Tag Archives: Preserved

Science

Researchers look a dinosaur in its remarkably preserved face

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Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology

Borealopelta mitchelli found its way back into the sunlight in 2017, millions of years after it had died. This armored dinosaur is so magnificently preserved that we can see what it looked like in life. Almost the entire animal—the skin, the armor that coats its skin, the spikes along its side, most of its body and feet, even its face—survived fossilization. It is, according to Dr. Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, a one-in-a-billion find.

Beyond its remarkable preservation, this dinosaur is an important key to understanding aspects of Early Cretaceous ecology, and it shows how this species may have lived within its environment. Since its remains were discovered, scientists have studied its anatomy, its armor, and even what it ate in its last days, uncovering new and unexpected insight into an animal that went extinct approximately 100 million years ago.

Down by the sea

Borealopelta is a nodosaur, a type of four-legged ankylosaur with a straight tail rather than a tail club. Its finding in 2011 in an ancient marine environment was a surprise, as the animal was terrestrial.

A land-based megaherbivore preserved in an ancient seabed is not as uncommon as one might think. A number of other ankylosaurs have been preserved in this manner, albeit not as well as Borealopelta. Scientists suspect its carcass may have been carried from a river to the sea in a flooding event; it may have bobbed at the surface upside-down for a few days before sinking into the ocean depths.

It would have been kept at the surface by what’s referred to as “bloat-and-float,” as the buildup of postmortem gasses would keep it buoyant. Modeling done by Henderson indicates its heavy armor would have rolled it onto its back, a position he suspects may have prevented ocean predators from scavenging its carcass.

Once the gasses that kept it floating were expelled, Borealopelta sank to the ocean floor, landing on its back.

“We can see it went in water deeper than 50 meters because it was preserved with a particular mineral called glauconite, which is a green phosphate mineral. And it only forms in cooler temperatures in water deeper than 50 meters,” explained Dr. Henderson.

He also told Ars that this environment probably also discouraged scavenging, saying, “It was probably a region where [long-necked] plesiosaurs and big fish didn’t like to go. It was too cold and too dark, and [there was] nothing to eat. And there were very few trace fossils in the sediments around it. So there wasn’t much in the way of worms and crustaceans and bivalves and things in there to further digest it. It was just a nice set of conditions in the seabed that had very low biological activity that led to that preservation.”

Unmet expectations

But none of this was known when the animal was discovered. Although it’s not entirely unusual to find dinosaur remains in marine environments, it’s also not very common. Henderson and Darren Tanke, also from the Royal Tyrrell Museum, walked onto the site fully anticipating that they would excavate an ancient marine reptile.

The two had consulted on fossil discoveries at other open-pit mines within the province. However, this was their first visit to Suncor, a mine in the northeast of Alberta, Canada. Everything about this mine is enormous. Massive machinery is constantly in motion, scooping out rock, sand, and gravel from surrounding cliffs, while other equipment clears it away, all with the goal of uncovering the deeper oil sands for fuel.

“It’s just unbelievable, the scale of the place,” Dr. Henderson said. “And it goes 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

Despite the pace of operations, one particular shovel operator, Shawn Funk, happened to notice something after taking a big chunk out of the cliff. It was thanks to him and several people within Suncor that operations stopped in that area and the Royal Tyrrell was notified.

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Science

Unusually large fossilized flower preserved in amber identified

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Almost 40 million years ago a flower bloomed in a Baltic conifer forest. Dripping tree resin encased the petals and pollen, forever showcasing an ephemeral moment in our planet’s past.

Scientists have taken a fresh look at the unique amber fossil, which was first documented in 1872 as belonging to a pharmacist called Kowalewski in what’s now Kaliningrad, Russia.

The striking fossil had been languishing largely forgotten in the collection of the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Berlin (BGR), according to Eva-Maria Sadowski, a postdoctoral researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin’s natural history museum, and author of the new study.

She said she heard about the fossilized flower, officially known as specimen X4088, in passing from a retired colleague, who she thought was exaggerating.

