Triassic wildlife after mass extinction

This video is called Excavating Triassic Fossils in Antarctica.

From ANI news agency:

Ups and downs of biodiversity after mass extinction unveiled

Saturday 22nd December, 2012

Marine animal groups like ammonoids and conodonts already peaked three or four million years earlier, namely still during the Early Triassic, researchers say.

The climate after the largest mass extinction so far 252 million years ago was cool, later very warm and cool again. Thanks to the cooler temperatures, the diversity of marine fauna ballooned, as paleontologists from the University of Zurich have reconstructed.

The warmer climate, coupled with a high CO2 level in the atmosphere, initially gave rise to new, short-lived species. In the longer term, however, this climate change had an adverse effect on biodiversity and caused species to become extinct.

Until now, it was always assumed that it took flora and fauna a long time to recover from the vast mass extinction at the end of the Permian geological period 252 million years ago.

According to the scientific consensus, complex ecological communities only began to reappear in the Middle Triassic, so 247 million years ago.

However, a Swiss team headed by paleontologist Hugo Bucher from the University of Zurich chart the temperature curves, demonstrating that the climate and the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere fluctuated greatly during the Early Triassic and what impact this had on marine biodiversity and terrestrial plants.

For their climate reconstruction, Bucher and his colleagues analyzed the composition of the oxygen isotopes in conodonts, the remains of chordates that once lived in the sea. According to the study, the climate at the beginning of the Triassic 249 million years ago was cool.

This cooler phase was followed by a brief very warm climate phase. At the end of the Early Triassic, namely between 247.9 and 245.9 million years ago, cooler conditions had resumed.

The scientists then examined the impact of the climate on the development of flora and fauna.

“Biodiversity increased most in the cooler phases,” Bucher said.

“The subsequent extremely warm phase, however, led to great changes in the marine fauna and a major ecological shift in the flora,” he said.

Bucher and his team can reveal that this decline in biodiversity in the warm phases correlates with strong fluctuations in the carbon isotope composition of the atmosphere.

These, in turn, were directly related to carbon dioxide gases, which stemmed from volcanic eruptions in the Siberian Large Igneous Province.

Through the climatic changes, conodont and ammonoid faunae were initially able to recover very quickly during the Early Triassic as unusually short-lived species emerged. However, the removal of excess CO2 by primary producers such as algae and terrestrial plants had adverse effects in the long run: The removal of these vast amounts of organic matter used up the majority of the oxygen in the water. Due to the lack of oxygen in the oceans, many marine species died out.

“Our studies reveal that greater climatic changes can lead to both the emergence and extinction of species. Thus, it is important to consider both extinction rates and the rate at which new species emerged,” Bucher added.

The study has been published in Nature Geoscience.

More than 200 million years ago, a massive extinction decimated 76 percent of marine and terrestrial species, marking the end of the Triassic period and the onset of the Jurassic. The event cleared the way for dinosaurs to dominate Earth for the next 135 million years, taking over ecological niches formerly occupied by other marine and terrestrial species: here.

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World’s oldest dinosaur discovery in Tanzania?

This video is called Dinosaur Evolution, 1 of 5.

From Discover magazine:

Scientists Discover the Oldest Dinosaur Yet…Maybe

By Breanna Draxler

December 6, 2012 11:13 am

Paleontologists in Tanzania have unearthed fossils from a new species of prehistoric reptile. The bones may have belonged to the world’s oldest dinosaur—or they may be from a reptile that kind of looks like a dinosaur.

Currently, the oldest confirmed dinosaur fossil dates back 230 million years. By this point in time, dinosaurs had grown in size and population to dominate the Earth. But when exactly did dinosaurs first enter the prehistoric picture, and how long did it take them to rise to such prominence? Paleontologists have narrowed the timeline down to the early or middle Triassic—the period of 20 million years before the oldest known dinosaur came to be.  The newfound species, dubbed Nyasasaurus parringtoni, predates this fossil by another 10 to 15 million years, and falls right in the middle of paleontologists’ projected timeframe for the first appearance of dinosaurs.

