Ancient Siberian worm came back to life after 46,000 years, and began reproducing!
A novel nematode species from the Siberian permafrost shares adaptive mechanisms for cryptobiotic survival.
A report from the Washington Post detailed a remarkable discovery by scientists: a female microscopic roundworm had been preserved in the Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years, and when they revived it, the creature started reproducing via parthenogenesis – a process that does not require a mate.
Study site: a) location of the Duvanny Yar outcrope on the Kolyma River, northeastern Siberia, Russia. b) view of the upper part of the outcrop composed of ice wedges and permafrost silty deposits. c) lithostratigraphic scheme of deposits, showing the location of studied rodent borrow (red circle). d) fossil rodent burrow with herbaceous litter and seeds buried in permafrost deposits; (m a.r.l. = meters above river level). PLOS Genetics
The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s press release discussed an organism that was in a prolonged dormancy called cryptobiosis for thousands of years. This state, which can be sustained for a long time, halts all metabolic processes, including reproduction, development, and repair.
In the PLOS Genetics journal published on Thursday, researchers identified a new species of worm based on their genome sequencing. They stated that the worm had not been previously classified.
It was recently reported by Live Science that nematodes such as Plectus murrayi and Tylenchus polyhypnus had been revived from moss and herbarium specimens after a few decades.
The new species, Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, however, had been in hibernation for tens of thousands of years.
The female of the species P. kolymaensis has a general morphology which is pictured here. PLOS Genetics
Holly Bik, a deep sea biologist, believes that millions of different species of nematode worms can be found in various habitats, such as ocean trenches, tundras, deserts, and volcanic soils.
Nevertheless, out of these, only 5,000 marine species have been documented by researchers.
Crow, a nematologist from the University of Florida who was unconnected to the research, suggested to the Post that this worm might be a species that vanished in the prior 50,000 years.
Crow commented that it is possible that the nematode is one which has yet to be described, as it is encountered frequently.
Scientists have been aware for some time that minuscule creatures, such as the one studied, have the capacity to cease their functions in order to endure even the most extreme conditions, hence the lack of surprise over the worm’s survival of all those years, as stated in the press release.
The PLOS Genetics paper concluded that nematodes possess capabilities that could enable them to survive for long periods of geological time.
Mysterious 5,500-Year-Old Sumerian Star Map Recorded Massive Asteroid Hit To Earth
A 5,500-year-old clay tablet discovered in the 19th century in the underground library of King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh is an astronomical treasure.
The ancient “document” excavated in present-day Iraq by Sir Henry Layard offers unprecedented insight into astronomical observations that took place more than 5,500 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. Long believed to be an Assyrian tablet, computer analysis that compared it to Mesopotamia’s sky in 3300 BC has revealed that it actually has much older Sumerian origins.
The “Astrolabe,” the earliest known astronomical instrument, is depicted on the tablet. It consists of a segmented disk-shaped star chart with rim markings for the many angles that can be measured. For more than 150 years, experts have been baffled by the ancient clay tablet housed in the British Museum. The Cuneiform tablet No. K8538 in the British Museum collection is known as “the Planisphere.” (Source)
Over 5,600 years ago, an amazing event occurred when a kilometer-long asteroid collided with the Alps in Köfels, Austria. Unfortunately, significant portions of the planisphere on this tablet (approximately 40%) are missing, due to damage caused by the sacking of Nineveh. The reverse of the tablet is not inscribed.
Archibald Sayce and Robert Bosanquet discovered the tablet’s astronomical relation in 1880 and named it “Astrolabe.” Leonard William King took the first step toward content analysis by creating a picture facsimile of the tablet. In 1912, his work was published.
The image facsimile of the cuneiform writing signs is perfectly transliterated, but he did not translate the facsimile signs into modern language. He joined an archaeological expedition to the same site at Nineveh hoping to find other astronomical tablets with additional information, but nothing useful was ever found. King presumed that K8538 was a “Planisphere,” showing the night sky over Nineveh.
