Discovery of ancient bee nests in fossils points to a never-before-seen behaviour.


The findings help to fill a gap in the fossil record since all other bee fossils described in the Caribbean were discovered within amber and are much older, dating back around 20 million years, Viñola-López explained.

The study authors believe that fossils housing the bee nests date back to around 20,000 years ago and could shed light on how bees have adapted to their environment, even in the ancient past.

“There’s very little known about the ecology of many of the bees on these islands,” Viñola-López said. “This shows that the diversity of nesting processes of bees is actually really big and sometimes expands past what we think is normal. … It also tells that we have to, when we prepare specimens, look closer for all the things that can get preserved inside these ones, which can show very strange behaviours of species that we think that we understand relatively well.”
A fossil within a fossil

Viñola-López was exploring the cave with colleagues in the summer of 2022, looking for specimens to study for his doctoral program at the University of Florida and the Florida Museum of Natural History. The cave itself holds a story, as it contains layer upon layer of fossils from more than 50 species, including rodents, birds and reptiles.

#Astronomers detect cosmic flash from early universe star blast.


An immensely powerful flash detected earlier this year was created by a massive star exploding when the universe was just five percent of its current age, astronomers said Tuesday.

The flash was spotted on March 14 by a French-Chinese space telescope called SVOM, which launched last year on a mission to track gamma-ray bursts, the brightest and most powerful explosions in the cosmos.

When the young scientists working on the mission for France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) received a mobile phone alert that a major burst had arrived at Earth, they urged other telescopes to turn towards the source.

It came from a star around a hundred times bigger than our Sun that exploded 700 million years after the Big Bang, according to two studies published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.

“This is extremely rare -- it’s the fifth most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected,” said Bertrand Cordier, the CEA’s scientific lead for SVOM and a co-author of both studies.

“The photons that reached our instruments travelled for 13 billion years” to reach Earth, he told AFP.

The detection of the burst, which lasted tens of seconds, is also “the most precise in terms of the light we collected and the measurements we made,” he added.
- Glimpse of ancient cosmos -

Gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic events in the universe, Cordier explained. They are thought to be caused by cataclysmic cosmic events such as massive stars going supernova or when binary neutron stars merge.

These flashes can release as much energy in a few seconds as our Sun will emit during its 10-billion-year life.

They shoot out matter at “speeds close to the speed of light”, creating conditions impossible to reproduce on Earth, Cordier said.

These bright flashes also act as “probes” of the cosmos, illuminating all the matter they pass through before finally reaching us, he added.

This allows scientists a rare glimpse into the distant past of the universe, which is 13.8 billion years old.

The gamma-ray burst in March, called GRB250314A, was created by an explosion during the first generation of stars formed after the Big Bang.

These stars produced the first heavy elements -- such as iron, carbon and oxygen -- which played a fundamental role in the evolution of the universe.

Cordier hopes SVOM will be able to detect one or two similar events every year.

“The challenge is to get everything together in the chain” of observations which involves other telescopes, he said.

For example, after the burst was first detected in March, it took 17 hours before the Very Large Telescope in Chile turned its powerful lens towards the flash.

“During that time, the intensity had decreased,” Cordier said.

“If we get there earlier, then we’ll have better data.”

By Bénédicte Salvetat Rey

#Archeologists uncover intact section of ancient Jerusalem wall from Hanukkah era.


Last week, archeologists finished excavating the most complete part ever discovered of the foundations of the walls, which surrounded Jerusalem during the time of the Hasmonean Kingdom, when the story of Hanukkah took place.

In Hebrew, Hanukkah means “dedication,” and the holiday marks the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem in the second century B.C., after a small group of Jewish fighters liberated it from occupying foreign forces, and the Hasmonean Kingdom that followed.

Jews celebrate the eight-day holiday, which this year begins on Dec. 14, with the ritual of lighting a nightly candle, in honour of the tiny supply of ritually pure oil that they found in the temple that lasted for eight nights instead of just one. Many also eat fried foods such as potato pancakes, called latkes, to memorialize this miraculously long-lasting oil.

The Hasmonean wall foundation, whose excavation was finished last week in Jerusalem, was likely built a few decades after the story of Hanukkah by the same rulers. It’s almost 50 metres (164 feet) long, around half the length of a football field, and around 5 metres (16 feet) wide. It held walls, which according to estimations and some historical writings, were taller than the current walls surrounding Jerusalem’s Old City.

Much of the current walls surrounding Jerusalem’s Old City date back hundreds of years to the Ottoman Era.

The Hasmonean walls encircled an area much larger than the current Old City of Jerusalem, with 60 watchtowers along the wall that were more than 10 metres (33 feet) tall, according to ancient writings. The part recently uncovered is one of the longest sections found intact from the foundation of the Hasmonean walls.
Separation wall and ceasefire

One of the most interesting aspects of the foundation was that the wall above it seems to have been purposefully and uniformly dismantled to a uniform height, not chaotically destroyed by the ravages of time or war, said Dr. Amit Re’em, one of the lead archeologists for the project from the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Experts wondered why any leader would take apart a perfectly good security wall in an area that was constantly threatened by invasion.

