 66 million years ago, leaving a massive crater underneath the sea and wreaking havoc with the planet. No, it's not that asteroid, the one that doomed the dinosaurs to extinction, but a previously unknown crater 248 miles off the coast of West Africa that was created right around the same time. Further study of the Nadir crater, as it's called, could shake up what we know about that cataclysmic moment in natural history.

Uisdean Nicholson, an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, happened on the crater by accident -- he was reviewing seismic survey data for another project on the tectonic split between South America and Africa and found evidence of the crater beneath 400 meters of seabed sediment. "While interpreting the data, I (came) across this very unusual crater-like feature, unlike anything I had ever seen before," he said. "It had all the characteristics of an impact crater."

To be absolutely certain the crater was caused by an asteroid strike, he said that it would be necessary to drill into the the crater and test minerals from the crater floor. But it has all the hallmarks scientists would expect: the right ratio of crater width to depth, the height of the rims, and the height of the central uplift -- a mound in the center created by rock and sediment forced up by the shock pressure. The journal [link:http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scia ... 096Science Advances published the study] on Thursday.

"The discovery of a terrestrial impact crater is always significant, because they are very rare in the geologic record. There are fewer than 200 confirmed impact structures on Earth and quite a few likely candidates that haven't yet been unequivocally confirmed," said Mark Boslough, a research professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico. He was not involved in this research but agreed that it was probably caused by an asteroid.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/africa/a ... index.html
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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4 Billion-Year-Old Piece of Earth's Crust Found Under Australia
Aug. 22, 2022 4:13 p.m. PT

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Researchers at Australia's Curtin University have discovered a piece of the Earth's crust that dates back 4 billion years.

The chunk, found underneath the South-West of Western Australia and about the size of Ireland, was discovered by researchers using "lasers smaller than a human hair."

The lasers targeted grains of a mineral extracted from beach sand, Curtin University said in a press release Monday. The announcement details a study published in June in Terra Nova. The lasers showed where the grains were originally eroded and their geological history.
https://www.cnet.com/science/4-billion- ... australia/
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Plants that Pull Nitrogen from Thin Air Thrive in Arid Environments
August 22, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) After a comprehensive study of plants across the United States, researchers have arrived at the unexpected conclusion that plants able to fix atmospheric nitrogen are most diverse in arid regions of the country. This finding runs counter to the prevailing assumption that nitrogen-fixers should be comparatively most diverse in environments where nitrogen in the soil is in limited supply.

The results were particularly surprising given that nitrogen-fixers lack the traits often associated with dry soils, such as the thick water-storing stems of cacti. “At first glance, nitrogen-fixers don’t necessarily appear to be adapted for arid ecosystems,” said lead author Joshua Doby, a doctoral student in the department of biology at the University of Florida.

The reason for this unexpected pattern wasn’t immediately clear, but Doby suspects it’s related to the way nitrogen-fixers and non-fixers use the element.
Conclusion:
Most nitrogen-fixing plant lineages got their start in the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs were still around and temperatures were higher than they are today. Over the last 50 million years, Earth’s climate has gradually cooled and dried, sparking the formation of sprawling grasslands and vast deserts. Plants that couldn’t cut it in these new environments were gradually weeded out, Doby explains, while many nitrogen-fixers that were well-suited to this new world diversified in the vacated landscapes.

“This study gives us a really good idea of why plant communities are the way they are today,” Doby said, adding that he worries conditions that support diverse floras in arid regions may not last much longer. “As things become wetter and warmer due to climate change, the traits that made these plants well-adapted and diverse aren’t going to be very beneficial anymore. Many of the unique plant communities we have around today are going to be at risk in the long term.”
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962599
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Study Finds that Ocean Cooling Over Millennia Led to Larger Fish
August 22, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Earth’s geological history is characterized by many dynamic climate shifts that are often associated with large changes in temperature. These environmental shifts can lead to trait changes, such as body size, that can be directly observed using the fossil record.

To investigate whether temperature shifts that occurred before direct measurements were recorded, called paleoclimatology, are correlated with body size changes, several members of the University of Oklahoma’s Fish Evolution Lab decided to test their hypothesis using tetraodontiform fishes as a model group. Tetradontiform fishes are primarily tropical marine fishes, and include pufferfish, boxfishes and filefish, among others.

The study was led by Dahiana Arcila, assistant professor of biology and assistant curator at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, with Ricardo Betancur, assistant professor of biology, along with biology graduate student Emily Troyer, and involved collaborators from the Smithsonian Institution, University of Chicago, and George Washington University in the United States, as well as University of Turin in Italy, University of Lyon in France, and CSIRO Australia.

The researchers discovered that the body sizes of these fishes have grown larger over the past hundred million years in conjunction with the gradual cooling of ocean temperatures.

Their finding adheres to two well-known rules of evolutionary trends, Cope’s rule which states that organismal body sizes tend to increase over evolutionary time, and Bergmann’s rule which states that species reach larger sizes in cooler environments and smaller sizes in warmer environments. What was less understood, however, was how these rules relate to ectotherms, organisms that can’t regulate their internal body temperatures and are dependent on their external or environmental climates.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962597
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Dinosaur tracks from 113 million years ago uncovered due to severe drought conditions at Dinosaur Valley State Park

Updated 0242 GMT (1042 HKT) August 24, 2022

Dinosaur tracks from around 113 million years ago have been revealed at Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas due to severe drought conditions that dried up a river, the park said Monday in a statement.

"Most tracks that have recently been uncovered and discovered at different parts of the river in the park belong to Acrocanthosaurus. This was a dinosaur that would stand, as an adult, about 15 feet tall and (weigh) close to seven tons," park spokesperson Stephanie Salinas Garcia told CNN in an email.

The other species that left tracks behind at the park in Glen Rose, Texas, was Sauroposeidon, which would be about 60 feet tall and weigh about 44 tons as an adult, Garcia added.

This summer's excessive drought has caused a river in the park to dry out completely in most spots, revealing the tracks -- the latest long-hidden secret recently exposed as bodies of water have dried up due to drought conditions across the globe.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/23/us/d ... index.html


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