Three years later, in 1915, Ernst F. Weidner released his work on K8538. He made an effort to decipher each of the 8 distinct tablet parts on the book’s six pages, but the text remained a mystery to him. He described it as “magic.” Because the star distributions on the tablet do not match those in the Nineveh sky, he rejected King’s term “Planisphere.”
K.8538, part of a circular clay tablet with depictions of constellations (planisphere)
Two authors, Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell ultimately made significant advances twenty years later. They note in the introduction to their book that, up until 2008, “there has never been a comprehensive and consistent translation of this unique tablet [which] might relate to an impact of a Near Earth Object.” (Source)
They re-translated the cuneiform inscription and claimed the tablet recorded the Köfels’ Impact, an ancient asteroid strike that struck Austria somewhere around 3100 BC. This caused a stir in the archaeological community.
Since geologists first examined the massive landslide in the 19th century, it has been a mystery. It is 500m deep and has a five-kilometer circle. It is situated near Köfels in Austria. Due to the evidence of crushing pressures and explosions, researchers in the middle of the 20th century came to the conclusion that it must have been caused by a very huge meteor impact.
Since Köfels lacks a crater, it does not appear as an impact site should to modern eyes. The idea that it is just another landslide, however, does not account for the facts that confounded the prior experts. What ties the complex Sumerian star chart found in the Nineveh library’s subterranean to the enigmatic impact that happened in Austria?
The clay tablet may be examined to determine that it is an astronomical work because it features drawings of constellations and names of recognized constellations in the text. Although it has received a lot of attention, no one has offered a credible explanation for what it is after more than a century.
The researchers have identified what the Planisphere tablet alludes to using contemporary computer algorithms that can mimic trajectories and recreate the night sky thousands of years ago. The K8538 observation tablet was created by an unknown alert Sumerian astronomer who recognized the historical significance of the event on his astronomical lookout tower and decided to record it. Bond and Hempsell dubbed him “Lugalansheigibar – the great man who observed the sky.”
Half of the tablet records planet positions and cloud cover, just like any other night, but the other half records an object large enough to note its shape even though it is still in space. The astronomers accurately recorded its trajectory relative to the stars, which is consistent with an impact at Köfels to within one degree of error.
The observation indicates that the asteroid is larger than a kilometer in diameter and that its original orbit around the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbits close to the Earth and is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.
This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The incoming angle was very low (six degrees), which means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometers from Köfels, causing the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. It grew into a five-kilometer-wide fireball as it traveled down the valley (the size of the landslide).
When it hit Köfels, it created enormous pressures that pulverized the rock and caused the landslide, but it did not create a classic impact crater because it was no longer a solid object.
Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.”
“The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material – including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.”
As a very rare scientific observation tablet, the K8538 provides comparative facts that aid in realistic forecasts of asteroid devastation and the resulting megadroughts on Earth. The British Museum is now in charge of preserving and protecting this valuable document, which was created by Sumerian astronomer Lugalansheigibar.
Well-Preserved, 42,000-Year-Old Baby Woolly Mammoth Emerges From Yukon Permafrost
A 42,000-year-old baby mammoth is set to go on display for the first time in Western Europe next month at the Natural History Museum.
The baby mammoth, found in Siberia by a reindeer herder in 2007, is little larger than a dog, and has been nicknamed Lyuba.
Lubya, who was named after the wife of the Siberian reindeer herder that found her, has been described as the most complete preserved mammoth in the world.
One month old when she died, the baby mammoth’s corpse was intact enough that fragments of her eyelashes remained as well as remnants of her mother’s milk in her stomach.
Palaeontologist Matthew McCurry at the exhibit.
“When they did the autopsy on her she is so complete that we could get a look at her insides and see her last meal,” Victoria Herridge, a paleobiologist from the Natural History Museum in London, told the Sunday Times.
“She had milk from suckling her mother and also remnants of faecal matter in her gut, which suggest she had been eating her mother’s dung.
This is something living elephants do as the dung provides the infants with microbes to help them ingest their food.”
Lubya, which means ‘love’ in Russian, is thought to have died after stumbling into a salty marsh bog and slowly drowning in the mud.
