On Oct. 14 of this year, as construction crews were clearing ground to expand the Ziegler Reservoir near Snowmass Village to increase snowmaking capacity, bulldozer operator Jesse Steele uncovered the bones of a juvenile female mammoth. What happened next was a minor miracle: he recognized them as fossils, and didn’t doze them.

Instead, he and others got on the horn (as it were) with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. An emergency paleonotological response team (how many times does that happen?) was dispatched. Just over a month later, stymied, for now, by snow and frozen soil, the museum took a step back, a big breath, and has realized they have stumbled onto the find of a lifetime.

Spake Museum Curator Kirk Johnson to the Denver Post:

“We know almost nothing about what the Rockies were like during the ice age. We have our first clear window into it,” museum curator Kirk Johnson said. “It is one of the most amazing finds in North America.”

It was he who has publicly suggested the town should be redubbed Snowmastodon Village, for here is what they have found, according to the Post:

Museum workers — 67 individuals — recovered more than 500 bones representing eight to 10 American mastodons, four Columbian mammoths, four ice-age bison, two deer, Colorado’s first-ever Jefferson’s ground sloth and several smaller animal species, and hundreds of pounds of plant material. . . Scientists have in house 15 tusks of mammoths and mastodons — one still bone white — plus two tusk tips and 14 bags of tusk fragment.

For those of us who also care about things without fur, the Post was gracious enough to report that the team has also found:

* One tiger salamander

* Distinctly chewed wood that provides evidence of Ice Age beavers

* Insects, including iridescent beetles

* Snails and microscopic crustaceans called ostracods

* Large quantities of well-preserved wood, seeds, cones, and leaves of white spruce, sub-alpine fir, sedges, seeds, and other plants.

Truly, this is The Age of Mammals, the companion mural to the Age of Reptiles at the Yale Peabody Museum, come alive. Age? The final word isn’t in yet, but it’s looking like somewhere between 40,000 and 130,000 years old. To give you a sense of the timing, the last interglacial began about 130,000 years ago, and the last ice age began about 100,000 years ago, ending just 10,000 years ago. You can read more about the discoveries in the Post here and here.

 

I have to say I do want to know more about the Ice Age beavers. I’m imagining they had some pretty sweet ice age digs — you know, lodge all tricked out with mammoth-fur lined walls and satellite TV. Like these guys.

 

In any case, on Saturday, the Museum held a Mastodon and Mammoth Madness Day at the Museum to show off a handful of their finds for one day only before everything disappears for a few years to be preserved. Yours truly made sure to attend (I do it all for you, dear readers) so I could be there for those of you who couldn’t. When I arrived I found swarms of children and a variety of non-Snowmass fossils blocking the way to the main event. No matter, I parted the seas to find the proper table. There, volunteers were assiduously misting the unprepared bones with squirt botttles.

Here was the first bone I looked at — a mastodon tusk. Note the blue stains.

A volunteer informed me those are actually a blue mineral formed from the biological ooze in the bone. The name is escaping me, but I think it was a woman’s name starting with a V + ite (Vanessite?)

Notice the tip. It’s not broken. Here’s a closer look.

Though it’s a little hard to see in this photo (go look at the photo at the very beginning of this post too), the end is worn smooth, from use in life. Just like the wear and tear on your molars. Speaking of which . . .

Here is the jawbone of a Columbian mammoth with one of its worn-down and extremely characteristic molars. They look like some sort of funky scrubbing pad, if you ask me. I LOVE the pattern. But even cooler than that is what lurks in that little shadow next to the tooth. See inside? It’s *a new* molar, just waiting to erupt. And unlike the existing molar, its crown is perfectly pointy and unworn.

You might be able to see it a little bit better here:

Mammoth teeth are very distinct from mastodon teeth. For comparison, here’s a mastodon molar, which looks much more like our own:

So by now you may be wondering, “Just how big were mastodons and mammoths compared to us and each other?” Well, I’m glad you asked — the museum had handy dandy banners made up, and I inserted myself into the picture as your human scale bar. I am quite a short human, though — only 5’2″ (just over 1.5 m). So bear that in mind. : )

Here’s a mastodon, which as you’ll see, is a little smaller than an elephant:

And here is the Columbian Mammoth — which was much bigger!

