In 1969, fossilized leaves of the species Othniophyton elongatum—which translates to “alien plant”—were identified in eastern Utah. Initially, scientists theorized the extinct species may have belonged to the ginseng family (Araliaceae). However, a case once closed is now being revisited. New fossil specimens show that Othniophyton elongatum is even stranger than scientists first thought.

Steven Manchester, curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has studied 47-million-year-old fossils from Utah for several years. While visiting the University of California, Berkeley, paleobotany collection, he came across an unidentified and unusually well-preserved plant fossil collected from the same area as the leaves of Othniophyton elongatum.

Manchester is the co-author of a new study in which he and his colleagues showed that the leaves in question belonged to a unique plant, with unusual flowers and fruits. The findings are published in the journal Annals of Botany.

Close observation revealed that the 1969 fossils and those later studied by Manchester at UC Berkeley were from the same plant species. But the leaves, fruits and flowers attached to the woody stem of the Berkeley fossils were nothing like those of the other plants in the ginseng family, to which that species had been originally assigned.

“This fossil is rare in having the twig with attached fruits and leaves. Usually those are found separately,” Manchester said.

The authors extensively analyzed physical features of the old and new fossils, then methodically searched for any living plant family to which they could belong. There are over 400 diverse families of flowering plants alive today, but the authors couldn’t match the fossils’ strange assortment of features with any of them.

Resisting the urge to tidily lump the obscure specimen in with a living group, the team then searched for extinct families it might have belonged to but came up empty-handed once again.

The authors say their results underscore what may be a pervasive problem in paleobotany. In many cases, extinct plants that existed less than 65 million years ago are placed within modern families, or genera—the taxonomic groups directly above the level of individual species. This can create a skewed estimate of biodiversity in ancient ecosystems.

“There are many things for which we have good evidence to put in a modern family or genus, but you can’t always shoehorn these things,” Manchester said.

The species does not belong to any living family or genus

The fossils were discovered in the Green River Formation near the ghost town of Rainbow in eastern Utah. Roughly 47 million years ago, the area was a tectonically active, massive inland lake system that provided the perfect conditions for fossil preservation. Low-oxygen lake sediments and showers of volcanic ash slowed the decomposition of many fish, reptiles, birds, invertebrates and plants, allowing some of them to be preserved in amazing detail.

Researchers who had studied the original leaf fossils of this species had very little to work with. Without flowers, fruits or branches, they were limited to analyzing the shape and vein patterns of the leaves. Based on the arrangement, researchers thought it might be a single leaf made up of multiple smaller leaflets. This type of compound leaf is a defining feature of several plants in the ginseng family.

But the new fossils had leaves that were directly attached to stems, which painted a very different picture of what the plant once looked like.

“The two twigs we found show the same kind of leaf attached, but they’re not compound. They’re simple, which eliminates the possibility of it being anything in that family,” Manchester said.

The fossil’s berries ruled out families like the grasses and magnolias. The flowers did resemble some modern groups, but other features ruled those out, too. Even with such a pristine fossil in their repertoire, researchers were left with more questions than before.

Researchers see the fossil in a new light

Stumped, the team set the fossil aside for several years. Then the Florida Museum hired a curator of artificial intelligence who established a new microscopy workstation. When viewed through the digital microscope’s powerful lens and computer-enhanced shadow effect illumination, the authors could see subtle peculiarities they’d missed during prior observations.

When they focused on the fossil’s minute fruits, they could see micro-impressions left behind by their internal anatomy, including features of the small, developing seeds.

“Normally we don’t expect to see that preserved in these types of fossils, but maybe we’ve been overlooking it because our equipment didn’t pick up that kind of topographic relief,” Manchester said.

One of the plant’s strangest newly seen features was its stamens, the male reproductive organs of the flower. In most plant species, once the flower is fertilized, the stamens detach along with petals and the rest of the flower parts, which are no longer needed for reproduction.

“Usually, stamens will fall away as the fruit develops. And this thing seems unusual in that it’s retaining the stamens at the time it has mature fruits with seeds ready to disperse. We haven’t seen that in anything modern,” Manchester said.

With all modern families ruled out, they compared the traits to extinct families. Once again, there was no match to be found.