The mud then froze, preserving the body until herder Yuri Khudi and his son stumbled across it while searching for firewood by the Yuribei river in north-west Siberia.
Lubya will go on display from 23 May until 7 September 2014 as part of a new exhibition entitled Mammoths: Ice Age Giants. Other species in the exhibition will include the dwarf mammoth and the spiral-tusked Columbian mammoth.
Although some enthusiasts may be hoping that this remarkable specimen is well preserved enough to allow scientists to clone the mammoth, as Herridge notes Lubya’s DNA will have “deteriorated” significantly.
Despite the widespread belief that DNA is easily preserved and resurrected, recent research has shown that the molecule only has a half-life of about 521 years, making Jurassic Park-style cloning an impossibility for now.
Registrars and preparators from the Field Museum join the team at Australian Museum to install the exhibit.
Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500-year-old tattoos
The mummy of a woman called the “Altai Princess” is in the museum of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Tattoos aren’t just a trendy way for people to express themselves – they’re also apparently a time-honored tradition dating back almost three thousand years.
A Siberian mummy, who researchers believe was buried 2500 years ago, will show off her intricate ink when she finally goes on display this month, and her shockingly well-preserved body art makes her look surprisingly modern.
The mummified body of the young woman, believed to be between 25 and 28 years old, was found in 1993, researchers told The Siberian Times.
Since then she has been kept frozen in a scientific institute, but she will soon be available to the public to be viewed from a glass case at the Republican National Museum in Siberia’s capital of Gorno-Altaisk.
The woman, dubbed in the media as the Ukok “princes,” was found wearing expensive clothing – a long silk shirt and beautifully decorated boots – as well as a horse hair wig.
A sculptor’s impression of how Princess Ukok looked 2,500 years ago.
Archeologists told the paper that because she was not buried with any weapons she was not a warrior, and that she was likely a healer or storyteller.
Though her face and neck weren’t preserved, she was inked across both arms and on her fingers, in what researchers say was an indication of status.
Princess Ukok’s hand, as the scientists saw her first, with marked tattoos on her fingers. She was buried with two men and six horses. Because she was not buried with weapons, researchers think that she might have been a healer or storyteller.
“The more tattoos were on the body, the longer it meant the person lived, and the higher was his position,” lead researcher Natalia Polosmak told the Times.
The woman was buried beside two men whose bodies also bore tattoos, as well as six horses.
A drawing of a tattoo on a warrior’s shoulder.
Researchers think the group belonged to the nomadic Pazyryk people, and that their body art is something special even in comparison to other mummies who have been found wih tattoos in the past.
“Those on the mummies of the Pazyryk people are the most complicated and the most beautiful,” Polosmak told the Times.
This diagram shows the placement and greater detail of the princess’ tattoos.
“It is a phenomenal level of tattoo art,” she said. “Incredible.”
Not everyone was pleased that the mummy was uncovered.
This diagram shows placement of the princess’ tattoos on her shoulder.
Controversy erupted after she was discovered, as many believed she should not have been removed from her burial site. Some locals even believed her grave’s disruption caused a “curse of the mummy” which they blamed for the crash of the helicopter carrying her remains.
The “Altai Princess” mummy was found at the Gorny Mountain Altai by Natalya Polos’mak, a scientist of the Novosibirsk Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“The Altai people never disturb the repose of the interned,” Rimma Erkinova, deputy director of the Gorno-Altaisk Republican National Museum told the Times. “We shouldn’t have any more excavations until we’ve worked out a proper moral and ethical approach.”
Tattoos that appear on the Princess’ hand. Because she was relatively young, researchers theorize, she had fewer tattoos.
Local authorities in the region have declared the area a ‘zone of peace,’ so no more excavations can be done in an effort to prevent plundering, though scientists believe there are many more mummies that can be found.
