Remarkable Limb Regeneration Began 300 Million Years Ago

By Joseph Castro

A fossil of the primitive amphibian Micromelerpeton credneri from Lake Odernheim in southwest Germany is so well preserved that features such as external gills and scales can be seen. Credit: Fröbisch et al./Royal Society Publishing

Fossilized, primitive amphibians with odd-looking appendages, some with extra toes and deformed shapes, suggest the ability of some vertebrates to regenerate or regrow amputated limbs first evolved at least 300 million years ago.
Salamanders are the only modern four-legged vertebrates, or animals that have backbones, able to fully regenerate their limbs into adulthood. But many other animals, including frogs, caecilians (amphibians that resemble earthworms) and some fish, also have some regenerative capabilities, suggesting the ability may have initially evolved a very long time ago. Yet, scientists have lacked fossil evidence for the ancient evolution of limb regeneration until now.
"In recent years, people have speculated about the evolution of regeneration, but the amount of data available has been limited," said David Gardiner, a developmental biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies limb regeneration but wasn't involved in the current research.

To observe limb regeneration in the fossil record, scientists need to find well-preserved specimens with abnormal limbs or limbs in the process of regenerating (a fully regenerated limb that has formed without defects is difficult to differentiate from an original limb). But in the majority of cases, researchers deal with fossils that are missing skeletal segments or entire body parts. [In Photos: Fossils Reveal Bizarre Boomerang-Headed Amphibian]
To better understand the early evolution of vertebrate limb regeneration, scientists at the Museum für Naturkunde (a natural history museum in Berlin) analyzed fossils of Micromelerpeton crederni, a primitive amphibian species and distant relative of modern amphibians that lived during the Upper Carboniferous to Lower Permian time periods, between about 310 million and 280 million years ago.  The fossils were originally discovered in lake deposits in Central Europe, such as Lake Odernheim in southwest Germany — the oxygen-free environment at the bottom of the lakes helped preserve the animals' remains, including fine structures such as gills, stomach contents and scale patterns.
The team found that several of the Micromelerpeton fossils had abnormal limbs. For example, some of the limbs had certain bones fused together. Other limbs had additional toes that were narrower than normal toes. And some limbs had toes with too many or too few bones. Though odd, these types of abnormalities can also be seen in living animals.
"These same kinds of anomalies typically are observed in response to injury in modern salamanders that are capable of regeneration, both in the wild and in response to experimental amputations in the lab," Gardiner told Live Science, adding that the modern examples suggest Micromelerpeton was also capable of limb regeneration.
The study suggests limb regeneration was an ancient ability present in the amphibian lineage that led to modern amphibians — an ability that salamanders retained. The ability of modern frogs to regenerate limbs as tadpoles further supports the idea, the researchers wrote in their paper, published today (Sept. 23) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
"The similarity between the variant patterns in the limbs of extant salamanders and Micromelerpeton caused by limb regeneration is striking," the authors wrote. It is "suggestive of shared molecular mechanisms that are still acting in modern salamanders as they did in their 300-million-year-old relative Micromelerpeton."
Though the research suggests limb regeneration has been around for at least 300 million years, it's not clear just when that ability first evolved. And the answer may not lie within fossils. "I have always thought that we will not really understand the evolution of regeneration until we understand the mechanisms of regeneration," Gardiner said.

Live Science

Pocket Pets? Mini Hedgehog and Tiny Tapir Fossils Found in Canada

By Stephanie Pappas,

An artist's reconstruction shows a newfound tapiroid drinking in the shallows of an Eocene lake in British Columbia, with the small, newly identified, proto-hedgehog in the foreground. Credit: Illustration © by Julius T. Csotonyi

