#Solnhofen formation

[thepaleopetshop]

Twig gets an Update

Twig gets an Update

Twig the Compsognathus gets the spotlight today, and he’s excited about his new look. (more…)

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

don't worry, marine ecosystems are getting their own polls

[makairodonx]

My 21st entry for Jurassic June 2023: Two Rhamphorhynchus muensteri plunge into the warm, shallow tropical waters of what is now the Solnhofen Formation of Germany in pursuit of fish to eat, 150-148 million years ago.

[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

Wordplay Wednesday: TITHONIAN

Here is a word used by paleontologists and geologists quite frequently along with many other related words. The Tithonian was the final age of the Late Jurassic Epoch of the Jurassic Period of the Mesozoic Era or the Phanerozoic Eon spanning from 19.2 +/- 0.7 Ma to 145 Ma.

Rocks associated with this age include upper Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison Formation in North America,

Solnhofen Limestone in Germany,

Lourinha Formation in Portugal, the Tendaguru Formation in Africa,

the Shangshaximiao Formation in China, and the Chacarilla Formation in South America just to name a few.

[obscurefossils]

Steleopteron

Steleopteron was a genus of steleopterid damselfly from the Early Jurassic and Early Cretaceous periods. Its type species is S. deichmuelleri. Its second known species is S. cretacicus. The known species are known from single fossils found in Solnhofen, Bavaria, Germany and the Weald Formation in Surrey, United Kingdom respectively. The discovery of S. cretacicus indicated that the Steleopteridae family had not died out by the Cretaceous period, as it is the only known member from that period.

S. cretacicus is named for its time period being that of the Cretaceous.

Its autapomorphies include particularily elongated and narrow wings, a very long petiolus, a characteristic pattern of pleats along the longitudinal veins, very long wing veins, distally zigzagged MA and CuA, and a distinctly curved MA. S. cretacicus in particular was diagnosed based on its wing being slimmer than that of its sister taxon.

S. deichmuelleri is known from only its holoype, a complete dissociated exoskeleton. S. cretacicus is known from a single preserved wing. The overall family of Steleopteridae is in unsure placement, only regarded as a member of the greater Odonata, possibly within Zygoptera.

Original paper: S. deichmuelleri description paper; S. cretacicus description paper.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steleopteron

[wanderingnork]

4 and/or 22 for the end of the year asks, please!

4. Movie of the year

Hey quick question WHY WOULD YOU MAKE ME CHOOSE

I’ve seen about 50 movies this year, horror and not horror, and it’s HARD to pick. But after much consideration…Martyrs (2008). It’s the one that stuck with me since I saw it. It moved me in a way very few works of art have ever moved me. I would go so far as to say it changed me.

22. Favorite place I visited

I had the opportunity over the summer to go to Germany to visit a dear friend. While I was there, I visited the Solnhofen Plattenkälk, a phenomenal limestone formation containing fossils from the Jurassic period. Crinoids, ammonites, Archaeopteryx, ichthyosaurs, and more have all been found there. That experience changed me, too.

[dinosly]

This is one of the few artworks for my Solnhofen formation paleobiota series! Compsognathus longipes was found in the Solnhofen limestone deposits in 1959, long said to be the smallest dinosaur. This depiction shows the lil critter sharing the horrifying table manners of the shrike, namely stabbing its prey on thorns for ease of consumption. I want to show well known prehistoric creatures in ways never thought of and bring new life and new quirks to the ecosystems of the past. I'll archive more of these soon, so stay tuned!

[arinewman7]

A Fossil Dragonfly

Aeschnogomphus intermedius

Upper Jurassic, Tithonian stage

Solnhofen Formation, Eichstätt, Bavaria, Germany

Sothebys

[kheironomos]

Hey! Pardon the dust around here; it’s been a while since I’ve posted artwork.

Here’s an Archaeopteryx I drew some time ago. Archaeopteryx lithographica is one of the most famous Mesozoic creatures discovered due to its apparent mixture of avian and dinosaurian features. The iconic fossil uncovered at the Solnhofen formation was exquisitely preserved and displayed the full extent of the creature’s feathering. Recent analysis on Archaeopteryx fossils suggest it was actually mostly lightly colored, rendering this particular design inaccurate. Nonetheless, the magpie-reminiscent pattern evokes the estimated size of an average adult Archaeopteryx! These were small creatures.