In 132 or 133 B.C., Hellenistic King Antiochus the Seventh, an heir to the Antiochus the Fourth from the story of Hanukkah, laid siege to Jerusalem and the Judean Kingdom, according to ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.

As the Judean army struggled, Jewish king John Hyrcanus I decided to strike a deal with Antiochus. He raided King David’s tomb for 3,000 talents of silver and offered 500 hostages, including his own brother, according to the writings of Josephus.

“Antiochus Sidetes (the Seventh) reached a ceasefire agreement with John Hyrcanus, saying, if you want me to remove my army, you yourself, the Jewish king, must raze to the ground the Hasmonean fortification that you and your father built,” Re’em said Monday. Josephus’ writings state that after Antiochus accepted Hyrcanus’ deal, they “pulled down the walls encircling the city.”

“We just think that we found the archeological proof for it, so it’s pretty amazing, the archeology and the ancient stories combining together, this is the magic of Jerusalem,” Re’em said.

Another hypothesis Re’em posits is that King Herod built his palace over the Hasmonean wall foundations, during his reign in the first-century B.C., as a clear message of his sovereignty over Jewish Jerusalem.

Other archeologists were intrigued by why this section of the Hasmonean wall seems to have been dismantled.

Orit Peleg-Barkat, the head of classical archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, believes it likely had more to do with King Herod’s palace than the ceasefire deal with Antiochus.

Other sections of the Hasmonean wall uncovered in other parts of Jerusalem weren’t dismantled, so it could have just been one section that was dismantled, possibly to provide a foundation for Herod’s palace, Peleg-Barkat explained. Its unlikely that Jerusalem was left unprotected without any security walls for more than a century, she said.
Wall under a prison

The current section of the wall was uncovered underneath an abandoned wing of the building known as the Kishleh, which was built in 1830 as a military base. The wing was used as a prison, including by the British up until the 1940s, and the walls were covered with graffiti carved by prisoners in English, Hebrew and Arabic. The remnants of the iron bars of the cells are still visible in the ceiling.

Most of the building is still used by the Israeli police today, but one wing was abandoned and later transferred to the Tower of David Museum. Archeologists first began excavating this wing of the Kishleh in 1999, but violence in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, halted the excavations until two years ago.

Archeologists removed the equivalent of two Olympic swimming pools worth of dirt and debris by hand over the past two years from the hall. The excavations revealed what they believe are Middle Age-era dye pits, likely for fabric dying, and the long section of the Hasmonean wall foundation.

In the coming years, the Tower of David Museum will install a floating glass floor over the ruins and use the hall as one of its new galleries in the Schulich Wing of Archeology, Art and Innovation. The renovations of this section are expected to take at least two years, now that the archeological dig has concluded.

Melanie Lidman, The Associated Press

Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved, But what was once the home of a Christian Scientist church, is now the holy grail of Internet history — the Internet Archive, a non-profit library run by a group of software engineers and librarians, who for nearly 30 years have been saving the web one page at a time.

Inside the stained-glass-adorned sanctuary, the sounds of church sermons have been replaced by the hum of servers, where the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves web pages.

The Wayback #Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical information on what corporations, people and governments have published online in the past, long after their websites have been updated or changed.

For many, the Wayback Machine is like a living history of the internet, and it just logged its trillionth page last month.

Archiving the web is more important and more challenging than ever before. The White House in January ordered vast amounts of government webpages to be taken down. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is blurring the line between what’s real and what’s artificially generated — in some ways replacing the need to visit websites entirely. And more of the internet is now hidden behind paywalls or tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.

It’s the Internet Archive’s job to figure out how to preserve it all.

“We are here to try to provide a record of what happened, so that people can learn and build on that to build a better future, or to build new ideas that are worthy of being in the (Internet Archive’s) library,” said Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle.
The internet’s library

Kahle created the archive in 1996 when a year’s worth of saved pages could fit on about 2 terabytes worth of hard drives, the amount of storage you can get today in an iPhone. Now, the archive is saving closer to 150 terabytes, or hundreds of millions worth of web pages, per day.

Kahle is the driving force and personality behind the archive, with the exuberance and energy of your favourite science teacher and like an evangelist whose religion is libraries and technology. Sitting for an interview on the original wooden pews of the church, Kahle said he was inspired to purchase the building because it resembles the group’s logo. But more importantly, he said it’s a symbol of permanence and a reference to the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

“That was the first time somebody tried to go and collect everything ever written by humans,” Kahle said. “Of course, now that place is the internet, and the Internet Archive serves the whole internet as a library.”

The Wayback Machine tool does more than just screenshot the page. It also saves the technical architecture — the HTML, CSS, JavaScript codes and more — so that it can attempt to “replay the page as it existed” even if the server is no longer functioning, said Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham.

