Posts

bees

Queen Honeybees Raised in ‘Buckingham Palace’-Style Royal Courts, Scientists Find

/in /by

For decades, scientists believed that queen honeybees owed their status largely to diet. Feed an ordinary female larva a steady supply of nutrient-rich royal jelly, the thinking went, and a queen would emerge. New research suggests the process is far more elaborate.

Read more
dinosaur

New Dinosaur Species Discovered in Thailand Is Largest Ever Found in Southeast Asia

/in /by

A gigantic new dinosaur species discovered in Thailand is giving paleontologists a clearer picture of prehistoric life in Southeast Asia and setting a new regional size record in the process.

Scientists have identified the dinosaur as Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis, an enormous long-necked herbivore that roamed the region roughly 100 million to 120 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous period. According to researchers, the dinosaur measured nearly 89 feet long and weighed an estimated 27 metric tons, making it the largest dinosaur ever found in Southeast Asia.

The findings were published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports by a team from Thailand and the United Kingdom.

The species belonged to the sauropods, a group of massive plant-eating dinosaurs recognized for their towering necks, heavy bodies and pillar-like limbs. Famous members of the group include Brontosaurus and Diplodocus, both among the largest land animals known to have existed.

“One of the many features that we’re kind of excited about is the size of this dinosaur,” lead author Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul, a paleontologist and Ph.D. student at University College London, told NPR.

While enormous, Sethapanichsakul said the species falls within the “upper middle” range of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, offering researchers insight into a key moment in sauropod evolution before truly colossal species emerged later in the Cretaceous period.

“It gives us an understanding of the potential kind of evolutionary trends that are beginning to occur” around this time, he said.

Embed from Getty Images

Researchers have identified even larger sauropods from later Cretaceous periods, including some estimated to weigh as much as 70 tons.

“In the Middle Cretaceous, we find dinosaurs in China, South America and probably Africa that are super giants. They are the biggest of the biggest. The new discovery essentially represents that kind of on-ramp towards that kind of supersizing.”

One fossil immediately stood out: a humerus, or upper arm bone, measuring nearly six feet long.

“When I first laid eyes on the humerus, it was taller than me, and that was quite surprising,” Sethapanichsakul told CNN. The paleontologist added that fossils of such scale are extremely uncommon in Thailand.

The dinosaur’s remains were first uncovered after a local resident spotted bones near a communal pond in northeastern Thailand during a 2016 drought, when lower water levels exposed the fossils. Excavations continued over several years, with teams conducting fieldwork from 2016 to 2019 before returning in 2024 for additional digs.

Recovered fossils included portions of the spine, ribs, pelvis and limb bones. Scientists later created 3D scans of the remains and determined the animal represented a previously unknown species.

Its name draws from both mythology and geography. “Naga” refers to serpent-like beings in South and Southeast Asian folklore, while “Titan” nods to the gigantic figures of Greek mythology.

Embed from Getty Images

“The Nagas are also often associated with water, and considering the dinosaur was found on the side of a communal pond, it just seemed very apt to have a serpent giant be the name.”

The final part of the species name honors Chaiyaphum province, where the fossils were discovered.

For Sethapanichsakul, who is originally from Thailand, the discovery also carried personal significance.

“It fulfills a kind of childhood promise. That, yeah, I’m going to name a dinosaur one day. And I want it to be from Thailand.”

Researchers believe Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis lived in a hot, relatively arid landscape crisscrossed by river systems. The environment would have supported a wide variety of ancient wildlife, including crocodiles, turtles, freshwater sharks and fish.

The dinosaur also likely shared its habitat with smaller herbivorous dinosaurs related to Iguanodon as well as “a kind of very early form of what we would call Ceratopsians, cousins of Triceratops,” Sethapanichsakul said.

He added that Thailand may hold one of the richest dinosaur fossil records in Asia because of its extensive layers of exposed Mesozoic Era sedimentary rock, dating to around 252 million to 66 million years ago.

“These rocks are exposed to less rain and vegetation, which could end up eroding or destroying those bones,” he said.

The discovery site now hosts a research center dedicated to further paleontological work, and scientists continue to study sauropods across Southeast Asia.

A life-sized reconstruction of the dinosaur is currently displayed at the Thainosaur Museum in Bangkok.

