Ancient teeth shed light on Miocene 'mouse' migration

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on August 29, 2019 / comment : 0 Early Mammals, Fossils, Lebanon, Palaeontology

A new species of prehistoric murine -- the group of mammals that includes mice, rats, and their relatives -- has been identified from fossils discovered in Lebanon. The findings, presented in Scientific Reports, represent the first known physical evidence that the initial dispersal of mice from Asia to Africa took place through the Levant.

Credit: Lopez-Antonanzas et al. 2019

Murinae, the largest subfamily of mammals, are thought to have originated 16 million years ago in southern Asia. Yet, the possible routes and timing of the first murine dispersal have remained unclear.

Raquel Lopez-Antonanzas and colleagues analysed fossil teeth excavated in Lebanon in 2013 and 2018 and identified them as belonging to a previously undiscovered species, which they named Progonomys manolo.

They find that P. manolo is morphologically comparable to the oldest populations of Progonomys, which lived around 10.5-11 million years ago. This suggests that P. manolo is one of the earliest representatives of Progonomys. The genus Progonomys was the first mouse to spread out of southern Asia, where mice are believed to have originated.

Given the proximity of Lebanon to the African continent, P. manolo is likely to have given rise to later populations of Progonomys that settled in Africa the authors suggest.

Dental analysis of various species of Progonomys also revealed that their teeth changed throughout the course of evolution. Later species had broader molars, which suggests a transition from an omnivorous, generalist diet to a more specialist, herbivorous one. This is related to the transition from a warm and moist middle Miocene to an increasingly drier one in the Late Miocene.

The findings, which constitute the first record of the genus Progonomys in the Arabian Peninsula, enhance the importance of the 'Levantine Corridor' as a crossroad between Eurasia and Africa and provide additional detail on the oldest intercontinental dispersal of the Murinae.

Source: Nature Publishing Group [August 29, 2019]

Archaeologists document the oldest known forerunners of fresco paintings in the Mediterranean region

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on July 26, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Lebanon, Near East

Researchers from the Universities of Beirut and Tübingen have analyzed 4000-year-old murals in a Bronze Age palace in Lebanon.

Floor paintings with botanical motif [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

Archaeologists from the American University of Beirut and the University of Tübingen have documented the oldest large-area wall paintings from the Ancient Near East. The first parts of the paintings were discovered in 2005 in the ruins of a Bronze Age palace in southern Lebanon, on the Mediterranean coast south of Sidon. In the following years, the paintings on large wall surfaces were uncovered and preserved; the researchers have now published their results in a book.

The biggest room of the palace where the large wall paintings were first discovered in 2005. The plaster of the interior walls is visible in the light-colored areas; the dark area is a blocked-off doorway [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

Professor Jens Kamlah of the Institute of Biblical Archaeology at the University of Tübingen describes how, in this early stage of fresco paining, the colors were applied to the walls – some time around 1900 BCE. This is the earliest known evidence of a preliminary form of the fresco technique in the entire Mediterranean region. The project was headed by Kamlah and the Lebanese archaeologist Professor Hélène Sader. They were supported by the German Archaeological Institute as a cooperation partner, under the scientific director, Dr. Dr. Margarete van Ess.

A corner of the biggest room of the palace; the ground rises here and the three-dimensional nature of the tree of life painting becomes clear as the tree grows from the top of a “hill” [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

The German-Lebanese team of archaeologists discovered the palace in 2001 at the Tell el-Burak site south of Sidon, and had fully excavated it by 2011. The paintings were found on the walls inside the largest room, which measured seven by 14 meters. The researchers say the palace was built around 1900 BCE. and was in use for some 200 years.

Map of the palace at Tell el Burak, south of Sidon in Lebanon. Excavations began in 2001. Large wall paintings were found in the biggest room (10) [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

The paintings show a geometric frieze as well as a hunting scene, a procession, and a “tree of life.” Comparable motifs are known from the Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian iconography, says Julia Bertsch from the University of Tübingen, a member of the team who has been investigating the paintings. She says the technique may be seen as a preliminary stage of the fresco because the preliminary drawings were applied to the still-damp plaster. By contrast, in the fully developed fresco technique, the paintings in their entirety are applied to the fresh plaster.