Julian Correa-Narvaez, the lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Florida, played a major role in gathering information to identify the fossils. “It’s important because it gives us a little bit of a clue about how these organisms were evolving and adapting in different places,” he said.

Plant families can contain astonishing amounts of diversity. Seemingly disparate plants like poison ivy, cashews and mangoes are all in the same family, along with over 800 other species. It’s unclear how much diversity in this mysterious extinct group has been lost to time.

This isn’t the only enigmatic species that has come out of the Green River Formation. Similar situations have unfolded when plant fossils from the locality surprised researchers, leading to the discovery of other extinct groups. “The book published in 1969 has all these interesting mysteries that remain,” Manchester said.

With digital access to museum specimens through tools like iDigBio, researchers can continue to study and understand the natural history of plant evolution.

Walter Judd of the Florida Museum of Natural History is also a co-author of the study.

Reference:
Steven R Manchester et al, Vegetative and reproductive morphology of Othniophyton elongatum (MacGinitie) gen. et comb. nov., an extinct angiosperm of possible caryophyllalean affinity from the Eocene of Colorado and Utah, USA, Annals of Botany (2024). DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcae196

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Florida Museum of Natural History

The giant fossil skull of an extinct elephant, discovered in northern India’s Kashmir Valley in 2000, sheds light on a poorly known episode in elephant evolutionary history.

The elephant skull was buried with 87 stone tools used by prehistoric humans, and all the materials were excavated under the leadership of Dr. Ghulam Bhat at the University of Jammu.

Recently, an international team of scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History, the British Museum, the University of York, and the Natural History Museum (London), along with the University of Helsinki’s Dr. Steven Zhang, studied the Kashmir skull to uncover the age and evolutionary context of this megaherbivore. The paper is published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“From the general shape of the skull, it’s quite apparent that the elephant belonged to Palaeoloxodon, or straight-tusked elephants, among the largest land mammals that ever lived. Full-grown adults easily stood around 4m tall at the shoulder and weighed 9–10 tonnes,” says Zhang, a paleontologist from the University’s Department of Geosciences and Geography.

“Yet what’s puzzled experts for some time is that the Kashmir skull lacks a thickened, forward-projecting crest at the skull roof which typifies other Palaeoloxodon skulls found in India.”

Over recent decades, whether the developmental extent of this crest could tell apart different species of Palaeoloxodon and the relative position of these species on the evolutionary tree of elephants has remained controversial. However, recent research concluded that the skull crest in these extinct elephants became more prominent with developmental and sexual maturity. This means that, once specimens can be aged by examining their teeth, it would be possible to compare skulls from individuals with similar levels of maturity.

“From the size, the wisdom teeth and a few other telltale features of the skull, it is evident that the animal was a majestic bull elephant in the prime of its life, but the lack of a well-developed skull crest, particularly in comparison with other mature male skulls from Europe and from India, tells us we have a different species on our hands here,” Zhang explained.

Instead, the research team noticed how the Kashmir skull’s features conform best with another obscure skull from Turkmenistan studied in the 1950s, which was proposed to represent a distinct species, Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus.

“What’s always been puzzling about the Turkmen skull is that, besides the lack of a prominent crest at the skull roof, its other features are highly similar to the already well-known European species, P. antiquus. And this led a number of experts to suggest that the Turkmen specimen is simply an aberrant individual of the European species,” says Zhang.

“But with the Kashmir skull added to the mix, it becomes clear now that the two specimens can be theorized to represent a distinct species that we previously knew very little about, with a broad distribution from Central Asia to the northern Indian Subcontinent,” added Dr. Advait Jukar, the study’s lead author, currently based at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

By measuring protein decomposition in the tooth enamel of the Kashmir Palaeoloxodon skull, and examining stone tools buried alongside the elephant remains, the team concluded that the Kashmir skull dates to the Middle Pleistocene period 300,000–400,000 years ago, very similar to the estimated age of the Turkmen skull. This supports the belief that the two skulls represent a species distinct from other Eurasian Palaeoloxodon.

Palaeoloxodon first evolved in Africa around 1 million years ago; this early African form had a narrow, convex forehead and underdevelopment of the skull crest. Later Palaeoloxodon, best-known from fossils discovered in Europe and India, have very wide, flattened forehead often associated with a thick crest that juts forward from the roof of the skull.

