A 518-million-year-old ambulacrarian fossil from China suggests that the common ancestor of starfish and their relatives was not a burrowing worm; it was probably a tentacled animal that fed from the water around it.
The post Early Cambrian Fossil Rewrites Starfish Family Tree appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Conspicuously missing fossils are leading scientists to rethink exactly when animals came on the scene.
A fossil theropod vertebra about the length of a thumb, found in the Algarve region in southern Portugal, may be the oldest dinosaur remains ever discovered on the Iberian Peninsula.
The post Single Vertebra Hints at Oldest Known Iberian Dinosaur appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A tiny piece of amber from Myanmar has captured a defensive maneuver that lizards still use today: shedding part of their tail to escape a predator.
The post Lizard Dropped Its Tail 99 Million Years Ago, Amber Preserved Evidence appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Paleontologists have described a new genus and species of early bird from the Late Jurassic Zhenghe Fauna of southeastern China.
The post Jurassic Fossil Hints that Some Early Birds Were Flightless appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A fossilized braincase that sat in in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London for a century has been identified as Europe’s first megaraptoran dinosaur, a lineage once thought to have flourished mainly in the southern hemisphere.
The post New Species of Predatory Dinosaur Identified in UK appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Tyrannosaurs sit at the top of the food chain in the popular imagination, but a newly described fossil from Alberta, Canada, suggests that a much smaller predator may have fed on the carcass of Albertosaurus sarcophagus, a tyrannosaur relative.
The post Small Raptors Likely Feasted on Fallen Tyrannosaur, Fossil Bite Marks Suggest appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Fossils from Montana show a small oviraptorosaur with a jaw that slid front to back, a feature shared with fruit-eating parrots.
The post Small, Chicken-Like Dinosaur May Have Had a Jaw Built for Fruit appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Paleontologists have described a previously unknown species of mosasaur -- a group of extinct marine reptiles that patrolled Cretaceous seas alongside dinosaurs on land -- based on fossils unearthed in Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis.
The post Paleontologists Uncover New Mosasaur Species in Egypt’s Western Desert appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Paleontologists have identified a new species of ancient, distant mammal relative from two fossil specimens found decades apart in the Manda Beds of Tanzania.
The post New Dicynodont Species from Tanzania Suggests Younger Age for Rocks Tied to Earliest Dinosaurs appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
The first fossilized adult T. rex trackway tells us a lot about how these predators got around
The post Here’s How Fast An Adult Tyrannosaurus Rex Walked appeared first on Nautilus.
El Soplao, a fossil site tucked into the hills of Cantabria in northern Spain, stands out for yielding amber pieces with a blue-violet hue and abundant bioinclusions, according to a new review paper.
The post Spanish Amber Deposit Offers Rare Window into Cretaceous Life appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Paleontologists from Fundación Dinópolis have identified the first confirmed fossils of the genus Diplodocus found outside North America.
The post Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Long before sharks or reptiles ruled the seas, armor-plated fish called placoderms were already experimenting with different jaw designs to crush hard-shelled prey.
The post Devonian Armored Fish Show Multiple Ways to Crush Hard-Shelled Prey appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Scientists investigating a 66-million-year-old mystery have revealed that a bird feather embedded in fossilized dinosaur excrement suggests that the ancestors of modern birds who survived the dinosaur-killing asteroid that also wiped out all other ancient bird species benefited from the waterproofing properties of their feathers.
The newly analyzed bird feather fossil that provided the missing clues comes from an extinct bird group called Hesperornithiforms and not from the ancestor of modern birds, Neornithes.
However, the team said subtle differences between the species suggest previous theories crediting adaptation to water diving as the key to Neornithes’ survival were likely on the right track.
When a huge piece of space rock slammed into Earth, killing off virtually all dinosaur species save the ancestors of modern birds, the event also left behind a 66-million-year-old mystery. How did these ancient avians survive this apocalyptic event, resulting in every bird species we see today?
Jingmai O’Connor, the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago, said her career has been spent analyzing fossils to try to answer this single, critical question. However, unlike the new poop-encased bird feathers, most were not so ‘naturally’ protected from the ravages of time.
“It’s such a beautiful, well-preserved feather, from such an unexpected source, and it’s exciting that it could help us answer this huge question in paleontology,” explained the lead author of a study detailing the new analysis. “As far as I know, no one has ever thought to look for feathers or to study feathers in coprolites, so this project was really exciting.”
Researchers discovered the ancient bird feather in 2016 in Montana. Although she initially suspected it could be a coprolite rock (fossilized feces), O’Connor said she couldn’t confirm the theory for a decade.
The situation changed when O’Connor and Nate Carroll, a co-author of the paper and paleontologist at the Carter County Museum in Ekalaka, Montana, gained access to the micro-CT scanner at USC’s medical campus in Los Angeles, California. According to O’Connor, that’s when “the full feathery fabric of this fossil feces” started to finally reveal itself.
“Every hour processing the data revealed another feather, another scale, another bone—in stunning 3D,” Carrol also recalled.
Along with multiple feathers and tiny fish scales, the ancient dinosaur poop, which may have come from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, also contained legs from a hesperonithiform bird.
O’Connor said hesperonithiforms were ancient aquatic birds with similarities to modern loons. Critically, these cousins of the modern bird ancestor group had evolved specialized feet to hunt for fish by diving deep into the water.
“The feathers showed adaptations for being underwater that we see in living aquatic birds,” O’Connor explained.
Notably, the team said this evolution likely cost ancient hesperonithiforms like the one that was consumed by a dinosaur the ability to fly.
Although the bird group represented by the fossilized feather did not survive the dinosaur-killing asteroid, its connection to the ancestor of modern birds appears to support a previously proposed theory that adaptation to water may have helped Neornithes survive. O’Connor said she thinks that small differences in the feathers of the two ancient bird species hold the answer to a 66-million-year-old mystery.
“We think the types of feathers that these birds had, and/or the way they molted those feathers, may have been one of the underlying causes of the selectivity of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction,” the researcher explained, adding that this is “essentially why some birds died out and why others survived.”
Specifically, O’Connor pointed to the “smaller, fuzzy, primitive body feathers” found on the extinct bird “that we associate with dinosaurs and enantiornithines” alongside more modern-looking waterproof adaptations.
The team said that these evolutionary relics suggest that hesperornithiforms like the one that left behind its feathers were an evolutionary bridge between older bird groups and the Neornithes that survived the cosmic collision. Even more critically, the team said these earlier feather structures may not have retained heat as effectively as Neornithes feathers, allowing one species to survive the asteroid and another to die in the extreme cold that followed.
“The hesperornithiforms retain primitive feather types that may not have been as efficient for insulation as modern plumaceous feathers, and that could explain why they went extinct along with the enantiornithines,” O’Connor explained.
The study “Bird feathers from a Late Cretaceous coprolite” was published in Current Biology.
Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.
Paleontologists have identified a new species of extinct alligatorid that lived in what is now Colorado just a few hundred thousand years after the asteroid impact that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.
The post Ancient Alligator Relative Lived Right After Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
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