Rare 20-million-year-old petrified tree measuring 62 feet tall discovered in Greece
A petrified tree 62 feet high complete with branches, leaves and roots has been discovered on the Greek island of Lesbos. It was found during salvage excavations at the site of roadwork in western Lesbos.
While the island is famed for its vast petrified forest, a national park, monument and designated UNESCO Global Geopark, most of the trees are trunks, either upright with their roots intact or fallen.
Trees with branches are rare — the last one before this was found in 1995 — and a tree of this scale with branches has never been found before.
The trees were mineralized and preserved in a series of massive volcanic eruptions that struck the northern Aegean 17 to 20 million years ago. The trees on the western part of the island were covered by volcanic lava and ash.
Heavy rains turned the ash into fast-moving mudflows that blanketed the forest. The subtropical forest of pines, oaks and Sequoia-like giants, plus leaves, fruits and roots were fossilized.
The latest discovery was preserved almost to its last leaf thanks to a coating of fine-grained volcanic ash which coated the whole thing and kept it intact in one piece exactly where it fell in the eruption. It was not moved or dragged by the mudflows.
It simply toppled over where it stood, was covered by a thick layer of fine ash and gradually turned to stone. Underneath it was a bed of fruit leaves, also preserved and mineralized by the volcanic ash. Nearby the excavation team unearthed a spectacular cache of 150 petrified logs one on top of the other in a single pit.
The discovery of an entire tree lying on a bed of leaves was not only unprecedented but down to pure luck. “Constructors were about to asphalt that part of the highway when one of our technicians noticed a tiny branch.
The road work stopped, we starting excavating and quite quickly realised we had chanced upon an incredible find,” said [University of the Aegean geology professor Nikolas] Zouros. “It will now form part of the open-air museum we intend to create.”
Geologists around the world have described the find as a breakthrough.
“We have a case of extraordinary fossilisation in which a tree was preserved with its various parts intact. In the history of palaeontology, worldwide, it’s unique” said the Portuguese palaeontologist Artur Abreu Sá. “That it was buried by sediments expelled during a destructive volcanic eruption, and then found in situ, makes it even more unusual.”
Because the road will still be built over the find site, the tree will have to be moved. The staff of the Natural History Museum of the Petrified Forest have been working assiduously for the past few weeks to complete the excavation of the tree and preserve it.
A custom splint has been wrapped around the trunk and branches to support them and ensure the tree remains intact. A metal grate has been built to transport the tree to an area 100 feet away where a protective shelter is being constructed for its display.
Remains of wooden safe excavated from the burned-out roman villa in Spain
A rare strongbox from the 4th century A.D. has been discovered in the Casa del Mitreo, a Roman villa in west-central Spain.
Arca ferrata found in Tarazona.
The area Ferrata, a wooden chest armed with bronze cladding and iron spikes, was used as a safe for valuables — coin, jewellery, textiles, important documents — in Roman homes and businesses. Because they are mostly made of wood, only four others are known to survive.
Three of the extant examples were preserved under the extraordinary conditions of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The only other arca Ferrata found in Spain was discovered in Tarazona, Aragon, northeastern Spain.
The Domus was dubbed Casa del Mitreo because a sanctuary believed to be Mithraeum was discovered nearby. The villa was built in the late 1st, early 2nd century and was remodelled and expanded several times over the next centuries. It was located outside the ancient Roman city Emerita Augusta (modern-day Mérida).
“It is unclear what the owner did for a living. But it is clear that it was probably a wealthy family because the surface of the house is around 3,386 square meters (36,447 square feet), with 15 rooms, including the bathrooms and the kitchen, as well as four other rooms,” said [Archaeologist Ana Maria Bejarano] Osario.
Osario said: “It is unclear what they did for a living, but it might be something related to commerce or business, and they could even have been using the four extra rooms themselves to sell their wares.”
The house also had two more rooms on the second floor, including the one that collapsed during the fire, the causes of which are unknown.
The ‘arca ferrata’ being readied for removal.
The remains of the arca Ferrata were first discovered in 1994 during excavations in a room of a building that had suffered a fire in the 4th century.
At the time, the condition of the exposed organic remains was precarious, so the team decided to leave it in situ and prevent further deterioration as much as possible.
It wasn’t until 2017 that a comprehensive conservation and consolidation project at the Casa del Mitreo tackled the burned room once more.
It was fully excavated and documented, as were the paintings and artefacts inside the room. It is misshapen from the effects of the fire which collapsed the roof onto the coffer and drove it into the ground. Today it measures 9.8 by 4.9 feet, but its original measurements are unknown.
