99 million years old dinosaur-era bird wings found trapped in amber
The new specimens come from a famous amber deposit in northeastern Myanmar, which has produced thousands of exquisite specimens of insects of all shapes and sizes
Beijing: In a first, scientists have discovered specimens of complete wings of tiny, prehistoric birds that were trapped in amber 100 million years ago and preserved in exquisite detail.
Thousands of fossil birds from the time of the dinosaurs have been uncovered in China. However, most of these fossils are flattened in the rock, even though they commonly preserve fossils.
The new specimens, discovered by researchers including Xing Lida from the China University of Geosciences, and Mike Benton from the University of Bristol in the UK, come from a famous amber deposit in northeastern Myanmar, which has produced thousands of exquisite specimens of insects of all shapes and sizes, as well as spiders, scorpions, lizards, and isolated feathers.
This is the first time that whole portions of birds have been noted.
The fossil wings are tiny, only two or three centimeters long, and they contain the bones of the wing, including three long fingers armed with sharp claws, for clambering about in trees, as well as the feathers, all preserved in exquisite detail.
The anatomy of the hand shows these come from enantiornithine birds, a major group in the Cretaceous, but which died out at the same time as the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
Amber is a solidified tree sap, and the Burmese amber occurs in small blocks that are polished to unveil treasures within. “These fossil wings show amazing detail.
Feathers of 99 million-year-old bird wings preserved in amber.
The individual feathers show every filament and whisker, whether they are flight feathers or down feathers, and there are even traces of colour – spots and stripes,” said Benton.
“The fact that the tiny birds were clambering about in the trees suggests that they had advanced development, meaning they were ready for action as soon as they hatched,” said Lida.
“These birds did not hang about in the nest waiting to be fed but set off looking for food, and sadly died perhaps because of their small size and lack of experience,” he said.
“Isolated feathers in other amber samples show that adult birds might have avoided the sticky sap, or pulled themselves free,” he added.
The Burmese amber deposits are producing a treasure trove of remarkable early fossils, and they document a particularly active time in the evolution of life on land, the Cretaceous terrestrial revolution.
An illustration of a Enantiornithine partially ensnared by tree resin, based on one of the specimens discovered.
Flowering plants were flourishing and diversifying, and insects that fed on the leaves and nectar of the flowers were also diversifying fasts, as too were their predators, such as spiders, lizards, mammals, and birds.
The Amazing Dinosaur Found (Accidentally) by Miners in Canada
This armored plant-eater lumbered through what is now Western Canada about 110 million years ago until a flooded river swept it into the open sea. The dinosaur’s undersea burial preserved its armor in exquisite detail. Its skull still bears tile-like plates and a gray patina of fossilized skins.
A heavy equipment mechanic named Shawn Funk cut his way through the earth in the afternoon of March 21, 2011, without knowing that he would encounter a dragon soon.
That Monday had started like any other at the Millennium Mine, a vast pit some 17 miles north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, operated by energy company Suncor.
Hour after hour Funk’s towering excavator gobbled its way down to sands laced with bitumen—the transmogrified remains of marine plants and creatures that lived and died more than 110 million years ago. It was the only ancient life he regularly saw. In 12 years of digging he had stumbled across fossilized wood and the occasional petrified tree stump, but never the remains of an animal—and certainly no dinosaurs.
But around 1:30, Funk’s bucket clipped something much harder than the surrounding rock. Oddly colored lumps tumbled out of the till sliding down onto the bank below. Within minutes Funk and his supervisor, Mike Gratton, began puzzling over the walnut brown rocks. Were they strips of fossilized wood, or were they ribs? And then they turned over one of the lumps and revealed a bizarre pattern: row after row of sandy brown disks, each ringed in gunmetal gray stone.
“Right away, Mike was like, ‘We gotta get this checked out,’ ” Funk said in a 2011 interview. “It was definitely nothing we had ever seen before.”
Stretched 18 feet long and weighed nearly 3,000 pounds. Researchers suspect it initially fossilized whole, but when it was found in 2011, only the front half, from the snout to the hips, was intact enough to recover. The specimen is the best fossil of a nodosaur ever found.
