Residue on newly discovered ancient pot shards suggests delicacies like Gruyere and Emmental got their start more than 3,000 years ago when dairy herders moved into the Swiss Alps and started making cheese.
Researchers found that the residue on shards from the 1st millennium BCE—the Iron Age—had the same chemical signatures associated with heating milk from animals such as cows, sheep, and goats, as part of the cheesemaking process.
The ceramic fragments were found in the ruins of stone buildings similar to those used by modern alpine dairy managers for cheese production during the summer months.
Although there is earlier evidence for cheese production in lowland settings, until now virtually nothing was known about the origins of cheesemaking at altitude due to the poor preservation of archaeological sites.
ALPINE DAIRYING
Researchers say that the development of alpine dairying occurred around the same time as an increasing population and the growth of arable farming in the lowlands. The resulting pressure on valley pastures forced herders to higher elevations.
“The principal interest of this piece of work is that it provides direct evidence for early dairying at high altitude in the Alps,” says Kevin Walsh, senior lecturer of archaeology at the University of York and coauthor of a new study published in PLOS ONE.
“Until now, we have been reliant on indirect evidence for pastoralism and dairying in the Alps, changes in vegetation and archaeological structures that suggest pastoral practices.”
Even today, producing cheese in a high mountainous environment requires extraordinary effort, says Francesco Carrer, a research associate at Newcastle University.
“Prehistoric herders would have had to have detailed knowledge of the location of alpine pastures, be able to cope with unpredictable weather, and have the technological knowledge to transform milk into a nutritious and storable product.
“We can now put alpine cheese production into the bigger picture of what was happening at lower levels. But there is more work needed to fully understand the prehistoric alpine cheesemaking process such as whether the cheese was made using a single milk or a blend and how long it was matured for.”
Palaeontologists and the famous Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz were once in search of the same thing: a heart. But in our case, it was the search for a fossilised heart. And now we’ve found one.
A new discovery, announced today in the journal eLife, shows the perfectly preserved 3D fossilised heart in a 113-119 million-year-old fish from Brazil called Rhacolepis.
This is the first definite fossilised heart found in any prehistoric animal.
For centuries, the fossil remains of back-boned animals – or vertebrates – were studied primarily from their bones or fossilised footprints. The possibility of finding well-preserved soft tissues in really ancient fossils was widely thought to be impossible.
Soft organic material rapidly decays after death, so organs start breaking down from bacterial interactions almost immediately after an animal has died. Once the body has decayed, what remains can eventually become buried and what’s left of the skeleton might one day become a fossil.
This 119 million year old fish, Rhacolepis, is the first fossil to show a 3D preserved heart which gives us a rare window into the early evolution of one of our body’s most important organs. Dr John Maisey, American Museum of Natural History in New York, Author provided. Click/tap for larger image.
Exceptional preservation of fossils
But certain rare fossil deposits, called konservat laggerstätten (meaning “place of storage”), are formed by rapid burial under special chemical conditions. These deposits can preserve a range of soft tissues from the organism.
The famous Burgess Shale fossils from British Columbia in Canada show soft-bodied worms and other invertebrate creatures. These were buried by rapid mudslides around 525 million years ago.
The well-preserved fishes from the 113-119 million-year-old Santana Formation of Brazil were among the first vertebrate fossils to show evidence of preserved soft tissues. These include parts of stomachs and bands of muscles.
The fish Rhacolepis imaged by synchrotron tomography showing the heart (left) and a cross-section through the heart showing valves (right, white arrows). Maldanis et al. (2016)
The discovery of complete soft tissues preserved as whole internal organs in a fossil was a bit of a Holy Grail for palaeontologists. Such finds could contribute to understanding deeper evolutionary patterns as internal soft organs have their own set of specialised features.
