Beautifully Complete 150-Million-Year-Old Turtle Fossil Discovered In Germany
An incredibly well-preserved fossil of an ancient Jurassic sea turtle has been uncovered in Germany, the first to have a complete skull, shell, and all four limbs.
This flat pancake of a fossil has tortoise a lot about the environment where the turtle would have lived.
The marine turtle had a massive head and would have swum through the shallows of a tropical sea that once covered Europe 150 million years ago.
Across the world, there are some extremely important fossil sites that have provided scientists with an array of specimens that help determine all sorts of information about the way ancient creatures once roamed across the land and seas of ancient Earth.
The Torleite Formation near Painten in southeastern Germany is such a place; an active quarry, it’s also home to hundreds of fossil Jurassic marine creatures such as turtles, crocodilians, fish, and even giant marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.
It was here in 2014 scientists uncovered a new specimen of the turtle species Solnhofia parsonsi, dating back around 150 million years. This area is known as the Franconian Alb and contains large amounts of marine sedimentary rocks from the Lower and Upper Jurassic.
The specific area in which the turtle specimen was found had only begun to be investigated in the last 20 years and has provided a wealth of specimens in different taxonomic groups.
The variation in specimens led scientists to suggest that this area would have been once connected to the open sea.
The fossil reveals more about the ecology of this ancient turtle species.
The new specimen is exceptionally well preserved with a complete skull and skeleton visible. “Compared to the size of the carapace, the skull is very large, reaching approximately 40% of the carapace (shell) length,” the authors write in the study.
However, it can only be looked at from the top of the shell down. This is the first fossil with a complete skull, shell, and nearly complete limbs, and only the second of this species found with the head and rear limbs in their natural positions, which helps the team understand more about the turtles’ behavior.
The team thinks that the way the turtle’s paddles differed from the stiff flippers of deep-sea turtles suggests that it did not have a fully pelagic (open sea) lifestyle and so did not spend large amounts of time on the open sea. Instead, they reason that the paddle formation along with a difference in tail length suggests that this turtle’s ecology was more suited to being a shallow-water coastal marine species.
The Mystery Of The Modern “London Hammer” Found Encased In Ancient Rock
While walking along Red Creek, London, Texas, in June 1936, Emma Zadie Hahn and her husband Max Edmond Hahn made an unusual discovery: a piece of wood poking out of what appeared to be an ancient rock formation.
The story goes that ten-ish years later, their son, who was clearly born with the merest hint of curiosity that they lacked, smashed open the rock to see what was inside. What he found was a hammer. Where it gets weirder is that it was clearly a modern(ish) hammer.
The hammer attracted the unhelpful attention of Young Earth Creationist Carl Baugh, who claimed that the rock around the hammer was from the Cretaceous period.
When they split it open, this is what they found.
This would mean that whoever dropped the hammer of 19th-century design did so while (e.g.) running away from a triceratops.
For Baugh, who was himself incorrect, this was evidence that evolution theory was incorrect.
“If the artifact is truly from the Cretaceous time frame, where does this leave evolutionary theory, since man was not supposed to have evolved for another 100-million years or so?” Baugh asked. “If the artifact is relatively recent, that means that the Cretaceous Hensell Sand formation from which it came is relatively young… Again, where does that leave evolutionary theory with its traditional dates for the Cretaceous formations?”
The answer, of course, was that the hammer was modern, but it had become encased in the rock by geological processes not known to Baugh.
“The stone is real, and it looks impressive to someone unfamiliar with geological processes.
How could a modern artifact be stuck in Ordovician rock?” investigator Glen J. Kuban asked in a 1997 paper on the hammer, published in Paleo.
“The answer is that the concretion itself is not Ordovician.
Minerals in solution can harden around an intrusive object dropped in a crack or simply left on the ground if the source rock (in this case, reportedly Ordovician) is chemically soluble.”
While an extremely cool find, the rock formation is not as ancient as it appears.
Likely, a miner dropped the hammer a century ago, or perhaps a touch earlier, after which the rock formed around it. It was not, repeat, not, proof of The Flintstones.
