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      Scientists find skull of enormous ancient dolphin in Amazon

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 20 March - 18:00

    Fossil of giant river dolphin found in Peru, whose closest living relation is in South Asia, gives clues to future extinction threats

    Scientists have discovered the fossilised skull of a giant river dolphin, from a species thought to have fled the ocean and sought refuge in Peru’s Amazonian rivers 16m years ago. The extinct species would have measured up to 3.5 metres long, making it the largest river dolphin ever found.

    The discovery of this new species, Pebanista yacuruna , highlights the looming risks to the world’s remaining river dolphins, all of which face similar extinction threats in the next 20 to 40 years, according to the lead author of new research published in Science Advances today. Aldo Benites-Palomino said it belonged to the Platanistoidea family of dolphins commonly found in oceans between 24m and 16m years ago.

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      I discovered thousands of fossils after retiring. Now I’m nearly 80 and still going strong

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 7 March - 10:43

    I’ve built up a collection from a beach in Weymouth that could help to establish what biodiversity in the UK was like over the course of millions of years

    My interest in fossils began at the age of 10 in my back garden in Glastonbury, Somerset, where I discovered ammonites. With hindsight, it wasn’t beauty that drew me to them, but the magic of discovery. I was drawn in by their sheer age, and the unfathomable nature of the distant past.

    After my degree in natural sciences in 1965 I wanted to go as far away as I could, so I applied to teach biology in Ghana. It was a fantastic period of my life where I discovered a lot more than rocks in the back garden. After eight years I came back to the UK, and spent much of the next decades raising four children. At times it was a hard life and I put all my dreams of research on hold.

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      The 280m-year-old fossil reptile that turned out to be a forgery

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 28 February - 06:00

    Modern imaging techniques reveal item thought to be well preserved lizard-like fossil is painted carving

    Generations of palaeontologists have marvelled over a 280m-year-old fossilised lizard-like reptile, Tridentinosaurus antiquus, discovered in the Italian Alps in 1931.

    Thought to be one of the best-preserved specimens of the species, palaeontologists believed there were even traces of carbonised skin on the surface. Now modern imaging techniques have revealed that this treasured fossil is, in fact, a carving covered in black paint.

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      It’s a fake: Mysterious 280 million-year-old fossil is mostly just black paint

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 16 February - 05:01 · 1 minute

    image of a reptilian fossil in a rock

    Enlarge / Discovered in 1931, Tridentinosaurus antiquus has now been found to be, in part, a forgery. (credit: Valentina Rossi)

    For more than 90 years, scientists have puzzled over an unusual 280 million-year-old reptilian fossil discovered in the Italian Alps. It's unusual because the skeleton is surrounded by a dark outline, long believed to be rarely preserved soft tissue. Alas, a fresh analysis employing a suite of cutting-edge techniques concluded that the dark outline is actually just bone-black paint. The fossil is a fake, according to a new paper published in the journal Paleontology.

    An Italian engineer and museum employee named Gualtiero Adami found the fossil near the village of Piné. The fossil was a small lizard-like creature with a long neck and five-digit limbs. He turned it over to the local museum, and later that year, geologist Giorgio del Piaz announced the discovery of a new genus, dubbed Tridentinosaurus antiquus . The dark-colored body outline was presumed to be the remains of carbonized skin or flesh; fossilized plant material with carbonized leaf and shoot fragments were found in the same geographical area.

    The specimen wasn't officially described scientifically until 1959 when Piero Leonardi declared it to be part of the Protorosauria group. He thought it was especially significant for understanding early reptile evolution because of the preservation of presumed soft tissue surrounding the skeletal remains. Some suggested that T. antiquus had been killed by a pyroclastic surge during a volcanic eruption, which would explain the carbonized skin since the intense heat would have burnt the outer layers almost instantly. It is also the oldest body fossil found in the Alps, at some 280 million years old.

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      Fossil found on the side of the road is a new species of mosasaur

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 30 October - 20:54 · 1 minute

    Artist's depiction of one mosasaur biting another.

    Enlarge (credit: Henry Sharpe / AMNH)

    In 2015, Deborah Shepherd returned to the site where she and other volunteers had worked on a public fossil dig with family members. That’s when she saw it: a fossil lying there, exposed on the surface. Most people would not have recognized it for what it was: It wasn’t a skull, a leg bone, or even a partial jaw. It was just a chunk of bone.

    Shepherd immediately notified a park ranger. That ranger then notified the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources. Her actions ultimately led to the discovery of what scientists say is not only a new species, but an entirely new genus of mosasaur, a giant marine predator from Late Cretaceous seas. Bite marks preserved on the fossil also suggest that it met its end at the hands—or rather teeth—of another mosasaur.

    Meet Jorgie the mosasaur

    The new mosasaur was described Monday in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Jǫrmungandr walhallaensis , or "Jorgie" for short, is the name suggested by co-author Clint Boyd, and it’s steeped in Norse mythology. Jǫrmungandr is the name of a sea serpent who circles the world with its body, clasping its tail in its jaws.