We know that Archaeopteryx had a pair of true wings, although whether these were able to support flight is still a matter of paleontological debate. Some argue that the apparent weakness of the sternum and the inability of Archaeopteryx to lift its wings above its back render it a glider; recent studies, however, grant some integrity to the flying hypothesis. These posit that the feather configuration of Archaeopteryx was more typical of flying birds than flightless ones, and that bird-like dinosaurs may have had a different style of flight than modern birds.

Archaeopteryx has been grouped with both birds and dinosaurs since its discovery. Currently, it is regarded as a particularly bird-like dinosaur. It shares traits in common with Maniraptorans such as an elongated third claw and a large brain case.

[tff-praefectus]

REMPC C0042 

Ammonite - Indeterminate species 

Jurassic, Tithonian 

Solnhofen Limestone, Altmuhltal Formation 

Bavaria, Germany

[thecoffeeisblack]

Final for my illustration of Compsognathus longipes attempting to seize the day along with a little Anurognathus ammoni for it's lunch.

Both animals lived roughly 150.8 million years ago during the Late Jurassic period in what would eventually become the Solnhofen Limestone Formation in Bavaria. When they were alive the area was dotted with lagoons separated from the ocean by reefs. There were many other species of fish, pterosaurs, icthyosaurs, and dinosaurs. One of the more famous dinosaurs in the area was Archaeopoteryx lithographica, it's fossils later found in the limestone that now remains.

Compsognathus was one of the more common theropod dinosaurs discovered in the area, though it measured only about a meter in length and wouldn't have posed much of a threat to the larger animals inhabiting the area, but it would have been the perfect size to go after the tiny pterosaur known as Anurognathus, itself only measuring a little over a foot from wing-tip to wing-tip. Both animals had huge eyes for their size, most and were most likely more active at night, and while Anurognathus was likely a fast flyer, Compsognathus is thought to have also been very quick on it's feet, able to easily catch up with anything foolish enough to have dropped down to ground level.

[mechatherium]

What the heck is a Tully Monster, anyway?

Not to be confused with Telly Monster.

An older reconstruction of T. gregarium by Stanton F. Fink. (source)

Last month I wrote a post on Illinois’ State Fossil, the enigmatic Tullimonstrum gregarium. I promised a future post where I planned to explain how an international team of scientists from Texas and the UK finally figured out what branch on the Tree of Life the infamous “Tully Monster” belongs on.

Alas, such is not the case. Let me explain.

Ever since Francis Tully brought the first specimen in to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, paleontologists have tried to discover what sort of animal T. gregarium was. It’s not for lack of material; unlike most fossil organisms, thousands of Tully monsters have been recovered from the Carboniferous Mazon Creek formation in Illinois.

And these creatures are preserved in exquisite detail; Mazon Creek is what is called a Lagerstätte: a rare fossil bed where organisms are so well preserved in fine detail that traces of soft parts are visible. (Other examples include the famous Cambrian-age Burgess Shale in Canada described in loving detail in Steven J. Gould’s Wonderful Life and the Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone in Germany that yielded the stem bird Archaeopteryx lithographica.) Good thing, too, as as Tully monsters have no hard parts—no bones, no shell, no exoskeleton.

Even with this wealth of well-preserved material, paleontologists have had a devil of a time trying to classify tullies as a particular kind of animal; the animal was so specialized in its construction it lacks any obvious features that clearly link it a known animal group. As a result over the years tullies have been classified as chordates (animals with notochords—our group), mollusks, annelids (segmented worms, including earthworms), conodonts (another once-enigmatic fossil group, later identified as chordates), and even a descendant of the stem-arthropod Opabinia.

In what I thought was the final answer to “what the heck are these things?” earlier this decade, two different teams of scientists led by Thomas Clements and Victoria McCoy from the University of Leicester in England made comprehensive studies of Tullimonstrum fossils with the latest tools, including scanning electron microscopes and high-powered particle accelerators.

