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

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

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Ancient Fish Fossil Suggests That Teeth Didn't Evolve From Inside The Mouth

28 August 2022

There are two theories about where teeth originated: They either evolved from external scales (the outside-in hypothesis) or from somewhere inside the mouth (the inside-out hypothesis).

Researchers studying a fossil of the Ischyrhiza mira species – an extinct sawfish that lived in North America around 65 to 100 million years ago – have found more evidence backing up the outside-in idea.

Like the sawsharks and sawfishes of today, the creature had jagged spikes around its snout to help ward off predators and forage for food. It's thought that these spikes, called rostral denticles, are modified versions of the scales on the rest of the body.

https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-fi ... -the-mouth


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A rostral denticle of I. mia. (Todd Cook/Penn State/Wiley Publications)
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Earliest gibbon fossil found in southwest China
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-earliest- ... china.html
by New York University

A team of scientists has discovered the earliest gibbon fossil, a find that helps fill a long-elusive evolutionary gap in the history of apes.

The work, reported in the Journal of Human Evolution, centers on hylobatids, a family of apes that includes 20 species of living gibbons, which are found throughout tropical Asia from northeastern India to Indonesia.

"Hylobatids fossil remains are very rare, and most specimens are isolated teeth and fragmentary jaw bones found in cave sites in southern China and southeast Asia dating back no more than 2 million years ago," explains Terry Harrison, a professor of anthropology at New York University and one of the paper's authors. "This new find extends the fossil record of hylobatids back to 7 to 8 million years ago and, more specifically, enhances our understanding of the evolution of this family of apes."

The fossil, discovered in the Yuanmou area of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, is of a small ape called Yuanmoupithecus xiaoyuan. The analysis, which included Xueping Ji of the Kunming Institute of Zoology and the lead author of the study, focused on the teeth and cranial specimens of Yuanmoupithecus, including an upper jaw of an infant that was less than 2 years old when it died.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Prehistoric Puke Reveals a Stomach-Churning Banquet From Millions of Years Ago
by Jennifer Nalewicki
September 15, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) Hundreds of millions of years ago, a carnivorous critter gorged on a feast of prehistoric amphibians – and puked up its meal afterward.

Now, paleontologists have unearthed the regurgitation and published their findings of the ancient upchuck.

In 2018, researchers discovered the regurgitalite – fossilized remains of an animal's stomach contents, also known as a bromalite – during an excavation in the southeastern Utah portion of the Morrison Formation.

This swath of sedimentary rocks that stretches across the Western United States is a hotbed for fossils dating to the late Jurassic period (164 million to 145 million years ago).

This section in particular, dubbed the "Jurassic salad bar" by local paleontologists, typically contains the fossilized remains of plants and other organic matter, rather than animal bones.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/prehistor ... years-ago
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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380-million-year-old heart illuminates evolutionary history
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-million-y ... story.html
by Curtin University

Researchers have discovered a 380-million-year-old heart—the oldest ever found—alongside a separate fossilized stomach, intestine and liver in an ancient jawed fish, shedding new light on the evolution of our own bodies.

The new research, published today in Science, found that the position of the organs in the body of arthrodires—an extinct class of armored fishes that flourished through the Devonian period from 419.2 million years ago to 358.9 million years ago—is similar to modern shark anatomy, offering vital new evolutionary clues.
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Researchers discover extinct prehistoric reptile that lived among dinosaurs
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-extinct-p ... saurs.html
by Smithsonian
Smithsonian researchers have discovered a new extinct species of lizard-like reptile that belongs to the same ancient lineage as New Zealand's living tuatara. A team of scientists, including the National Museum of Natural History's curator of Dinosauria Matthew Carrano and research associate David DeMar Jr. as well as University College London and Natural History Museum, London scientific associate Marc Jones, describe the new species Opisthiamimus gregori, which once inhabited Jurassic North America about 150 million years ago alongside dinosaurs like Stegosaurus and Allosaurus, in a paper published today in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. In life, this prehistoric reptile would have been about 16 centimeters (about 6 inches) from nose to tail—and would fit curled up in the palm of an adult human hand—and likely survived on a diet of insects and other invertebrates.

"What's important about the tuatara is that it represents this enormous evolutionary story that we are lucky enough to catch in what is likely its closing act," Carrano said. "Even though it looks like a relatively simple lizard, it embodies an entire evolutionary epic going back more than 200 million years."
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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weatheriscool wrote: Fri Sep 16, 2022 1:22 am 380-million-year-old heart illuminates evolutionary history
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-million-y ... story.html
by Curtin University

...
More on that:
Discovery of Oldest Fossil Heart Puts Organ At 380 Million Years Old
by Rachael Funnel
September 15, 2022

Introduction:
(IFL Science) The oldest heart known to science has been discovered in the remains of an ancient, jawed fish, along with a stomach, intestine, and liver to boot. The 380 million-year-old fish organ smashes previous records by a comfortable 250 million years and is shedding light on the evolution of even human bodies.

It comes from an extinct class of armored fishes, arthrodires, which were swimming about around between 419.2 to 358.9 million years ago. Despite its ancient origins, the discovery of a selection of its organs has shown that its body anatomy wasn’t that dissimilar to sharks alive today, revealing the ancient origins of their evolution.

“Evolution is often thought of as a series of small steps, but these ancient fossils suggest there was a larger leap between jawless and jawed vertebrates,” said Professor Kate Trinajstic, lead researcher from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences and the Western Australian Museum, in a statement.

