Fossil for Sale

Megapiranha was up to 3 feet long (1 meter) — a fish-beast four times as big as piranhas living today, studies of its jawbones indicate. It lived about 8 million to 10 million years ago and might have been quite comfortable stalking cartoon animals in an “Ice Age” movie.

Another close relative of the piranha, called pacu (singular and plural), is not so scary. Pacu have squared-off stumps of teeth used for munching veggies. (For the record, tales of carnivorous piranhas eating humans are fictional.)

Now a newly uncovered jawbone of a transition species ties all these teeth together. Named Megapiranha paranensis, this previously unknown fossil fish bridges the evolutionary gap between flesh-eating piranhas and their plant-eating cousins.

The new fossil shows an intermediate pattern: teeth in a zig-zag row. This suggests that the two rows in pacu were compressed to form a single row in piranhas. “It almost looks like the teeth are migrating from the second row into the first row,” said John Lundberg, curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and a co-author of a study of the jawbone.

If this is so, Megapiranha may be an intermediate step in the long process that produced the piranha’s distinctive bite. To find out where Megapiranha falls in the evolutionary tree for these fishes, Dahdul examined hundreds of specimens of modern piranhas and their relatives.

The Megapiranha fossil was originally collected in a riverside cliff in northeastern Argentina in the early 1900s, but remained unstudied until paleontologist Alberto Cione of Argentina’s La Plata Museum rediscovered the startling specimen — an upper jaw with three unusually large and pointed teeth — in the 1980s in a museum drawer.

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Fossil traces found in an oil field on the Arabian Peninsula are the oldest evidence yet of animals, pushing back the known origins of higher life to more than 635 million years ago

The animals’ remains don’t look like traditional fossils. They’re more like fossil echoes: chemical traces of a compound only produced — at least in modern times — by demosponges, descendants of what some scientists consider to be the last common ancestor of all animals.

“It is, definitively, the earliest evidence for animals,” said geochemist Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, lead author of the study published Wednesday in Nature.

Love’s team identified the fossils while analyzing sedimentary deposits mined by Oman’s national oil company. The sediments date to the last stages of the the aptly-named Cryogenian period after a deep freeze referred to by scientists as Snowball Earth.

Until now, the oldest animal fossils dated to Earth’s next geological period, called the Ediacaran. Scientists had been unsure whether they reflected the actual birth of animal life, or merely the beginning of the fossil record.

The new findings show that animals indeed evolved before the Ediacaran, giving these humble sponges at least 100 million years to develop the kaleidoscopic physiologies that bloomed during the early Cambrian period.

“Biologists might argue about which animals diverged first,” said Love, “but regardless of that, we’re certainly looking at very basal animals.”

The telltale sign discovered by Love’s team is a fatty chemical called 24-isopropylcholestane, which scientists have found only in the skeletal structures of demosponges, the most common member of the sponge family. Until recently, sponges were believed to be modern descendants of the first animals.

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Researchers excavating a coal mine in South America have found the fossilized remains of the mother of all snakes, a nightmarish tropical behemoth as long as a school bus and as heavy as a Volkswagen Beetle.

Modern boas and anacondas, which average less than 20 feet in length and reach a maximum of 30 feet, have been known to swallow Chihuahuas, cats and other small pets, but this prehistoric monster ate giant turtles and primitive crocodiles.

The find sheds new light on snake evolution, but it also provides telling insights into climate. Because Titanoboa cerrejonensis, as it has been named, was coldblooded, the tropical climate had to be six to eight degrees warmer than it is today for a snake that large to survive.

The fossils of several specimens of the snake are from a cache of fossils excavated from the open-pit Cerrejon coal mine in Colombia. Paleontologists are excited about the find because there are few fossils of tropical vertebrates from the 10-million-year period after the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Most rock outcroppings that might contain fossils have been hidden by the region’s dense foliage, said evolutionary biologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Mississauga, lead author of a paper on the fossils appearing Thursday in the journal Nature. The coal mining exposed them.

Researchers now believe that the climate got even hotter after this period, perhaps hastening the snake’s ultimate demise. “Big animals went extinct because it simply got too hot,” Conrad said. “This helps us to understand that the effects of global warming aren’t just rising sea levels.”

About Titanoboa

Titanoboa,  meaning “titanic boa”, is a genus of snake that lived approximately 60 to 58 million years ago, in the Paleocene epoch, a 10-million-year period immediately following the dinosaur extinction event. The only known species is the Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the largest snake ever discovered, supplanting the previous record holder, Gigantophis.

By comparing the sizes and shapes of its fossilized vertebrae to those of extant snakes, researchers estimated that the T. cerrejonensis reached a maximum length of 12 to 15 metres (40 to 50 ft), weighed about 1,135 kilograms (2,500 lb), and measured about 1 metre (40 in) in diameter at the thickest part of the body.

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Wikipedia

It’s hard enough to find fossils of hard things like dinosaur bones. Now scientists have found evidence of 95 million-year-old octopuses, among the rarest and unlikeliest of fossils, complete with ink and suckers.

The body of an octopus is composed almost entirely of muscle and skin. When an octopus dies, it quickly decays and liquefies into a slimy blob. After just a few days there will be nothing left at all. And that assumes that the fresh carcass is not consumed almost immediately by scavengers.

Fuchs and his colleagues now have identified three new species of octopuses (Styletoctopus annae, Keuppia hyperbolaris and Keuppia levante) based on five specimens discovered in Cretaceous Period rocks in Lebanon. The specimens, described in the January 2009 issue of the journal Palaeontology, preserve the octopuses’ eight arms with traces of muscles and rows of suckers. Even traces of the ink and internal gills are present in some specimens.

Unlike vertebrate animals, octopuses lack a well-developed skeleton, which allows them to squeeze into spaces that a more robust animal could not.

