Fossils

430 million years ago, towering life-forms known as Prototaxites emerged from the ground, reaching heights of up to 26 feet and growing trunks up to 3 feet wide. When the first Prototaxites fossil was unearthed in 1843, it was mistaken for an ancient rotting conifer. But trees didn’t yet exist during the Silurian period, so what exactly was this thing taking over the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana?

That argument was never truly settled. Most scientists made Prototaxites out to be a sort of humungous fungus, but the field as a whole was never certain. That, however, may have just changed.

Back in 2007, the carbon isotopes in fossils convinced scientists this really was a fungus, since they appeared to be evidence that Prototaxites behaved like fungi by leeching off other living organisms for oxygen. Videos with clickbait titles like When Giant Fungi Ruled the Earth soon spread through the internet. But now, a new analysis by researchers at the University of Edinburgh is showing otherwise.

When paleobiologist Corentin Loron and his colleagues examined Prototaxites fossils from what is now Aberdeenshire, Scotland, they found evidence that it was anatomically and chemically differed from fungi in too many ways to be considered fungal. The problem—it also belonged with nothing else. It was apparently not a plant, animal, or fungus.

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“No extant group was found to exhibit all the defining features of Prototaxites,” Loron said in the study, suggesting that “it is best considered a member of a previously undescribed, entirely extinct group of eukaryotes.”

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/24698265

A hunter found a mammoth tusk sticking out of a creek bed on a ranch in the Big Bend region. There is an interview with Bryon Schroeder, director of the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sol Ross (a Texas university), on the linked page, but I'll add a few quotes:

How could this be overlooked for so long? It must be just that remote.

I think it’s that remote and there’s not that many people out there. I think these hunters had a little serendipity involved. These guys were out, you know, the right place at the right time.

It could have also just been dislodged rather recently because, I mean, it was in the creek drainage. So it could have just been exposed that quickly.

And it was it was it known that prior to this discovery mammoths lived in this region or what?

Yeah, so Harvard, with Sul Ross, did a very early, very large study out here in the late 1920s, early ’30s. And they knew about a lot of mammoths, and we’ve been actually trying to find those mammoth localities. And we just haven’t had a ton of luck.

And so people knew about them, but nobody’s ever dated them. Nobody’s ever really found one and figured out, you know, which part of the Pleistocene we’re talking about. Because at some point, mammoths get over here before people do.

You know, are these too early? Are these the right age for being associated with humans? And we’ve just not done that work because we just haven’t been able to find those localities.

How rare is this discovery? I mean, when was the last time a discovery like this was made out in your neck of the woods?

Uh, I’m sure there’s probably some ranchers out here that probably know where a lot of mammoths are on their land.

They just haven’t rang you up yet.

Yeah, haven’t rang me up. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and I’ve seen one. I’ve seen this one. So they’re fairly rare.

A bone from the largest stegosaur fossil ever found in the UK is returning to its hometown

The piece of vertebra is said to have come from a dinosaur discovered about 150 years ago in Swindon, which experts have said is the UK's most complete stegosaur skeleton.

It will be on display at Museum & Art Swindon on Euclid Street.

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The fossil was first found in the quarry pit at Swindon Brick and Tile Company in 1874, a site now occupied by Halford's and The Range on Fleming Way.

While most of the Swindon Stegosaur remains on display at the Natural History Museum in London, smaller parts were taken by fossil hunters and dispersed into other collections.

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The latest artefact to join the council-run museum was found by palaeontologist Dr Neville Hollingworth and Sally Hollingworth, who have been working alongside museum volunteers and staff through the Arts Council England-funded 'Unlocking Collections' project.

The pair said: "We saw this specimen for sale and realised its importance straight away.

"When the Swindon Stegosaur was collected in the 19th Century some of the original material ended up in private collections and we instantly recognised that the vertebra offered for sale had come from the original site where the skeleton was found.

"We're delighted that Museum & Art Swindon has put this truly unique find from the town on display and, hopefully, this will help raise awareness about the town's Jurassic past," they added.

The UK's biggest ever dinosaur trackway site has been discovered in a quarry in Oxfordshire.

About 200 huge footprints, which were made 166 million years ago, criss-cross the limestone floor.

They reveal the comings and goings of two different types of dinosaurs that are thought to be a long-necked sauropod called Cetiosaurus and the smaller meat-eating Megalosaurus.

The longest trackways are 150m in length, but they could extend much further as only part of the quarry has been excavated.

