Ancient DNA Holds Clues to Climate Change Adaptation

ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2012) — Thirty-thousand-year-old bison bones discovered in permafrost at a Canadian goldmine are helping scientists unravel the mystery about how animals adapt to rapid environmental change.

The bones play a key role in a world-first study, led by University of Adelaide researchers, which analyses special genetic modifications that turn genes on and off, without altering the DNA sequence itself. These 'epigenetic' changes can occur rapidly between generations -- without requiring the time for standard evolutionary processes.

Such epigenetic modifications could explain how animal species are able to respond to rapid climate change.

In a collaboration between the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) and Sydney's Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, researchers have shown that it is possible to accurately measure epigenetic modifications in extinct animals and populations.

Read more:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120131102519.htm

Sth America's oldest predator fossil found

Palaeontologists say they have found the fossil of a carnivorous predator that lived more than 260 million years ago and is the oldest unearthed in South America.

"This predator lived nearly 40 million years before the dinosaur and is a precursor to mammifers," said Juan Carlos Cisneros, of the Federal University of Piaui.

The fossil, a complete 35-centimetre skull found in 2008 in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, was restored and analysed by South African and Turkish experts who validated the discovery and published it inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We are talking about the oldest fossil ever found in South America of a species of the last period of the Palaeozoic era - before the separation of the continents, with characteristics of species only known in South Africa and Russia," says Cisneros.

The remains found are those of a species of dinocephalus, a remote relative of mammifers.

The discovery made it possible to reconstruct the body of the predator believed to have been three meters long and to have weighed 300 kilograms.

It had four big hook-shaped canine teeth (two upper and two lowers) to catch its prey as well as other saw-shaped teeth, says Cisneros.

The species may have walked from South Africa to South America but the long distance to Russia, where similar species have also been found, raises questions as to the shape of the single continent which then made up the world to allow the movement these animals, he added.

The dinocephalus became extinct 250 million years ago along with 90 per cent of species on the planet as a result of volcanic explosions.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/01/19/3411499.htm?site=science&topic=latest

Most Recent European Great Ape Discovered

ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2012) — Based on a hominid molar, scientists from Germany, Bulgaria and France have documented that great apes survived in Europe in savannah-like landscapes until seven million years ago.

A seven million year old pre-molar of a hominid discovered near the Bulgarian town of Chirpan documents that great apes survived longer in Europe than previously believed. An international team of scientists from the Bulgarian Academy of Science, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen was involved in the project. The new discovery may cause a revision in our understanding of some major steps in hominid evolution. To date scientists have assumed that great apes went extinct in Europe at least 9 million years ago because of changing climatic and environmental conditions. Under the direction of Nikolai Spassov from the National Museum of Natural Science in Sofia, Bulgaria, the molar was discovered in Upper Miocene fluvial sediments near Chirpan. The morphology and the great thickness of the tooth enamel point to a hominid fossil. The age of the fossiliferous sands at 7 million years reveals the fossil to be most recent known great ape from continental Europe.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120113210347.htm

German marine reptile find rewrites fossil record

German experts have found a new species of prehistoric marine giant from a time when most of that family of reptiles were thought to have died out.

The rare ichthyosaur find from the Braunschweig area, northern Germany, is 130 million years old, dating from the Lower Cretaceous era.

Most ichthyosaur fossils date from the Jurassic era, millions of years before.

The Braunschweig fossil revelations were reported in the science journal Plos One on Tuesday.

The new type of ichthyosaur, discovered during roadworks in 2005, has been called Acamptonectes densus - "Stiff Swimmer".

The neck vertebrae were so tightly packed that "it couldn't move its neck, so it must have shot through the water like a dart", said palaeontologist Ulrich Joger of the Braunschweig Natural History Museum.

"It's a spectacular find. It raises new questions about the [Jurassic] extinction theory," he said.

The specimen is similar to the Speeton Clay ichthyosaur found in the north of England in 1958.

The experts say the predator fed on fish and squid and looked like a dolphin, though the species are not related.