The murals uncovered [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

As the plaster dries, the paints combine permanently with the substrate. “It was previously assumed that this technique was developed several centuries later in Minoan-Aegean palace paintings. These finds from Tell el-Burak show us that, at the very least, important steps in the development of the technique were made in the Near East,” says Bertsch.

Schematic detail: Hunting scene with dogs driving a herd of gazelle before them [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

An analysis of the paints showed that one of the colors used was Egyptian blue. This hardly ever occurs naturally, but it was produced and used in ancient Egypt from the third millennium B.C.E. “This shows that there were close ties between today’s southern Lebanon and the Egyptian Empire at that time,” Kamlah says. “The paintings could have been created by Egyptian artists. In any case, they testify to an early form of cultural exchange and knowledge transfer in the Eastern Mediterranean.”

Complex architecture and static problems

The palace walls are partly preserved to their original height of about 3.5 meters. “This is particularly remarkable because they are made of air-dried clay bricks that are around 4,000 years old,” Kamlah explains. This complete preservation was a stroke of luck and only possible because the room was completely filled with sand, gravel and clay from floor to ceiling around 1800 BCE.

Schematic detail: Procession scene with striding men [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

The doors were blocked up with clay bricks. “The palace stood on a 17-meter-high artificial mound directly on the beach. The wing on the sea side was originally located on a lower terrace than the other rooms. We assume that this led to static problems. The walls on the lower level, which included the room with the murals, were deformed by the pressure of the higher terrace. The lower rooms were filled in to stabilize,” Kamlah says. As a result, the paintings were extensively preserved, but are very fragile. “They had to be uncovered by specially trained experts – in small sections and very carefully.

Schematic detail: “Tree of life” [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

Gradually, the researchers were able to see the big picture: a geometric frieze divides the long side of the room into an upper and a lower register. It is made of diamonds and is framed by two bands of alternating colors. In the upper register, a hunting scene is visible in which two hunting dogs drive a herd of gazelles towards a hunter who has already shot one of the animals. In the lower register, three striding men and other people are visible in a procession scene. A third scene is arranged three-dimensionally in a corner of a room with a rising floor. The painting shows a tree on a hill in which a blue animal has placed its front hooves and eats. The animal’s head is not preserved.

“Tree of life” [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

The painting also covers parts of the floor, and in the corner of the room the tree’s branches stretch out on both walls. “The motif corresponds to Ancient Near Eastern representations of the “tree of life,” which represents the fertility of the divinely created order,” Kamlah explains. All three motifs correspond to Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian iconography, which idealized kings, rulers and members of the elite.

Excavation of the palace at Tell el-Burak, south of Sidon in Lebanon [Credit : Universität Tübingen]

The almost 4,000-year-old wall paintings testify to an era of artistic richness in the south of present-day Lebanon in the Middle Bronze Age (approx. 2000-1550 BCE). “Until now, very little was known about the people of that time. The German-Lebanese excavations show that there must have been an economically and culturally flourishing city-kingdom in Sidon. Since we have found no signs of major upheavals in the population, we can assume that these people were ancestors of the Phoenicians who later inhabited the area,” Kamlah concludes.

Source: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen [July 26, 2019]

4,000-year-old Canaanite warrior grave found in Sidon dig

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on July 08, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Lebanon, Near East

New excavations at Sidon’s Freres archaeological site have unearthed an ancient grave of Canaanite warriors dating back to the 19th century BC, shedding light on some of the ancient southern port city’s history.

The new findings shed light on some of the ancient southern port city’s history [Credit: The Daily Star/Mohammed Zaatari]

The dig, led by the British Museum under the supervision of Sidon’s Directorate General of Antiquities, has uncovered 171 burials on the Freres site over 21 years, according to the head of the British Museum’s delegation Claude Doumet-Serhal.

The well-preserved grave that was recently unearthed is an important discovery, as it provides information about the traditions of the ancient societies that lived along the Lebanese coast, Doumet-Serhal told The Daily Star Thursday.

An archaeologist works on the remains of two skulls discovered at the site [Credit: Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP/Getty Images]

The grave housed the bodies of two adult male warriors, who were found buried with daggers and bronze belts that had been carefully placed near them. The feet of sheep or goats had been placed by the warriors’ feet, meant to accompany them in the afterworld.

