If further analysis proves the study correct, the remains belong to the first known such hybrid, providing direct evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred.

The present study focuses on the individual’s jaw – unearthed at a rock-shelter called Riparo di Mezzena in the Monti Lessini region of Italy. Both Neanderthals and modern humans inhabited Europe at the time.

Co-author Silvana Condemi, an anthropologist and CNRS research director at the University of Ai-Marseille, told Discovery News that from the morphology of the lower jaw, the face of the individual may have looked somehow intermediate between classic Neanderthals, who had a rather receding lower jaw (no chin), and the modern humans, who have a projecting lower jaw with a strongly developed chin.

The mandible from Mezzena. show more Frontal view : A, internal view : B, lateral view: C, superior view : D), inferior view – Credit: doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0059781.g001 Silvana Condemi, Aurelien Mounier, Paolo Giunti, Martina Lari, David Caramelli, Laura Longo

She and her colleagues studied the remains via DNA analysis and 3D imaging and compared the results with the same features from Homo sapiens.

The genetic analysis showed that the individual’s mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is Neanderthal and since this DNA is transmitted from a mother to her child, they conclude that it must have been a female Neanderthal who mated with a male Homo sapiens.

Condemi and her colleagues wrote that it supports the theory of a slow process of replacement of Neanderthals by the invading modern humans.

The research team also hinted that the modern humans may have raped female Neanderthals.

The paper has been published in PLoS ONE.

Source: ANI [March 28, 2013]

Some of the prehistoric predators – animals known collectively as the early pseudosuchians – likely preyed on certain dinosaurs, which later evolved some of impressive characteristics of the ancient pseudosuchians. Those included features like sturdy body armour and strong tails for whacking enemies.

“It is likely, therefore, that dinosaurs prospered to some extent as a result of the extinction of most pseudosuchians and many other groups at the end of the Triassic,” says co-author Richard Butler, a palaeontologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

He adds that some evidence suggests dinosaurs “had better locomotor and breathing systems than pseudosuchians,” so they thrived in the Jurassic after the mass extinction.

As for what caused that die-off, researchers suspect an enormous burst of volcanic activity, as part of the Atlantic Ocean’s formation, led to dramatic increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and rapid global warming.

Pseudosuchians such as Longosuchus meani had features like sturdy body armour and strong tails for whacking enemies – Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons

For the latest study, published in Biology Letters , Butler and colleague Olja Toljagić assessed changes in pseudosuchians that occurred during the critical Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods.

The study shows that during the extinction event 201 million years ago, these animals declined rapidly, with only one lineage surviving into the Jurassic. Some of the animals evolved into ancestors of today’s alligators and crocodiles. Another lineage, referred to as the “bird-line archosaurs”, consisted of the non-avian dinosaurs and their species that later evolved into modern birds.

Luck, in part, helps to explain why some animals died, while others survived.

“Selectivity of mass extinction events is sometimes linked with body size, ecological constraints and competition, while other times it could be related to just pure luck of the survivors,” explains Toljagić.

Rise of new archosaurs
Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, previously studied how crocodile-line archosaurs changed during the Triassic and across the Triassic-Jurassic boundary.

Brusatte says that the recent study by Butler and Toljagić is important “because we really need to understand what happens at mass extinction events in order to better understand how our own world may change in the face of warming temperatures.”

“Many early relatives of crocodiles flourished during the Triassic, but many of them were killed off at or near the Triassic,” he says.”After they were killed, whole different groups of crocodile-line archosaurs had a chance to rise in their place, and it was this dramatic moment that was the root of the diversification of the lineages leading to living crocodiles.”

More than anything, he says, this study shows what can happen during and after mass extinction events.

“Extinctions often reset the evolutionary clock,” he concludes.

Non-avian dinosaurs appear to have benefited, at least in part, from one extinction event, but they bit the dust during another. Mammals then seem to have benefited when the dinosaurs died out.

It remains to be seen which mammals – including humans – will survive the next big extinction event. The current biodiversity crisis has already resulted in drastic population drops for some species and the extinction of others.