A cluster of pebble-like masses may be remnants of the nodosaur’s last meal.
Royal Tyrrell Museum technician Mark Mitchell slowly frees the nodosaur’s foot and scaly footpad from the surrounding rock. Mitchell’s careful work will preserve for years to come the animal’s enigmatic features.
Nearly six years later, I’m visiting the fossil prep lab at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in the windswept badlands of Alberta. The cavernous warehouse swells with the hum of ventilation and the buzz of technicians scraping rock from the bone with needle-tipped tools resembling miniature jackhammers. But my focus rests on a 2,500-pound mass of stone in the corner.
At first glance, the reassembled gray blocks look like a nine-foot-long sculpture of a dinosaur. A bony mosaic of armor coats its neck and back, and gray circles outline individual scales. Its neck gracefully curves to the left, as if reaching toward some tasty plant. But this is no lifelike sculpture. It’s an actual dinosaur, petrified from the snout to the hips.
The more I look at it, the more mind-boggling it becomes. Fossilized remnants of skin still cover the bumpy armor plates dotting the animal’s skull. Its right forefoot lies by its side, its five digits splayed upward. I can count the scales on its sole. Caleb Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the museum, grins at my astonishment. “We don’t just have a skeleton,” he tells me later. “We have a dinosaur as it would have been.”
During its burial at sea, the nodosaur settled onto its back, pressing the dinosaur’s skeleton into the armor and embossing it with the outlines of some bones. One ripple in the armor traces the animal’s right shoulder blade.
Paleobiologist Jakob Vinther, an expert on animal coloration from the U.K.’s University of Bristol, has studied some of the world’s best fossils for signs of the pigment melanin. But after four days of working on this one—delicately scraping off samples smaller than flecks of grated Parmesan—even he is astounded. The dinosaur is so well preserved that it “might have been walking around a couple of weeks ago,” Vinther says. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Shielded from Decayarmored dinosaurs’ trademark plates usually scattered early in decay, a fate that didn’t befall this nodosaur. The remarkably preserved armor will deepen scientists’ understanding of what nodosaurs looked like and how they moved.
“That was a really exciting discovery,” says Victoria Arbour, an armoured-dinosaur palaeontologist at Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum. Arbour has seen the fossil at various stages of preparation, but she’s not involved in its study. “It represents such a different environment from today and such a different time, and it has great preservation.” (Arbour has begun studying a similarly well-preserved ankylosaur found in Montana in 2014, much of which remains hidden within a 35,000-pound block of stone.
Arbour and her colleague David Evans published a description of the Montana ankylosaur, naming it Zuul crurivastator—”Zuul, destroyer of shins”—after the monster in the film Ghostbusters.)
A lucky break in the nodosaur’s left shoulder spike reveals a cross-section of its bony core. The spike’s tip was sheathed in keratin, the same material that’s in human fingernails.
The afterword of the discovery raced up the ladder at Suncor, the company quickly notified the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Henderson and Darren Tanke, one of the museum’s veteran technicians, scrambled aboard a Suncor jet and flew to Fort McMurray. Suncor excavators and museum staff chipped away at the rock in 12-hour shifts, shrouded in dust and diesel fumes.
They eventually whittled it down to a 15,000-pound rock containing the dinosaur, ready to be hoisted out of the pit. But with cameras rolling, disaster struck: As it was lifted, the rock shattered, cleaving the dinosaur into several chunks. The fossil’s partially mineralized, cakelike interior simply couldn’t support its own weight.
Tanke spent the night devising a plan to save the fossil. The next morning Suncor personnel wrapped the fragments in plaster of Paris, while Tanke and Henderson scrounged for anything to stabilize the fossil on the long drive to the museum. In lieu of timbers, the crew used plaster-soaked burlap rolled up like logs.
