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.

In March 2022, Stellenbosch University (SU) student Rohan Barnard was out and about on a farm in the Swartberg Mountains between Calitzdorp and Oudtshoorn, flipping over rocks looking for ants, reptiles and other critters, when he stumbled upon the finding of a lifetime.

Buried deep in the moist sand below a pile of leaf litter at the periphery of a small river, he found a slate black velvet worm. Being familiar with how rare velvet worms are, he took a specimen and also posted an image of it to the biodiversity observation app, iNaturalist.

“I had a basic knowledge of the Cape velvet worms, having found one for the first time on Table Mountain in 2019. My older brother was under assignment from his zoology lecturer, Prof. Savel Daniels, to collect velvet worms. With my interest in ants, I gladly assisted him in this task,” Rohan, now a third year BSc student in Conservation Ecology and Entomology, explains.

Velvet worms’ lineage date back to over 500 million years ago, making it a living relic of the Cambrian period. With their soft bodies and non-jointed legs, these critters have changed little over millions of years, earning them the title of “living fossils.”

Little did Rohan know at the time that he had just found a new species of velvet worm, now aptly named Rohan’s velvet worm or, in scientific terms, Peripatopsis barnardi.

Even more remarkable is the fact that it represents the first ever species from the little Karoo, which indicates that the area was historically more forested than at present. In other words, with prehistorical climate changes, and aridification, the species became isolated and underwent speciation.

According to Prof. Daniels, an evolutionary biologist from SU’s Department of Botany and Zoology and one of South Africa’s foremost specialists on velvet worms, it is utterly remarkable that such a prehistorical lineage is still around today. After viewing this rare find on iNaturalist, he visited the same area in July 2022 and collected a paratype and another nine specimens for analysis.

The results of his analysis, and the announcement of seven new species of velvet worms, were published in the journal Ecology and Evolution recently. Daniels, the first author on the paper, says South Africa’s velvet worms are mainly found in prehistoric Afro temperate forest patches that persist in deep gorges in the Cape Fold Mountains

“The origin of these forest patches can be traced to the early Miocene, about 23 to 15 million years ago, when the region used to be temperate and sub-tropical. During the late Miocene, however, the region underwent significant climatic changes, with a decrease in rainfall due to the advent of the proto Benguela current along the West Coast, and two geotectonic uplifting events. These events resulted in a complex mosaic of habitat connectivity and isolation, what we know today as the Cape Fold Mountains, driving the speciation of habitat specialists such as velvet worms,” he explains.

Daniels used new mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequencing techniques, combined with morphological analysis and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), to determine that P. barnardi diverged from its most recent common ancestor about 15.2 million years ago. Another novel finding from the Cederberg Mountains, P. cederbergiensis, can trace its lineage to 12.47 million years ago.

Daniels welcomes the efforts of citizen scientists to share their findings on biodiversity apps: “It is thanks to citizen science data that we were able to identify the new species. In the Cape Fold Mountains, we now know that every mountain peak has an endemic species. This suggests that in unsampled areas there are likely to be additional novel diversity, waiting to be found.”

Most importantly, though, it means that we must conserve these prehistoric forest fragments to limit extinction.

To Rohan, it still feels surreal to have such a fossil-like creature named after him: “It is incredible to realise that I’ve uncovered a living fossil. It is as if I have found a missing link that we did not even know about. It gives me hope that there is still so much left to discover. But it also makes me worried for the future, that we will lose animals and plants to extinction that we did not even know existed,” he warns.

The seven new species are P. fernkloofi, P. jonkershoeki, P. kogelbergi, P. landroskoppie, P. limietbergi and P. palmeri. Apart from P. barnardi, all the new species were named after their places of origin.

Why are velvet worms unique?

Like the indestructible water bears (Tardigrades), modern velvet worms are looked on as a separate line of evolution (and placed in a distinct phylum) that arose independently from some long forgotten marine ancestor — probably the Hallicogenia. Fossils show that velvet worms have not changed much since they diverged from their ancient relative about 540 million years ago. This means Onycophorans have been living on Earth ever since what is called the Cambrian period of prehistory. Today, modern velvet worms live on land and are found only in damp, moist habitats in areas that were originally part of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana.

Reference:
Savel R. Daniels, Aaron Barnes. Perched on the Plateau: Speciation in a Cape Fold Mountain Velvet Worm Clade, With the Description of Seven New Species (Onychophora: Peripatopsidae: Peripatopsis) From South Africa. Ecology and Evolution, 2025; 15 (4) DOI: 10.1002/ece3.71256

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Stellenbosch University. Original written by Wiida Fourie-Basson.