“These fish literally have their hearts in their mouths and under their gills – just like sharks today.”

The specimen is not only remarkable in its age but also that it was preserved in its 3D form, something which the researchers didn’t become completely aware of until they were at the scanning stage.
Read more of the IFL Science article here: https://www.iflscience.com/discovery-o ... old-65353

Here is a link to the statement by Professor Kate Trinajstic of Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences and the Western Australian Museum: https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/new-cu ... evolution
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Earth's First Continents Sank into the Planet Before Rising Up Again
by Michele Starr
September 20, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) A new examination of some of the oldest rocks in the world suggests that the first continents on Earth were unstable, and sank back into the mantle before making their way out again and reforming.

This could explain some of the more puzzling characteristics of cratons, extremely old and stable parts of the lithosphere (the crust and uppermost mantle) that have survived continental changes over eons and record Earth's ancient history.

The new findings could help us understand Earth's changing geology over its 4.5-billion-year lifespan.

"The rocks in the core of the continents, called cratons, are more than three billion years old," explains geologist Fabio Capitanio of the Monash University School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment in Australia.

"They formed in the early Earth and hold the secret to how continents and the planet changed over time."
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/earths-fi ... 0time.%22
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Three Major Aquatic Animal Groups Can Trace Their Lineage to This Ancient Armored 'Worm'
by Patrick Pester
October 1, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) A bristly armored "worm" that scuttled across ocean reefs 518 million years ago is the ancestor to three aquatic animal groups that today live very different lifestyles, and it offers new clues about the explosion of diverse species at the time, a new study finds.

An international team of researchers recently discovered the fossil of a species that gave rise to brachiopods, bryozoans, and phoronids; these three groups of filter-feeding marine creatures all fix themselves to the seafloor, but each group has highly specialized feeding structures and they look very different from one another.

The fossil species, named Wufengella bengtsoni, is a member of an older, shelled group of organisms called tommotiids, scientists reported in a new study.

The find adds a new piece to the puzzle of how animals evolved during the Cambrian explosion, a time during the Cambrian period (541 million to 485.4 million years ago) when early life diversified rapidly on Earth, introducing and establishing a variety of different body plans that we still see in living animals today.

Brachiopods are shelled, bivalved creatures; bryozoans are soft-bodied with crowns of tentacles, and phoronids are encased in protective tubes made of chitin, a material that reinforces organic structures such as exoskeletons, beaks, and shells.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/3-major-a ... ored-worm
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Re: Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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Asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs also triggered a global tsunami

Published 1:59 PM EDT, Tue October 4, 2022

When a city-size asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, it wiped out the dinosaurs – and sent a monster tsunami rippling around the planet, according to new research.

[...]

It’s the first global simulation of the tsunami caused by the Chicxulub impact to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, according to the authors.

The tsunami was powerful enough to create towering waves more than a mile high and scour the ocean floor thousands of miles away from where the asteroid hit, according to the study. It effectively wiped away the sediment record of what happened before the event, as well as during it.

“This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments,” said lead author Molly Range, who began working on the study as an undergraduate student and completed it for her master’s thesis at the University of Michigan.

Researchers estimate that the tsunami was up to 30,000 times more energetic than the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, one of the largest on record, that killed more than 230,000 people. The energy of the asteroid impact was at least 100,000 times larger than the Tonga volcanic eruption earlier this year.

Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/04/worl ... index.html


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

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Ancient Chemistry May Explain Why Living Things Use ATP as the Universal Energy Currency
October 4, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) A simple two-carbon compound may have been a crucial player in the evolution of metabolism before the advent of cells, according to a new study published October 4th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, by Nick Lane and colleagues of University College London, UK. The finding potentially sheds light on the earliest stages of prebiotic biochemistry, and suggests how ATP came to be the universal energy carrier of all cellular life today.

ATP, adenosine triphosphate, is used by all cells as an energy intermediate. During cellular respiration, energy is captured when a phosphate is added to ADP (adenosine diphosphate) to generate ATP; cleavage of that phosphate releases energy to power most types of cellular functions. But building ATP’s complex chemical structure from scratch is energy intensive and requires six separate ATP-driven steps; while convincing models do allow for prebiotic formation of the ATP skeleton without energy from already-formed ATP, they also suggest ATP was likely quite scarce, and that some other compound may have played a central role in conversion of ADP to ADP at this stage of evolution.

The most likely candidate, Lane and colleagues believed, was the two-carbon compound acetyl phosphate (AcP), which functions today in both bacteria and archaea as a metabolic intermediate. AcP has been shown to phosphorylate ADP to ATP in water in the presence of iron ions, but a host of questions remained after that demonstration, including whether other small molecules might work as well, whether AcP is specific for ADP or instead could function just as well with diphosphates of other nucleosides (such as guanosine or cytosine), and whether iron is unique in its ability to catalyze ADP phosphorylation in water.

In their new study, the authors explored all these questions. Drawing on data and hypotheses about the chemical conditions of the Earth before life arose, they tested the ability of other ions and minerals to catalyze ATP formation in water; none were nearly as effective as iron. Next, they tested a panel of other small organic molecules for their ability to phosphorylate ADP; none were as effective as AcP, and only one other (carbamoyl phosphate) had any significant activity at all. Finally, they showed that none of the other nucleoside diphosphates accepted a phosphate from AcP.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/965354
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