Fossil Data Plugs Gaps In Current Knowledge, Study Shows

Researchers have shown for the first time that fossils can be used as effectively as living species in understanding the complex branching in the evolutionary tree of life.

While many scientists feel that fossils can offer insights from the ancient past, others have been reluctant to use extinct species because the data they offer is often less complete.

Most biologists, for example, have traditionally tried to piece together the evolutionary relationships between species using only the animals that are alive today.

But in research published in journal Systematic Biology, scientists from the University of Bath and the Natural History Museum compared the morphological datasets of 45 animal groups, both living (extant) and extinct.

By running a series of analyses they were able to measure how much the family tree of life needed to be altered when data from these extant and extinct species are included or removed.

They found no difference in the impact that the fossil groups made on the family tree compared to extant groups.


“Evolutionary biologists try to reconstruct rapid and deep evolutionary branching events that happened many tens or hundreds of millions of years ago,” said Dr Matthew Wills from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry, who worked with Andrea Cobbett (University of Bath) and Dr Mark Wilkinson (Natural History Museum).

“Unlike living species, fossils offer ancient snapshots of life forms that were around at the time those branching events occurred.

“Also, living species have millions of years ‘worth’ of change piled on top of this, which can often bury the important signals we need to understand.

“Despite this, detractors have claimed that because fossil data are often less complete, usually just bones, shells and other hard parts, they are likely to muddy the water and make it difficult to find a robust evolutionary tree.

“What our research has done is demonstrate conclusively, and for the first time, that this is not the case.

“We also show that adding just one fossil to an analysis can result in a radically different picture of that group’s evolutionary history. The trees constructed without fossils may be oversimplifications, and far from the truth.”

The research was funded by the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council.


Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Bath

Lobster’s ancestor enters historical melting pot

Scientists from the University of Leicester have discovered a long lost ancestor of the barnacles and lobsters – from over 500 million years ago.

Professor David Siveter, of the Department of Geology, is part of an international team that has made the rare find in China.

Fossils of a new species obtained from 520 million year old Lower Cambrian rocks in Yunnan Province of China represent the earliest known true representatives of the Crustacea, the major group of arthropods that includes shrimps, lobsters, crabs and barnacles.

The fossils are exceptionally well preserved, phosphatised in three-dimensions, complete with all their appendages, mouth-parts and even their eyes.

The species is tiny (the fossils are 1-2 millimetres long), but is represented by several growth stages. Crustaceans are present in the fossil record of the last 500 million years (back to the early Ordovician period) and very rare representatives are also known from the late Cambrian period of geological time.


The new find represents the first undoubted true crustacean from the early Cambrian. The limb morphology and other details of the new species are particularly similar to certain living groups of crustaceans such as branchiopods (e.g. ‘water fleas’), cephalocarids and copepods.

The study by researchers from Kunming, Leicester and Ulm was reported in the scientific journal Nature (as below).

The new species has been named Yicaris dianensis, eluding to the ethnic minority ‘Yi’ people present in the ancient kingdom of Dian in southern China where the fossils were found.

Professor David Siveter (University of Leicester) comments: “This exciting palaeobiological find from a new site yielding exceptionally preserved fossils extends the stratigraphical record of crustaceans by more than 10 million years and has significance for the evolution of a major group of invertebrate animals”.

Its stratigraphical position provides substantial support to the idea that the main evolutionary event that gave rise to the arthropods was before the Cambrian. Small leaf-shaped structures occur on the outer limb base of the new species. Some authors consider that insect wings may have originated from similar structures, and the early Cambrian occurrence of this trait is of potential significance to the debate regarding the emergence of winged forms within the arthropods.


Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Leicester

Stone Age farmers used fire and flood to create first paddy fields

Terraced rice paddy on a hillslope in Indonesia
Terraced rice paddy on a hillslope in Indonesia
Stone Age farmers in eastern China used fire and flood control to create the first known rice paddy fields.

According to a new study, Stone Age farmers in eastern China used fire and flood control to manage coastal swamps and turn them into the first known rice paddy fields.

The Durham University-led research, published in prestigious scientific journal Nature, provides a detailed insight into this Neolithic rice cultivation system.

The adoption of cereal cultivation was one of the most important cultural processes in history, marking the transition from hunting and gathering by Mesolithic foragers to the food-producing economy of Neolithic farmers.