Doumet-Serhal said the daggers were not used for fighting, but were significant because they showed the warriors belonged to the society’s elite: “The Canaanites did not bury in such a way unless the dead belonged to the aristocratic and elite class of the Canaanite society.”

Bronze dagger in situ [Credit: Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP/Getty Images]

DNA taken previously from other Canaanites graves at Freres compared to the DNA of 100 Lebanese showed 95 percent were of Canaanite descent, Doumet-Serhal said, adding, “We were never divided. We were all Canaanites, then we were Phoenicians, then the Romans came, then the Byzantines, then the Arabs.”

Excavations at the site take place for two months each summer, with this year’s dig set to end next week.

The find was made at an archaeological dig in Sidon in southern Lebanon [Credit: Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP/Getty Images]

Doumet-Serhal said she hoped excavations would resume next year, as the findings would be included in Sidon’s historical museum when it opens to the public. Doumet-Serhal said the museum would feature artifacts on its first floor, and visitors could visit the dig on the ground floor.

In 2014, Sidon began construction of a museum that would preserve and showcase ruins from the various civilizations that lived in the city over a period of 6,000 years. It is unclear when the museum will open.

Aerial view of the Freres archaeological site in Sidon in southern Lebanon [Credit: Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP/Getty Images]

“The belt and the daggers excavated will be placed in this Sidon museum next to all the pieces and artifacts discovered in this site over the course of 21 years,” Doumet-Serhal said.

Authors: Mohammed Zaatari & Sahar Houri | Source: The Daily Star [July 08, 2019]

Baalbek: Were the megaliths put in place under Herod?

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on May 22, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Lebanon, Near East

One of the most complex architectural feats ever conceived on planet Earth is the magnificent temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, Lebanon. The Temple is worldwide famous for its size and megalithic architecture, but a impressive number of problems remain unsolved about this monument, including precise dating of the phases of construction. The Romans indeed certainly built the final phase, boosting huge 20 mts high columns, around 60 AD, but who started the construction?

Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, Lebanon [Credit: G. Magli, Politecnico di Milano]

The building indeed consists of a huge basement surrounded by a even huger wall. The design of this wall is astonishing: it was conceived as the superposition of increasingly greater stones as the height increases.

Enormous megaliths (about 500 tons each) were raised to sustain the upper course, made of simply unbeliaveble blocks (around 4x4x20 m, 1000 tons). Other, enormous blocks remain in the quarry a few hundreds of meters to the southwest.

Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, Lebanon [Credit: G. Magli, Politecnico di Milano]

A few years ago, it was proposed by Andreas J. M. Kropp and Daniel Lohmann that the internal basement was first conceived and partly built by Herod the Great around 15 BC. The area was not under Herod's direct control, but he was a friend of the Romans who funded the colony of Berytus (Beirut) exactly in those years. These authors, however, did not attempt to date the megalithic phase to Herodian architects. This has been recently done by Giulio Magli in a work published in the scientific volume Archaeoastronomy in the Roman World.

In the paper, Magli gives several arguments taken from different disciplines - including Archaeoastronomy. The temple is indeed shown to be oriented to the rising of the Pleiades, a group of stars connected with fertility and renewal in the Greek-Hellenistic world but a uncommon choice of orientation for a Roman architect.

Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, Lebanon [Credit: G. Magli, Politecnico di Milano]

Further, clear architectural analogies exist with the Herodian foundations of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, visible in the so called western tunnel and made of gigantic stone blocks very similar to those of the intermediate course in Baalbeck.

Herod the Great is a quite controversial figure of history. However, his fame as a great builder is undisputed, and it really seems that we can add a further masterpiece - besides the Temple Mount, Masada, and the Herodium - to the list of his architectural achievements.

Source: Politecnico di Milano [May 22, 2019]

Butterflies swarm Lebanon's meadows in numbers unseen for 100 years

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on April 22, 2019 / comment : 0 Climate Change, Ecosystems, Environment, Lebanon, Natural Heritage, Wildlife

A vast number of migrating butterflies have swarmed across Lebanon this year after heavy winter rain in the Middle East led to an exceptional spring for wild flowers.

A painted lady butterfly sits on a flower in a field at the village of Mrouj, Lebanon April 13, 2019 [Credit: Mohamed Azakir/Reuters]

“The last time this migration happened in this way was back in 1917,” said Magda Bou Dagher Kharrat, a professor in plant genetics at Lebanon’s St Joseph University.