James Webb Space Telescope

James Webb Space Telescope Finds Lemon-Shaped Exoplanet That Defies Planet Formation Models

/in /by

Astronomers studying data from the James Webb Space Telescope have identified one of the strangest exoplanets ever observed, an object so extreme that it’s forcing scientists to rethink how planets can form at all.

Known as PSR J2322-2650b, the exoplanet has roughly the mass of Jupiter but lives an impossibly fast and hostile life. It completes a full orbit around its star in just 7.8 Earth hours, skimming past at a distance of only one million miles or about 1 percent of the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

At that range, the planet is locked in a brutal gravitational tug-of-war that physically deforms it, stretching it into a long, oblong shape resembling a lemon, with an equatorial diameter 38 percent wider than its polar diameter. Earth, by comparison, is around 0.3 percent wider than from pole to pole.

“It’s the stretchiest planet that we’ve confirmed the stretchiness of,” lead author Michael Zhang, an exoplanet scientist at the University of Chicago, told The New York Times.

“This was an absolute surprise,” said co-author Peter Gao of the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington.

“I remember after we got the data down, our collective reaction was ‘What the heck is this?’ It’s extremely different from what we expected.”

The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggests the object may not even fit comfortably into existing categories of planets or stars. That’s because PSR J2322-2650b doesn’t orbit a normal sun, but a pulsar, one of the most extreme objects in the universe.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars, the ultra-dense remnants left behind after massive stars explode as supernovae. They pack the mass of the Sun into a sphere roughly the size of a city, producing gravity so intense that a teaspoon of neutron-star material would weigh trillions of pounds. As these stars spin, they emit narrow beams of radiation that sweep across space.

Embed from Getty Images

Crucially, this pulsar emits most of its energy in gamma rays, making it effectively invisible to Webb’s infrared instruments. That turns a typical exoplanet problem on its head. Instead of being drowned out by starlight, the planet can be studied almost in isolation, said Maya Beleznay, a physicist at Stanford University, in a NASA statement.

“This system is unique because we are able to view the planet illuminated by its host star, but not see the host star at all. So we get a really pristine spectrum. And we can study this system in more detail than normal exoplanets.”

What that spectrum revealed only deepened the mystery. The planet’s surface temperature reaches 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit, about four times hotter than Venus, the hottest planet in our solar system. Under those conditions, its atmosphere is dominated almost entirely by helium and carbon, while lacking hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, an unprecedented combination for a planet.

Carbon usually bonds readily with elements like oxygen and nitrogen, which are common in planetary atmospheres, especially in gas giants. Their absence suggests something profoundly unusual about how this object formed.

The planet’s bizarre chemistry may also drive alien weather patterns. Researchers speculate that clouds of carbon soot or graphite drift through the atmosphere, and deeper inside the planet, these clouds may compress into solid diamond fragments.

Virtually every aspect of PSR J2322-2650b defies expectations. Only a handful of pulsars are known to host planets at all, and none like this, one that’s visibly stretched, chemically anomalous, and orbiting so close it’s being pulled apart.

One explanation is that the system is a variation of a “black widow binary,” a configuration in which a pulsar slowly strips material from a smaller companion until it’s nearly destroyed. However, black widow systems have only been observed between pulsars and other stars, not planets.

Embed from Getty Images

That opens the possibility that PSR J2322-2650b isn’t truly a planet at all, but the remains of something much larger.

“It would have lost 99.9 percent of its mass, and we just happened to catch it right at the very end,” said Gao.

“I hope we have a sibling to compare this object to. If it’s continuously losing mass, we had to be really lucky to see it in its last breath before it disappears.”

Still, even that scenario raises problems. The planet’s extreme carbon abundance doesn’t align neatly with known stellar processes, leaving researchers with more questions than answers.

The most tantalizing option, Zhang suggests, is that astronomers are seeing something entirely unprecedented. “We’re witnessing an ‘entirely new type of object that we don’t have a name for,'” Zhang said.

“Did this thing form like a normal planet? No, because the composition is entirely different. Did it form by stripping the outside of a star, like ‘normal’ black widow systems are formed? Probably not, because nuclear physics does not make pure carbon. It’s very hard to imagine how you get this extremely carbon-enriched composition. It seems to rule out every known formation mechanism.”