Palaeontologists at the Manitoba Museum and Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have discovered a remarkable new 506-million-year-old predator from the Burgess Shale of Canada. The results are announced in a paper in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Mosura fentoni was about the size of your index finger and had three eyes, spiny jointed claws, a circular mouth lined with teeth and a body with swimming flaps along its sides. These traits show it to be part of an extinct group known as the radiodonts, which also included the famous Anomalocaris canadensis, a meter-long predator that shared the waters with Mosura.

However, Mosura also possessed a feature not seen in any other radiodont: an abdomen-like body region made up of multiple segments at its back end.

“Mosura has 16 tightly packed segments lined with gills at the rear end of its body. This is a neat example of evolutionary convergence with modern groups, like horseshoe crabs, woodlice, and insects, which share a batch of segments bearing respiratory organs at the rear of the body,” says Joe Moysiuk, Curator of Palaeontology and Geology at the Manitoba Museum, who led the study.

The reason for this intriguing adaptation remains uncertain, but the researchers postulate it may be related to particular habitat preference or behavioural characteristics of Mosura that required more efficient respiration.

With its broad swimming flaps near its midsection and narrow abdomen, Mosura was nicknamed the “sea-moth” by field collectors based on its vague appearance to a moth. This inspired its scientific name, which references the fictional Japanese kaiju also known as Mothra. Only distantly related to real moths — as well as spiders, crabs, and millipedes — Mosura belongs on a much deeper branch in the evolutionary tree of these animals, collectively known as arthropods.

“Radiodonts were the first group of arthropods to branch out in the evolutionary tree, so they provide key insight into ancestral traits for the entire group. The new species emphasizes that these early arthropods were already surprisingly diverse and were adapting in a comparable way to their distant modern relatives.” says study co-author Jean-Bernard Caron, Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at ROM.

Several fossils of Mosura additionally show details of internal anatomy, including elements of the nervous system, circulatory system, and digestive tract.

“Very few fossil sites in the world offer this level of insight into soft internal anatomy. We can see traces representing bundles of nerves in the eyes that would have been involved in image processing, just like in living arthropods. The details are astounding,” Caron adds.

Instead of having arteries and veins like we do, Mosura had an “open” circulatory system, with its heart pumping blood into large internal body cavities called lacunae. These lacunae are preserved as reflective patches that fill the body and extend into the swimming flaps in the fossils.

“The well-preserved lacunae of the circulatory system in Mosura help us to interpret similar, but less clear features that we’ve seen before in other fossils. Their identity has been controversial,” adds Moysiuk, who is also a Research Associate at ROM. “It turns out that preservation of these structures is widespread, confirming the ancient origin of this type of circulatory system.”

Of the 61 fossils of Mosura, all except one were collected by ROM between 1975 and 2022, mostly from the Raymond Quarry in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. Some also came from new areas around Marble Canyon in Kootenay National Park, 40 km to the southeast, which have revealed spectacular new Burgess Shale fossils, including other radiodonts: Stanleycaris, Cambroraster and Titanokorys. One previously unpublished specimen of Mosura was also studied that had been collected by Charles Walcott, the discoverer of the Burgess Shale.

“Museum collections, old and new, are a bottomless treasure trove of information about the past. If you think you’ve seen it all before, you just need to open up a museum drawer,” Moysiuk says.

The Burgess Shale fossil sites are located within Yoho and Kootenay National Parks and are managed by Parks Canada. Parks Canada is proud to work with leading scientific researchers to expand knowledge and understanding of this key period of Earth’s history and to share these sites with the world through award-winning guided hikes. The Burgess Shale was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 due to its outstanding universal value and is now part of the larger Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site.

Many radiodont fossils can be seen on display in ROM’s Willner Madge Gallery, Dawn of Life, in Toronto, and a specimen of Mosura will be exhibited for the first time at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg later this year.

For 50 years, ROM has been at the forefront of Burgess Shale research, uncovering dozens of new fossil sites and species. Located in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks of British Columbia, the Burgess Shale fossils are exceptionally preserved and provide one of the best records of marine life during the Cambrian period anywhere.

Reference:
Joseph Moysiuk, Jean-Bernard Caron. Early evolvability in arthropod tagmosis exemplified by a new radiodont from the Burgess Shale. Royal Society Open Science, 2025; 12 (5) DOI: 10.1098/rsos.242122

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Royal Ontario Museum.

Newly discovered evidence of Australia’s earliest species of tree frog challenges what we know about when Australian and South American frogs parted ways on the evolutionary tree.