With only one upper arm bone and six vertebrae to work with, the researchers were able to glean a surprising amount of information about the newly discovered two-legged creature. It measured between 6 and 10 feet from head to tail, and only weighed between 45 and 130 pounds. Certain indicators in the fossils are unique to dinosaurs, namely an “elongated deltopectoral crest”—the attachment necessary to support strong chest muscles. Without more material the researchers cannot definitively declare the creature a dinosaur, rather than a silesaurid, the dinosaurs’ closest relative. Still, scientists say the fossils are the best available evidence of the presence of dinosaurs in the middle Triassic period, and regardless of how it ends up being classified, the new species offers a valuable view of the lives of early reptiles.

Image courtesy of Sterling J. Nesbitt, et. al.

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Flying fish fossil discovery

From the BBC:

31 October 2012 Last updated at 09:45

New flying fish fossils discovered in China

New flying fish fossils found in China provide the earliest evidence of vertebrate over-water gliding strategy.

Chinese researchers have tracked the “exceptionally well-preserved fossils” to the Middle Triassic of China (235-242 million years ago).

The Triassic period saw the re-establishment of ecosystems after the Permian mass extinction.

The fossils represent new evidence that marine ecosystems re-established more quickly than previously thought.

The Permian mass extinction had a bigger impact on the earth’s ecological systems than any other mass extinction, wiping out 90-95% of marine species.

Phenomenal flying fish

Previous studies have suggested that Triassic marine life developed more quickly than was once thought and that marine ecosystems were re-established more rapidly than terrestrial ecosystems.

The new research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal, was carried out by scientists from Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History.

The study shows that the new flying fish, named Potanichthys xingyiensis, was 153mm long and had the “unusual combination of morphological features” associated with gliding strategy in fishes.

The fossils show an asymmetrical, forked caudal (tail) fin and a “four-winged” body formation: a pair of enlarged pectoral fins forming “primary wings”, and a smaller pair of pelvic fins acting as “auxiliary wings”, according to the study.

The fossils were discovered in Guizhou Province in south-west China. They represent the first record of the extinct Thoracopteridae family of fishes to be found in Asia.

A reconstruction of what Potanichthys xingyiensis would have looked like

Previous Thoracopteridae fossils have been confined to the Upper Triassic of Austria and Italy, but the new discovery extends the group’s geographical distribution from the western to the eastern rim of the Paleo-Tethys Ocean (an ocean that closed during the Jurassic period).

The Triassic Thoracopteridae family belongs in the same Neopterygii group of animals as today’s flying fishes, of which there are around 50 species belonging to the Exocoetidae family.

Gliding has evolved many times in animals, such as in frogs, lizards and mammals but has “evolved only twice among fishes”, according to the study: once in the Triassic Thoracopteridae fishes and again in the modern-day Exocoetidae family.

Scientists suggest both families of flying fishes evolved so that they could escape marine predators by “gliding” over-water to safety.

Dutch 16th century book on fish by Adriaen Coenen: here.

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New Nothosaurus fossil in museum

19 April 2010.

According to Naturalis museum in Leiden, the Netherlands, a new reptile fossil has been added to their collection.

It is the oldest reptile fossil ever discovered in the Netherlands, a skull of Nothosaurus winkelhorsti; about 240 million years old, from the Triassic.

It was discovered in 1990 in Winterswijk in the eastern Netherlands. It is a primitive Nothosaurus species, three times smaller than later representatives of those swimming reptiles.

Triassic aetosaurs: here. And here.

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Permian-Triassic extinction survivor discovered in Antarctica

From BigNews Network:

Antarctica may have served as climatic refuge in Earth’s greatest extinction event

ANI Thursday 3rd December, 2009

Washington: A new fossil species suggests that some land animals may have survived Earth’s greatest extinction event, about 252 million years ago, by taking refuge in cooler climates in Antarctica.

Jorg Frobisch and Kenneth D. Angielczyk of The Field Museum together with Christian A. Sidor from the University of Washington have identified a distant relative of mammals, Kombuisia antarctica, that apparently survived the mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period by living in Antarctica.

The new species belongs to a larger group of extinct mammal relatives, called anomodonts, which were widespread and represented the dominant plant eaters of their time.

“Members of the group burrowed in the ground, walked the surface and lived in trees,” said Frobisch, the lead author of the study.

Kombuisia antarctica was not a direct ancestor of living mammals, but it was among the few lineages of animals that survived at a time when a majority of life forms perished.