Co-author Roger Romani, of Stanford University and the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, looks forward to further studying the phenomenon.

“As the companion cools down, the mixture of carbon and oxygen in the interior starts to crystallize. Pure carbon crystals float to the top and get mixed into the helium, and that’s what we see. But then something has to happen to keep the oxygen and nitrogen away. And that’s where the mystery comes in. But it’s nice to not know everything. I’m looking forward to learning more about the weirdness of this atmosphere. It’s great to have a puzzle to go after.”

For now, PSR J2322-2650b remains a cosmic riddle of a lemon-shaped, diamond-clouded anomaly orbiting one of the universe’s most violent stars.

 

stem cell

Researchers Discover Technique to Revive Energy Production in Aging Cells

/in /by

Scientists may be one step closer to tackling one of biology’s biggest challenges: how to revive the energy systems inside aging human cells.

A new study from Texas A&M University, published in PNAS, reports that researchers have managed to boost the internal “power supply” of human stem cells, allowing them to hand off fresh mitochondria to older, failing cells nearby.

Mitochondria, often described as the cell’s power stations, naturally decline with age. They slow down, shrink in number, or become damaged, contributing to a wide range of diseases that affect tissues requiring constant energy, including the heart and brain. The new research suggests it may be possible to replenish these energy sources without drugs or genetic engineering.

The technique hinges on an unusual tool—tiny, flower-shaped nanoparticles made of molybdenum disulfide. Known as “nanoflowers,” these structures were engineered with microscopic pores that enable them to absorb excess reactive oxygen species or chemically aggressive molecules that build up over time and place immense stress on cells.

When these molecules were removed, the stem cells began activating genes linked to mitochondrial biogenesis, producing far more mitochondria than usual.

Embed from Getty Images

“We have trained healthy cells to share their spare batteries with weaker ones,” said biomedical engineer Akhilesh Gaharwar, one of the study’s senior authors.

“By increasing the number of mitochondria inside donor cells, we can help aging or damaged cells regain their vitality—without any genetic modification or drugs.”

Stem cells already have a natural ability to transfer mitochondria to cells in distress, but the researchers found that the nanoflower treatment dramatically amplified this ability. In laboratory tests, treated stem cells shared roughly twice as many mitochondria as they normally would.

The receiving cells responded dramatically. Smooth muscle cells, including those found in the heart, expanded three- to four-fold after the mitochondrial handoff. Heart cells exposed to chemotherapy, treatments known to damage cellular energy systems, experienced significantly higher survival rates after receiving mitochondria from the boosted stem cells.

The researchers believe the approach could be adapted to treat a wide range of conditions rooted in cellular energy decline. They envision targeted injections near the heart for cardiovascular disorders or direct application into weak or degenerating muscles.

Embed from Getty Images

“It’s pretty promising in terms of being able to be used for a whole wide variety of cases, and this is just kind of the start,” said geneticist John Soukar, who worked on the project.

“We could work on this forever and find new things and new disease treatments every day.”

For now, the work remains firmly at the proof-of-concept stage. The experiments were conducted in controlled laboratory conditions using human stem cells, and the team acknowledges that the next steps, like testing the approach in animals and eventually in humans, will determine whether the strategy can translate into real therapies.

“This is an early but exciting step toward recharging aging tissues using their own biological machinery,” Gaharwar said. “If we can safely boost this natural power-sharing system, it could one day help slow or even reverse some effects of cellular aging.”

Future studies will also need to establish where in the body the mitochondria-rich stem cells should be placed, how large a dose is both safe and effective, and whether there are any long-term consequences to amplifying the natural mitochondrial-sharing process.

dinosaur

Scientists Discover Two Dinosaur ‘Mummies’ That Capture Every Scale and Spike

/in /by

Long before Wyoming was cattle country, it was a land of monsters and mud. Sixty-six million years ago, rivers wound through a humid coastal valley where herds of the gentle, duck-billed plant eaters, Edmontosaurus, trudged along the floodplains. Some of them, through a bizarre twist of biology and luck, never fully disappeared.