The sheer number of Vanessa Cardui butterflies traveling from Africa to northern Europe caused admiring bewilderment, as millions crossed mountains, fields, villages and cities.

“They did not only pass through wild areas, forests and nature... so even the people who don’t usually go out to nature witnessed this migration,” said Bou Dagher Kharrat.

“What happened this year should be noted down for history.”

The butterflies’ distinctive black, white and russet wings have earned them the common name of “painted lady” and they could be seen in the northern villages of Mrouj and Zaarour flitting across large meadows of wild flowers.

A painted lady butterfly sits on a flower in a field at the village of Mrouj, Lebanon April 13, 2019 [Credit: Mohamed Azakir/Reuters]

“It was something really beautiful. People were stopping on the road to watch them... We have never seen anything like it before,” said Rony Kharrat in Zaarour.

But for some villagers the influx brought back reminders of a locust infestation that fell upon Lebanon during its Great Famine of 1915-18, in which thousands died and many others emigrated.

Nassib al-Alam, an elderly farmer who has plowed his fields for the past 60 years, said at first some people had thought the locusts were back.

“Everywhere is still green, these (butterflies) are just passing by,” he said, with snowcapped mountains behind him, another rare sight in mid-spring when most of the snow has usually melted. “They are beautiful.”

Author: Imad Creidi | Source: Reuters [April 22, 2019]

Underwater find off Lebanon coast points to fleet of ancient Greek ships

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on April 20, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Lebanon, Near East, Underwater Archaeology

Forty metres down, on the Mediterranean seabed off the coast of Lebanon, the divers knew they were looking at history.

Credit: Lebanon Divers Syndicate, HO

Among the shipwrecks they investigated this month at 11 sites south of the city of Tyre, they found pottery and stone that had been there for more than 2,300 years.

“The shape of the pottery confirms that it dates back to more than 332 BC,” said the Lebanese archaeologist Dr. Jafar Fadlallah.

Mohammed Al-Sargi, captain of the diving team that found the wrecks, is even more certain. “The pottery and stone found on these wooden ships indicate that they were part of the campaign of Alexander the Great, who in 332 BC attempted to capture the city of Tyre, which was then an island,” he said.

“According to the history books, Alexander built a causeway linking the mainland to the island. These vessels might have been used to transport the stone required for the construction of the road, but due to the heavy loads and storms, they might have sunk.”

Credit: Lebanon Divers Syndicate, HO

UNESCO recognized the archaeological importance of Tyre in 1979, when it added the city to its list of World Heritage Sites. Lebanon’s Directorate of Antiquities, in cooperation with European organizations, has carried out extensive excavations since the 1940s to uncover its historical secrets.

They have revealed that the ancient maritime city included residential neighborhoods, public baths, sports centers, and streets paved with mosaics. The discoveries date back to the Phoenician, Roman and Byzantine periods.

During the Phoenician era, Tyre played an important role as it dominated maritime trade. It contributed to the establishment of commercial settlements around the Mediterranean and the spread of religions in the ancient world. It also resisted occupation by the Persians and the Macedonians, choosing to remain neutral in the struggle between the two bitter enemies.

However, Macedonian king Alexander the Great considered gaining control of the island and establishing a naval base there to be a key to victory in the war, and he set out in January 332 BC to conquer it at any cost.

Credit: Lebanon Divers Syndicate, HO

The area in which the diving team discovered the wrecks is “an underwater desert with no valleys or seaweed, a few hundred meters from the coast of Tyre,” said Al-Sargi.

“We found 11 sites, some of them close to each other and others far apart. In each location, there were piles of stones and broken pots.

“We continued to explore the sites quietly to keep away fishermen and uninvited guests. We sought the help of archaeologists, who assured us that the discovery rewrites the history of the city, and specifically the campaign of Alexander the Great. So, we decided to put the discovery in the custody of the General Directorate of Antiquities for further exploration and interpretation.”

The most recent find, which Al-Sargi described as a “time capsule,” is only the latest important discovery made by the team in Lebanon.

Credit: Lebanon Divers Syndicate, HO

“In 1997, the divers discovered the submerged city of Sidon,” Al-Sargi continued. “In 2001, we discovered the city of Yarmouta opposite the Zahrani area. In 1997, we discovered sulfuric water in the Sea of Tyre. We conducted studies on fresh-water wells in the sea off the city coast.