The MacGyver-like plan worked. Some 420 miles later the team reached the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s prep lab, where the blocks were entrusted to fossil preparator Mark Mitchell. His work on the nodosaur has required a sculptor’s touch: For more than 7,000 hours over the past five years, Mitchell has slowly exposed the fossil’s skin and bone. The painstaking process is like freeing compressed talcum powder from concrete. “You almost have to fight for every millimeter,” he says.
Mitchells fight is nearly over, but it will take years, if not decades, to fully understand the fossil he uncovers. Its skeleton, for example, remains mostly obscured in skin and armor. In some ways it’s almost too well preserved; reaching the dinosaur’s bones would require destroying its outer layers. CT scans funded by the National Geographic Society have revealed little, as the rock remains stubbornly opaque.
In May the Royal Tyrrell Museum unveils the nodosaur as the centerpiece of a new exhibit of fossils recovered from Alberta’s industrial sites. Now the public is marveling at what has wowed scientists for the past six years: an ambassador from Canada’s distant past, found in a moonscape by a man with an excavator.
The cache of Ancient coins and Jewelry From the time of Alexander the Great discovered
he explorers of the grotto in Israel discovered a small cache of coins and jewellery from the time of Alexander the Great that archaeologists believe was hidden by refugees during an ancient war.
coins jewellery from alexander the great era found in Israel
The 2,300-year-old cache of jewelry and two Alexander the Great coins.
Eitan Klein of the Israeli Antiquities Authority said that the 2300-year-old cache was the first of its kind to be discovered from the period of the conqueror.
The Israel Antiquities Authority said that, in Israel, ancient coins and jewelry from the time of Alexander the Great were found in a cave. In addition, several pieces of silver and bronze jewellery were found, including decorated earrings, bracelets, and rings, which were apparently concealed in the cave, inside a cloth pouch.
Silver coin of Alexander the Great, here depicted in the guise of the Greek hero Herakles wearing a lion-skin cloak, discovered in a cave in northern Israel.
“The valuables might have been hidden in the cave by local residents who fled there during the period of governmental unrest stemming from the death of Alexander, a time when the Wars of the Diadochi broke out in Israel between Alexander’s heirs,” Xinhua quoted the Israel Antiquities Authority as saying in a statement.
“Presumably the cache was hidden in the hope of better days, but today we know that whoever buried the treasure never returned to collect it,” the authority said.
Archaeologists with the authority believe this is one of the important discoveries to come to light in the north of the country in recent years.
The cache was discovered by chance, as three members of the Israeli Caving Club were touring the area, known as one of the largest and well-hidden stalactite caves in northern Israel.
They wandered and crawled between various parts of a stalactite cave for several hours, as a shinning object caught their eyes.
They reported the find to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which sent researchers that have examined the cave over the past two weeks.
The discovery comes a month after a hoard of at least 2,000 ancient gold coins was accidentally discovered by divers off the coast of Caesarea, north of Tel Aviv, in the largest gold trove ever discovered in Israel.
An 18th-century ship under the world trade center new york
In the midst of this tragic event and chaos, however, cleanups found something amazing in the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC), took place on 11 September 2001.
Archaeologists found the remains of a big boat’s hull underneath the ruins of the Twin Towers in 2010. Now, scientists have revealed the secrets behind this mysterious vessel.
Underneath the excavation site, the ship was found in the wreckage, some 22 feet (6.7 m) underneath the ground. By gathering samples and testing the wood from the hull of the ship, scientists were able to determine that the hull came from the same era as the Declaration of Independence, in the late 1700s.
Scientists at Columbia’s Tree Ring Lab, who were led by Dr. Martin-Benito, made this determination after comparing the wood’s ring patterns, which were found on the timber of the hull, with those found in the historical record.
The researchers used dendrochronological dating and provenancing to uncover the date of the ships’ production. More specifically, it seems that the ship was built in a Philadelphia shipyard around 1773.
Image of the Hull in the wreckage.
It also seems that the oak timbers that were used to build the ship all originated from the same general region in Philadelphia. Since the timber all comes from the same vicinity, it is likely that the ship was produced by a small shipyard.