Dr Yongqiang Zong, Dr Jim Innes and colleagues in China presented evidence from the earliest known Neolithic site in eastern China, around 7,700 years ago, demonstrating that communities selected lowland swamps for their rice cultivation.


They suggested that, even at this early stage, rice cultivation involved high-intensity clearance and management of coastal marsh vegetation by fire.

It is also likely that floodwater input to cultivated areas was controlled by humans, with artificial “bunding” used to maintain crop yields and prevent major flood damage.

The site was eventually overwhelmed by the sea around 7,550 years ago, demonstrating the vulnerability of early rice production in this fertile but unstable ecosystem.

These results establish that rice cultivation began in the coastal wetlands of eastern China.

The authors’ conclusion that incipient Neolithic groups used fire management to modify these regions may also apply to other areas, and requires further investigation.


Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Durham University

Toothy dinosaur newest to come out of southern Utah

Gryposaurus monumentensis. (Gryposaurus means 'hook-beaked lizard' and monumentensis honors the monument where the fossils were found in Utah)
Gryposaurus monumentensis. (Gryposaurus means ‘hook-beaked lizard’ and monumentensis honors the monument where the fossils were found in Utah)
The newest dinosaur species to emerge from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument had some serious bite, according to researchers from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah.

“It was one of the most robust duck-billed dinosaurs ever,” said museum paleontologist Terry Gates, who is also with the U.’s Department of Geology and Geophysics. “It was a monster.”

Researchers from the Utah museum, the national monument and California’s Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology unearthed fossils of this ancient plant-eater from the rocks of the Kaiparowits Formation. Researchers announced the name of the creature – Gryposaurus monumentensis. (Gryposaurus means “hook-beaked lizard” and monumentensis honors the monument where the fossils were found.)

The first description of the duck-billed dinosaur – which dates to the Late Cretaceous period 75 million years ago — appears in the Oct. 3 issue of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

“Gryposaurus monumentensis is probably the largest dinosaur in the 75-million-year-old Kaiparowits fossil ecosystem,” said Alan Titus, paleontologist for the national monument.

Gates, lead author on the study, explained that this creature could have eaten just about any vegetation it stumbled across. “With its robust jaws, no plant stood a chance against G. monumentensis,” he said.

Scott Sampson, another paleontologist with the Utah museum who was involved with the project, emphasized the massively-built skull and skeleton, referring to the animal as the “Arnold Schwarzenegger of duck-billed dinosaurs.”

Finding the skull

In 2002, a team from the Alf Museum, in Claremont, Calif, located at the Webb School, discovered the site that contained the skull used to describe the new creature. Every summer, the California institution, the only nationally-accredited paleontology museum on a high school campus, gives Webb students and volunteers the chance to participate in scientific field work.

The California team was working a stretch of Grand Staircase that Utah researchers had not examined. Duncan Everhart, a Pennsylvania furniture maker, is credited with finding the skull.

Don Lofgren, curator of the Alf Museum, said the team received permission from the monument to dig deeper in 2003.

“We determined it was a skull sitting upside down with the jaw on top,” he said.

Once Gates went out to take a look in 2004, he quickly realized the California team had a potentially-important find. The Alf Museum gave the Utah researchers permission to prepare and study the skull.

Titus noted the discovery of this new species was a team effort involving the Alf Museum, the Utah Museum of Natural History and the national monument.

“The cooperative effort put into its collection and research has truly been a model for scientific investigation on public lands,” he said.

It wasn’t until Utah researchers began working on the skull in 2005 that the full significance of the find began to emerge, Gates said.

The well-preserved skull was initially missing key pieces from the nose region. Fortunately, the California museum had collected a box full of eroded bones, including bits of the nose bone, which was critical for identifying the creature.

“I knew immediately that we had some species of Gryposaurus,” Gates said.


A toothy beast

The creature’s large number of teeth embedded in the thick skull is among the features that made G. monumentensis, as well as other closely related duck-billed dinosaurs, such a successful herbivore.

At any given time, the dinosaur had over 300 teeth available to slice up plant material. Inside the jaw bone, there were numerous replacement teeth waiting, meaning that at any moment, this Gryposaur may have carried more than 800 teeth.

“It was capable of eating most any plant it wanted to,” Gates said. “Although much more evidence is needed before we can hypothesize on its dietary preferences.”

While the diet is unknown, given the considerable size of the creature, the massive teeth and jaws are thought to have been used to slice up large amounts of tough, fibrous plant material.