The ‘arca ferrata’ on a grill for removal.
Archaeologists consolidated the remains to keep the metal parts from oxidizing and the wood from decay.
It was removed intact and transferred to the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain (IPCE) of the Ministry of Culture and Sports where it will be studied, stabilized and restored for future display.
Roman Baths Emerge On The Banks Of The Cosa River In Frosinone
The remains of Roman imperial-era baths have been discovered in Frosinone, 50 miles southeast of Rome in central Italy. The complex on the left bank of the Cosa river retains sections of black-and-white mosaic floors and marble cladding lining a rectangular pool.
Marble basin of the Roman baths on the Cosa river with access steps
The baths were discovered last month during a preventive archaeology survey at the site of planned sewer work on the Ponte Della Fontana, a street named after the Roman bridge, long-since obliterated by flooding, that once crossed the Cosa river at this spot.
Very few remains from the Roman city have survived, and while Frosinone was known for its rivers and mineral springs in antiquity, there are no ancient sources documenting baths, so the discovery comes as a total surprise to archaeologists. It’s also the first archaeological evidence that the imperial Roman town occupied the left bank of the river.
Detail of the mosaic floor with Triton. Baths on the River Cosa, Frosinone
Found just a few inches under street level, the surviving mosaic floors can be dated by their style to the 2nd century A.D.
The black-and-white mosaics adorning the floor of a large room depict mythical marine creatures and deities, including a taurocampus (a fish-tailed bull), a hippocampus (fish-tailed horse) over whom looms the god Triton, son of Poseidon, blowing a conch shell like a trumpet. There are others visible as shadows under a layer of plaster.
At one end of the large room is a pool lined in marble. A large proportion of the cladding is extant, as are bronze staples used to affix the marble slabs to the walls of the pool.
The pool also had a mosaic floor, albeit not a figural one; just a monochromatic white. There are patches evident from repairs done in antiquity.
The large mosaic floor also has a number of patches where tesserae were lost and squares of marble and larger, more roughly-cut tiles in varying sizes were used to fill in the blanks.
Detail of mosaic floor with sea ox. Roman baths on the Cosa river, Frosinone
A smaller room adjacent to the large one also had a mosaic floor, although from what we can tell there were no figural motifs. It was white tile with a thick black border.
The function of this space cannot be determined, as most of the room was lost when the baths were destroyed.
Archaeologists believe their source of water was the ultimate cause of their demise. The Cosa changed course in later antiquity, shifting 30 feet and taking a bunch of the bath complex with it.
Excavations of the site are ongoing and cultural patrimony officials plan to conserve the mosaics and marble walls in situ. The remains will be covered and secured. The ultimate goal is to include them in a future Cosa River city park.
Arabian cult may have built 1000 monuments older than Stonehenge
The Arabian Peninsula is home to more than 1,000 ancient monuments that are more than 2,500 years older than the U.K.’s Stonehenge. Called “mustatils,” which is the Arabian term for “rectangles,” these rectangular stone structures were likely used by Arabian cattle herders to perform rituals.
Researchers from the University of Western Australia arrived at this conclusion after excavating the site in northwestern Saudi Arabia. They uncovered cattle horns and skulls in one mustatil, suggesting that ancient Arabians might have used cattle fragments as ritual offerings.
Based on the age of the skulls, the researchers posited that mustatils were built between 5300 and 5000 B.C. This would make the monuments the earliest large-scale, ritual site anywhere in the world, predating Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids by more than two millennia.
“This could completely rewrite our understanding of cults in this area at this time,” said team member Melissa Kennedy. She explained that religious groups located further south became focused on homes, with families displaying small shrines. But the opposite was happening in ancient Saudi Arabia with mustatils, she went on.
The researchers detailed their findings in the journal Antiquity.
Ancient Arabians likely used stone monuments to pray to weather gods
Made of blocks of sandstone piled on top of each other, mustatils were originally called “gates” because they resembled traditional European field gates when viewed from above. They were discovered in the 1970s but received little attention from archaeologists until recently.
Lead researcher Hugh Thomas and his team embarked on the largest investigation into mustatils to date to learn more about these structures.
After flying over northwestern Saudi Arabia and surveying the ground, the researchers found more than 1,000 mustatils spread across 20 million hectares, which were twice as many as previously thought to exist in the area.