The team thus concluded that with a wide, flat forehead with only the faintest trace of a skull crest, P. turkmenicus may represent a poorly-known missing link that fills a gap in our understanding of how these prodigious prehistoric megaherbivores evolved.

Reference:
Advait M. Jukar et al, A remarkable Palaeoloxodon (Mammalia, Proboscidea) skull from the intermontane Kashmir Valley, India, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (2024). DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2396821

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Helsinki.

A team of Australian researchers has described a new species of now-extinct sawfly from an extremely well-preserved fossil found in central NSW.

This fossilised sawfly, which is between 11 and 16 million years old from the Miocene Period, was the first of its kind discovered in Australia and only the second discovered in the world. It was found by a team of palaeontologists in 2018 who were exploring McGraths Flat, a fossil site in central NSW that has since yielded many other detailed fossils.

Despite the name, sawflies are not flies but a type of wasp, with spitfires the most widely recognised group of sawfly species in Australia. They are called sawflies because they have a saw-like ovipositor that is used to lay eggs, and they could be mistaken as flies because they lack a typical ‘wasp waist’.

With the approval of the Mudgee Local Aboriginal Land Council, Wiradjuri words were used to name the newly described species of sawfly Baladi warru. ‘Baladi’ means ‘saw’ and ‘warru’ means ‘wasp’. This name honours the Traditional Owners of the lands on which the fossil was located.

Researchers from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, the University of Canberra, Australian Museum and Queensland Museum have analysed the sawfly’s wing venation and other features preserved in the fossil and determined its taxonomic (scientific naming) placement within sawflies. This allowed them to describe it as a new species.

CSIRO research scientist, Dr Juanita Rodriguez, helped describe the new sawfly species.

“We looked at the fossil and its morphology and then put this information together with molecular and morphological data from a wide sample of current sawfly species. This helped us decipher the fossil’s placement in the sawfly tree of life,” Dr Rodriguez said.

“We used the fossil’s age and its placement to establish that sawflies originated in the Cretaceous Period, around 100 million years ago, which means their ancient ancestors lived in Gondwana. When this supercontinent split up, sawflies ended up distributed in Australia and South America.

“When we examined the fossil, we identified pollen grains on the sawfly’s head which revealed it had visited a flowering Quintinia plant. This helped our team trace complex species interactions in the palaeoenvironment of McGraths Flat.”

University of Canberra palaeontologist and CSIRO visiting scientist, Dr Michael Frese, who found the fossil sawfly, said this discovery would help researchers track evolution and distribution of sawflies.

“In particular, this find has helped us in understanding the incredible ability of sawflies to feed on toxic plants,” Dr Frese said.

“They eat the leaves of Myrtaceae – a family of woody plants that includes eucalypts – because they have mouthparts with which they can separate toxic oils or a chemical detoxification system inside their gut when feeding on myrtaceous leaves. This enables the larvae, sometimes called spitfires, to use the oils as a defensive weapon.

“In terms of the bigger picture, our work is helping researchers make sense of their current distribution across Australia and the Americas.

“Although this particular species, Baladi warru, has been extinct for millions of years, it provides information on native pollinators so we can understand their evolution and impact in the present.”

Reference:
Juanita Rodriguez et al, A new exceptionally preserved sawfly fossil (Hymenoptera: Pergidae) and an evaluation of its utility for divergence time estimation and biogeography, Systematic Entomology (2024). DOI: 10.1111/syen.12653

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by CSIRO.

A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Luke Parry, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, have unveiled a spectacular new 450-million-year-old fossil arthropod (the group that contains spiders, centipedes, and insects). Besides being an extraordinary-looking new scientific species, the specimens are entirely preserved by fool’s gold.

The work is published in the journal Current Biology.

Associate Professor Parry said, “As well as having their beautiful and striking golden color, these fossils are spectacularly preserved. They look as if they could just get up and scuttle away.”

The new fossil, named Lomankus edgecombei, after arthropod expert Greg Edgecombe of London’s Natural History Museum, belongs to a group called megacheirans, an iconic group of arthropods with a large, modified leg (called a “great appendage”) at the front of their bodies that was used to capture prey.

