A newly described fossil reveals that leeches are at least 200 million years older than scientists previously thought, and that their earliest ancestors may have feasted not on blood, but on smaller marine creatures.

“This is the only body fossil we’ve ever found of this entire group,” said Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist with the University of California, Riverside. He collaborated with researchers from the University of Toronto, University of São Paulo, and Ohio State University on a paper describing the fossil, which is published in PeerJ.

Roughly 430 million years old, the fossil includes a large tail sucker—a feature still found in modern leeches—along with a segmented, teardrop-shaped body. But one important feature isn’t found in this fossil: the forward sucker that many of today’s leeches use to pierce skin and draw blood.

This absence, along with the fossil’s marine origin, suggests a very different early lifestyle for the group known as Hirudinida. Rather than sucking blood from mammals, reptiles, and other vertebrates, the earliest leeches may have roamed the oceans, consuming soft-bodied invertebrates whole or feeding on their internal fluids.

“Blood feeding takes a lot of specialized machinery,” Nanglu said. “Anticoagulants, mouthparts, and digestive enzymes are complex adaptations. It makes more sense that early leeches were swallowing prey whole or maybe drinking the internal fluids of small, soft-bodied marine animals.”

Previously, scientists believed leeches emerged about 150–200 million years ago. That timeline has now been pushed back by at least 200 million years, thanks to the fossil found in the Waukesha biota, a geological formation in Wisconsin known for preserving the bodies of soft tissue animals that usually decay before fossilization.

Preserving a leech fossil is no small feat. Leeches lack bones, shells, or exoskeletons that are most easily preserved over millions of years. Fossils like this require exceptional circumstances to preserve, often involving near-immediate burial, a low-oxygen environment, and unusual geochemical conditions.

“A rare animal and just the right environment to fossilize it—it’s like hitting the lottery twice,” Nanglu said.

The fossil came to light during a broader study of the Waukesha site by researchers at Ohio State University, who are co-authors on this paper. Though initially unrecognized for what it was, the specimen caught Nanglu’s eye during the early pandemic years.

He consulted with leech specialists, including lead author Danielle de Carle of the University of Toronto, and the group worked together to confirm its identity. They were ultimately convinced they’d found a leech because of the tail sucker and the clear body segmentation, which is a combination only found in leeches.

Today’s leeches are found in freshwater, saltwater, and even on land. Their feeding behaviors are equally diverse, from scavenging to predation to parasitic blood feeding. But understanding their origin has been difficult because soft-bodied animals rarely leave fossils.

Nanglu, who studies creatures rarely found in the fossil record, said the find is part of a larger effort to trace the early history of complex life, and to challenge assumptions about the past.

“We don’t know nearly as much as we think we do,” he said. “This paper is a reminder that the tree of life has deep roots, and we’re just beginning to map them.”

“It’s a beautiful specimen,” Nanglu added. “And it’s telling us something we didn’t expect.”

Reference:
de Carle D, et al. The first leech body fossil predates estimated hirudinidan origins by 200 million years, PeerJ (2025). doi.org/10.7717/peerj.19962

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of California – Riverside.

A team of international scientists has discovered new fossils at a field site in Africa that indicate Australopithecus, and the oldest specimens of Homo, coexisted at the same place in Africa at the same time—between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago. The paleoanthropologists discovered a new species of Australopithecus that has never been found anywhere.

The paper “New discoveries of Australopithecus and Homo from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia,” is published in the journal Nature.

The Ledi-Geraru Research Project is led by scientists at Arizona State University and the site has revealed the oldest member of the genus Homo and the earliest Oldowan stone tools on the planet.

The research team concluded that the Ledi-Geraru Australopithecus teeth are a new species, rather than belonging to Australopithecus afarensis (the famous “Lucy”), confirming that there is still no evidence of Lucy’s kind younger than 2.95 million years ago.

“This new research shows that the image many of us have in our minds of an ape to a Neanderthal to a modern human is not correct—evolution doesn’t work like that,” said ASU paleoecologist Kaye Reed. “Here we have two hominin species that are together. And human evolution is not linear, it’s a bushy tree, there are lifeforms that go extinct.”

Reed is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and President’s Professor Emerita at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU. She has been co-director of the Ledi-Geraru Research Project since 2002.

Ledi-Geraru

What fossils did they find to help them tell this story? Teeth, 13 of them to be exact.

This field site has been famous before. In 2013, a team led by Reed discovered the jaw of the earliest Homo specimen ever found at 2.8 million years old. This new paper details new teeth found at the site that belong to both the genus Homo and a new species of the genus Australopithecus.

“The new finds of Homo teeth from 2.6–2.8 million-year-old sediments—reported in this paper—confirms the antiquity of our lineage,” said Brian Villmoare, lead author and ASU alumnus.

“We know what the teeth and mandible of the earliest Homo look like, but that’s it. This emphasizes the critical importance of finding additional fossils to understand the differences between Australopithecus and Homo, and potentially how they were able to overlap in the fossil record at the same location.”

The team cannot name the species yet based on the teeth alone; more fossils are needed before that can happen.

How old are the fossils? How do scientists know these fossil teeth are millions of years old?

Volcanoes.

The Afar region is still an active rifting environment. There were a lot of volcanoes and tectonic activity and when these volcanoes erupted ash, the ash contained crystals called feldspars that allow the scientists to date them, explained Christopher Campisano, a geologist at ASU.

