For the past 46,000 years, a small bird that perished in the last ice age was frozen, protected from deterioration and scavenger until the body in Siberian permafrost was found by two Russians searching for fossil mammoth tusks.
Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, who was with the ivory hunters, Boris Berezhnov and Spartak Khabrov, when they spotted the bird, said that the bird was in such fine condition that it seemed “like it had] died just a few days ago,”
Dalén told Live Science in an email. “The bird is in pristine condition,” The discovery is remarkable, as “small animals like this would normally disintegrate very quickly after death due to scavengers and microbial activity.”
The frozen flier is a one-of-a-kind find, too: It’s the only near-intact bird carcass documented from the last ice age, Dalén added.
When the fossil hunters first uncovered the bird in September 2018, Dalén and his colleagues had no idea of the mystery bird’s age or species. So, Dalén “collected a couple of feathers and a small piece of tissue for radiocarbon dating and DNA sequencing,” he said.
The 46,000-year-old bird’s delicate feet are still in good shape.
He brought the ice age samples to his lab, where postdoctoral researcher Nicolas Dussex, the lead author of a new study on the bird, analyzed the remains.
Radiocarbon dating revealed that the bird lived during the same time as other ice age beasts, including mammoths, horses, woolly rhinos, bison, and lynx.
To discover the bird’s species, the researchers sequenced its mitochondrial DNA, genetic data that is passed down through the maternal line.
Although the bird’s mitochondrial DNA was fragmentary — there were “many millions of short DNA sequences,” Dalén said, a common occurrence in ancient specimens — the team was able to piece together these short sequences with the help of a computer program.
Then, the scientists took the finished mitochondrial DNA puzzle and searched for a match in an online database that has the genetic sequences of nearly every bird alive today. The results revealed that the ice age bird was a female horned lark (Eremophila alpestris).
This discovery sheds light on the transformation of the so-called mammoth steppe. When this bird was alive, the land was a mix of steppe (unforested grassland) and tundra (treeless, frozen ground), according to pollen records from 50,000 to 30,000 years ago.
When the last ice age ended about 11,700 years ago, the mammoth steppe transitioned into the three main Eurasian environments that exist today: the northern tundra, the taiga (a coniferous forest) in the middle, and the steppe in the south said Dalén, the senior researcher on the new study.
Nowadays, there are two subspecies of horned lark: “one living on the tundra in the far north of Eurasia and the other in the steppe in the south, in Mongolia and its neighboring countries,” Dalén said.
The horned lark (Eremophila alpestris), also known as the shore lark in Europe, is a small songbird that breeds across the northern hemisphere. It has 42 formally recognized subspecies that are divided into six different clades, each of which could warrant reclassification into distinct species clusters.
It appears that the newly discovered bird is an “ancestor of two different subspecies of the horned lark,” he said. As the environment changed, however, the horned lark diverged into the two evolutionary lineages that exist today, Dalén said.
“So all in all, this study provides an example of how climate change at the end of the last ice age could have led to the formation of new subspecies,” he said.
The Mystery Behind the “Rare Emerald Icebergs” of Antarctica
For decades, the sight of bottle-green icebergs in the Antarctic has captivated polar travellers and scientists. The mysterious phenomena have intrigued many journals, but the “why for their presence has remained enigmatic. Today scientists have suggested a new theory of why these jade bergs are happening, and if verified, a decades-long enigma will be solved.
During an Australian expedition in 1988, the search to discover the secret of the green monoliths started when glaciologist Stephen Warren from the University of Washington climbed up on one to get a better look at it.
“What is most amazing is not their colour but rather their clarity, because they have no bubbles,” said Warren to IFLScience.
Ordinary icebergs, on the other hand, originate as snow and “as the snow is compressed under its own weight into ice, the air in the snow is closed off as bubbles. So glacier ice contains numerous bubbles, and icebergs are bright and cloudy.”
The emerald ice, however, has no bubbles, suggesting it is not ordinary glacier ice. Warren took a core sample from a glacier near East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf and compared it to other green ice samples from Australian expeditions in the 1980s. He found that the clear jade colouration was due to marine ice, not glacier ice.
Most icebergs seen by sailors in Antarctica are white or blue, some are even striped.