Most notably, the researchers found that the rings on the hull match other samples that were taken from Independence Hall, which is the building where the founding fathers signed both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. In the abstract, the authors of the findings report:
After developing a 280-year long floating chronology from 19 samples of the white oak group (Quercus section Leucobalanus), we used 21 oak chronologies from the eastern United States to evaluate absolute dating and provenance.
Our results showed the highest agreement between the WTC ship chronology and two chronologies from Philadelphia (r = 0.36; t = 6.4; p < 0.001; n = 280) and eastern Pennsylvania (r = 0.35; t = 6.3; p < 0.001; n = 280). The last ring dates of the seven best-preserved samples suggest trees for the ship were felled in 1773 CE or soon after.
This finding is notable, as very few ships have been discovered from the latter decades of the 18th Century, and there is very little historical documentation related to how the ships that were produced during this year were constructed.
Consequently, this ship offers us important insights into the history of American shipbuilding.
So, how did the ship get beneath the WTC? It’s actually not as strange as you might think. When Manhattan (where the WTC was located) was first settled, the site lay within the Hudson River.
To clarify, in the 18th century, the current location of the WTC would have been underwater—beneath the Hudson.
Maps and other archival documents clearly detail this data. Obviously, as the settlement became more populated, commercial waterfront space became increasingly desirable and (consequentially) more and more scarce.
As a result, from the mid-1700s until the mid-1800s, the area along the river was increasingly filled in to advance the Manhattan coastline farther into the Hudson.
Historians still aren’t certain whether or not the ship sank accidentally, because of some unintentional mishap, or if it was purposely submerged.
Oftentimes, city planners would use garbage and other debris (like an old ship) to build the foundations of new ground in Manhattan. Essentially, we would make landfills along the Hudson in order to create a buildup that would, ultimately, increase Manhattan’s coastline.
Oysters were also found fixed to the ship’s hull, which suggests that the ship languished in the waters of the Hudson for quite some time before being buried by layers of trash and dirt that (eventually) formed the land upon which the Twin Towers rested.
It is a little ironic that the World Trade Center attack—the historic moment that reshaped much of America’s future—also opened up a door into America’s past.
Over 6000 ancient tombs discovered by archaeologists in China
CHENGDU, May 14 (Xinhua) — More than 6,000 ancient tombs dating back between the Warring States Period (475 B.C.-221 B.C.) and the Ming Dynasty (1368―1644）have been discovered in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, local archaeological authorities said Thursday.
In China, archaeologists have found thousands of burials on a cliff. The burial ground was in use for over 2000 years. Many important historical artifacts have been uncovered in the tombs.
These graves could allow experts to trace the evolution of Chinese burial customs and indeed offer priceless insights into the culture’s religious beliefs over many centuries.
These tombs were found in the provincial capital of Sichuan, Chengdu, which is in the south-west of the People’s Republic.
The discoveries were made inside the Chuanxin Innovative Science and Technology Park during construction work in 2015.
Archaeologists from Chengdu Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute, led by Zuo Zhiqiang, carried out a dig at the site and identified a large number of burials. Ecns.cn reports that the tombs cover an ‘area of 10.34 square meters’ (111 sq. ft.) The burials are cut into the face and on the top of a cliff.
The tombs have been cut into the red earth of the cliff. Heritage Daily reports that they are mostly ‘rock pit tombs or constructed from brick’. Some of the tombs have to be supported with wood so they do not collapse. So far, archaeologists have uncovered 6000 burial spaces of different sizes.
This burial site dates from the Warring States period (475 BC), the period before the unification of China to the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912 AD), the last Chinese dynasty.
The discovery can provide an insight into the history and burial customs of Sichuan. This region played a very important part in Chinese history and it was often the base for rebellious generals and independent empires, such as the Shu dynasty.
6000 tombs have been discovered cut into the cliffs.
The archaeologists discovered many artifacts that can provide them with clues to ancient Chinese burial customs. For example, they uncovered terracotta pottery and figurines. Ceramic figures of humans and also animals, such as ducks, were unearthed.