The rise of artificial intelligence and AI chatbots means the Internet Archive is changing how it records the history of the internet. In addition to web pages, the Internet Archive now captures AI-generated content, like ChatGPT answers and those summaries that appear at the top of Google search results.

The Internet Archive team, which is made up of librarians and software engineers, are experimenting with ways to preserve how people get their news from chatbots by coming up with hundreds of questions and prompts each day based on the news, and recording both the queries and outputs, Graham said.

The group keeps copies of its archive in locations around the world in the event of a fire or flood that could damage its servers. But there are political considerations behind this approach, as well. The Trump administration has exerted pressure over content it disagrees with by filing lawsuits against media companies or by way of the Federal Communications Commission.

“Libraries are always targeted. The new guys often don’t like the old stuff around. So let’s design for it,” Kahle said. “Let’s go and live up to the moment and make it so that there’s different points of view stored and made permanently accessible in different environments.”

The Trump administration implemented a massive overhaul of government websites that included taking down countless pages on everything from health policies to the achievements of minority members of the military. It was the archive, which has been saving webpages during the transition of presidential administration websites since 2004, which enabled journalists to understand what had been altered.

“This change was huge. Whole sections of the web came down,” Kahle said. “(The administration) has a new point of view, and that’s why we have libraries to go and have the record.”
The people preserving the web

Most of the archive’s servers live in a large warehouse outside of San Francisco, although a set of servers have been symbolically placed in the main sanctuary of the former church. That placement is intentional, said Kahle. By displaying the servers, he hopes “that people understand that we’re all part of the collective protection for our knowledge.”

The headquarters is an homage to the work of the Internet Archive’s 200 staff members, which include engineers, librarians and archivists.

Archivists use bespoke machines to digitize books page by page, livestreaming their work on YouTube for all to see (alongside some lo-fi music). Record players churn out vintage tunes from 1920s and 1940s, and the building houses every type of media console for any type of content imaginable, from microfilm, to CDs and satellite television. (The Internet Archive preserves music, television, books and video games, too).

The former church’s main sanctuary also boasts more than 100 three-foot statues of employees who have been on staff for at least three years – a reference to the famous Chinese terracotta army from thousands of years ago.

In some ways, the space captures the quirkiness -— and community — of the internet itself.

“There are a lot of people that are just passionate about the cause. There’s a cyberpunk atmosphere,” Annie Rauwerda, a Wikipedia editor and social media influencer, said at a party thrown at the Internet Archive’s headquarters to celebrate reaching a trillion pages “The internet (feels) quite corporate when I use it a lot these days, but you wouldn’t know from the people here.”

The headquarters might feel something like a living history exhibit. But the Internet Archive’s goal, says Kahle, is to preserve the web so that it can continue to have a future, not to be the arbiters of truth.

“It’s not a presentation. It’s not a museum that has a story,” he said. “It’s trying to be a resource to make it so that other people can come up with their own ideas.”

A footprint fossil from long before dinosaurs roamed is raising big questions on P.E.I.

It dates back about 290 million years, to the Permian Period. But researchers say the animal they think likely left it has no fossil record that early, suggesting this may be the oldest known example and could shift the evolutionary timeline back.

“I was dumbfounded,” said Patrick Brunet, a self-taught citizen scientist who found the fossil along the shore of Hillsborough Bay.

For five years, Brunet has combed the Island, checking places that usually produce finds. On an eventful day six months ago, at a spot that had never delivered, he found the biggest footprint he’s ever seen. About 25 centimetres wide, it’s larger than many tracks from that period.

“That’s the mystery and that’s the big question and that’s what going to be studied,” Brunet said.

Island investigators will make the case that it is Pachypes, a type of track typically linked to Pareiasaurus, stocky, plant-eating reptiles. That’s where the timeline gets tricky.

“The only Cinderella that fits this particular slipper, didn’t appear in the fossil record for another 30 to 40 million years,” said John Calder, an advisor to the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation, and also to Parks Canada.

Calder explains the creatures alive during the Permian Period were usually smaller - cat- or dog-sized, lizard-like animals. But this footprint is about the size of a dinner plate. If they’re right about it being a Pareiasaurus, that means they were walking the Earth much earlier than experts thought.

“And that means that they had to evolve from something else earlier than we thought,” Calder said. “It changes our drawing of the tree of life.”

A team of international scientists, including Calder and Brunet, will continue working to confirm what’s behind the print. The team will soon start drafting a paper to put their case through scientific review. They’ve already consulted colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History.

Brunet said he plans to go back to the area, and to keep searching other sites for more evidence to support the find.

“We have one spectacular footprint, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t find more.”

Calder said it’s part of his job to answer inquiries from Islanders who find interesting rocks. Sometimes it is not a fossil. Sometimes it is. It’s important to present them to experts, he adds, or a piece of history could end up as someone’s doorstop.