Clements studied the structure of the tully eye, specifically the structure and arrangement of protective pigment structures called melanosomes in the cells of its retina that preserve very well in Lagerstätte fossils; McCoy took thousands of tully fossils to Argonne National Laboratory to use their  particle accelerators like super-powered CAT scanners, trying to image the animals’ internal structures.

In 2016 they released their results, declaring Tully monsters not just chordates, but vertebrates, jawless fish related to living lampreys.

I thought that would be the end of it. Frank Tully’s mystery solved at last. Alas, science often doesn’t work like that.

Humans, you see, are really good at convincing ourselves of things. We build models in our minds to try to understand how the universe works. The problem comes when those models don’t accurately reflect how the universe actually works. Worse, our minds are wired with a tendency to automatically reject evidence that our models don’t reflect reality.

The beauty of science is it’s a constant testing and re-testing of our models against reality, not just by one lone genius but by many people, many groups—the more, the better. The more and harder our ideas of how the Universe works are tested, the more certain we can be the models that survive are an accurate description of how the world actually works.

When I went to refresh myself on my sources Saturday night I ran across an article that led me to this piece in The Conversation published November 11, 2019: “The mysterious ‘Tully Monster’ fossil just got more mysterious.” Trying to find a link to the scientific paper, I ran across an earlier article in phys.org, “‘Tully monster’ mystery is far from solved, group argues,” published in 2017.

The 2017 article describes a paper in the journal Paleontology (not linked, but here’s a UPenn press release) where a team led by assistant professor Lauran Sallan went through the Clements and McCoy papers and found major flaws in their reasoning.

First, Sallan and her team point out that the Mazon Creek formation was a marine environment, an ancient sea bed. Lagerstätte or no, that has major effects on fossil preservation. “In the marine rocks you just see soft tissues,” she says in the press release, “you don’t see much internal structure preserved.”

Next, they point out there were lampreys living with Tully monsters in that same ecosystem; their fossils are found with the tullies, in the same rock layers. And, according to Sallan, et. al, their fossils don’t look a thing like the tullies’.

Then they point out vertebrates were hardly the only animal group to evolve eyes. Eyes, of whatever level of complexity, are found in about every major animal group. And, according to Sallan, tully eyes weren’t that complex; Sallan’s group asserts Tullimonstrum had a simpler form of eye called a cup eye, like those found in many mollusks, nautiluses, some worms—and some primitive chordates.

If tullies had cup eyes, they could not have been vertebrates, however primitive. All known vertebrates, living and fossil, have complex eyes with lenses; there are some groups that lost their eyes secondarily, like some cave fish, but none have ever simplified the design.

Finally, Sallan points out that if tullies had been vertebrates, McCoy should have found two specific structures found in aquatic vertebrates—and only in vertebrates. The first are otic capsules, structures in the inner ear that provide the sense of balance (we have them; we call them the semicircular canals). The other is a lateral line; a sensory structure found in all fish and many amphibians but lost in land vertebrates. Lampreys have both otic capsules and lateral lines; if Tully monsters were really lamprey relatives, as McCoy asserts, her team should have found them in the thousands of fossils they examined.

The 2019 conversation article was written by paleobiologist Chris Rogers from the University College Cork in Ireland. In it, he describes his own work on comparing the structure and chemistry of tully eyes to those of other animals, both vertebrates and invertebrates. Specifically, he focused on their melanosomes, like Thomas Clements did.

Clements claimed the structure and arrangement of melanosomes in tully eyes was the same as in vertebrates, leading him to put Tullimonstrum among the chordates. Rogers tested that claim with a two-pronged approach. First, he studied and compared melanosome structure and arrangement in living and fossil invertebrates with large, complex eyes, finding that some invertebrates, like cephalopods, had similar melanosome arrangements, and that these can be found in fossils as well.

Rogers concluded the arrangement of melanosomes in Tullimonstrum eyes isn’t enough to prove it was a chordate.

Next, he took a page from McCoy’s book, using high-powered X-ray beams generated by particle accelerators at the California’s Stamford University to analyze the chemical makeup of traces of melanin left in fossil tully eyes.