“We are not archaeologists and we cannot explain what we have seen. Our role is to inspect and report to the relevant Lebanese authorities and abide by the law.”

Fadlallah, an archaeologist with 40 years experience of working at Lebanon’s ancient sites, picks up the story to explain what he believes to be the significance of the discovery at Tyre.

“The sites are about 700 metres from where Tyre beach was when it was an island,” he said. “The piles of stones were 50 metres to 200 metres apart and the pots seemed to have been broken by a collision because there was not one left intact. This means that these stones and pots were on ships and there was a violent collision between them.”

Credit: Lebanon Divers Syndicate, HO

He said that studies of the remains of the pots suggest that they are of Greek origin.

“There are various forms of them,” he said, “and it is clear that the ships that were carrying them were related to the ships of Alexander the Great during his campaign on Tyre, and they appear to have been hit by storms.”

There are, of course, always skeptics — among them Dr. Ali Badawi, director of archaeological sites in the south at Lebanon’s General Directorate of Antiquities. The pots alone did not constitute sufficient “evidence that the ships belonged to the campaign of Alexander the Great,” he said.

“What was published by the captain of the divers contains unclear details, and the subject should be based on scientific explanations. I think that the sea is wide and piracy was possible at the sites of the submerged ships.

Credit: Lebanon Divers Syndicate, HO

“Exploration operations are taking place in the breakwater area, involving a French mission and Lebanese archaeologists. Before that, a Spanish expedition along with marine archaeologists participated in examining the remains of a ship dating back to the BC era.

“Ship exploration is very expensive, and the city of Tyre was subjected to numerous military siege campaigns and many ships sank. But this does not mean that we will not investigate this new discovery, according to the instructions of the minister of culture.”

Author: Najia Houssari | Source: Arab News [April 20, 2019]

A history of the Crusades, as told by crusaders' DNA

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on April 18, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Genetics, Lebanon, Near East

History can tell us a lot about the Crusades, the series of religious wars fought between 1095 and 1291, in which Christian invaders tried to claim the Near East. But the DNA of nine 13th century Crusaders buried in a pit in Lebanon shows that there's more to learn about who the Crusaders were and their interactions with the populations they encountered. The work appears in The American Journal of Human Genetics.

This image shows the bones of the Crusaders found in a burial pit in Sidon, Lebanon [Credit: Claude Doumet-Serhal]

The remains suggest that the soldiers making up the Crusader armies were genetically diverse and intermixed with the local population in the Near East, although they didn't have a lasting effect on the genetics of Lebanese people living today. They also highlight the important role ancient DNA can play in helping us understand historical events that are less well documented.

"We know that Richard the Lionheart went to fight in the Crusades, but we don't know much about the ordinary soldiers who lived and died there, and these ancient samples give us insights into that," says senior author Chris Tyler-Smith, a genetics researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

"Our findings give us an unprecedented view of the ancestry of the people who fought in the Crusader army. And it wasn't just Europeans," says first author Marc Haber, also of the Wellcome Sanger Institute. "We see this exceptional genetic diversity in the Near East during medieval times, with Europeans, Near Easterners, and mixed individuals fighting in the Crusades and living and dying side by side."

Archaeological evidence suggested that 25 individuals whose remains were found in a burial pit near a Crusader castle near Sidon, Lebanon, were warriors who died in battle in the 1200s. Based on that, Tyler-Smith, Haber, and their colleagues conducted genetic analyses of the remains and were able to sequence the DNA of nine Crusaders, revealing that three were Europeans, four were Near Easterners, and two individuals had mixed genetic ancestry.

The bones of the Crusaders found in a burial pit in Sidon, Lebanon [Credit: Claude Doumet-Serhal]

Throughout history, other massive human migrations--like the movement of the Mongols through Asia under Genghis Khan and the arrival of colonial Iberians in South America--have fundamentally reshaped the genetic makeup of those regions. But the authors theorize that the Crusaders' influence was likely shorter-lived because the Crusaders' genetic traces are insignificant in people living in Lebanon today. "They made big efforts to expel them, and succeeded after a couple of hundred years," says Tyler-Smith.