A rare 2,500-year-old marble disc, designed to protect ancient ships and ward off the evil eye discovered near Palmachim Beach
A rare 2,500-year-old marble disc designed to protect ancient ships and ward off the evil eye was discovered by a lifeguard diving at sea and turned over to the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The Israel Antiquities Authority announced from social media on July 18 that the object the lifeguard turned over was a 2,500-year-old, eye-shaped marble disc that was attached to ships to ward off the evil eye.
Experts say the relic, found during a dive by lifeguard David Shalom at the Yavne-Yam archaeological site near Palmachim Beach, dates back to the 5th to 4th centuries BC.
Yaakov Sharvit, Director of the Marine Archaeology Unit at the Israel Antiquities Authority, explains: “From drawings on pottery, mosaics, and ancient coins, as well as from historical sources from the 5th century BCE, we learn that this design was common on ships’ bows and served to protect against the evil eye and envy, aided navigation, and acted as a pair of eyes looking ahead and warning of danger.
This decoration is still common today on modern ships in Portugal, Malta, Greece, and the far east.”
The large white marble disc, 20 cm in diameter, is flat on one side and curved on the other, and it has a central cavity with traces of paint appearing as two circles around the center.
It is identified as an eye motif, in Greek “ophtalmoi,” and such discs adorned the bows of ancient warships and merchant’s vessels.
Lead or bronze nails attached the center of the disc to the ship’s hull. Archaeologists have turned up a wealth of artifacts in the same area.
Although this artifact was once common and one would expect to find many similar artifacts, it is, in fact, rare. So far, only four similar ancient items have been discovered in the Mediterranean: two from the wreck of an ancient merchant ship found at the Tektaş Burnu site off the western coast of Turkey, between the islands of Samos and Kios, dating to 440–425 BCE, and two on the Mediterranean coast of Israel—one from the Carmel Beach and the other, just discovered, on the Yavneh-Yam coast.
In water surveys conducted by the Marine Archaeology Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority since the 1980s, finds from shipwrecked ships testifying to extensive commercial activity at the site were discovered.
Meganeura: The largest insect ever to exist was a giant dragonfly
Meganeura is a genus of extinct insects from the Carboniferous period (approximately 300 million years ago), which resembled and are related to the present-day dragonflies.
Its wingspans from 65 cm (25.6 in) to more than 70 cm (28 in), M.Monyi is one of the largest known species of flying insects. Meganeura was predatory and their diet consisted mainly of other insects.
Fossils were discovered in the French Stephanian Coal Measures of Commentry in 1880.
Fossil of a Meganeuridae The largest insect that ever existed was a dragonfly.
In 1885, French paleontologist Charles Brongniart described and named the fossil “Meganeura” (large-nerved), which refers to the network of veins on the insect’s wings. Another fine fossil specimen was found in 1979 at Bolsover in Derbyshire.
The holotype is housed in the National Museum of Natural History, in Paris.
Oxygen levels and atmospheric density
The way in which oxygen is diffused through the body of the insect through its tracheal respiration system puts an upper limit on body size, which ancient insects seem to have far surpassed.
Harlé (1911) originally suggested that Meganeura could only fly because at that time the atmosphere provided more oxygen than the present 20 per cent.
This theory was initially rejected by fellow #oxygen but was more recently approved through further analysis of the relationship between the availability of gigantism and oxygen.
If this hypothesis is correct, these insects would have been vulnerable to declining oxygen levels and, in our current atmosphere, could probably not survive. Some research suggests that insects breathe with “rapid cycles of compression and expansion of the trachea.”
A recent analysis of modern insects and birds ‘ flight energetics suggests that both the oxygen levels and air density provide an upper bound on size.
In the case of the giant dragonflies, the presence of very large Meganeuridae with wing spans rivaling those of Meganeura during the Permian, when the atmospheric oxygen content was already much lower than in the Carboniferous, presented a problem for the oxygen-related explanations.
However, despite the fact that Meganeurids had the largest known wing spans, their bodies were not very heavy, being less colossal than those of many living Coleoptera; therefore, they were not true giant insects, only giant in comparison with their living relatives.