Megacheirans like Lomankus were very diverse during the Cambrian Period (538–485 million years ago) but were thought to be largely extinct by the Ordovician Period (485–443 million years ago).

This discovery offers important new clues towards solving the long-standing riddle of how arthropods evolved the appendages on their heads: one or more pairs of legs at the front of their bodies modified for specialized functions like sensing the environment and capturing prey. Such appendages include the antennae of insects and crustaceans, and the pincers and fangs of spiders and scorpions.

“Today, there are more species of arthropod than any other group of animals on Earth. Part of the key to this success is their highly adaptable head and its appendages, that has adapted to various challenges like a biological Swiss army knife,” Associate Professor Parry continued.

While other megacheirans used their large first appendage for capturing prey, in Lomankus the typical claws are much reduced, with three long and flexible whip-like flagella at their end. This suggests that Lomankus was using this frontal appendage to sense the environment, rather than to capture prey, indicating it lived a very different lifestyle to its more ancient relatives in the Cambrian Period.

Unlike other megacheirans, Lomankus seems to lack eyes, suggesting that it relied on its frontal appendage to sense and search for food in the dark, low-oxygen environment in which it lived.

“Rather than representing a ‘dead end,’ Lomankus shows us that megacheirans continued to diversify and evolve long after the Cambrian, with the formerly fearsome great appendage now performing a totally different function,” Associate Professor Parry continued.

The fossil offers new clues towards solving the highly-debated question of what the equivalent of the great appendage of megacheirans is in living species.

Co-corresponding author Professor Yu Liu (Yunnan University) said, “These beautiful new fossils show a very clear plate on the underside of the head, associated with the mouth and flanked by the great appendages. This is a very similar arrangement to the head of megacheirans from the early Cambrian of China except for the lack of eyes, suggesting that Lomankus probably lived in a deeper and darker niche than its Cambrian relatives.”

This arrangement of features on the head is similar to living arthropods, suggesting the great appendage is the equivalent of the antenna of insects and the chelicera (mouthparts) of spiders and scorpions.

The fossil was found at a site in New York State, U.S. that contains the famous “Beecher’s Trilobite Bed”; a layer of rock containing multiple trilobites with incredible preservation. Aside from trilobites, other kinds of organisms are much less common at this site, reflecting the rarity of this find.

The animals preserved in Beecher’s Trilobite Bed lived in a hostile, low oxygen environment that allowed pyrite, commonly known as fool’s gold, to replace parts of their bodies after they were buried in sediment, resulting in spectacular golden 3D fossils. Pyrite is a very dense mineral, and so fossils from this layer can be CT scanned to reveal hidden details of their anatomy.

This technique involves rotating the specimen while taking thousands of X-ray images, allowing the fossils to be reconstructed in three dimensions.

Professor Derek Briggs, a co-author of the study at Yale University said, “These remarkable fossils show how rapid replacement of delicate anatomical features in pyrite before they decay, which is a signature feature of Beecher’s Trilobite Bed, preserves critical evidence of the evolution of life in the oceans 450 million years ago.”

Reference:
A pyritized Ordovician leanchoiliid arthropod, Current Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.013.

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Oxford.

Scientists have discovered the oldest-known fossil of a giant tadpole that wriggled around over 160 million years ago.

The new fossil, found in Argentina, surpasses the previous ancient record holder by about 20 million years.

Imprinted in a slab of sandstone are parts of the tadpole’s skull and backbone, along with impressions of its eyes and nerves.

“It’s not only the oldest tadpole known, but also the most exquisitely preserved,” said study author Mariana Chuliver, a biologist at Buenos Aires’ Maimonides University.

Researchers know frogs were hopping around as far back as 217 million years ago. But exactly how and when they evolved to begin as tadpoles remains unclear.

This new discovery adds some clarity to that timeline. At about a half foot (16 centimeters) long, the tadpole is a younger version of an extinct giant frog.

“It’s starting to help narrow the timeframe in which a frog becomes a frog,” said Ben Kligman, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the research.

The results were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The fossil is strikingly similar to the tadpoles of today—even containing remnants of a gill scaffold system that modern-day tadpoles use to sift food particles from water.

That means the amphibians’ survival strategy has stayed tried and true for millions of years, helping them outlast several mass extinctions, Kligman said.

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.