Finding a complete fossilised heart in a fish almost 120 million years old was a major breakthrough for José Xavier-Neto of the Brazilian Biosciences National Laboratory, Lara Maldanis of the University of Campinas, Vincent Fernandez of the European Synchotron Radiation Facility and colleagues from across Brazil and Sweden.
Back in 2000, a group of US scientists claimed to have found a heart preserved in a dinosaur nicknamed Willo, a Thescelosaurus. But recent work has debunked this claim, showing the cavity of the dinosaur body was infilled by sediment and then impregnated with iron-rich minerals to make the cavity inside look a bit heart-like when imaged by CT scanning.
The only other claims for fossilised vertebrate hearts are stains supposedly made by haemoglobin-rich blood found in the region of the fossil where the heart should be. These, along with stains representing possibly the liver, have recently been documented in 390 million-year-old fishes from Scotland.
Setting up a fossil in the Australian Synchrotron’s IMBL facility. Fossilised soft organs can be studied using these high-tech imaging methods. John Long, Flinders University
Digital heart surgery on a fossil
The new discovery was made by imaging a fossil still entombed within its limestone concretion using synchrotron X-ray tomography down to 6µm sections. The heart is then rendered out slice by slice using software to digitally restore the features of the organ.
This method has now been widely applied in palaeontology for the past decade or so to reveal many intricate soft tissue structures in fossils, including the actual preserved brain of a 300 million-year-old fish from North America and actual muscle bundles attached to 380 million-year-old placoderm fishes from Australia.
The Rhacolepis heart was digitally restored by tomography and from images studied in cross-sections through the rock. It shows clear detail of the conus arteriosus, or bulb at the top of the heart, which has a pattern of five rows of valves inside it.
A detailed comparison with a dissected tarpon heart in the paper shows similar structures in the same relative position as the fossil heart.
The discovery of the fossilised heart is significant in that it shows the valve condition in an early member of the ray-finned fish group. These are the largest group of vertebrates alive today with nearly 30,000 species, and naturally they display a wide range of valve patterns in their hearts.
Some, such as the African reedfish, a very basal member of the ray-finned fishes, has nine rows of valves. But the modern most diverse group of ray-fins, the teleosts, have just a single outflow valve in the heart. In teleosts another structure, the bulbus arteriosus, prevails over the conus arteriosus to dominate outflow of blood from the heart.
The fossil heart data from Rhacolepis shows an intermediate condition between the many-valved types seen in basal ray-finned fishes and the single-valved hearts in modern teleosts. (From Maldanis et al. 2016) John Long
Enter our fossil, Rhacolepis, a fish belonging to an entirely extinct family, the Pachyrhizodontidae, named after the extinct fish Pachyrhizodus. This is a group placed close to the base of the teleosts.
The pattern shown by the fossil seems to represent a good intermediate condition between the most primitive pattern and the most advanced type. In biology, simple patterns often hold more complex hidden meanings.
Within some ray-finned fish groups there is also thought to be a secondary simplification of the valve arrangements. For example, in sturgeons and bowfins there is independent pattern of simplification within the conus arteriosus.
There is also evidence for independent increase in the numbers of valves in some basal ray-fins, like the reedfish Polypterus, so interpreting evolutionary patterns from just one data point in time must be open to several explanations.
Nonetheless, for the first time we actually do have a data point to study the anatomy in detail of a fossilised heart in an extinct group of fishes.
The find demonstrates the immense potential for more discoveries of this nature, enabling more discussion of the comparative anatomy of soft organs in extinct organisms and how they have evolved through time.
With increased discoveries like this one, and more detailed knowledge of the soft tissue anatomy of extinct animals, we will one day really get to the heart of understanding the evolution of the first back-boned animals.
Deep-sea creatures were able to survive the catastrophic asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago thanks to tiny algae that supplied a slow but steady trickle of food to the ocean floor.
Like the dinosaurs themselves, giant marine reptiles, invertebrates, and microscopic organisms became extinct after the catastrophic asteroid impact in an immense upheaval of the world’s oceans, but, somehow, deep-sea creatures managed to survive.