“He told me that he once visited the BGR and that (he) saw the most amazing and largest amber flower in their collection. I was not aware that they had an amber collection. So I asked the curator of the BGR collection if I could come to see their collection – and there I found the specimen X4088,” she said via email.

“I was more than surprised to see such a large flower inclusion.”

At 28 millimeters (1.1 inches) across, it’s the largest known flower to be fossilized in amber – three times the size of similar fossils.

Sadowski extracted and examined pollen from the amber. She found that the flower had been misidentified when it was first studied.

“The original genus name of this specimen was Stewartia of the plant family Theaceae. But we could show in our study that this was not correct, mainly based on the pollen morphology. But when the specimen was first studied in the 19th century, they (had) not discovered or studied the pollen,” she said.

The flower is closely related to a genus of flowering plants common in Asia today known as Symplocos – shrubs or trees that sport white or yellow flowers.

Originally named Stewartia kowalewskii, the authors propose a new name for the flower of Symplocos kowalewskii.

Amber fossils offer a tantalizing, three dimensional look at the past. As well as plants and flowers, a dinosaur tail, a crab, a hell ant, a spider mom and her young, an ancient bird’s foot and a lizard’s skull have been found entombed in globs of tree resin.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday.

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Science

Rare Dinosaur Fossil Found With Perfectly Preserved Final Meal Inside : ScienceAlert

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Around 120 million years ago, four-winged dinosaurs roughly the size of crows called Microraptors stalked the ancient woodlands of what is now China.

While researchers have studied several Microraptor specimens, there’s still a lot we don’t know about these feathered bird-like creatures – including what and how they ate.

Now an incredibly rare fossil has revealed the preserved final meal of one individual: and unexpectedly, it was a mammal.

“At first, I couldn’t believe it,” says vertebrate paleontologist Hans Larsson from McGill University in Canada, who found the fossil while looking through samples at museum collections in China.

“There was a tiny rodent-like mammal foot about a centimeter long perfectly preserved inside a Microraptor skeleton.”

Close up photograph of the mammal foot among the ribs of Microraptor. (Hans Larsson/McGill University)

“These finds are the only solid evidence we have about the food consumption of these long extinct animals – and they are exceptionally rare,” Larsson adds.

The first Microraptor fossil was found in Liaoning, China, in 2000. There are three known species, which lived in the early Cretacious period, and the fossil in question belongs to Microraptor zhaoianus.

Illustration of a Microraptor with a rodent. (Hans Larsson)

The Microraptors were among some of the first dinosaurs that were found with fully feathered wings on both its arms and legs – and alongside the famous feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx, have reinforced theories that propose modern birds are closely related to categories of dinosaur.

While some studies have shown that Microraptors would have been capable of powered flight, it’s generally thought that they mostly used their wings to glide.

Up until now, the small dinosaurs had only been confirmed to eat birds, fish, and lizards, and they were thought to be arboreal hunters that glided down from the trees to capture prey.

Illustration of two Microraptors. (Durbed/Deviant Art/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The latest discovery expands on that idea, suggesting they were more likely to be opportunistic eaters that both scavenged and preyed upon a variety of vertebrates.

“We already know of Microraptor specimens preserved with parts of fish, a bird, and a lizard in their bellies. This new find adds a small mammal to their diet, suggesting these dinosaurs were opportunistic and not picky eaters,” says Larsson.

That’s a big deal, because although generalist carnivores are common and important stabilizers in today’s ecosystems – think of foxes and crows – this could very well be the first evidence of a generalist carnivores in a dinosaur ecosystem, Larsson and his team write.

It’s incredibly rare to find dinosaur fossils that preserve their last meal inside their stomach, they add. Out of all the carnivorous dinosaur fossils that have been found, we only know of 20 that contain their last meals.

The latest discovery takes that number to 21.

Understanding more about their diets isn’t just fascinating for those of us trying to imagine how the world looked 120 million years ago, it also provides important clues for the researchers working hard to understand exactly how dinosaurs left the land for the sky, and evolved into the true birds we see today.