“The more primitive relatives of octopuses had fleshy fins along their bodies. The new fossils are so well preserved that they show, like living octopus, that they didn’t have these structures,” Fuchs said.

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Giant fossil sea monster found in the Arctic and known as “Predator X” had a bite that would make T-Rex look feeble, scientists said Monday.

The 50 ft (15 meter) long Jurassic era marine reptile had a crushing 33,000 lbs (15 tonnes) per square inch bite force, the Natural History Museum of Oslo University said of the new find on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

“With a skull that’s more than 10 feet long you’d expect the bite to be powerful but this is off the scale,” said Joern Hurum, an associate professor of vertebrate paleontology at the museum who led the international excavation in 2008.

“It’s much more powerful than T-Rex,” he said of the pliosaur reptile that would have been a top marine predator. Tyrannosaurus Rex was a top land carnivore among dinosaurs.

The scientists reconstructed the predator’s head and estimated the force by comparing it with the similarly-shaped jaws of alligators in a park in Florida.

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The location of the finds is unexpected, because today the birds are only known from the Americas. In the latest edition of Science magazine, Dr Gerald Mayr claims the fossils show many striking resemblances to modern hummingbird groups.

“Fossils of primitive hummingbirds have been found in the Old World before, but it was a great surprise to find a bird that looked so similar to the modern hummingbirds of the Old World,” Dr Mayr, of the Senkenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, told BBC News Online.

More than 30 million years ago in Europe, a hummingbird-like creature hovered over flowering plants, feeding on their nectar. The scientists who discovered the bird named it Eurotrochilius inexpectatus, which roughly translates to “unexpected European hummingbird.”

The surprise is that the fossils, shown here, are the first modern hummingbird-type fossils known from outside the Americas and are millions of years older than those in the New World. The Old World birds were about an inch and a half from head to tail, with beaks and wings ideal for feeding while hovering.

About Hummingbird

Hummingbirds are birds in the family Trochilidae, and are native to the Americas. They are among the smallest of birds, and include the smallest extant bird species, the Bee Hummingbirds.

They can hover in mid-air by rapidly flapping their wings 12-90 times per second (depending on the species). They can also fly backwards, and are the only group of birds able to do so.

Their English name derives from the characteristic hum made by their rapid wing beats. They can fly at speeds exceeding 15 m/s (54 km/h, 34 mi/h).

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Wikipedia

The fossil of a tropical Asian freshwater turtle, found in the Canadian Arctic. The turtle has been named auroral. The discovery, detailed today in the journal Geology, suggests animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean. It also provides additional evidence that a rapid influx of carbon dioxide some 90 million years ago was the likely cause of a super-greenhouse effect that created extraordinary heat in the polar region.

The discovery of the Asian freshwater tropical turtle fossil in the Canadian Arctic raised the question of how exactly it wound up there. After all, a saltwater ocean separates Asia from North America. The scientists who made the discovery said the fossil dates to about 90 million years ago, a time when massive volcanic eruptions appear to have triggered a bout of super greenhouse warming.

The rapid warming, the scientists suspect, allowed meltwater to pour off the continents into the Arctic Ocean. Because fresh water is less dense than salt water, it may have rested on top of the marine water, creating a freshwater pathway for the turtle’s migration.

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The earliest known and well-preserved bony fish has been found in southern China.  The fossil of a Guiyu oneiros, described in this week’s Nature journal, sheds light on the evolutionary history of jawed vertebrates.

Previously this was documented almost exclusively from fossil fragments. The fossil represents the oldest near-complete gnathostome (jawed vertebrate) and has been described by Min Zhu and colleagues of the Key Laboratory of Evolutionary Systematics of Vertebrates, Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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Diminutive humans whose remains were found on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 truly are a new species, and not pygmies whose brains had shriveled with disease, researchers reported Wednesday. Anthropologists have argued, sometimes bitterly, since the discovery of Homo floresiensis — dubbed “the hobbit” due to its size — as to the identity and origins of these distant cave-dwelling cousins.

Some scientists say the creature, dubbed the “hobbit,” represent a new species called Homo floresiensis. If so, it would mean the hobbit species, which dates to about 18,000 years ago, was marooned on the island as humans were spreading around the world. Other scientists, however, dispute the claim of a new species. Instead, they propose theories about island dwarfing or a range of genetic diseases that might explain why the fossils are actually from modern humans even though they look different.

Many scientists have said H. floresiensis were prehistoric humans descended from Homo erectus, stunted by natural selection over millennia through a process called insular dwarfing.

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China says that they have found the world’s largest dinosaur fossil at eastern Shandong province.

Scientists had recovered some 7,600 fossils from a 300 metre (980 ft) long pit near Zhucheng city over the past seven months, Xinhua news agency said.

The discovered also found another 20 metre hadrosaurus fossil that could be another record for hadrosaurus size.

Zhucheng, known locally as China’s “Dinosaur City,” has produced dinosaur fossils in some 30 sites.

About Zhucheng

Zhucheng is a county-level city in Weifang prefecture, Shandong Province, China. It has a population of 1.06 million.

Zhucheng has been an important site for dinosaur excavation since 1960. The local community is known to use calcium rich fossils for traditional village remedies used to treat muscle cramps and other minor ailments.

The world’s largest hadrosaurid fossil was found in Zhucheng in the 1980s and is on display in the local museum.

Scientists have collected more than 50 metric tons (55 short tons) of fossils since 1960. The city has also been a place for smuggling of dinosaur bones; in January 2008, Australia returned hundreds of kilograms of Chinese dinosaur fossils, including dinosaur fossil eggs. These fossils were recovered during a sting operation carried out on warehouses and cargo containers.

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About Zhucheng