Their survival has puzzled scientists since it has been widely believed that the asteroid impact cut off the food supply in the oceans by destroying free-floating algae and bacteria.
But, now, new research by oceanic scientists from Cardiff University offers strong evidence suggesting that some forms of algae and bacteria were actually living in the aftermath of the asteroid disaster, and that they acted as a constant, sinking, slow trickle of food for creatures living near the seafloor.
The findings, published in the journal, Geology, are a result of an analysis of the chemical composition of the fossilized shells of sea surface and seafloor organisms from that period, taken from drilling cores from the ocean floor in the South Atlantic.
This gave the researchers an idea of the flux, or movement, of organic matter from the sea surface to the seafloor in the aftermath of the asteroid strike, and led them to conclude that a slow trickle of food was constantly being delivered to the deep ocean.
Furthermore, the team were able to calculate that the food supply in the ocean was fully restored around 1.7 million years after the asteroid strike, which is almost half the original estimate, showing that marine food chains bounced back more quickly than originally thought.
“The global catastrophe that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs also devastated ocean ecosystems. Giant marine reptiles met their end as did various types of invertebrates such as the iconic ammonites,” says Heather Birch, a PhD student at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff University.
“Our results show that despite a wave of massive and virtually instantaneous extinctions among the plankton, some types of photosynthesizing organisms, such as algae and bacteria, were living in the aftermath of the asteroid strike.
“This provided a slow trickle of food for organisms living near the ocean floor which enabled them to survive the mass extinction, answering one of the outstanding questions that still remained regarding this period of history.
“Even so, it took almost two million years before the deep-sea food supply was fully restored as new species evolved to occupy ecological niches vacated by extinct forms.”
Many scientists currently believe that the mass extinction of life on Earth around 65 million years ago was caused by a 10 kilometer wide asteroid that hit Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. It is believed the debris from impact starved the Earth of the Sun’s energy and, once settled, led to greenhouse gases locking in the Sun’s heat and causing temperatures to rise drastically.
This period of darkness followed by soaring heat, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, was thought to obliterate almost half of the world’s species.
Scientists also claim that the impact of the asteroid would have filled the Earth’s atmosphere with sulphur trioxide, subsequently creating a gas cloud that would have caused a mass amount of sulphuric acid rain to fall in just a few days, making the surface of the ocean too acidic for upper ocean creatures to live.
The team’s research was published in the journal Geology.
Analysis of fossil remains from a newly discovered dinosaur species that is a relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex have helped paleontologists piece together how T. Rex became the dominant dino that it did by the Late Cretaceous period. The new species, named Timurlengia euotica, was a horse-sized dinosaur that was found in the Kyzylkum Desert of Uzbekistan.
Original painting by Todd Marshall reconstructing the environment of the new tyrannosaur Timurlengia euotica in its environment 90 million years ago. Click/tap for larger image
A fascinating news release on the Science Daily website reveals the details of this new dino and how the researchers used what they learned to solve the mystery of how T. Rex got so huge:
Paleontologists have long known from the fossil record that the family of dinosaurs at the center of the study–tyrannosaurs–transitioned from small-bodied species to fearsome giants like the T. rex over the course of 70 million years. But now, newly discovered dinosaur fossils suggest that much of this transition and growth in size occurred suddenly, toward the end of this 70 million-year period. The study also shows that before the evolution of their massive size, tyrannosaurs had developed keen senses and cognitive abilities, including the ability to hear low-frequency sounds. This positioned them to take advantage of opportunities to reach the top of their food chain in the Late Cretaceous Period after other groups of large meat-eating dinosaurs had gone extinct about 80-90 million years ago.
Until now, little was known about how tyrannosaurs became the giant, intelligent predators that dominated the landscape about 70 to 80 million years ago. The newly discovered species, named Timurlengia euotica, lived about 90 million years ago and fills a 20 million-year gap in the fossil record of tyrannosaurs. The new species is a tyrannosaur but not the ancestor of the T. rex.