Lack of predators
Other explanations for the large size of Meganeurids compared to living relatives are warranted.
Bechly (2004) suggested that the lack of aerial vertebrate predators allowed terygote insects to evolve to maximum sizes during the Carboniferous and Permian periods, perhaps accelerated by an evolutionary “arms race” for an increase in body size between plant-feeding Palaeodictyoptera and Meganisoptera as their predators.
Man finds 8,000-year-old dolphin bones in the back garden
Paul McDonald was building a rectangular pool for his kids when he came across the bones
A man has discovered 8,000-year-old dolphin bones while digging in his back garden. Paul McDonald, 44, was digging a swimming pool for his children when he struck a bone of the 10ft foot mammal with his digger.
The bottlenose dolphin is thought to have washed up on an ancient shoreline after the last Ice Age. Archaeologists have described the prehistoric discovery in Causewayhead, Stirling, as “the find of a lifetime”.
The father-of-four said he recognized the dolphin’s skull by its long snout, rows of teeth, and unmistakable shape. The bones were preserved in clay, around 80cm below the current ground level, for what is thought to have been up to 8,000 years.
With them was a broken tool made from deer antlers, which would have been used to carve the meat.
It is thought the dolphin was made into a meal by local hunter-gatherers.
Mr. McDonald, a medical rep in orthopedics, who works with bones himself, said: “I was digging away in the swimming pool when I caught something unusual. I rolled it back and came down and pulled it out.
“I saw the roundness of the skull and then saw the snout and teeth and I knew right away it was a dolphin.
The bones date back up to 8,000 years ago
“I googled bottlenose and thought ‘wow’. Stuck in clay at that depth I knew it must be old. Now a tool has been found that tells us more about what was going on, it’s mind-blowing.
“We bought the house six years ago and I’ve found a few interesting things, like old bottles and coins, but I’ve always wanted to find something like this.”
The skull has been removed by experts from the National Museums Scotland (NMS) so it can be analyzed, while the rest of the skeleton will be fully excavated.
Stirling archaeologist Dr. Murray Cook said the discovery could be the first of its kind in Scotland in over a century.
The last whale bones found near Stirling were in 1897 but there are no recent records of dolphin discoveries.
Dr. Cook said: “It is the find of a lifetime. I don’t think one of these has ever been subject to modern excavation.
“After the Ice Age, following the retreat of the ice, this area was a vast inland sea teeming with life.
“Our earliest ancestors would have been walking the shoreline every day for food such as seaweed and shellfish and if a seal, a whale, or a dolphin washed up it would be carved into almost immediately.
“The tool made from antler tine means that they were hacking into the dolphin and that’s tremendously exciting. The tip has broken off – we still hope to find it – and they’ve discarded it.”
Paul McDonald (left) and Dr Murray Cook (right) were delighted to find the mammal’s bones
Andrew Kitchener, principal curator of vertebrates at NMS, said: “I’ve been at the museum for 35 years and this is the first time something has emerged from the clay like this. It is a really interesting and important find.
“It seems like it’s a stranded animal that’s just sunk into the clay and been preserved all this time until Paul uncovered it, which is kind of a miracle really.”
Mr. Kitchener said there was lots of analysis to be done, but after they get the bones radiocarbon dated, they can work out the age.
“It’s fairly small so possibly a female, and its teeth are fairly worn which suggests it’s an older animal.
“We’re only at the beginning. It’s just exciting to see it emerging from the clay.”
The bones in isolation are owned by Mr. McDonald, but the antler tool could be declared Treasure Trove, which may mean he could win a reward as the finder.
He said: “I’m just happy to find it and make sure it’s looked after and people get to see it.”
17th-Century Warship Pulled From Icy Baltic Sea Is Almost Perfectly Preserved
In the 1620s, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden ordered the construction of a new warship to protect his citizens. The warship was named Vasa and its construction was hurried as the Swedes waged war in those years with the now-historic bi-confederation entity reigned by one monarch–the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Vasa’s port bow.
After its creation, with several superlatives, the Vasa warship was described as being the largest and most capable battleship at the disposal of the Swedish navy.
