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Fearsome spinosaurus wasn’t the scourge of prehistoric seas after all

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The largest predatory dinosaur to ever walk on Earth sported a massive sail that rose from its back, but it turns out this imposing creature would have made for a very slow and awkward swimmer, according to new research.

Spinosaurus was even larger than Tyrannosaurus rex and measured 45 feet (13.7 meters) long. The colossus had an unusual skull shape that made it look more like a toothy crocodile than a raptor, said Paul Sereno, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at The University of Chicago.

Spinosaurus primarily hunted very large fish, such as sawfish, lungfish and coelacanths, and had long, scythe-shaped hand claws to catch and rip them apart. However, the dinosaur was more adapted to life on land and hunting from shorelines rather than filling the niche of an aquatic, underwater predator, said Sereno, lead author of a new paper published November 30 in the journal eLife.

“Do I think that this animal would have waded into water on a regular basis? Absolutely, but I don’t think it was a good swimmer nor capable of full submergence behavior,” Sereno said.

“This is simply not an animal that in your wildest dreams would be dynamic above water as a swimmer much less underwater.”

Spinosaurus has long intrigued scientists.

German paleontologist Ernst Stromer named the prehistoric predator Spinosaurus aegyptiacus in 1915 after the first partial skeleton was discovered by his fossil hunter Richard Markgraf in Egypt.

Stromer, who suggested the dinosaur stood upright on its back legs and snacked on fish, displayed the find in Munich’s Paleontological Museum. The fossils were destroyed during Allied bombing in World War II, and only Stromer’s notes and drawings survived.

Many decades later, more fossils were unearthed by miners from the sandstone rocks of southeastern Morocco. Sereno and his team studied the fossils, as well as specimens from museums and Stromer’s original notes, and shared their findings in 2014.

A more complete depiction of the predatory dinosaur emerged as one with interlocking slanted teeth perfect for catching fish, a long neck and trunk, short back legs and a towering sail made up of dorsal spines covered in skin.

The dinosaur’s small nostrils were set back farther in the skull, enabling it to breathe even when partially submerged in the water. This anatomical clue suggested Spinosaurus was “semiaquatic” and waded into the shallow waters along river banks for its prey.

In recent years, other teams have published research as they studied new fossils that suggested Spinosaurus was a fully aquatic predator with a fleshy paddle-like tail that would have allowed it to move like an eel, and dense bones that acted as ballast, allowing it to dive deep into the water column.

Sereno and his team returned to their work with Spinosaurus in search of answers about what life had really been like for the fearsome dinosaur.

Sereno began by confronting a mistake in the 2014 paper. When he and his team calculated the dinosaur’s center of gravity, the software didn’t deduct enough mass to account for its lungs. This made it seem like Spinosaurs would need to walk on all fours.

“I love to admit mistakes, especially when I can correct them myself,” Sereno said.

The team collected CT scans of the Spinosaurus skeleton and added layers of musculature and body mass, based on modern reptiles, to virtually construct a new model. This time, Spinosaurus had a center of gravity over its hips and stood upright, much like T. rex and other towering dinosaur predators.

“The solid limbs are not there for ballast while swimming, but rather to support the great weight of the beast,” Sereno said.

Next, the team turned to Spinosaurus’ tail. Dr. Frank Fish, tail mechanics expert and professor of biology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, took the lead.

Fish compared the Spinosaurus tail with those of alligators and other reptiles and found the dinosaur would have been too rigid to function well underwater. While alligators tuck their limbs in as they swim and have the flexibility to spin and roll underwater in pursuit of prey, Spinosaurus’ huge body mass, tall sail and dangling hind legs would have been a hindrance.

“The hind paddles are an order of magnitude too small to produce any consequential paddling motion or power,” Sereno said. “No fully aquatic animals, conversely, has forelimbs as proportionately large as Spinosaurus, as the front limbs are very inefficient as paddles.”

Its bony, muscular tail wouldn’t have had the same flexibility of a whale or fish, and the heavy sail might have been more of an obstacle than a useful tool.

If Spinosaurus was plunked down in deep water, the results wouldn’t have been very pleasant.

“Its thorax would be crushed, and it would die within a minute,” Sereno said, not to mention the drag of its “super ungainly stiff sail and hanging limbs.” And it wouldn’t have been able to catch fish by swimming after them.

So what was the purpose of the sail?

“Display, like a billboard,” Sereno said. Similar to some lizards today that have spine-supported sails, Spinosaurus likely used its sail during competition and courtship, he said.

The fossil record also suggests Spinosaurus was more adapted to rivers and lakes than oceans. Spinosaurus fossils have largely been found in the riverbank deposits of Niger’s inland basins, which are distant from prehistoric marine coastlines.