Author: Jennifer Viegas | Source: Discovery News [March 26, 2013]

Klaus Honninger, who heads the team that made the find, said the bird resembled a giant pelican that stood more than two meters (6.6 feet) tall dating from the Oligocene epoch.

The Oligocene, part of the Paleogene Period, spanned from 40 million years to 23 million years before present day, and was marked by the extinction of numerous species, a general cooling and increased aridity.

“The fossil clearly retains remnants of skin. It is an extraordinary discovery because no similar specimen has been discovered anywhere else in the world before,” Honninger said.

The discovery was made in the coastal desert of the Ica region on March 6. The site is popular among paleontologists for its abundance of whale, shark and penguin fossils.

Source: AFP [March 15, 2013]

Research by Clint Boyd, Ph.D., provides the first definitive evidence that plant-eating baby ornithopod dinosaurs were a food of choice for the crocodyliform, a now extinct relative of the crocodile family. While conducting their research, the team also discovered that this dinosaur prey was a previously unrecognized species of a small ornithopod dinosaur, which has yet to be named.

The evidence found in what is now known as the Grand Staircase Escalante-National Monument in southern Utah dates back to the late Cretaceous period, toward the end of the age of dinosaurs, and was published today in the online journal PLOS ONE. The complete research findings of Boyd and Stephanie K. Drumheller, of the University of Iowa and the University of Tennessee, and Terry A. Gates, of North Carolina State University and the Natural History Museum of Utah, can be accessed online.

A large number of mostly tiny bits of dinosaur bones were recovered in groups at four locations within the Utah park — which paleontologists and geologists know as the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) Kaiparowits Formation — leading paleontologists to believe that crocodyliforms had fed on baby dinosaurs 1-2 meters in total length.

Clint Boyd, Ph.D., of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, points to a crocodyliform tooth embedded in the femur of a young dinosaur – Credit: South Dakota School of Mines & Technology

Evidence shows bite marks on bone joints, as well as breakthrough proof of a crocodyliform tooth still embedded in a dinosaur femur.

The findings are significant because historically dinosaurs have been depicted as the dominant species. “The traditional ideas you see in popular literature are that when little baby dinosaurs are either coming out of a nesting grounds or out somewhere on their own, they are normally having to worry about the theropod dinosaurs, the things like raptors or, on bigger scales, the T. rex. So this kind of adds a new dimension,” Boyd said. “You had your dominant riverine carnivores, the crocodyliforms, attacking these herbivores as well, so they kind of had it coming from all sides.”

Based on teeth marks left on bones and the large amounts of fragments left behind, it is believed the crocodyliforms were also diminutive in size, perhaps no more than 2 meters long. A larger species of crocodyliform would have been more likely to gulp down its prey without leaving behind traces of “busted up” bone fragments.

Until now, paleontologists had direct evidence only of “very large crocodyliforms” interacting with “very large dinosaurs.”

“It’s not often that you get events from the fossil record that are action-related,” Boyd explained. “While you generally assume there was probably a lot more interaction going on, we didn’t have any of that preserved in the fossil record yet. This is the first time that we have definitive evidence that you had this kind of partitioning, of your smaller crocodyliforms attacking the smaller herbivorous dinosaurs,” he said, adding that this is only the second published instance of a crocodyliform tooth embedded in any prey animal in the fossil record.

“A lot of times you find material in close association or you can find some feeding marks or traces on the outside of the bone and you can hypothesize that maybe it was a certain animal doing this, but this was only the second time we have really good definitive evidence of a crocodyliform feeding on a prey animal and in this case an ornithischian dinosaur,” Boyd said.

The high concentrations of tiny dinosaur bones led researchers to conclude a type of selection occurred, that crocodyliforms were preferentially feeding on these miniature dinosaurs. “Maybe it was closer to a nesting ground where baby dinosaurs would have been more abundant, and so the smaller crocodyliforms were hanging out there getting a lunch,” Boyd added.

