It looks like an insignificant spec of dust, but if scientists are right, it could be the ancestor of us all.

Meet Otavia antiqua, a microscopic, sponge-like African fossil that could be the earliest known animal:

The creature, Otavia antiqua, was found in 760-million-year-old rock in Namibia and was as tiny as it may be important.

"The fossils are small, about the size of a grain of sand, and we have found many hundreds of them," said study leader Anthony Prave, a geologist at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K.

"In fact, when we look at thin sections of the rocks, certain samples would likely yield thousands of specimens. Thus, it is possible that the organisms were very abundant."

From these tiny "sponges" sprang very big things, the authors suggest. As possibly the first muticellular animals, Otavia could well be the forerunner of dinosaurs, humans-basically everything we think of as "animal."

Read more at National Geographic: Link (Photo: Anthony Prave/University of St. Andrews)

From the look of the fossilized skull, you’d think this was a Smilodon, a sabertooth tiger. But no, this is Thylacosmilus, not a cat at all, but an ancient form of today’s marsupials. Note the strange lower jaw that runs the length of the saber teeth. Read more about Thylacosmilus at TYWKIWDBI. Link

Siphusauctum has a long stem, with a calyx – a bulbous cup-like structure – near the top which encloses an unusual filter feeding system and a gut. The animal is thought to have fed by filtering particles from water actively pumped into its calyx through small holes. The stem ends with a small disc which anchored the animal to the seafloor. Siphusauctum lived in large clusters, as indicated by slabs containing over 65 individual specimens.

Lorna O’Brien, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto and her supervisor Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, report on the discovery today in the online science journal PLoS ONE.

“Most interesting is that this feeding system appears to be unique among animals. Recent advances have linked many bizarre Burgess Shale animals as primitive members of many animal groups that are found today but Siphusauctum defies this trend. We do not know where it fits in relation to other organisms,” said O’Brien.

Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Royal Ontario Museum)

Image: John Paterson

Thankfully, the Anomalocaris is extinct, because there's no hiding from this Cambrian superpredator. Scientists examinning the 515-million-year-old fossil of this unusual animal discovered that it has upwards of 16,000 eyes:

It takes a microscope to see them, but individual lenses were preserved in each eye. For someone who has seen countless images of the compound eyes of Drosophila, they are startling in how modern they look. Based on their density, the authors estimate that each eye housed 16,000 individual lenses, the most that have ever been seen on any animal we know about. Based on the curve of the eye and what we know about modern compound eyes, they suggest that the animal had very good visual acuity.

Updated Link - Thanks Eric!

Previously on Neatorama: Strangest Dinosaur Names

Looking a bit like precious gold, this fossilized beetle is 47 million years old and retains almost the same color it had when it was alive. According to paleontologist Maria McNamara, the fossils are only slightly redder than they originally were. -Link

With forepaws adapted to climbing trees, the newfound eutherian scurried about temperate Jurassic forests feasting on insects under the cover of darkness. This diet allowed J. sinensis to tip the scales at around half an ounce (15 grams), making the creature lighter than a chipmunk.

“The great evolutionary lineage that includes us had a very humble beginning, in terms of body mass,” said Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who led the team that discovered the fossil.

Although this discovery helps us fill in the blanks of mammals’ evolutionary timeline, the reason for the split between placental mammals and marsupials is still a mystery. Link -via The Caudal Lure

(Image credit: Mark A. Klinger, Carnegie Museum of Natural History)

An engraved bone, believed to be from a mastodon, giant sloth or mammoth, may be the oldest example of primitive art ever found in the Americas. The carved bone features the depiction of an ancient mammoth, and was discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in Florida, in an area near Vero Beach where other mammoth bones have recently been found. The archaeological team working on carbon dating the bone feel that it is at least 13,000 years old, and that the etching must be at least that old as well.

Link

Be thankful that you don’t live 50 million years ago, or you’d have to use a baseball bat instead of a shoe to kill this ant:

A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western Hemisphere, says paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.

The new species, Titanomyrma lubei, is related to giant ants previously found in German fossils. These long-distance relatives bolster the notion that the climate of the time had hot blips that allowed warmth-loving giant insects to spread from continent to continent, Archibald and a U.S.-Canada team propose online May 4 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Link

The fossil itself is not as big as this picture.