Intriguingly, the dinosaur likely lived along marine and freshwater habitats like other semiaquatic reptiles, but it’s not something that any other extinct or extant large aquatic vertebrates like ichthyosaurs or sea turtles did. So Spinosaurus would have prowled along coastal and inland waterways, ambushing prey as it waded into shallow waters.

“Nonavian dinosaurs dominated the world for 150 million years, but they never went into the water in a serious way,” Sereno said. “Of course, they could swim just like we do, but that doesn’t mean we’re aquatic. We’re talking about whether they were truly adapted to life in the water, and that’s the central question behind all this attention on Spinosaurus.”

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Prehistoric giant sea turtle newly discovered in Europe

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Long ago, gigantic marine turtles swam the Earth’s seas. Until recently, these prehistoric giants, reaching lengths of over 3 meters (10 feet) from head to tail, had been thought to be found only in waters surrounding North America.

Now, scientists have discovered a previously unknown species — the largest European sea turtle ever to be identified.

Initially found by a hiker who stumbled upon the remains in 2016 in the Pyrenees mountains of northern Spain, the species has been given the name Leviathanochelys aenigmatica. “Leviathan” is the biblical term for a sea monster, an allusion to the creature’s large body size, while “chelys” translates to turtle and “aenigmatica” translates to enigma — in reference to the turtle’s peculiar characteristics, wrote the authors of a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The unusual animal’s presence in this part of the prehistoric world revealed that giant turtles were more common than previously thought, according to the study.

Before the discovery, the largest European species measured at just 1.5 meters (5 feet) in length, similar to today’s leatherback sea turtles, which weigh an average of 300 to 500 kilograms (660 to 1,100 pounds) and measure 1 to 2 meters (or between 3 and 6.5 feet), according to the Smithsonian Institute.

The bone fragments of this newly identified species, however, have led scientists to estimate that Leviathanochelys had a 3.7-meter-long body (12.1 feet), almost as big as an average sedan.

“We never thought it was possible to find something like this. After quite a long study of the bone fragments, we realized that there were some features that were totally different, not present in any other fossil of a turtle species discovered so far,” said Albert Sellés, coauthor of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Spain.

Originally, researchers believed the bones belonged to a different kind of animal, according to Sellés.

“It is quite common to find bone fragments, a lot of them. But most of them are uninformative,” Sellés said. “It is quite rare to discover something that really tells you a little bit of the life of the past.”

A local museum and Catalonia’s Ministry of Culture had originally collected the bone specimens, but they remained unstudied for nearly five years. When Sellés and the other researchers began their work studying the bones in 2021, they realized they were looking at a species of marine turtle completely new to science, and quickly went back to the Pyrenees site to perform more excavations.

There, more fragments of the specimen, including pieces of the turtle’s pelvis and carapace — the part of the shell that covered the creature’s back — were discovered. With these finds, the scientists observed more features not previously seen in any living or dead turtle species.

“The main differences of this new fossil are related to the pelvic region. More specifically, to a couple of bony bumps present in the anterior part of the pelvis, which we suspect are related to some kind of muscle that controls the movement of the abdominal region of the turtle,” Sellés said.

This feature or muscle most likely impacted the turtles’ breathing capacity, allowing them to hold their breath longer than other turtle species, in order to swim deep in the ocean to find food or escape predators, according to Sellés.

The research team estimated the ancient animal lived during the Campanian Age of the Late Cretaceous Epoch, making it at least 72 million years old.

The largest turtle on record, called Archelon, lived some 70 million years ago and grew to be about 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. Before this recent discovery, all prehistoric giant marine turtle discoveries were part of the same lineage as Archelon.

“We’re proving that turtles could achieve really gigantic proportions in different times, and also in different families,” Sellés said. “For the first time, we found a (giant) turtle that doesn’t belong to this family.”

The researchers hope to return to the fossil site again to look for more bones, as they are not certain that all fragments from this specimen have been discovered, according to Sellés.

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Prehistoric predator? Artificial intelligence says no

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An artistic digital rendition of the recently identified dinosaur. Credit: Dr Anthony Romilio

Artificial intelligence has revealed that prehistoric footprints thought to be made by a vicious dinosaur predator were in fact from a timid herbivore.

In an international collaboration, University of Queensland paleontologist Dr. Anthony Romilio used AI pattern recognition to re-analyze footprints from the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument, south-west of Winton in Central Queensland.

“Large dinosaur footprints were first discovered back in the 1970s at a track site called the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument, and for many years they were believed to be left by a predatory dinosaur, like Australovenator, with legs nearly two meters long,” said Dr. Romilio.

“The mysterious tracks were thought to be left during the mid-Cretaceous Period, around 93 million years ago.