In a study published Thursday in “Science,” paleontologist Paul Sereno and his colleagues describe two of these remarkably preserved creatures, their skin, spikes, and even hooves immortalized in stone. “For the first time, I think that we’ve got Edmontosaurus’s look completely down,” said Sereno, who teaches at the University of Chicago.

“Based on our drawings, you can put it in a Hollywood movie, and it’s going to be accurate head to toe.”

Sereno’s team stumbled across the fossils back in 2001 while exploring eastern Wyoming’s sandstone ridges, which date back to the late Cretaceous period, with a group of students. At first, they thought they had found ordinary skeletons. One belonged to a young dinosaur, the other to the back half of an older one. Only after months of painstaking cleanup in Sereno’s lab did the team realize what they had: two dinosaur mummies.

The smaller specimen, Ed Jr., bore a faint fleshy crest running along its back, coated in tiny, beadlike scales. The larger one, Ed Sr., had wrinkled skin, wedge-shaped hooves instead of claws, and a spiny tail.

Embed from Getty Images

Sereno later learned that these new mummies had been unearthed in the same patch of land where fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg had made headlines more than a century earlier. In 1908, Sternberg discovered a skin-covered Edmontosaurus near the same site. When it was unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History, The New York Times raved that it was “not only a skeleton, but a genuine mummy.” Sternberg soon found another and shipped it to Germany. All four fossils, separated by time and ocean, came from what Sereno’s team now calls the “mummy zone.”

To understand how the dinosaurs avoided decay, Sereno’s team turned to CT scanning and electron microscopy. The results upended expectations. No remnants of skin or tissue survived. The animals had, in fact, decomposed before burial.

So how did the fine details of their bodies — every wrinkle and scale — remain? The researchers believe microbes were the secret undertakers. After the carcasses dried out on the floodplain, bacteria formed a biofilm that left behind a thin clay shell, sealing in the dinosaurs’ final forms.

“When you rub clay on your face, it goes into every pore. When you touch these fossils and then look at your fingers, you still see traces of clay.”

This microbial “spa treatment” preserved the animals in exquisite detail. Sereno noted that such preservation usually occurs in calm seas, not in the chaotic floods that swept ancient Wyoming.

Embed from Getty Images

For other scientists, the find offers a glimpse into one of paleontology’s strangest miracles—the making of a dinosaur mummy.

Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, a paleontologist at the University of Tennessee who was not involved in the study, told The New York Times that the findings present an intriguing new way to mummify a dinosaur.

Drumheller-Horton, who has studied a half-eaten Edmontosaurus mummy in North Dakota, said the latest discovery suggests there’s more than one recipe for this kind of fascinating preservation.

“Understanding what conditions you need to get a mummy in the first place can help paleontologists target where we’re looking. There’s so few mummies out there, and every single one is this amazing treasure trove of information.”

Back when Sternberg’s first find hit the news in 1909, it seemed almost mythical—a dinosaur that looked as if it might still twitch. Now, with modern tools and microbial insight, Sereno’s team has shown that the magic had a method.

In the quiet clay of Wyoming’s badlands, the ghosts of Edmontosaurus endure, not through miracles, but through the steady work of bacteria, floods, and time itself.

earth

Scientists Discover New Layer Under Earth’s Crust

/in , /by

Researchers from Australian National University have found evidence of a hidden layer inside Earth’s inner core. The scientists found the layer, an iron-nickel alloy ball around 800 miles (1350 km) wide, by studying the reverberations of seismic waves from large earthquakes through the Earth.

When seismic waves travel through the Earth, they change shape and provide insight into Earth’s internal structure. Previous studies had only looked at single bounces of seismic waves (from one side of the Earth to the other and back).

In this new study, scientists accessed data from waves of 200 earthquakes with magnitudes above 6.0, traveling up to five times across the Earth’s diameter.

“In this study, for the first time, we report observations of seismic waves originating from powerful earthquakes traveling back and forth from one side of the globe to the other up to five times like a ricochet,” study co-author Dr. Thanh-Son Phạm, a seismologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University told CNN in an email.

The earthquake waves penetrated different depths and angles near the center, suggesting a different crystalline structure was nestled beneath the surface. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Earth’s internal structure has four known layers—an outer crust, a rocky mantle, an outer core made of molten-liquid magma and a solid inner metal core. In the 1930s, scientists used the same seismic wave analysis method to discover the Earth’s metallic inner core.