Green is a rarity. At first, Warren’s team suspected impurities in the ocean water beneath were transforming the ice green, perhaps from the trapped microscopic particles of dead marine plants and animals. But a sample of the ice proved their theory wrong: green and blue marine ice have similar amounts of organic material.
Researchers on top of a large composite iceberg in October 1996.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that Warren was inspired to have another go at an idea. His inspiration was born from research by oceanographer Laura Herraiz-Borreguero at the University of Tasmania, who found that the Amery Ice Shelf core had nearly 500 times more iron than the glacial ice above.
He wondered if it was possible iron oxides are turning the common blue hue of ice a dark green. If so, where was the iron coming from? These compounds are scarce in many regions of the ocean.
Warren believes the answer may lie in “glacial flour” – the powder formed from glaciers grinding over bedrock, eroding particles from the surface. These iron-rich particles then flow into the ocean and become caught under an ice shelf, where they mingle with the marine ice as it forms.
The finding could play a role in sustaining life in the oceans. Iron is a key nutrient for the microscopic plants upon which many other organisms rely. If the green icebergs are shuttling iron from Antarctica’s mainland to the Southern Ocean, it could be a crucial process to marine life.
“Iron is the limiting nutrient for phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean, so the biological oceanographers are keen to quantify the various sources of iron,” said Warren, whose study is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
“Phytoplankton are the base of the food chain in the Southern Ocean. The photosynthesis by this phytoplankton also removes CO2 from the atmosphere, so they are important in the global carbon cycle.
With global warming, if the ocean water flowing in under the ice shelf becomes warmer, then probably less marine ice will form, and less iron will be delivered to the phytoplankton.”
To confirm their hypothesis, the team recommend further analysis of short cores from icebergs to measure dissolved organic carbon and particulate organic carbon versus depth, as well as the mineralogy of the iron.
In the future, Warren, Herraiz-Borreguero, and her advisor Delphine Lannuzel hope to work together to sample icebergs for iron and measure their reflectance spectra.
This Green Iceberg was spotted on February 16th, 1985, in Antarctica.
Excavation in Western Turkey Reveals 2,000-Year-Old Sculpture
Hurriyet Daily News reports that a fragment of a sculpture depicting the head of a priest has been unearthed in the large ancient city of Laodicea, which is located in western Turkey.
Laodicea on the Lycus, situated in the western province of Denizli, was an ancient metropolis and an obscure archaeological site prior to 2003. The city came to light only after the excavation activities that were started by the Denizli Museum.
A team of Turkish archaeologists headed by Pamukkale University’s Professor Celal Şimşek has been working in Laodicea continuously.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Şimşek said that they have unearthed an exciting artefact in the 15,000-seat western theatre of the 7,500-year-old city.
Noting that they are trying to restore the theatre by preserving it precisely, Şimşek said that they found a priest statue, which was believed to be around 2,000 years old, during the excavation works.
“There was an eight-meter embankment next to the fortification wall extending west from the stage building of the theatre and was built at the beginning of the fifth century.
We encountered a stunning statue of a priest during the removal of the filling, which was the waste of buildings destroyed by earthquakes,” Şimşek noted.
“It is among the most beautiful finds of the year 2020 in terms of its age, profession, and especially being a very vibrant portrait, which we can date to the late Hellenistic early empire period,” he added.
Ancient sources say that the city was founded in honour of Laodice, the wife of Seleucid King Antiochus II Theos, in the third century B.C. However, excavations revealed that the history of Laodicea dates back to 5,500 B.C.
The city had its golden period between the first and third centuries A.D and according to the calculations, the city’s population was around 80,000 during that period.
Considering that the ancient cities of Hierapolis and Tripolis had populations of around 40,000, Laodicea can be called a metropolis.
Egypt Arrests Photographer Over Pyramid Shoot of Model Wearing Ancient Costume
A photographer was arrested by Egyptian police for disrespect after he took photographs of a model in a revealing ancient outfit at the Djoser Pyramid outside Cairo, a security source reported.
Social media rumours had spread that the Egyptian fashion model, Salma al-Shimi, had been arrested after the shooting in the necropolis of Saqqara, 20 miles south of Cairo, but the source said the photographer was detained by police on Monday.