“We can date the eruptions that were happening on the landscape when they’re deposited,” said Campisano, a Research Scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and Associate Professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

“And we know that these fossils are interbed between those eruptions, so we can date units above and below the fossils. We are dating the volcanic ash of the eruptions that were happening while they were on the landscape.”

Finding fossils and dating the landscape not only helps scientists understand the species—it helps them recreate the environment millions of years ago. The modern faulted badlands of Ledi-Geraru, where the fossils were found, are a stark contrast to the landscape these hominins traversed 2.6–2.8 million years ago. Back then, rivers migrated across a vegetated landscape into shallow lakes that expanded and contracted over time.

Ramon Arrowsmith, a geologist at ASU, has been working with the Ledi-Geraru Research Project since 2002. He explained the area has an interpretable geologic record with good age control for the geologic time range of 2.3 to 2.95 million years ago.

“It is a critical time period for human evolution as this new paper shows,” said Arrowsmith, professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration. “The geology gives us the age and characteristics of the sedimentary deposits containing the fossils. It is essential for age control.”

Reed said the team is examining tooth enamel now to find out what they can about what these species were eating. There are still remaining questions the team will continue to work on.

Were the early Homo and this unidentified species of Australopithecus eating the same things? Were they fighting for or sharing resources? Did they pass each other daily? Who were the ancestors of these species?

No one knows—yet.

“Whenever you have an exciting discovery, if you’re a paleontologist, you always know that you need more information,” said Reed. “You need more fossils. That’s why it’s an important field to train people in and for people to go out and find their own sites and find places that we haven’t found fossils yet.”

“More fossils will help us tell the story of what happened to our ancestors a long time ago—but because we’re the survivors, we know that it happened to us.”

The team of scientists and field team working on this project is widespread and many work at Arizona State University, or are alumni of ASU.

Reference:
New discoveries of Australopithecus and Homo from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09390-4.

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Arizona State University.

Researchers at the Gray Fossil Site and Museum have discovered something surprisingly familiar among the site’s exotic ancient tapirs and rhinos: the first fossil deer, representing one of the earliest records of the deer family in North America.

The newly described fossils of Eocoileus gentryorum, detailed in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, offer a fascinating glimpse into the deep roots of America’s most recognizable wildlife.

These 5-million-year-old fossils reveal the likely ancestor of today’s white-tailed deer—animals that have a deep history in Appalachian forests and have great importance to the people living here.

“The Gray Fossil Site continues to yield extraordinary discoveries that reshape our understanding of ancient life,” said Dr. Blaine Schubert, executive director of the Gray Fossil Site and Museum. “Our team’s collaborative research is uncovering remarkable stories about how ecosystems have evolved over millions of years. From tapirs and mastodons to these early deer, we’re revealing the incredible diversity of life that once flourished in Tennessee and how some species, like deer, have shown amazing resilience through geological time.”

The research team, which was led by Head Curator Dr. Joshua Samuels and included recent graduate Olivia Williams and Assistant Collections Manager Shay Maden, collaborated to piece together the story from fragmentary remains. Those remains include part of a juvenile skull, an upper molar and various limb bones.

Previously, Eocoileus gentryorum was known only from Florida, making the Tennessee discovery significant for understanding how quickly these early deer spread across the continent.

Interestingly, these ancient deer were notably smaller than most modern species.

“These early deer are generally smaller than modern deer species in the New World,” Williams explained, highlighting how the animals have evolved over millions of years. “The only smaller species today are the Key deer of Florida and brocket deer of Central and South America.”

The discovery underscores the incredible versatility of deer as a species.

Fossil evidence from Washington and Florida shows these early deer dispersed rapidly coast-to-coast after their North American arrival, successfully adapting to diverse habitats from Pacific forests to Appalachian highlands.

“Deer have probably filled the same ecological role in Appalachian forests for nearly 5 million years,” Samuels said, “persisting and thriving through dramatic climate changes and habitat shifts that eliminated other large herbivores from the region.”

This fossil deer is the latest in a string of fascinating discoveries, including a strong-jawed salamander and a giant flying squirrel, at the site. It’s part of what makes ETSU the flagship institution of Appalachia.

“Discoveries like this connect Appalachia’s past to its present in powerful ways,” said Dr. Joe Bidwell, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “Our researchers are revealing not just the history of a species, but the evolutionary lineage of life in this region. It is work that exemplifies ETSU’s commitment to exploring and preserving the natural history of Appalachia.”

Reference:
Joshua X. Samuels et al, Early Pliocene Deer from the Gray Fossil Site, Appalachian Highlands, Tennessee, USA, Palaeontologia Electronica (2025). DOI: 10.26879/1560

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by East Tennessee State University.

Scientists have discovered the fossil of a tiny mouse-sized mammal that lived in the time of the dinosaurs in Chilean Patagonia.

“Yeutherium pressor” weighed between 30 and 40 grams (about one ounce) and lived in the Upper Cretaceous period, about 74 million years ago.

It is the smallest mammal ever found in this region of South America, dating back to the era when it was part of a continental land mass known as Gondwana.