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      We finally know for sure what a trilobite ate

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 27 September, 2023 - 19:31 · 1 minute

    artist's conception of a trilobite grazing on a collection of shell fragments.

    Enlarge (credit: Jiri Svoboda)

    Trilobites first appear early in the Cambrian and are one of the earliest examples of arthropods, the group that includes all insects. They flourished for over 100 million years, leaving fossils that are seemingly ubiquitous—we've described over 20,000 different trilobite species. That's over three times the number of mammalian species we're aware of.

    Despite all those fossils, however, we've never found one with a meal inside it. We've been able to infer what some of them were likely to have been dining on based on their appearance and the ecosystems they were found in, but we haven't been able to establish what they ate with certainty. But today, researchers are describing an exquisitely preserved sample that includes several of the animal's last meals, which suggests that this particular animal was a bit like an aquatic vacuum cleaner.

    The last several suppers

    The fossil comes from shale deposits found in the Prague Basin of the Czech Republic. Those rocks date from the Ordovician, which came immediately after the Cambrian and lasted until about 450 million years ago. Mixed in among the layers of shale here are harder silicate nodules that have been termed "Rokycany Balls." When these nodules contain fossils, they tend to be well-preserved and provide three-dimensional details of the long-dead organisms.

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      Fish’s big mistake preserved an unusual fossil for us

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 20 September, 2023 - 14:57 · 1 minute

    Image of a fossilized fish in brownish rock.

    Enlarge / The fish in question, with the ammonite located just below its spine. (credit: Cooper, et. al.)

    Some extinct species left copious fossil remnants of their existence. Ammonites —an extinct type of cephalopod—are one such example. From the Devonian through the Paleocene, wherever ancient seas once covered Earth, one can usually find their coiled shells. So one more exquisitely preserved ammonite isn’t necessarily a big deal.

    With the exception, perhaps, of one intact example found in the Posidonienschiefer Formation in Germany, where most ammonite shells are flattened and fragmentary. Now, decades after its original discovery, scientists have taken a more careful look at the well-preserved ammonite and the fossil fish it was seemingly nestled against. What they found surprised them: the fish had actually swallowed the large ammonite—something we’ve never seen before, even in fossils of much larger marine species that we know attempted to feed on ammonites.

    It didn’t work out well for the fish. The size of the ammonite may have caused the fish to drown, or it may have blocked its digestive tract, causing internal bleeding. Drifting down to the seafloor, the fish was eventually buried and fossilized, preserving that ammonite—along with information about the ecosystem it and the fish inhabited—for over 170 million years.

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      New Triassic fossil features sharp claws and a nasty beak

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 16 August, 2023 - 15:08 · 1 minute

    Image of a small reptile perched on the end of a branch, with a smaller lizard in its mouth.

    Enlarge / Artist's conception of the newly found species. (credit: Matheus Fernandes)

    It was relatively small in comparison to the giants that would follow it later in Earth’s history. With a hip height of approximately 0.3 meters (about a foot) and a length of perhaps a meter (roughly three feet), this ancient reptile existed long before the evolution of the pterosaurs most of us recognize.

    Its most striking features are its skull and hands, two body parts that rarely survive fossilization among similar animals this old. The skull consists of a raptorial-like beak without teeth, while its forelimbs end in long fingers with scimitar-like claws. These two surprising features are among many revelations in a paper published Wednesday in Nature.

    Venetoraptor gassenae is the name of this new species of lagerpetid, a type of pterosaur precursor that lived about 230 million years ago in Brazil. Named for the district of Vale Vêneto in the same municipality in which the fossil was found—and for the plundering it might have done with its beak and claws ("raptor" is Latin for "plunderer")—it is also named to honor Valserina Maria Bulegon Gassen. Although not a paleontologist herself, the authors note that she is “one of the main people responsible for the CAPPA/UFSM ” (the Centro de Apoio à Pesquisa Paleontológica da Quarta Colônia, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria), a paleontological research support center).

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      Dinosaurs and the evolution of breathing through bones

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 26 July, 2023 - 11:00

    Image of a dinosaur looming over some small mammals, potentially about to eat them.

    Enlarge / It takes careful study and the right kind of bones to determine how something like this breathed. (credit: Tito Aureliano et. al. )

    Somewhere in Earth’s past, some branches on the tree of life adopted a body plan that made breathing and cooling down considerably more efficient than how mammalian bodies like ours do it. This development might not seem like much on the surface, until you consider that it may have ultimately enabled some of the largest dinosaurs this planet has ever known. It was so successful that it was maintained by three different groups of extinct species and continues to exist today in the living descendants of dinosaurs.

    Because lungs don’t usually survive fossilization, one might wonder how scientists are able to ascertain anything about the breathing capabilities of extinct species. The answer lies within their bones.

    In a suite of papers published in late 2022 and early 2023 , paleontologists examined fossil microstructure within some of the earliest known dinosaurs to determine just how early parts of this system evolved.

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