A miniature hedgehog smaller than a mouse and a pint-sized tapir are the first mammals ever found at a fossil site in British Columbia known for exquisitely preserved plants, insects and fish.
The new fossils date back about 50 million to 53 million years ago, to the warm Eocene Epoch, when British Columbia's climate was similar to that of Portland, Oregon, today. These are the first two mammals ever found at the dig site in Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park, and they fill in a gap the size of Canada.
"We know a lot about this time interval in Wyoming and Colorado. We know a bit about it in the high Arctic," said study researcher Jaelyn Eberle, the curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. "But we know nothing about what was going on in between."
Fossil surprise
Scientists made this gap-filling discovery by accident. Study researcher David Greenwood of Brandon University in Manitoba and his colleagues were quarrying for plant fossils in the lakebed shales of Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park, when a student cracked open a rock and found a miniscule bone inside. [See Images of the New Hedgehog & Tapir Fossils]
"When they looked at it under a hand lens, they realized it was a fossil vertebrate," Eberle told Live Science. The bone turned out to be a partial jaw and some teeth belonging to a previously unknown species of hedgehog, dubbed Silvacola acares, from the words for "tiny forest dweller" in Greek and Latin.
This little hedgehog would have been only about 2 inches (5 centimeters) long, smaller than a house mouse. Its molars were a mere millimeter (0.04 inches) long, so small that paleontologists declined to chip the animal's tiny jaw from the rock surrounding it. Instead, the study researchers sent the whole hunk to Penn State University to be scanned with high-resolution computed tomography (CT), a technique that yields virtual slices of the interior of an object.
The tapir was equally surprising. Greenwood and his colleagues found it in coal-rich rock beds in the park, the site of a swampy spot in the Eocene and a rare place to find vertebrate fossils.
"It was just kind of, 'Whoa, not expected,'" Eberle said.
Balmy British Columbia
The tapir is a species of the Heptodon genus, which is part of a group that is the oldest in the tapir lineage. Species of Heptodon would have been about half the size of modern tapirs, which weigh around 330 to 660 pounds (150 to 300 kilograms). (During the time these creatures lived, other animals were pipsqueaks, too — the earliest known horse, which started out evolutionarily the size of a mini schnauzer, shrunk to housecat size during the warmest part of the early Eocene.) Heptodon probably ate leaves, which makes sense as it shows up in many forested Eocene environments, Eberle said.
The early Eocene was a steamy time on Earth. The breakup of the supercontinent Pangea came with no small amount of volcanic activity, which released billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These emissions, among other greenhouse gases, heated the globe by about 11 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) over roughly 20,000 years. The areas that now comprise Colorado and Wyoming hosted tropical rainforests, and ferns and trees thrived in the Arctic.
"This is the height of global warming since the extinction of the dinosaurs, so it's the time interval that people look at a lot for trying to understand global warming today," Eberles said.
A forest of mixed conifer and broadleaf trees carpeted Northern British Columbia, with palms and spruce living side-by-side, Eberle said. It would have rained often and frozen rarely, not unlike the climate in Portland today, 700 miles (1,126 kilometers) to the south.
"British Columbia is adding a new dimension to that time interval," Eberle said. "Not everything was hot and tropical."
The researchers reported their findings today (July 8) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

http://www.livescience.com/46700-tapir-hedgehog-fossils-discovered.html

Fossils of dinosaur-era forest fire discovered in Canada

A fossil of a leaf from the Salix genus, which includes willows, found during the study of 66-million-year-old plants in Saskatchewan.Larsson/Bamforth

 

In the badlands of southern Saskatchewan, Canada, scientists discovered evidence of a 66-million-year-old forest fire locked in stone.
Fossilized plants found on top of the layers of ancient charcoal show that forests bounced back from wildfires during the last days of the dinosaurs much like they do today, the new study found.

 

Dry, treeless grasslands cover much of southern Saskatchewan today, but 66 million years ago, the region was covered in swampy, lowland forests. It was perhaps six times rainier and 18-26 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today, the researchers said. The area may have resembled North America's Pacific Coast, with forest canopies dominated by towering sequoias and a diversity of smaller plants growing closer to the ground. [See Photos of Fossils from the Ancient Forest]
The ancient forests also suffered the occasional fire. Researchers from McGill University, in Montreal, and the Saskatchewan Museum found evidence of one of those blazes among fossilized plants at Grasslands National Park, in a geologic layer known as the Frenchman Formation (so named because it's exposed around the Frenchman River).
This rock deposit is a natural time capsule from the Late Cretaceous Period, just before a mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs. In this layer of stone and dirt, scientists have discovered the fossils of ancient turtles, crocodiles, croc-like champsosauruses, as well as dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex and the three-horned Triceratops horridus.
The scientists compared the fossils at Grasslands to another deposit without any fire disturbance, located about 125 miles away in a valley called Chambery Coulee. Differences in the type of plants found at both sites reveal how the prehistoric landscape recovered after a fire.
Similar to patterns of regrowth seen today, the fossils from Grasslands showed that plants like alder, birch and sassafras started popping up in the early stages after the fire. Meanwhile, the fossils from Chambery Coulee told the scientists that sequoia and ginkgo would have been thriving in mature forests that hadn't been scorched by a blaze.
The researchers hope their findings and further study will help them understand the forest ecology and biodiversity in this region immediately before the dinosaurs fell.
"We won't be able to fully understand the extinction dynamics until we understand what normal ecological processes were going on in the background," study researcher Hans Larsson, of McGill University, said in a statement.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/06/06/fossils-dinosaur-era-forest-fire-discovered-in-canada/

 

How to Shrink a Dinosaur: Fossils Reveal Evolution of 'Pocket Sauropods'

By Elizabeth Palermo

Newly unveiled models of a group of Europasaurus holgeri dinosaurs at the Dinopark Munchehagen. Copyright and Credit: Dinopark Münchehagen.