“We’re constantly unearthing, literally, the record of life on the planet before us, and everybody can make a contribution. That’s really cool.”

The exact spot where the fossil was found is being kept secret for its protection. It’s the latest in a wave of prehistoric finds putting P.E.I. on the paleontology map. The Island’s red rocks hold the best record in Canada for the Permian Period, according to the provincial government.

A 2,000-Year-Old Sarcophagus Was Just Unsealed—and the Mummy Inside is Mind-Blowing
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

Experts working in the Tomb of Cerberus in Giugliano, an area in Naples, unsealed a 2,000-year-old sarcophagus.
Inside they found the remains of a shockingly well-preserved body lying face-up and covered in a shroud.
Ongoing analysis of the contents of the sarcophagus could yield new social, cultural, and scientific insight into ancient life.

“The Tomb of Cerberus continues to provide valuable information on the Phlegraean territory near Liternum,” Marian Nuzzo, a superintendent with the Italian Ministry of Culture, said in a statement, “expanding knowledge of the past, and offering opportunities for research of a multidisciplinary nature.”

The team now has a new treasure trove of information to mine. “In recent months,” Nuzzo said, “laboratory analyses conducted on samples taken from the burials and depositional beds have returned a considerable amount of data regarding the treatment of the body of the deceased and the funerary rituals implanted, considerably enriching the panorama of our knowledge.”

A skull unearthed in #China challenges the timeline of human evolution, scientists say.

A badly crushed cranium unearthed decades ago from a riverbank in central China that once defied classification is now shaking up the human family tree, according to a new analysis.

Scientists digitally reconstructed the squashed skull, thought to be 1 million years old, and its features suggest that the fossil belonged to the same lineage as a striking specimen called “Dragon Man” and the Denisovans — an enigmatic and recently discovered population of prehistoric humans with murky origins. The skull’s age and categorization as an early Denisovan ancestor would mean the group originated much earlier than thought.

The researchers’ wider analysis, based on the reconstruction and more than 100 other skull fossils, has also sketched a radically different picture of human evolution, they reported Thursday in the journal Science. The results significantly shift the timeline for species such as our own, Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis. Neanderthals, archaic humans who lived in Europe and Central Asia before disappearing around 40,000 years ago, are known to have lived alongside the Denisovans and interbred with them.

“This changes a lot of thinking because it suggests that by one million years ago, our ancestors had already split into distinct groups, pointing to a much earlier and more complex human evolutionary split than previously believed,” said study coauthor Chris Stringer, paleoanthropologist and research leader in human evolution at London’s Natural History Museum, in an email.

The findings, if widely accepted, would push back the emergence of our own species by 400,000 years and dramatically reshape what’s known about human origins.
Tangled ancestry

The skull is one of two partially mineralized specimens unearthed in 1989 and 1990 in an area known as Yunxian in Shiyan, located in Hubei province in central China. A third skull discovered nearby in 2022 hasn’t yet been formally described in the scientific literature, Stringer noted.

“We decided to study this fossil again because it has reliable geological dating and is one of the few million-year-old human fossils,” said the study’s first author Xiaobo Feng, a professor at Shanxi University in China, in a statement. “A fossil of this age is critical for rebuilding our family tree.”

Both of the Yunxian skulls were deformed from millennia spent underground, but the second, known as Yunxian 2, was better preserved. That specimen formed the basis of the new reconstruction, which used cutting-edge CT scanning, light imaging and virtual techniques to separate the bones from the rock matrix that encased them, and to correct the distortions inherent in the fossil.

The skull’s age, determined by dating the layer of sediment in which it was found and mammal fossils found in the same layer, had led some experts to believe that it belonged to Homo erectus, a more primitive human species known to have lived in many places around the world at that point in time. However, while Yunxian 2’s large, squat braincase did resemble that of Homo erectus, other features of the skull, such as flat and shallow cheekbones, did not.

Stringer and his colleagues concluded that Yunxian 2 belonged to an early ancestor of Dragon Man, formally called Homo longi. Scientists identified Dragon Man in 2021 from a skull found at the bottom of a well in northeastern China, and authors of a June study used ancient DNA to link Homo longi to the Denisovans, a shadowy population known from genetic information extracted from a few fossil fragments but thought to have lived across much of Asia.

The latest analysis also suggests other hard-to-classify fossils uncovered in China should be grouped with Homo longi and the Denisovans — including fossils that another research team recently proposed as a newfound species they called Homo juluensis, a name that roughly translates to huge-headed man.

Stringer said the third Yunxian skull fossil, once researchers prepare and study it in detail, will enable the team to test the accuracy of the reconstruction and its placement within the human family tree.
Rewriting history

With telltale bumps and ridges, skulls are particularly informative in the study of human evolution because they have a lot of characteristic features, and a skull is typically the specimen that can definitively confirm a newly discovered species.