When it served as refuge, Antarctica was located some distance north of its present location, was warmer and wasn’t covered with permanent glaciers, according to the researchers.

The refuge of Kombuisia in Antarctica probably wasn’t the result of a seasonal migration but rather a longer-term change that saw the animal’s habitat shift southward.

Fossil evidence suggests that small and medium sized animals were more successful at surviving the mass extinction than larger animals.

They may have engaged in “sleep-or-hide” behaviors like hibernation, torpor and burrowing to survive in a difficult environment.

Earlier work by Fröbisch predicted that animals like Kombuisia antarctica should have existed at this time, based on fossils found in South Africa later in the Triassic Period that were relatives of the animals that lived in Antarctica.

“The new discovery fills a gap in the fossil record and contributes to a better understanding of vertebrate survival during the end-Permian mass extinction from a geographic as well as an ecological point of view,” Frobisch said.

The team found the fossils of the new species among specimens collected more than three decades ago from Antarctica that are part of a collection at the American Museum of Natural History.

See also here. And here. And here.

Relationships & Monophyly of Therocephalian Therapsids: here.

An investigation into the cladistic relationships and monophyly of therocephalian therapsids (Amniota: Synapsida): here.

Extinction of many ammonites during the Triassic: here. See also here.

Dr Chen and his team are studying the much delayed recovery of marine species after the ‘Great Dying’, which occured 251 million years ago, by examining fossils around the world, particularly in his native South China, which, during the Triassic, enjoyed a temperate climate and was the site of a major re-flourishing of microfloras, then invertebrates and vertebrates following an order from low to high levels comparable to modern ecosystems: here.

About 250 million years about 95 per cent of life was wiped out in the sea and 70 per cent on land. Researchers at the University of Calgary believe they have discovered evidence to support massive volcanic eruptions burnt significant volumes of coal, producing ash clouds that had broad impact on global oceans: here.

The Permian extinction event was the biggest shake-up of life that Earth has ever seen: in the “Great Dying” that took place 250 million years ago, more than 90 percent of marine species were killed and about 70 percent of land animals vanished. The cause of this catastrophe has been debated for years, but new research suggests that volcanic eruptions triggered massive coal fires that pumped pollution into the air, eventually poisoning the planet: here.

The end-Permian crisis, by far the most dramatic biological crisis to affect life on Earth, was triggered by a number of physical environmental shocks – global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification and ocean anoxia. These were enough to kill off 90 per cent of living things on land and in the sea: here.

Tetraceratops insignis is not a close and nearly unknown relative with 4 horns of the well-known dinosaur Triceratops, but a very ancient mammal-like reptile or sphenacodontid (intermediate between therapsids and pelycosaurs). This classification is still uncertain and controversial among palaeontologists and, consequently, not definitive. In any case, Tetraceratops is considered an early therapsid, maybe the first one and still not completely evolved as such: here.

Scientists have uncovered a lot about the Earth’s greatest extinction event that took place 250 million years ago when rapid climate change wiped out nearly all marine species and a majority of those on land. Now, they have discovered a new culprit likely involved in the annihilation: an influx of mercury into the eco-system: here.

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New plateosaurus in natural history museum

This video is called Plateosaurus Tribute.

On Wednesday 30 September, a recently aquired plateosaurus fossil skeleton will be assembled in Naturalis museum in Leiden, the Netherlands.

This assembling will be open to the museum public.

The plateosaurus is over five meter in size. It is from Frick in Switzerland, where over a hundred specimens of this dinosaur have been discovered in a mass grave.

This will be the third dinosaur in the Naturalis museum.

Special Issue: Unearthing the Anatomy of Dinosaurs: New Insights Into Their Functional Morphology and Paleobiology: here.

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Fossil Shark That Ate Fossil Amphibian That Ate Fossil Bony Fish discovered

This video says about itself:

One of the most dramatic and mysterious events in the history of life, the so-called “Great Dying” of animals and plants some 250 million years ago, continues to fascinate and baffle scientists. Of the five or so mass extinctions recorded in Earth’s fossils, this one at the end of the Permian period and the start of the Triassic was the most catastrophic.

From LiveScience:

There Once Was a Shark That Ate an Amphibian That Ate a Fish …

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

posted: 27 November 2007 07:33 am ET

A fossilized shark that swallowed a crocodile-like amphibian that, in turn, had gobbled up a fish has now been unearthed.