“Timurlengia was a nimble pursuit hunter with slender, blade-like teeth suitable for slicing through meat,” said Hans Sues, chair of the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “It probably preyed on the various large plant-eaters, especially early duck-billed dinosaurs, which shared its world. Clues from the life of Timurlengia allow us to fill in gaps and better understand the life and evolution of other related dinosaurs, like T. rex.”
Sues and Alexander Averianov, a senior scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, collected the fossils at the center of the study between 1997 and 2006 while co-leading international expeditions to the Kyzylkum Desert of Uzbekistan.
“Central Asia was the place where many of the familiar groups of Cretaceous dinosaurs had their roots,” Sues said. “The discoveries from the Kyzylkum Desert of Uzbekistan are now helping us to trace the early history of these animals, many of which later flourished in our own backyard in North America.”
Sues and a team of paleontologists led by Steve Brusatte at the University of Edinburgh studied tyrannosaur fossils collected from the international expedition and discovered the new species. The team later reconstructed the brain of the dinosaur using CT scans of its brain case to glean insights into the new species’ advanced senses.
“The ancestors of T. rex would have looked a whole lot like Timurlengia, a horse-sized hunter with a big brain and keen hearing that would put us to shame,” Brusatte said. “Only after these ancestral tyrannosaurs evolved their clever brains and sharp senses did they grow into the colossal sizes of T. rex. Tyrannosaurs had to get smart before they got big.”
The species’ skull was much smaller than that of T. rex. However, key features of Timurlengia‘s skull reveal that its brain and senses were already highly developed, the team says.
Timurlengia was about the size of a horse and could weigh up to 600 pounds. It had long legs and was likely a fast runner.
The first tyrannosaurs lived during the Jurassic Period, around 170 million years ago, and were only slightly larger than a human. However, by the Late Cretaceous Period–around 100 million years later–tyrannosaurs had evolved into animals like T. rex, which could weigh up to 7 tons.
The new species’ small size some 80 million years after tyrannosaurs first appeared in the fossil record indicates that its huge size developed only toward the end of the group’s long evolutionary history.
He lay alone in a shallow grave at the base of a cliff for hundreds of years. Then, in 2008, patrol staff at a game lodge stumbled across the man’s remains – and he became the first mummy ever found in Botswana. Now a team of scientists from Botswana, South Africa and Switzerland has used computerised tomography (CT) scanning and ancient DNA analysis to uncover some of the Tuli mummy’s secrets. The Conversation Africa’s science and technology editor Natasha Joseph asked two of the study’s authors, Maryna Steyn and Frank Rühli, to explain what they found.
The Tuli mummy is one of a kind, so mummification obviously wasn’t a common practise in Botswana. Was it common elsewhere in southern Africa?
Mummification was not common in southern Africa, but it did happen. This is the first mummy found in Botswana. A few have been found in neighbouring South Africa, like the 2000 year old Kouga mummy.
Ethnographic literature, particularly focusing on Zimbabwe, suggests that after a leader died, his body was not immediately interred but may have been treated by
usually slowly drying it over a low fire. This may have assisted in the preservation of such a body. The body would then be wrapped in a cloth or bull hide and buried at the same time that the leader’s successor came to power.
The Tuli remains were not intentionally mummified – they mummified by accident. The dry conditions led to the drying out, or dessication, of the remains. This contributed to the mummification or preservation of soft tissues such as skin and tendons. So the remains were naturally mummified.
A three-dimensional volume rendering of the Tuli mummy. Click/tap for larger image. Credit: SA Journal of Science
How does one perform a CT scan on a mummy? It must be quite risky, given the fragile condition of the remains. Is it a common procedure elsewhere in the world where mummies are found more frequently?