“When we started looking at all the other bones, we starting finding marks that are known to be diagnostic for crocodyliform feeding traces, so all that evidence coming together suddenly started to make sense as to why we were not finding good complete specimens of these little ornithischian dinosaurs,” Boyd explained. “Most of the bites marks are concentrated around the joints, which is where the crocodyliform would tend to bite, and then, when they do their pulling or the death roll that they tend to do, the ends of the bones tend to snap off more often than not in those actions. That’s why we were finding these fragmentary bones.”

In the process of their research, the team discovered through diagnostic cranial material that these baby prey are a new, as yet-to-be-named dinosaur species. Details on this new species will soon be published in another paper.

Source: South Dakota School of Mines and Technology [February 28, 2013]

But if ice covered the earth all the way to the tropics during what is known as the Marinoan glaciation, how did the planet spring back from the brink of an ice apocalypse? Huiming Bao, Charles L. Jones Professor in Geology & Geophysics at LSU, might have some of the answers. Bao and LSU graduate students Bryan Killingsworth and Justin Hayles, together with Chuanming Zhou, a colleague at Chinese Academy of Sciences, had an article published on Feb. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, that provides new clues on the duration of what was a significant change in atmospheric conditions following the Marinoan glaciation.

“The story is to put a time limit on how fast our Earth system can recover from a total frozen state,” Bao said. “It is about a unique and rapidly changing post-glacial world, but is also about the incredible resilience of life and life’s remarkable ability to restore a new balance between atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere after a global glaciation.”

Artwork depicting Snowball Earth -vCredit: Chris Butler/SPL

Bao’s group went about investigating the post-glaciation period of Snowball Earth by looking at unique occurrences of “crystal fans” of a common mineral known as barite (BaSO4), deposited in rocks following the Marinoan glaciation. Out of the three stable isotopes of oxygen, O-16, O-17 and O-18, Bao’s group pays close attention to the relatively scarce isotope O-17. According to Killingsworth, there aren’t many phenomena on earth that can change the normally expected ratio of the scare isotope O-17 to more abundant isotope O-18. However, in sulfate minerals such as barite in rock samples from around 635 million years ago, Bao’s group finds large deviations in the normal ratio of O-17 to O-18 with respect to O-16 isotopes.

“If something unusual happens with the composition of the atmosphere, the oxygen isotope ratios can change,” Killingsworth said. “We see a large deviation in this ratio in minerals deposited around 635 million years ago. This occurred during an extremely odd time in atmospheric history.”

According to Bao’s group, the odd oxygen isotope ratios they find in barite samples from 635 million years ago could have occurred if, following the extensive Snowball Earth glaciation, Earth’s atmosphere had very high levels of carbon dioxide, or CO2. An ultra-high carbon dioxide atmosphere, Killingsworth explains, where CO2 levels match levels of atmospheric oxygen, would grab more O-17 from oxygen. This would cause a depletion of the O-17 isotope in air and subsequently in barite minerals, which incorporate oxygen as they grow. Bao’s group has found worldwide deposits of this O-17 depleted sulfate mineral in rocks dating from the global glaciation event 635 million years ago, indicating an episode of an ultra-high carbon dioxide atmosphere following the Marinoan glaciation.

“Something significant happened in the atmosphere,” Killingsworth said. “This kind of an atmospheric shift in carbon dioxide is not observed during any other period of Earth’s history. And now we have sedimentary rock evidence for how long this ultra-high carbon dioxide period lasted.”

By using available radiometric dates from areas near layers of barite deposits, Bao’s group has been able to come up with an estimate for the duration of what is now called the Marinoan Oxygen-17 Depletion, or MOSD, event. Bao’s group estimates the MOSD duration at 0 – 1 million years.

“This is, so far, really the best estimate we could get from geological records, in line with previous models of how long an ultra-high carbon dioxide event could last before the carbon dioxide in the air would get drawn back into the oceans and sediments,” Killingsworth said.

Normally, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are in balance with levels of carbon dioxide in the ocean. However, if water and air were cut off by a thick layer of ice during Snowball Earth, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could have increased drastically. In a phenomenon similar to the climate change Earth is witnessing in modern times, high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide would have created a greenhouse gas warming effect, trapping heat inside the planet’s atmosphere and melting the Marinoan ice. Essentially, the Marinoan glaciation created the potential for extreme changes in atmospheric chemistry that in turn lead to the end of Snowball Earth and the beginning of a new explosion of animal life on Earth.