This ancient DNA can tell us things about history that modern DNA can't. In fact, when the researchers sequenced the DNA of people living in Lebanon 2,000 years ago during the Roman period, they found that today's Lebanese population is actually more genetically similar to the Roman Lebanese.

"If you look at the genetics of people who lived during the Roman period and the genetics of people who are living there today, you would think that there was just this continuity. You would think that nothing happened between the Roman period and today, and you would miss that for a certain period of time the population of Lebanon included Europeans and people with mixed ancestry," says Haber.

These findings indicate that there may be other major events in human history that don't show up in the DNA of people living today. And if those events aren't as well-documented as the Crusades, we simply might not know about them. "Our findings suggest that it's worthwhile looking at ancient DNA even from periods when it seems like not that much was going on genetically. Our history may be full of these transient pulses of genetic mixing that disappear without a trace," says Tyler-Smith.

The bones of the Crusaders found in a burial pit in Sidon, Lebanon [Credit: Claude Doumet-Serhal]

That the researchers were able to sequence and interpret the nine Crusaders' DNA at all was also surprising. DNA degrades faster in warm climates, and the remains studied here were burned and crudely buried. "There has been a lot of long-term interest in the genetics of this region, because it has this very strategic position, a lot of history, and a lot of migrations. But previous research has focused mainly on present-day populations, partly because recovering ancient DNA from warm climates is so difficult. Our success shows that studying samples in a similar condition is now possible because of advances in DNA extraction and sequencing technology," says Haber.

Next, the researchers plan to investigate what was happening genetically in the Near East during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

But they also hope that these kinds of studies will become more commonplace--and more interdisciplinary. "Historical records are often very fragmentary and potentially very biased," Tyler-Smith says. "But genetics gives us a complementary approach that can confirm some of the things that we read about in history and tell us about things that are not recorded in the historical records that we have. And as this approach is adopted by historians and archaeologists as a part of their field, I think it will only become more and more enriching."

Source: Cell Press [April 18, 2019]

Fossilized slime of 100-million-year-old hagfish shakes up vertebrate family tree

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on January 21, 2019 / comment : 0 Fossils, Lebanon, Palaeontology

Paleontologists at the University of Chicago have discovered the first detailed fossil of a hagfish, the slimy, eel-like carrion feeders of the ocean. The 100-million-year-old fossil helps answer questions about when these ancient, jawless fish branched off the evolutionary tree from the lineage that gave rise to modern-day jawed vertebrates, including bony fish and humans.

Tethymyxine tapirostrum, is a 100-million-year-old, 12-inch long fish embedded in a slab of Cretaceous period limestone from Lebanon, believed to be the first detailed fossil of a hagfish [Credit: Tetsuto Miyashita, University of Chicago]

The fossil, named Tethymyxine tapirostrum,is a 12-inch long fish embedded in a slab of Cretaceous period limestone from Lebanon. It fills a 100-million-year gap in the fossil record and shows that hagfish are more closely related to the blood-sucking lamprey than to other fishes. This means that both hagfish and lampreys evolved their eel-like body shape and strange feeding systems after they branched off from the rest of the vertebrate line of ancestry about 500 million years ago.

"This is a major reorganization of the family tree of all fish and their descendants. This allows us to put an evolutionary date on unique traits that set hagfish apart from all other animals," said Tetsuto Miyashita, PhD, a Chicago Fellow in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago who led the research. The findings are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The slimy dead giveaway

Modern-day hagfish are known for their bizarre, nightmarish appearance and unique defense mechanism. They don't have eyes, or jaws or teeth to bite with, but instead use a spiky tongue-like apparatus to rasp flesh off dead fish and whales at the bottom of the ocean. When harassed, they can instantly turn the water around them into a cloud of slime, clogging the gills of would-be predators.

This ability to produce slime is what gave away the Tethymyxine fossil. Miyashita used an imaging technology called synchrotron scanning at Stanford University to identify chemical traces of soft tissue that were left behind in the limestone when the hagfish fossilized. These soft tissues are rarely preserved, which is why there are so few examples of ancient hagfish relatives to study.