Modern imaging techniques have opened up a whole new world when it comes to mummy studies. CT scans are frequently used, though it can be a risky process – the mummy can be damaged during transportation and scanning. The scientists involved usually wrap the mummy and wear gloves as much as possible so that the mummy isn’t physically damaged.
The intact mummy, covered with animal skin, as it was discovered at the base of a cliff in Botswana. SA Journal of Science
Also, as these mummies are not in the same position a living patient would be – supine, straight or on their back – it is sometimes difficult to fit them into the scanner. The Tuli mummy, for instance, was found curled up into a foetal position. These unusual body positions sometimes make it difficult to interpret the scans’ findings.
But CT scans give us the chance to get really important medical and archaeological information through non-invasive examinations.
What did the CT scans and DNA analysis tell you about the Tuli mummy? Who was he?
In the initial study his age was estimated to be between 40 and 55, but the new information from our scans suggests that the Tuli mummy was definitely older than 50. He lived during the Iron Age or, more specifically, the Late Iron Age, and suffered from degenerative disease, especially of the spine. We could tell this because of the osteophytes along his spine. These are bony projections that suggest degeneration of the joints.
The scans didn’t reveal any preserved organs, which means they either degenerated after death or were removed before burial. The second is unlikely, since it would be unusual practice in the area.
We also did aDNA analysis, which stands for ancient DNA. It is old, and therefore difficult to extract. One has to do this in a specialised aDNA laboratory. One of the co-authors on our paper in the SA Journal of Science was Molebogeng Bodiba, who travelled to Switzerland to work in a dedicated aDNA lab.
Extracting ancient DNA is a delicate, fascinating process
The Tuli mummy marks the first time that ancient DNA has been extracted from a southern African mummy. Generally speaking, this helps scientists to get a better understanding of things like local population genetics.
His aDNA revealed that Tuli was related to modern day Sotho-Tswana and Khoesan people. This is what we would have expected, but it’s great to have it confirmed and to see that the technology works.
Scientists have pieced together an early human habitat in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and discovered that despite access to food, water, and shady shelter, the living 1.8 million years ago was far from easy.
These human ancestors, who looked like a cross between apes and modern humans, even had stone tools with sharp edges, but still had to eke out a tough living, says Gail M. Ashley, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Rutgers University. “It was a very stressful life because they were in continual competition with carnivores for their food.”
During years of work, researchers reconstructed the landscape on a fine scale, using plant and other evidence collected at the sprawling site. The landscape reconstruction will help paleoanthropologists develop ideas and models on what early humans were like, how they lived, how they got their food (especially protein), what they ate and drank, and their behavior, Ashley says.
Paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered the site in 1959 and uncovered thousands of animal bones and stone tools. Through exhaustive excavations in the last decade, scientists collected numerous soil samples and studied them via carbon isotope analysis. The landscape had a freshwater spring, wetlands, woodland, and grasslands.
An artist’s rendition of an early human habitat in East Africa 1.8 million years ago. (Credit: M.Lopez-Herrera via the Olduvai Paleoanthropology and Paleoecology Project and Enrique Baquedano) Click/tap for larger image.
“We were able to map out what the plants were on the landscape with respect to where the humans and their stone tools were found,” Ashley says. “That’s never been done before. Mapping was done by analyzing the soils in one geological bed, and in that bed there were bones of two different hominin species.”
The two species of hominins, or early humans, are Paranthropus boisei—robust and pretty small-brained—and Homo habilis, a lighter-boned species. Homo habilis had a bigger brain and was more in sync with our human evolutionary tree, Ashley says. Both species were about 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall, and their lifespan was likely about 30 to 40 years.
The shady woodland had palm and acacia trees, but researchers don’t think the hominins camped there. Based on the high concentration of bones, the primates probably obtained carcasses elsewhere and ate the meat in the woods for safety.