Using information from the new digital reconstruction and anatomical information from 104 skulls and jawbones in the human fossil record, Stringer and his coauthor Xijun Ni, professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, reconstructed the evolutionary relationships between different groups using a mathematical program used in evolutionary biology. The team pieced together what’s known as a phylogenetic tree showing how different human species may have diverged from one another over the past 1 million years.

The analysis suggests that the origins of Homo sapiens, Denisovans and Neanderthals are much older than previously thought.

The finding challenges the traditional view, based on studies of ancient DNA, that the three species began to diverge from a common ancestor around 700,000 to 500,000 years ago — although it has never been clear who this ancestral species, sometimes dubbed Ancestor X, was.

The Denisovans and modern humans last shared a common ancestor about 1.32 million years ago, according to the new analysis. The Neanderthals branched away from that evolutionary line earlier, around 1.38 million years ago, the study suggested. The findings mean that Denisovans are more closely related to us than the Neanderthals, which had been viewed by many as Homo sapiens’ closest sister species, the researchers wrote.

The reconstruction of the warped skull looked good, said Ryan McRae, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. McRae, who was not involved in the research, agreed it fit with Homo longi and the Denisovans.

However, McRae is less convinced by the phylogenetic tree analysis and said the team may have tried “to do too much at once with limited data.”

“This study says that Denisovans (Homo longi) and Homo sapiens are more closely related to the exclusion of Neanderthals,” he explained. “It also goes one step further saying that the origins of all these groups is much older than expected, about twice as old if not more. This would place the origins of all these groups firmly in the time of Homo erectus.

“At this point in time, I think the safer thing to say is that the Homo longi/Denisovan group and Homo sapiens (including very archaic fossils and modern humans both) look more similar to each other than they do to Neanderthals,” he added via email.

If the timing pointed out in this paper is accurate, McRae said the only candidate for the common ancestor of the Homo sapiens, Homo longi and Homo neanderthalensis would be Homo erectus. “There really isn’t another known species from the ~1.5 million year old time period that would make sense,” McRae said.

The human species Homo antecessor is known to have lived around 1 million years ago, and another, Homo heidelbergensis about 700,000 years ago, he added.

Stringer said he anticipated the findings would attract some skepticism, and the researchers plan to extend their analyses to include further sources of data and other fossils, including more from Africa, to refine the picture.

The study raises a broader question about where the ancestral populations of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Homo longi lived: inside or outside Africa, which is widely regarded as the cradle of humankind, Stringer noted.

The authors said that while the study makes some progress toward resolving what paleoanthropologists call the “muddle in the middle” — the confusing array of human specimens in the fossil record between 1 million and 300,000 years ago — finds like the Yunxian 2 skull also underscore just how much scientists have to learn about human origins.

“When I began working in human evolution over fifty years ago the East Asian record was either marginalised, or its fossils were only ever considered as direct ancestors of recent East Asians,” Stringer said by email. “But what we now see from Yunxian — and from … many other sites — is that East Asia preserves crucial clues to the later stages of human evolution.”

By Katie Hunt, CNN

Researchers spot rare evidence of how two baby #pterosaurs died 150 million years ago.

A violent storm may have sent two baby pterosaurs spiraling to their deaths in a lagoon about 150 million years ago, based on a new analysis of the tiny, astonishingly well-preserved fossils. This latest research also provides fresh clues that may unravel a broader enduring mystery surrounding the site where the specimens were found.

The prehistoric flying reptiles, nicknamed Lucky and Lucky II by the authors of a new study published in the journal Current Biology on September 5, were likely a few days to weeks old when they died in what is now southern Germany.

The fossils, which dated to between 153 million and 148 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, are among the smallest pterosaur specimens ever found, with wingspans of less than 8 inches (20 centimetres). Small bones don’t often preserve well in the fossil record because they break so easily — especially ones as delicate as lightweight, hollow pterosaur bones.

At first glance, the skeletons appear pristine, seemingly representing how the pterosaurs would have appeared when they were alive. But each one bears a similar injury. Lucky’s left upper arm bone, or humerus, and Lucky II’s right upper arm bone both show a clean, slanted fracture, suggesting they were twisted by powerful wind gusts.

The researchers believe that after sustaining their injuries, the pterosaurs fell into the lagoon and drowned in the waves, falling to the seabed where mud stirred up by the storm rapidly buried them. Ironically, the very storm responsible for their deaths is likely what preserved their skeletons so well, the researchers said.

“The odds of preserving (a pterosaur) are already slim and finding a fossil that tells you how the animal died is even rarer,” said lead study author Rab Smyth, a paleontology researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, in a statement. Smyth conducted the research as a doctoral student at the University of Leicester’s Centre for Palaeobiology and Biosphere Evolution in the United Kingdom.

In addition to shedding light on how the pterosaurs died, the fossils may reveal why researchers have uncovered the remains of hundreds of small pterosaurs, but few large ones, within the Solnhofen Limestone of southern Germany.
Islands of discovery

About 150 million years ago, Europe looked completely different, Smyth said.