World-First Fossil Shows Dinosaur Sitting On Clutch Of Eggs Like A Bird
The ~70-million-year-old fossil in question: an adult oviraptorid theropod dinosaur sitting atop a nest of its fossilized eggs. Multiple eggs (including at least three that contain embryos) are clearly visible, as are the forearms, pelvis, hind limbs, and partial tail of the adult.
It’s hard to imagine a mighty T. rex kneeling delicately above a clutch of eggs, but new research surrounding a fossilized oviraptor suggests that this behavior may have indeed been practiced by some dinosaurs.
The first non-avialan dinosaur (species outside of the clade of dinosaurs related to living birds) fossil to feature an adult dinosaur sat on top of a clutch of eggs that contain embryonic remains has been detailed in Science Bulletin.
What’s more, the embryos were at different stages, suggesting the eggs would hatch at different times, something that is usually determined by when the parent starts incubating.
An attentive oviraptorid theropod dinosaur broods its nest of blue-green eggs while its mate looks on in what is now Jiangxi Province of southern China some 70 million years ago.
The partial skeleton of the oviraptorosaur was found on a nest of at least 24 fossilized eggs.
“This isn’t the first time an oviraptorid has been found in such a way, nor are these the first-ever oviraptorid embryos,” study author Shundong Bi, a professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, told IFLScience.
“But it is the first time that an adult has been found atop embryo-bearing eggs. It’s also the first nesting oviraptorid to be discovered outside the Gobi Desert.”
Brooding, seen in chickens that sit on their eggs to incubate them during development, was thought to be an unlikely behavior in non-avialan dinosaurs whose heavy bodies would surely squish their progeny.
However, this new fossil found near Ganzhou, China, is the first discovered having preserved a non-avialan dinosaur atop an egg clutch that still contains embryonic remains.
The researchers believe the presence of an adult on eggs containing embryos at advanced growth stages provides strong support for the brooding hypothesis in some non-avialan dinosaurs.
Interestingly, the embryos inside the eggs are at different developmental stages, which points to the possibility that had they survived the eggs would’ve hatched at different times.
“The asynchronous hatching was not widespread among dinosaurs,” said Bi.
“This phenomenon, known as asynchronous hatching, is pretty peculiar and uncommon even in modern birds, the living descendants of dinosaurs.”
The researchers say their findings demonstrate that the evolution of reproductive biology along bird-line archosaurs (a large group of vertebrates that includes dinosaurs and pterosaurs and is represented today by birds) was complex and not the linear, incremental process it’s previously assumed to have been.
They theorize that some aspects of non-avialan theropod reproduction may have been unique to these dinosaurs and not passed to the avialan ancestors that eventually gave rise to modern birds.
Recent research detailed how the avialan feature of flight likely evolved twice in dinosaurs before the clade containing modern birds’ ancestors came into the picture.
This new insight presents a further trait of avialan dinosaurs and animals that may have been shared by some of their distant cousins.
Ancient ‘unknown’ script finally deciphered 70 years after first being discovered
Last year, researchers discovered Bactrian and Kushan inscriptions on a rock face near the Almosi Gorge in northwestern Tajikistan.
Researchers have partially deciphered the “unknown Kushan script” — a writing system that has puzzled linguists since it was first found in the 1950s.
The researchers decoded the ancient text using rock face inscriptions that were discovered near the Almosi Gorge in northwest Tajikistan in 2022, which include sections in an extinct but known language called Bactrian.
“We have worked out that the so-called ‘Kushan script’ was used to record a previously unknown Middle Iranian language,” lead study author Svenja Bonmann, a comparative linguist at the University of Cologne in Germany, said in a video posted by the university on July 13. “In other words, we have deciphered the script.”
This Middle Iranian language was likely one of the official languages of the Kushan Empire, which sprawled across Central Asia and northwestern India between 200 B.C. and A.D. 700. At the height of its power, in the second century A.D., the Kushans co-existed with the Roman Empire.
Ancient Eurasian nomads that originally settled in the Kushan Empire — called the “Tocharians” by Greco-Roman authors — may also have spoken the language, which the researchers have proposed to call “Eteo-Tocharian.” (“Eteo” is a prefix used by modern scholars that means “true” or “original.”)