The main dinosaur extinction event was at the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago. It is widely believed a meteorite impact caused it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16432364

Fossils Reveal Secrets of Insects' Weird Ears

Various species of insects boast ears in the strangest places, including on their necks and under their wings. Now, a new examination of 50-million-year-old cricket and katydid fossils finds that these odd ears evolved before even the appearance of the predators that these ears can hear.

Crickets, moths and other flying insects can hear the ultra high-pitched sonar of hunting bats, a talent that helps them avoid being eaten. Researchers suspected that the appearance of bats on the scene triggered the evolution of these sensitive ears. But the new research reveals that crickets and katydids had modern ears 50 million years ago, before echolocating bats evolved.

"Their bat-detecting abilities may have simply become apparent later," study researcher Dena Smith of the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a statement.

Insects have evolved ears at least 17 times in different lineages, and other insects, such as the blue morpho butterfly, may even be able to distinguish between low and high pitches with their primitive under-wing ears. But the fossil record has been too sparse to determine whether bats can take credit for certain bugs' hearing boost.

http://www.livescience.com/17721-fossil-insect-ear-evolution.html

Hellbender Salamander Study Seeks Answers for Global Amphibian Decline

Hellbender Salamander Study Seeks Answers for Global Amphibian Decline


ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2011) - A new study co-authored by University of Florida researchers on the endangered Ozark Hellbender giant salamander is the first to detail its skin microbes, the bacteria and fungi that defend against pathogens.

Published recently in the online journal PLoS One, the study details changes in the salamander's declining health and habitat, and could provide a baseline for how changing ecosystems are affecting the rapid decline of amphibians worldwide.

"Scientists and biologists view amphibians as kind of a 'canary in the coal mine' and their health is often used as a barometer for overall ecosystem health, including potential problems that may affect humans," said study co-author Max Nickerson, herpetology curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus.

More than 2 feet long, the Ozark Hellbender is the one of largest salamander species in the United States. Its unusual biological characteristics include the ability to regenerate injured or missing body parts.

In the new study, lead author Cheryl Nickerson, a professor at Arizona State University, along with NASA and UF scientists, cultured and identified microorganisms from abnormal and injured tissue on the salamanders searching for pathogens that may be causing the lack of regeneration and population decline.

The researchers found several potentially dangerous pathogens, including Aeromonas hydrophila, a bacterium scientists believe is associated with disease and death in both amphibians and fish.

While many different pathogens were found in the injured tissue, no single organism was found to be responsible for the lack of regeneration. Researchers believe the occurrence of abnormalities and injury in the Ozark Hellbender may have many contributing factors, including disease and habitat degradation, and say further study is needed

"If you don't understand an amphibian's skin you don't understand the amphibians," Nickerson said.

Scientists have known about the remarkable powers of salamander regeneration for more than 200 years, but beginning in the 1980s, researchers noticed a sharp decline in the Ozark Hellbender population. They also found a specific population from the North Fork of Missouri's White River was declining dramatically and losing the ability to regenerate.

"We were finding animals with no legs that were still alive with flesh wounds or bones sticking out of limbs," Nickerson said.

"Looking at the microorganisms on their skin can help us understand why these animals aren't regenerating at the rate we're used to seeing, and may lead to conclusions about population declines," he said.

In November, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added the Ozark Hellbender to the federal endangered species list. Its species name is Cryptobranchus alleganiensis bishopi.

Stanley Trauth, curator of amphibians and reptiles in the department of biological sciences at Arkansas State University, said public awareness of the species is increasing, and Hellbenders have recently been successfully bred for the first time in captivity at the St. Louis Zoo.

"There has been a dramatic decrease in the population and there are a number of factors that contribute to that," Trauth said. "But these types of studies will help provide more consistent results on the impact of microorganisms and animal health."

"In the last 20 years we have been finding a tremendous number of injuries on these animals and those injuries are not healing," Nickerson said. "Now the population is down to almost nothing and we are very worried about the species and the environmental changes around them."

The Ozark Hellbender's fossil record goes back 161 million years and it represents one of the most ancient lines of amphibian life.

"This is about as far, in phylogeny, as that type of regeneration goes, this is the most ancient group of salamanders that we know of," Nickerson said. "They have been through a lot and we want to find out what these changes mean."