“Knowing that Microraptor was a generalist carnivore puts a new perspective on how ancient ecosystems may have worked and a possible insight into the success of these small, feathered dinosaurs,” says Larsson.

The research has been published in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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Science

Ravenous meat-eating dinosaur’s guts preserved in exceptionally rare fossil

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The “exceptional” fossil of Daurlong wangi from the Upper Cretaceous period of Inner Mongolia, China. (Image credit: Wang, X. et al. Scientific Reports (2022); (CC BY 4.0))

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More than 100 million years ago, a fearsome birdlike dinosaur was swept into a lake and transformed into an exceptional fossil in what is now China, preserving one of the few intact gut remnants known from nonavian dinosaurs, a new study finds.

Paleontologists knew they had unearthed something special when they saw “a large bluish layer in the abdomen” of the fossilized beast, which belongs to the newly discovered species Daurlong wangi, as well as a dinosaur lineage called the dromaeosaurids, which includes the ancestors of modern birds. This bluish layer had “exceptional preservation” of the dinosaur’s gut, the researchers wrote in the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports (opens in new tab) on Nov. 19.

The finding offers valuable insight into both bird and dinosaur gut evolution, giving researchers a clearer window into dinnertime during the Lower Cretaceous (145 million to 100.5 million years ago). 

Related: These 125 million-year-old fossils may hold dinosaur DNA

Dromaeosaurids — also known as “raptors” — like D. wangi were mostly small, feathered and carnivorous. This group roamed the Earth from the mid-Jurassic period (about 167 million years ago) until the end of the Cretaceous period (66 million years ago). Their ranks included some of the most famous pop culture dinosaurs, such as Velociraptor and Deinonychus. But despite their popularity, little is known about their actual guts.

Soft tissue preservation is rare for any fossil, and intestinal preservation is particularly uncommon in dinosaurs. “This is the first case among dromaeosaurids,” study co-author Andrea Cau, an independent paleontologist based in Parma, Italy, told Live Science in an email. 

Fossilization conditions have to be just right in order to prevent decay-causing bacteria from eating away delicate soft tissues, such as cartilage and organs. The newly described D. wangi specimen was likely buried very quickly under soft, fine sediments at the bottom of a body of water in what is now the Jehol Biota — an area known for well-preserved fossils in modern-day Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in northern China. There, in the low-oxygen environment where aerobic bacteria could not survive, the dinosaur’s remains mineralized into fossils. 

The researchers named the dinosaur’s genus, “Daurlong,” after the Daur people of Inner Mongolia and “long,” the Chinese word for “dragon.” The species name, “wangi,” honors Wang Junyou, the director of the Inner Mongolian Museum of Natural History.

The remarkable preservation provides insight into how D. wangi lived, and what it could have eaten. From what the researchers could tell, its intestinal tract appears similar to the very few other remnants known from meat-eating dinosaurs, suggesting that more omnivorous dromaeosaurid gut plans didn’t evolve until after the dawn of modern birds following the Cretaceous period. It also appears that D. wangi ate small prey, such as mammals (which were no larger than badgers during the Mesozoic era), fish, other small dinosaurs and possibly amphibians. “Given the abundance of frogs and other amphibians in the Daurlong locality,” it’s possible that this dromaeosaurid hunted frogs and salamanders, Cau said.

Although D. wangi‘s guts were preserved, its stomach was not. Perhaps the “extremely acid environment of the stomach immediately after the death of the animal” prevented it from mineralizing and turning into a fossil, the researchers wrote in the study. 

Contrary to their depiction in the 1993 movie “Jurassic Park,” most dromaeosaurids were relatively small and lightweight. D. wangi itself was a little less than five feet (1.5 meters) long from tip to tail, about the size of a pony. And, like other members of its family, it sported feathers.

In the future, Cau and his team plan to examine the specimen more closely to glean insight about its feathers, life, and possibly its death. “Our hope is to determine some information about its plumage color in life and to better reconstruct the peculiar conditions which led to soft tissue preservation,” he said.