“But working out what dino species made the footprints exactly—especially from tens of millions of years ago—can be a pretty difficult and confusing business.

“Particularly since these big tracks are surrounded by thousands of tiny dinosaur footprints, leading many to think that this predatory beast could have sparked a stampede of smaller dinosaurs.

“So, to crack the case, we decided to employ an AI program called Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.”

It was trained with 1,500 dinosaur footprints, all of which were theropod or ornithopod in origin—the groups of dinosaurs relevant to the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument prints.

The results were clear: the tracks had been made by a herbivorous ornithopod dinosaur.

Dr. Jens Lallensack, lead author from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, said that the computer assistance was vital, as the team was originally at an impasse.

“We were pretty stuck, so thank god for modern technology,” Dr. Lallensack said.

“In our research team of three, one person was pro-meat-eater, one person was undecided, and one was pro-plant-eater.

“So—to really check our science—we decided to go to five experts for clarification, plus use AI.

“The AI was the clear winner, outperforming all of the experts by a wide margin, with a margin of error of around 11 percent.

“When we used the AI on the large tracks from the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument, all but one of these tracks was confidently classified as left by an ornithopod dinosaur—our prehistoric ‘predator’.”

The team hopes to continue to add to the fossil dinosaur tracks database and conduct further AI investigations.

The research is published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface and includes collaborations between Australian, German, and UK researchers.

A replica of the dinosaur trackway is on display at the Queensland Museum, Brisbane, and the track site can be visited near south-west of Winton, Queensland.

More information:
Jens N. Lallensack et al, A machine learning approach for the discrimination of theropod and ornithischian dinosaur tracks, Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2022.0588

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Prehistoric predator? Artificial intelligence says no (2022, November 15)
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Jurassic Barf: Puke From 150 Million Years Ago Reveals Prehistoric Predator

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Around 150 million years ago in what’s now Utah, an animal chowed down on a small frog and a salamander. It then lost its lunch. Fast forward to today, when a team of paleontologists identified and investigated the fossilized vomit, unraveling a mystery along the way.

The researchers published a study on the puke in the journal Palaios late last month. The scientists found frog bones, including some that likely came from a tadpole, and bits from a salamander. “Aspects of this new fossil, relating to the arrangement and concentration of the bones in the deposit, the mix of animals, and the chemistry of the bones and matrix, suggested that the pile of bones was regurgitated out by a predator,” Utah State Parks said in a statement on Tuesday.

This delightful illustration shows two fish, one in the act of hunting and the other puking up its prey.


Brian Engh

Whose puke was it? The vomit dates back to the Late Jurassic, a time when dinosaurs like the jumbo-size Brachiosaurus and armored Stegosaurus still roamed. Shoutout to ReBecca Hunt-Foster, a paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, for coining the phrase “Jurassic Barf.” However, the vomit didn’t come from a dino. 

The fossil site, famous for plant remains, was a pond long ago, home to amphibians and fish. The researchers worked out that a bowfin fish most did the vomiting. It’s possible the ancient fish upchucked to distract a predator. Utah State Parks noted the paleontologists jokingly referred to the fossil find as the “fish-puked tadpole.”

Despite having happened many millions of years ago, the vomit represents a familiar scene.

“There were three animals that we still have around today, interacting in ways also known today among those animals — prey eaten by predators and predators perhaps chased by other predators,” said study co-author John Foster, curator of the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum. “That itself shows how similar some ancient ecosystems were to places on Earth today.” 

The researchers hope to find other, similar fossils within Utah’s Morrison Formation, a layer of history that also preserves many dinosaur remains. Puke might not seem like the most glamorous paleontology subject, but it’s a fascinating (and slightly gross) window into life long ago.



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Prehistoric Puke Reveals a Stomach-Churning Banquet From Millions of Years Ago : ScienceAlert

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Hundreds of millions of years ago, a carnivorous critter gorged on a feast of prehistoric amphibians – and puked up its meal afterward.

Now, paleontologists have unearthed the regurgitation and published their findings of the ancient upchuck.

In 2018, researchers discovered the regurgitalite – fossilized remains of an animal’s stomach contents, also known as a bromalite – during an excavation in the southeastern Utah portion of the Morrison Formation.

This swath of sedimentary rocks that stretches across the Western United States is a hotbed for fossils dating to the late Jurassic period (164 million to 145 million years ago).

This section in particular, dubbed the “Jurassic salad bar” by local paleontologists, typically contains the fossilized remains of plants and other organic matter, rather than animal bones.

So, when a team that included researchers from the Utah Geological Survey (UGS) stumbled upon the “compact little pile” of retched remains measuring no more than one-third of a square inch (1 square centimeter), they knew they had found something special, the scientists reported in a study, published Aug. 25 in the journal Palaios.