“The continent was broken into a complex chain of small islands,” he wrote in an email. “Southern Germany, among the last specks of land before the vast Tethys Ocean stretching toward Africa, consisted of semi-arid islands covered in low, shrub-like vegetation.”

The Solnhofen lagoons were part of an archipelago, with the nearest landmasses just a few miles away, he said.

Researchers have regularly recovered well-preserved small pterosaur fossils for the past 240 years from the lagoon deposits at Solnhofen, Smyth said. In contrast, scientists have found only fragments, such as skulls or limbs, of larger adult pterosaurs. The lack of complete adult specimens is unusual because larger animals tend to fossilize better, the researchers said.

The fossils recovered from the Solnhofen Limestone, including 500 specimens representing 15 different species, have “long underpinned and continues to dominate much of our understanding of these flying reptiles,” the authors wrote in the study.

Knowledge of just how the specimens became fossilized in the region has remained limited.

Smyth and his colleagues studied the two fossils, held at the Museum Bergér in Harthof and the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology in Munich, using Ultraviolet Fluorescence Photography, to search for clues.

The technique revealed details difficult to see in visible light alone, like areas of soft tissue preservation, the condition of the limestone in which the fossils were preserved, and the thickness of the hollow walls of the bones. The fossils are also distinctive in that they show evidence of bone trauma, unlike the other small pterosaur remains found in Solnhofen.

“When Rab spotted Lucky we were very excited but realised that it was a one-off,” said study coauthor Dr. David Unwin, reader in paleobiology in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, in a statement. “A year later, when Rab noticed Lucky II we knew that it was no longer a freak find but evidence of how these animals were dying. Later still, when we had a chance to light-up Lucky II with our UV torches, it literally leapt out of the rock at us — and our hearts stopped. Neither of us will ever forget that moment.”

Some of the fossils found in the limestone belong to the pterosaur species Rhamphorhynchus muensteri and Pterodactylus antiquus, and both Lucky specimens belong to the latter. But the researchers thought it was unusual to find hatchling and juvenile P. antiquus within the lagoon, since the species didn’t appear to have any adaptations for a marine lifestyle.

Rhamphorhynchus muensteri, on the other hand, had long, gull-like wings and jaws suited for catching fish and squid. There are also many examples of specimens ranging from young to adult pterosaurs, as expected of a local population, Smyth said.

Instead, Smyth believes the Lucky pterosaurs and other juvenile Pterodactylus antiquus specimens lived on the landmasses near the lagoons.

“These islands and coastal areas were likely semi-arid, with sparse forest or scrub,” Smyth said. “They supported a variety of invertebrates and small reptiles, as well as Archaeopteryx, one of the earliest known birds. We know this because these plants and animals are occasionally found washed into the lagoons.”

Researchers are still recovering a variety of pterosaur specimens from the Solnhofen Limestone, allowing scientists to study pterosaur growth, variation and anatomy in much greater detail, Smyth said.
A lucky find

Studying the Lucky pterosaurs helped the researchers realize how prehistoric tropical storms led to a bias in the fossil record.

Much of the time, the lagoons would have been calm, with shallow waters. But they were ticking time bombs, Smyth said. The water column contained specific layers, with an oxygenated surface above a super-salty, oxygen-free bottom.

“Sudden storms could churn the lagoon, bringing the toxic bottom water to the surface and causing mass die-offs of marine life,” Smyth said. “At the same time, the storms could sweep other animals into the lagoons, including young pterosaurs, which were quickly buried in fine sediment.”

The fact that so many of the young pterosaur fossils are so complete suggests they were buried shortly after the storms occurred before scavengers could disturb them, he said.

But how did nonlocal pterosaurs end up in the lagoon? The young hatchlings were likely unable to escape the strong stormy winds, unlike adult pterosaurs.

“For centuries, scientists believed that the Solnhofen lagoon ecosystems were dominated by small pterosaurs,” Smyth said. “But we now know this view is deeply biased. Many of these pterosaurs weren’t native to the lagoon at all. Most are inexperienced juveniles that were likely living on nearby islands that were unfortunately caught up in powerful storms.”

Meanwhile, adult pterosaurs, better able to withstand the storms, likely died of natural causes and floated for days or weeks on the lagoon surface, with pieces of their remains slowly falling to the bottom.
Flight of the baby pterosaurs

Now, Smyth and his colleagues want to better understand how hatchling pterosaurs were able to fly so early in life, which is something almost no modern flying animal can do, he said.

Scientists have previously debated the flying capabilities of baby pterosaurs, but the study suggests that the Lucky pterosaurs sustained flight-related injuries similar to those seen in birds, especially inexperienced juveniles that fly through marine storms, the authors wrote in the study.

David Martill, professor emeritus at the Institute of the Earth and Environment at the University of Portsmouth, was fascinated by the study and UV images. Martill did not participate in the research and has some reservations about the injuries having been caused by storms. The injuries tend to occur when animals are bashed against rocks, and there were no cliffs present in the lagoons, he suggested.