"This is one of the most impressive track sites I've ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of the size of the tracks," said Prof Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist from the University of Birmingham.

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This summer, more than 100 scientists, students and volunteers joined an excavation at the quarry which features on the new series of Digging for Britain.

The team found five different trackways.

Four of them were made by sauropods, plant-eating dinosaurs that walked on four legs. Their footprints look a bit like an elephant's - only much much bigger - these beasts reached up to 18m in length.

Another track is thought to have been created by a Megalosaurus.

"It's almost like a caricature of a dinosaur footprint", explained Dr Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate palaeontologist from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

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One area of the site even reveals where the paths of a sauropod and megalosaurus once crossed.

The prints are so beautifully preserved that the team have been able to work out which animal passed through first - they believe it was the sauropod, because the front edge of its large, round footprint is slightly squashed down by the three-toed megalosaurus walking on top of it.

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The future fate of the trackways hasn't yet been decided but the scientists are working with Smiths Bletchington, who operate the quarry, and Natural England on options for preserving the site for the future.

They believe there could be more footprints, these echoes of our prehistoric past, just waiting to be discovered.

The excavation is featured on Digging for Britain on BBC Two at 20:00 on Wednesday 8 January. The full series will be available on BBC iPlayer on 7 January

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19730685

Scientists have estimated the size of an extinct flying reptile called a pterosaur, based on fragments of a fossil finger bone discovered in southern England in June 2022. These results reveal it to be the largest British pterosaur yet described, and the second-largest Jurassic pterosaur worldwide.

This 149 million-year-old fossil, known as EC K2576 and nicknamed “Abfab” by the researchers, was found in Abingdon, Oxfordshire – and it is fabulous. They have since attempted to work out what type of pterosaur it was – its taxonomy – and how big the animal was.

During the Mesozoic Era, the “age of reptiles” which lasted from 252 to 66 million years ago and which includes the Jurassic period, dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other giant reptiles roamed Earth – with many dwarfing the largest terrestrial animals alive today.

Thousands of people have walked over the remains of 385 million-year-old fish in the slab of Caithness flagstone outside Inverness Town House.

James Ryan, who works at a National Trust for Scotland museum dedicated to Highland geologist Hugh Miller, spotted the fossils while on a wander.

He said: "Whilst fossil fish are known in pavements in cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, to my knowledge these fossils seem to have gone amiss."

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Mr Ryan said: "These fossils in the paving slab are the remains of ancient fish dating to around 385 million years ago - around 140 million years before the first dinosaur.

“Caithness flagstone was laid down as sediment over a period of thousands of years at the bottom of a giant freshwater lake which stretched from the Moray coast up north to Orkney and Shetland."

The fish date from the Devonian period, which are thought to include evidence of a fin.

Mr Ryan said: "I brought them to the attention of a palaeontologist who studies these fossils and they were not aware of them.

"The staff at Inverness museum likewise were not aware of these fossils either."

When 10-year-old Tegan went for a summer holiday beach stroll with her mum, she had no idea they would be actually walking in the footsteps of dinosaurs.

The schoolgirl spotted five enormous footprints that dinosaur experts believe are the mark of a camelotia that was there more than 200 million years ago.

Palaeontologists think the footprints, which are up to 75cm (30in) apart, were made by a huge herbivore from the late triassic period, and now there are efforts to get them verified.

Tegan and mum Claire have been told by the National Museum Wales palaeontology curator that she is "fairly certain they are genuine dinosaur prints".

The fossil of a herbivorous dinosaur, as big as an American male bison, has been discovered on the Isle of Wight.

It is the most complete dinosaur skeleton discovered in the UK in a century, with 149 bones in total.

The hefty dinosaur, now called Comptonatus chasei, roamed southern England around 125 million years ago and would have weighed as much as an African elephant.

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The dinosaur belongs to a group of herbivorous dinosaurs known as iguanodontians, large, bulky creatures often described as the "cows of the Cretaceous period" by palaeontologists.

It was discovered by fossil hunter Nick Chase who sadly died of cancer just before the COVID-19 pandemic. The species is named after him.

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Paying tribute to Mr Chase, Mr Lockwood said: "Nick had a phenomenal nose for finding dinosaur bones."

"He collected fossils daily in all weathers and donated them to museums," he added.

"I was hoping we'd spend our dotage collecting together as we were of similar ages, but sadly that wasn't to be the case.

"Despite his many wonderful discoveries over the years, including the most complete Iguanodon skull ever found in Britain, this is the first dinosaur to be named after him."