The ship came to symbolize Sweden’s Great Power Period, in which the Nordic country controlled most of the Baltic Sea and forged its status as one of Europe’s most powerful kingdoms.
Warship in Vasa museum in Stockholm
The ship’s appearance was stunning, measuring 226 feet in length, 164 feet in height, and weighing more than 1,200 tons. With some 64 cannons installed on it, it promised whoever tried to mess with Vasa would face serious consequences. As it turned out, it never came to that.
The ship, against everyone’s expectations, proved to be fallible and faced an end that might easily remind people of the story of the RMS Titanic. Vasa did not hit an iceberg but still ignominiously sunk on its very first journey.
It was an embarrassing incident, overseen by crowds of Swedes who had gathered at the port of Stockholm from where the ship set sails towards the open seas for the very first and last time on August 10, 1628.
There were also prominent guests in the onlooking crowd, including royals and ambassadors from other countries. Having not sailed even one nautical mile, the mighty warship suddenly plunged into the water. Accounts point to errors happening during construction.
The vessel was the work of a Dutch shipbuilder. The contract was signed early in the year 1625 and Vasa was one of four vessels agreed on the list with shipbuilder Henrik Hybertsson.
The original arrangement was to have two smaller and two bigger vessels. Hybertsson died shortly after undertaking the project, and the construction effort was taken over by his assistant, Hein Jakobsson.
Illustration from a treatise on salvaging from 1734, showing the traditional method of raising a wreck with the help of anchors and ships or hulks as pontoons, basically the same method that was used to raise Vasa in the 20th century.
Construction plans were obviously modified, as Vasa, which was supposed to be one of the two smaller ships, appeared to be fitting the pair of two bigger ships upon completion. The ship came out much heavier than planned. It also carried extra weights such as hundreds of sculptures and at least 100 tons of ballast.
More evidence shows that the Swedes had the warship tested and noticed something was wrong with it, but under the pushy demands of the king, Vasa was prematurely sailed into the open sea and towards its premature doom.
The preserved Vasa in the main hall of Vasa Museum seen from above the bow.
A strong gust of wind was enough to overturn the vessel. When the water began to enter, all it took was a few minutes for it to sink 105 feet below the surface.
The Swedes were quick to dismiss and forget Vasa. This was to be their new favourite war toy and national pride and joy, yet it now lay sunk on the bottom of the ocean on its maiden voyage. It was a scandal that hurt the reputation of the kingdom, as well as having huge economic repercussions. Vasa had costed a fortune.
While an investigation was ushered in immediately after the ship sank, little could be done. The main shipbuilder had already been dead for over a year.
Illustration of a Swedish Emperors: Gustav Vasa, Gustav Adolf, Dronning Christine, A. Oxenstierna, Charles Gustav, Charles IX, Torstenson
There were efforts to recover Vasa from the seafloor immediately, but the task seemed impossible with the limited technology of the time. By the 1660s, a group of divers was able to retrieve the cannons, using an early model of the diving bell. The shipwreck was eventually left abandoned and forgotten…until the mid-20th-century.
In 1961, a few years after the shipwreck was rediscovered and identified as the lost 17th-century Vasa vessel, Sweden finally managed to recover it. Although Vasa had for centuries remained submerged in the sea, upon its reappearance it seemed positively in pristine condition.
The underwater position where it had sunk was key. The water was dark enough to stop ultraviolet light from protruding and affecting the ship’s wood. The chilly temperature of the Baltic was also soothing, preventing any rapid deterioration processes.
The inside of the lower gun deck looking toward the bow.
Having sunk close enough to the harbour, there was enough pollution in the water to bleach most parasites that may have wanted to feast on the wood of the wreck.
But some decaying issues began once the ship was taken out of the water. Vasa underwent restoration at that point and was treated with substances to protect the wood, however, lab research later confirmed that the wood of the ship was struggling with extremely slow, ongoing fibre degradation.
Vasa warship canon hatches detail
There is no threat of immediate collapse, but this has remained a major occupation for conservationists who are still looking for the best way to stop the risky process.