"The animals in the river systems in that area, just like in Florida, where we have these huge amounts of spring water you have to worry about it," Nickerson said. "That's a big dome of fresh water and it has implications on human health as well."

via Herp Digest

Titanosaur bone found in Antarctica

Long before the arrival of penguins, giant plant-eating dinosaurs roamed Antarctica.


Scientists discovered a fossil tail bone belonging to a titanosaur, a family that included the largest land animals ever to walk the Earth.

Titanosaurs were sauropods, four-legged herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails.

Sauropods included some 150 species whose remains have been found around the world, but never in Antarctica until now.

The new specimen was discovered on James Ross Island by an Argentinian-led team and it consists of section of vertebrae almost 20cm long believed to have come from the middle third of the dinosaur's tail.

Scientists identified it as belonging to a "lithostrotian titanosaur" from the Late Cretaceous period around 70 million years ago.

The discovery is reported in the German journal Naturwissenschaften - The Science of Nature.

Authors Dr Ignacio Alejandro Cerda, from the Conicet research institute in Argentina, and colleagues wrote: "Our finding indicates that advanced titanosaurs achieved a global distribution at least by the Late Cretaceous."

Titanosaurs included the mighty Argentinosaurus, which may have reached 100ft in length.

However, the discovery of a single vertebrae fossil yielded too little information to allow speculation about the dinosaur's species.


http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5gB64R8mYY7MnGUKAk15IZ7ZMdLDQ?docId=N0540141324303131758A

New dinosaur species found from museum vaults

Researchers have discovered what they say are the remains of a new horned dinosaur species which has been lying in the vaults of a British museum for nearly a century.


The remains of Spinops sternbergorum, which belongs to the same family as the Triceratops, were excavated from a quarry alongside a large group of fossils in a so-called “bone bed” in Alberta, Canada in 1916.

But the bones were described as “rubbish” by the Natural History Museum’s keeper of Geology at that time, and lay unnoticed for almost 100 years before experts realised they belonged to an undescribed species.

They were rediscovered by a current group of researchers who decided to take another look at the fossils and realised that they were unlike any others known to science.

Dr Andrew Farke, who led the research team, said: “I knew right away that these fossils were something unusual, and it was very exciting to learn about their convoluted history.

“Here we have not just one, but multiple individuals of the same species, so we are confident that it’s not just an odd example of a previously known species,” Dr Farke was quoted as saying a newspaper.

The find means that paleontologists will have to redefine how the horned dinosaur group, plant-eating dinosaurs sporting large horns and bony frills on their necks, are classified.

Dr Paul Barrett, the Natural History Museum’s resident researcher, said: “This discovery is of particular importance as it has implications on the way we use the spines that extend from the bony neck frill, which may have been used for identification between individuals, in our classifications of these animals.

“These embellishments are central to determining relationships between the groups of horned dinosaurs and are a sign of evolutionary relatedness.”

http://www.discoveryon.info/2011/12/new-dinosaur-species-found-from-museum-vaults.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+Discoveryon+%28Discoveryon%29

‘Biggest’ dinosaur bones unveiled in US

Paleontologists have discovered what they claim are bones of the “biggest” dinosaur in the US.


A team from the Museum of Rockies in Montana State and the State Museum of Pennsylvania has described two gigantic vertebrae and a femur that it collected in New Mexico from 2003 to 2006 in a research report.

The bones belong to the sauropod dinosaur Alamosaurus sanjuanensis: A long-necked plant eater related to Diplodocus which roamed what is now the southwestern region of the US and Mexico about 69 million years ago.

In their report, the palaeontologists have written how carrying the the vertebrae alone was a “killer” task taking up an entire day because they carried them 1.2 miles through 100- degree heat, a website reported.

Denver W Fowler at Montana State University, who led the team, said: “Alamosaurus has been known for some time, its remains were first described in 1922 from the Naashoibito beds of New Mexico.

“Since then, more bones have been discovered in New Mexico, Utah, some really nice material from Texas, and Mexico, including a few partial skeletons.”