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Technology

Every US PS2 Game Manual Has Now Been Preserved in 4K (and It Cost $40,000)

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A game preservationist called Kirkland has done a great service to the world of video games – he has created a complete set of U.S. PS2 game manuals online in 4K that can be viewed for free at any time. Oh, and it cost $40,000 to complete.

As reported by Kotaku, Kirkland has preserved over 1,900 PS2 game manuals, variants, art books, mini-guides, and comics by uploading them to Archive.org in 4K, and in doing so has forever opened a door to a time before the digital renaissance.

Kirkland’s Collection of PS2 Games (Image Credit: Kirkland and Kotaku)

These game manuals used to be part of the joy of purchasing a new game, and you’d read them to learn how to play the game, see special art and other surprises, and more. These manuals are mostly a thing of the past now and either live online or have disappeared altogether, but Kirkland has helped ensure they won’t ever be forgotten.

The entire package comes in at around 17GB (230GB before compression!) and are organized alphabetically so you can jump to your favorite game with ease. For example, you can jump right into the game manual of Final Fantasy X and learn about the controls, each of the characters, the battle system, abilities, Aeons, and more. Also included are ads for merchandise, the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within DVD, and even an ad for Final Fantasy X-2.

As for why Kirkland chose to undergo this project that took him nearly 22 years to complete, he said it’s all about preserving that piece of history and that he wanted “our kids to be able to enjoy what we did.”

“The goal is to raise some awareness for game preservation efforts,” Kirkland said. “So many games growing up shaped how we looked at and experienced the world. Of course as we ‘grow up,’ we move to other things but there are a lot of us who have nostalgia for these things and want our kids to be able to enjoy what we did. The whole ‘read the books your father read’ deal. And there have been great efforts to preserve games: VGHF, the Strong Museum, and grassroots efforts like MAME, redump.org, No-Intro, and Cowering’s Good Tools before that. Which I always thought, ‘This is great! We’re going to have everything preserved. But without the manuals, we’re not going to know how to play them.’”

Kirkland had to take out the staples of each manual and scan each page through the Epson DS-870 sheetfed scanner. He then used a variety of apps to clean them up before uploading them in 2K and 4K resolution.

The Best PS1 Games Ever

Science

Scientists Discover 380 Million-Year-Old Heart, Stunningly Preserved

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A 380 million-year-old fish heart found embedded in a chunk of Australian sediment has scientists’ pulses racing. Not only is the organ in remarkable condition, but it could also yield clues about the evolution of jawed vertebrates, which include you and me. 

The heart belonged to an extinct class of armored, jawed fish called arthrodires that thrived in the Devonian period between 419.2 million and 358.9 million years ago — and the ticker’s a good 250 million years older than the jawed-fish heart that currently holds the “oldest” title. But despite the fish being so archaic, the positioning of its S-shaped heart with two chambers led researchers to observe surprising anatomical similarities between the ancient swimmer and modern sharks. 

“Evolution is often thought of as a series of small steps, but these ancient fossils suggest there was a larger leap between jawless and jawed vertebrates,” said professor Kate Trinajstic, a vertebrate paleontologist at Australia’s Curtin University and co-author of a new study on the findings. “These fish literally have their hearts in their mouths and under their gills — just like sharks today,” Trinajstic said. 

The study appeared in the journal Science on Wednesday. 

Scientists got an extra good look at the organ’s exact location because they were able to observe it in relation to the fish’s fossilized stomach, intestine and liver, a rare happening. 

“I can’t tell you how truly amazed I was to find a 3D and beautifully preserved heart and other organs in this ancient fossil,” Trinajstic said. 

The white ring shows the spiral valves of the intestine, but the heart isn’t visible here. “I was totally blown away by the fact we could actually see the soft tissues preserved in such an ancient fish,” says John Long, a professor of paleontology at Flinders University in Australia and co-author of a new study on the finding. “I knew immediately it was a very significant find.”


John Long/Flinders University

Paleontologists encountered the fossil during a 2008 expedition at the GoGo Formation, and it adds to a trove of information gleaned from the site, including the origins of teeth and insights into the fin-to-limb transition. The GoGo Formation, a sedimentary deposit in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, is known for its rich fossil record preserving reef life from the Devonian period of the Paleozoic era, including relics of tissues as delicate as nerves and embryos with umbilical cords. 