The model had been pictured wearing a short ‘semi-naked’ Pharaonic-style dress in front of the ancient burial site.
‘A photographer has been arrested after a private shoot with dancer Salma al-Shimi in the archaeological zone,’ the source said, adding that his case had been referred to the courts.
Late last week, Shimi, who boasts thousands of followers on Instagram, had posted photographs from the shoot of her in ancient Egyptian dress at the foot of the 4,700-year-old Step Pyramid of Djoser.
Rumours quickly spread that she had been detained for wearing outfits that betrayed Egypt’s ancient heritage and broke the rules set by the antiquities ministry for photoshoots.
Saqqara was an active burial ground for more than 3,000 years and is a designated Unesco World Heritage Site.
Social media users who had seen the photographs expressed disbelief and outrage.
“Is there really a ban on taking photographs in archaeological zones, even pictures that are not indecent but completely normal?” one user asked.
The model was pictured by the ancient site whilst wearing a revealing ancient costume
The police are investigating the incident, and are looking to identify the employee responsible for allowing the model and photographer into the archaeological area, according to The Egypt Independent.
On Monday, the pictures were quietly removed from the model’s Instagram account.
In recent months, Egyptian courts have handed down jail sentences against a dozen social media influencers for sharing content judges deemed offensive.
In December 2018, images of a naked couple embracing at the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops prompted a media outcry.
The authorities arrested a camel owner and a young female guide for helping the couple to gain access to the site.
In three rescue excavations near the town of Radnevo, three different ancient settlements are discovered funded by a coal mining company, the most interesting was a new artefact was a statuette of the ancient goddess Athena, an early Thracian settlement a town from the time of the Roman Empire, and an early Byzantine and mediaeval Bulgarian settlement.
This bronze statuette of Ancient Thracian, Greek, and the Roman goddess Athena has been found on the fringes of a Roman Era settlement from the 2nd – 4th century AD near Radnevo in Southern Bulgaria during rescue digs sponsored by a state-owned coal-mining conglomerate.
The rescue excavations have been carried out by the Maritsa East Archaeological Museum in Radnevo with funding from the Maritsa East Mines Jsc company, a large state-owned coal mining company, on plots slated for coal mining operations.
An Early Ancient Thracian settlement has been discovered in the first researched location to the west of the town of Polski Gradets, Radnevo Municipality, Stara Zagora District, (in an area called “Dyado Atanasovata Mogila”), the Maritsa East Mines company has announced.
The Maritsa East Archaeological Museum has not announced the precise dating of the site but the Early Thracian period would typically refer to ca. 1,000 BC, the Early Iron Age.
The rescue excavations on the site of the Early Thracian settlements were carried out in September and October 2020 by a team led by Assoc. Prof. Krasimir Nikov and Assoc. Prof. Rumyana Georgieva, both of them archaeologists from the National Institute and Museum of Archaeology in Sofia.
The archaeologists have discovered the ruins of Thracian residential and “economic” buildings. The artefacts discovered in the site include anthropomorphic figurines, pottery vessels, ceramic spindle whorls, loom weights, millstones, stone tools used for polishing and hammering. Inside the ritual pits of the Early Thracian settlement near Radnevo, the archaeologists have found human burials.
In them, the humans were buried in a fetal position (in archaeological texts in Bulgaria and some other European and Asian countries, it is known as the “hocker position” – in which the knees are tucked against the chest).
The Maritsa East Museum says that the discovery of the Early Thracian settlement has yielded new “information about the settlement structure of the Thracian Age.”
A human burial with the deceased placed in a fetal position inside one of the ritual pits from the Early Thracian settlement discovered near Polski Gradets, Radnevo Municipality, in Southern Bulgaria
An aerial photograph of the archaeological site where the ruins of the Early Thracian settlement have been discovered in rescue digs by a coal-mining company near Bulgaria’s Radnevo.
In the second location subject to rescue excavations near Bulgaria’s Radnevo (in an area called “Boyalaka”), an archaeological team has found the periphery of a settlement from the 2nd – 4th century AD, i.e. the period of the Roman Empire, which also existed in later periods, all the way into the Middle Ages.