He said the sheer size of the new bones had caught the researchers by surprise, who had believed that a fully grown Alamosaurus measured around 60 feet long and weighed about 30 tons.

The enormity of the new bones puts Alamosaurus in the same size league as other giant sauropods from South America, including Argentinosaurus which weighed about 70 tons, and is widely considered to be the biggest dinosaur of all.

Dr Fowler said: “Over the past 20 years, Argentinean and Brazilian paleontologists have been unearthing bigger and bigger dinosaurs, putting the rest of the world in the shade.

“However, our new finds not only show that Alamosaurus is newly recognised as the biggest dinosaur from North America, but also that it was right up there with the biggest South American species…”

He added: “We found a shed Tyrannosaurus tooth with another Alamosaurus neck bone that we were excavating. The Tyrannosaurus may have lost its tooth while feeding on an Alamosaurus carcass.”

http://www.discoveryon.info/2011/12/biggest-dinosaur-bones-unveiled-in-us.html

First python fossil unearthed in Germany

The fossil of a python dating from about 15 million years ago has been discovered in Bavaria, first time proof that the reptile lived so far north, according to German palaeontologists.


They deduced from a group of seven vertebrae that the python had measured three and a half metres (11.5 feet). The complete snake is thought to have had at least 400 vertebrae. The researchers also found fossils of eight other snake species from the same period.

The snake was relatively small compared to giant reticulated pythons alive today in south-east Asia, which grow up to nine metres in length, and positively puny alongside the Titanoboa cerrejonensis, a 15-metre monster that slithered through the South American rainforests 60 million years ago.

But this is thought to be the longest snake that ever lived in central Europe. The fossil of the python, normally found in tropical regions of Africa and Asia, was found about 80 kilometres (50 miles) northwest of Munich by a team of German and Czech researchers.

“With the sudden fall in temperatures 14 million years ago, the destiny of this python was sealed,” said Madeleine Böhme, of the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoecology at Tübingen University in southwestern Germany, who worked together with colleagues from Masaryk University in the Czech city of Brno.

Temperatures in southern Germany during the Miocene period, when the snake is thought to have lived, were roughly the same as Egypt today. “We‘re assuming that the average yearly temperature was about 19 degrees Celsius,” Böhme told the Südwest Presse newspaper on Tuesday. “Otherwise the snake would not have felt very comfortable here.”

The average temperature in a typical year in Bavaria is currently around 8 degrees. Temperatures dropped rapidly in Europe around 14 million years ago. No large reptile fossils have been found in central Europe after this period, and Böhme believes the giant python could only have survived so far north during a relatively short time window of about a million years.

A few weeks ago, researchers from the same research institute in Tübingen proved that the oldest great apes in Eurasia also lived in southwestern Germany. The scientists dated a fossilized ape tooth, discovered in the area in 1973, to 17 million years ago.


http://www.discoveryon.info/2011/11/first-python-fossil-unearthed-in-germany.html

Ancient super-predator eyes found in Australia

Australian scientists on Thursday hailed the discovery of a pair of insect-like eyes belonging to a freakish prehistoric super-predator which trawled the seas more than 500 million years ago.


Measuring three centimetres (1.2 inches) across and with a whopping 16,000 individual lenses the fossilised eyes, from a huge shellfish-type creature called anomalocaris, were found in rocks on Australia's Kangaroo Island.

Anomalocaris could grow up to one metre long and were considered the "great white shark" of the Cambrian era, topping the ancient marine food chain, according to lead researcher John Paterson.

Modern-day houseflies have about 3,000 lenses in their eyes, while dragonflies have about 30,000 -- the only creature known to have more lenses than anomalocaris.

Paterson said the discovery showed that anomalocaris had lived in well-lit, clear waters and had developed sophisticated vision extremely rapidly, likely triggering an evolutionary "arms race" among other creatures.

Spines, poison glands and other defence mechanisms had probably erupted among creatures eager to escape detection by its huge eyes, which protruded from the side of its head on stalks.

"When you look at the animal itself it's quite an alien-looking beast," Paterson, from Australia's University of New England, told AFP.

