First winged mammals from the Jurassic period discovered

160-million-year-old fossils suggest a new model of life -- gliding -- for the forerunners of mammals, in an evolutionary parallel to modern mammal gliders

Date:  August 9, 2017

Source:  University of Chicago Medical Center

Summary:

Two 160-million-year-old mammal fossils discovered in China show that the forerunners of mammals in the Jurassic Period evolved to glide and live in trees. With long limbs, long hand and foot fingers, and wing-like membranes for tree-to-tree gliding, Maiopatagium furculiferum and Vilevolodon diplomylos are the oldest known gliders in the long history of early mammals.

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Ethiopian jawbone may mark dawn of humankind

A 2.8-million-year-old mandible and a digital model of a key fossil paint a complicated picture of the genus Homo.

Ewen Callaway

04 March 2015

The 2.8-million-year-old jawbone that may have come from the first Homo.

A 2.8-million-year-old battered jawbone from Ethiopia may represent the earliest ancient human fossil ever discovered — pushing back the known origins of humankind by 500,000 years. The remains, alongside a digital reconstruction of a damaged fossil from a key early-human species, point to an evolutionary explosion at the dawn of our genus, Homo.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the latest link in a chain of ancestry that stretches back 5 to 7 million years to a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, humanity's two closest living relatives. An incomplete fossil record means that researchers have had a hard time finding the other links of that chain, and distinguishing true human ancestors from evolutionary dead-ends — side branches in the family tree.

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Ancient Human Fossil Could Be New Primitive Species

by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | January 27, 2015 11:01am ET

An ancient human fossil discovered from the seafloor near Taiwan reveals that a primitive group of humans, potentially an unknown species, once lived in Asia, researchers say.

These findings suggest that multiple lineages of extinct humans may have coexisted in Asia before the arrival of modern humans in the region about 40,000 years ago, the scientists added.

Although modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only surviving human lineage, others once walked the globe. Extinct human lineages once found in Asia include Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives of modern humans; Denisovans, whose genetic legacy may extend from Siberia to the Pacific islands of Oceania; Homo erectus, the most likely ancestors to modern humans; and the hobbitlike Homo floresiensis, who lived in Indonesia. These all are hominins — the group of species consisting of humans and all their relatives after the split from the chimpanzee lineage.

Read on ..

Ancient balloon-shaped animal fossil sheds light on Earth's ancient seas

Date:

December 9, 2014

Source:

University of Leicester

Summary:

A rare 520-million-year-old fossil shaped like a 'squashed bird's nest' that will help to shed new light on life within Earth's ancient seas has been discovered in China by an international research team. The fossil is of a probable ‘chancelloriid’, a group of bizarre, balloon-shaped animals with an outer skeleton of defensive spines.

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New fossil find pinpoints the origin of jaws in vertebrates

Date:

June 11, 2014

Source:

University of Cambridge

Summary:

A major fossil discovery in Canada sheds new light on the development of the earliest vertebrates, including the origin of jaws, the first time this feature has been seen so early in the fossil record.

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First intact skull of Mediterranean worm lizard found: Skull of new species sheds light on Mediterranean worm lizard evolution

Date:

June 4, 2014

Source:

PLOS

Summary:

The first intact skull of a Mediterranean worm lizard has been found in Spain, according to a new study. Only isolated fragments of fossil Mediterranean worm lizards have previously been found in Europe, and currently, our limited knowledge of their evolution is mainly based on molecular studies. The worm lizard is a limbless, scaled reptile and categorized in the genus Blanus in the Mediterranean.

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Young Boy Accidentally Finds Fossilized Tooth Of Ancient Mastodon

April 22, 2014

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Mothers often tell their kids not to pick up any strange objects, but one young boy from Michigan is probably glad he doesn’t follow that advice.

Phillip Stoll, a 9-year-old boy from Windsor Township, Michigan, was playing in a creek behind his house last summer when he literally stumbled upon a fossilized mastodon tooth.

“I was walking down at the creek last summer. I felt something that I stepped on so I picked it up and everybody in the neighborhood thought it was pretty cool,” Philip Stoll told CNN last week.

The boy known as “Huckleberry Phil” around the neighborhood brought the object home to show his mother and begin an analysis on his discovery. After washing off the rabbit-sized object, Stoll said he checked to see if it was magnetic – it wasn’t.

Read more at 

Half a billion-year-old shrimp with a modern heart found in invertebrate version of Pompeii

An international team of researchers from the US, China and the UK have discovered the earliest known cardiovascular system in fossilised remains of an extinct marine shrimp that lived over 520 million years ago. The finding sheds new light on the evolution of the body in the animal kingdom and shows that even the earliest creatures had internal systems that strongly resemble those found in their modern descendants.

"This is the first preserved vascular system that we know of," said Nicholas Strausfeld, a Regents' Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Arizona's Department of Neuroscience.

The researchers can only speculate as to why the chemical reactions that occurred during the process of fossilisation allowed for this unusual and rare kind of preservation, and as to why only select tissues were preserved between a few rare and different specimens.