The fossil consists of “a small piece of jaw with a molar and the crown and roots of two other molars,” said Hans Puschel, who led the team of scientists from the University of Chile and Chile’s Millennium Nucleus research center on early mammals.

The discovery was published this month in the British scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Researchers found the fossil in the Rio de las Las Chinas Valley in Chile’s Magallanes region, about 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) south of Santiago.

Despite its similarity to a small rodent, “Yeutherium pressor” was a mammal that must have laid eggs, like the platypus, or carried its young in a pouch like kangaroos or opossums.

The shape of its teeth suggests that it probably had a diet of relatively hard vegetables.

Just like the dinosaurs with whom it coexisted, the tiny mammal abruptly went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 66 million years ago.

Reference:
Hans P. Püschel et al, A subantarctic reigitheriid and the evolution of crushing teeth in these enigmatic Mesozoic mammals, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2025.1056

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

Fossils are the backbone—oftentimes literally—of researching the far past. And because most of human evolution took place throughout Africa, the fossils the continent holds are vital to piecing together early human history. The fossils there also tell other stories of ancient ecological history, and how humans fit into the lives of the animals and plants around them.

But most of the known fossil record comes from just a handful of sites across Africa, said Tyler Faith, chief curator and curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah. That’s one reason why he’s been squeezing his way through newly discovered caves in South Africa.

In 2022, Faith, a paleoecologist and University of Utah professor of anthropology, set out to find a series of caves mentioned in a report from the 1980s. They were somewhere near the tip of South Africa in the Cango Valley, a region streaked with outcrops of limestone, the kind of rock that is often riddled with caves. But when he arrived, there were so many caves he couldn’t narrow down which were described in the report. He came back several times over the years, documenting two dozen caves.

“We found all these caves, and there appears to be a really rich fossil record within them,” Faith said. “Fossils are everywhere.”

The caves formed as water worked its way through the limestone over millions of years, eventually carving out tunnels and chambers in the rock. Throughout the caves’ existence, bones found their way inside. Sometimes, this was because a predator took its meals within the cave. Other times, remains were swept in with debris and water. And occasionally, an unlucky animal might have fallen in if a cave entrance or roof collapsed. Layers of sediment slowly built up over the bones, fossilizing them.

In June of 2025, Faith returned to the caves with a crew of researchers, ready to excavate. The work began with a tromp around, looking for cave entrances. Those entrances are inconspicuous to the untrained eye, sheltered by trees and vegetation. But their leafy concealment is one major tell that there’s a cave nearby, Faith said. Because the caves need flowing water to form, trees and shrubs cluster around their opening to take advantage of the extra moisture.

The cave entrances are often just large enough for an adult to wriggle through. Once inside, the limestone gives way to a maze of tunnels that could require belly crawling through bat guano or descending tight, steep shafts to navigate. Cave ticks writhed among the piles of guano, waiting to sink their hooks into a passerby. And without marking which direction they came from, the spelunkers could easily get lost amidst the twists and turns.

“It’s oppressively quiet and dark,” Faith said. “You start hearing things that aren’t there.”

Faith and his crew visited four caves on their trip, with two main goals: find fossils and peg an age to the things they found. There were fossils galore, sticking out of sediments adhering to ceilings and walls and erupting out of the ground. To further explore the caves’ potential, the team dug multiple test pits to see what lies beneath the surface.

Ancient wildebeests, zebras and unknown carnivores were among the finds. A molar, conspicuously like that of a human, was found poking out of a ceiling—but it’s not yet confirmed if the tooth is indeed from a hominid. Further hominid-like fossils emerged from other caves as well.

One of the most abundant animals the team found was an extinct mountain goat relative, likely similar to an ibex. The animal was first discovered around 25 years ago, but the known fossils were too incomplete to give it a name or to understand how it is connected to related species.

But now, thanks to the Cango Valley caves, Faith has sufficiently complete fossils to properly document the species. The prize specimen will come from an individual lodged in sediments cemented to the side of a cave, which was painstakingly removed with a hammer and chisel over several days.

As for the second goal of dating the fossils, the Cango Valley research team won’t know any ages for sure until they can date samples of the caves’ flowstones, the sheet-like mineral deposits that form as water flows through. Dating the flowstones sandwiching a layer of sediment gives researchers the minimum and maximum age of the fossils trapped in between.

Faith’s hunch is that the fossils probably came from the Pleistocene Epoch, but that’s a wide window: a period of around 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago. “I strongly suspect they are more than 100,000 years old,” he said.

The caves’ age is great news for South Africa’s fossil record. Most fossils recovered in southern parts of the country are from the last 100,000 years, while older fossils—those from the last several million years or so—are mostly isolated in the north, near Johannesburg.

The Cango Valley cave project has the potential to bolster the older fossil record, Faith said. And, since the caves hold what seem to be hominid fossils, they could help fill gaps about early human evolution and humans’ place in the landscape.

For now, the caves Faith and his team explored are just the beginning. The sheer number of subterranean time capsules in the area means decades of discoveries lie ahead.

“There’s zillions of caves in this area that I think are waiting for someone to pop into them and start working,” Faith said. “There’s lifetimes of work to do in that valley.”

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Jude Coleman, University of Utah.

About 56 million years ago, when Earth experienced a dramatic rise in global temperatures, one meat-eating mammal responded in a surprising way: It started eating more bones.