“What struck us was this small concentration of animal bones in a relatively tiny area,” lead author John Foster, a curator with the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, told Live Science.

“Normally there are no animal remains at this site, only plants, and the bones we did find weren’t spread out [amongst the rock] but were concentrated to this one spot. These are the first bones we’ve ever seen there.”

Related: Ginormous Jurassic fossil in Portugal may be the biggest dinosaur ever found in Europe

Initially, the team didn’t know they had found prehistoric vomit. Instead, the scientists thought they had discovered the bones of one critter, until they “realized that some of them looked wrong and weren’t all from a single salamander,” Foster said.

“Looking closer, most of the material is from a frog and at least one salamander. It was then that we started suspecting that what we were seeing was puked out by a predator.”

Frog bones and a femur that might have belonged to a salamander fill a suspected ‘regurgitalite’, which scientists think was made by an ancient fish. (J. R. Foster et al., Palaios, 2022)

Those remains include amphibian bones, specifically femurs from a frog and a salamander, as well as vertebrae from one or more unidentified species.

All told, nearly a dozen bone fragments were found clustered together, along with a matrix of fossilized soft tissues, according to the study.

And unlike coprolites (fossilized poop), this regurgitation isn’t completely digested, leading researchers to determine that it’s a regurgitalite.

Although there have been a number of recorded findings of regurgitalites around the world, Foster said that this is the first known instance of one at the Morrison Formation, calling the discovery “one of a kind”.

While there’s no way of knowing exactly which species of animal lost its lunch millions of years ago – or why it upchucked in the first place – further analysis could determine other components of the partly digested animals that the predator swallowed.

“We think that there’s more to this thing than just the tiny bones of amphibians,” Foster said. “By doing a chemical analysis, we can begin to rule things out and determine what exactly the soft tissues are made up of.”

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150M-year-old vomit found in Utah offers ‘rare glimpse’ into prehistoric ecosystems

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An artist rendering of a bowfin fish attempting to sneak up on a frog floating at the surface of a pond while another bowfin regurgitates part of a recent meal of frogs and a salamander. The bowfin fish is the suspected predator of a 150 million-year-old vomit fossil discovered in southeast Utah. (Brian Engh via Utah Division of State Parks)

Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes

VERNAL — A recently discovered fossil in southeast Utah appears to show the type of prey that predators feasted on back in the age of dinosaurs and when the region wasn’t quite the desert it is today.

Utah paleontologists discovered a pile of amphibian bones that they say appear to have been puked out by some sort of predator. This prehistoric vomit is believed to be 150 million years old, according to paleontologists with the Utah Geological Survey, Utah Division of State Parks and the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum in Washington.

Their findings were published in the journal Palaios last month.

“This fossil gives us a rare glimpse into the interactions of the animals in ancient ecosystems,” said John Foster, the curator of the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum and one of the study’s co-authors, in a statement Tuesday.

The team discovered the fossil while scouring the Morrison Formation, a famous paleontological site known for its fossils from the late Jurassic age, which ranges from about 148 million years ago to 155 million years ago. It’s mostly known for its dinosaur bones but it’s also where scientists have found all sorts of other animals, such as fish, salamanders and frogs.

Southeast Utah’s section of the formation mostly features prehistoric plants like ginkgoes, ferns and conifers; however, paleontologists have also found amphibians and bowfin fish there, too. These discoveries are why they believe the region was once home to either a pond or a small lake.

But during a recent survey, the team discovered an oddly arranged fossil. It was a cluster of bones that included “elements” of at least one small frog or tadpole and would be the “smallest reported salamander specimen from the formation,” the researchers wrote in the study. Some of these bones were only 0.12 inches long, which are among the smallest set of bones within the formation.

They added that the chemical and bone structure of the fossil indicated that it’s a regurgitalite, which is a fossilized form of vomit. The team noted that it’s the first finding of its kind within the Morrison Formation and also within North America’s Jurassic period.

What’s still not clear 150 million years later is what killed the species within the regurgitalite. Foster points out that past research puts bowfin fish in the region at the time, which he views as the “current best match” for the predator behind the fossil. Scientists have discovered fish, salamanders and frog species in the Morrison Formation for well over a century.

“Although we can’t rule out other predators, a bowfin is our current suspect, so to speak,” he said, explaining that fish — and other animals — do sometimes regurgitate their recent meals when they are pursued or want to distract a potential predator.

“There were three animals that we still have around today, interacting in ways also known today among those animals — prey eaten by predators and predators perhaps chased by other predators,” he added. “That itself shows how similar some ancient ecosystems were to places on Earth today.”

The finding is the team’s most recent in the region. Two of the study’s three co-authors also help discover a massive 151 million-year-old water bug, which led to a paper that was published in 2020.

