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Newly Discovered: Animal Fossils

Not newly discovered [early 90s] but interesting nonetheless: Bone Stories - 15min iplayer prog about the largest Mammoth skeleton ever discovered in UK, West Runton, Norfolk

Some details:

Dated around 700,00 years old

Estimated to stand 4m tall

Tusks were 9ft long

In it's prime at 40 years old

Had a bad knee injury which probably played a part in it's demise

Scavenged by hyenas
 
Palaeontologists in China have discovered a fossilized sea creature that they describe as "strange beyond measure", with long spines along its worm-like body and a shell that covers its head, like a helmet.


An artist's impression of Orthrozanclus elongata [Credit: Zhao, F. et al. Scientific Reports. 2017]
The 515-million-year-old specimen was unearthed last year by a fossil collector in the hills of the Maotianshan Shales, a palaeontological hotspot in Southwest China's Yunnan province.

The collector gave the fossil to Zhao Fangchen, a palaeobiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who studied it, along with researchers from Durham University in the United Kingdom.

"The creature is like a mythical beast," Martin Smith, an assistant professor at Durham, told science news website Live Science.

Read more at https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blog...measure-sea-creature.html#spy98vr840bH26SY.99
 
Fossil hunters find bones of human-sized penguin on New Zealand beach
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The remnants of an ancient penguin that stood as tall as a human have been found encased in rock on a beach in New Zealand.

Fossil hunters chanced upon the prehistoric bones in sedimentary rock that formed 55m to 60m years ago on what is now Hampden beach in Otago in the country’s South Island.

Measurements of the partial skeleton show that the flightless bird weighed about 100kg and had a body length of 1.77 metres (5ft 10in), equal to the average height of an American man. Emperor penguins, the tallest penguin species alive today, reach only 1.2 metres when fully grown.
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https://amp.theguardian.com/science...=Share_iOSApp_Other&__twitter_impression=true
 
ramonmercado said:
... More than 100 new species have been discovered in the ecologically diverse region of the Mekong river ...
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So why is this posted in a thread about fossils? :dunno:
 
New starfish species.

A 435-million-year-old fossil discovered in Connemara by an Irish geologist has been confirmed as a new species and the oldest of its type in Ireland.

The thumbnail-sized ophiuroid, or brittlestar, has also been named after the man who found it, Dr Eamon Doyle, in a rare honour for an Irish scientist.

The newly analysed brittlestar, a type of marine animal closely related to the starfish, is a species with super survival powers, Dr Doyle noted. Its relatives lived with little change through continents colliding, oceans opening and closing, and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The specimen that he found in the Maam Valley scavenged for a living at a time when Ireland was farther south and split over two continents separated by the Iapetus Ocean, which predated the Atlantic.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ire...rittlestar-confirmed-as-new-species-1.3361416
 
Filling in the saber-tooth gaps.

'Monstrous' new Russian saber-tooth fossils clarify early evolution of mammal lineage

Fossils representing two new species of saber-toothed prehistoric predators have been described by researchers from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (Raleigh, USA) and the Vyatka Paleontological Museum (Kirov, Russia). These new species improve the scientists' understanding of an important interval in the early evolution of mammals—a time, between mass extinctions, when the roles of certain carnivores changed drastically.

Living mammals are descended from a group of animals called therapsids, a diverse assemblage of "protomammals" that dominated terrestrial ecosystems in the Permian Period (~299-252 million years ago), millions of years before the earliest dinosaurs. These protomammals included tusked herbivores, burrowing insectivores, and saber-toothed predators. The vast majority of Permian therapsids have been found in the Karoo Basin of South Africa, and as a result, the South African record has played an outsized role influencing scientists' understanding of protomammal evolution. Because of this, therapsid fossils from outside of South Africa are extremely important, allowing scientists to discern whether observed events in the protomammal fossil record represent global or merely regional patterns.



Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-monstrous-russian-saber-tooth-fossils-early.html#jCp
 
A 99 million year old baby snake has been discovered preserved in amber in Myanmar

asnake.jpg


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44872148
 
OK, not a fossil, but a creature that is 40,000 years old has been brought back to life (reminds me of 'The Thing'):
https://gizmodo.com/russian-scientists-claim-to-have-resurrected-40-000-yea-1827923906

Russian Scientists Claim to Have Resurrected 40,000-Year-Old Worms Buried in Ice
A team of Russian scientists is lining themselves up to be the opening cast of a John Carpenter film. Earlier this month, in the journal Doklady Biological Sciences, they announced they had apparently discovered ancient nematode worms that were able to resurrect themselves after spending at least 32,000 years buried in permafrost. The discovery, if legitimate, would represent the longest-surviving return from the cold ever seen in a complex, multi-celled organism, dwarfing even the tardigrade.

The worms were found among more than 300 samples of frozen soil pulled from the Kolyma River Lowlands in Northeastern Siberia by the researchers. Two of the samples held the worms, with one from a buried squirrel burrow dating back 32,000 years and one from a glacier dating back 40,000 years.
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Rest of article at link.
 
Ahh, I loved that X-Files episode.
 
New Sauropod species found in Argentina

The area in which the fossils were found is unusual for dinosaurs as it would have been a desert with sporadic lakes in that era.

The remains came from three separate dinosaurs from the herbivorous group of sauropods, the best known of which are the Diplodocus and Brontosaurus. This new species has been named Lavocatisaurus agrioensis.

“We found most of the cranial bones: the snout, the jaws, a lot of teeth, also the bones that define the eye sockets for example and, in that way, we were able to create an almost complete reconstruction,” said Jose Luis Carballido, a researcher at the Egidio Feruglio museum and the national council of scientific investigations.

The remains belonged to an adult about 12 metres long, and two young of six to seven metres which lived around 110 million years ago.
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hunck said:
New Sauropod species found in Argentina

The area in which the fossils were found is unusual for dinosaurs as it would have been a desert with sporadic lakes in that era.
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However it doesn't really surprise me. Reptiles have some excellent survival strategies. Deserts are strong holds for lizards, snakes and tortoises. Sauropods were reptilian in nature unlike many of the theropods.
 
Something funny in the link - doesn't open for me.
 
Jim said:
Makes sense since during the Devonian to Carboniferous periods giant arthropods and invertebrates of numerous kinds existed. An earthworm "Gippsland earthworm" still grows to > 3 meters in present day Australia.
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Do you share a name?
 
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The sea urchin had an interesting history.

An amateur paleontologist has discovered a rare 66-million-year-old sea urchin on a beach in Denmark.

Peter Bennicke stumbled across the ancient creature while on a fossil hunt at white cliffs of Stevns Klint on the Island of Møn, a UNESCO World Heritage site, according to the Danish TV2 public broadcaster. He knew straight away that he had found something unique - not only because of its large size, but also because it contained clues as to what had happened to it.

"I could see it was a pretty large sea urchin, so I took it home to look at it more closely. That's when I saw that it had been bitten," Mr Bennicke said.

Judging by the teeth marks situated right on top of the fossil, the sea urchin survived an attack by a predator that came from above. One speculation is that the scars could have been caused by the jaws of the marine predator Mosasaurus. Mr Bennicke described it as his "best-ever find". "This happened 66 million years ago, and to think that I'm just standing here with it in my hand, visualising the drama that took place so far back," he said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-46513790
 
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