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3.5 billion-year-old fossil found

What may be the oldest complete fossil on Earth paints a smelly but colorful picture of our microbial ancestors from nearly 3.5 billion years ago.

The fossil is the remains of what once was a purple-and-green slimy, smelly mat of single cell microbes that worked, lived and even communicated in what is a lot like a prehistoric microscopic society.

Nora Noffke of Old Dominion University in the US found the remnants of this life in sandstone rock in western Australia.

This is likely an ancestor of ours, researchers said.

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Ichthyosaur fossil at Charmouth narrowly misses storm destruction

A near-complete ichthyosaur skeleton discovered on the Dorset coast after Christmas storms was hours away from destruction, fossil hunters have said.

Storms uncovered the 1.5m (5ft) fossil at the base of Black Ven near Charmouth on Boxing Day.

The giant marine reptile fossil was painstakingly removed over eight hours, shortly before another storm was due.

Professional fossil hunter Paul Crossley, who helped excavate it, said it was "a beautiful find".

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Dinosaur Bone Damaged in WWII Revealed with 3D Printing

The identity of a mislabeled fossil damaged in a World War II era bombing has finally been revealed as part of an enormous long-necked plant-eating dinosaur.

The fossil, tucked inside the plaster jacket paleontologist wrapped around it more than 100 years ago, belongs to the Museum of National History in Berlin. During World War II, a bomb fell on the museum's east wing, collapsing the basement where dinosaur fossils were stored.

Many fossils were reduced to dust in the bombing, and the ones that survived were scattered and mixed up. Making matters worse, bones from two separate expeditions had been housed in the same area. One expedition, in Tanzania, ran from 1909 to 1913 and brought back 235 tons of fossils, labeled with letters based on their locations. The other fossils came from a 1909 discovery in Halberstadt, Germany. Those bones also used a letter-based label system — but the letters referred not to locations, but to individual animals.

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Big clawed fossil had spider-like brain

Scientists have discovered the best-preserved nervous system in an ancient fossil.

Dating back 520 million years, the clawed spider-like fossil shows clear evidence of a brain and of nerve cords running through the creature's trunk.

The specimen now confirms that the ancestors of spiders and scorpions were related, but branched off more than half-a-billion years ago.

A team of international scientists present their work in Nature.

The "great appendage" arthropods, are an extinct group of joint-legged creatures with large claw-like appendages - or growths - protruding from their heads.

The nervous system tends to be similar between major groups of animals, which helps palaeontologists work out how they are related, explained Greg Edgecombe from the Natural History Museum in London.

"The nervous system is one of the more reliable tool-kits we have. We were trying to investigate whether there was evidence for the preservation of neural tissues from very early parts of the animal fossil record," he told BBC News.

"What we've been working with is fossils with very fine anatomical preservation from the Cambrian period. These have given us information about brains, the nerve cords and the neural tissue that goes into the eyes."

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Rare Blood-Engorged Mosquito Fossil Found

About 46 million years ago, a mosquito sunk its proboscis into some animal, perhaps a bird or a mammal, and filled up on a meal of blood. Then its luck turned for the worse, as it fell into a lake and sunk to the bottom.

Normally this wouldn't be newsworthy, and nobody would likely know or care about a long-dead insect in what is now northwest Montana. But somehow, the mosquito didn't immediately decompose — a fortuitous turn of events for modern-day scientists — and became fossilized over the course of many years, said Dale Greenwalt, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Greenwalt discovered the mosquito fossil after it was given to the museum as a gift, and he immediately realized the specimen's rarity.

It is, in fact, the only blood-engorged mosquito fossil found, Greenwalt told LiveScience. The fossil is even stranger because it comes from shale, a type of rock formed from sediments deposited at the bottom of bodies of water, as opposed to amber, the age-old remains of dried tree sap, in which insect remnants are generally better preserved.

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The world’s oldest face belongs to this 419 million-year-old fish

Scientists believe that a new fossil discovery from China is the world’s oldest known example of the bone structure we now recognize as a face.

The remarkably well-preserved fish (an example of the species Entelognathus primordialis) was discovered in Southeast China in a layer of sediment dating back to the Silurian period – making the specimen roughly 419 million years old.

Detailed in the journal Nature, the find is remarkable because it’s the earliest known example of the basic facial bone structure we recognize today: the ancient predator has a jaw, a mouth, two eyes and a nose.

All other previous finds from this geological time period have been of jawless fish – a type of animal that still exists today as lamprey and hagfish.

However, even stranger than looking eye to eye with the world’s oldest known face is the idea that this fossil might even be a director ancestor of human life.

The fossil is unique in that it displays characteristics of two types of ancient fish: placoderms (heavily armoured fish that were thought to have gone extinct millions of years ago) and bony fish (a taxonomic group that gave rise to all modern veterbrate fish - and subsequently amphibians, birds, mammals and finally us).