Aside from its protuberant eyes, anomalocaris had formidable claws lined with spines which it used to catch its prey and a "gnarly-looking circular mouth with teeth-like serrations inside".

"Those serrations were either used for shredding or chomping up its prey, so it was a pretty nasty-looking creature," Paterson said.

The fact that anomalocaris had been found to have compound eyes also confirmed it was an ancestor of modern arthopods, which include insects and shellfish, said Paterson, whose study was published in Nature.

When the specimen was originally trapped in seafloor mud about 500 million years ago Australia, then part of the Gondwana supercontinent, was in tropical waters straddling the equator, Paterson said.

The fossil had been pushed from the sea floor at about the same speed human fingernails grow and eventually ended up on Kangaroo Island -- now a hotbed of Cambrian artefacts -- off Adelaide in South Australia.

Paterson said the site was riddled with "a variety of fairly enigmatic" specimens that remained a mystery to science and were difficult to classify because they were from a very early period in animal evolution.

"The body plans of animals that we're familiar with today were still kind of being tinkered with in the Cambrian," he said.

"Sometimes they have features that are completely foreign to what you would see in a modern organism."

Though anomalocaris specimens had been found before in Canada and China, Kangaroo Island was the first place an intact eye had been discovered, due to the unique shale rock it was trapped in, which had once been "zero oxygen" mud.

"Within the mud or within the sediment there's essentially no oxygen to allow for microbes to start to break down soft tissues," Paterson said.

"What we've seen in the Emu Bay shale at Kangaroo Island is a much better picture of what was living there at the time than you would otherwise get in a conventional fossil deposit."

http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-super-predator-eyes-found-australia-032344743.html

Oldest Hairy Microbe Fossils Discovered

Ancient rock deposits, laid down between two massive ice ages, reveal the oldest known fossils for two types of single-celled creatures: Tube-shelled foraminifera and hairy, vase-shape ciliates.
Both closely resemble microbes living today. But the climate they lived in may have been quite different. The fossils appear in limestone deposited on the ocean floor between 635 million and 715 million years ago. This period was marked by two "Snowball Earth" events, when ice may have covered the entire planet.

These fossils date back more than 100 million years earlier than the oldest foraminifera and ciliates previously known. Even so, scientists think these organisms were around much longer, based on changes accumulated in their DNA since they split from close relatives. Some believe these types of single-celled creatures have been around for considerably more than 1 billion years, said Tanja Bosak, a study researcher and assistant professor of geobiology at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology.

Read more here ...

Mastodon Fossils Discovered At Daytona Beach

Prehistoric animal bones found at a Daytona Beach construction site have been confirmed as belonging to a mastodon, officials at the local Museum of Arts and Sciences confirmed on Tuesday.

According to reports by both WESH.com and The Daytona Beach News Journal, the bones were discovered by crews working on a storm water retention pond near Nova Road. The construction site was closed down in order to preserve the fossils — a jawbone, some vertebrae, two tusks, pieces of femur and some additional bones belonging to the large-tusked, Ice Age-era mammal.

“We’re finding some significant pieces — tusks and vertebrae. We don’t know completely what’s down there yet, so it gets more exciting the more we dig,” Museum of Arts and Sciences representative Zach Zacharias told WESH on Wednesday.

Officials from the museum added that they did not know as of that time whether or not there was a single partial skeleton, a full set of remains, or bones from multiple creatures located at the fossil site. However, they said that they kept finding more and more bones at the retention pond’s location, and they believe that they are between 13,000 and 150,000 years old.

Officials from the museum added that they did not know as of that time whether or not there was a single partial skeleton, a full set of remains, or bones from multiple creatures located at the fossil site. However, they said that they kept finding more and more bones at the retention pond’s location, and they believe that they are between 13,000 and 150,000 years old.

“If the bone fragments add up to a full skeleton, it would only be about the 13th such find in Florida, according to a top official with the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville,” Daytona Beach News Journal Staff Writer Eileen Zaffiro-Kean wrote on November 23.