The script associated with this Kushan language has remained elusive partly because many texts didn’t withstand the test of time, Bonmann said. “Most of what was written at the time was probably recorded on organic materials, such as palm-tree leaves or the bark of birch trees. Organic material decomposes very quickly, which means practically none of it remains.”
Characters carved into cave walls and painted onto ceramics, however, have survived across Central Asia and provide clues about the Kushan language. Archeologists have discovered several dozen inscriptions since the late 1950s, mostly in present-day Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.
“Researchers have worked on this for decades, mostly in France and Russia, but they were met with little success,” Eugen Hill, a professor of comparative linguistics at the University of Cologne who did not participate in the study, said in the video.
“The best-case scenario is to have a parallel text — a so-called bilingual or trilingual — that presents approximately the same meaning, but in two or three different scripts or languages,” Bonmann said.
In this case, the researchers were able to work out the Kushan meaning using parallel inscriptions in Bactrian carved into rocks found at Almosi Gorge and at Dašt-i Nāwur, in Afghanistan, in the 1960s.
“We had parallel texts and we knew that the elements they contained were likely to come up in our script,” Bonmann said. “Step by step, we were able to read more and more Iranian words, so it became clear that this was an Iranian language.”
Words that referred to Kushan emperor Vema Takhtu as the “king of kings” in the texts from Tajikistan and Afghanistan tipped the researchers off about the phonetic values of individual characters that had, until then, remained a mystery. Their observations suggest the Kushan script records a language that developed mid-way between Bactrian and a language known as Khotanese Saka that was spoken in ancient western China.
The discovery sheds light on more than half of the 25 to 30 signs used in the Kushan script, according to the study. The team hopes that by re-examining known inscriptions and searching for more examples, they can decipher the remaining characters and read the enigmatic script in its entirety.
Japanese scientists ‘reawaken’ cells of 28,000 Old woolly mammoth
Her name is Yuka: an ancient woolly mammoth that last lived some 28,000 years ago, before becoming mummified in the frozen permafrost wastelands of northern Siberia.
But now that icy tomb is no longer the end of Yuka’s story.
The mammoth’s well-preserved remains were discovered in 2010, and scientists in Japan have now reawakened traces of biological activity in this long-extinct beast – by implanting Yuka’s cell nuclei into the egg cells of mice.
“This suggests that, despite the years that have passed, cell activity can still happen and parts of it can be recreated,” genetic engineer Kei Miyamoto from Kindai University told AFP.
In their experiment, the researchers extracted bone marrow and muscle tissue from Yuka’s remains, and inserted the least-damaged nucleus-like structures they could recover into living mouse oocytes (germ cells) in the lab.
Red and green dyed proteins around a mammoth cell nucleus (upper right) in a mouse oocyte (Kindai University)
In total, 88 of these nuclei structures were collected from 273.5 milligrams of mammoth tissue, and once some of these nuclei were injected into egg cells, a number of the modified cells demonstrated signs of cellular activity that precede cell division.
“In the reconstructed oocytes, the mammoth nuclei showed the spindle assembly, histone incorporation, and partial nuclear formation,” the authors explain in the new paper.
“However, the full activation of nuclei for cleavage was not confirmed.”
Despite the faintness of this limited biological activity, the fact anything could be observed at all is remarkable and suggests that “cell nuclei are, at least partially, sustained even in over a 28,000-year period”, the researchers say.
Calling the accomplishment a “significant step toward bringing mammoths back from the dead”, Miyamoto acknowledges there is nonetheless a long way to go before the world can expect to see a Jurassic Park-style resurrection of this long-vanished species.
“Once we obtain cell nuclei that are kept in better condition, we can expect to advance the research to the stage of cell division,” Miyamoto told The Asahi Shimbun.
Less-damaged samples, the researchers suggest, could hypothetically enable the possibility of inducing further nuclear functions, such as DNA replication and transcription.
Another thing needed is better technology. Previous similar work in 2009 by members of the same research team didn’t get this far – which the scientists at least partially put down to “technological limitations at that time”, and the state of the frozen mammoth tissues used.