Anatomy of an arthrodire. 

  

“Most cases of soft-tissue preservation are found in flattened fossils, where the soft anatomy is little more than a stain on the rock,” said study co-author professor Per Ahlberg of Sweden’s Uppsala University. “We are also very fortunate in that modern scanning techniques allow us to study these fragile soft tissues without destroying them. A couple of decades ago, the project would have been impossible.”

Those techniques include neutron beams and X-ray microtomography, which creates cross sections of physical objects that can then be used to re-create virtual 3D models. 

Recent fish fossil finds have illuminated how “dinosaur fish,” a critically endangered species, stand on their heads and how much the prehistoric fish lizard looked like Flipper the dolphin. 

But for those who might not consider such discoveries significant, study co-author Ahlberg has a reminder: that life is, at its most fundamental level, an evolving system. 

“That we ourselves and all the other living organisms with which we share the planet have developed from a common ancestry through a process of evolution is not an incidental fact,” Ahlberg said. “It is the most profound truth of our existence. We are all related, in the most literal sense.” 

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Science

Scientists Discover 380 Million-Year-Old Heart, Stunningly Preserved

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A 380 million-year-old fish heart found embedded in a chunk of Australian sediment has scientists’ pulses racing. Not only is this organ in remarkable condition, but it could also yield clues about the evolution of jawed vertebrates, which include you and me. 

The heart belonged to an extinct class of armored, jawed fish called arthrodires that thrived in the Devonian period between 419.2 million and 358.9 million years ago — and it’s a good 250 million years older than the jawed-fish heart that currently holds the “oldest” title. But despite the fish being so archaic, the positioning of its S-shaped ticker with two chambers led researchers to observe surprising anatomical similarities between the ancient swimmer and modern sharks. 

“Evolution is often thought of as a series of small steps, but these ancient fossils suggest there was a larger leap between jawless and jawed vertebrates,” said professor Kate Trinajstic, a vertebrate paleontologist at Australia’s Curtin University and co-author of a new study on the findings. “These fish literally have their hearts in their mouths and under their gills — just like sharks today,” Trinajstic said. 

The study appeared in the journal Science on Wednesday. 

Scientists got an extra good look at the organ’s exact location because they were able to observe it in relation to the fish’s fossilized stomach, intestine and liver, a rare happening. 

“I can’t tell you how truly amazed I was to find a 3D and beautifully preserved heart and other organs in this ancient fossil,” Trinajstic said. 

The white ring shows the spiral valves of the intestine, but the heart isn’t visible here. “I was totally blown away by the fact we could actually see the soft tissues preserved in such an ancient fish,” says John Long, a professor of paleontology at Flinders University in Australia and co-author of a new study on the finding. “I knew immediately it was a very significant find.”


John Long/Flinders University

Paleontologists encountered the fossil during a 2008 expedition at Western Australia’s GoGo Formation, and it adds to a trove of information gleaned from the site, including the origins of teeth and insights into the fin-to-limb transition. The GoGo Formation, a sedimentary deposit in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, is known for its rich fossil record preserving reef life from the Devonian period of the Paleozoic era, including relics of tissues as delicate as nerves and embryos with umbilical cords. 

Anatomy of an arthrodire. 

  

“Most cases of soft-tissue preservation are found in flattened fossils, where the soft anatomy is little more than a stain on the rock,” said study co-author professor Per Ahlberg of Sweden’s Uppsala University. “We are also very fortunate in that modern scanning techniques allow us to study these fragile soft tissues without destroying them. A couple of decades ago, the project would have been impossible.”

Those techniques include neutron beams and X-ray microtomography, which creates cross sections of physical objects that can then be used to re-create virtual 3D models. 

Recent fish fossil finds have illuminated how “dinosaur fish,” a critically endangered species, stand on their heads and how much the prehistoric fish lizard looked like Flipper the dolphin. 

