Fossil of Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi PIMUZ A/III 4380 (Credits: Dr. Torsten Scheyer; Palaeontological Institute and Museum, University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Very occasionally, exceptionally well-preserved fossils reveal new clues about poorly understood creatures. Complete, articulated skeletons are rare and, when found, offer rich insight for palaeontologists. One of our research fellows, Dr James Neenan, has been involved with just such a discovery and description, of an armoured reptile from the Middle Triassic named Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi.
A beautifully-preserved fossil found in the Alps in eastern Switzerland has revealed the best look so far at this animal. The findings about its anatomy and probable lifestyle were somewhat unexpected, according to a paper published in Scientific Reports today, led by Dr Torsten Scheyer at the University of Zurich and co-authored by James.
At just 20 cm long, the specimen represents the remains of a juvenile. Yet large portions of its body were covered in armour plates, with a distinctively spiky row around each flank, protecting the animal from predators. Today’s girdled lizards, found in Africa, have independently evolved a very similar appearance even though they are not closely related to Eusaurosphargis.
Life reconstruction of Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi based on new specimen PIMUZ A/III 4380 (Credits: Beat Scheffold; Palaeontological Institute and Museum, University of Zurich, Switzerland).
The new fossil, found in the Prosanto Formation at Ducanfurgga, south of Davos in Switzerland, is not the first material of Eusaurosphargis to be discovered. The species was originally described in 2003 based on a partially complete and totally disarticulated specimen from Italy. This was found alongside fossils of fishes and marine reptiles, leading scientists to believe that Eusaurosphargis was an aquatic animal.
However, the detail preserved in the new specimen shows a skeleton without a streamlined body outline and no modification of the arms, legs or tail for swimming. This suggests that the reptile was in fact most probably adapted to live, at least mostly, on land, even though all of its closest evolutionary relatives lived in the water.
Until this new discovery we thought that Eusaurosphargis was aquatic, so we were astonished to discover that the skeleton actually shows adaptations to life on the land. We think this particular animal must have washed into the sea from somewhere like a beach, where it sank to the sea floor, was buried and finally fossilised. – Dr James Neenan
The findings from the research team are published in Scientific Reports as ‘A new, exceptionally preserved juvenile specimen of Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi (Diapsida) and implications for Mesozoic marine diapsid phylogeny’.
The latest display in our changing Presenting… case showcases a wonderful array of dung beetles. Darren Mann, head of our Life Collections, tells us why they are so important.
Worshipped during ancient Egyptian times, dung beetles have a long history of human appreciation. Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915), one of the first to popularise insects in his writings, began his Souvenirs entomologiques series with the Sacred Scarab, and even Charles Darwin appreciated the weaponry adorning many dung beetles.
Dung beetles can be divided into three main groups based on their nesting behaviour. The rollers, often seen on television wildlife documentaries, make a ball out of dung and roll it some distance before burying it. The tunnellers dig directly below the dung pile and bury as much as needed for nest construction. Finally, the dwellers nest within the dung pile.
The South American Phanaeinae is one of most colourful groups of beetles. They are often referred to as Rainbow Scarabs due to their bright metallic bodies. We don’t fully understand why these beetles are quite so colourful.
Dung beetles are one of the more popular groups of insects used in ecological and evolutionary research today. They can help us to understand questions about how biodiversity loss impacts on ecosystems, or act as model organisms in the field of evolutionary development.
Unlike the much-publicised importance of bees and their pollination services, dung beetles are relatively unknown, despite their huge ecological and economic value. Their feeding and nesting behaviours provide many useful ecosystem services such as dung removal, pest fly control, parasite suppression, nutrient cycling, plant growth enhancement, improvement of soil structure, secondary seed dispersal, and a possible reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Through these activities, one study calculated that dung beetles are worth around £367 million a year to the UK cattle industry alone.
The largest dung beetles belong to the genus Heliocopris, which can reach up to 69 mm (pictured is Heliocopris dominus). These large beetles specialise on elephant and rhino dung. From around 2 mm in length is the oriental genus Panelus. These small beetles probably feed on the ‘dung’ of other insects and fungi.
Ancient Egyptians believed that the dung beetle kept the Sun moving across the sky like a giant ball of dung, linking the insect to the god of the rising sun Khepri. Some historians believe that it was through observing dung beetle behaviour and biology that Egyptians developed ideas about life after death.
The two most widely depicted species in Egyptian art are Kheper aegyptiorum and Scarabaeus sacer. Nowadays, only Scarabaeus occurs in this region of Africa; Kheper is now a more southern species, possibly indicating climatic changes since Ancient Egyptian civilization.