The teeth may hold important clues the dinosaur’s eating habits. The Utah museum plans to study the composition of the dinosaur teeth, which when compared to other plant-eating dinosaurs from the Kaiparowits Formation, will help researchers decipher differences in diet.

G. monumentensis is one of several new dinosaur species found in Grand Staircase, including: a Velociraptor-like carnivore named Hagryphus, a tyrannosaur, and several kinds of horned dinosaurs. In all, more than a dozen kinds of dinosaurs have been recovered from these badlands, and most represent species that are new to science.

“This is a brand new and extremely important window into the world of dinosaurs,” said Sampson.

Under ideal circumstances, paleontologists will find the skull and other key bones at the same site. In this case, the head was the only thing they managed to find from where the Alf team searched.

Researchers believe the head of this particular Gryposaur likely rolled into a bend of a river, where it was partly buried. The right half of the head remained exposed to the river current, dislodging several bones before this side was buried as well.

In other parts of the monument, Utah researchers have excavated bones believed to be from the same species. Gates estimates G. monumentensis may have grown up to 30 feet long as an adult.

“As each new find such as this new Gryposaur is made,” Titus said, “it is placed into the greater context of an entire ecosystem that has remained lost for eons, and is only now coming under scientific scrutiny.”

Life in “West America”

Around 75 million years ago, southern Utah differed dramatically from today’s arid desert and redrock country. During much of the Late Cretaceous, a shallow sea split North America down the middle, dividing the continent into eastern and western landmasses.

In what Sampson terms as “West America,” G. monumentensis and its fellow dinosaurs lived in a narrow strip of land sandwiched between the seaway to the east and rising mountains to the west. Due in large part to the presence of the seaway, the climate was moist and humid.

Thanks to more than 100 years of fossil collection, scientists know more about the Cretaceous dinosaurs from North American than they do from any other time or continent on earth, Sampson noted.

While G. monumentensis gulped down its greens and tried to avoid predatory tyrannosaurs down in Utah, closely related but different species of duck-billed dinosaurs were doing the same thing further north, in places like Montana and Alberta, Canada.

The new Utah species is proving crucial for determining patterns of duck-billed dinosaur evolution and ecology during the Late Cretaceous of North America, Gates said. He added that “this calls for a re-evaluation of previous ideas about the evolution of duck-billed dinosaurs across the world”.

Earlier explanations of dinosaurs undertaking long distance migrations have gone out the window. “Now we have to figure out how so many different kinds of giants managed to coexist in such small areas,” said Sampson. “We’re just beginning to unravel this story.

Bones from G. monumentensis are on display at Big Water Visitor Center in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and for a short time at the Utah Museum of Natural History before returning to the Alf Museum.


Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the Utah Museum of Natural History

Fossil data plug gaps in current knowledge, study shows

Researchers have shown for the first time that fossils can be used as effectively as living species in understanding the complex branching in the evolutionary tree of life.

While many scientists feel that fossils can offer insights from the ancient past, others have been reluctant to use extinct species because the data they offer is often less complete.

Most biologists, for example, have traditionally tried to piece together the evolutionary relationships between species using only the animals that are alive today.

But in research published in journal Systematic Biology, scientists from the University of Bath and the Natural History Museum compared the morphological datasets of 45 animal groups, both living (extant) and extinct.

By running a series of analyses they were able to measure how much the family tree of life needed to be altered when data from these extant and extinct species are included or removed.

They found no difference in the impact that the fossil groups made on the family tree compared to extant groups.


“Evolutionary biologists try to reconstruct rapid and deep evolutionary branching events that happened many tens or hundreds of millions of years ago,” said Dr Matthew Wills from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry, who worked with Andrea Cobbett (University of Bath) and Dr Mark Wilkinson (Natural History Museum).

“Unlike living species, fossils offer ancient snapshots of life forms that were around at the time those branching events occurred.

“Also, living species have millions of years ‘worth’ of change piled on top of this, which can often bury the important signals we need to understand.

“Despite this, detractors have claimed that because fossil data are often less complete, usually just bones, shells and other hard parts, they are likely to muddy the water and make it difficult to find a robust evolutionary tree.

“What our research has done is demonstrate conclusively, and for the first time, that this is not the case.

“We also show that adding just one fossil to an analysis can result in a radically different picture of that group’s evolutionary history. The trees constructed without fossils may be oversimplifications, and far from the truth.”

The research was funded by the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council.


Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Bath