And study co-author Ahlberg has a reminder for those who might not consider such finds significant: that life is, at its most fundamental level, an evolving system. 

“That we ourselves and all the other living organisms with which we share the planet have developed from a common ancestry through a process of evolution is not an incidental fact,” Ahlberg said. “It is the most profound truth of our existence. We are all related, in the most literal sense.” 

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Science

‘Never seen anything like it’: Impeccably preserved Jurassic fish fossils found on UK farm

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A farm in England was the unlikely source of a Jurassic jackpot: a treasure trove of 183 million-year-old fossils. On the outskirts of Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds, beneath soil that is currently trampled under the hooves of grazing cattle, researchers recently uncovered the fossilized remains of fish, giant marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs, squids, insects and other ancient animals dating to the early part of the Jurassic period (201.3 million to 145 million years ago). 

Of the more than 180 fossils logged during the dig, one of the standout specimens was a three-dimensionally preserved fish head that belonged to Pachycormus, an extinct genus of ray-finned fishes. The fossil, which researchers found embedded in a hardened limestone nodule poking out of the clay, was exceptionally well preserved and contained soft tissues, including scales and an eye. The 3D nature of the pose of the specimen’s head and body was such that the researchers couldn’t compare it to any other previous find.  

“The closest analogue we could think of was Big Mouth Billy Bass,” said Neville Hollingworth, a field geologist with the University of Birmingham who discovered the site with his wife, Sally, a fossil preparator and the dig’s coordinator. “The eyeball and socket were well preserved. Usually, with fossils, they’re lying flat. But in this case, it was preserved in more than one dimension, and it looks like the fish is leaping out of the rock,” Hollingworth told Live Science.

A fish’s scales and eyes were some of the soft tissues preserved for more than 180 million years.  (Image credit: Dean Lomax)

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Sally Hollingworth added. “You could see the scales, skin, spine — even its eyeball is still there.”

The sight astounded the Hollingworths so much that they contacted ThinkSee3D, a company that creates digital 3D models of fossils, to create an (opens in new tab)interactive 3D image (opens in new tab) of the fish to help bring it to life and to allow researchers to study it more closely.

Related: Enormous graveyard of alien-like sea creatures discovered at ‘Jurassic Pompeii’ in central UK

Most of the fossils the Hollingworths and a team of scientists and specialists unearthed were located behind the farm’s cowshed. (The farm is home to a herd of English longhorn — a British breed of beef cattle with long, curved horns — many of which kept a close eye on the excavation.)

“It was a bit unnerving digging when you’re being watched by a herd of longhorn,” Sally Hollingworth told Live Science.

At one time, this region of the United Kingdom was completely submerged by a shallow, tropical sea, and the sediments there likely helped preserve the fossils; Neville Hollingworth described the Jurassic beds as slightly horizontal, with layers of soft clays under a shell of harder limestone beds.

“When the fish died, they sank to the bottom of the seabed,” said fossil marine reptile specialist Dean Lomax, a visiting scientist at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and a member of the excavation group. “As with other fossils, the minerals from the surrounding seabed continually replaced the original structure of the bones and teeth. In this case, the site shows that there was very little to no scavenging, so they must’ve been rapidly buried by the sediment. As soon as they hit the seabed, they were covered over and protected immediately.”

During the four-day dig earlier this month, the eight-person team used a digger to excavate 262 feet (80 meters) across the farm’s grassy banks, “pulling back layers to reveal a small slice of geological time,” Neville Hollingworth said. A number of diverse specimens dated to the Toarcian age (a stage of the Jurassic that occurred between 183 million and 174 million years ago) and included belemnites (extinct squid-like cephalopods), ammonites (extinct shelled cephalopods), bivalves and snails, in addition to fish and other marine animals.

“It’s important that we can compare these fossils with other Toarcian age fossil sites, not only in the U.K. but also across Europe and potentially sites in America,” Lomax said. He pointed to Strawberry Bank Lagerstätte, an early Jurassic site in southern England, as one such example.