That’s the conclusion reached by a Rutgers-led team of researchers, whose recent study of fossil teeth from the extinct predator Dissacus praenuntius reveals how animals adapted to a period of extreme climate change known as the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The findings, published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, could help scientists predict how today’s wildlife might respond to modern global warming.

“What happened during the PETM very much mirrors what’s happening today and what will happen in the future,” said Andrew Schwartz, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the School of Arts and Sciences, who led the research. “We’re seeing the same patterns. Carbon dioxide levels are rising, temperatures are higher and ecosystems are being disrupted.”

Associate Professor Robert Scott of the Department of Anthropology is a co-author of the study. Schwartz, Scott and another colleague used a technique called dental microwear texture analysis to study the tiny pits and scratches left on fossilized teeth. These marks reveal what kinds of food the animal was chewing in the weeks before it died.

The ancient omnivore was about the size of a jackal or a coyote and likely consumed a mix of meat and other food sources like fruits and insects. “They looked superficially like wolves with oversized heads,” Schwartz said, describing them as “super weird mammals.” “Their teeth were kind of like hyenas. But they had little tiny hooves on each of their toes.”

Before this period of rising temperatures, Dissacus had a diet similar to modern cheetahs, eating mostly tough flesh. But during and after this ancient period, its teeth showed signs of crunching harder materials, such as bones.

“We found that their dental microwear looked more like that of lions and hyenas,” Schwartz said. “That suggests they were eating more brittle food, which were probably bones, because their usual prey was smaller or less available.”

This dietary shift happened alongside a modest reduction in body size, likely because of food scarcity. While earlier hypotheses blamed shrinking animals on hotter temperatures alone, this latest research suggests that limited food played a bigger role, Schwartz said.

This period of rapid global warming lasted about 200,000 years, but the changes it triggered were fast and dramatic. Schwartz said studies of the past like his can offer practical lessons for today and what comes next.

“One of the best ways to know what’s going to happen in the future is to look back at the past,” he said. “How did animals change? How did ecosystems respond?”

The findings also highlight the importance of dietary flexibility, he said. Animals that can eat a variety of foods are more likely to survive environmental stress.

“In the short term, it’s great to be the best at what you do,” Schwartz said. “But in the long term, it’s risky. Generalists, meaning animals that are good at a lot of things, are more likely to survive when the environment changes.”

Such an insight may be helpful for modern conservation biologists, allowing them to identify which species today may be most vulnerable, he said. Animals with narrow diets, such as pandas, may struggle as their habitats shrink. But adaptable species, including jackals or raccoons, might fare better.

“We already see this happening,” Schwartz said. “In my earlier research, jackals in Africa started eating more bones and insects over time, probably because of habitat loss and climate stress.”

The study also showed that rapid climate warming as seen during the ancient past can lead to major changes in ecosystems, including shifts in available prey and changes in predator behavior. This may suggest that modern climate change could similarly disrupt food webs and force animals to adapt, or risk extinction, he said.

Even though Dissacus was a successful and adaptable animal that lived for about 15 million years, it eventually went extinct. Scientists think this happened because of changes in the environment and competition from other animals, Schwartz said.

Schwartz conducted his research using a combination of fieldwork and lab analysis, focusing on fossil specimens from the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, a site with a rich and continuous fossil record spanning millions of years. Schwartz chose the location because it preserves a detailed sequence of environmental and ecological changes during the ancient period of climate warming.

Schwartz has been interested in paleontology, specifically dinosaurs, since he was a boy, journeying with his father, an amateur fossil hunter, on treks through New Jersey’s rivers and streams. Now, as a late-stage doctoral student, he hopes to use ancient fossils to answer urgent questions about the future.

He also wants to inspire the next generation of researchers.

“I love sharing this work,” he said. “If I see a kid in a museum looking at a dinosaur, I say, ‘Hey, I’m a paleontologist. You can do this, too.'”

Reference:
Andrew Schwartz et al, Dietary change across the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum in the mesonychid Dissacus praenuntius, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.palaeo.2025.113089

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Kitta MacPherson, Rutgers University.

The Burgess Shale in British Columbia is renowned for its exceptional preservation of soft tissues in fossils, including limbs and guts. While trilobites are abundant in the fossil record thanks to their hard exoskeleton, their soft limbs are rarely preserved and poorly understood. However, Olenoides serratus, a particularly abundant and well-preserved Burgess Shale trilobite, offers a unique opportunity to study these appendages.

In a new study published in BMC Biology, researchers led by Sarah Losso, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) at Harvard, analyzed 156 limbs from 28 O. serratus fossil specimens to reconstruct the precise movement and function of these ancient arthropod appendages—shedding light on one of the planet’s earliest and most successful animals.

“Understanding behavior and movement of fossils is challenging, because you cannot observe this activity like in living animals,” said Losso. “Instead, we had to rely on carefully examining the morphology in as many specimens as possible, as well as using modern analogs to understand how these ancient animals lived.”

Arthropods have jointed legs composed of multiple segments that can reach upwards (extend) or downwards (flex). The range of motion depends on the difference between how far each joint can reach in either direction. This range, along with the leg and shape of each segment, determines how the animal uses the limb for walking, grabbing, and burrowing.