Sauropods are best known for being the largest dinosaurs ever to roam Earth. But a new study of these ancient creatures focuses on a surprising fact: Some sauropods were actually quite small.
The conclusion is based on the discovery of the fossil remains of the smaller-than-average sauropod dubbed Europasaurus holgeri in 2006 in a quarry in northern Germany.The specimens were approximately 20 feet (6 meters) long and are believed to have supported dinosaurs weighing less than a ton each. While these dimensions may seem large by today's standards — the animals were bigger than the average horse — they belonged to animals that were significantly smaller than other sauropods.
Scientists originally thought the fossils may have belonged to juvenile dinosaurs. But the new study determined that the fossils actually belonged to adult dwarf dinosaurs, said lead researcher Martin Sander, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the Steinmann Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology at the University of Bonn in Germany.

 The dwarfism exhibited in this rare discovery of sauropod fossils is a result of what's known as island or insular dwarfism. This gradual shrinking of a large species over several generations has also affected other animals — like elephants and hippopotamuses — living in isolated and cramped quarters.
This particular group of sauropods, Europasaurus holgeri, lived about 150 million years ago in what is now Europe. But during the Late Jurassic period, Europe was submerged in a shallow sea, and most of the animals that lived there inhabited small islands. Over time, Europasaurus evolved to better survive in its island habitat by shrinking, the researchers said.
To make their case, the researchers focused on the details of the anatomy of these diminutive dinosaur specimens. They found that, in the case of Europasaurus, two different sizes of dwarf dinosaurs — a small dwarf and a large dwarf — evolved during the Late Jurassic, Sander told Live Science in an email.
"Bone microstructure tells us that the largest of the two kinds of Europasaurus was fully grown," Sander said. "To find this out, we had to grind samples of Europasaurus bones into thin slices, about one-twentieth of a millimeter in thickness."
At this thickness, Sander explained, the bone becomes translucent and can be studied with a microscope, allowing researchers to examine the bones' microstructure. The researchers also examined the shapes of the skull bones to determine each specimen's morphological ontogenetic stage (MOS), or where that animal is over the course of its development.
Sander said both the MOS and the specimen's microstructure help researchers determine how old a dinosaur was when it died.
Once the researchers determined that the specimens they were studying did, indeed, belong to the dwarf dinosaur Europasaurus and not juvenile sauropods, one important question remained: How did Europasaurus get so small?
"To be a dwarf as a dinosaur, your ancestors have to have been giants," Sander said. "In the case of Europasaurus, this is not difficult to check because, with very few exceptions, all of those long-necked sauropods were giants. The question then becomes how to shrink your dinosaur."
Sander said there were two ways dinosaurs could shrink over the course of evolution: Either a dinosaur could stop growing earlier than its ancestor — after five years instead of 20, for instance — or a dinosaur could grow for the same time period (say 20 years), but did so more slowly, at half the speed.
In both cases, a dinosaur would end up being significantly smaller than its ancestor, Sander said. In the case of Europasaurus, both processes seem to have been at work. However, his team was not able to determine which process was dominant.
Another mystery left unresolved by the University of Bonn study is that of the origins of the two different "forms" of Europasaurus — what Sander refers to as "a small dwarf and a large dwarf." These two sizes of Europasaurus could represent an instance of sexual dimorphism, Sander said, in which males and females of the species are formed or sized differently. However, scientists aren't ruling out another possibility: that the fossils from the 2006 discovery represent two distinct Europasaurus species, separated either by time or by distance.
http://www.livescience.com/46384-dwarf-sauropod-dinosaur-evolution.html

Million-Year-Old Fossils Show Hippos Going for a Swim

By Megan Gannon

Researchers in Kenya have uncovered fossilized animal tracks, which they believe may have been left by swimming hippos 1.4 million years ago. Credit: Courtesy of Matthew Bennett

More than a million years ago, hippopotamuses paddled across a shallow pool in the region that's now northern Kenya, occasionally scraping their feet on the sandy bottom. Today, researchers have evidence of the hippos' fleeting swim in the form of fossilized footprints.
The newly identified prints represent the first known tracks of ancient mammals taking a dip, joining previously discovered trace fossils left behind by swimming dinosaurs, turtles and crocodiles, the researchers said.
The hippo foot impressions were found in Kenya's Koobi Fora region, which is part of the Lake Turkana Basin, considered the cradle of human evolution because the area contains some of the oldest fossils from hominins — a group that comprises multiple species that came after Homo, the human lineage, split from chimpanzees. In fact, early humans may have witnessed the aquatic adventures of these ancient hippos; hominin footprints were discovered on the same geologic surface a mere 230 feet (70 meters) from the hippo tracks.