The spider, a new species called Nephila jurassica, stretches about two inches from end to end. It was found in a fossil-rich rock formation near Daohugou village in northeastern China. The fossil dates back to the Middle Jurassic, about 165 million years ago, researchers reported in the April 20 Biology Letters.

Spiders from the same family still exist today. Female giant golden orb-weaver spiders can grow to a whopping 4 or 5 inches in diameter (although males tend to be less than a quarter that size). These spiders are known for spinning huge webs of golden silk and have been known to trap bats and small birds.

Spider fossils are very rare, and this discovery leads scientists to believe that the Nephila genus is 130 million years older than previously thought. Link

(Image credit: Paul Selden)

October 13th is National Fossil Day! In commemoration, Wired Science has a gallery of recent discoveries that show how, no matter how much we dig, there’s always something new to learn about our past. Shown is a mysterious organism that lived about 2.1 billion years ago. Scientists haven’t determined whether the five-inch-wide life form was a colony of cells or an early animal. Link

(Image credit: Abderrazak El Albani and Arnaud Mazurier)

The enormous wingspan gave P. chilensis certain advantages, like the ability to travel long distances and reach areas of the open ocean thick with potential prey. The researchers think it feasted on fish and squid, and may have trolled its hunting grounds with its lower beak skimming the water until its teeth could clamp down on a wriggling meal. But lead researcher Gerald Mayr says that a 17-foot wingspan is probably close to the maximum for a flying bird.

The bird flew over South America between 10 and 5 million years ago, which means it may have been seen by our hominid ancestors. Link

Previously: Argentavis magnificens

The shell of one early meiolaniid species, known from fossils recovered in South America and named Stupendemys for its size, was 11 feet long and seven feet wide. The more modern Meiolania platyceps, found in Australia and Melanesia, had a relatively small five-foot-diameter shell, and weighed an estimated half-ton. All had armored club tails and horned heads.

(One species is even named Ninjemys, in honor of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, though M. platyceps looks much more like Super Mario Brothers 3-vintage Bowser, the King Koopa).

According to the fossil record, Meiolania damelipi flourished 3,000 years ago and were extinct 200 years later, possibly because of human hunting. The size of the newly-discovered species is not specified in the article. Pictured is Meiolania platyceps. Link -via Unique Daily

(Image credit: Australian National Museum)

An 800 year old fossilized brain from an infant was discovered in Northwestern France. Because brain matter usually decomposes rapidly, scientists are excited because this particular brain is well preserved, with many of its cells still visible:

The paper describing this extraordinary artifact, which is due to be published in the journal NeuroImage next month, reads somewhat like a medieval murder mystery, with elements of archaeology, forensic science and neuropathology. The child’s skeletonised remains were exhumed in 1998 from a burial site in the city of Quimper, north-western France, in a wooden coffin with the head wrapped in leather and resting on a pillow. The coffin was dated by dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) to the mid- to late 13th century (1250-1275 AD), and the age of the child determined by examination of the teeth. After the remains were discovered, the brain was removed and immersed in a preservative formalin solution. Several years later, Christina Papageorgopolou of the University of Zurich’s Institute of Anatomy and her colleagues began to re-examine it

Link – via techmedicus

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

When University of Michigan professor Jeffrey Wilson stumbled upon fossilized dinosaur eggs, he discovered something quite remarkable – a death scene best described as "Anaconda" meets "Jurassic Park":

"It was amazing," Wilson recalls, "because we realized that not only do we have an egg, not only do we have a chain of vertebrae, but they are arranged in a coil, and on top of the coil was a skull."

The snake was coiled around the broken eggshell. "Next to that coil, eggshell, skull, was a solid egg, and another solid egg, and then some larger bones," says Wilson.

Those bones belonged to a baby sauropod. Full-grown sauropods were the vegetarian 100-ton giants of the dinosaur world. But the baby was only about a foot-and-a-half long. It had apparently just hatched from that broken egg. The snake, about 11 feet long, had been waiting for the baby to hatch in order to eat it.

Link

“It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimension, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old.

“The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it. I suppose we could theoretically use it for food colouring, too, but I don’t think I will try tasting it.”

A sample of the ink has been sent to Yale University for further analysis. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: BMPS)

Study author and palaeontologist Dr Kate Trinajstic, of Curtin University in Perth, says the clasper was discovered in a fish specimen uncovered in the Gogo region of Western Australia in 2001.