Should the Vasa museum where the shipwreck is famously displayed in Stockholm allow its prime exhibit to perish for the second time, it would be a huge national loss. The Vasa goes a long way and has a special history with the Swedes as well as being one of the best-preserved historical ships in all of the world.
Denny, a mysterious child from 90,000 years ago, whose parents were two different human species
More than 90,000 years back in time, a unique child was walking the Earth. This individual was a young human hybrid. Scientists dubbed the ancient girl “Denny,” the only known individual whose parents were from two distinct human species!
The tiny arm or leg fragment belonged to Denisova 11, a 13-year-old hybrid hominin.
In 2018, researchers looking into Denisova Cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia located the skeletal remains of the Denny. With only a bone and teeth to work with, researchers were still able to identify who the individual was.
A new effort, called FINDER, has been launched to explore the Denisovans and the relationships between them, Homo sapiens, and the Neanderthals.
The purpose of the investigation is to gain a further understanding of the interaction between the three species. It is known that the three species interbred, but the study aims to provide further detail of the connections between them.
The purpose of the project, led by Katerina Douka of the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, and a visitor at Oxford University, is to identify where Neanderthals lived when they interacted with Homo sapiens, and why they eventually went extinct.
Studying the history of the Denisovans is difficult due to the fact that the only archaeological site that has yielded their fossils is the Denisovan Cave in Siberia. Moreover, only a few fossils have been unearthed from this site, along with some Neanderthal specimens.
Tom Higham, the deputy director of Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit and an advisor to Finder, remarks on how great the site is. He states that it is nice and cool inside, thus preserving the DNA in the bones. Unfortunately, he goes on to add that the majority of the bones in the cave were destroyed by hyenas and other carnivores, leaving a mess of tiny, unrecognizable bone fragments scattered across the floor.
Higham states that it is not possible to distinguish between the source of a piece of material, be it from a mammoth, sheep, man, or woman, without a thorough examination. He further explains that even if only a handful of finds are from humans, they are of great value as they provide a great deal of knowledge.
Artist’s reconstruction of the teenage Denisovan. John Bavaro / Fair Use
DNA sequencing of the ancient girl’s bones revealed her to be a product of two distinct species. Her mother was Neanderthal, and her father was a Denisovan. Denny had been living with various Neanderthals and Denisovans in the cave when she tragically passed away at a young age.
It is believed that Neanderthals and Denisovans separated from each other at least 390,000 years ago, making them both now extinct groups of hominins.
A photo of the Denisova Cave.
Analysis of the genome of ‘Denisova 11’ – a bone fragment from the Denisova Cave located in Russia – reveals that the individual had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. The father’s genome displays Neanderthal ancestry, belonging to a population linked to a later Denisovan from the cave.
The mother came from a population that is more closely connected to Neanderthals that lived in Europe than to the earlier Neanderthal discovered in Denisova Cave, indicating that migrations between eastern and western Eurasia of Neanderthals happened sometime after 120,000 years ago.
The new study published in the journal Nature indicates that interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans was more common than previously assumed, considering the small number of archaic samples that have been sequenced.
It could be assumed that the extraordinary lineage of Denny suggests that Neanderthals and Denisovans were often engaging in interbreeding, though researchers caution against forming such speculations hastily.
It is evident that the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans are different, making it easy to distinguish between them. According to Douka, this suggests that interbreeding between the two did not occur frequently, as otherwise, their DNA would be similar.
It has been demonstrated by prior research that Denisovans and Homo sapiens interbred, yet the question of why this happened at Denisova is still unanswered.
It has been proposed that the cave could be seen as a border crossing for the two species, with the Neanderthals mostly located in Europe and the Denisovans in the east. Periodically, both species would find themselves in the cave at the same time, which could have led to relations between the two.
Detailed studies of Denny’s Neanderthal mom revealed that her genes had a special connection to Neanderthals in Croatia, which suggests that the predecessors of her mother may have been part of a group migrating east from Europe to Denisova – where she and Denny’s father met at the boundaries of their respective homelands.