While previous work by Bao’s group had advanced the interpretation of the strange occurrence of O-17 depleted barite just after the Marinoan glaciation, there was still much uncertainty on the duration of ultra-high CO2 levels after meltdown of Snowball Earth. Bao’s discovery of a field site with many barite layers gave the opportunity to track how oxygen isotope ratios changed through a thickness of sedimentary rock. As the pages in a novel can be thought of as representing time, so layers of sedimentary rock represent geological history. However, these rock “pages” represented an unknown duration of time for the MOSD event. By using characteristic features of the Marinoan rock sequence occurring regionally in South China, Bao’s group linked the barite layer site to other sites in the region that did have precise dates from volcanic ash beds. Bao’s group has succeeded in estimating the duration of the MOSD event, and thus the time it took for Earth to restore “normal” CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

“To some extent, our findings demonstrate that whatever happens to Earth, she will recover, and recover at a rapid pace,” Bao said. “Mother Earth lived and life carried on even in the most devastating situation. The only difference is the life composition afterwards. In other words, whatever humans do to the Earth, life will go on. The only uncertainty is whether humans will still remain part of the life composition.”

Bao says that he had been interested in this most intriguing episode of Earth’s history since Paul Hoffman, Dan Schrag and colleagues revived the Snowball Earth hypothesis in 1998.

“I was a casual ‘non-believer’ of this hypothesis because of the mere improbability of such an Earth state,” Bao said. “There was nothing rational or logic in that belief for me, of course. I remember I even told my job interviewers back in 2000 that one of my future research plans was to prove that the Snowball Earth hypothesis was wrong.”

However, during a winter break in 2006, Bao obtained some unusual data from barite, a sulfate mineral dating from the Snowball Earth period that he received from a colleague in China.

“I started to develop my own method to explore this utterly strange world,” Bao said. “Now, it seems that our LSU group is the one offering the strongest supporting evidence for a ‘Snowball Earth’ back 635 million years ago. I certainly did not see this coming. The finding we published in 2008 demonstrates, again, that new scientific breakthroughs are often brought in by outsiders.”

Bao credits his research ideas, analytical work and pleasure of working on this project to his two graduate students, Killingsworth and Hayles, as well as his long-time Chinese collaborators. Bao brought Killingsworth and Hayles to an interior mountainous region in South China in December 2011, where the group succeeded in finding multiple barite layers in a section of rocks dating to 635 million years ago. This discovery formed a large part of their analysis and subsequent publication in PNAS.

“Nothing can beat the intellectual excitement and satisfaction you get from research in the field and in the laboratory,” Bao said.

Source: Louisiana State University via EurekAlert! [February 28, 2013]

The dirty, ragged part is understandable. After all, in the Mesolithic period there were no washing or sewing machines. And, unless your cave was near a convenient waterfall, a shower was out of the question. That much can be gleaned by scientists studying remains of those ancient peoples, along with the tools they used, as well as the foods which made up their diet.

And that’s where the nice teeth came in.

Apparently, since the advent of industrialized, mass produced food in the last 150 years, our mouths are taking a beating. And it’s our modern teeth which are suffering the most.

According to Nature.com, a study of the lifestyles of Neolithic peoples has lead to the conclusion that our ancient ancestors didn’t need to see a dentist very often. Which is good, considering they probably didn’t have very many at the time. Apparently, hunting and gathering were just about the only career choices available in those days.

The study, conducted by Dr Christina Adler of the Australian Center for Ancient DNA, University of Adelaide, looked at the skeletal remains of 34 Europeans and found that their teeth were remarkably free of cavities and retained much more of the vital dental plaque which protects teeth from harmful bacteria and decay.

“What we found was that the early hunter-gatherer groups really had a lot lower frequencies of any of the disease-associated bacteria compared to what you see today, and that the number of species per person’s mouth, or the diversity, was much higher in the past,” says Adler.