Nick Chase also discovered the remains of Europe's largest-ever land-based predator dinosaur on the island, which were revealed last year.

When Richard Forrest walks along the Lyme Regis beach on the Jurassic coast in Dorset, he carries in his small backpack a pointed pick, a geological hammer and an old kitchen knife. But he very rarely uses them until he is back home with a rock or two to work on. “The most important thing to take with you is your eyes,” he says. “And learn what it is you’re looking for.”

Forrest is a fossil finder and has spent more than 50 years on Britain’s beaches hunting for evidence of the country’s prehistoric past. The Jurassic coast, stretching 95 miles (150km) across Devon and Dorset, is world famous for its treasure trove of ammonites and other fossils that lie, in many places, conspicuous beneath visitors’ feet. Others are hidden within the cliffs, only exposed after heavy rains bring on one of the regular landslips. “The best feeling is when you find something you think is potentially interesting and then you get it home and discover that wow, this is really interesting,” he says. “That feeling is amazing.”

An ancient worm discovered in Herefordshire was a carnivorous predator that stuck its throat out to catch and eat prey, according to scientists.

The creature, named Radnorscolex latus, was found at a disused Victorian quarry site in Leintwardine.

The marine worm is thought to have lived on the sea floor about 425 million years ago, when the region was under water.

Analysis suggests it had a retractable throat that could extend out onto the seabed to capture prey hidden within the sediment.

Radnorscolex is reminiscent of giant worms in the Hollywood film Dune, according to Dr Richie Howard, curator of fossil arthropods at the National History Museum.

Dr Howard said: "We think they weren't too picky when it came to feeding and likely just shoved their throat out into the mud and grabbed anything they could find.

"They certainly make you think of the sandworms in Dune in that respect."

Fossil remains of Radnorscolex were first discovered a century ago, but the technology was not advanced enough to allow palaeontologists to examine these in great detail.

A large fossil discovery has helped shed light on the history of dinosaurs in Wales. The find is reported in Proceedings of the Geologists' Association.

Until recently, the land of the dragon didn't have any dinosaurs. However, in the last 10 years, several dinosaurs have been reported, but their life conditions were not well known.

In a new study by a team from the University of Bristol, important details have been revealed for the first time. The researchers found that early Welsh dinosaurs, from more than 200 million years ago, lived on a tropical lowland beside the sea. Dinosaur trackways are known from Barry and other sites nearby, showing that dinosaurs had walked across the warm lowlands.

The discovery was made at Lavernock Point, close to Cardiff and Penarth, where the cliffs of dark-colored shales and limestones document ancient shallow seas. At several levels, there are accumulations of bones, including the remains of fish, sharks, marine reptiles and occasionally, dinosaurs.

The largest and most complete Stegosaurus fossil ever found is expected to fetch up to $6m (£4.7m) when it is sold as the star lot in Sotheby’s “geek week” auction this summer.

At 11ft (3.4 metres) tall and more than 20ft long the “virtually complete” fossil, which has been nicknamed “Apex”, is more than 30% larger than “Sophie”, the previously most intact stegosaurus specimen which was on display in London’s Natural History Museum.

Cassandra Hatton, the qglobal head of science at Sotheby’s, said: “Apex marks an incredibly important milestone, as simply one of the best fossils of its kind ever unearthed.

Keen fossil hunter Steve was exploring Irchester Country Park, Northants, with three-year-old Cody when they found an unusually shaped rock partially buried.

Experts from London's Natural History Museum confirmed the find as being a dinosaur footprint cast.

It is thought it belonged to a megalosaurus that stood six metres (20 feet) in length.

A type of shrimp that died out hundreds of millions of years ago has been declared a new species and a Glaswegian.

The shrimp is believed to have swam in the Carboniferous seas surrounding Glasgow around 333 million years ago. Its fossil was found at the same world-famous locality where the Bearsden Shark was excavated in the early 1980s.

The shrimp has been given the name Tealliocaris weegie after a scientific paper identified it as a Glaswegian crustacean. Its authors thought that it would be appropriate to name the new species in honour of the people of Glasgow and the local dialect.

The paper was recently published in the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions.

The feathered limbs, sharp teeth and claws of the oldest known bird-like dinosaurs, the Archaeopteryx have fascinated naturalists and paleontologists including Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin who propelled the species to fame especially following publication of his theory of evolution.