Previously, scientists believed Australian and South American tree frogs separated from each other about 33 million years ago.

But in a study published today in Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology, palaeontologists from UNSW Sydney say the new species, Litoria tylerantiqua, is now at about 55 million years old, the earliest known member of the pelodryadid family of Australian tree frogs.

The study is based on fossils unearthed from Murgon on the traditional lands of the Waka Waka people of south-eastern Queensland. The new species, Litoria tylerantiqua, is named in honour of the late Michael Tyler, a renowned Australian herpetologist globally celebrated for his research on frogs and toads.

“It is only fitting to name Australia’s earliest tree frog in honour of a man who was a giant in Australian frog research and in particular the first to explore the fossil record for Australian frogs,” says study lead author Dr Roy Farman, an adjunct associate lecturer with UNSW School of Biological, Earth & and Environmental Sciences.

Evolutionary history of Australian tree frogs

Around 55 million years ago, Australia, Antarctica and South America were linked together as the last remnants of the southern supercontinent Gondwana. Global climates were warmer during this period, while a forested corridor linked South America and Australia.

Up until now, it was thought the earliest Australian tree frogs came from the Late Oligocene (about 26 million years ago) and the Early Miocene (23 million years ago). Fossils of the Late Oligocene were found at Kangaroo Well in the Northern Territory and Etadunna Formation at Lake Palankarinna, South Australia, while the Riversleigh World Heritage Area in Queensland revealed tree frogs from the Early Miocene.

But the new species extends the fossil record of pelodryadids by approximately 30 million years, to a time potentially close to the divergence of Australian tree frogs from the South American tree frogs.

Previous estimates based on molecular clock studies — a method scientists use to figure out when different species split from a common ancestor by looking at the rate of genetic changes over time — suggested that Australian and South American tree frogs separated from each other at about 33 million years ago.

“Our research indicates that that date is at least 22 million years too young,” Dr Farman says.

“While molecular studies are important for understanding the evolutionary relationships of different groups of animals, these studies should be calibrated using knowledge from the fossil record and in this case the fossil record provides a more accurate time for separation of the southern world’s tree frogs.”

Using new technology to study ancient frogs

To conduct this research, the authors used CT scans of spirit-preserved frogs from Australian museum collections to compare the three-dimensional shape of the fossil bones with those of living species. The technique — called three-dimensional geometric morphometrics — has only been used on fossil frogs once before. Using these new methods, they were able to unravel the relationships of these fossils to all other groups of frogs living and extinct.

“We had a real problem at the start of this study because the pelvic bones of most living frogs were invisible inside whole pickled frogs rather than available for study as skeletons,” Dr Farman says.

“Museums understandably want to ensure these often unique or rare pickled specimens remain intact for molecular studies because DNA can be obtained from their soft tissues. This meant that instead of skeletonising these specimens, we needed instead to make CT scans of them, enabling us to create 3D models of their otherwise invisible skeletons.

“Using these cutting-edge investigative methods, we were able to determine from the shape of the fossil ilia — one of three bones that make up each side of the pelvis — that this new Murgon species of frog is more closely related to the Australian tree frogs (pelodryadids) than the South American tree frogs (phyllomedusids).”

Seasoned survivors that outlasted the dinosaurs

Litoria tylerantiqua joins the only other Murgon frog, the ground-dwelling Platyplectrum casca (previously described as Lechriodus casca), as the oldest frogs known from Australia. Both have living relatives in Australia and New Guinea demonstrating remarkable resilience over time.

“Despite their delicate nature, frogs have been surprisingly successful at surviving several mass extinction events since their origins about 250 million years ago, including the mass extinction 66 million years ago that took out the non-flying dinosaurs,” Dr Farman says.

“Although global extinction events triggered by human activities — such as rapid climate change and the spread of chytrid fungus — may be among the worst challenges frogs have had to face, the fossil record could reveal how some frog groups overcame previous challenges, perhaps by adapting to new, less-threatening habitats. This could provide clues about how we might be able to help by translocating some threatened frogs into more future-secure habitats.”

Frogs such as the southern corroboree frog are threatened in their current habitats which have become more hostile due to climate change. The authors say that if the fossil record shows physically similar frogs living in very different habitats, today’s frogs may benefit by being reintroduced into similar environments.

Reference:
roy M. Farman, Michael Archer, Suzanne J. Hand. Early Eocene pelodryadid from the Tingamarra Local Fauna, Murgon, southeastern Queensland, Australia, and a new fossil calibration for molecular phylogenies of frogs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2025; DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2025.2477815

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of New South Wales.