The findings lead to the assumption there’s something in our food today which promotes unusually virulent tooth decay. Scientists have long suspected that the modern diet, full of refined carbohydrates and sugars, has given us mouths dominated by cavity-causing bacteria. This study seems to bear that suspicion out.

Of course, the trade-off has been an extended lifespan, thanks mostly to a softer lifestyle. Who knows what those cave people’s teeth would’ve looked like if they’d lived past the age of 30 or so?

And just think. No flossing… Via, Bubblews.com

In the type of discovery they have dreamed about for years, Groves and Dan Mann, both researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in summer 2012 found in the thawing bank of a northern river almost the entire skeleton of a steppe bison that died during the last ice age.

In adventurous work sponsored by the Bureau of Land Management, Mann and Groves have been boating down lonely northern rivers for 15 years looking for scattered bones of ice age mammals, always hoping to find a complete skeleton or mummy of a mammoth, horse, or American lion. In mid-June, on a familiar stretch of river that flows northward on Alaska’s North Slope, they rounded a river bend and saw the skull of a large bison trapped against a willow shrub. Upside-down skull

Groves described the scene: “We were paddling downriver, battling through a nasty squall of hail and wind, thinking about our camping spot about a mile downriver,” she said. “When the hail was just breaking up, we saw the upside-down skull with the lower jaw still attached. The teeth were really white. They stood out.”

The pair landed their inflatable canoe at the base of the 60-foot bluff. Even before they stepped out in their rubber boots, Groves spotted other bones that told her this wasn’t an ordinary site. Though this ever-changing wall had yielded many bones over the years, those were scattered remains of ice-age creatures separated by meandering river action and the crumbling and re-forming of permafrost-cemented bluffs. Mann said their typical discoveries resemble “Pleistocene in a blender.”

“It’s really unusual to find bones that are still articulated (together),” he said. “We’ve never found anything this intact before. I think it’s really exciting when we find single lion bones.”

Groves and Mann spent the next four hours carefully removing soil from the skull. When Mann lifted it out, the spread of the steppe bison’s horns was 43 inches. The record Boone and Crockett modern bison has a horn tip spread of 27 inches. Fairbanks expert on Pleistocene animals Dale Guthrie estimated this bison, which Mann and Groves have nicknamed “Bison Bob,” was a 12-year-old male.

After stowing the skull safely in the front of their canoe, Groves and Mann camped for the night. When they returned to the site, they saw more bones sticking out of frozen bluff sediments. Bones of each leg were still connected by ligaments. Reddish-brown hair clung to some bones.

“When I saw the fur, that’s when I really got excited,” Mann said.

Transporting skull by helicopter
The pair worked the bluff for the next three days, pulling up buckets of river water to thaw the pieces of their rare find. They ended up finding every piece of the animal’s skeleton except for a left shoulder blade.

With a few hundred bison parts attracting blowflies in their camp, Mann and Groves awaited a helicopter they had called to transport the bison to somewhere safer.

Shortly after their find, they used a satellite phone to try and contact archaeologist Mike Kunz, their longtime collaborator at the Bureau of Land Management. Kunz is interested in the ancient Paleoindians that once lived on Alaska’s North Slope and what might have caused both them and bison to disappear about 10,000 years ago. Bad weather kept Kunz pinned down at the archaeological site he was digging several hundred miles away, but a helicopter arrived near Mann and Groves and transported Bison Bob to a North Slope BLM camp. There, someone put the bones in a predator-proof case. Via, Alaskadispatch

In order for us to end up with a fossil, quite a few things have to happen. Obviously the creature in question must become buried in some manner (in mud, in desert sands, in a tar pit) and in a form that will allow it to become fossilised (tiny insects can’t leave much impression in coarse sand where the grains are bigger than they are). This must then be compressed and undergo the necessary geological processes to become a fossil. In then has to survive what may be hundreds of millions of years where it could be lost or destroyed from an earthquake perhaps, or simply buried under more recent rocks and inaccessible to researchers – we can only excavate fossils from places where they are exposed on the surface after all, and here there’s the big problem.