The group plans to continue studying the specimens and is working toward publishing the findings. Meanwhile, a selection of the fossils will be placed on display at the Museum in the Park in Stroud.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Science

Never-before-seen crystals found in perfectly preserved meteorite dust

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A close-up image of one of the new crystals taken using an electron microscope. (Image credit: Taskaev et al.)

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Researchers have discovered never-before-seen types of crystal hidden in tiny grains of perfectly preserved meteorite dust. The dust was left behind by a massive space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, nine years ago.

On Feb. 15, 2013, an asteroid measuring 59 feet (18 meters) across and weighing 12,125 tons (11,000 metric tons) entered Earth‘s atmosphere at around 41,600 mph (66,950 km/h). Fortunately, the meteor exploded around 14.5 miles (23.3 kilometers) above the city of Chelyabinsk in southern Russia, showering the surrounding area in tiny meteorites and avoiding a colossal single collision with the surface. Experts at the time described the event as a major wake-up call to the dangers asteroids pose to the planet.

The Chelyabinsk meteor explosion was the largest of its kind to occur in Earth’s atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska event. It exploded with a force 30 times greater than the atomic bomb that rocked Hiroshima, according to NASA (opens in new tab). Video footage (opens in new tab) of the event showed the space rock burning up in a flash of light that was briefly brighter than the sun, before creating a powerful sonic boom that broke glass, damaged buildings and injured around 1,200 people in the city below, according to Live Science’s sister site Space.com (opens in new tab). 

In a new study, researchers anlyzed some of the tiny fragments of space rock that were left behind after the meteor exploded, known as meteorite dust. Normally, meteors produce a small amount of dust as they burn up, but the tiny grains are lost to scientists because they are either too small to find, scattered by the wind, fall into water or are contaminated by the environment. However, after the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded, a massive plume of dust hung in the atmosphere for more than four days before eventually raining down on Earth’s surface, according to NASA. And luckily, layers of snow that fell shortly before and after the event trapped and preserved some dust samples until scientists could recover them shortly after. 

Related: Diamond hauled from deep inside Earth holds never-before-seen mineral 

The researchers stumbled upon the new types of crystal while they were examining specks of the dust under a standard microscope. One of these tiny structures, which was only just big enough to see under the microscope, was fortuitously in focus right at the center of one of the slides when one team member peered through the eyepiece. If it had been anywhere else the team would likely have missed it, according to Sci-News (opens in new tab).  

After analyzing the dust with more powerful electron microscopes, the researchers found many more of these crystals and examined them in much greater detail. However, even then, “finding the crystals using an electron microscope was rather challenging due to their small size,” the researchers wrote in their paper, which was published May 7 in The European Physical Journal Plus (opens in new tab). 

A computer model showing a massive cloud of dust in the atmosphere leftover from the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion in 2013. (Image credit: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio)

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The new crystals came in two distinct shapes; quasi-spherical, or “almost spherical,” shells and hexagonal rods, both of which were “unique morphological peculiarities,” the researchers wrote in the study. 

Further analysis using X-rays revealed that the crystals were made of layers of graphite — a form of carbon made from overlapping sheets of atoms, commonly used in pencils  — surrounding a central nanocluster at the heart of the crystal. The researchers propose that the most likely candidates for these nanoclusters are buckminsterfullerene (C60), a cage-like ball of carbon atoms, or polyhexacyclooctadecane (C18H12), a molecule made from carbon and hydrogen. 

The team suspects that the crystals formed in the high-temperature and high-pressure conditions created by the meteor breaking apart, although the exact mechanism is still unclear. In the future, the scientists hope to track down other samples of meteorite dust from other space rocks to see if these crystals are a common byproduct of meteor break-ups or are unique to the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Science

Scientists claim they’ve found a perfectly preserved dinosaur fossil killed when the mass extinction asteroid hit the earth 66 million years ago

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The skin of a triceratops, perfectly preserved in this fossil found at the Tanis site, is being filmed by the BBC documentary crew.BBC Studios/Eric Burge

  • Several incredibly well-preserved dinosaur fossils were uncovered at Tanis, a site in North Dakota.

  • Scientists believe the dinosaurs died the day a giant asteroid hit the earth 66 million years ago.

