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Researchers have discovered traces of two different seas in fossil teeth from the floor of the North Pacific! The teeth’s outer layer reveals the water in which the fish once swam, while the interior records where the tooth later came to rest.
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Researchers have discovered traces of two different seas in fossil teeth from the floor of the North Pacific! The teeth’s outer layer reveals the water in which the fish once swam, while the interior records where the tooth later came to rest. From this, the team draws a proposal: a deep current from Antarctica gathers up the teeth, building deposits of mud packed with rare metals.
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From the magazine
Researchers have identified a silesaurid in India beyond doubt for the first time. This animal belonged to the dinosaurs’ closest relatives. The new species, *Rewasaurus minori*, is known from an incomplete skull with a lower jaw, where three teeth at the tip jut forwards at an angle. Yet two analytical methods give different answers about where the animal belongs in the dinosaur family.
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Researchers have identified a fossil discovered more than 20 years ago in north-eastern Italy as a new Triassic reptile, an animal from the period before the Jurassic and Cretaceous. An extraordinarily long neck bone put them on the trail. But only the remaining bones reveal why the incomplete skeleton matches no previously known species.
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New York – On 27 October, Sotheby’s will auction a roughly 67-million-year-old predatory dinosaur skeleton from Montana, with an estimate of six to nine million US dollars! In 2023, “Jodi” was still considered a juvenile of the most famous predator of all. Now it is called Nanotyrannus: a separate, smaller predator from the same period. However, the evidence behind the new name comes from other skeletons, not Jodi.
Read the story and sourcesNew film on YouTube
Our time-travel episode spends a day at the spring-fed lake of Blackwater Draw, where Clovis hunters hunted mammoths 13,000 years ago.
Stone-age spear point sharper than a kitchen knife0:35 min
Camels in North America? 13,000 years ago, yes0:29 min
The real dire wolves at a mammoth kill0:27 min
Giant ground sloth: as heavy as a small car0:41 min
American lion: a quarter bigger than today0:35 min
Not a sabre-toothed tiger: this cat saw me0:41 min
Mammoth hunt 13,000 years ago: this close0:38 minResearchers have identified a silesaurid in India beyond doubt for the first time. This animal belonged to the dinosaurs’ closest relatives. The new species, *Rewasaurus minori*, is known from an incomplete skull with a lower jaw, where three teeth at the tip jut forwards at an angle. Yet two analytical methods give different answers about where the animal belongs in the dinosaur family.
New studies, briefly explained. Each item includes the original study’s publication date.
Researchers have described a new type of fossil track from the Val Gardena Sandstone in northern Italy: Pachychirotherium gardenaensis. The prints date from the late Permian, before the mass extinction at the end of that period. They are the earliest known tracks of the chirotheriid family. The team thinks the trackmakers were early relatives of crocodiles and dinosaurs, perhaps from the group known as the erythrosuchids.
The features of the tracks fit a wide-legged gait, with the legs splayed out to the sides. Tracks from the Early Triassic show transitional forms, and the group probably only achieved an upright stance in the Middle Triassic. Walking on the toes also developed step by step.
The first track of this family, the "hand beast" Chirotherium, was noticed in 1833 by a headmaster in Hildburghausen in Thuringia.
Palaeontology · Study published · Original study ↗
Researchers have found the bones of another Neanderthal in Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq. There is a hole in the shoulder blade, and its shape matches a wooden spear. The wound occurred around the time of death, reports the journal Scientific Reports.
Shanidar A, an older adult, was placed in the cave around 75,000 years ago. A flash flood later jumbled the bones. This means at least five dead now lie together at this spot. The researchers see this as a sign of a deliberate, perhaps meaningful treatment of the dead. The Neanderthal had survived a severe injury to the face. This suggests that their group cared for them.
Back in 2018, a team from Cambridge had already excavated the skull of the older female Neanderthal Shanidar Z in the same cave.
Scientific Reports · Study published · Original study ↗
Researchers in North Carolina have described three new coral species from the Middle Eocene, a time long after the dinosaurs. The most common is called Moltkia alveolata. The surprise lies in its genus: Moltkia was long thought to be a bamboo coral. The study in the Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History now shows that it belongs to the precious corals.
Precious corals like these no longer exist in the western tropical Atlantic today. The closest living relatives of Moltkia now grow only in the western tropical Pacific. Precious corals are known as a material for jewellery: Mediterranean red coral has been harvested and traded since antiquity.
The team also found two species of the genus Ellisella and individual skeletal spicules from other, unidentified corals.
Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History · Study published · Original study ↗
Researchers have fully described fossils of ancient spiny fishes from East Greenland for the first time. Their analysis points to a species previously known only from Siberia: Acanthodes lopatini. The study appears in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
The fish lived in a lake in the earliest Carboniferous. Their remains lie in the rock of the mountain Celsius Bjerg, including animals at different stages of growth. They therefore link the wildlife of Euramerica, the supercontinent of the time, with the wildlife of Siberia.
The same rock layers also record the Hangenberg event. This mass extinction around 360 million years ago wiped out the armoured fishes, after which ray-finned fishes took over the waters.
Canadian Journal of Zoology · Study published · Original study ↗
Selected discoveries, clearly explained, with sources to read further.
DinosaursNew York – On 27 October, Sotheby’s will auction a roughly 67-million-year-old predatory dinosaur skeleton from Montana, with an estimate of six to nine million US dollars! In 2023, “Jodi” was still considered a juvenile of the most famous predator of all. Now it is called Nanotyrannus: a separate, smaller predator from the same period. However, the evidence behind the new name comes from other skeletons, not Jodi.