This exceptional find marks the first time scientists have found direct evidence of such a complex, extinct food chain.

In the past, researchers had uncovered evidence of what past species ate based on the fossilized contents of their guts or droppings. For instance, fossilized dung, or “coprolites,” have revealed some dinosaurs ate grass.

“Prey, especially in the gut or intestines of fossil organisms, are very rarely preserved,” said paleobiologist Jurgen Kriwet at Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany. At most, only a single victim or perhaps several of the same species are preserved, he added.

By accident, Kriwet and his colleagues discovered the new shark fossil in a museum collection. These exceptionally preserved remains are roughly 290 million years old, pre-dating the emergence of the dinosaurs.

The freshwater shark, some 20 inches (50 centimeter) long, dates back to the late Permian period, when the Saar-Nahe Basin in southwest Germany was peppered with short-lived lakes. In the shark’s gut were two young amphibians known as temnospondyls, each roughly 8 inches to 10 inches (20 to 25 centimeters) large.

“The temnospondyl was crocodile-like,” Kriwet said. “The temnospondyls in the gut of the shark were larvae. Their adult equivalents grew very big up to one meter (three feet), maybe more, and they occupied the niche that is occupied today by crocodiles in lakes.”

“Crocodiles were not around in the Permian,” he added. “They evolved much later.” The disappearance of the temnospondyls appears linked with the rise of the crocodiles, Kriwet explained.

In turn, one of the amphibians possessed the remains of a digested bony fish that was about four inches (10 centimeters) long during life. Adults of this fish grew up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) or more.

The remarkable fossils shed welcome new light onto the ancient world. For instance, “no other extinct or modern, living shark is known to feed on amphibians,” Kriwet told LiveScience.

Future research could help reconstruct ancient food webs “and might shed light on how modern food webs in aquatic systems arose.”

The findings were detailed online Oct. 30 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The shark is in the genus Triodus. It is Triodus sessilis. The bony fish is an acanthodian. It is Acanthodes bronni.

See also here.

Amphibians and evolution: here.

Fish-amphibian transition: here.

A new stereospondyl from the German Middle Triassic, and the origin of the Metoposauridae: here.

Salamander-like development in a seymouriamorph revealed by palaeohistology: here.

AMPHIBIANS FROM THE MIDDLE JURASSIC BALABANSAI SVITA IN THE FERGANA DEPRESSION, KYRGYZSTAN (CENTRAL ASIA): here.

Permian sharks: here.

The world’s only animal, past or present, with a complete 360-degree spiral of teeth was Helicoprion, which sliced into prey like a buzz saw. This shark-like fish, which lived 270 million years ago, is described in the latest issue of Biology Letters. It had one of the most unusual mouths and sets of teeth in the animal kingdom: here.

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First fossil mammal found in New Zealand

This video from the USA says about itself:

Oct 15, 2008

On the Science Channel‘s “Mammals vs. Dinos,” paleontologist Adrian Hunt discovered Adelobasileus, the oldest known mammalian fossil in the Chinle Formation. Adelobasileus is thought to be the common ancestor of mammals and lived 200 million years ago.

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Ancient Kiwi ‘mouse’ fills fossil gap

Marilyn Head

ABC Science Online

Tuesday, 12 December 2006

Palaeontologists have found remains of one of the most primitive type of land mammal in the world, a mouse-sized creature that’s unlike any mammal alive today.

The find, at the edge of a swampy lake on New Zealand’s South Island, not only fills a gap of the nation’s fossil record, it may also help us understand more about the origin of mammals worldwide.

Researchers, led by Trevor Worthy from Australia’s University of Adelaide, publish their results today online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Many types of mammals evolved in the Mesozoic period when the dinosaurs dominated, says co-author Alan Tennyson, a palaeontologist from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

But most of those early lineages are now extinct and mammals living today fall into only one of three groups: placentals, marsupials or monotremes.

But this latest find, in sediments deposited 16-19 million years ago, doesn’t fit into any of these groups.

“This is an incredible find. We never expected to find anything like this,” says Tennyson.

“What’s so exciting about this fossil mammal is that it is from one of those ancient lineages that we thought had become extinct much earlier.

This will help us understand more about the origin of mammals worldwide,” he says.