They are exposed on the surface and visible to us because that rock is, by definition, eroding. If it was an area of deposition like a floodplain, more material would be being piled on top, or an area with little activity has little change (or perhaps has not much rock exposed, such as on a savannah), but where the rocks are on the surface and eroding, the bones and shells within will be exposed. Of course they will only be exposed for a limited time before they too are weathered away to nothing.

This means that every fossil going generally has a pretty limited timeframe in which it can be discovered. If a palaeontologist comes across it before it’s on the surface, they’ll walk right by, come by a little too late and the thing will have disintegrated and been destroyed. Only in that period in between (which depending on the fragility of the fossil and the rate of erosion could be just a few days) can a fossil be found and potentially collected.

Given how few palaeontologists there are out there, and the limited time we spend in the field (not to mention limited funds) it should come as no real surprise that while fossils are not only rare to begin with, we struggle to collect what is there before it is lost. Whole rafts of specimens, probably whole species and higher groups are being lost because we never found the few fossils that had survived to the modern era. Think of everything that has survived so long only to be hidden forever because it’s under a car park, came to the surface in 1753, or was used as ballast, or for that matter, was collected by fossil dealers and whipped away into private collections.

There are, obviously, an awful lot of fossils out there. But they still represent a finite resource that is trickling away from us with each passing day. In my time in the field it’s been far from uncommon to come across a mass of shattered and eroded bone splinter that just a few weeks ago would have been a magnificent skeleton if only someone had found it sooner. This is going on all the time all over the world and quite simply the only way we can really make a dent in the problem is to dig up more material, faster.

Protecting areas from illegal digging and development is an important step in protecting the fossil heritage of the Earth, but this only goes so far if the specimens in the area are not dug up and brought to the safety of museums and public collections. I have no idea what any of the figures are like, but I imagine that fossil collecting for academic research and museums has been increasing over the last couple of decades. Even so, it’s easy to imagine that we are missing out on spectacular and important finds as we quite simply lack the personnel and resources to do much about it.

Fossils have to be incredibly lucky to make it to a point where they could be discovered and to miss out on anything by a matter of months over such colossal time periods seems almost comical. But it’s a sad fact of life for palaeontologists that for all that fossils represent a tiny fraction of life that once lived, the specimens we do have are themselves a tiny fraction of the limited number of fossils that made it even this far.

Author: Dr Dave Hone | Source: The Guardian [January 12, 2013]

Pere Galceran got in touch with the Conca Della Museum and the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology several weeks ago after his son, Lo Pere Xic, found the remains while out tending to the family herd in the town of Basturs, Lleida province.

The pair recognized the fossils as prehistoric remains as soon as they saw them.

Remains of more than a thousand dinosaurs have been found in the area and Basturs residents are familiar with their appearance.

However, the paleontologists who confirmed the discovery believe this most recent site to be of particularly spectacular proportions.

The scientists, who are directed by Angel Galobart, began excavating the area on Monday as a matter of urgency as they are worried that the bones, many of which are poking out of the ground, may be plundered by unscrupulous dinosaur bone hunters.

“They are very big bones, and there are a lot of them,” a Conca Della Museum spokesman told EL PAIS.

The paleontological team’s first assessment of the newly named Costa de les Solanes site believes it to be an immense find that will be investigated for many years to come.

Its studies have already classified the first bones as belonging to some type of hadrosaurid – large herbivores from the Upper Cretaceous period of around 70 to 65 million years ago.

Many traces of hadrosaurids have previously been found in the area, but this new discovery promises to be something exceptional.

The Costa de les Solanes site, like the others, preserves the remains of some of the last dinosaurs to live in Europe before a global catastrophe – that many scientists believe may have been the result of an enormous meteorite hitting the Earth – wiped them out.

The excavation will continue until Friday and forms part of the Catalan Pyrenees dinosaur research project.

Author: Jacinto Anton | Source: El Pais [July 15, 2012]

Justin Mukanku from the Wits Institute of Human Evolution spotted the tooth – Credit: University of the Witwatersrand

South African scientists will share the country’s latest fossil discovery with the world using live virtual technology.