Synchrotron scanning of the Tethymyxine tapirostrum hagfish fossil revealed traces of chemical left behind when the soft tissues fossilized, including signs of keratin that indicate a series of slime-producing glands along the body [Credit: Tetsuto Miyashita, University of Chicago]

The scanning picked up a signal for keratin, the same material that makes up fingernails in humans. Keratin, as it turns out, is a crucial part of what makes the hagfish slime defense so effective. Hagfish have a series of glands along their bodies that produce tiny packets of tightly-coiled keratin fibers, lubricated by mucus-y goo. When these packets hit seawater, the fibers explode and trap the water within, turning everything into shark-choking slop. The fibers are so strong that when dried out they resemble silk threads; they're even being studied as possible biosynthetic fibers to make clothes and other materials.

Miyashita and his colleagues found more than a hundred concentrations of keratin along the body of the fossil, meaning that the ancient hagfish probably evolved its slime defense when the seas included fearsome predators such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs that we no longer see today.

"We now have a fossil that can push back the origin of the hagfish-like body plan by hundreds of millions of years," Miyashita said. "Now, the next question is how this changes our view of the relationships between all these early fish lineages."

Shaking up the vertebrate family tree

Features of the new fossil help place hagfish and their relatives on the vertebrate family tree. In the past, scientists have disagreed about where they belonged, depending on how they tackled the question. Those who rely on fossil evidence alone tend to conclude that hagfish are so primitive that they are not even vertebrates. This implies that all fishes and their vertebrate descendants had a common ancestor that -- more or less -- looked like a hagfish.

The Tethymyxine tapirostrum hagfish fossil suggests a new hypothesis for the structure of the vertebrate family tree, with hagfish and other eel-like creatures branching off early from the lineage that gave rise  to modern-day jawed vertebrates, including bony fish and humans [Credit: Tetsuto Miyashita, University of Chicago]

But those who work with genetic data argue that hagfish and lampreys are more closely related to each other. This suggests that modern hagfish and lampreys are the odd ones out in the family tree of vertebrates. In that case, the primitive appearance of hagfish and lampreys is deceptive, and the common ancestor of all vertebrates was probably something more conventionally fish-like.

Miyashita's work reconciles these two approaches, using physical evidence of the animal's anatomy from the fossil to come to the same conclusion as the geneticists: that the hagfish and lampreys should be grouped separately from the rest of fishes.

"In a sense, this resets the agenda of how we understand these animals," said Michael Coates, PhD, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at UChicago and a co-author of the new study. "Now we have this important corroboration that they are a group apart. Although they're still part of vertebrate biodiversity, we now have to look at hagfish and lampreys more carefully, and recognize their apparent primitiveness as a specialized condition.

Paleontologists have increasingly used sophisticated imaging techniques in the past few years, but Miyashita's research is one of a handful so far to use synchrotron scanning to identify chemical elements in a fossil. While it was crucial to detect anatomical structures in the hagfish fossil, he believes it can also be a useful tool to help scientists detect paint or glue used to embellish a fossil or even outright forge a specimen. Any attempt to spice up a fossil specimen leaves chemical fingerprints that light up like holiday decorations in a synchrotron scan.

"I'm impressed with what Tetsuto has marshaled here," Coates said. "He's maxed out all the different techniques and approaches that can be applied to this fossil to extract information from it, to understand it and to check it thoroughly."

Author: Matt Wood | Source: University of Chicago Medical Center [January 21, 2019]

Newborn insects trapped in amber show first evidence of how to crack an egg

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on December 20, 2018 / comment : 0 Fossils, Lebanon, Palaeontology

Fossilised newborns, egg shells, and egg bursters preserved together in amber provide the first direct evidence of how insects hatched in deep time, according to a new article published in the journal Palaeontology.

Four complete Tragychrysa ovoruptora newborns preserved together with egg shell remains and one visible egg burster (right inset) [Credit: Palaeontology, 2018]

One of the earliest and toughest trials that all organisms face is birth. The new findings give scientists evidence on how tiny insects broke the barrier separating them from life and took their first steps into an ancient forest.

Trapped together inside 130 million-year-old Lebanese amber, or fossilised resin, researchers found several green lacewing newborn larvae, the split egg shells from where they hatched, and the minute structures the hatchlings used to crack the egg, known as egg bursters. The discovery is remarkable because no definitive evidence of these specialised structures had been reported from the fossil record of egg-laying animals, until now.

The fossil newborns have been described as the new species Tragichrysa ovoruptora, meaning 'egg breaking' and 'tragic green lacewing', after the fact that multiple specimens were ensnared and entombed in the resin simultaneously.