In a surprising twist, a layer of volcanic ash covered the site’s surface, nicely preserving the bones and organic matter, Ashley says. “Think about it as a Pompeii-like event where you had a volcanic eruption.” A volcano about 10 miles from the site may have erupted and “spewed out a lot of ash that completely blanketed the landscape.”
At the site, scientists found thousands of bones from giraffes, elephants, and wildebeests, swift runners in the antelope family. The hominins may have killed the animals for their meat or scavenged leftover meat. Competing carnivores included lions, leopards, and hyenas, which also posed a threat to hominin safety.
Paleoanthropologists “have started to have some ideas about whether hominins were actively hunting animals for meat sources or whether they were perhaps scavenging leftover meat sources that had been killed by say a lion or a hyena,” Ashley says.
“The subject of eating meat is an important question defining current research on hominins. We know that the increase in the size of the brain, just the evolution of humans, is probably tied to more protein.” They may have also eaten hominins’ food also may have included wetland ferns for protein and crustaceans, snails and slugs.
Scientists think the hominins likely used the site for a long time, perhaps tens or hundreds of years, Ashley says. “We don’t think they were living there. We think they were taking advantage of the freshwater source that was nearby.”
The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from Penn State, the Geological Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and Complutense University in Madrid, Spain contributed to the work.
About 100 million years ago, a tiny chameleon was creeping through the ancient tropics of present-day Myanmar when it got trapped in the resin of a coniferous tree. Over time, the resin fossilized into amber, leaving the lizard remarkably preserved.
Seventy-eight million years older than the previous oldest specimen on record, the dime-size chameleon along with 11 more ancient fossil lizards were pulled, encased in amber, from a mine decades ago, but they were never analyzed. Until now.
The real-life fossils hold snapshots of “missing links” in the evolutionary history of lizards that will allow scientists to gain a better understanding of where they fit on the tree of life, says Edward Stanley, a postdoctoral student in herpetology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida and coauthor of a new study published in the journal Science Advances.
Of the 12 lizard specimens, three—a gecko, an archaic lizard, and the chameleon—were particularly well-preserved. The new species will be named and described in a future study.
“These fossils tell us a lot about the extraordinary, but previously unknown, diversity of lizards in ancient tropical forests,” Stanley says.
“The fossil record is sparse because the delicate skin and fragile bones of small lizards do not usually preserve, especially in the tropics, which makes the new amber fossils an incredibly rare and unique window into a critical period of diversification.”
Ancient lizard, gecko, and chameleon fossils preserved in amber. Click or tap for larger image. (Credit: Kristen Grace)
Stanley first encountered the amber fossils at the American Museum of Natural History after a private collector donated them. He knew the fossils were ancient, but it was a combination of luck and micro-CT technology that allowed him to identify the oldest chameleon.
“It was mind-blowing” to see the fossils for the first time, he says. “Usually we have a foot or other small part preserved in amber, but these are whole specimens—claws, toepads, teeth, even perfectly intact colored scales. I was familiar with CT technology, so I realized this was an opportunity to look more closely and put the lizards into evolutionary perspective.”
A micro-CT scanner looked inside the amber without damaging the fossils, allowing researchers to digitally piece together tiny bones and examine soft tissue. Scanned images of the detailed preservation provided insight into the anatomy and ecology of ancient lizards, Stanley says.
A 3-D print of one of the fossilized lizards, created from micro-CT scan data. (Credit: Kristen Grace)
The amber gecko, for example, confirms the group already had highly advanced adhesive toe pads used for climbing, suggesting this adaptation originated earlier than previously thought.
As for the Southeast Asian chameleon, the find significantly pushes back the origins of the group and challenges long-held views that chameleons got their start in Africa.
It also reveals the evolutionary order of chameleons’ strange and highly derived features. The amber-trapped lizard has the iconic projectile tongue of modern chameleons, but had not yet developed the unique body shape and fused toes specially adapted for gripping that we see today.
The fact that these incredibly ancient lizards have modern counterparts living today in the Old World tropics speaks to the stability of tropical forests.