The excavations in question have covered a large area of about 40 decares (10 acres) on a plot slated for coal mining. The archaeological team has performed a total of 32 drillings at selected spots in order to designate areas for further more detailed excavations.
On the surface, the archaeologists have found pottery from different time periods – from the Roman Era, the Early Byzantine Era, the Middle Ages, and the Late Middle Ages – the time of the medieval Bulgarian Empire. The archaeologists have unearthed bricks, tegulae, and a glazed plate from the Late Antiquity period.
“We assume this was the periphery of a settlement from the Roman Era – 2nd – 4th century AD, which developed in the western direction. The eight [Roman] coins that we have found during the drillings also confirm this dating,” says Plamen Karailiev, Director of the Maritsa East Archaeological Museum in Radnevo. The most interesting artefact from the Roman Era settlement in question is a bronze statuette depicting Ancient Thracian, Greek, and the Roman goddess Athena.
This bronze statuette of Ancient Thracian, Greek, and Roman goddess Athena has been found on the fringes of a Roman Era settlement from the 2nd – 4th century AD near Radnevo in Southern Bulgaria during rescue digs sponsored by a state-owned coal-mining conglomerate.
“What’s generating interest is the bronze statuette depicting goddess Athena, which is the first of its kind to become part of the collection of [our] museum,” the museum director states. In the same location, however, the archaeologists have also discovered for the first time pottery fragments from the Bronze Age, which the Museum says is adding information to the site’s stratigraphy for future excavations to precede the coal mining there.
The third location excavated at the request of the state mining company near Radnevo in 2020 is near the town of Troyanovo (in an area called “Vehtite Lozya”), where an archaeological team has discovered structures from a settlement from the Early Byzantine period, i.e. Late and Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, and from the medieval period when the region at different times was part of the First and Second Bulgarian Empire and the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire).
There the archaeological team led by Krasimir Velkov from the Tvarditsa Museum of History and Tatyana Kancheva from the Maritsa East Museum of Archaeology has found a wide range of early medieval and medieval structures.
These include a total of 12 dwellings, 7 semi-dugouts which, however, were not used as homes, i.e. for residential purposes, a total of 14 pits, two household kilns and one hearth. The excavations of the “layer settlement from the Early Byzantine and medieval period” covered an area of 4 decares (app. 1 acre), and were carried out from early August until early October 2020.
The wide range of archaeological artefacts discovered on the site including a number of coins, including two Byzantine “cup-shaped” coins, the so-called scyphates, fragments from bronze and glass bracelets, an iron spur, iron arrow tips, small knives, an iron fishing hook, numerous spindle whorls, clay candlesticks, and lids of pottery vessels.
The 2020 rescue archaeological excavations in all three locations around the town of Radnevo, which is the largest coal mining area in Bulgaria, have been funded by the state-owned Maritsa East Mines company with a combined total of more than BGN 240,000 (app. EUR 120,000).
In a release, the Maritsa East Mines company points out that the first-ever rescue archaeological excavations in the area of Radnevo in Southern Bulgaria were carried out back in 1960 right at the start of the industrial coal mining there.
“For many decades now, Maritsa East Mines Jsc have contributed to the preservation of artefacts from past millennia. The extraction of coal begins only after the respective plots have been researched by archaeologists. The finds from these rescue archaeological expeditions, some of which are unique, have been processed and exhibited at the Maritsa East Museum of Archaeology in Radnevo,” the state-owned company says.
A very interesting archaeological artefact discovered during rescue excavations near Radnevo funded by the coal mining conglomerate has been an Ancient Thracian clay altar from the 4th century BC.
2,300-Year-Old Burials Discovered in Southern Greece
According to a Keep Talking Greece report, Greece’s Ministry of Culture and Sports announced the discovery of eight burials dated to the late fourth through the second century B.C. during rescue excavations on private land in southern Greece.
A recent rescue excavation by the Ephorate of Antiquities of Ilia on a privately owned land plot at the location “Droubes or Paliabela” within the Municipality of Ilida, the Regional Unit of Ilia.
According to the preliminary examination of the offerings, the tombs are dated from the end of the 4th to the 2nd century BC.
Three burial pits, four box-shaped ones and a tiled tomb roof tomb were found.