Embed from Getty Images

In 2002, researchers hypothesized that the Earth’s inner core concealed another unknown layer. Thanks to the improved accuracy of seismic monitoring, scientists can now verify this hypothesis.

Lead author of the study and observational seismologist Thanh-Son Pham of ANU, told Reuters, “We may know more about the surface of other distant celestial bodies than the deep interior of our planet.”

“We analyzed digital records of ground motion, known as seismograms, from large earthquakes in the last decade. Our study becomes possible thanks to the unprecedented expansion of the global seismic networks, particularly the dense networks in the contiguous U.S., the Alaskan peninsula and over the European Alps.”

Both the inner core’s outer shell and the sphere within it are hot enough to be molten. However, the high pressures found at the Earth’s center render them solid.

Australian National University geophysicist and study co-author Hrvoje Tkalčić told Reuters, “I like to think about the inner core as a planet within the planet. Indeed, it is a solid ball, approximately the size of Pluto and a bit smaller than the moon.”

“If we were somehow able to dismantle the Earth by removing its mantle and the liquid outer core, the inner core would appear shining like a star. Its temperature is estimated to be about 5,500-6,000 degrees (Celsius/9,930-10,830 Fahrenheit), similar to the sun’s surface temperature.”

According to Pham, there does not seem to be a clear line that distinguishes the outer region of the inner core from the sphere nestled within. Instead, the transition is gradual. Scientists could tell the two regions apart because seismic waves behaved differently between them.

“It could be caused by different arrangements of iron atoms at high temperatures and pressures or the preferred alignment of growing crystals.”

Embed from Getty Images

As the Earth slowly cools, its inner core grows, while its outer core contracts as molten materials solidify.

The researchers told The Washington Post that the innermost core might hold clues to a “significant global event that occurred in the planet’s past,” allowing scientists to understand the evolution of Earth’s magnetic field by providing something akin to a fossilized record.

“The latent heat released from solidifying the Earth’s inner core drives the convection in the liquid outer core, generating Earth’s geomagnetic field. Life on Earth is protected from harmful cosmic rays and would not be possible without such a magnetic field.”

The discovery may also give “us a glimpse of what might have happened with other planets,” Pham said. “Take Mars as an example. We don’t understand yet why (Mars’ magnetic field) ceased to exist in the past.”

Mars is thought to be devoid of life because it lost its magnetic field some 4 billion years ago, leaving it vulnerable to the solar winds and dust storms that swept away the planet’s atmosphere and oceans.

einstein

Solving the Bohr-Einstein Issue of the Moving Hydrogen Atom | Dr. Young Suh Kim

/in , , , , /by

There is no more recognizable name in the history of science and physics than Albert Einstein. Ask any pedestrian on the street in any country, and chances are that they will have heard about the German scientist, often associating him with the title of “genius.” However, many people would be surprised to know that the scientist had somewhat of a tumultuous upbringing. 

Read more
wormhole

Physicists Create ‘Baby Wormhole’ Using Quantum Computer

/in , /by

Physicists announced on Wednesday that they had successfully simulated a pair of black holes and created a “theoretical” wormhole on a quantum computer. The researchers were able to transmit a message through the wormhole without affecting space or time, potentially paving the way for future studies of teleportation.

According to a study published in the journal “Nature,” scientists at the California Institute of Technology used the computer to virtually simulate what amounts to a tunnel connecting distant regions of the universe.

The achievement is a small step in understanding the relationship between gravity and quantum mechanics.

Dr. Maria Spiropulu, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, the leader of a consortium called Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics, and co-author of the report, described that the “holographic” tunnel has the elements of a “baby wormhole.” 

“This is important because what we have here in its construct and structure is a baby wormhole. And we hope that we can make adult wormholes and toddler wormholes step-by-step.”

Of course, scientists did not create a real-life wormhole, but physicists celebrated their work as a spectacular technical triumph. Dr. Spiropulu and her colleagues created the wormhole through an “emergent” two-dimensional space with “quantum fields on the edge of space-time determining what happens within.” 

Embed from Getty Images

The computer-generated cosmic tunnel was built by scientists on Google’s Sycamore quantum processor. Essentially, their system was small enough to be implemented on current hardware while retaining the key properties of a gravitational wormhole.