There are 1000 ancient monuments across one region of Saudi Arabia
The open-air rectangular structures ranged from 65 feet to nearly 2,000 feet in length but their walls stood only around four feet high. According to Thomas, they were not designed to keep anything in but to demarcate an area that needed to be isolated.
In a typical mustatil, long walls surrounded a central courtyard that was bounded at one end by a distinctive rubble platform, or “head,” and an entryway at the opposite end. In some mustatils, the entrance was blocked by stones, suggesting that the mustatil might have been decommissioned after use.
Many structures also featured a chamber in the centre of the rubble platform. In one mustatil, the chamber contained cattle fragments that might have been used as ritual offerings to weather gods.
As the study showed, mustatils were built during the Holocene Humid Phase – a period between 8000 and 4000 B.C. during which Arabia and parts of Africa were wetter and what are now deserts were grasslands. But despite this humid environment, droughts were still common in these areas. As such, ancient Arabians might have herded and offered cattle to the gods to protect the land from changes in the weather, according to Kennedy.
Gary Rollefson, a professor of anthropology at Whitman College who was not part of the study, opined that the rituals in mustatils were also important for bringing communities together. Indeed, mustatils were typically clustered in groups of two to 10, suggesting that ancient Arabians held gatherings that were broken up into small social groups.
“The mustatils themselves are probably associated with an annual or generational coming-together of people who would normally be out with their herds and cattle,” he said. “But there’s no indication that these guys spent a lot of time around the mustatil.”
Meet Shuvuuia deserti, a nocturnal dinosaur that lived 70 million years ago
Under the cover of darkness in desert habitats about 70 million years ago, in what is today Mongolia and northern China, a gangly looking dinosaur employed excellent night vision and superb hearing to thrive as a menacing pint-sized nocturnal predator.
Scientists said on Thursday an examination of a ring of bones surrounding the pupil and a bony tube inside the skull that houses the hearing organ showed that this dinosaur, called Shuvuuia deserti, boasted visual and auditory capabilities akin to a barn owl, indicating it could it hunt in total darkness.
Their study, published in the journal Science, showed that predatory dinosaurs overall generally possessed better-than-average hearing — helpful for hunters — but had vision optimized for daytime. In contrast, Shuvuuia loved the nightlife.
The fossilized skeleton of the small bird-like dinosaur Shuvuuia deserti is seen in this undated handout image.
Shuvuuia was a pheasant-sized, two-legged Cretaceous Period dinosaur weighing about as much as a small house cat. Lacking the strong jaws and sharp teeth of many carnivorous dinosaurs, it had a remarkably bird-like and lightly built skull and many tiny teeth like grains of rice.
Its mid-length neck and small head, coupled with very long legs, made it resemble an awkward chicken. Unlike birds, it had short but powerful arms ending in a single large claw, good for digging.
“Shuvuuia might have run across the desert floor under cover of night, using its incredible hearing and night vision to track small prey such as nocturnal mammals, lizards and insects.
With its long legs it could have rapidly run down such prey, and used its digging forelimbs to pry prey loose from any cover such as a burrow,” said palaeontologist Jonah Choiniere of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the study’s first author.
“It’s such a strange animal that palaeontologists have long wondered what it was actually doing,” added palaeontologist Roger Benson of the University of Oxford in England, who helped lead the study.
Professor Jonah Choiniere of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, is seen holding a 3D printed model of the lagena, an inner-ear structure, of the small bird-like dinosaur Shuvuuia deserti, in this undated handout photograph.
The researchers looked at a structure called the lagena, a curving and finger-like sac that sits in a cavity in the bones surrounding the brain and is connected to the part of the ear that lets reptiles and birds keep balance and move their heads while walking.
Acute hearing helps nocturnal predators locate prey. The longer the lagena, the better hearing an animal has.
The barn owl, a proficient nocturnal predator even in pitch-black conditions, has the proportionally longest lagena of any living bird. Shuvuuia is unique among predatory dinosaurs with a hyper-elongated lagena, almost identical in relative size to a barn owl’s.
The researchers also looked at a series of tiny bones called the scleral ring that encircles the pupil of the eye. It exists in birds and lizards and was present in the ancestors of today’s mammals. Shuvuuia had a very wide scleral ring, indicating an extra-large pupil size that made its eye a specialized light-capture device.
The study found that nocturnality was uncommon among dinosaurs, aside from a group called alvarezsaurs to which Shuvuuia belonged. Alvarezsaurs had a nocturnal vision very early in their lineage, but super-hearing took more time to evolve.