So, when a precious 150-million-year-old Ostromia crassipes fossil—formerly known as a specimen of Archaeopteryx—arrived at Diamond Light Source in a high security operation, it naturally caused a great deal of excitement.

The rare fossil, which is usually housed at the renowned Teylers Museum in the Netherlands, was brought to Diamond so scientists could discover more about its features, including the color of its feathers. The specimen was studied on the I18 beamline, using a microfocus X-ray available at the U.K.'s leading science facility.

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Collection manager, Tim de Zeeuw, described it as the Mona Lisa of the museum's fossil collection. He explained that the Jurassic fossil was discovered at Jachenhausen, a village in southeastern Germany in 1855. The fossil was secretly brought to the U.K. by a special transport team and was kept under lock and key around the clock, even while on the beamline at Diamond.

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Lead author, Edgar Mulder, a master's student at the university explained that it was a bit of dream come true to get time to examine the fossil at Diamond and the team worked through the night to get as much information as possible.

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Analysis was conducted using a combination of X-ray fluorescence imaging and absorption spectroscopy at Diamond's microfocus spectroscopy beamline I18. Principal Beamline Scientist on I18, Konstantin Ignatyev added, "This beamline has a super bright energy-tuneable X-ray microbeam that can be focused down to 2 micron, that can scan the widest range of elements on the periodic table.

"This allows the study elemental and chemical composition of various samples at very high spatial resolution. In this case, it allowed us to look in detail at the chemical environment of sulfur at different locations on the fossil as well as pinpoint the distribution and concentration of other elements from phosphor to zinc.

"Looking at the sulfur chemistry in this sample, for example, might reveal chemical signals of degradation products of soft tissues like tissues, feathers, skin, keratin, etc. This will reveal more detail about this fossil than what has been possible to see before."

A collector who has amassed thousands of rare fossils that he displays in a private museum is in talks to sell his "cabinet of curiosities".

Wolfgang Grulke has been buying and conserving prehistoric artefacts, which he keeps in a converted barn near Sherborne, Dorset, for 50 years.

Now he wants to find them a new home, before he turns 80 in two years' time.

Mr Grulke says he wants the collection to go to a place where "people will be astonished and fuel their curiosity".

It was half a century ago that Mr Grulke, who at the time knew nothing about fossils, was "enticed" to visit Lyme Regis by a fossil-hunting friend.

He said: "That evening, over a beer, we discussed our finds with some of the locals and they introduced me to the idea of Mary Anning - a young person in her teens and twenties - collecting fossils and becoming world famous."

The conversation would spark a lifelong passion and Mr Grulke spent the next five decades building his multimillion-pound collection, which has received some notable visitors, including Sir David Attenborough.

Artefacts include the world's largest uncoiled ammonite, an entire ichthyosaur skeleton, and huge clusters of marine fossils that were discovered high in the Alps.

Britain is home to some of the best beaches for fossil hunting. The 96-mile-long Jurassic coast of Dorset and Devon, the Isle of Wight (also known as “Dinosaur Island”) and the Yorkshire coast are hotspots. Quarries – when accessed safely – are like fossil amphitheatres; their layers of rock stripped back to reveal prehistoric treasure.

Here, we’ve dug up five of the best fossil hunting locations in Britain.

They are:

• Compton Bay, Isle of Wight
• Crail, Fife
• Boggle Hole, Yorkshire
• Lyme Regis, Dorset
• Upper Gilwern Quarry, mid-Wales

My tips:

• Guided walks are the best place to start
• Be aware of the tide times when on thr coast
• Don't go into quarried without taking advice from the owners or local experts

The fossils are thought to be from a type of ichthyosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile that lived in the time of dinosaurs. The newly discovered species is believed to have roamed the seas towards the end of the Triassic, about 202m years ago.

The team have named the species Ichthyotitan severnensis, meaning “giant fish lizard of the Severn”.

“This giant probably represents the largest marine reptile formally described,” said Dr Dean Lomax, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol and co-author of the research, adding that comparisons with fossils from other ichthyosaurs suggested the creature would have been about 25 metres in length – about the size of a blue whale.

“Of course, we have to be careful with such estimates because we are dealing with fragments of giant bones,” he added. “But nonetheless, simple scaling is commonly used to estimate size, especially when comparative material is scarce.”

The team say samples from the fossils suggest the creature was still growing. And there is another twist.

“We believe these ichthyosaurs are the last surviving members of the family called shastasaurida, which went extinct during the global mass extinction event at the end of the Triassic,” said Lomax.