DinosaursResearchers have discovered a small dinosaur in North America that chewed like a parrot! *Infernogallus jamesi* slid its lower jaw backwards and forwards, crushing soft food between ridged chewing surfaces — probably juicy fruit above all. A fruit-eating dinosaur: until now, there had been no direct evidence of one.
DinosaursA predator tugs at a carcass and tears flesh from the tail. Its teeth scrape diagonally across the vertebrae. Researchers in Canada have systematically analysed just such suspected tyrannosaur bite marks. The result: 84.7 per cent of the bitten duck-billed dinosaur vertebrae from Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta come from the tail. The scratches follow the flesh.
DinosaursA *Tyrannosaurus rex*, one of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever, seizes a large prey animal, holds it fast and bites through flesh and bone. That is the picture revealed by 3D models used by researchers in Spain to compare its skull with the heads of two other giant predators. The tyrannosaur’s shorter head is the more robust one, and its thick teeth were probably built for tremendous bite force.
Sea ReptilesAbout 2.5 metres long, with legs like a land animal and buried in the deposits of an ancient lake: researchers have described a new freshwater mosasaur from Provence. Mosasaurs are known as marine reptiles of the Cretaceous. This animal, named *Garamaudo bauciensis*, probably lived in freshwater near Bouc-Bel-Air in south-eastern France about 85 million years ago.
Sea ReptilesIchthyosaurs made a lightning start in the Triassic. According to the median of a new evolutionary model, the range of their skull lengths peaked around 231.1 million years ago. At that point, only about one eighth of their evolutionary history had passed. That is the finding of a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed. Neither sea level nor sea-surface temperature, rock area or sedimentary sequences show a turning point that matches it significantly.
Sea ReptilesA skeleton from Asturias tears down an old boundary: this ichthyosaur from Spain unquestionably belongs to *Ichthyosaurus anningae*, a species previously confirmed only in Dorset, England. Judged by its upper arm bone, it is also the largest known animal of its species. It swam through a Lower Jurassic sea whose fauna closely linked northern Spain with Britain.
Sea ReptilesA rock block from Japan sat in a museum for more than three decades — packed with mosasaur bones that nobody had recognised. Researchers found four overlooked bones inside it, including the first confirmed front upper-jaw bone from a mosasaur in Japan. A braincase bone bears a combination of features unlike any described mosasaur. It may represent a new species, but that has not been established.
EvolutionPalaeontologists have redrawn the evolution of the dinosaur spine: when early dinosaurs gained an extra vertebra in the sacrum, the part of the spine firmly joined to the pelvis, they lost one from the back! According to the new analysis, the additional pelvic vertebrae were remodelled trunk vertebrae that had shifted from the back into the pelvis. Evolution did not invent new vertebrae for the job.
EvolutionResearchers have discovered three new species of bone-eating worms around the Iberian Peninsula! They found the animals on cow and pig bones that they had deliberately sunk to depths of 90 to 1,200 metres. *Osedax* worms have neither mouths nor guts and depend on bacteria capable of digesting the organic material inside bones.
EvolutionResearchers studying 146 living and recently extinct crown birds have uncovered a startling contradiction: when birds lose the ability to fly, the semicircular canals in their inner ears — tiny ring-shaped tubes responsible for balance — change only slightly. Yet they respond strongly to a remodelled skull. For avian evolution, this means the supposed signature of flight in the ears of early birds probably arose as the joint between the head and neck was rebuilt.
EvolutionAround 75 million years ago, a turtle lived in the rivers of what is now Alberta. *Plesiobaena antiqua* was the most common Cretaceous turtle in Canada’s Dinosaur Park Formation. X-ray scans of four skulls and three lower jaws now show that its head changed as it grew. The jaws also fit a shift towards hard food.
Fossil FindsResearchers have discovered traces of two different seas in fossil teeth from the floor of the North Pacific! The teeth’s outer layer reveals the water in which the fish once swam, while the interior records where the tooth later came to rest. From this, the team draws a proposal: a deep current from Antarctica gathers up the teeth, building deposits of mud packed with rare metals.
Fossil FindsResearchers have identified a silesaurid in India beyond doubt for the first time. This animal belonged to the dinosaurs’ closest relatives. The new species, *Rewasaurus minori*, is known from an incomplete skull with a lower jaw, where three teeth at the tip jut forwards at an angle. Yet two analytical methods give different answers about where the animal belongs in the dinosaur family.
Fossil FindsResearchers have identified a fossil discovered more than 20 years ago in north-eastern Italy as a new Triassic reptile, an animal from the period before the Jurassic and Cretaceous. An extraordinarily long neck bone put them on the trail. But only the remaining bones reveal why the incomplete skeleton matches no previously known species.
Fossil FindsResearchers have described a fossil right whale from Antwerp that adds weight to the size history of these marine giants: the early members of the bowhead whale lineage apparently shrank first, while right whales became giants only later, twice and independently. The researchers infer this from a reconstruction of body sizes. The skull, almost five million years old, belongs to a previously unknown genus and species.
On This DayA tiny single-celled organism rides around the world on tardigrades and also clings to mites and even specks of dirt. For almost sixty years, the hitchhiker was considered a rarity. Researchers have now reported 49 new locations, from Britain through Canada and Australia to Antarctica.
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