James Kirkland, the state paleontologist, who co-authored both of the studies, said that paleontologists plan to continue to search the site where the prehistoric vomit was discovered to see if they can find more evidence of the region’s past ecosystem.

“I was so excited to have found this site, as Upper Jurassic plant localities are so rare,” he said, in a statement. “We must now carefully dissect the site in search of more tiny wonders in among the foliage.”

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Carter Williams is an award-winning reporter who covers general news, outdoors, history and sports for KSL.com. He previously worked for the Deseret News. He is a Utah transplant by the way of Rochester, New York.

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Hundreds of Shimmering Crystal Fragments Discovered at Prehistoric Burial Site : ScienceAlert

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Hundreds of fragments of a rare transparent type of quartz called ‘rock crystal’ suggest Neolithic people used the mineral to decorate graves and other structures at a ceremonial site in western England, archaeologists say.

The rock crystals were likely brought to the site from a source more than 80 miles (130 kilometers) away, over mountainous terrain, and the crystals appear to have been carefully broken into much smaller pieces, possibly during a community gathering to watch the working of what must have seemed like a magical material.

“You can think of it as a really special event,” Nick Overton, an archaeologist at The University of Manchester in England, told Live Science.

“It feels like they’re putting a lot of emphasis on the practice of working [the crystal] … people would have remembered it as being distinctive and different.”

Overton is the lead author of a study published in July in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal that describes the discovery of more than 300 of these quartz crystal fragments at a 6,000-year-old ceremonial site at Dorstone Hill in western England, about a mile (1.6 kilometers) south of the monument known as Arthur’s Stone.

As well as being almost as transparent as water, several of the crystal fragments are prismatic, splitting white light into a visible rainbow spectrum.

More than 300 fragments of transparent quartz rock crystal had been found at the early Neolithic burial site at Dorstone Hill, sometimes in the ancient graves themselves. (Overland et al., Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2022).

Quartz crystal is also triboluminescent – that is, it gives off flashes of light when it’s struck – and that peculiar property must have enhanced the process of breaking the crystals into smaller fragments, Overton said.

Related: Back to the Stone Age: 17 key milestones in Paleolithic life

“If you bash two of these crystals together, they emit little flashes of bluish light, which is really fascinating,” Overton explained.

“It must have been an arresting experience – the material is quite rare and quite distinctive in this period where there is no glass and no other solid transparent material.”

Neolithic landscape

The rock crystal fragments were found at an early Neolithic ceremonial site at Dorstone Hill in the west of England that’s thought to have been built about 6,000 years ago. (Adam Stanford)

Archaeologists think ancient structures at Dorstone Hill and Arthur’s Stone were part of an early Neolithic, or New Stone Age, ceremonial landscape built up 1,000 years before Stonehenge, which was constructed roughly 5,000 years ago on Salisbury Plain, about 80 miles to the southeast.

Local legends link Arthur’s Stone to the mythical King Arthur, although it would have already been thousands of years old by his time, if he ever existed.

Dorstone Hill is the site of the ‘Halls of the Dead’, three timber buildings that were deliberately burned down and replaced by three earthen burial mounds in Neolithic times, possibly after a local leader had died.

Archaeologists think an earthen mound at the Arthur’s Stone site once pointed to the Halls of the Dead, the remains of which were discovered in 2013. But later mounds at both structures were aligned to a prominent gap in the hills to the south.

Overton said the rock crystal fragments were scattered around the Dorstone Hill site but were concentrated in the burial mounds. Some of the largest fragments seem to have been placed as grave goods inside buried pits that also held cremated human bones.

The first piece of crystal that the modern excavators saw was mistaken for a piece of glass, but the team soon found many more that are still as transparent as they were when they were made, he said.

“It looked like glass, but then we noticed it was a different color,” Overton said. “And we started to think, ‘Blimey, maybe this is something else.’ So that really got us in the mindset of looking for the stuff.”

Rock crystal

Overton said there were no local sources of rock crystal, and so it’s likely that the transparent mineral originated at one of two sites known since Neolithic times: one in a cave in the mountains of Snowdonia in the north of Wales, about 80 miles away; and one at St David’s Head on the southwest coast of Wales, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) away.

It seems that the mineral was transported to Dorstone Hill in the form of large crystals up to 4 inches (10 centimeters) long, possibly through a trading network that brought them from farther afield, he said.

Analysis suggests that the large crystals were then expertly ‘knapped’ with the techniques used for flint – deliberately broken into smaller pieces – but the resulting fragments were not formed into tools afterward, he said.

Rather, many of these very tiny chips were then collected and deposited at structures at the site, especially over the burial mounds, Overton said.