"Egg-laying animals such as many arthropods and vertebrates use egg bursters to break the egg surface during hatching; a famous example is the 'egg tooth' on the beak of newborn chicks," explains Dr Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, a researcher at Oxford University Museum of Natural History and lead author of the work. "Egg bursters are diverse in shape and location. Modern green lacewing hatchlings split the egg with a 'mask' bearing a jagged blade. Once used, this 'mask' is shed and left attached to the empty egg shell, which is exactly what we found in the amber together with the newborns."

Studied amber preparations (top) and extant green lacewing egg batch (bottom) for comparison. Note the pinhead for scale [Credit: Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, Oxford University Museum of Natural History]

Green lacewing larvae are small hunters which often carry debris as camouflage, and use sickle-shaped jaws to pierce and suck the fluids of their prey. Although the larvae trapped in amber differ significantly from modern-day relatives, in that they possess long tubes instead of clubs or bumps for holding debris, the studied egg shells and egg bursters are remarkably similar to those of today's green lacewings. Altogether, they provide the full picture of how these fossil insects hatched like their extant counterparts, about 130 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous.

"The process of hatching is ephemeral and the structures that make it possible tend to disappear quickly once egg-laying animals hatch, so obtaining fossil evidence of them is truly exceptional," remarks Dr Michael S. Engel, a co-author of the study from the University of Kansas.

The Tragichrysa ovoruptora larvae were almost certainly trapped by resin while clutching the eggs from which they had freshly emerged. Such behaviour is common among modern relatives while their body hardens and their predatory jaws become functional. The two mouthparts forming the jaws are not interlocked in most of the fossil larvae, which further suggests that they were recently born.

All the preparations studied were obtained from the same amber piece and are as thin as a pinhead, allowing a detailed account of the fossils and finding the tiny egg bursters, according to Dr Dany Azar, another co-author of the work, from the Lebanese University, who discovered and prepared the studied amber samples.

Reconstruction of two Tragychrysa ovoruptora newborns clutching the eggs from where they recently hatched, moments before they were trapped by resin. Larvae color and egg stalks are conjectural [Credit: Palaeontology, 2018]

It would seem reasonable to assume that traits controlling a life event as crucial as hatching would have remained quite stable during evolution. However, as Dr Enrique Peñalver of the Spanish Geological Survey (IGME; Geomining Museum) and co-author of the work explains: "There are known instances in modern insects where closely related groups, even down to the species level, show different means of hatching that can entail the loss of egg bursters. So, the long-term stability of a hatching mechanism in a given animal lineage cannot be taken for granted."

Nonetheless, this new discovery in fossil green lacewings shows the existence 130 million years ago of a sophisticated hatching mechanism which endures to this day.

Source: University of Oxford [December 20, 2018]

Megalithic constructions discovered in Lebanon

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on November 24, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Lebanon, Near East

Polish archaeologists discovered the buildings erected from enormous, unworked stones, dating from the mid-4th century BC, in northern Lebanon, Zuzanna Wygnańska from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology (CAŚ) of Warsaw University informed PAP.

Credit: Centrum Archeologii Śródziemnomorskiej Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego

The archaeological mission of CAŚ conducted its first reconnaissance in the Lebanese province of Akkar, in the Fertile Crescent (also known as the cradle of civilization). The area is still being explored by the archaeologists.

The team found buildings made of unworked stones, each weighing several hundred kilograms. They noted two different types of megalithic structures - burial chambers (which were found to be empty) and large rectangular rooms, about 10 by 5 metres in size with an apse adjacent to the shorter sides.

Credit: Centrum Archeologii Śródziemnomorskiej Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego

According to Wygnańska, the constructions could have been used as cult temples. It is thought that the buildings also served as funeral sites.

Moreover, the archaeologists also discovered rocks decorated with snakes and other animals curled up or stretched-out along the stone. In their opinion, the neighbouring megalithic constructions served the purpose of being associated with cult activity.

Credit: Centrum Archeologii Śródziemnomorskiej Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego

The Polish archaeologists also located and explored extensive settlements which had been inhabited for hundreds years.

Akkar province is partially mountainous, partially level and intercut with numerous river valleys. The area was selected for research purposes from satellite images.

Source: The First News [November 24, 2018]