Horseshoe crabs, common arthropods found along the eastern shore of North America, are frequently compared to trilobites even though they are not closely related. Horseshoe crabs belong to a different branch of the arthropod tree, more closely related to spiders and scorpions, whereas trilobites’ family ties remain uncertain. The comparison is due to the similarity in that both animals patrol the ocean floor on jointed legs. The results, however, showed less similarity between the two animals.

Unlike horseshoe crabs, whose limb joints alternate in their specialization for flexing and extending—a pattern that facilitates both feeding and protection—O. serratus displayed a simpler, but highly functional limb design.

“We found that the limbs of O. serratus had a smaller range of extension and only in the part of the limb farther from the body,” explained Losso. Although their limbs were not used in exactly the same way as horseshoe crabs, Olenoides could walk, burrow, bring food towards its mouth, and even raise its body above the seafloor.

To bring their findings to life, the team created sophisticated 3D digital models based on hundreds of fossil images preserved at different angles. Because fossilized trilobite limbs are usually squashed flat, reconstructing them in three-dimensions posed a challenge.

“We relied on exceptionally well-preserved specimens, comparing limb preservation across many angles and filling in missing details using related fossils,” said senior author Professor Javier Ortega-Hernández, also in OEB.

The team compared the shape of trace fossils with the movement of the limbs.

“Olenoides serratus could create trace fossils of different depths using different movements,” Losso explained. “They could raise their body above the sediment in order to walk over obstacles or to move more efficiently in fast-flowing water.”

Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that the male species also had specialized appendages used for mating, and that each leg also had a gill used for breathing.

While more than 22,000 species of trilobites have been described, less than 0.2% show any trace of legs at all. Nevertheless, lack of preservation does not imply these ancient arthropods went legless—rather, their soft limbs simply seldom survived the fossilization process. The rare conditions of the Burgess Shale—a fast burial by underwater landslides cutting off oxygen—were key to capturing such fleeting biological details.

The study provides a rare window into a more dynamic picture of life more than half a billion years ago, as trilobites like Olenoides serratus scuttled across the seabed with sophisticated limbs that could burrow and foraged through prehistoric seas, revealing not just how they survived, but how they thrived.

Reference:
Sarah R. Losso et al, Quantification of leg mobility in the Burgess Shale Olenoides serratus indicates functional differences between trilobite and xiphosuran appendages, BMC Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1186/s12915-025-02335-3

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

A fossilized tooth recovered from the Galería site in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain) confirms that reindeer (Rangifer) inhabited this area of the Iberian Peninsula between 243,000 and 300,000 years ago. It represents one of the southernmost reindeer remains ever found in Eurasia and constitutes the earliest record of glacial fauna in the Iberian Peninsula, according to a study published today in the journal Quaternary.

The presence of cold-adapted species such as reindeer at these latitudes indicates that the climate at that time was glacial. The fossil was uncovered in Galería’s GIIIa unit, in the same layer as a human cranial fragment and numerous lithic artifacts, confirming that this species coexisted with early human populations.

This discovery, carried out by researchers from the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN-CSIC); the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), and the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES-CERCA), demonstrates that glacial fauna extended into the Iberian Peninsula, which—like other southern European peninsulas—served as a refuge for species not adapted to cold climates.

“This fossil helps to refine the dating of the site’s stratigraphic levels, but it also provides evidence of the intensity of the glacial periods that affected the peninsula’s inhabitants during the Pleistocene,” explains Jan van der Made, a researcher at MNCN-CSIC. “The presence of this reindeer at such a latitude indicates that extreme cold may have impacted Iberian fauna earlier and more severely than previously thought,” he adds.

The most recent glaciations expanded the ecosystem known as the “Mammoth Steppe,” which hosted not only these large proboscideans but also woolly rhinoceroses and reindeer. Some of these species reached as far south as Madrid and even Granada, well below the latitude of Atapuerca.

“This work highlights the importance of studying the biogeographic patterns of glacial fauna, allowing us to better understand the adaptive capacity of human populations during the Middle Pleistocene, roughly between 125,000 and 800,000 years ago,” concludes Ignacio Aguilar Lazagabaster, a researcher at CENIEH.

Reference:
Jan van der Made et al, Southernmost Eurasian Record of Reindeer (Rangifer) in MIS 8 at Galería (Atapuerca, Spain): Evidence of Progressive Southern Expansion of Glacial Fauna Across Climatic Cycles, Quaternary (2025). DOI: 10.3390/quat8030043

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Spanish National Research Centre for Human Evolution.

Researchers have demonstrated a technique that geometrically models organic objects and creates photorealistic, three-dimensional (3D) images of those objects. These mathematically precise images can be used to engineer robotic systems capable of identifying and sorting these complex shapes autonomously.

The technique was created to improve robotic systems that sort and identify microscopic marine fossils used in climate research, but could serve as a blueprint for applications in a range of other fields.

The paper, “Foram3D: A Pipeline for 3D Synthetic Data Generation and Rendering of Foraminifera for Image Analysis and Reconstruction,” is published in the journal Marine Micropaleontology.

“We demonstrated the functionality of this technique in two ways: in a robotic system for 3D imaging of these microscopic marine fossils and in a robotic system for identification of the fossils,” says Edgar Lobaton, co-author of a paper on the work and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “And identifying these fossils is very challenging, which is what led us to this work in the first place.”