Researchers in Kenya have uncovered fossilized animal tracks, which they believe may have been left by swimming hippos 1.4 million years ago. Credit: Courtesy of Matthew Bennett View full size image

More than a million years ago, hippopotamuses paddled across a shallow pool in the region that's now northern Kenya, occasionally scraping their feet on the sandy bottom. Today, researchers have evidence of the hippos' fleeting swim in the form of fossilized footprints.
The newly identified prints represent the first known tracks of ancient mammals taking a dip, joining previously discovered trace fossils left behind by swimming dinosaurs, turtles and crocodiles, the researchers said.
The hippo foot impressions were found in Kenya's Koobi Fora region, which is part of the Lake Turkana Basin, considered the cradle of human evolution because the area contains some of the oldest fossils from hominins — a group that comprises multiple species that came after Homo, the human lineage, split from chimpanzees. In fact, early humans may have witnessed the aquatic adventures of these ancient hippos; hominin footprints were discovered on the same geologic surface a mere 230 feet (70 meters) from the hippo track
 'Bottom walkers'
Recent excavations in Koobi Fora revealed dozens of large animal tracks, dating back to 1.4 million years ago, but a majority of the prints appear to have been left by a four-toed animal "bottom walking" in a shallow water body, study leader Matthew Bennett, of the United Kingdom's Bournemouth University, and his colleagues said.
Because of the size and shape of the prints, the team thinks the tracks could belong to adults and juveniles of the species Hippopotamus gorgops, which went extinct during the Ice Age, and perhaps the pygmy hippo species Hippopotamus aethiopicus.
At the time, the Lake Turkana area was much more fertile than it is today. The semi-arid environment had lots of shallow pools and channels, all feeding into larger lakes, and it supported a striking diversity of plants and animals, Bennett said.
The hippo prints appear to have been pressed into fine sands and silts deposited on the floor of a shallow body of water, before being buried by a layer of coarser sand, likely during a small flood, Bennett explained in an email to Live Science.
Today's gliding hippos

Sometimes, the hippos would thrust upwards towards the water surface using both hind feet placed firmly apart.
Credit: Courtesy of Matthew Bennett

View full size image

To look for a modern comparison to these extinct animals, the researchers observed the swimming styles of two female common Nile hippopotamuses (Hippopotamus amphibius) through a glass tank at the Adventure Aquarium in Philadelphia.
Underwater, the Nile hippos would glide with their limbs folded beneath their bodies. They would occasionally scratch the bottom of the tank with one leg, dragging only their digits across the ground. Sometimes, the hippos would thrust upward, toward the water surface, using both of their hind legs. These movements were reflected in the shape of the ancient tracks, the researchers said.
Bennett said other swimming tracks of mammals likely have been uncovered but just haven't been recognized. These types of prints do not form clear sequences like footprints on land do, Bennett said. He also guessed that many researchers have tended to dismiss animal tracks in their quest for hominin footprints.
"[The hippo tracks] tell us about mammal locomotion in a near-zero-gravity environment," Bennett said in an email. "They show how different types of 'bottom walking' motion may be recorded as tracks. All of this helps us understand and interpret swim tracks made by much larger extinct animals, such as dinosaurs."
 http://www.livescience.com/46286-swimming-hippos-fossil-tracks.html

Tapeworm-Like Fossil Suggests Origins of Left and Right

Traces of the tapeworm-like creature Plexus ricei as seen in the fossil record. Individuals were likely 2 to 31 inches (5 to 80 cm) long. Credit: Droser Lab, UC Riverside

 