Kheper aegyptiorum on display in the museum’s Presenting… case
The UK has about 60 species of dung beetle and most of these belong to the ‘lesser dung beetle’ subfamily Aphodiinae. The largest of our dung beetles are the Dor Beetles which can reach 28 mm. Our smallest, Plagionus arenarius, is a meagre 2.5 mm. Sadly, over 50 per cent of our dung beetles are in decline due to agricultural intensification, pesticides and habitat loss.
Last month we had the pleasure of hosting artist and scientist Dr Immy Smith as part of her week-long takeover of @IAmSciArt on Twitter. Drawing inspiration from the Museum’s collections, Immy has created some beautiful paintings. Here she tells us a little more about her interests and work…
My current artwork is focused on crypsis and mimicry – the ways that animals and plants disguise themselves or pretend to be something they’re not. Cryptic camouflage helps animals to avoid being seen, often to help them catch prey – or to avoid becoming prey themselves! Mimicry is also often about trying not to get eaten: the harmless hornet moth, for example, mimics a stinging insect to deter predators. I use these themes to develop print art projects, and also public workshops to help people learn more about the ecology of cryptic animals.
Cryptic Cards by Immy Smith
In my arts practice I try to imagine how animals and plants might evolve to camouflage themselves on human-made materials, and what they might look like. Will we one day find moths adapted to hide on advertising hoardings, or beetles mimicking litter? I made an entire deck of Cryptic Cards as a response to this kind of question.
Another project I’m working on at the moment is called Emergent Crypsis. This is a collaboration with Norweigan generative artist Anders Hoff who makes art using algorithms executed by a computer. I’m imagining how creatures might adapt to an extreme example of human-made patterns – computer generated abstract images.
Violin Beetle (Mormolyce phyllodes) by Immy Smith
My work requires me to closely study many animals and plants, but how do I learn about all these species in order to draw their imaginary relatives? How do I make my art a convincing representation of how life might find ways to hide on human-made art?
One answer is of course, the internet. I’ve been lucky enough to find many wildlife photographers online who are kind enough to let me use their images as reference. But photographs alone are not always enough to get to know the fine details and defining characteristics of a species: the joints and articulations of small insects, for example, are best studied from specimens. And some species are rare, or even extinct, and it can be hard to find photographic a reference.
Leaf-footed Bug (Diactor bilineatus) by Immy Smith
This is where scientific collections come into the picture. The collections held in museums and other institutions are not only essential for scientists and scientific illustrators, they are also an invaluable resource for artists of many disciplines, science communicators, and educators of many kinds. In the collections at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History I can photograph and sketch leaf-mimicking insects, for example, that are native to the forests of South America which I may never visit. I can study in minute detail the articulation of beetles that are rarely seen, and which might be difficult to find – and irresponsible to collect – myself.
A display of terrestrial bugs (Heteroptera) in the Museum, including the Leaf-footed Bug painted by Immy Smith
Not only do I find specific species that I want to study in natural history collections, I often see new ones – animals I didn’t know about or hadn’t thought of drawing before. In the same week that I visited Oxford, I also made a trip to Herbarium RNG in Reading to study plant mimicry, and found similar inspiration there. I can channel all this into both aesthetic art destined for print and sciart workshops that communicate the wonders of insects or plants with the wider community.
Working on sciart projects and educational workshops helps me appreciate the multitude of ways in which collections benefit research and education. We must try to communicate the plethora of roles they play, and the host of ways they cross into our lives – whether through scientific research on insects pollinators of the crops we eat, or via a deck of cards made by someone like me for mainly recreational purposes. We must fight to protect scientific collections because they are a resource that benefits all of us as a society.
On the southern shores of Newfoundland in Canada lie rocks containing the oldest known evidence of large, architecturally-complex life. Deposited within the Ediacaran Period, some 565 million years ago, these deep marine deposits have been the focus of palaeontological research since the first discovery of fossils there in 1967, and the locality – Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve – now sits in the UNESCO World Heritage list.
As part of my research on these rocks, alongside colleagues from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and the University of Cambridge, I created a new geological map of the area, covering 35 km of coastline in and around the Reserve. As well as providing new insights into the rocks themselves, and what environments they were deposited in, this mapping had an unexpected outcome – the discovery of some totally new fossil sites.
Overview of the Mistaken Point outcrop of the famous ‘E’ Surface
One site in particular, dubbed the ‘E’ surface, is the focus for Ediacaran fossils in Newfoundland. It is an area about the size of three Olympic boxing rings, containing more than 3,000 fossil organisms. Through the mapping we found a number of other outcrops of this same surface, but each shows slightly different types of fossils.
This is a mystery: if all the outcrops are from the same geological surface, why do they show different fossil assemblages?