“These exquisitely preserved examples of past diversity show us why we should be protecting these areas where their modern relatives live today,” Stanley says.
“The tropics often act as a stable refuge where biodiversity tends to accumulate, while other places are more variable in terms of climate and species. However, the tropics are not impervious to human efforts to destroy them.”
Animation created from mico-CT scans of ancient gecko fossilized in amber. (Credit: provided by original author)
The research was reported in a study published in the journal Science Advances.
A chance finding of an ancient object by a British metal detector enthusiast has led to the discovery of a previously unknown Anglo-Saxon settlement which appears to be a monastic or trading center from the 8th century. The site, which was in fact an island in the 8th century, was discovered in a field outside of Little Carlton near Louth, Lincolnshire, and is yielding numerous artifacts from the settlement. Archaeologists from the University of Sheffield have deemed it one of the most important finds in decades.
A press release from the University of Sheffield website supplies all of the intriguing details:
A glass counter decorated with twisted colorful strands found at the site. Click or tap for larger image. (Credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme)
The remains of an Anglo-Saxon island have been uncovered in one of the most important archaeological finds in decades.
The island which was home to a Middle Saxon settlement was found at Little Carlton near Louth, Lincolnshire by archaeologists from the University of Sheffield.
It is thought the site is a previously unknown monastic or trading centre but researchers believe their work has only revealed an enticing glimpse of the settlement so far.
The exciting discovery was made after a local metal detectorist Graham Vickers reported an intriguing item to the Lincolnshire Finds Liaison Officer (FLO), Dr Adam Daubney, from the Portable Antiquities Scheme which encourages the voluntary recording of archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales.
Mr Vickers unearthed a silver stylus, which is an ornate writing tool dating back to the 8th century, from a disturbed plough field.
This was the first of many unusual items found at the site which held important clues to the significant settlement lying below.
The large number of artefacts now include a total of 21 styli, around 300 dress pins, and a huge number of ‘Sceattas’, coins from the 7th-8th centuries, as well as a small lead tablet bearing the faint but legible letters spelling ‘Cudberg’ which is a female Anglo-Saxon name.
After the interesting finds were reported, Dr Hugh Willmott and Pete Townend, a doctoral student from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology, visited the site to carry out targeted geophysical and magnetometry surveys along with 3D modelling to visualise the landscape on a large scale.
The imagery showed that the island they had discovered was much more obvious than the land today, rising out of its lower surroundings. To complete the picture the researchers raised the water level digitally to bring it back up to its early medieval height based on the topography and geophysical survey.
Dr Willmott, said: “Our findings have demonstrated that this is a site of international importance, but its discovery and initial interpretation has only been possible through engaging with a responsible local metal detectorist who reported their finds to the Portable Antiquities Scheme.”
Students from the University have subsequently opened nine evaluation trenches at the site which revealed a wealth of information about what life would have been like at the settlement.
They found a number of intriguing items including an area which seems to have been an area of industrial working, as well as very significant quantities of Middle Saxon pottery and butchered animal bone.
“It’s been an honour to be invited to work on such a unique site and demonstrate the importance of working with local people on the ground; one of the greatest strengths of the University of Sheffield is its active promotion of an understanding of our shared pasts for all concerned,” added Dr Willmott.
In an interesting case of an archaeologist making an archaeological find in a museum, a previously unidentified dinosaur bone was rediscovered buried in a drawer at the Museum of Geology and Palaeontology in Palermo Italy by a PhD student from the Imperial College London. The student, Alessandro Chiarenza, requested permission to analyze the femur bone and ended up solving two mysteries at once.