By Elizabeth Howell

A puzzling fossil find from the Ediacaran period, an era that occurred more than 500 million years ago, has scientists curious about how "bilateral" creatures such as humans evolved.
The Plexus ricei organism resembled a tapeworm or flatworm. Mysteriously, it appears to have had "bilateral", or left-right, symmetry before anything else living 540 million to 575 million years ago.
"Plexus was unlike any other fossil that we know from the Precambrian," said study researcher Mary Droser, a paleobiologist at the University of California at Riverside, in a statement. The Precambrian was the period before abundant animal life appeared on our planet, and represents latter part is called the Ediacaran period.
"It was bilaterally symmetrical at a time when bilaterians — all animals other than corals and sponges — were just appearing on this planet." [In Photos: Spooky Deep-Sea Creatures]
Tube worm
The tubular creature was about 5 to 80 centimeters (2 to 31 inches) in length and 5 to 20 millimeters (0.2 inches to 0.78 inches) wide, and it lived on the seafloor. That wasn't unusual, as all life on Earth lived in the oceans during this time. The earliest evidence of a bilaterally symmetrical organism comes from about 585 million years ago. That slug-like animal, less than a half-inch long, left itsy-bitsy tracks found fossilized in Uruguay.

Here, a reconstruction of the tapeworm-like creature Plexus ricei, which lived more than 500 million years ago.
Credit: Droser Lab, UC Riverside

View full size image

"Ediacaran fossils are extremely perplexing: They don’t look like any animal that is alive today, and their interrelationships are very poorly understood," Lucas Joel, a former graduate student at UC Riverside who led the research, said in a statement.
The Ediacaran period also lacked bioturbation, Joel said, or churned-up seafloors from marine organisms snuffling for food.
It was only in the Cambrian period — the explosion of life that started around 540 million years ago — that organisms began churning up the seafloor. By contrast, large algae mats carpeted the Ediacaran oceans, a rare occurrence on Earth today.
Tricky identity
Because the seafloor remained undisturbed, organisms that died and drifted to the ocean floor were preserved when sediments accumulated over their bodies, creating a mold.
"What this means is that the fossils we see in the field are not the exact fossils of the original organism, but instead molds and casts of its body," Joel said. That makes it sometimes difficult to tell if a fossil represents an organism like Plexus or simply an empty burrow created by a long-ago creature worming its way through the sand.
Joel and his colleagues discovered that Plexus ricei was not, in fact, a trace fossil (fossil of an organism's path), but rather was an unknown organism. The species gets its name from the Latin word "plexus," which means braided, and from Dennis Rice, a field assistant at the South Australian Museum who excavated many specimens of Plexus.
Droser said researchers need to confirm that Plexus was truly bilateral, but the scientists suspect that this tapeworm-like creature is a distant ancestor of other bilateral organisms — including humans.

http://www.livescience.com/46206-tapeworm-fossil-reveals-bilateral-symmetry.html

Fossils of dinosaur-era forest fire discovered in Canada

By Megan Gannon

In the badlands of southern Saskatchewan, Canada, scientists discovered evidence of a 66-million-year-old forest fire locked in stone.
Fossilized plants found on top of the layers of ancient charcoal show that forests bounced back from wildfires during the last days of the dinosaurs much like they do today, the new study found.

 

Dry, treeless grasslands cover much of southern Saskatchewan today, but 66 million years ago, the region was covered in swampy, lowland forests. It was perhaps six times rainier and 18-26 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today, the researchers said. The area may have resembled North America's Pacific Coast, with forest canopies dominated by towering sequoias and a diversity of smaller plants growing closer to the ground. [See Photos of Fossils from the Ancient Forest]
The ancient forests also suffered the occasional fire. Researchers from McGill University, in Montreal, and the Saskatchewan Museum found evidence of one of those blazes among fossilized plants at Grasslands National Park, in a geologic layer known as the Frenchman Formation (so named because it's exposed around the Frenchman River).
This rock deposit is a natural time capsule from the Late Cretaceous Period, just before a mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs. In this layer of stone and dirt, scientists have discovered the fossils of ancient turtles, crocodiles, croc-like champsosauruses, as well as dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex and the three-horned Triceratops horridus.
The scientists compared the fossils at Grasslands to another deposit without any fire disturbance, located about 125 miles away in a valley called Chambery Coulee. Differences in the type of plants found at both sites reveal how the prehistoric landscape recovered after a fire.
Similar to patterns of regrowth seen today, the fossils from Grasslands showed that plants like alder, birch and sassafras started popping up in the early stages after the fire. Meanwhile, the fossils from Chambery Coulee told the scientists that sequoia and ginkgo would have been thriving in mature forests that hadn't been scorched by a blaze.
The researchers hope their findings and further study will help them understand the forest ecology and biodiversity in this region immediately before the dinosaurs fell.
"We won't be able to fully understand the extinction dynamics until we understand what normal ecological processes were going on in the background," study researcher Hans Larsson, of McGill University, said in a statement.http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/06/06/fossils-dinosaur-era-forest-fire-discovered-in-canada/