These tombs are part of the western necropolis of the ancient city of Ilida, from which more than 200 tombs dating to the late classical and Hellenistic period have been excavated to date.
“Particularly important are the findings of burial pit 1, including a bronze urn with its base, which has a floral decoration on the handles and lion heads at the junction of the handles with the rim and a bronze folding mirror,” the Ministry said.
From the first assessment of the offerings, the burial pit dates to the end of the 4th to the beginning of the 3rd century BC.
Apart from a large number of vessels from the Hellenistic period, mainly from the findings of the other tombs, a marble tombstone with a gabled crown stands out”, the Culture Ministry said.
Baby lyuba, the worlds most complete and Best-Preserved Woolly Mammoth
She is 42,000 years old and has come a long way for her Australian debut. First, she was recovered from the frozen mud in Siberia that was her tomb for so long. Then she was packed into a crate at a tiny museum in Russia and flown to a humidity-controlled cube at the Australian Museum.
Mammoths – Giants of the ice age
The ice age world of woolly mammoths will be brought to life in Mammoths – Giants of the Ice Age, exclusive to the Australian Museum from 17 November 2017.
Baby Lyuba, the world’s most complete and best-preserved woolly mammoth, has arrived in Sydney. She is in remarkable condition, with her skin and internal organs intact. Scientists even found her mother’s milk in her belly.
The 42,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth was unveiled on Friday at the Sydney Museum
We will finally be able to see her when she is unveiled as the centrepiece of the museum’s Mammoths – Giants of the Ice Age exhibition.
Lyuba, who died at 35 days, is one of Russia’s national treasures, and the government is reluctant to let her out of its sight too often. This is only the fifth time Shemanovsky Museum has let her out, and it’s her first trip to the southern hemisphere.
The mammoth was first spotted in 2007 by Yuri Khudi, a Siberian reindeer herder, who found her as the frost thawed on a muddy bank of the Yuribey River. When he brought a team of scientists back to recover her, she was gone; someone else had got there first.
The 42,000-year old carcass was discovered by a reindeer herder
The team tracked her to a village deep within Siberia’s frozen wasteland. She was propped up on the door of a shop. The shop keeper had reportedly bought her for two snowmobiles and a year’s worth of food from Mr Khudi’s cousin.
“And while she was propped up, a dog came up and chewed off her tail and her ear. If only for that she’d be completely intact,” says Trevor Ahearn, the Australian Museum’s creative producer.
Lyuba (Lay-oo-bah) means love in Russian. The museum has chosen to surround her with models of huge, ferocious adult mammoths, much as the herd would have surrounded and protected her in life.
It is thought her feet had become stuck in a muddy hole on the side of a Siberian riverbank. Before her mother could yank her out, Lyuba slipped below the surface, where the mud choked her mouth and trunk.
But the mud that killed her also contained sediments and bacteria that created an acid barrier around her body, in effect pickling her. When the river froze over, she was left perfectly preserved.
Had she lived a full mammoth life – 60 years – Lyuba would have grown to more than three metres in height and about five tonnes. To sustain that bodyweight she would have consumed up to 180 kilograms of grass and 80 litres of water a day. Mammoths lived in the late Paleolithic period, which stretched from about 200,000 BC, the time Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa, to 10,000 BC.
Mammoths were uniquely adapted for the conditions, with small ears and thick, woolly fur. They ate grass and bark and roamed across Europe, North America and Siberia.
That makes Lyuba the first of her kind to visit our shores, and it took the Australian Museum a fair bit of what director Kim McKay terms “cultural diplomacy” to get her over here. Negotiations involved the Shemanovsky Museum and the Russian government.
Mr Ahearn says: “One of the first things we had to do before we brought Lyuba over here was absolutely guarantee our Russian colleagues that there was no possibility of her getting seized because there is some controversy over who owns her.
“She’s a little controversial in Russia, with her association with an oil company that helped bring her into the museum. I think it’s paranoia. Russia is feeling a little bit of pressure, so I don’t know if it’s founded. There are lots of myths; it’s all very hazy.”
The prospect of mammoth cloning
Scientists have two competing theories on why mammoths became extinct about 10,000 years ago. Both have important things to tell us about the modern environment – and perhaps contain a message about why we shouldn’t be trying to bring mammoths back.
