Latest news with #fossilresearch
BBC News
a day ago
- Science
- BBC News
200 million year-old jawbone revealed as new species
Scientists have discovered a new species of pterosaur – a flying reptile that soared above the dinosaurs more than 200 million years jawbone of the ancient reptile was unearthed in Arizona back in 2011, but modern scanning techniques have now revealed details showing that it belongs to a species new to research team, led by scientists at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, has named the creature Eotephradactylus mcintireae, meaning "ash-winged dawn goddess".It is a reference to the volcanic ash that helped preserve its bones in an ancient riverbed. Details of the discovery are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of about 209 million years old, this is now believed to be the earliest pterosaur to be found in North America."The bones of Triassic pterosaurs are small, thin, and often hollow, so they get destroyed before they get fossilised," explained Dr site of this discovery is a fossil bed in a desert landscape of ancient rock in the Petrified Forest National Park. More than 200 million years ago, this place was a riverbed, and layers of sediment gradually trapped and preserved bones, scales and other evidence of life at the time. The river ran through the central region of what was the supercontinent of Pangaea, which was formed from all of Earth's Sounds: 200 years of dinosaur scienceFossil of largest Jurassic pterosaur found on SkyeDragon Prince dinosaur rewrites T-rex family tree The pterosaur jaw is just one part of a collection of fossils found at the same site, including bones, teeth, fish scales and even fossilised poo (also known as coprolites).Dr Kligman said: "Our ability to recognise pterosaur bones in [these ancient] river deposits suggests there may be other similar deposits from Triassic rocks around the world that may also preserve pterosaur bones." Studying the pterosaur's teeth also provided clues about what the seagull-sized winged reptile would have eaten. "They have an unusually high degree of wear at their tips," explained Dr Kligman. suggesting that this pterosaur was feeding on something with hard body parts." The most likely prey, he told BBC News, were primitive fish that would have been covered in an armour of boney scales. Scientists say the site of the discovery has preserved a "snapshot" of an ecosystem where groups of animals that are now extinct, including giant amphibians and ancient armoured crocodile relatives, lived alongside animals that we could recognise today, including frogs and turtles. This fossil bed, Dr Kligman said, has preserved evidence of an evolutionary "transition" 200 million years ago. "We see groups that thrived later living alongside older animals that [didn't] make it past the Triassic. "Fossil beds like these enable us to establish that all of these animals actually lived together."
Gizmodo
14-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
The Famous, Fearsome Archaeopteryx Was More Bird Than We Knew
CT scans, UV light, and careful prep work uncovered feathers that may have given the ancient dinosaur liftoff. It's been more than 160 years since Archaeopteryx first shook up science as the missing link—part reptile, part bird—and indicated that today's pigeons and parakeets are the feathery descendants of dinosaurs. But despite decades of research, there's still more to learn. Case in point: a newly described fossil, nicknamed the Chicago Archaeopteryx, may be the most detailed and revealing specimen yet. 'The most important findings all center around rarely preserved soft tissues. For the first time we see the soft tissue of the hand and foot,' said Jingmai O'Connor, lead author of the new study in Nature and associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum, in an email to Gizmodo. With that information, paleontologists are getting a more nuanced understanding of the creature than they've ever had. 'The tissue on the right hand suggests that the two main digits of the hand were not bound together in soft tissue and that the third digit could move independently, supporting long abandoned claims from the 90s that Archaeopteryx could use its hands to climb,' O'Connor added. The fossil had been in private hands since 1990, but made its public debut at Chicago's Field Museum last year. At roughly the size of a pigeon, the Chicago Archaeopteryx is the smallest specimen yet found, and was pulled from the same German limestone where all Archaeopteryx fossils come from. What sets this fossil apart is its pristine preservation and exhaustive preparation. Over a year of painstaking work by the Field's fossil prep team, led by the museum's chief preparator Akiko Shinya, revealed bones and soft tissues that had never been visible before. That tissue included a set of upper wing feathers called tertials, which may have helped Archaeopteryx fly when many of its dinosaur cousins couldn't. The team used UV light and CT scans to carefully chip away the rock encasing the bird's mineralized remains, sometimes removing just fractions of a millimeter to avoid damaging tissue. The result is the most complete and delicately preserved Archaeopteryx yet. Among the findings: scales on the bottom of the animal's toes, soft tissue in the fingers, and fine details in the skull that could help explain how modern birds evolved flexible beaks. But the key takeaway in this paper is evidence of the creature's flight. While earlier dinosaurs had feathers and wings, Archaeopteryx may have been the first to actually take wing, based on the tertials, which are missing in feathered dinosaurs that aren't quite birds. Though non-avian dinosaurs couldn't fly, this spunky critter could. That supports the idea that flight evolved more than once in dinosaurs—an exceptionally cool notion that serves as a reminder that Archaeopteryx is merely one branch of the tree of life—albeit a very neat one. And as for this fossil, O'Connor says we're only just scratching the surface. More analysis of the Chicago Archaeopteryx will reveal more details of how these flying dinosaurs lived. 'Some very cool and surprisingly bird-like new features of the skull; chemical data about the soft tissues; the full body CT scan, and much, much more are still to come,' O'Connor added.