Rogers’ team analyzed melanin in living animals, finding a slight but consistent chemical difference between vertebrates and invertebrates; we vertebrates have a higher ration of zinc to copper in our melanin than invertebrates do. When they used Stamford’s accelerator to analyze melanin traces in fossils of known vertebrates and invertebrates found at Mazon Creek they found the same difference. When Tullimonstrum fossils were finally put under the X-rays Rogers and his team found the traces of melanin left in their fossils’ eyes was more like that of invertebrates.

Rogers is careful to say that this does not prove the Tully monster was not a vertebrate, merely that Clements’ and McCoy’s analyses aren’t the “smoking gun” the popular science press of the time thought they were.

So the mystery remains, the debates continue, and that’s okay. Because that how science happens. Now Clements and McCoy may go over the data they collected some more and answer the concerns raised by Sallan and Rogers. Maybe Clements can show that tully eyes were built just like those of fish, as opposed to the superficially similar eyes of say, cephalopods. Maybe McCoy will go over the thousands of tully fossil X-rays and find otic capsules and lateral lines—or show that contemporaneous vertebrate fossils don’t preserve those either. Perhaps someone will point out flaws in Sallan and Rogers’ work, I don’t know.

Hopefully, what will happen is as these and other scientists look more and more closely at Tully monster fossils, sooner or later they will find some feature—some anatomical or biochemical clue that will point us toward tully origins, and maybe perhaps some living relatives.

Sorry about the wall of text. I’ll try to make my next posting a bit shorter.

References:

Clements, T., Dolocan, A., Martin, P. et al. The eyes of Tullimonstrum reveal a vertebrate affinity. Nature 532, 500–503 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17647

McCoy, V., Saupe, E., Lamsdell, J. et al. The ‘Tully monster’ is a vertebrate. Nature 532, 496–499 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16992

Baillie, Katherine Unger. “'Tully Monster' Mystery Is Far From Solved, Penn-Led Group Argues.” Penn Today, University of Pennsylvania, 20 Feb. 2017, https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/tully-monster-mystery-far-solved-penn-led-group-argues.

Rogers, Chris. “The Mysterious 'Tully Monster' Fossil Just Got More Mysterious.” The Conversation, 11 Nov. 2019, https://theconversation.com/the-mysterious-tully-monster-fossil-just-got-more-mysterious-126531.

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

Citizen Science, The Last Ice Age in Western Pennsylvania and Carnegie Museum of Natural History Exhibits

Recent education initiatives in the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology encourage citizen science collaborations among professional geological societies to elevate the value of fossil collections, research and museum exhibits of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. For example, this April, 20 members of the North Alleghenies Geological Society were introduced to exceptional Pennsylvanian age fossils on display in Benedum Hall of Geology, i.e., the giant Eurypterid trackway (discovered in Elk County, PA) and the amphibian fossil skull Fedexia (discovered in Moon Twp., near the Pittsburgh International Airport), and the Jurassic age Lyme Regis of England, Holzmaden and Solnhofen fossils of Germany in DITT. And yes, we did view the Carnegie dinosaurs from the Morrison Formation of Sheep Creek, Wyoming and Dinosaur National Monument, Jensen, Utah. The group was amazed with the behind-the-scenes in fossil invertebrates. This month, another citizen science field trip event took place to Slippery Rock Gorge and Moraine State Park in Butler and Lawrence Counties for 40 members of the Pennsylvania Council of Professional Geologists (PCPG). The title of the field trip: The Last Ice Age in Western Pennsylvania: A Changing Climate as Seen in the Glacial Landscape co-led by Albert D. Kollar of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Dan A. Billman (Billman Geologic Consultants, Inc.) Dan and his wife Pam (both geologists) are longtime supporters of the section and museum. They are members of the section’s PAlS (Patrons and lauradanae Supporters). Dan co-authored the 2011 PAlS Publication 11, Geology of the Marcellus Shale and has provided drill cuttings of the 390 million-year-old Marcellus Shale for the section’s Geology and Energy workshops. Dan served as president of PCPG in 2017 and 2018 and asked if I would be interested to co-lead a glacial geology field trip for PCPG in June of 2019.