Dinosaur Fossil Smuggler Gets 3-Month Sentence

       

Eric Prokopi, who pleaded guilty to charges he smuggled this Tarbosaurus skeleton and other fossils into the United States, was sentenced to three months in federal prison on Tuesday, June 3, 2014. Credit: Wynne Parry for Live Science View full size image

NEW YORK — An international drama centering on the restored skeleton of a predatory dinosaur began on the auction block two years ago and came to a close here in a Manhattan courtroom today (June 3). Eric Prokopi, the man who pleaded guilty to charges he smuggled these fossils and others into the United States, was sentenced to three months in federal prison.
Prokopi "is clearly not a bad person, but he has done a bad thing," said U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein before issuing the sentence. "The punishment must deter others."
The outcome upset Prokopi and his family, said Prokopi's attorney Georges Lederman afterward. "He was hoping for probation."

 

One dinosaur leads to many
On Dec. 27, 2012, Prokopi pleaded guilty to charges he made misleading or false statements on U.S. customs forms when importing dinosaur fossils, and that he transported fossils into the United States and across state lines knowing they had been taken illegally from Mongolia. Together, these charges carried a cumulative sentence of as much as 17 years, plus possible fines. [See Photos of the Smuggled Dinosaur Skeleton]
In court, however, the prosecution supported leniency, citing Prokopi's cooperation.
"We went into the case pursuing one Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton," said Martin Bell, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. "Speaking with Mr. Prokopi, we were alerted to the existence [of many other dinosaur fossils], also Mongolian property, of which we were not aware."
The federal investigators recovered these fossils from Prokopi and his contacts, and made arrangements to repatriate the finds to Mongolia. The specimens, mostly from Prokopi and his business partner in the England, Chris Moore, include a number of Tarbosaurus specimens, some nearly complete and others fragmentary. It also includes dinosaur eggs and fossils from duck-billed dinosaurs called hadrosaurs, frilled protoceratops, armored ankylosaurs, the roosterlike Gallimimus and others.
End to an open black market?
The story began when Prokopi attempted to sell an 8-foot-tall (2.4 meters) and 24-foot-long (7.3 m)Tarbosaurus, an Asian relative to the North American Tyrannosaurus rex,that Prokopi had prepared at a public auction in May 2012. News of the impending sale of the T. rex-like dinosaur fossils reached Mongolian President Elbegdorj Tsakhia, who sought to stop the sale. Elbegdorjsaid these fossils were most likely taken illegally from his country, where law makes fossils state property. Paleontologists from Mongolia and North America supported the president's claim.
At auction, the Tarbosaurus attracted a bid of just over $1 million, though the fossil never sold. The federal government sought to seize the skeleton; Prokopi defended his claim on it, and found himself facing criminal charges related to fossil smuggling. [Image Gallery: Amazing Dinosaur Fossils]
Before this case, Mongolian fossils were easily bought and sold in the United States, regardless of Mongolian law. However, this case has changed things, said Robert Painter, an American attorney who represents President Elbegdorj."You have seen an evaporation of smuggled fossils being offered for sale in the U.S," Painter said.
Painter said he, too, had expected Prokopi to receive probation, because of the man's cooperation with investigators, but that the three-month sentence would further deter the sale of ill-gotten fossils. "I think [the sentencing is] adding this last chapter to this story: Not only do the smuggled items get returned, but you can go to jail as a smuggler. That is the most chilling of all effects I can imagine," he told Live Science.
Preparing to rebuild
Prokopi’s version of eventsProkopi's version of eventsdid not sit well with Judge Hellerstein. The commercial paleontologist said he believed permits could be obtained to export fossils legally from Mongolia and did not realize he lacked those permits until after the fossils had left the country. The judge wanted to ascertain whether or not Prokopi accepted full responsibility for his actions. (The Mongolian government has never issued export permits for commercial sale, Painter said.)
Once Prokopi realized the fossils had been taken out of Mongolia illegally, "he was committed" to keeping the fossils and went on to falsify customs forms so as to bring the specimens from England into the United States, Lederman explained to the judge.
Prior to hearing his sentence, Prokopi apologized to the judge. "I have not lost my love for paleontology," Prokopi said. "I hope to rebuild my business with more emphasis on proper documentation on everything." He said he regretted the negative publicity his case has attracted for commercial paleontology.
Hellerstein originally sentenced Prokopi to six months in federal custody; after some discussion with Lederman, the judge lowered that sentence to three months, followed by three months in a halfway house, and a year of probation. Hellerstein waved a $10,000 fine after Lederman noted that, since the case began, Prokopi has gone through bankruptcy and is in debt. His sentence also includes 100 hours of community service, which Hellerstein recommended be served in a natural history museum.
http://www.livescience.com/46085-dinosaur-fossil-smuggler-gets-3-month-sentence.html