“So, I welcome this study as an extremely interesting hypothesis that requires deeper study,” Martill wrote in an email.

Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who was also not involved in the research, called the study “paleontological detective work of the highest caliber,” providing rare evidence of how animals died and fossilized.

“When you think about it, each fossil is a tragedy,” Brusatte wrote in an email. “It’s part of a plant or animal that has died and gotten buried and turned into rock. This study is a haunting window into the lives of pterodactyls. I can actually envision in my head, a dark and stormy night in the Jurassic, when the winds of fate took down these pterodactyls, turning them into the fossils that we celebrate 150 million years later.”

By Ashley Strickland, CNN

Ancient temple could reveal secrets of a lost society that predates the Inca Empire. Archaeologists say they have discovered the ruins of what they believe are the boundaries of an ancient temple belonging to the mysterious Andean society of Tiwanaku that disappeared around AD 1000.

The research team unearthed the immense temple complex in the highlands of what is now Bolivia’s municipality of Caracollo. The site is southeast of Lake Titicaca, a different region than where researchers had previously focused their search for clues that might help unravel the secrets of this lost society.

The extraordinary find is roughly 130 miles (about 210 kilometres) south of the established archaeological site of Tiwanaku, the capital of the powerful empire that preceded the Incas. The latest findings were described in a study published on June 24 in the journal Antiquity.

Called Palaspata after the native name for the region, the temple lies outside the borders of where Tiwanaku was previously known to have expanded, said Dr. José Capriles, a Bolivian archaeologist and associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University.

Capriles, who was the lead author of the study, noted that the building’s architectural elements, including a terraced platform and sunken courtyard, have a striking resemblance to the Tiwanaku style found in other parts of the Lake Titicaca region. “We don’t expect it in this particular place and the fact that it exists there is remarkable,” he said.

The temple, which has a trail cutting through it from repeated travel by locals, is near a long-used Bolivian travel route, now called the La Paz–Cochabamba Highway, which connected three trade routes used by other societies that followed, like the Inca.

The discovery of the ceremonial temple is shedding light on the interconnectivity of the lost society’s various territories and how Palaspata could have served as a gateway for Tiwanaku society to expand its power in the region, according to the researchers.
Who were the Tiwanaku?

Archaeological investigations of Tiwanaku sites began in the 1860s, but researchers still have scant knowledge of the society. Most of what experts know has been deduced from studying ceramics, camelid remains, and other religious sites, such as Akapana, that dot the Andean highlands.

Tiwanaku communities first emerged in an altiplano, or high plain, of the Andes called the Titicaca Basin, named after Lake Titicaca.

Due to its location, farming crops, like maize, was difficult, so the people relied on llama caravans to connect the communities in the region and facilitate trade. The capital city of Tiwanaku, also called Tiwanaku, managed trade, commerce and interregional interaction, according to the study.

“Tiwanaku was what we call a primary state formation, meaning that it was a complex society that had complex social stratification,” Capriles said. The empire developed without external influence and “emerged out of a series of prior agricultural societies.”,

Evidence of Tiwanaku objects, like pottery, suggests Tiwanaku people began to settle in that area around AD 700, as well as farther west in a valley that’s now southern Peru, according to Dr. Nicola O’Connor Sharratt, associate professor of anthropology at Georgia State University. She was not involved in the study.

Tiwanaku populations are also suspected to have lived in what is now northern Chile and in Cochabamba, Sharratt added.

The Tiwanaku constructed Palaspata to further exert its sociopolitical influence over other societies in the area by controlling trade between regions, the new study suggests.

“The placement of this site is strategically located between two major geographic zones of the Andean Highlands,” Capriles said.

“This might have been sort of a nice strategic control outpost that not only controlled flow of goods in an economic and political sense, but it also did so through religion, and this is why it is a temple,” he said. “The alignment of religious, political and economic institutions, which is how many of these institutions emerge, is something that I think people were kind of surprised about.”
Uncovering a lost temple

The temple Palaspata is only visible by its perimeter wall, which is outlined with red sandstone.

While working on an unrelated archaeology project near the highway, researchers noticed the structure and decided it “seemed significant,” Capriles said.

They investigated the area further on foot and with drones. From the initial findings, Capriles was able to use 3D rendering to create a digital reconstruction of the temple.

The structure is 125 meters long and 145 meters wide (410 by 475 feet) — about the size of a city block — with 15 modular enclosures that were likely rooms surrounding an inner courtyard.

The building’s main entrance faces west, aligned with the solar equinox and indicative of the temple’s religious role in the society. While not much is known of Tiwanaku’s spiritual practices, archaeologists have previously found stone monoliths and ceramics with plant- and animal-based symbolism that may allude to traditions known to be part of other pre-Inca societies. Researchers on past expeditions related to Tiwanaku commonly uncovered religious structures designed to highlight the landscape’s natural features and align with key events in the solar cycle.