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23-Million-Year-Old Lizard Fossil Found In Mexico – via Herp Digest

Published July 08, 2013

San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico –  Mexican scientists are studying a complete fossil of a lizard that lived some 23 million years ago and whose soft tissue remains have been preserved in amber.

The small piece of fossil resin, which is in the shape of a trapezoid and entombs the skeleton, was found several months ago in the Simojovel amber deposits of the northern part of the southeastern state of Chiapas.

Amber often contains small remains of plants and animals, but it is rare to find complete vertebrates such as this lizard, preliminarily identified as a new species of the genus Anolis and currently on display at the Amber Museum in San Cristobal de las Casas.

Francisco Riquelme of the National Autonomous University of Mexico's Physics Institute told Efe the specimen, measuring about approximately 1.8 inches (or 4.5 centimeters) by .5 inches (or 1.3 centimeters) was "a complete and articulated animal that also preserves remains of soft tissue and skin."

Chiapas's Paleontology Museum director Gerardo Carbot fossil specimens found in the state date back a minimum of 23 million years ago because that is the age of the amber that is extracted from deposits in the municipalities of Simojovel, Huitihupan, El Bosque, Pueblo Nuevo, Palenque, Totolapa and Malpaso.

Manatee's Missing Link Found in Africa

A fossil found in 2008 may be the missing link — for manatees, that is.

Modern manatees and their lookalike relatives, the dugongs, are close relatives of elephants, yet no trace of their ancestry had ever been found in Africa, where elephants evolved.  

Then a small piece of skull was found unexpectedly in Tunisia. The fossil, which scientists have been able to identify as from an extinct sea cow, re-roots the origin of manatees in Africa, said study researcher Julian Benoit of the University of Science and Technology in Montpellier, France.

Read on: http://www.livescience.com/26325-manatee-missing-link-africa.html

Extinct Whale Fossil Found on Seafloor

Researchers diving off the coast of Georgia may have found the remains of an Atlantic gray whale, a relic of a population that was hunted to extinction by the 18th century.

But this particular specimen died long before whalers became a threat. Carbon dating showed that the fossil, a left jawbone, is about 36,000 years old.

The big bone was first discovered along with two badly eroded vertebrae near Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary about 20 miles (32 kilometers) off southeast Georgia in 2008. It took the researchers two years to pull out all the pieces of the fossil, which was embedded in layers of shell and sand 70 feet (21 meters) below the surface. The jawbone was recovered in sections and measures 5 feet (1.5 meters) in length.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/25765-extinct-atlantic-gray-whale.html

Woolly mammoth skeleton found in perfect condition near Paris

The accidental discovery was made by archaeologists exploring an ancient Roman site 30 miles east of the French capital in Changis-Sur-Marne.

Researchers say it is the only the third long-haired mammoth to be discovered in France in the last 150 years, with such finds more common in northern Siberia.

Head of the excavation, Greg Bayle, said it was extremely rare to find such a well-preserved carcass of the long-extinct animal.

Archeologists work at the site along the Changis-sur-Marne riverbank (AP)

'Some archaeologists have spent have spent their lives dreaming of such a discovery with no luck,' he said.

He added that the mammoth, believed to have died as a relatively young adult, would have existed when the surrounding land was a vast grassy plain, with ice blocks flowing across the nearby River Marne. 

The dig team also found two flint blades next to the giant 9ft creature, suggesting it may have been hunted and killed for food by Neanderthals.

'The greatest prize are the flints nearby,' said Stephane Pean, another scientist involved.

'They show the presence of man on the side, and will help us built up a better understanding of the Neanderthals, who were contemporaries of the mammoth.'

Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/917295-woolly-mammoth-skeleton-found-in-perfect-condition-near-paris#ixzz2BjPAThdJ

100-Million-Year-Old Spider Attack Found in Amber

Researchers have found trapped in amber a rare dinosaur-age scene of a spider attacking a wasp caught in its web.

The piece of amber, which contains 15 intact strands of spider silk, provides the first fossil evidence of such an assault, the researchers said. It was excavated in a Burmese mine and dates back to the Early Cretaceous, between 97 million and 110 million years ago.

"This juvenile spider was going to make a meal out of a tiny parasitic wasp, but never quite got to it," George Poinar, Jr., a zoology professor at Oregon State University, said in a statement.

Read on:  http://www.livescience.com/23796-spider-attack-found-in-amber.html

Early Humans Began Eating Meat Earlier Than Thought: Oldest Known Evidence of Anemia Caused by a Nutritional Deficiency

ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2012) — A fragment of a child's skull discovered at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania shows the oldest known evidence of anemia caused by a nutritional deficiency, reports a new paper published Oct. 3 in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

The discovery, made by a global team of researchers led by Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo from Complutense University, Madrid, suggests that early human ancestors began eating meat much earlier in history than previously believed. The skull fragment identified is thought to belong to a child somewhat younger than two and shows bone lesions that commonly result from a lack of B-vitamins in the diet.

Continued: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121003195122.htm