At issue are foraminifera, or forams, which have been prevalent in Earth’s oceans for more than 100 million years. Forams are protists, neither plant nor animal, and when they die, they leave behind their tiny shells. These shells give scientists insights into the characteristics of the oceans as they existed when the forams were alive.

For example, different types of foram species thrive in different kinds of ocean environments, and chemical measurements can tell scientists about everything from the ocean’s chemistry to its temperature when the shell was being formed.

However, evaluating foram shells and fossils is both tedious and time consuming—imagine sorting through hundreds of similarly shaped objects that are less than a millimeter wide. This is why paleontology researchers want to automate the process. And the nature of the challenge caught the interest of Lobaton.

“We had already developed a fully functional robotic system for identifying and sorting forams, called Forabot,” Lobaton says. “And creating Forabot taught us that the most time-consuming aspect of the process is fine-tuning the hardware and how it is laid out.

“What size should each component be? What is the best configuration of components? There are a million variations you may want to tweak. The work we’re sharing here was developed specifically to address that challenge, because we wanted to find a more efficient way to improve Forabot.”

By capturing 3D facsimiles of these fossils with incredible precision, the researchers can use those facsimiles in simulations of the robotic system.

“You can make adjustments in the simulation far more easily than when working with actual hardware,” Lobaton says. “And once you have optimized the configuration of the system in the simulation, the process of fine-tuning the hardware in the real world is vastly easier—you already know how it should be set up.”

For this work, the researchers modified a mathematical model so that it can produce detailed 3D facsimiles of the fossils. Lobaton’s team then worked with a paleontologist to ensure the facsimiles corresponded to the characteristics of seven representative species of foraminifera.

The researchers then turned to a simulation of Forabot. Using the newly captured 3D facsimiles to explore modifications to Forabot’s system, the researchers were able to improve its accuracy from 82% to 89%—without having to go through the time-consuming process of repeatedly reconfiguring the hardware in their lab.

“Using our synthetic dataset, we were able to test how state-of-the-art AI models can reconstruct 3D shapes from just a sparse set of 2D images,” says Sanjana Banerjee, corresponding author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State.

“These simulations helped us understand the best imaging conditions and are now guiding the development of a new robotic system focused on 3D reconstruction—an essential step toward further automating the identification of these microfossils.”

“Our work provides a strong foundation for studying the growth and morphology of a wide range of foraminifera species,” Banerjee says. “It also tackles major challenges in micropaleontology, such as limited data availability and accurate shape recovery.”

“More broadly, the approach we took here could be used to develop or optimize any robotic system that identifies or sorts objects with complex shapes,” Lobaton says. “Potential use cases include microbe and pathogen isolation at the microscopic scale and sorting of agricultural produce at a larger scale.”

The researchers have made the code base used in this work open source, so other researchers can make use of it. That can be found at: https://github.com/ARoS-NCSU/Forams-3DGeneration.

The paper was co-authored by Turner Richmond, a former Ph.D. student at NC State; Michael Daniele, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State; and Thomas Marchitto, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Reference:
Sanjana Banerjee et al, Foram3D: A pipeline for 3D synthetic data generation and rendering of foraminifera for image analysis and reconstruction, Marine Micropaleontology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.marmicro.2025.102486

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by North Carolina State University.

More than 300 million years ago, during the Carboniferous Period, much of northern Illinois outside Chicago — including what is now the Mazon Creek (“muh-ZAHN”) fossil site — was alive with ancient creatures thriving in lush, tropical swamps, river deltas and shallow seas.

Now, researchers at the University of Missouri’s College of Arts and Science are collaborating with geologist Gordon Baird to reanalyze his massive fossil collection from Mazon Creek — currently housed at the Field Museum in Chicago — which includes 300,000 siderite concretions from around 350 different localities.

The Mazon Creek fossil beds are renowned for their exceptional preservation of both plants and animals, made possible by their unique geological setting. The fossils are encased in siderite — an iron carbonate mineral — forming abundant concretions that have become a treasure trove for scientists and avocational fossil hunters alike.

Thanks to decades of research at Mazon Creek, including foundational fieldwork by Baird and colleagues in the late 1970s, we now have an extraordinary view of life along that ancient coast.

A snapshot of ancient life

Baird’s original work at the Mazon Creek fossil site helped distinguish two major faunal assemblages, or groups of animal remains. These assemblages helped scientists understand the ancient environments where the fossils originated. They were a marine assemblage comprised of life in offshore coastal waters, and a mixed assemblage from a river delta along the shoreline, where freshwater organisms and washed-in terrestrial plants and animals were preserved together.

Now, Mizzou’s team has confirmed a slightly more nuanced view of Baird’s original findings, using modern data analysis techniques coupled with advanced imaging at Mizzou’s X-ray Microanalysis Core.

“We found three readily identifiable paleoenvironments, including the unique characteristics of a benthic marine assemblage representing a transitional habitat between the nearshore and offshore zones,” said Jim Schiffbauer, Marie M. and Harry L. Smith Endowed Professor of Geological Sciences. “These ancient environments were each dominated by specific groups of animals, for example freshwater animals nearest to shore, jellyfish and sea anemones further offshore, and marine clams and worms in the transitional zone.”

The fossils formed during a phase of sea-level rise and flooding of what used to be large coal swamps.