“Like many palaeontologists, I once considered that nighttime in the age of dinosaurs was when the mammals came out of hiding to avoid predation and competition.
The importance of these findings is that it forces us to imagine dinosaurs like Shuvuuia evolving to take advantage of these nocturnal communities,” Choiniere said.
Benson added, “This really shows that dinosaurs had a wide range of skills and adaptations that are only just coming to light now. We find evidence that there was a thriving ‘nightlife’ during the time of dinosaurs.”
‘Extinct Fossil Fish’ Dating Back 420 Million Years Found Alive in Madagascar
Shark hunters have found a 420m year-old ‘extinct’ four-legged fossil fish alive in ocean
Shark hunters have rediscovered a population of fish that predates dinosaurs that many believed to be extinct. The “four-legged fossil fish” known as the coelacanth, has been found alive and well in the West Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar, according to Mongabay News.
Their re-emergence is partly because of fishermen using gillnets in their shark-hunting expeditions.
As they continue to target sharks for their fins and oil these deep-sea nets can reach where the fish gathers, around 328 to 492 feet below the water’s surface.
The species, which dates back 420 million years, was thought to have been extinct until 1938.
But the conservation news site said scientists were shocked to find a member of the “Latimeria chalumnae” species still alive, with its eight fins, a specific spotting pattern on the scales and huge bodies.
A recent study in the SA Journal of Science indicated that the coelacanths might face a new threat to survival with the uptick in shark hunting, which began booming in the 1980s.
Researchers wrote in the paper: “The jarifa gillnets used to catch sharks are a relatively new and more deadly innovation as they are large and can be set in deep water,” the researchers noted in their paper.
“They fear that the coelacanths are now at risk for ‘exploitation’, particularly in Madagascar.
“There is little doubt that large mesh jarifa gillnets is now the biggest threat to the survival of coelacanths in Madagascar.”
The lead author of the study Andrew Cooke told Mongabay News he and the others were shocked at the increase of accidental captures of the creature.
Newsweek reported he said: “When we looked into this further, we were astounded [by the numbers caught]…even though there has been no proactive process in Madagascar to monitor or conserve coelacanths,”
Coelacanths or Latimeria are carnivorous fish that live up to 60 years and grow as large as 6.5 feet and weigh approximately 198 pounds.
Their study suggests that Madagascar is the “epicentre” of various coelacanth species and says vital conservation steps are taken to preserve the ancient species.
But Madagascan government marine researcher Paubert Tsimanaoraty Mahatante told the site he is not concerned with the species becoming a hot commodity among hunters.
He reportedly said: “Catching a coelacanth is totally uncommon and people are in some ways even afraid to catch something so uncommon. So I don’t think that coelacanths are being targeted deliberately,”
But Cooke and his team want to continue educating people about the unique species based on around 40 years of research.
The paper in the SA Journal of Science provides is first comprehensive account of Madagascar coelacanths and shows the existence of a regionally important population.
Mysterious three-mile wide ‘star map dating back 150,0000 YEARS’ found in Hawaii
Perhaps you haven’t still scrolled through the internet for the latest videos of mind-blowing discoveries that have been posted by some of the content creators of some platforms. However, we’ve found something interesting and of course incredible for you today.
The official content creator of the channel “Third Phase of Moon,” Brett Cousins, said that he had never made discoveries by himself and published until he found some information across an insane discovery.
He has only published discoveries that had been reported worldwide until this incredible moment. Anyhow, this is considered the oldest petroglyphs that humanity has ever found.
He was the first to come across this incredible discovery through the usage of Google Earth. He had discovered it on an ancient celestial star map.
The dating is believed to be more than 150,000 years.
As per Brett Cousins, his novel discovery that he was able to find in Hawaii can help reveal the hidden secrets of the ancient civilizations if we sit back and put some effort into it.
Brett was able to drag the attention of more than 19,000 viewers on his YouTube channel since the release of this great finding. Among them were some of the greats too.
Brett has an idea that this star map as well as the astronomical site have a connection with the mysterious Nazca Lines.
Pre-Human Fossils Suggest Mankind Emerged From Europe Rather Than Africa
The common lineage of great apes and humans split several hundred thousand earlier than hitherto assumed, according to an international research team headed by Professor Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen and Professor Nikolai Spassov from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
The researchers investigated two fossils of Graecopithecus freybergi with state-of-the-art methods and came to the conclusion that they belong to pre-humans. Their findings, published today in two papers in the journal PLOS ONE, further indicate that the split of the human lineage occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and not — as customarily assumed — in Africa.