Huge Tooth Proves Jurassic Seas Were Crazy Dangerous

      by Jennifer Viegas

Photograph of the Dakosaurus maximus tooth (front and side) recovered from the English Channel near Dorset, England.

A fossilized tooth dredged from the bottom of the English Channel near Dorset, England, belonged to a formidable Jurassic marine predator and is the largest known tooth of its kind found in the U.K., according to a new study.

 

Analyzing Dinosaur Fossils

Kasey-Dee Gardner gets a behind-the-scenes look at how information is extracted from ancient fossils.

Hemera/Thinkstock

The 2.36-inch-long tooth has a broken tip, and would have been even bigger when new, suggests the paper, published in the journal Historical Biology.
The study determined that the tooth is 152 million years old and belonged to a prehistoric relative of modern crocodiles known as Dakosaurus maximus.
NEWS: Giant Dinosaurs Unearthed in Argentina
"That (Dakosaurus) had 2.36 inch (6 centimeter) or longer teeth for an animal only 4.5 meters (about 15 feet) long is remarkable," lead author Mark Young told Discovery News.
"The teeth were serrated, robust and contacted one another, making slicing much easier," added Young, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Biological Sciences. "This animal would have had a fearsome bite for its size."
During the marine predator’s lifetime, a shallow sea covered what is now Europe, turning the landmasses into an archipelago. Archaeopteryx, believed to have been the world’s first bird, lived in Europe during this time, as did some dwarf non-avian dinosaurs, such as Europasaurus. But the real predator action was found in the water.
Photos: Dinosaur Claws Evolved from Basic to Badass
Young said that Dakosaurus maximus, which belonged to a family of croc predecessors known as metriorhynchids, was puny in comparison to the gigantic marine reptile Pliosaurus. The skull alone of Pliosaurus measured about 6.6 feet long, and some estimates hold that the entire body of this monster predator measured 49 feet long.
Yet another marine predator at the time was Plesiosuchus manselii, which was larger than today’s great white sharks. Dakosaurus maximus, however, was particularly abundant, living in shallow lagoons, coastal environments and deep-sea regions. In the lagoonal environments, which lacked the other large animals, it seems to have been the top predator.
"The shallow seas of the late Jurassic would have been an exceptionally dangerous place to swim," Young said.http://news.discovery.com/animals/dinosaurs/huge-tooth-proves-jurassic-seas-were-crazy-dangerous-140527.htm

Ancient Lyme Disease Bacteria Found in 15-Million-Year-Old Tick Fossils

By Megan Gannon

 

This tick trapped in ancient amber from the Dominican Republic is between 15 million and 20 million years old. Before it died, it was carrying the type of bacteria that causes Lyme disease

Photo by George Poinar, Jr

The oldest known evidence of Lyme disease may lie in ticks that were entombed in amber at least 15 million years ago, scientists announced.
The researchers investigated four fossilized ticks that had been trapped in chunks of amber found in the Dominican Republic. Inside the ticks' bodies, the scientists saw a large population of cells that looked like the squiggly shaped spirochete cells of the Borrelia genus — a type of bacteria that causes Lyme disease today.
Bacteria, which arose on the planet 3.6 billion years ago, rarely survive in the fossil record. But amber, the hardened resin from oozing trees, can preserve soft tissues and microscopic cells that would otherwise degrade over time. In recent years, scientists have discovered the 100-million-year-old gut microbes of a termite and 40-million-year-old sperm from an insect-like springtail, both trapped in amber. [Photos: Ancient Life Trapped in Amber]