The first theory is climate change. The ending of the ice age about 10,000 BC may have dramatically reduced the area in which these cold-environment animals could survive.
The second theory is over-hunting. Mammoths, with their tonnes of fat, would have represented an incredibly valuable food source for early humans, who developed sharp spears to hunt them. Scientists think it is possible the mammoth is the first species humanity managed to push into extinction.
Mammoth cloning has always excited the popular imagination, and the exhibition dedicates a section to the possibilities. So far, we have sequenced about 70 per cent of mammoth DNA, so the raw material is not there yet. But even if we could, we shouldn’t, says David Alquezar, manager of the Australian Museum’s genetics lab.
“The money to do that could be better invested in species that are endangered right now, rather than focusing our efforts on a species that has been extinct for 10,000 years,” says Dr Alquezar.
Amber fossils reveal the true colours of 99-million-year-old insects
Nature is full of colours, from the radiant shine of a peacock’s feathers or the bright warning colouration of toxic frogs to the pearl-white camouflage of polar bears.
Usually, fine structural detail necessary for the conservation of colour is rarely preserved in the fossil record, making most reconstructions of the fossil-based on artists’ imagination.
A research team from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) has now unlocked the secrets of true colouration in the 99-million-year-old insects.
Diverse structural-colored insects in mid-Cretaceous amber from northern Myanmar
Colours offer many clues about the behaviour and ecology of animals. They function to keep organisms safe from predators, at the right temperature, or attractive to potential mates. Understanding the colouration of long-extinct animals can help us shed light on ecosystems in the deep geological past.
The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B on July 1, offers a new perspective on the often overlooked, but by no means dull, lives of insects that co-existed alongside dinosaurs in Cretaceous rainforests.
Researchers gathered a treasure trove of 35 amber pieces with exquisitely preserved insects from an amber mine in northern Myanmar.
“The amber is mid-Cretaceous, approximately 99 million years old, dating back to the golden age of dinosaurs. It is essentially resin produced by ancient coniferous trees that grew in a tropical rainforest environment.
Animals and plants trapped in the thick resin got preserved, some with life-like fidelity,” said Dr. CAI Chenyang, associate professor at NIGPAS who lead the study.
The rare set of amber fossils includes cuckoo wasps with metallic bluish-green, yellowish-green, purplish-blue or green colours on the head, thorax, abdomen, and legs. In terms of colour, they are almost the same as cuckoo wasps that live today, said Dr. CAI.
The researchers also discovered blue and purple beetle specimens and a metallic dark-green soldier fly. “We have seen thousands of amber fossils but the preservation of colour in these specimens is extraordinary,” said Prof. HUANG Diying from NIGPAS, a co-author of the study.
“The type of colour preserved in the amber fossils is called structural colour. It is caused by the microscopic structure of the animal’s surface. The surface nanostructure scatters light of specific wavelengths and produces very intense colours.
This mechanism is responsible for many of the colours we know from our everyday lives,” explained Prof. PAN Yanhong from NIGPAS, a specialist on palaeoecology reconstruction.
To understand how and why colour is preserved in some amber fossils but not in others, and whether the colours seen in fossils are the same as the ones insects paraded more than 99 million years ago, the researchers used a diamond knife blades to cut through the exoskeleton of two of the colourful amber wasps and a sample of the normal dull cuticle.
Using electron microscopy, they were able to show that colourful amber fossils have a well-preserved exoskeleton nanostructure that scatters light.
The unaltered nanostructure of coloured insects suggested that the colours preserved in amber may be the same as the ones displayed by them in the Cretaceous. But in fossils that do not preserve colour, the cuticular structures are badly damaged, explaining their brown-black appearance.
What kind of information can we learn about the lives of ancient insects from their colour? Extant cuckoo wasps are, as their name suggests, parasites that lay their eggs into the nests of unrelated bees and wasps.
Structural colouration has been shown to serve as camouflage in insects, and so it is probable that the colour of Cretaceous cuckoo wasps represented an adaptation to avoid detection.
“At the moment we also cannot rule out the possibility that the colours played other roles besides camouflage, such as thermoregulation,” adds Dr CAI.