“It’s not extremely rare, but it’s not common, either,” that official, vertebrate paleontology expert Richard Hulbert, told Zaffiro-Kean. After seeing pictures of the jaw and bone fragments via email, Hulbert said that the specimen “definitely looks like an American mastodon… The size and nature of the teeth are very distinctive. It looks pretty nice. It’s definitely of scientific interest.”

The News Journal notes that since the fossils were found on city property, the city owns them. Hulbert said that he would come to assist at the site if the city were willing to donate the fossils to his museum, and pledged his long-distance assistance should they decline to do so, Zaffiro-Kean said.

“Museum officials, who are being aided by a local amateur paleontologist, are making most of their discoveries on one end of the site. They’re worried about people drifting in and taking souvenirs, and they’ve asked the media not to pinpoint the area where the retention ponds are being built by identifying nearby side streets and landmarks,” she added.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112429190/mastodon-fossils-discovered-at-daytona-beach/index.html

Scientists unearthing major whale fossil hoard in Chile

Scientists are in the process of excavating a desert fossil bed in Chile containing dozens of whole skeletons of ancient whales dating back seven million years.

One of the researchers said 15 whales were found in 15 days, far exceeding expectations.

Carolina Robino reports.

Watch video here ...

50-Legged Creature May Have Been Top Predator of Ancient Seafloor

An ancient cockroach-like creature nearly a foot long once skittered along the seafloor in what is now Canada, a new fossil find reveals.

The fossil, a series of 500-million-year-old tracks, captured the movement of a large seafloor-dwelling creature with at least 25 pairs of legs. The animal was likely an arthropod called Tegopelte, a rare giant very rarely found fossilized. Arthropods are invertebrates with exoskeletons, a group that includes today's crustaceans and insects.

Reporting the discovery Tuesday (Nov. 8) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers led by Nicholas Minter of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada suggest that Tegopelte was a fearsome predator or perhaps a quick-moving scavenger, capable of "rapidly skimming across the seafloor" with only a few of its many legs touching the ground at a time.

Read more ...

Prehistoric Mite Caught Hitching A Ride On A Spider

Scientists have produced amazing three-dimensional images of a prehistoric mite as it hitched a ride on the back of a 50 million-year-old spider.

At just 176 micrometers long and barely visible to the naked eye, University of Manchester researchers and colleagues in Berlin believe the mite, trapped inside Baltic amber (fossil tree resin), is the smallest arthropod fossil ever to be scanned using X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning techniques.

They say their study – published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters on Wednesday, 9 November – also sets a minimum age of almost 50 million years for the evolution among these mites of phoretic, or hitchhiking, behavior using another animal species.

“CT allowed us to digitally dissect the mite off the spider in order to reveal the important features on the underside of the mite required for identification,” said Dr David Penney, one of the study’s authors based in the Faculty of Life Sciences. “The specimen, which is extremely rare in the fossil record, is potentially the oldest record of the living family Histiostomatidae.

“Amber is a remarkable repository of ecological associations within the fossil record. In many cases organisms died instantaneously and were preserved with lifelike fidelity, still enacting their behavior immediately prior to their unexpected demise. We often refer to this as ‘frozen behavior’ or palaeoethology and such examples can tell us a great deal about interactions in ecosystems of the past. However, most amber fossils consist of individual insects or several insects together but without unequivocal demonstrable evidence of direct interaction. The remarkable specimen we describe in this paper is the kind of find that occurs only once in say a hundred thousand specimens.”

Fellow Manchester biologist Dr Richard Preziosi said: “Phoresy is where one organism uses another animal of a different species for transportation to a new environment. Such behavior is common in several different groups today. The study of fossils such as the one we described can provide important clues as to how far back in geological time such behaviors evolved. The fact that we now have technology that was unavailable just a few years ago means we can now use a multidisciplinary approach to extract the most information possible from such tiny and awkwardly positioned fossils, which previously would have yielded little or no substantial scientific data.”

Read more ...

Ancient Whale Taken Down by Shark, Tooth Marks Reveal

The sharp eyes of an Italian stonecutter were the first to spy a new ancient species of whale 40 million years after it was first encased in stone.