“The largest piece we have is 34 millimeters [1.3 inches] in length,” he said. That gives the researchers an idea of how big the original crystals must have been, which could help narrow down their origin; they also hope to conduct chemical tests of the fragments that could reveal a ‘geological signature’ of where they came from.

The 337 fragments from Dorstone Hill represent the largest collection of worked rock crystal pieces ever found in Britain and Ireland, Overton said; quartz rock crystal pieces have also been found at other Neolithic burial sites in Britain and Ireland, but they’ve mostly been overlooked before now.

“I felt it was really important to point out just how wonderful and how interesting this material is,” Overton said.

“And it might help us think about other aspects of [the Neolithic] period, such as connections of trade or exchange, and also the way that people think about and engage with materials.”

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Prehistoric Fossil Fishing at the Farm – Jurassic Marine World Unearthed in a Farmer’s Field

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Jurassic fish called Pachycormus. Credit: Dean Lomax

An exceptional prehistoric site containing the remains of animals that lived in a tropical sea has been discovered in a farmer’s field in Gloucestershire, England.

Discovered beneath a field grazed by an ancient breed of English Longhorn cattle, the fossils are stunningly well preserved. Despite being approximately 183-million-year-old, the fossils look like they were frozen in time.

Contained within three-dimensionally preserved limestone concretions, the remains of fish, ancient marine reptiles, squids, rare insects and more have been revealed for the first time by a team of paleontologists. The fossils come from an inland rock layer that was last exposed in the UK more than 100 years ago. It represents a unique opportunity to collect fossils from a time when this part of the country was deep underwater.

The newly found site is at Court Farm, Kings Stanley near Stroud, Gloucestershire. It was discovered by Sally and Neville Hollingworth, avid fossil collectors. They recently uncovered the remains of mammoths in the nearby Cotswold Water Park, a discovery that was featured in the BBC One documentary “Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard” in 2021.

Sally and Neville explained: “These fossils come from the Early

Dr. Dean Lomax, a paleontologist and a Visiting Scientist at The University of Manchester, who recently led the excavation of the Rutland ichthyosaur that also dates to the Toarcian geological age, was part of the team and said: “The site is quite remarkable, with numerous beautifully preserved fossils of ancient animals that once lived in a Jurassic sea that covered this part of the UK during the Jurassic. Inland locations with fossils like this are rare in the UK. The fossils we have collected will surely form the basis of research projects for years to come.”

“The site is quite remarkable, with numerous beautifully preserved fossils of ancient animals that once lived in a Jurassic sea that covered this part of the UK during the Jurassic. Inland locations with fossils like this are rare in the UK. The fossils we have collected will surely form the basis of research projects for years to come.”

— Dr. Dean Lomax

Many of the specimens collected will be donated to the local Museum in the Park, Stroud, where they will form a significant part of the museum’s paleontology collections. One of the team members, Alexia Clark, who is the museum’s Documentation and Collections Officer said: “We’re excited to expand our knowledge of the geology of the Stroud District and we are looking forward to a time when we can share these amazing finds with our members and visitors. Being part of the excavation team has been a real privilege and I can’t wait to share details of that experience through our members’ newsletter.”

Among the best finds were several fossil fish with excellent details of their scales, fins, and even their eyeballs. One of the most impressive discoveries was a three-dimensionally preserved fish head, belonging to a type of Jurassic fish called Pachycormus. The fish looks as if it is ‘leaping off the rock’ that it was contained inside. A digital 3D model of this fossil has been created by Steven Dey of ThinkSee3D.

Field observations and preparation of the fauna found so far indicate that the Court Farm fossils were rapidly buried, as suggested by the absence of any encrusting animals or burrows in the sediment. The layered concretions around the skeletons formed relatively early before the sediments were compacted, as the original sediment layering is preserved. These concretions prevented further compaction and compression from the overlying sediments during burial and thus preserved the fossils in three-dimensional time capsules.

Neville added, “Using the latest fossil preparation and imaging techniques to understand this unique fauna in more detail will create a rich repository. Also, we will leave a permanent reference section after excavations have concluded. Given the location and enthusiasm from the landowner and local community to be involved it is hoped to plan and develop a local STEM enrichment program as there will be opportunities for community groups and local schools to be involved in the research, particularly from the Stroud area with a focus of targeting audiences in areas of low STEM capital.”

The landowner, Adam Knight, said: “I’m delighted that after the initial work that Sally and Nev did over three years ago we now have a full-scale dig on the farm involving a range of fossil experts from The Natural History Museum, The University of Manchester, University of Reading and The Open University. On Friday we were also joined by Emily Baldry (16) on a day’s work experience before she goes to University to study paleontology – it’s wonderful to see her enthusiasm for her chosen profession. It has been a real pleasure to host the dig and I’m excited to see the results of what has been found.”