Present-day chimpanzees are humans’ nearest living relatives. Where the last chimp-human common ancestor lived is a central and highly debated issue in palaeoanthropology. Researchers have assumed up to now that the lineages diverged five to seven million years ago and that the first pre-humans developed in Africa.
According to the 1994 theory of French palaeoanthropologist Yves Coppens, climate change in Eastern Africa could have played a crucial role. The two studies of the research team from Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Canada, France and Australia now outline a new scenario for the beginning of human history.
Dental roots give new evidence
The team analyzed the two known specimens of the fossil hominid Graecopithecus freybergi: a lower jaw from Greece and an upper premolar from Bulgaria. Using computer tomography, they visualized the internal structures of the fossils and demonstrated that the roots of premolars are widely fused.
The lower jaw of the 7.175 million-year-old Graecopithecus freybergi (El Graeco) from Pyrgos Vassilissis, Greece (today in metropolitan Athens).
“While great apes typically have two or three separate and diverging roots, the roots of Graecopithecus converge and are partially fused — a feature that is characteristic of modern humans, early humans and several pre-humans including Ardipithecus and Australopithecus,” said Böhme.
The lower jaw, nicknamed ‘El Graeco’ by the scientists, has additional dental root features, suggesting that the species Graecopithecus freybergi might belong to the pre-human lineage. “We were surprised by our results, as pre-humans were previously known only from sub-Saharan Africa,” said Jochen Fuss, a Tübingen PhD student who conducted this part of the study.
An upper premolar found in the Balkans. Scientists say it is 7.24 million years old. (Wolfgang Gerber, University of Tübingen)
Furthermore, Graecopithecus is several hundred thousand years older than the oldest potential pre-human from Africa, the six to seven million-year-old Sahelanthropus from Chad. The research team dated the sedimentary sequence of the Graecopithecus fossil sites in Greece and Bulgaria with physical methods and got a nearly synchronous age for both fossils — 7.24 and 7.175 million years before the present. “It is at the beginning of the Messinian, an age that ends with the complete desiccation of the Mediterranean Sea,” Böhme said.
Professor David Begun, a University of Toronto paleoanthropologist and co-author of this study added, “This dating allows us to move the human-chimpanzee split into the Mediterranean area.”
Environmental changes as the driving force for divergence
As with the out-of-East-Africa theory, the evolution of pre-humans may have been driven by dramatic environmental changes. The team led by Böhme demonstrated that the North African Sahara desert originated more than seven million years ago. The team concluded this based on geological analyses of the sediments in which the two fossils were found. Although geographically distant from the Sahara, the red-coloured silts are very fine-grained and could be classified as desert dust. An analysis of uranium, thorium and lead isotopes in individual dust particles yields an age between 0.6 and 3 billion years and infers an origin in Northern Africa.
Moreover, the dusty sediment has a high content of different salts. “These data document for the first time a spreading Sahara 7.2 million years ago, whose desert storms transported red, salty dusts to the north coast of the Mediterranean Sea in its then form,” the Tübingen researchers said. This process is also observable today. However, the researchers’ modelling shows that, with up to 250 grams per square meter and year, the amount of dust in the past considerably exceeds recent dust loadings in Southern Europe more than tenfold, comparable to the situation in the present-day Sahel zone in Africa.
Fire, grass, and water stress
The researchers further showed that, contemporary to the development of the Sahara in North Africa, a savannah biome formed in Europe.
Using a combination of new methodologies, they studied microscopic fragments of charcoal and plant silicate particles, called phytoliths. Many of the phytoliths identified derive from grasses and particularly from those that use the metabolic pathway of C4-photosynthesis, which is common in today’s tropical grasslands and savannahs. The global spread of C4-grasses began eight million years ago on the Indian subcontinent — their presence in Europe was previously unknown.
“The phytolith record provides evidence of severe droughts, and the charcoal analysis indicates recurring vegetation fires,” said Böhme. “In summary, we reconstruct a savannah, which fits with the giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, and rhinoceroses that were found together with Graecopithecus,” Spassov added
“The incipient formation of a desert in North Africa more than seven million years ago and the spread of savannahs in Southern Europe may have played a central role in the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages,” said Böhme. She calls this hypothesis the North Side Story, recalling the thesis of Yves Coppens, known as East Side Story.
The findings are described in two studies pubished in PLOS ONE titled “Potential hominin affinities of Graecopithecus from the Late Miocene of Europe” and “Messinian age and savannah environment of the possible hominin Graecopithecus from Europe.”