According to Heritage Daily, the excavators also uncovered ‘pieces of pottery, porcelain, copper, iron, glass, coins and stone artifacts’. Among the rarer finds are a bronze knife, statues of the Buddha, and some painted miniature ceramic houses and buildings.
Artifacts such as figurines can provide more insight into ancient Chinese burial customs
Xinhua. Net reports that in ancient China ‘people had the tradition of giving the deceased luxurious burials’. It seemed that the deceased family placed the grave goods in the tombs so that they could use them in the afterlife.
In Chinese burial customs, lavish offerings have been a sign of social status. This practice has taken place since the imperial period and continues today.
One of the rich burials found at the cliff site.
What is unique about the burial site is that all of the graves were left intact and were undisturbed for centuries. Xinhua reports that burials ‘of that period were typically robbed by modern-day tomb raiders.’ What is more, the grave goods were still in their original positions and this can help the researchers to better understand the evolution of Chinese funerary customs.
One particularly important find was from the late or Eastern Han (25-220 AD) period or after, which has been called the M94 Cliff Tomb. Here researchers have found 86 burial goods and hundreds of coins from the period.
The tomb clearly belonged to a person of high social rank. Zuo Zhiqiang told Heritage Daily, “The tomb will help us to construct the archaeological cultural sequence and the funeral behaviors, rituals, and concepts of the Shudiya tombs in the late Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period .”
Aerial view of the M94 cliff tomb, including skeletons and grave goods.
Work is ongoing at the tomb cliffs and it is hoped that more treasures will be found at the site to reveal even more secrets of ancient Chinese burial customs. More findings from the research will be announced in the near future. The site at Chengdu can help us comprehend the worldview and funerary beliefs of people over an incredibly long period of time.
Underwater robot finds shipwreck with treasure worth up to $17B
Researchers have released new details about the discovery of a centuries-old shipwreck holding up to $17 billion worth of sunken treasure off the coast of Colombia. Just don’t ask them to mark the spot with an “X” on any map.
The Spanish galleon San Jose, often called the “Holy Grail of shipwrecks,” was found off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia in November 2015, using a specialized robot, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said.
WHOI scientists worked with the Colombian government and the Maritime Archeology Consultants group to find the wreck, although it took them some time to confirm that it was actually the San Jose.
MAC allowed the WHOI researchers to announce their role in the project this week, although Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos previously tweeted about the shipwreck discovery in 2015.
The famed 64-gun, the three-mast vessel was sunk by a British ship in 1708, sending it to the bottom of the ocean with its cargo hold loaded full of gold, silver, and emeralds.
Its location has long been a mystery and subject of fascination, but in the end, it was a submersible robot – not a treasure-hunter – that found it.
Researchers first detected the ship on sonar and used a remote submersible, dubbed the REMUS 6000, to investigate it further.
The REMUS 6000 captured a slew of images showing the San Jose to be mostly buried in sediment, at a spot some 600 meters below the surface.
Researchers say they knew it was the San Jose when they saw photos of its distinctive bronze cannons, which are engraved with dolphin designs.
“With the camera images from the lower altitude missions, we were able to see new details in the wreckage and the resolution was good enough to make out the decorative carving on the cannons,” expedition leader Mike Purcell, a WHOI engineer, said in a news release. “MAC’s lead archaeologist, Roger Dooley, interpreted the images and confirmed that San Jose had finally been found.”
Bronze cannons discovered the Remus 6000 at the bottom Caribbean Sea
The exact location of the wreck remains a Colombian state secret.
Colombia says it will set up a museum to display artifacts from the wreck. However, don’t expect to see a pile of sunken treasure in that museum anytime soon.
The fate of San Jose’s treasure remains unclear, as there have been several lawsuits in recent decades over who has a claim to it.
Every piece of that treasure will remain on the seafloor, at least until the legal battle is won.
Hillfort revealed to be the largest Pictish site ever discovered in Scotland
The fort, overlooking the small village of Rhynie, is believed to be one of the largest ancient settlements ever discovered in Scotland.