The 23,000 year old Jacksville Esker in Butler County, PA. The esker is the ridge between the shrubs and base of the tree line.

So why propose a field trip to the region known with the best-preserved landscapes of the Last Ice Age in western Pennsylvania? In Dan’s opinion, many of the PCPG members are certainly aware of the current discussion on human induced climate change but may be less familiar with the climate change and landscapes that occurred and formed respectively just 23,000 years ago. For instance, a summary of the professional affiliations of the 40 participants on the field trip confirms a division of sorts in disciplines. The dominant groups in attendance are made up of sixteen environmental geologists, followed by nine oil and gas geologists, four with PA DEP, four earth resource scientists, four geologic consultants, two academic professors, and one part-time school teacher – who asked to volunteer in the section – a new citizen scientist for the section.

To plan the field trip, we reviewed past geologic field trip guides and publications on the subject and visited the sites several times over the last six months. We also looked at key exhibits in the Carnegie Museum that mimic many of the glacial and climate change features that we would see on the field trip. These include the bedrock geology of western Pennsylvania i.e., coal, sandstone, limestone and shale that represent depositional cycles associated with the Milankovitch cyclothems and Earth’s precession. These are related to some 120 glaciation events in the rock record that occurred over Permo-Carboniferous time (Pennsylvanian Period) 319 MA to Early Permian 270 MA. In the museum dioramas: A replica coal forest and coeval marine seaway can be seen in Benedum Hall of Geology. In Botany Hall, the Northern Pennsylvania Bog is an example of a glacial tundra bog like the West Liberty Bog – a paleoclimate indicator. And the Muskox exhibit of the Arctic tundra biome is representative of the Alpine permafrost periglacial environment in the Appalachian ridges, which formed “rock city”. The Last Glacial Maximum, a +/-23,000-year-old Kent glacial terminal moraine, Jacksville Esker, and the scenic gorge at Cleland Rock were the highlights of the trip.    

Blog post by Albert D. Kollar, collection manager in the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Dan A. Billman of Billman Geologic Consultants, Inc.

[fossilera]

This is is a nice, 3.6" long fossil dragonfly (Isophlebia?) from the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone of Germany. Complete fossil dragonflies are rare finds in this formation and there are several species present. This specimen is preserved on it's side which is a more unusual orientation to find these fossils in.

For sale at: https://www.fossilera.com/fossils/3-65-3-fossil-dragonfly-isophlebia-solnhofen-limestone

[hermannsthumb]

There’s this one fossil formation in Germany during the Jurassic that I’m obsessed with (the Solnhofen Formation) so imagine Newt making a well-researched friendfiction AU where, among other things, he and Hermann are a bonded pair of Archaeopteryx. There’s lots of tender feather-preening and the like. He’s so proud of himself.

he reads it aloud to hermann and hermann is like.....thank you.....i think?

[desimonewayland]

Georg Wolfgang Knorr (1705-1761)

Three decapod crustaceans from the Solnhofen limestone quarry from Knorr's Recueil de monumens des catastrophes que le globe terrestre a éssuiées 1768-1778

Rare Book Collection - American Museum of Natural History

Text via: Donald A. Heald Rare Books, NYC

Knorr was one of the leading proto-geologists of the eighteenth century as well as an excellent engraver, painter and art dealer. Born in Nuremberg, he was initially apprenticed to his father's trade of wood turning, but at the age of eighteen became an engraver of copper-plates for Leonhard Blanc, working with Martin Tyroff on the illustrations for Jacob Scheuchzer's Physica Sacra (1731). This work and his acquaintance with J.A. Beurer, a mineralogist-correspondent of the Royal Society, quickened Knorr's interest in natural history. Further stimulus was provided by the wealthy doctor and polymath Christoph Jakob Trew, owner of a menagerie as well as a wide-ranging natural history collection. Trew gathered around him a highly talented group of artists, engravers and scientists, all of whom contributed to making Nuremberg a centre for the publication of top quality large format natural history books.