The clue to the answer came while photographing the fossils and overlying volcanic ash at Mistaken Point, when I heard a loud, deep boom: a freak wave had struck the bottom of the cliff below the outcrop, sending a large splash of salty spray over much of the surface.
This got me thinking – how are processes such as weathering and erosion affecting the fossil surfaces now? Closer observation revealed those outcrops of ‘E’ with pristine beautiful fossils tended to be further from the sea, have a shallower dip, and the overlying ash tended to fall away in little flakes revealing beautiful, crisp, fossils. Other outcrops with scruffy fossils were usually close to the sea, battered by waves and rocks, steeply dipping, and the overlying ash, and often the fossils below it, would gradually abrade away as they are attacked by the sea.
Looking along the ‘E’ surface showing areas still covered in ash (black) and revealed fossil surface (red and grey)
Palaeontologists often discuss how changes during the fossil preservation of an organism can affect what we discover today, but they rarely discuss how processes occurring after preservation – metamorphism, exhumation, weathering, erosion, and even the time, manner, and conditions in which the fossil is recorded – might all affect how we analyse and interpret the original community of life which became fossilised.
Our new paper, published by the Geological Society of London, talks about these Post-Fossilization Processes, and recommends that when researchers are collecting fossil data they consider how their measurements might have been biased by such factors.
For 50 years now, the coastline of Newfoundland has yielded some of the most important finds in understanding the rise of the early life of the Ediacara, and through that the first evidence of animal life. Discoveries over the past few years show there is still much more to be found, and we’ll just have to hope that the post-fossilization processes fall in our favour to allow for many more significant discoveries.
In April 1842, 175 years ago this year, the dinosaurs were created – in a taxonomic sense at least. In a landmark paper in the Report for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Richard Owen, one of the world’s best comparative anatomists, introduced the term ‘Dinosauria’ for the very first time.
Owen coined the term using a combination of the Greek words Deinos, meaning ‘fearfully great’, and Sauros, meaning ‘lizard’, in order to describe a new and distinct group of giant terrestrial reptiles discovered in the fossil record. He based this new grouping – called a clade in taxonomic terms – on just three genera: Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus.
In the Museum’s collections are some specimens of those three original dinosaurs, collected and described during this exciting early period of palaeontology. These discoveries, amongst others, helped to revolutionise our understanding of extinction, deep time, and the history of life on earth, and paved the way for the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Megalosaurus
The right lower jaw of Megalosaurus bucklandii from the Taynton Limestone Formation, Middle Jurassic, Oxfordshire, UK. OUMNH J.13505.
A nine metre long, 1.4 tonne carnivore that roamed England during the Middle Jurassic, about 167 million years ago, Megalosaurus has the accolade of being the world’s first named dinosaur. It was described by William Buckland, the University of Oxford’s first Reader in Geology, in 1824, and was discovered in a small village called Stonesfield, about 10 miles north of Oxford. The toothy jawbone of Megalosaurus is on display in the Museum.
The sacrum of Megalosaurus. One of the characteristics that made Richard Owen realise dinosaurs were a distinct group was the presence of a sacrum with five fused vertebrae, visible here in the specimen on display at the Museum.
Iguanodon Iguanodon was a plant-eating reptile with a spike on the end of its thumbs, and teeth that look like those of an iguana, only 10 times bigger! Iguanodon lived in the Lower Cretaceous, around 130 million years ago and was named by Gideon Mantell in 1825.
When first discovered, Iguanodon’s spike was thought to go on its nose, like a rhinoceros or a rhinoceros iguana, rather than on its thumb, which is rather unique. In fact, we still don’t know why Iguanodon had such prominent thumb spikes.
Tooth of Iguanodon from the Wealden Group, Lower Cretaceous, Cuckfield, Sussex, UK. Gideon Mantell Collection. OUMNH K.59828.The Iguanodon’s spike was first thought to go on its nose, rather than on its thumb. A paper label attached to the specimen reads, “Cast of the Horn of the Iguanodon, from Tilgate Forest; in the possession of G. Mantell, Castle Place, Lewes.”
Hylaeosaurus A squat, armoured, plant-eating dinosaur with long spines on its neck and shoulders. It is the least well known and smallest of the three dinosaurs originally described, but arguably the cutest. Hylaeosaurus was also named by Gideon Mantell, in 1833.
A dorsal spine, probably from the holotype of Hylaeosaurus armatus from the Wealden Group, Lower Cretaceous, Sussex, UK. OUMNH K.59799. Accompanying label in Gideon Mantell’s handwriting.