Experts like Dr. Spiropulu stressed that scientists are still a long way away from being able to teleport any living being through a time-travel portal.

“Experimentally, for me, I will tell you that it’s very, very far away. People come to me and they ask me, ‘Can you put your dog in the wormhole?’ So, no.”

The study’s co-author, Dr. Joseph Lykken, said, “These ideas have been around for a long time, and they’re very powerful ideas.”

“But in the end, we’re in experimental science, and we’ve been struggling now for a very long time to find a way to explore these ideas in the laboratory. And that’s what’s really exciting about this.”

Dr. Daniel Jafferis, a physics professor at Harvard, said that the “key question, which is perhaps hard to answer, is: Do we say from the simulation it’s a real black hole?”

“I kind of like the term ’emergent black hole.’ We are just using the quantum computer to find out what it would look and feel like if you were in this gravitational situation.”

M.I.T. physicist Dr. Daniel Harlow, who was not involved in the experiment, told the New York Times that the study’s foundation was an extremely simplistic and unrealistic model of quantum gravity.

“So I’d say that this doesn’t teach us anything about quantum gravity that we didn’t already know. On the other hand, I think it is exciting as a technical achievement, because if we can’t even do this, and until now we couldn’t, then simulating more interesting quantum gravity theories would certainly be off the table.” 

According to Dr. Harlow, developing computers capable of handling these simulations might take 10 or 15 years.

Dr. Leonard Susskind, a Stanford University physicist who was also not involved in the study, agreed with Dr. Harlow.

“They’re learning that they could do this experiment. The really interesting thing here is the possibility of analyzing purely quantum phenomena using general relativity, and who knows where that’s going to go.”

Embed from Getty Images

The concept of a wormhole was first born from physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1935. Einstein and a fellow physicist, Nathan Rosen, showed how shortcuts connecting black holes through space and time could theoretically exist. These bridges were later termed “wormholes” by physicist John Wheeler in 1957. 

The recent wormhole experiment used the mathematics of general relativity to investigate quantum teleportation in the hopes of illuminating some previously unknown facet of physics or gravity.

In quantum teleportation, researchers can use a set of quantum manipulations to convey a message between two entangled particles, whether separated by inches or miles, without the researchers knowing what the information is. The technique is seen as fundamental to the development of an unhackable “quantum internet” of the future.

In a Nature article accompanying the paper, Dr. Susskind and Dr. Adam Brown, a physicist at Stanford, said the results could help demystify aspects of quantum mechanics.  

“The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled.”

According to Dr. Lykken, the most straightforward explanation is that the message went through a “really short” wormhole. 

In quantum mechanics, the shortest conceivable length of a wormhole in nature is 10⁻³³ centimeters, which is also known as the Planck length. Dr. Lykken calculated that the wormhole in the study was no more than three Planck lengths long.

“It’s the smallest, crummiest wormhole you can imagine making. But that’s really cool because now we’re clearly doing quantum gravity.”

fossil

Scientists May Have Solved the Mystery of an Ancient ‘Alien Goldfish’

/in , /by

Scientists may have finally figured out where an ancient sea animal fits into the “tree of life.” The animal, known as Typhloesus wellsi, perplexed scientists for nearly 50 years, leading them to dub it the “alien goldfish.”

Typhloesus was just 90 mm long when it was alive. It had no fins other than a singular large tail fin. Bizarrely, it also had no backbone, anus, eyes or shell.

Scientists previously thought the creature was a conodont, a group of jawless vertebrates that resembled eels. Upon closer inspection, scientists realized that the Typhloesus fossil specimen actually showed the animal had the remains of a conodont inside its digestive tract, indicating the Typhloesus ate conodonts.

The recent discovery of a tooth-covered ribbon-like structure in the Typhloesus helped scientists figure out its possible taxonomic placement. Paleontologists believe they were most likely a marine mollusk and an ancient relative of gastropods like sea slugs.

Embed from Getty Images

Dr. Jean-Bernard Caron and Dr. Simon Conway Morris, paleontologists at the University of Cambridge, made the discovery after examining several Typhloesus fossil specimens taken from a 330-million-year-old fossil deposit in the Bear Gulch Limestone site in Montana, US.