The team of paleontologists is very grateful to the Geologists’ Association Curry Fund for financing the excavation phase. Going forward, the team will continue to analyze the specimens and publish their research with the fossils planned for display at Museum in the Park, Stroud, and at the Boho Bakery Café at Court Farm, Kings Stanley, Gloucestershire. 



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New Giant Dinosaur Discovery Reveals Why Many Prehistoric Carnivores Had Such Tiny Arms

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An international team that includes a University of Minnesota Twin Cities researcher has discovered a new big, meat-eating dinosaur, dubbed Meraxes gigas (illustrated above), that provides clues about the evolution and anatomy of predatory dinosaurs such as the Carcharodontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex. Credit: Jorge A Gonzalez

Discovery provides insight into the evolution and anatomy of big, carnivorous dinosaurs.

Researchers discovered a new huge, meat-eating dinosaur, dubbed Meraxes gigas. The new dinosaur provides fascinating clues about the evolution and biology of dinosaurs such as the Carcharodontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex—particularly, why these creatures had such large skulls and tiny arms.

The study was co-led by University of Minnesota Twin Cities researcher Peter Makovicky and Argentinean colleagues Juan Canale and Sebastian Apesteguía and was published in Current Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific biology journal.

Initially discovered in Patagonia in 2012, scientists have spent the last several years extracting, preparing, and analyzing the Meraxes specimen. The dinosaur is part of the Carcharodontosauridae family. This group of giant carnivorous theropods also includes Giganotosaurus, one of the largest known meat-eating dinosaurs and one of the reptilian stars of the recently released “

Meraxes is among the most complete carcharodontosaurid skeletons paleontologists have found thus far in the southern hemisphere. It includes nearly the entirety of the animal’s skull, hips, and both left and right arms and legs. 

“The neat thing is that we found the body plan is surprisingly similar to tyrannosaurs like T. rex,” said Peter Makovicky, one of the principal authors of the study and a professor in the University of Minnesota N.H. Winchell School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “But, they’re not particularly closely related to T. rex. They’re from very different branches of the meat-eating dinosaur family tree. So, having this new discovery allowed us to probe the question of, ‘Why do these meat-eating dinosaurs get so big and have these dinky little arms?’”

“The discovery of this new carcharodontosaurid, the most complete up to now, gives us an outstanding opportunity to learn about their systematics, paleobiology, and true size like never before,” said Sebastian Apesteguía, a co-author of the study and a researcher at Maimónides University in Argentina.

With the statistical data that Meraxes provided, the researchers found that large, mega-predatory dinosaurs in all three families of therapods grew in similar ways. As they evolved, their skulls grew larger and their arms progressively shortened.

The possible uses of the tiny forelimbs in T. rex and other large carnivorous dinosaurs have been the topic of much speculation and debate. 

“What we’re suggesting is that there’s a different take on this,” Makovicky said. “We shouldn’t worry so much about what the arms are being used for, because the arms are actually being reduced as a consequence of the skulls becoming massive. Whatever the arms may or may not have been used for, they’re taking on a secondary function since the skull is being optimized to handle larger prey.”

The researchers also found that carcharodontosaurids including species from Patagonia evolved very quickly, but then disappeared suddenly from the fossil record very soon after.

“Usually when animals are on the verge of extinction, it’s because their evolutionary rates are quite slow, meaning they aren’t adapting very quickly to their environment,” explained  Juan Canale, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the National University of Río Negro. “Here, we have evidence that Meraxes and its relatives were evolving quite fast, and yet within a few million years of being around, they disappeared, and we don’t know why. It’s one of these finds where you answer some questions, but it generates more questions for the future.”

For more on this research, see Giant New Carnivorous Dinosaur Discovered With Tiny Arms Like T. rex.

Reference: “New giant carnivorous dinosaur reveals convergent evolutionary trends in theropod arm reduction” by Juan I. Canale, Sebastián Apesteguía, Pablo A. Gallina, Jonathan Mitchell, Nathan D. Smith, Thomas M. Cullen, Akiko Shinya, Alejandro Haluza, Federico A. Gianechini, Peter J. Makovicky, 7 July 2022, Current Biology.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.05.057

The research was funded by the National Geographic Society, Municipalidad de Villa El Chocón, Fundación “Félix de Azara,” and the Field Museum in Chicago.

In addition to Makovicky, Apesteguía, and Canale, the research team included National University of Río Negro researcher Alejandro Haluza; Maimónides University researcher Pablo Gallina; West Virginia Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Jonathan Mitchell; Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County researcher Nathan Smith; Carleton University researchers Thomas Cullen; Akiko Shinya of the Field Museum in Chicago; and National University of San Luis researcher Federico Gianechini.