The exact specimen used by Mantell to describe Hylaeosaurus armatus is in a big block of rock in the Natural History Museum in London. But recently I spotted a specimen in our collections that Mantell had sent to William Buckland in 1834. It has the following label with it, written by Mantell himself:
Extremity of a dorsalspine of the Hylaeosaurus from my large block –
Perhaps Mantell just snapped a bit off to send to his friend. Or perhaps more likely, it was one of the broken fragments Mantell said were lying near the main block when it was dug out of the ground.
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From just three genera included in Dinosauria in 1842, we now have around 1,200 species nominally in the group. The study of dinosaurs has come a long way since those early days; new finds, new technologies, such as micro CT scanning and synchrotron scanning, and new statistical techniques are helping us to better understand these iconic animals and re-evaluate older specimen collections.
The Museum’s dinosaur specimens are exceptionally historically important, but are still used heavily by scientists from across the world for their contemporary research. This is something that I think William Buckland, Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen would be very pleased about.
Cetiosaurus fossil bones on display in the Museum
The one that got away… Although Owen didn’t know it, other dinosaurs were known in 1842, including Cetiosaurus, the ‘whale lizard’. When Owen named it in 1841, he thought it was a giant marine reptile that ate plesiosaurs and crocodiles. By the following year, he suggested it was actually a crocodile that had webbed feet and used its tail for propulsion through the water.
It wasn’t until 1875, after more substantial remains had been found that Owen recognised Cetiosaurus as a land-living sauropod dinosaur. Interestingly, however, research published last month presented a new hypothesis for dinosaur relationships which, if the previous definition of Dinosauria had been adhered to, would have placed all sauropods outside of the group. So perhaps Owen’s earlier omission wasn’t so wrong after all.
Image: Arthur AnkerIn 1975, on Have a Cigar, Pink Floyd wryly sang “The band is just fantastic / That is really what I think / Oh, by the way, which one’s Pink?”
Well, in the rather different world of snapping shrimps there really is no question which one’s pink; and, unlikely as it seems, these two worlds have now overlapped…
The strikingly bright pink-clawed species of pistol shrimp pictured above, and discovered on the Pacific coast of Panama, has been given the ultimate rock and roll name in recognition of the discoverers’ favourite rock band – Pink Floyd. In a paper published today, and co-authored by our head of research Sammy De Grave, it has been named as Synalpheus pinkfloydi.
Just like all good rock bands, pistol shrimps, or snapping shrimps, have an ability to generate substantial amounts of sonic energy. By closing its enlarged claw at rapid speed the shrimp creates a high-pressure cavitation bubble, the implosion of which results in one of the loudest sounds in the ocean – strong enough to stun or even kill a small fish.
Combined with its distinct, almost glowing-pink snapping claw, Synalpheus pinkfloydi is aptly named by the report’s authors: lead author Arthur Anker of the Universidade Federal de Goiás in Brazil, Kristin Hultgren of Seattle University in the USA, and Sammy De Grave here at the Museum.
If Synalpheus pinkfloydi had adorned the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals, rather than the famous dirigible pig. Image: Chris JarvisSammy has been a lifelong Pink Floyd fan and has been waiting for the opportunity to name the right new species after the band.
I have been listening to Floyd since The Wall was released in 1979, when I was 14 years old. I’ve seen them play live several times since, including the Hyde Park reunion gig for Live8 in 2005. The description of this new species of pistol shrimp was the perfect opportunity to finally give a nod to my favourite band.
Synalpheus pinkfloydi is not the only pistol shrimp with such a lurid claw. Its closely-related and similar-looking sister species, Synalpheus antillensis, scientifically described in 1909, is found in the western Atlantic, including the Caribbean side of Panama. But the authors of the new paper found that the two species show considerable genetic divergence, granting S. pinkfloydi a new species status and its very own rock and roll name.
Arthur Anker, the report’s lead author, says:
I often play Pink Floyd as background music while I’m working, but now the band and my work have been happily combined in the scientific literature.
Another Shrimp in the Wall featuring Synalpheus pinkfloydi, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History building, and other Pink Floyd references. Artwork by Kate Pocklington.Animals feature frequently in the Floyd back-catalogue. Indeed, the 1977 album Animals includes tracks titled Dogs, Sheep, and a suite of music dedicated to pigs. Then there’s Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict from 1969’s Ummagumma. In fact, other biologists have already named a damselfly after that album: Umma gumma, in the family Calopterygidae.
However, until today there have been no crustacean names known to honour the band.
The full paper, Synalpheus pinkfloydi sp. nov., a new pistol shrimp from the tropical eastern Pacific (Decapoda: Alpheidae), by Arthur Anker, Kristin M. Hultgren, and Sammy De Grave is published by Zootaxa.