The find is particularly significant for New Zealand as there are virtually no fossils of terrestrial vertebrates between 65 million years ago, when an asteroid impact is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs, and about 1 million years ago.

In other parts of the world many different mammals evolved to replace dinosaurs as the dominant species.

But in New Zealand the only terrestrial vertebrates that seemed to have evolved were reptiles, frogs, and birds – not mammals.

That’s despite the fact that New Zealand’s landmass separated from Gondwana after many mammals had evolved.

“The suggestion has been that giant birds, like the extinct Haast eagle and the moa, filled the ecological niches that mammals like tigers and grazing animals did elsewhere,” says Tennyson.

“But this is a very primitive mammal and it’s unlikely to have lived here for 60 million years without diversification.

So it opens the possibility that there may be bigger mammals to be found.”

The researchers say the discovery implies the existence of one or more ‘ghost lineages’ and suggests that mammals may have existed on New Zealand more than 125 million years ago.

That may contradict an alternative theory for the lack of fossil evidence for terrestrial mammals: that New Zealand was completely submerged about 25 million years ago and that all of its animals and plants arrived from nearby landmasses.

But the paper suggests that the discovery, along with other Mesozoic survivors such as the lizard-like tuatara and New Zealand’s primitive frogs, confirms that at least some land remained above water throughout the period.

See also here.

And here.

And here.

Kiwi on small New Zealand island: here.

The recently described St Bathans Fauna, from the Manuherikia Group, Early–Middle Miocene, 19–16 Ma, New Zealand, includes six anatid taxa: here.

Australia: digging for dinosaurs and dinosaur age spiny anteater relatives: here.

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Indonesia: expedition looks for 280 million year old plants in Sumatra

From Dutch museum Naturalis:

An international team of researchers, brought together by Naturalis, from 24 July to 19 August are going to northern Sumatra to collect about 280 million year old leaves, trunks, and seeds, to look how the flora on this island developed after the breakup of [original big continent] Pangea.

They wrote a weblog on this research into the Permian period flora.

See also here.

Permian-Triassic mass extinction: here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

Crater of Permian mass extinction in Wilkes Land, Antarctica? Here.

Mass extinctions and their causes: here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

Discosauriscus, Permian amphibian from Czech republic: here.

Petrified forest from Namibia, 250 million years old: here.

Norway: first dinosaur fossil found

The BBC reports:

North Sea fossil is deepest dino

The first dinosaur fossil discovered in Norway is also the deepest one that has been found anywhere in the world.

The 195-210-million-year-old specimen was found 2.3km (1.4 miles) below the floor of the North Sea by an offshore oil drilling platform.

Norwegian palaeontologist Jorn Harald Hurum, from the University of Oslo, identified the fossil as the knucklebone of a plateosaur.

Details of the discovery are to appear in the Norwegian Journal of Geology.

“It’s the first time a dinosaur bone has ever been found in such a deep core,” Dr Hurum told the BBC News website.

Marine reptile fossils have been found in some previous North Sea drill cores, but to find a terrestrial animal at such a depth is rare.

“To drill through a terrestrial animal is much rarer because there are so many more marine sediments there,” Dr Hurum, assistant professor of vertebrate palaeontology at Oslo’s Natural History Museum, explained.

The crushed knucklebone was identified in a long cylinder of rock drilled out from an exploration well at Norway’s Snorre offshore field.

Enigmatic specimen

The geologists who drilled the core spotted the curious specimen in 1997; but they were discouraged by colleagues who thought it was plant matter and tucked it away in a drawer.

Only in 2003 did they pass the specimen to Hurum, who thought it looked like a dinosaur.

Plateosaurus fossils are known from across Europe

After consulting palaeontologists at the University of Bonn in Germany, a microscopic examination of the specimen showed it to be identical in structure to bones from a Plateosaurus species.

This dinosaur is the most common type found in Europe. At the time it lived, there was a desert between Norway and Greenland crossed by meandering rivers.

“We knew there was food there, so something must have been eating it; but we didn’t know what animals were there,” Dr Hurum said.

Dr Hurum describes himself as Norway’s only dinosaur researcher. Successive ice ages have eroded dinosaur-bearing rocks in mainland Norway.

But the scientist thinks fossils could be found on the northern island of Spitsbergen.

See also here.

Dinosaur tracks in the USA: here.

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