Columbian mammoth — or oliphaunt?

The museum also had bits of other fun stuff they found in the peat from which they’ve been excavating the bones, including lots of bits of grass and grass seeds:

Those are tens-of-thousands-of-year old grass seeds and blades, folks. And they look like they just fell yesterday! Would be fun to see if you can get any of them to germinate. They also had a very tiny piece of peat with an irridescent blue beetle butt, but the light was too bad and my camera too poor to capture it well. The beetle was so well preserved they could identify it to family as a Buprestid.

Alas, they didn’t have the sloth bone on display, but they did have a giant sloth skeleton from another site displayed:

Pretty scary looking, eh? And yet, according to the volunteers, those scary claws were used for digging up ant and termite mounds. Here’s some more info and a nice reconstruction.

Finally, I happened to notice this inconspicuously laid on a table nearby. Real woolly mammoth hair!!

I’m sure it came from a frozen mammoth somewhere. Though they found Columbian mammoths — not woolly mammoths — at this site, it was still so cool to see. The box had like six different “NEVER OPEN THIS” stickers, but to me, it was so wonderful that, in theory, I could pet the fur of a mammal long extinct from the Earth. The bones at Snowmass seem to have come from a swamp or lake, so the odds of finding fur are slim. But you never know . . . there’s always next season. And I can’t wait to find out what’s still buried out there, high up and lonesome at 8,874 feet.

Part praying mantis, part flatworm, part geminating snuffleupagus: Model of Anomalocaris from the Natural History Museum, London. Creative Commons Gaetan Lee.

On the list of hallucinatory animals, the Cambrian creation known as Anomalocaris has held a particular grasp on natural history buffs’ imagination. Its name (essentially “weirdo shrimp”), its fascinating path to discovery, and its use as a Cambrian fall guy in Burgess Shale recreations have all contributed to this. Natural history documentaries, in particular, have tended to portray this thing patrolling the Cambrian oceans and harassing helpless trilobites with the cool assurance of a Great White Shark. In my copy of “Prehistoric Life: The Definitive Visual History of Life on Earth” published by DK just last year (and highly recommended), the caption of the beautiful full-color page describing Anomalocaris declares “3 ft 3 in The length of the largest Anolmalocaris specimens. Its size and formidable mouthparts made it a top predator of the Cambrian seas.”

Before I come to the current study, it’s worth knowing something about the history of this thing. In the world of Cambrian paleontology, Anomalocaris is a superstar. Life’s first big multicellular experiment (that we know about) — the Ediacaran — was mostly about soft-bodied life. Its second great multicellular experiment is the one that gave rise to most of the major groups we recognize today. This was the community of organisms famously discovered in the Canadian Burgess Shale, and it is the one in which Anomalocaris was found. The only problem was that when scientists first found it, they thought they had three separate living things — a real life enactment of the story of the blind men and the elephant.

First found was a shrimp’s tail — but only the tail. It was this that was named Anomalocaris.

A proboscis of Anomalocaris. On first glance, they thought it was a weird shrimp because its little "appendages" were not jointed, unlike modern shrimp. As it turns out, it was a weirdo shrimp because it wasn't a shrimp.

Next found was a pineapple ring — or what looked like a pineapple ring. Captain Morgan notwithstanding, scientists interpreted this as a squashed jellyfish and named it Peytoia. Finally, scientists found a fossil they judged to be a sponge, and named it Laggania. The pineapple ring was attached, but was interpreted as a jelly fish that had just happened to settle on top of the sponge and got squashed into place. Finally, the scientist Harry Whittington at last found a fossil in which the shrimp hinder was attached to the pineapple ring. No, really? What the heck was this thing? A few years later, they put it all together: the sponge was the body, the pineapple ring the mouth, and the cocktail shrimp was one of a pair of probosci of this titanically large (for the Cambrian) animal. Anomalocaris, they called it, since earliest taxonomic names have precedence, and judged it to be the terror of the Burgess Shale fauna.