The first mystery he solved was exactly which dinosaur the bone came from and how huge these ancient creatures could grow to be. According to a fascinating press release on the EurekAlert website, the fossil has been classified as belonging to the abelisaur:
Alessandro Chiarenza, a PhD student from Imperial College London, last year stumbled across a fossilised femur bone, left forgotten in a drawer, during his visit to the Museum of Geology and Palaeontology in Palermo Italy. He and a colleague Andrea Cau, a researcher from the University of Bologna, got permission from the museum to analyse the femur. They discovered that the bone was from a dinosaur called abelisaur, which roamed the Earth around 95 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period.
Abelisauridae were a group of predatory, carnivorous dinosaurs, characterised by extremely small forelimbs, a short deep face, small razor sharp teeth, and powerful muscular hind limbs. Scientists suspect they were also covered in fluffy feathers. The abelisaur in today’s study would have lived in North Africa, which at that time was a lush savannah criss-crossed by rivers and mangrove swamps. This ancient tropical world would have provided the abelisaur with an ideal habitat for hunting aquatic animals like turtles, crocodiles, large fish and other dinosaurs.
By studying the bone, the team deduced that this abelisaur may have been nine metres long and weighed between one and two tonnes, making it potentially one of the largest abelisaurs ever found. This is helping researchers to determine the maximum sizes that these dinosaurs may have reached during their peak.
Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, co-author of the study from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said: “Smaller abelisaur fossils have been previously found by palaeontologists, but this find shows how truly huge these flesh eating predators had become. Their appearance may have looked a bit odd as they were probably covered in feathers with tiny, useless forelimbs, but make no mistake they were fearsome killers in their time.”
Continue to the next page to learn about the second mystery that Chiarenza and Cau solved with this amazing find…
Archaeologists from the University of York in Great Britain have reported an amazingly rare discovery: an etched pendant from the Mesolithic era. The etched artwork on the 11,000-year-old fragile pendant is the earliest known Mesolithic art in Britain.
Crafted from a single piece of shale, the subtriangular three-millimeter-thick artifact was found recently at the early Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire. The pendant contains a series of lines that archaeologists believe may represent a tree, a map, a leaf, or even tally marks.
Engraved motifs on Mesolithic pendants are extremely rare and no other engraved pendants made of shale are known in Europe.
“It was incredibly exciting to discover such a rare object. It is unlike anything we have found in Britain from this period. We can only imagine who owned it, how they wore it, and what the engravings actually meant to them,” says Nicky Milner, professor of archaeology at the University of York.
When archaeologists uncovered the pendant last year the lines on the surface were barely visible. Click for larger image. (Credit: Harry Robson)
“One possibility is that the pendant belonged to a shaman—headdresses made out of red deer antlers found nearby in earlier excavations are thought to have been worn by shamans. We can only guess what the engravings mean but engraved amber pendants found in Denmark have been interpreted as amulets used for spiritual personal protection.”
When archaeologists uncovered the pendant last year the lines on the surface were barely visible. They used a range of digital microscopy techniques to generate high resolution images to help determine the style and order of engraving. They also carried out scientific analysis to try to establish if the pendant had been strung or worn and whether pigments had been used to make the lines more prominent.
Star Carr is one of a number of archaeological sites around what was the location of a huge lake which covered much of the Vale of Pickering in the Mesolithic era. The pendant was discovered in lake edge deposits. Initially researchers thought it was natural stone—the perforation was blocked by sediment and the engravings were invisible.
It is the first perforated artifact with engraved design discovered at Star Carr though shale beads, a piece of perforated amber, and two perforated animal teeth have been recovered from the site previously.
“This exciting find tells us about the art of the first permanent settlers of Britain after the last Ice Age,” says Chantal Conneller from the University of Manchester. “This was a time when sea-level was much lower than today.
“Groups roamed across Doggerland (land now under the North Sea) and into Britain. The designs on our pendant are similar to those found in southern Scandinavia and other areas bordering the North Sea, showing a close cultural connection between northern European groups at this time.”
The European Research Council, Historic England, and the Vale of Pickering Research Trust funded the work. The discovery is reported in the journal Internet Archaeology.
