A rare pre-historic fossil, possibly 35 to 40 million years old, has been stolen from a village in Meghalaya, leaving people in shock and outraged. The fossil was discovered in May last year in the state’s Tolegre village in South Garo Hills.

The Geological Survey of India (GSI) had examined the site last year and collected samples. Following this, the villagers were safeguarding the remaining fossil by restricting access to the area, officials said.

The fossil is possibly from the extinct Rodhocetus or Ambulocetus – early ancestors of modern whales.

A case has been filed at the Siju Police Station and the police are on the lookout for the culprits, officials said.

According to Meghalaya Education Minister Rakkam Sangma, the state government was planning to build a museum at the site.

“The villagers informed me…They have filed an FIR. This is very unfortunate. It should not have happened…A portion of the fossil has been cut and taken away. This fossil is an asset to the state and the country. We will find and arrest the culprit,” he said.

“This site is located in Tolegre under my constituency, under Siju Police Station, South Garo Hills, Meghalaya. Geologists from abroad had discovered it. The state government was considering constructing a museum at the site, and as the local MLA, I was planning to push for it. Now, we will have to see how things unfold. The police will conduct an inquiry,” Mr Sangma added.

A fossilised skeleton, Australopithecus afarensis, best known by her nickname ‘Lucy’, was unearthed by researchers 50 years ago this month in the Afar region of Ethiopia. It eventually went on to transform scientists’ understanding of human evolution.

Opening a new chapter in human history, the discovery by Don Johanson, an American palaeontologist and graduate student Tom Gray on November 24, 1974, provided proof that the ancient hominins could walk upright on two feet 3.2 million years ago — a trait thought to have evolved more recently, CNN reported.

Lucy had a mixture of ape and humanlike traits, suggesting she occupied a pivotal branch in the family tree of humans. Over the past few decades, she has encouraged multiple researches and debates, besides igniting a broader public fascination with human origins.

Although researchers have now unearthed fossil hominins twice as old as Lucy, she continues to remain a key subject for scientific studies.

At the time when it was found, Lucy had 47 bones and was the oldest known and the most complete skeleton of early human ancestors.

Reminiscing his 1974 Ethiopia visit, Don Johanson told CNN he was walking on sediment 3.2 million years in age to search for the fossilised remains of various kinds of animals, “but particularly the remains of our ancestors.” 

“I happened to look over my right shoulder. If I had looked over my left shoulder, I would have missed it,” he said.

At first, he witnessed a little fragment of bone, a little part of the elbow as well as a part of a forearm. 

He could tell “immediately that it was from a human ancestor,” Johanson said, adding when he and his student, Tom Gray, kneeled to have a closer look, they saw “fragments of the skull and fragments of a pelvis and fragments of an arm bone and the leg bone.” 

“I realized at that moment that here was the childhood dream… I’d always wanted to go to Africa to find something and by golly this was something. But we didn’t know how much it would become an icon in the study of human origins,” Johanson said.

At the time of discovery, Lucy’s bones were “very fragile” because they had mineralised and changed into stone. So, the team did a “very careful crawl to pick up the obvious pieces,” before they put them into the burlap bags.

Later, they water-washed them in the stream via fine screening. The whole process took two and a half weeks. 

Johanson recalled it was wonderful to see Lucy come together on the lab table in the field. “The femur there was only about a foot long, or 28 centimetres long. What is this? I thought. Is this a child? Well, let’s look at the jaw. The wisdom teeth had erupted so she was an adult. But my god, if this was an adult, it had to have been only about 3 and a half feet tall, a meter tall,” he added.

Asked how it got the name Lucy, Johanson said it had a delicate nature of the bones and the short stature, so they felt “she was probably a female.”

He went on to say that while Lucy’s species did not give rise directly to modern humans, “her pivotal place on the human family tree led to all later hominin species, most of which went extinct.” 

“The Homo lineage persisted and ultimately gave rise to us, Homo sapiens,” he concluded.

 

Coelacanths are deep-sea fish up to two metres in length which were believed to have been extinct.

In new research published in Nature Communications, we reveal the best-preserved coelacanth fossil ever found from the ancient period hundreds of millions of years ago when these ancient sea-dwellers first evolved. The fossil comes from the Gogo Formation on Gooniyandi Country in northern Western Australia.

We also studied the evolution of all the hundreds of coelacanth species we know from the fossil record to find out what drove the creation of new species across the aeons.

The answer came as a surprise: the greatest influence on coelacanth evolution was not ocean.

Later, during the age of dinosaurs which began around 250 million years ago, coelacanths became more diverse. In total, we have found traces of more than 175 fossil species from all over the globe.

Finally, at the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, all signs of coelacanths mysteriously vanished from the fossil record. For a long time, scientists assumed the coelacanths were casualties of the massive asteroid impact that also signed the death warrant of the dinosaurs (along with around three-quarters of all life on Earth).

All that changed in 1938, when fisherpeople in South Africa pulled a large, enigmatic fish from the ocean depths that was like nothing they had seen before. A local museum employee with a keen interest in the natural sciences, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, immediately knew the fish was special.

Courtenay-Latimer enlisted her friend J. L. B. Smith, a renowned South African chemist with an interest in ichthyology (the study of fish). Smith identified and named Latimeria, the first living coelacanth known to science.

Discovering this “Lazarus fish” was like stumbling across a live Triceratops dinosaur still roaming the forests of North America today. Even today, coelacanths are often described as “living fossils”.

A new fossil coelacanth

Our team from Flinders University, together with other colleagues from Australia, Canada and Europe, discovered a new species of fossil coelacanth on Gooniyandi Country in northern WA. Around 380 million years ago, the site was a tropical reef teeming with more than 50 species of fish.

Ngamugawi wirngarri, the new fossil coelacanth, is the first fish found in the area to bear a name given to us from the Gooniyandi language. The name means “ancient fish in honour of Wirngarri”, a respected elder of the community.

Ngamugawi is the best three-dimensionally preserved coelacanth from the Devonian Period (359 million to 419 million years ago). This fossil provides a great insight into the early anatomy of this lineage.

Plate tectonics drive coelacanth evolution

Our study of the new species led us to analyse the evolutionary history of all known coelacanths. In doing so, we calculated the rates of evolution across their 410 million-year history.

We found that coelacanths have generally evolved slowly, with a few intriguing exceptions.

Furthermore, we analysed a series of environmental factors that we considered potential candidates for influencing coelacanth evolutionary rates. These included tectonic plate activity, ocean temperatures, water oxygen levels, and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

Of all the variables we looked at, the one with the greatest influence on the rate of coelacanth evolution was tectonic plate activity. New species of coelacanth were more likely to evolve during periods of heightened tectonic activity, as seismic movement transformed habitats.

Are coelacanths still evolving?

Along with our analysis of all fossil coelacanths, we also had a close look at the two living species, Latimeria chalumnae and Latimeria menadoensis.

At first glance, these fish look almost identical to some of their counterparts from hundreds of millions of years ago. However, on closer analysis, we could see they were in fact distinct from their extinct relatives.

While Latimeria has essentially ceased evolving new features, the proportions of its body and the details of its DNA are still changing a little. So perhaps it’s not a “living fossil” after all.

Alice Clement, Research Associate in the College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University and John Long, Strategic Professor in Palaeontology, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.