Dr. Caron found the toothed tonguelike structure under a high-powered scanning microscope. The structure was similar to that of a radula, an anatomical structure snails and mollusks use to scrape food into their mouths.

The scientists believe the structure was likely attached to a retractable trunk. The alien goldfish would extend it whenever it was feeding, much like a lizard. The existence of the Typhloesus’ radula led scientists to deduce that the mysterious creature may be a mollusk.

Embed from Getty Images

Dr. Caron believes the creature was similar to a sea slug, which swims through water, sticking its radula through trunklike proboscis to hunt prey. Typhloesus also had a flexible body and large tail. They were likely good swimmers and did not move along the sea floor.

Professor Mark Purnell from the Center for Paleobiology at the University of Leicester in the UK suggests that scientists cannot definitively say “the very strange animal” is a mollusk.

“[The researchers] have found some tantalizing new information, but it is far from being a slam-dunk case in terms of definitely knowing what this weird thing is.”

Typhloesus fossils predate the rest of the swimming snail fossil record by over 100 million years. Dr. Christopher Whalen, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, said that since sea slugs lacked shells and other features commonly imprinted in fossils and quickly swam in the water, they are not as present in fossil records.

Understanding the Typhloesus will help paleontologists learn more about the evolution of mollusks, the planet’s second largest group of invertebrates.

According to Dr. Caron, studying the strangest creatures often unearths the most valuable discoveries.

 “They are enigmatic, but they reveal a lot of important evolutionary information.”

Scientists Discover Tiny Fossil Found In 16-Million-Year-Old Amber, ‘A Once-In-A-Generation Find!’

/in , /by

Microscopic tardigrades are a species that have lived on Earth for more than 500 million years. It’s thought that these miniscule creatures will also outlive humans, however, due to their extremely small size, they don’t typically leave behind fossils for us to learn about them. 

Recently, however, scientists discovered the third-ever tardigrade fossil on record, and they found it suspended in a piece of 16-million-year-old Dominican amber. 

Embed from Getty Images

The species found within the amber has been classified as Paradoryphoribius chronocaribbeus, a new species thought to be a relative of the modern living family of tardigrades known as Isohypsibioidea. This is the first tardigrade fossil to appear during the Cenozoic era, the current geological era that the Earth is in which began 66 million years ago. 

The study on this discovery was published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a scientific publication. 

Beneath a microscope, these tardigrades look like little water bears. They’re known for their ability to survive and thrive in extreme environments, which is why they’ve been around for so long. They’re no longer than one millimeter, have eight legs with claws at the end, a brain, nervous system, and a pharynx behind their mouth used to pierce food.

“All of these details are incredibly well preserved in the new fossil specimen, down to its tiny claws. The discovery of a fossil tardigrade is truly a once-in-a-generation event,” said Phil Barden, senior author of the study.

Embed from Getty Images

“What is so remarkable is that tardigrades are a ubiquitous ancient lineage that has seen it all on Earth, from the fall of the dinosaurs to the rise of terrestrial colonization of plants. Yet, they are like a ghost lineage for paleontologists with almost no fossil record. Finding any tardigrade fossil remains is an exciting moment where we can empirically see their progression through Earth history,” Barden said.

The fossil will now allow scientists to observe all the evolutionary changes this species has endured within the past hundreds of millions of years. Javier Ortega-Hernandez, the study’s co-author, claimed that at first, they didn’t even notice the fossil in the piece of amber they collected. 

“It’s a faint speck in amber. In fact, Pdo. chronocaribbeus was originally an inclusion hidden in the corner of an amber piece with three different ant species that our lab had been studying, and it wasn’t spotted for months. Close observational analysis helped us determine where the new species belongs on the tardigrade family tree. The fact that we had to rely on imaging techniques usually reserved for cellular and molecular biology shows how challenging it is to study fossil tardigrades. We hope that this work encourages colleagues to look more closely at their amber samples with similar techniques to better understand these cryptic organisms,” Ortega-Hernández said in a statement. 

“We are just scratching the surface when it comes to understanding living tardigrade communities, especially in places like the Caribbean where they’ve not been surveyed. This study provides a reminder that, for as little as we may have in the way of tardigrade fossils, we also know very little about the living species on our planet today,” said Barden.