She says the team originally discounted the bone as the reproductive organ because they thought it was part of the pelvic gurdle.

On closer inspection, Trinajstic says they realised it was a sexual organ.

“We were surprised because it’s so big,” she says. “We were expecting something smaller.”

Link -via Digg

(image credit: John Long)

Paleontologist Jorn Hurum lead a team of scientists to analyze a 47-million-year-old fossil above (named "Ida") and came up with this intriguing conclusion: it is a critical missing-link species in the evolution of primates!

The fossil, he says, bridges the evolutionary split between higher primates such as monkeys, apes, and humans and their more distant relatives such as lemurs.

"This is the first link to all humans," Hurum, of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway, said in a statement. Ida represents "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor."

Ida, properly known as Darwinius masillae, has a unique anatomy. The lemur-like skeleton features primate-like characteristics, including grasping hands, opposable thumbs, clawless digits with nails, and relatively short limbs.

"This specimen looks like a really early fossil monkey that belongs to the group that includes us," said Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study.

Link | Ida’s official website – Thanks Marilyn!

A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.

… Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80 million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample, sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.

Now they report recovering not just collagen – which conveys little evolutionary information because it is the same in almost all animals – but also haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells. The proteins should reveal more about dinosaur evolution because they vary much more between species.

This can’t possibly end well: Link

They went to the place where the stone was extracted and found prehistoric bone fragments and more. A bigger dig is currently underway. We hope this didn’t put the masons out of business.

National Geographic has a video report, with an unedited transcript:

“BEING MASONS WE WERE IGNORANT OF THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DISCOVERY WE HAD MADE” SAYS SUPERVISOR RICARDO FRANCIONI.

BUT THEY KNEW ENOUGH TO CALL IN SOME ITALIAN EXPERTS WHO DETERMINED THEY HAD INADVERTENTLY CREATED AN ALMOST PERFECT CROSS SECTION OF AN ANCIENT WHALE.

IT LIVED IN EGYPT 40 MILLION YEARS AGO.

FINDING ANCIENT WHALES FROM EGYPT, A COUNTRY THATS 95 PERCENT DESERT, MIGHT SEEM UNUSUAL — BUT IT ISNT.

Link – via yesbutnobutyes

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Baierman.

Paleontologist Lucinda Blackwell and her colleagues at the University of Witwatersrand were digging in Gladysvale cave, South Africa, when they came upon a sensational find. 

In the fossilized hyena waste they collected they found the remains of human hair dated 195,000 to 257,000 years ago!  This predates the earliest known sample of human hair by 200,000 years.

She and her team removed a 9.8-inch block of calcified hyena waste from a brown hyena latrine found in the cave. Such latrines are only used by one animal and are typically demarcated areas that measure about 6 feet round in size.

The researchers then extracted 40 hairs from a single coprolite using fine tweezers. Although amino acid analysis detected no protein, and DNA sampling was not possible, very high magnification revealed that the size and shape of the hairs, along with their distinct cuticular scale patterns, best matched those of human hair.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

Alan Taylor of the Big Picture Blog over at Boston Globe has a(nother) neat post – this time of fantastic photos of Mike Hettwer of a dinosaur fossil excavation in the Sahara Desert:

About 9,000 years ago, a very wet climate prevailed in parts of the Sahara Desert called the Neolithic Subpluvial period. Lasting several thousand years, this Green Sahara was home to many grassland and woodland animals as well as humans. While on an expedition for dinosaur fossils with paleontologist Paul Sereno in Niger in 2000, Hettwer discovered a burial area containing hundreds of skeletons from two distinct cultures, each thousands of years old – the Kiffian and Tenerian. Also found in the dry and desolate site were hunting tools, pottery, and bones of large land animals and fish.

Link | Many more excellent photos at Mike’s website: Link

In China’s Henan province, a local resident found the remains of a turtle that is belived to be around 100 million years old according to an expert from a local institute. Reports also says that the organic remains were discovered in a river in Jiaxian, located in Pingdingshan City.

The turtle organic remains are around 15 centimeters long and seven centimeters wide, and weigh one kilogram. The fossil still has all four limbs and its tail, but lacks a head.

Source: english.cri.cn