To that end, the researchers think their new research could provide a new “platform to evaluate the biological activities of nuclei in extinct animal species” – an incremental progression to perhaps one day, maybe, seeing Yuka’s kind roam again.
Tiny, 540-Million-Year-Old Human Ancestor Didn’t Have an Anus
A scanning election microscope (SEM) took this detailed image of the deuterostome with the extra-large mouth.
A speck-size creature without an anus is the oldest known prehistoric ancestor of humans, a new study finds. Researchers found the remains of the 540-million-year-old critter — a bag-like sea organism — in central China.
The creature is so novel, it has its own family (Saccorhytidae), as well as its own genus and species (Saccorhytus coronaries), named for its wrinkled, sac-like body. (“Saccus” means “sac” in Latin, and “rhytis” means “wrinkle” in Greek.)
S. coronaries, with its oval body and large mouth, is likely a deuterostome, a group that includes all vertebrates, including humans, and some invertebrates, such as starfish.
“We think that as an early deuterostome, this may represent the primitive beginnings of a very diverse range of species, including ourselves,” Simon Conway Morris, a professor of evolutionary palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. “To the naked eye, the fossils we studied look like tiny black grains, but under the microscope the level of detail is jaw-dropping.”
At first glance, however, S. coronaries do not appear to have much in common with modern humans. It was about a millimeter (0.04 inches) long, and likely lived between grains of sand on the seafloor during the early Cambrian period.
While the mouth onS. coronaries were large for its teensy body, the creature doesn’t appear to have an anus.
“If that was the case, then any waste material would simply have been taken out back through the mouth, which from our perspective sounds rather unappealing,” Conway Morris said.
Tiny ancestor
Other deuterostome groups are known from about 510 million to 520 million years ago, a time when they had already started to evolve into vertebrates, as well as sea squirts, echinoderms (starfish and sea urchins), and hemichordates (a group that includes acorn worms).
However, these incredibly diverse animals made it hard for scientists to figure out what the common deuterostome ancestor would have looked like, the researchers said.
The newfound microfossils answered that question, they said. The researchers used an electron microscope and a computed tomography (CT) scan to construct an image of S. coronaries.
“We had to process enormous volumes of limestone — about 3 tonnes [3 tons] — to get to the fossils, but a steady stream of new finds allowed us to tackle some key questions: Was this a very early echinoderm or something even more primitive?” study co-researcher Jian Han, a paleontologist at Northwest University in China, said in the statement. “The latter now seems to be the correct answer.”
The analysis indicated that S. coronaries had a bilaterally symmetrical body, a characteristic it passed down to its descendants, including humans. It was also covered with thin, flexible skin, suggesting it had muscles of some kind that could perhaps help it wriggle around in the water and engulf food with its large mouth, the researchers said.
Small, conical structures encircling its mouth may have allowed the water it swallowed to escape from its body. Perhaps these structures were the precursor of gill slits, the researchers said.
An artist’s interpretation of Saccorhytus coronaries, which measured about a millimeter in size.
Molecular clock
Now that researchers know that deuterostomes existed 540 million years ago, they can try to match the timing to estimates from biomolecular data, known as the “molecular clock.”
Theoretically, researchers can determine when two species diverged by quantifying the genetic differences between them. If two groups are distantly related, for instance, they should have extremely different genomes, the researchers said.
However, there are few fossils from S. coronaries’ time, making it difficult to match the molecular clocks of other animals to this one, the researchers said. This may be because animals before deuterostomes were simply too minuscule to leave fossils behind, they said.
In another paper, researchers reported on the discovery of another type of tiny animal fossil from the late Cambrian. These creatures, called loriciferans, measured about 0.01 inches (0.3 mm) and, like S. coronaries, lived between grains of sand, the researchers said in a study published online today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The newly identified species, Eolorica deadwoodensis, discovered in western Canada, shows when multicellular animals began living in areas once inhabited by single-celled organisms, the researchers said.
