The Burgess Shale was discovered 109 years ago today by Charles Doolittle Wolcott. The deposit dates to about 508 million years ago. Currently located high in the mountains of British Columbia, Canada, in life, it was located near the equator. It's one of the most important fossil localities ever discovered, as it opened our eyes to the animals of the Cambrian Explosion. The fine preservation of soft body parts in the Burgess Shale made this possible. Since then, numerous other localities of similar animals have been found around the world and on other neighboring mountains.
National Geographic has a story about the first direct evidence of interbreeding among Neanderthal and Denisovans. A paper in this week's Nature has all the details.
When the results first popped up, paleogeneticist Viviane Slon didn't believe it. “What went wrong?” she recalls asking herself at the time. Her mind immediately turned to the analysis. Did she make a mistake? Could the sample be contaminated?
The data was telling her that the roughly 90,000-year-old flake of bone she had tested was from a teenager that had a Neanderthal mom and Denisovan dad. Researchers had long suspected that these two groups of ancient human relatives interbred, finding whiffs of both their genes in ancient and modern human genomes. But no one had ever found the direct offspring from such a pairing.
Slon, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, sampled the bone from another spot; she got the same result. So she did it again. After running tests on six samples in all, the results always came out the same: The bone had nearly equal amounts of DNA from a Neanderthal and a Denisovan.
PBS's Eons Channel on YouTube has an episode about the supervolcano under Yellowstone. Twelve million years ago saw the creation of Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska. Truly, a bad day in the Miocene!
There is a an upcoming auction at the Boone County Fairgrounds. It will be minerals, gems, fossils, and lapidary equipment.
Details:
JKiesling Auctioning Series Contact: 815-558-4664 Date: Saturday September 8th, 2018 8:00 am preview | 9:00 am Public Auction starts Location: Boone County Fairgrounds 8791, IL-76, Belvidere, IL Items for sale include numerous minerals, gems, fossils & lapidary machinery/equipment
The Smithsonian Magazine has an article about a new pterosaur discovered in the desert in Utah. Its name is Caelestiventus hanseni (meaning Heavenly Wind) and it dates back to the Triassic, about 200 to 210 million years ago. Pterosaurs first took to the air during the Triassic. Hopefully, this specimen can shed some light on how that happened. This fossil comes from a rock formation on public land in north-eastern Utah known as the Saints and Sinners Quarry. During this time period, this area is believed to be an oasis in a massive dune covered desert. There is a BYU press release and the original paper appeared in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“This one site we’ve pulled out 18,000 bones from an area the size of a good sized living room,” BYU’s Brooks Britt, the study’s lead author, tells Mary Halton at the BBC. “And there’s only one pterosaur.”
The amount of material is unprecedented. In most cases, researchers only find tiny or fragmentary fossils of pterosaurs, like a finger bone or vertebrae. But the new specimen likely died in soft sand or sediment that hardened into rock, keeping the specimen intact. “Most [pterosaur fossils] are heavily distorted; literally like roadkill,” Britt tells Halton. “The bones are so delicate, you can’t take them all the way out of the rock because they would just fall apart.”
The researchers didn’t completely dig out the pterosaur bits, instead leaving them encased in sandstone, getting 3-D images of the bones with a CAT-scan, which they used to make models of the fossils. The scans reveal some interesting info about the flying beast. The BBC reports that the fossil comes from a juvenile with a wingspan about five feet wide, likely the largest pterosaur of the era (in later times, pterosaurs would evolve to reach the size of small airplanes). The animal had 112 teeth and the size and shape of its brain indicates it could see well though its sense of smell was poor.
Field trips require membership, but visitors are welcome at all meetings!
see details in this post
Sat, Sep 8th
ESCONI Field Trip, 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM Braceville Spoil Pile - See details here
Sun, Sep 9th
ESCONI Field Trip, 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM Braceville Spoil Pile - See details here
Fri, Sep 14th
ESCONI General Meeting, 8:00 PM College of Dupage - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: "The Origin of Crinoids" by Dr. Tom Guensburg Research Associate at the Field Museum
Sat, Sep 15th
ESCONI Paleontology Study Group Meeting, 7:30 PM College of Dupage - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: "Show and Tell"
Sun, Sep 30th
ESCONI Field Trip, Irene Quarry in Belvedere, IL. - See details here
Sue the T-rex was discovered on August 12th, 1990 by Sue Hendrickson. She resides at the Field Museum in Chicago, IL. She's the biggest, most complete, and oldest T-rex ever discovered. In Spring 2019, she will be unveiled in her new home. Don't miss it!
The Atlantic has an article about Gerta Keller and her differences with the consensus view on the causes of the K-Pg mass extinction. It's a good read, but there are some errors. Gerta's position is that the meteor strike was just a bit player in the whole event. There are many good books on either Mass Extinctions in general or the K-Pg event specifically. They can provide some good summer reading material. Here are a few below.
The speaker at our September meeting will be Dr. Tom Guensburg, Research Associate at the Field Museum. The title of his program is "The Origin of Crinoids". Don't miss it!