“The different environments affected how quickly and deeply organisms were buried, and in what specific geochemical conditions fossilization may have started,” Schiffbauer said. “That, in turn, shaped where certain microbes lived and helped form the minerals that make up the concretions surrounding these fossils today.”

Next steps

In current and future research, Schiffbauer and Baird are using this information to create a sedimentological model to show how the Mazon Creek ecosystem connects to the Colchester coal layers below — where coal mining led to the fossil site’s original discovery.

“Given that multiple episodes of rapid coastal drowning events occurred in the U.S. midcontinent during the Carboniferous Period, refinement of information from the Mazon Creek locality will lead to a deeper understanding of similar deposits in other coal basins,” said Baird, who is now an emeritus professor at State University of New York at Fredonia.

Mizzou’s new collaborative analysis with Baird, colleagues from the private sector and the University of Toronto is the most comprehensive and data-driven picture of what Mazon Creek’s ancient ecosystem looked like long ago. This knowledge contributes significantly to our understanding of the Carboniferous Period’s biodiversity and paleoecology.

“It offers a real snapshot of the incredible diversity present in the late Carboniferous Period and allows for inferences about the complexity of food chains and how this ecosystem functioned,” Schiffbauer said. “Now, we have an unparalleled and statistically supported look at the interconnected terrestrial, estuarine and marine life of the Carboniferous Period.”

The study, “283,821 concretions, how do you measure the Mazon Creek? Assessing the paleoenvironmental and taphonomic nature of the Braidwood and Essex assemblages,” was published in the journal Paleobiology.

Other co-authors are John Warren Huntley and Tara Selly at Mizzou; Charles Chabica at Northeastern Illinois University; Marc Laflamme at University of Toronto Mississauga; and A. Drew Muscente at Princeton Consultants, Inc.

Reference:
James Schiffbauer, Gordon C. Baird, John Warren Huntley, Tara Selly, Charles W. Shabica, Marc Laflamme, A. Drew Muscente. 283,821 concretions, how do you measure the Mazon Creek? Assessing the paleoenvironmental and taphonomic nature of the Braidwood and Essex assemblages. Paleobiology, 2025; 1 DOI: 10.1017/pab.2025.10045

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia.

An international team of paleontologists has spent more than 15 years excavating and studying fossils from Africa to expand our understanding of the Permian, a period of Earth’s history that began 299 million years ago and ended 252 million years ago with our planet’s largest and most devastating mass extinction. Led by researchers at the University of Washington and the Field Museum of Natural History, the team is identifying the animals that thrived in southern Pangea — the planet’s single supercontinent at the time — just before the so-called “Great Dying” wiped out about 70% of terrestrial species, and an even larger fraction of marine ones.

“This mass extinction was nothing short of a cataclysm for life on Earth, and changed the course of evolution,” said Christian Sidor, a UW professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the UW Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture. “But we lack a comprehensive view of which species survived, which didn’t, and why. The fossils we have collected in Tanzania and Zambia will give us a more global perspective on this unprecedented period in our planet’s natural history.”

Sidor and Kenneth Angielczyk, curator of paleomammalogy at the Field Museum, are co-editors of a 14-article series published Aug. 7 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology featuring the team’s recent discoveries about the myriad of animals that made Permian Africa their home. These include saber-toothed predators, burrowing foragers and a large, salamander-like creature.

All these finds were excavated in three basins across southern Africa: the Ruhuhu Basin in southern Tanzania, the Luangwa Basin in eastern Zambia and the Mid-Zambezi Basin in southern Zambia. Most were discovered by team members on multiple, month-long excavation trips to the region over the past 17 years. Others were analyses of specimens dug up decades prior that had been stored in museum collections.

“These parts of Zambia and Tanzania contain absolutely beautiful fossils from the Permian,” said Sidor. “They are giving us an unprecedented view of life on land leading up to the mass extinction.”

Starting in 2007, Sidor and his team, including UW students and postdoctoral researchers, made five trips to the Ruhuhu Basin and four to the Mid-Zambezi and Luangwa basins, all in cooperation with the Tanzanian and Zambian governments. The researchers trekked between field sites miles apart to collect fossils. They stayed in villages or camped in the open — once waking during the night to the ground-quaking stomps of a nearby elephant herd. All fossils collected by the team will be returned to Tanzania and Zambia after researchers have completed their analyses.

The Permian is the endpoint of what paleontologists call the Paleozoic Era. During this time, animal life — which evolved first in Earth’s oceans — began to colonize land and complex terrestrial ecosystems developed. By the Permian, a diverse array of amphibian and reptile-like creatures roamed environments ranging from early forests to arid valleys. The end-Permian mass extinction — whose precise cause scientists are still debating — obliterated many of these ecosystems and ushered in the Mesozoic Era, which saw the evolution of dinosaurs, as well as the first birds, flowering plants and mammals.

For decades, scientists’ best understanding of the Permian, the Great Dying and the start of the Mesozoic came from the Karoo Basin in South Africa, which contains a near-complete fossil record of periods before and after the mass extinction. But beginning in the 1930s, paleontologists realized that basins in Tanzania and Zambia contain fossil records of this time range that are almost as pristine as the Karoo’s. The excavation trips by Sidor, Angielczyk and their colleagues represent the largest analysis to date of the region’s fossil record from before and after the Great Dying. In 2018, they published a comprehensive analysis of the post-Permian animals of the Ruhuhu and Luangwa basins. These new papers look further back into the Permian.