This is a captivating image, yet more data is needed to authenticate it. Researchers don’t have direct proof that the Denisovans were mainly situated in the east of the cave, notwithstanding, the fact that their genetic material has been identified in the DNA of people in Australia, New Guinea, and different parts of Oceania, reinforces this concept and implies that future investigations for sites should be focused on eastern Russia, China, and south-east Asia.
Though scientists have limited knowledge about the extinct human species known as the Denisovans, experts have recently been able to construct the inaugural facial reconstruction to provide an image of what they may have looked like. This has enabled people to see a vision of what the Denisovans may have appeared to be.
Higham mentions that researchers have numerous inquiries they have yet to answer. For instance, where did the Denisovans extend to, and what is the earliest proof for their divergence from the common ancestor they had with Neanderthals 500,000 years ago?
It may take some time before scientists can locate a bone or two from different areas, but the potential benefits would be worth the wait.
This ancient weapon was made from an object that fell out of the sky
An exceedingly small artifact crafted from an iron alloy that fell from the sky was retrieved near a settlement. It was not the closest meteorite to the area, however, researchers think it may have originated from Estonia, which is a considerable distance away.
The unassuming arrowhead was found to be made from a meteorite.
The arrowhead is not only indicative of the use of sky iron in the pre-smelting era, but it also reveals the existence of vast trading systems which operated thousands of years ago.
Geologist Beda Hofmann of the Natural History Museum of Bern and the University of Bern in Switzerland initiated an extensive search to find ancient meteoritic iron artifacts.
As pure iron was a rarity in ancient times, the only readily available option was to use the iron that had fallen from the sky in the form of meteorites.
Iron meteorites are the type that are most commonly seen. They can survive the impact of entering the atmosphere and are generally composed of iron, as well as small amounts of nickel and minuscule amounts of other metals. It is believed that most iron tools and weapons used during the Bronze Age were created using meteoritic iron.
Throughout the Middle East, Egypt, and Asia, numerous artifacts have been discovered; however, there have been vastly fewer finds across Europe.
Morigen, located in present-day Switzerland, was a thriving settlement during the Bronze Age, from approximately 800 to 900 BCE.
The Twannberg field, which contains remnants of a rock that arrived from the heavens a great many years prior to the last ice age, was only a short distance from Morigen (no more than 8 kilometers, or 5 miles) according to the Harvard University abstract.
Hofmann and his crew uncovered an iron arrowhead from the site that they had already excavated. It was 39.3 mm long and weighed 2.904 grams. The team noticed that organic residue was present, which they assumed was birch tar, likely used to attach the arrowhead to its shaft. Its composition was out of this world.
Analysis of the object has confirmed the presence of iron and nickel, which is the usual makeup of meteoritic iron. Additionally, a radioactive isotope of aluminum – aluminum-26 – was found, which can only be created in space, among the stars.
The X-ray sections of the arrowhead are depicted in the image above. The areas signifying the highest density and brightness are identified as iron.
It’s quite interesting to note that the combination of metals present in the arrowhead doesn’t match the iron found in Twannberg. Rather, it appears to be a type of iron meteorite known as an IAB meteorite.
The origin of the arrowhead is easier to identify considering the large IAB meteorites known to have crashed in Europe.
Three of these have a composition that coincides with the arrowhead: Bohumilitz from Czechia, Retuerte de Bullaque from Spain, and Kaalijarv from Estonia. These meteorites are documented on the websites of the Lunar and Planetary Institute.
The researchers concluded that Kaalijarv most likely matched the description. It had arrived on Earth near 1500 BCE and the pieces it created were suitable for forging into arrowheads. However, its location was 1600 km (994 miles) away from Morigen, indicating that it had possibly traveled via the Amber Road.
Considering the vast amount of meteorite debris created by the Kaalijarv impacts, it would be beneficial to survey through collections for items corresponding to the arrowhead, in an effort to discover the parent meteorite.
The researchers state that although it may have originated from Kaalijarv, it is highly probable that the arrowhead was not an isolated object and that there may be other worked fragments of meteoritic iron, such as those of miniature size, in archaeological collections around Europe and possibly even further.
The study was originally published in the journal Science Direct on July 25, 2023.