Archaeologists have also found Tiwanaku pottery at the site, such as keru cups, typically used to drink some form of maize-based alcohol. This suggests that the building was likely used for parties or large gatherings, Sharratt said.

Compared with other ancient societies, Tiwanaku remains enigmatic, and researchers have a limited, patchwork understanding of the civilization, according to Sharratt.

Archaeological theories suggest that Tiwanaku collapsed because of a drought or environmental degradation. Others experts believe that both of these factors may have led to social tension and unrest, ultimately giving rise to a populist uprising.

Why don’t researchers know much about this cryptic society? Tiwanaku “didn’t fit some early archaeologists’ ideas about what a state should look like or where you could have a thriving city,” Sharratt said. “It hasn’t necessarily met all of our expectations, so I think that’s partly why.”

By Gina Park, CNN

#DNA analysis of two burials from 1,000 years ago reveals West African heritage.

#Archeologists studied two separate burials on the southern coast of England from more than 1,000 years ago, suggesting they had recent ancestors, likely grandparents, from West Africa.

Researchers from universities based in the U.K. conducted ancient DNA analysis on individuals buried at two seventh-century AD cemeteries in England – Updown in Kent and Worth Matravers in Dorset – to explore migration patterns in early medieval Europe, according to research published in Antiquity on Wednesday.

“Migration and its direction, scale and impact have been much debated in European archeology,” the authors said in a news release. “Archeogenetic research can now provide new insight, even identifying individual migrants”.

Duncan Sayer, lead author of the Updown research article and a professor at the University of Lancashire, told CTVNews.ca Monday that at first, the researchers were trying to understand kinship patterns.

“Initially, we were exploring ancient DNA to look at early medieval migrations into Britain from continental Europe in the early Middle Ages – specifically if we could see an early Anglo-Saxon migration in the genetics," he said.

In the news release, Sawyer called Kent a “conduit for influence from the adjacent continent” of Africa, which was particularly seen in the sixth century, also known as Kent’s “Frankish Phase.”

“Updown is also located near to the royal centre of Finglesham, indicating that these connections were part of a wider royal network,” Sayer said.

Sawyer also brought up the diversity of the region, adding that people with different accents or ways of life would not have been uncommon at the time.

The Updown grave contained several goods, according to Sawyer: a pot, possibly from Frankish Gaul; a spoon that could indicate Christian faith and exotic gold, silver, and garnet items, often left as gifts or possessions of the buried.

‘The boy from Worth Matravers’

Meanwhile, Dorset “sat on the fringes of continental influence” compared to Updown, according to Ceiridwen J. Edwards, lead author of the Worth Matravers article from the University of Huddersfield.

“The archeological evidence suggests a marked and notable cultural divide between Dorset and areas to the west, and the Anglo-Saxon influenced areas to the east,” Edwards said in the news release.

“The difference is in the context and part of why this is so important,” Sawyer said. “In Dorset, this is a costal community who relied on the sea and consumed costal shellfish.”

“The boy from Worth Matravers” was buried in a double grave, but the children in both cases were a part of the fabric of their community, Sawyer said.

His grave contained a local limestone anchor, which links the site or the occupants to the sea or seafaring travel, he added.

Most of the individuals buried at the cemeteries were either northern European descendants, or had western British and Irish ancestry, both of which were prevalent in England at the time. However, one individual at each cemetery had a recent ancestor from West Africa, the paper read.

The mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the mother, was northern European. But the researched indicated that autosomal DNA, which comes from both parents, showed non-European ancestry, connecting them to present-day Yoruba, Mende, Mandenka, and Esan groups from sub-Saharan West Africa.

That means both individuals had genetic and geographical mixed descent, further suggesting that both had one paternal grandparent from West Africa, the research article said.

According to Sawyer, the genetics place the two individuals’ maternal grandparents around Nigeria, Tongo, Gambia, Senegal or Sierra Leone.

“In both cases, the DNA points to long distance connections. The movement not just of exotic goods, but of people seen in their DNA,” Sawyer explained. “The Byzantines used this as a way to get to new gold supplies from sub-Saharan Africa to mint coins.”
‘Cosmopolitan nature of England’

The route into Europe could have been across east Africa to the Nile, up north into Alexandra in Egypt, over the Mediterranean to Byzantium Rome, over the Alps into France and Germany, then eventually, the U.K., Sawyer added.

Despite the lack of written literature that can point out migration patterns of the early Middle Ages, DNA has proven helpful in understanding how people from long distances may have travelled and integrated into communities in England, the research paper said.

“Our joint results emphasise the cosmopolitan nature of England in the early medieval period, pointing to a diverse population with far-flung connections who were, nonetheless, fully integrated into the fabric of daily life,” Edwards said.

“Britian was quite bohemian, even in the sixth and seventh centuries,” Sawyer added.