“The number of specimens we’ve found in Zambia and Tanzania is so high and their condition is so exquisite that we can make species-level comparisons to what paleontologists have found in South Africa,” said Sidor. “I know of no better place on Earth for getting sufficient detail of this time period to make such detailed conclusions and comparisons.”

The team’s papers describe a number of new species of dicynodonts. These small, burrowing, reptile-like herbivores first evolved in the mid-Permian. By the time of the mass extinction, dicynodonts — many of whom sported a beak-like snout with two small tusks that likely aided burrowing — were the dominant plant-eaters on land. The team’s findings also include several new species of large, saber-toothed predators called gorgonopsians, as well as a new species of temnospondyl, a large salamander-like amphibian.

“We can now compare two different geographic regions of Pangea and see what was going on both before and after the end-Permian mass extinction,” said Sidor. “We can really start to ask questions about who survived and who didn’t.”

In addition to the UW and the Field Museum, the team includes scientists from the University of Chicago, Loyola University Chicago, Idaho State University, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, Carleton University, the University of Southern California, the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the Iziko South African Museum, Southern Methodist University, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the Museum for Natural History in Berlin, the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Oklahoma, the National Heritage Conservation Commission in Lusaka, Virginia Tech, and the Chipembele Wildlife Education Center in Mfume, Zambia. Seven of these scientists are former UW postdoctoral researchers, doctoral students or undergraduate students. The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

References:

1. Christian A. Sidor, Kenneth D. Angielczyk. Introduction to vertebrate evolution in the Permian rift basins of Tanzania and Zambia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2446616
2. Roger M. H. Smith, Christian A. Sidor, Kenneth D. Angielczyk, Sterling J. Nesbitt, J-Sébastien Steyer, Neil J. Tabor. Origin of conglomerate-hosted bonebeds at the base of the upper Permian Usili Formation, Ruhuhu Basin, Tanzania. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2025.2466442
3. J.-Sébastien Steyer, Christian A. Sidor. The first Paleozoic temnospondyl from Zambia: a new species of Rhineceps from the Permian Madumabisa Mudstone Formation, Mid-Zambezi Basin. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2025.2451312
4. Xavier A. Jenkins, Claire Browning, Jonah Choiniere, Brandon R. Peecook. A new moradisaurine captorhinid from the Upper Permian (Lopingian) upper Madumabisa Mudstone Formation (Luangwa Basin) of Zambia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2427529
5. Christian F. Kammerer, Kenneth D. Angielczyk, Jörg Fröbisch. Permian origins of the Lystrosauridae (Therapsida: Dicynodontia). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2025.2451813
6. Henry N. Thomas, Kenneth D. Angielczyk, Brandon R. Peecook. The first geikiid dicynodont, Aulacephalodon kapoliwacela , sp. nov. (Therapsida, Anomodontia), from the upper Madumabisa Mudstone Formation, Zambia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2446603
7. Kenneth D. Angielczyk, Benjamin K. A. Otoo. A new cryptodont dicynodont (Therapsida, Anomodontia) from the Lopingian Usili Formation, Ruhuhu Basin, Tanzania. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2441898
8. Brenlee K. Shipps, Christian A. Sidor, Kenneth D. Angielczyk. Dicynodontoides kubwa , sp. nov. (Synapsida: Anomodontia), a new large emydopoid from the base of the Usili Formation (Ruhuhu Basin, Tanzania). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2440112
9. Caroline P. Abbott, Selena A. Martinez, Jacqueline K. Lungmus, Isaac Magallanes, Kenneth D. Angielczyk. The postcranial anatomy of Kembawacela kitchingi (Therapsida, Anomodontia) and the functional diversity of cistecephalid forelimbs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2025.2486068
10. Zoe T. Kulik. Bone histology of a gorgonopsian skeleton from the upper Madumabisa Mudstone Formation, Zambia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2025.2490799
11. Alex Acker, Brandon R. Peecook, Christian A. Sidor, Megan R. Whitney. The first occurrence of Cyonosaurus (Therapsida, Gorgonopsia) from the Luangwa Basin of Zambia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2444407
12. Arjan Mann, Christian A. Sidor. Arctops umulunshi , sp. nov. (Therapsida: Gorgonopsia) from the upper Madumabisa Mudstone Formation of Zambia, with new information on gorgonopsian postcranial anatomy. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2444405
13. Adam K. Huttenlocker, Claire Browning, Brandon R. Peecook, Roger M. H. Smith, Pia A. Viglietti. The stratigraphic record of the therocephalian Theriognathus (Synapsida) and its utility as a biostratigraphic index in Karoo-Aged basins. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2441899
14. Brandon R. Peecook, Christian A. Sidor, Julia A. McIntosh, Pia A. Viglietti, Roger M. H. Smith, Neil J. Tabor, Christian F. Kammerer, Jacqueline K. Lungmus, Joseph Museba, Stephen Tolan, Megan R. Whitney, Kenneth D. Angielczyk. Successive assemblages of upper Permian vertebrates in the upper Madumabisa Mudstone Formation of the Luangwa Basin, Zambia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; 45 (sup1) DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2025.2486065

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