Writing in the journal Plos One, Lomax and colleagues report how the first pieces of the jawbone were discovered by Justin Reynolds and his daughter Ruby – co-authors of the paper – on the beach at Blue Anchor in May 2020, when Ruby was 11.

The skull of a prehistoric sea monster found on the Jurassic Coast has made it into the world record books.

The 2m-long (6ft) skull of a pliosaur, excavated from high above a beach in Dorset, was the subject of a BBC film presented by Sir David Attenborough.

Guinness World Records confirmed it was the "most complete" of its type on the planet.

It said it was about "95% complete by surface area", with "previously unobservable details" of the genus.

The snout of the pliosaur was discovered in 2022 by fossil enthusiast Philip Jacobs, prompting an excavation involving teams suspended by ropes high above the beach.

Sir David investigated the discovery in a BBC film broadcast on New Year's Day.

It is now on display at the Etches Collection museum in Kimmeridge.

Founder Dr Steve Etches is crowdfunding to recover the rest of the 150-million-year-old creature that remains embedded in the fast-eroding cliff face.

Fossilized trees discovered by chance in southwest England belong to Earth's earliest-known forest, new research has found. The 390 million-year-old fossils supplant the Gilboa fossil forest in New York state, which dates back 386 million years, as the world's oldest known forest.

The new discovery highlights differences between the two ecosystems, suggesting forests went from being relatively primitive to well established over the course of just a few million years, said Neil Davies, the lead author of a new study published Feb. 23 in the Journal of the Geological Society.

"Why it's important — broadly — is it ticks the boxes of being the oldest fossil forest," Davies, a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told Live Science. The finding is also remarkable because it reveals stark differences between the complex array of ancient plants found at Gilboa and the newly discovered forest, which appears to have hosted just one type of plant, Davies said.

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Davies and his colleagues stumbled upon the forest remnants during fieldwork in the Hangman Sandstone Formation, which dates to the Middle Devonian period (393 million to 383 million years ago). During the Devonian period, what is now the U.K. formed part of a continent called Laurentia that sat just below the equator, meaning the climate was warm and dry, Davies said.

Older trees exist elsewhere in the world, with plants first colonizing land 500 million years ago, but this new discovery is the earliest example of a forest with trees growing close together and en masse.

"We've found rocks where you've got standing trees in growth positions adjacent to each other over a set area," Davies said, "so we're looking at a snapshot where we can tell for definite that there were trees growing in that specific location and that the sediment we're looking at is the forest floor."

Among the fossil trees, the researchers found trackways belonging to small Devonian critters. "At this time, there's nothing much bigger than lots of little arthropods knocking around on land," Davies said. "You might find some more amphibian-type things and fish in some of the lakes and rivers nearby."

A unique species of flying reptile, or pterosaur, that lived 168-166 million years ago has been discovered on the Isle of Skye.

Its wings, shoulders, legs and backbone were found in a rock on a beach, but the fossil's skull was missing.

Scientists were surprised to find a pterosaur from this period off Scotland's west coast - they were thought to mostly live in China.

The creature - called Ceoptera - is the second pterosaur found on Skye.

Its name comes from the Scottish Gaelic word cheò, meaning mist, and is a reference to the Gaelic name of Isle of Syke - Eilean a' Cheò or Isle of Mist.

Fossils from this era, called the Middle Jurassic, are extremely rare, says Dr Liz Martin-Silverstone at the University of Bristol who used a CT scanner to make a 3D digital model of the fossil.

"Finding anything from that time period that's more than just a single bone is really exciting," she says.

In the first of this four-part BBC series, David Attenborough shows us how ancient creatures have come to be preserved as fossils and how those fossils can shed light on characteristics of these creatures' lives, and even their death. He further demonstrates how scientists use a variety of ingenious methods to extract once living creatures and plants from their rocky tombs.

IMDb

In it he goes to the Jurassic Coast and talks about his early experiences fossil hunting in Leicestershire.

For those not in the UK.

A team of palaeontologists has uncovered parts of a Jurassic sea creature in a quarry near Peterborough.

Fossil hunter Jamie Jordan unearthed 20 sections of vertebrae belonging to a ichthyosaur called Ophthalmosaurus - thought to be about 155 million years old.

Mr Jordan, who runs the Fossils Galore museum in March, Cambridgeshire, said the bones were found in "pretty good" condition during last week's dig.

A fundraising effort has begun to raise £5,000 for ground penetration radar to find the rest of the animal's skeleton.

Fund raiser