Professor Lee Berger, a Reader in Palaeoanthropology and the Public Understanding of Science at the Wits Institute for Human Evolution,will the announcement at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in Shanghai, China on Friday, 13 July 2012 at 09:00 South African standard time. Prof Berger is visiting China as part of a South African delegation promoting trade, business and tourism relations between the two competitive city regions, Gauteng and Shanghai.

New discovery
“We have discovered parts of a jaw and critical aspects of the body including what appear to be a complete femur (thigh bone), ribs, vertebrae and other important limb elements, some never before seen in such completeness in the human fossil record,” says Berger. “This discovery will almost certainly make Karabo the most complete early human ancestor skeleton ever discovered. We are obviously quite excited as it appears that we now have some of the most critical and complete remains of the skeleton, albeit encased in solid rock. It’s a big day for us as a team and for our field as a whole.”

The remains are invisible to the casual observer and are entrenched in a large rock about one metre in diameter. It was discovered almost three years ago, but lay unnoticed in the Wits laboratories until early last month. Prof. Berger and his wife Jackie Smilg, a radiologist at the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital, who is conducting her PhD on the CT scanning of fossil material embedded in rock, scanned the large rock in a state of the art CT scanner.

A world first – Live Science!
In an unprecedented gesture of open access to science and public participation, the University of the Witwatersrand, the Gauteng Provincial Government and the South African national government announced that for the first time in history, the process of exploring and uncovering these fossil remains would be conducted live, captured on video, and conveyed to the world in real time. This will allow members of the public and the scientific community to share in the unfolding discovery in an unprecedented way.

The small tooth (in the centre) that was spotted and led to the discovery of the skeleton in the rock – Credit: University of the Witwatersrand

A laboratory studio, designed in collaboration with the National Geographic Society, will be built at the Maropeng Visitor Centre in the heart of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. It will allow the public to view the preparation of this skeleton live if they visit Maropeng, or live on the internet. “The public will be able to participate fully in Live Science and future discoveries as they occur in real time – an unprecedented moment in palaeoanthropology,” explains Berger. “The laboratory studio will be also linked to laboratories at Wits University and the Malapa site.”

“We are excited to have helped make this cutting-edge facility possible for the University of the Witwatersrand,” says National Geographic Executive Vice President Terry Garcia. “We can’t wait to watch palaeontology happening in real time.”

Gauteng MEC for Economic Development, Qedani Mahlangu, said: “We are proud to be part of this programme which proves that Gauteng is indeed a world-class City-Region at the forefront of scientific discovery and technological development. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the best in the world.”

Virtual outposts
Mahlangu also indicated that access to the laboratory studio would not be limited only to visitors to the Cradle of Humankind and the internet.

“We intend to create virtual ‘outposts’ in major partner museums around the world,” says Mahlangu. “These outposts will allow visitors to these partner museums the chance to interact with scientists in real time in a way we simply could not conceive of a few years ago. It is anticipated that the laboratory and virtual infrastructure will be built within a year, expanding our ambitious tourism and smart province infrastructure programme.”

Berger added that negotiations had begun with the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, the Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom and the Smithsonian in Washington. “We have already donated casts of Australopithecus sediba to these three institutions, amongst others,” says Berger. “It has also just been confirmed that one of the virtual outposts will be hosted in the new Shanghai Natural History Museum due to open later this year.”

The excitement generated by the latest discovery is also shared by the National Department of Arts and Culture. The Department has hailed it as an important addition to the drive to educate South Africans, especially the youth, about their history and heritage.

Paul Mashatile, South African Minister of Arts and Culture, says: “Maropeng means the place of origin. South Africans are prepared to share this information about our history and heritage with the rest of the world, with the help of modern technology. This is history in the making, with the added dimension of being relayed live to the world as it is made.”

Berger concludes: “It’s breath-taking to actually ‘see the future’ using technology. It unlocks the potential for us to make ambitious plans to share this find with other scientists and with the public. Such an endeavour is quite literally changing the way we conduct science, and it’s a wonderful opportunity to share this magnificent discovery with the world. But, truthfully, my colleagues and I just can’t wait to get our hands on the fossils in that rock!”

Contacts and sources:
Wits Institute for Human Evolution
University of the Witwatersrand