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Controversial Prehistoric Egg Identified To Be the Last of the “Demon Ducks of Doom”

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The only almost completely intact Genyornis eggshell ever discovered. It was located by N. Spooner and collected by Gifford H. Miller, South Australia. The presence of four puncture wounds on the egg indicates that it was predated by a scavenging marsupial. Credit: Gifford H. Miller

Researchers identify ancient birds behind prehistoric giant eggs

A years-long scientific controversy in Australia about what animal is the true mother of gigantic primordial eggs has been settled. In a recent study, scientists from the University of Copenhagen and their global counterparts showed that the eggs could only be the last of a rare line of megafauna known as the “Demon Ducks of Doom.”

Consider living next to a 200 kg, two meters tall bird with a huge beak. This was the situation for the first people who settled in Australia some 65,000 years ago.

Genyornis newtoni, the last members of the “Demon Ducks of Doom,” coexisted there with our ancestors as a species of a now-extinct family of duck-like birds.

Illustration of Genyornis newtoni being hunted by a giant lizard in Australia about 50,000 years ago. Credit: Illustration supplied by the artist Peter Trusler.

According to a recent study by experts from the University of Copenhagen and an international team of colleagues, the flightless bird lay eggs the size of cantaloupe melons, presumably to the delight of ancient humans who most likely gathered and consumed them as an essential protein source. The research was just released in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since experts initially found the 50,000-year-old eggshell pieces 40 years ago, the huge eggs have been the subject of debate. It wasn’t known until recently if the eggs genuinely belonged to the family of “demon-ducks,” also known as dromornithids.

Since 1981, the identity of the bird that lay the eggs has been a source of controversy for scientists all across the globe. While some proposed Genyornis newtoni, others thought the shells were from Progura birds, an extinct member of the megapode group of species. Progura were “chicken-like birds” that only weighed between five and seven kilos and had huge feet.

The eggshells are too little, according to supporters of the Progura bird, for a bird the size of Genyornis newtoni to lay them.

“However, our analysis of protein sequences from the eggs clearly shows that the eggshells cannot come from megapodes and the Progura bird,” explains Josefin Stiller, an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Biology and one of the researchers behind the new study.

“They can only be of the Genyornis. As such, we have laid to rest a very long and heated debate about the origin of these eggs,” adds co-author and University of Copenhagen professor Matthew Collins, whose area of research is evolutionary genetics.

To the right is an emu-egg and to the left is the egg, which the researchers believe originates from the Demon Duck of Doom, Genyornis newtoni. The latter egg weighs about 1.5 kilograms which is more than 20 times the weight of an average chicken egg. Credit: Trevor Worthy

Protein analysis and a gene database identified the mother

In sand dunes in the southern Australian towns of Wallaroo and Woodpoint, the scientists examined the proteins from eggshells.

The proteins were broken down into little pieces by bleach before the researchers assembled the pieces in the correct sequence and used artificial intelligence to study their structure. The protein sequences gave them a collection of gene “codes” that they could compare to the genes of more than 350 species of currently existing bird species.

A large femur from Genyornis newtoni (left) and on your right a somewhat smaller femur from an emu. Credit: Trevor Worthy

“We used our data from the B10K project, which currently contains genomes for all major bird lineages, to reconstruct which bird group the extinct bird likely belonged to. It became quite clear that the eggs were not laid by a megapode, and did therefore not belong to the Progura,” explains Josefin Stiller.

Thereby, the researchers have solved the mystery about the origin of the ancient Aussie eggs and have given us new knowledge on evolution.

“We are thrilled to have conducted an interdisciplinary study in which we used protein sequence analysis to shed light on animal evolution,” concludes Matthew Collins.

The eggs were consumed by the first humans in Australia

Previous research on the egg shards indicates that the shells were cooked and then discarded in fire pits. Charring on eggshell surfaces is confirmation of this, proving that the earliest Australian people devoured the eggs about 65,000 years ago.

Eggshell fragments from an ancient nest in South Australia. The mass of eggshell collected within one meter squared is equivalent to around 12 whole eggs. Credit: Gifford H. Miller

Australia’s first inhabitants probably harvested eggs from nests, which the hypothesis states, may have led to the extinction of the Genyornis bird 47,000 years ago.

For more on this research, see First Australian People Ate Giant Eggs of Huge Flightless Birds.

Reference: “Ancient proteins resolve controversy over the identity of Genyornis eggshell” by Beatrice Demarchi, Josefin Stiller, Alicia Grealy, Meaghan Mackie, Yuan Deng, Tom Gilbert, Julia Clarke, Lucas J. Legendre, Rosa Boano, Thomas Sicheritz-Pontén, John Magee, Guojie Zhang, Michael Bunce, Matthew James Collins and Gifford Miller, 24 May 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2109326119



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