Researchers think that as many as 4,000 people may have lived in more than 800 huts on the Tap O’Noth in the fifth to sixth centuries.
However, the settlement may date back as far as the third century, which would make it Pictish in origin.
Researchers excavating around a construction at the Tap o’ Noth site.
The Aberdeenshire settlement may, in fact, date back as far as the third century, meaning it is likely to be Pictish in origin.
The Picts were a collection of Celtic-speaking communities who lived in the east and north of Scotland during the Late British Iron Age and Early Medieval periods.
The “Craw Stane”, a Pictish symbol stone depicting a salmon and an unknown animal, with Tap o’ Noth in background.
It was previously thought that settlements of that size did not appear until about the 12th century.
At its height, it may have rivalled the largest known post-Roman settlements in Europe.
Archaeologists from the University of Aberdeen used radiocarbon dating to establish timeframes.
Judging by the distribution of the buildings, they are likely to have been built and occupied at a similar time.
Many are positioned alongside trackways or clustered together in groups, the University of Aberdeen said.
Drone surveys showed one hut that was notably larger, suggesting a hierarchy.
The site is near Rhynie in Aberdeenshire
Professor Gordon Noble, who led the research, said the discovery was “truly mind-blowing”, adding that it “shakes the narrative of this whole time period”.
He continued: “The size of the upper and lower forts together are around 16.75 hectares and one phase at least dates from the fifth to sixth centuries AD.
“This makes it bigger than anything we know from early medieval Britain.
“The previous biggest known fort in early medieval Scotland is Burghead at around five and a half hectares, and in England, famous post-Roman sites such as Cadbury Castle is seven hectares and Tintagel around five hectares.”
He said the site was “verging on urban in scale and in a Pictish context we have nothing else that compares to this”.
The Mystery Of Cahokia Mounds, North America’s First City
Long before Christopher Columbus “discovered” North America, the mounds of Cahokia stood tall and formed the continent’s first city in recorded history.
In fact, during its height in the 12th century, Cahokia Mounds was larger in population than London. It spread across six square miles and boasted a population of 10,000 to 20,000 people — vast figures for the time.
But Cahokia’s peak didn’t last long. And its demise remains mysterious to this day.
An illustrated aerial view of Cahokia.
The region has been occupied for the first time around 1200 BC in the late Archaic period but the first inhabitants in the area are thought to have arrived in the late woodland period around AD 600–700.
It is founded around AD 1050 in what is now western Illinois by archaeological evidence.
Cahokia at its peak was the largest urban center north of Central America’s Mesoamerican civilization with a population of 20,000 inhabitants, although the extent of the population at its highest is still disputed.
Monks Mound, the largest manmade pre-Columbian earthen mound in North America.
The city covered an area between six to nine square miles, notably larger than many contemporary European cities such as London, which during the same period was just 1.12 square miles.
The inhabitants constructed 120 earthen mounds, ranging in size and shape from raised platforms, conical, and ridge-top designs that involved moving 55 million cubic feet of earth over a period several decades.
They constructed ceremonial plazas, situated around the mounds that were interconnected with pathways, courtyards and thousands of dwellings made from wattle and daub, with outlying farming villages that supported the main urban centre.
The largest structure at Cahokia is “Monks Mound” (named after a community of Trappist monks who settled on the mound) which is a 290-metre-tall platform with four terraces that was built around AD 900–955.
An 1882 illustration of Monks Mound
The perimeter of the base of Monks Mound measures similar in size to the Great Pyramid of Giza and is notably larger than the base of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.
Surrounding the main precinct was a defensive wooden palisade measuring 2 miles in length with watchtowers, that was built around the year AD 1200.
Although there is no archaeological evidence of conflict, some theories suggest that the defences were built for ritual or societal separation rather than for military purposes.
Cahokia began to decline by the 13th century and was mysteriously abandoned around AD 1300-1350.
Scholars have suggested that environmental factors such as flooding, or deforestation led to an exhaustion of natural resources.
In 1982, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) designated the site a World Heritage Site.