The newfound bacteria species was dubbed Palaeoborrelia dominicana. The findings suggest illnesses like Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases may have been plaguing animals long before humans ever walked Earth.
Today, ticks are more significant disease-carrying insects than mosquitos in the United States, Europe and Asia, said entomologist George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, lead author of the study detailed in the journal Historical Biology last month.
"They can carry bacteria that cause a wide range of diseases, affect many different animal species, and often are not even understood or recognized by doctors," Poinar said in a statement. "It's likely that many ailments in human history for which doctors had no explanation have been caused by tick-borne disease."
Lyme disease, for example, wasn't formally recognized until the 1970s even though it affects thousands of people each year. In 2009, there were 30,000 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Humans acquire the disease when bitten by ticks that carry Borrelia bacteria. But because it has symptoms that overlap with many other disorders — including rash, aches, fatigue and fever — Lyme disease is often misdiagnosed.
The oldest documented case of Lyme disease in humans comes from the famous 5,300-year-old ice mummy dubbed Ötzi, discovered in the Eastern Alps about 20 years ago. In a 2012 study detailed in the journal Nature Communications, scientists said they found genetic material for the Borrelia bacteria in the iceman.
"Before he was frozen in the glacier, the iceman was probably already in misery from Lyme disease," Poinar said. "He had a lot of health problems and was really a mess."
http://www.livescience.com/46007-lyme-disease-ancient-amber-tick.html

500-Million-Year-Old Embryos Fossilized in Rare Find

A Cambrian embryo fossil exposed by acid etching on rock. The polygonal pattern suggests that the embryo was in the multicellular blastula stage of development.
Credit: Broce et al


By Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer

Tiny, spherical fossils found in southern China appear to be the embryos of a previously unknown animal.
The fossils come from the Cambrian, a period dating from 540 million to 485 million years ago and known for an explosion of diversity. Some of the organisms that appeared during the Cambrian, such as the bug-like trilobite, had exoskeletons and other hard parts that fossilized nicely. Others, including sponges and worms, were made of soft tissue that rarely preserves.
Researchers Jesse Broce of Virginia Tech, James Schiffbauer of the University of Missouri and their colleagues were searching for these rare soft-tissue fossils in limestone from the Hubei province of southern China when they found something even more rare: tiny spheres, including some with polygonal patterns on their surfaces. These itsy-bitsy fossils are most likely fossilized embryos, the researchers report in the March issue of the Journal of Paleontology. The fossils come from the third stage of the Cambrian, dating back to around 521 million to 541 million years ago.

"We found over 140 spherically shaped fossils, some of which include features that are reminiscent of division-stage embryos, essentially frozen in time," Schiffbauer said in a statement.
The researchers began their investigation by attempting to dissolve fossils out of the limestone from China's Shuijingtuo formation with acid, but that method seriously damaged or destroyed the spherical fossils. Researchers then hand-chiseled the rock into millimeter- or centimeter-sized chunks, exposing the fossil surfaces manually.

Soft-tissue fossils from the Ediacaran period, the last period before the Cambrian. These fossils come from the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada.
Credit: Broce, et al

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From there, the researchers investigated the spheres with a variety of techniques, including slicing them into thin sections, which can be viewed under a microscope. The scientists also imaged the fossils with X-ray and scanning electron microscopy and X-ray techniques.
The results showed specimens with a phosphate-rich envelope surrounding a ball of calcite. (The organic compounds that once made up the embryos have long since mineralized.) Some of the spheres had polygonal patterns that look very similar to those seen on fossilized embryos from Markuelia, a Cambrian worm-like creature. The researchers believe that these specimens are blastulas, which are an early, multicellular stage of embryonic development.
It remains a mystery what these embryos would have grown up to become. Fossilized embryos from a variety of species pop up occasionally in the fossil record, from a 380-million-year old fish with an embryo still in her belly to dinosaur embryos still curled up inside their eggs.
http://www.livescience.com/44828-cambrian-embryo-fossils.html

450-Million-Year-Old Marine Creatures 'Babysat' Their Young

By Becky Oskin, Senior Writer

 

 A newly discovered fossil ostracod called Luprisca incuba, showing limbs and eggs, from 450-million-year old rocks in NewYork.
Credit: Siveter, David J., Tanaka, G., Farrell, C. Ú., Martin, M.J., Siveter, Derek J & Briggs, D.E.G.



The oldest fossil evidence of animal "babysitting" now comes from 450-million-year-old rocks in New York.
Small marine animals called ostracods, a group of crustaceans that includes more than 20,000 species living today, were discovered buried with their eggs and young by a team led by researchers from the University of Leicester in Britain. The findings were published today (March 13) in the journal Current Biology.
"This is a very rare and exciting find from the fossil record," David Siveter, lead study author and a geologist at the University of Leicester, said in a statement. "Only a handful of examples are known where eggs are fossilized and associated with the parent. This discovery tells us that these ancient, tiny marine crustaceans took particular care of their brood in exactly the same way as their living relatives."

http://www.livescience.com/44088-fossil-evidence-egg-care-ostracods.html