  • The findings are the work of paleontologist Robert DePalma, who has previously attracted controversy.

Scientists claim to have found a fossil of a dinosaur killed on the day an extinction asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago.

Scientists say that the perfectly preserved leg of a Thescelosaurus dinosaur, complete with scaly skin, can be dated back to the mass extinction event because of the presence of debris from the impact, the BBC said.

It is widely believed that when the 7.5 mile-wide asteroid, approximately the size of Mount Everest, hit the Gulf of Mexico, all non-avian dinosaurs on earth were wiped out.

An upcoming BBC documentary looks at a slew of fossils found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. It includes the Thescelosaurus leg, seen in a video here, and the skin of a triceratops, pictured above.

Sir David Attenborough will narrate the upcoming BBC documentary.BBC Studios/Jon Sayer

The site is rich in well-preserved fossils, including fish, a turtle, and even the embryo of a flying pterosaur encased in an egg.

Scientists believe that tiny glass-like particles of molten rock lodged in the gills of fish fossils found at the site were kicked up by the asteroid’s explosive impact, the BBC said.

Spherules are seen in sediment.BBC Studios/Ali Pares

“We’ve got so many details with this site that tells us what happened moment by moment. It’s almost like watching it play out in the movies,” Robert DePalma, a graduate student from the University of Manchester, UK, who leads the Tanis dig, told the BBC.

Prof Phil Manning, DePalma’s Ph.D. supervisor at Manchester, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that the discovery was “absolutely bonkers” and something he “never dreamt in all my career.”

“The time resolution we can achieve at this site is beyond our wildest dreams. This really should not exist, and it’s absolutely gobsmackingly beautiful,” Manning said.

The documentary, which David Attenborough presents, was filmed over three years and will be released on April 15.

A discovery so ‘fabulous’ it has attracted skepticism

In the BBC documentary, Robert DePalma, a relative of film director Brian De Palma, can be seen sporting an Indiana Jones-style fedora and tan shirt.

He christened the paleontological site “Tanis,” the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant in the 1981 film “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” per The New Yorker.

The findings from Tanis, and the work of DePalma, have attracted controversy over the years.

Tanis dig-leader Robert DePalma talks with a colleague.BBC / Tom Traies

The New Yorker first wrote about the Tanis site in 2019 before presenting the findings in an academic journal.

While paleontologists usually cede their rights and curation of the fossils to institutions, DePalma, who had collected few academic laurels until the discovery of the site, insists on contractual clauses that give him oversight over the specimens. He has controlled how the fossils are presented, per The New Yorker.

In response to the article, Kate Wong, science editor of Scientific American, said in a 2019 tweet that the findings from the site “have met with a good deal of skepticism from the paleontology community.”

A few peer-reviewed papers have since been published, and the BBC said that the dig team promises more.

The BBC also said that it has called outside consultants to verify the specimens.

Prof Paul Barrett from London’s Natural History Museum looked at the leg and said it was a Thescelosaurus that likely died “more or less instantaneously.”

“It’s from a group that we didn’t have any previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very conclusively that these animals were very scaly like lizards. They weren’t feathered like their meat-eating contemporaries,” Barrett told the BBC.

However, Prof Steve Brusatte, an outside consultant on the documentary from the University of Edinburgh, told the BBC he was skeptical about the dinosaurs’ findings for now and would like to see the hypotheses being subjected to the scrutiny of peer review.

“Those fish with the spherules in their gills, they’re an absolute calling card for the asteroid. But for some of the other claims — I’d say they have a lot of circumstantial evidence that hasn’t yet been presented to the jury,” he said.

Prof Brusatte said that it is possible that some of the animals died before the asteroid strike but could have been exhumed and then buried again by the impact.

But ultimately, Brussate said the quality of the fossils trumps the controversy about the event’s timing.

“For some of these discoveries, though, does it even matter if they died on the day or years before? The pterosaur egg with a pterosaur baby inside is super-rare; there’s nothing else like it from North America. It doesn’t all have to be about the asteroid.”

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