The fossil, of a new ancient whale species called Aegyptocetus tarfa, was found in a block of limestone headed to decorate an Italian building. The stonecutter realized after slicing through the stone block that he was looking at the cross section of a fossilized skull, and he contacted Giovanni Bianucci, a researcher at the University of Pisa, to help identify it.

The whale belongs to a group of whales ancestral to all of today's modern whales, including the toothed whales, like the dolphin, and baleen whales, like the blue whale.

The remains also show the scars of a shark attack, which may have led to the beast's demise.

Read more ...

Ancient bear had the strongest bite

The largest bear that ever lived also had the strongest bite of any land mammal, say scientists.

Agriotherium africanum was a giant short-faced bear that became extinct five million years ago.

Reconstructions of the carnivore's skull revealed that it was well adapted to resist the forces involved in eating large prey.

By comparing the skulls of several species, scientists also found polar bears to have surprisingly weak bites.

The findings were published in the Journal of Zoology.

Dr Stephen Wroe from the University of Newcastle, Australia and his team used CT scanners to create 3-D images of bear skulls. They scanned six species, ranging from a giant panda to a reconstructed fossil of A. africanum.

Using the computer generated models created by student Chris Oldfield, the researchers investigated how the skulls stood up to the forces that mimicked killing and feeding behaviours.

"Our analyses show that Agriotherium africanum had an enormously powerful bite - considerably greater than for the largest of living big cats, or any living bear," said Dr Wroe.

The extinct bear exerted the highest bite force with its large canine teeth. Of all the bears the team examined, its model showed the least strain through the skull when the researchers simulated the forces of biting an item of prey.

"Our analyses show that it had the most powerful bite of any known terrestrial mammal determined thus far," Dr Wroe told BBC Nature.

Read on ...

By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature

Fossil feast for 'zombie worms'

Traces of bone-eating "zombie worms" have been found in a three-million-year-old fossil from Italy, say researchers.

Osedax worms feed on whale skeletons on the seabed using root-like tissues to bore into and dissolve the bones.

Scientists from the Natural History Museum in London identified telltale borings in the fossil using a scanner.

The discovery suggests the worms were much more widespread throughout prehistoric oceans than thought.

The findings of lead scientist Nicholas Higgs and colleagues are published in the journal Historical Biology.

The only other evidence of Osedax worms in the fossil record was found off the coast of Washington state, US, last year.

Mr Higgs, a PhD student at the University of Leeds, was investigating Osedax worms for his studies with scientists at the Natural History Museum, London and made contact with staff at the University of Florence's Museum of Natural History in Italy.

Staff had previously discovered a whale fossil surrounded by other fossilised organisms that suggested an ecosystem had developed around the carcass.

These 'whale falls' provide ideal conditions for bone-eating worms so Mr Higgs travelled to Italy to investigate the fossils.

Read on ...

By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature

Dinosaurs may have migrated: study

Giant plant-eating dinosaurs may have lumbered across hundreds of miles as they made seasonal migrations in search of food and water, scientists believe.

The long-necked "sauropods", which stood on four legs, were the largest animals that ever walked the Earth.

Given their enormous appetites and water needs, their ability to survive in lowland flood plains affected by seasonal dry spells and drought has puzzled scientists.

Now researchers have learned at least one dinosaur species made regular journeys between lowland to highland habitats covering several hundred miles.

The evidence is in the teeth of Camarasaurus, a large sauropod which grew to a length of 60ft and weighed to 18 tonnes.

Fossilised Camarasaurus teeth, found in the US states of Wyoming and Utah, contained a chemical record of the animals' movements during the Late Jurassic period around 150 million years ago.

Different atomic versions of oxygen, or isotopes, occur in the surface water of lowland and highland regions.

These differences remained imprinted in the oxygen from drinking water deposited in the Camarasaurus teeth.

Comparing the oxygen isotopes to those in ancient soil, lake and wetland samples revealed a picture of the dinosaurs' migration patterns.

The researchers, led by Dr Henry Fricke, from Colorado College, US, wrote in the journal Nature: "Camarasaurus populations... must have directly occupied high-elevated regions for at least part of the year before returning to the basin where they died."

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/dinosaurs-may-migrated-study-171726034.html