For the Cambrian, this thing was big. At about one meter (three feet) it dwarfed the other species we typically find in the ecosystem. But it turns out that titanism may have been the size enhancement that comes with being a whale shark, not a white shark. Scientists at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science conducted computer studies of Anomalocaris‘s bizarre mouthparts and found that it was extremely unlikely it was capable of crushing much more than a gummy bear, much less an armor-plated trilobite. Supporting their study, they examined some 400 fossil Anomalocaris mouthparts — and found nary a chip or scratch. Considering how soft our fingernails are and how frequently they get chipped or scratched, I’m afraid it appears Anomalocaris must have been chowing down on something either very soft or tiny indeed. Soft worms, they suggest — or plankton.

So the vicious predator may have been a gentle, harmless (unless you happen to be a plankter) filter feeder. At least — that’s the tale now! With as many twists and turns as this story has taken, I wouldn’t be surprised if another surprise lies in wait. For instance . . . scientists have actually found and identified fecal pellets of this thing. That’s one study I, for one, will be glad not to have to do . . .

Fractofusus, vintage 600 million years ago give or take. Salp ancestors? Shark tooth kebabs? Early Surf-board Peeps(TM)? If you can figure out what the heck this is, you get a gold star -- and a paper in Nature! Photo by Dr. S.B. Misra

No time for a long post tonight or likely over the weekend, but just wanted to give you guys a heads-up on a don’t-miss article. The grand story of life on Earth has a rather extended bacterial prologue (or a fairly short multicellular epilogue, depending on how you look at it). In fact, the story of bacteria is almost the story of the entire book.  Multicellular life only came along in the last 600 million years or so, and life is posited to have existed on Earth almost since its formation 4.6 <pinky to mouth>billion</pinky to mouth> years ago, and certainly since at least 4 billion years ago (doing the math, that means bacteria have been around 8 times longer than us “higher” organisms).

Anywho, one of the Big Questions is why it took so long for multicellular life to show up, and once it did, why the first draft was *so frickin’ weird* compared to what exists today. The Ediacaran fauna is that first draft, and it bears little resemblance to the life that came afterward in the Cambrian Explosion. You’ve heard me mention the Ediacaran fauna before, notably on my visit to the Sant Ocean Hall last fall in which I was utterly ecstatic to get to see some of the original Ediacaran fossils in person. This article in the New York Times tackles scientists’ current thinking on the Big Questions — and has a lovely slide show  that helps explain why I get so excited about Ediacara (only disadvantage: no scale bars. Some of these guys are way smaller than photos would leave you to believe — and some are larger).

Even I was stunned to discover a few fossils in the show I’d never seen before — particularly Fractofusus, above. I had a big WOW moment when I saw it. By far, it is the most beautiful Ediacaran I’ve seen. It comes from an Ediacaran locality I hadn’t been aware of previously: the gloriously named “Mistaken Point” on the south shore of Newfoundland. The photo above doesn’t quite do justice to the photo in the NYT slideshow, so make sure you check it out.

What the heck was it? How was it making a living? What did it look like in real life? Was it brightly colored? Was it an evolutionary dead end or is it a secret ancestor of some totally common form today? If secret ancestor, was it of plant, animal, or “other”? If only, if only, if only I could climb in a phone booth time machine with Keanu and So-crates and take a peak in those early oceans(ok, that’s multicellularist. Late oceans.). That would be most excellent.

The pliosaur Kronosaurus. Still NOT a dinosaur.

… this week New Scientist’s cover story took a closer look at the four major taxa of marine reptiles, in all their incarnations from the Permian to the Big Cretaceous Sleep. I covered two of them in my post on “Sea Monsters” — the plesiosaurs and the mosasaurs — but there are two others: the icthyosaurs and the pliosaurs. You should definitely have a look.

And scientists announced this week that they had found the skull of a giant pliosaur in the UK that could have measured 16 meters (52 feet) long – only two meters shorter than the current pliosaur record-holder, a Pliosaurus found in Oxfordshire, UK, that was so big you could fit your arm in its tooth sockets.

Able I was ere I saw Svalbard.

New pliosaur specimens have been popping up all over recently. They come from Mexico, the UK, and the island of Spitsbergen in the Hoth-like waste of the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago, which is apparently bursting with pliosaur brittle (thousands of skeletons are presently weathering out in the choice spot). Two massive pliosaur specimens (est. length 15 m.) were excavated recently there and dubbed (in King-Kong-worthy choices) “The Monster” and “Predator X”.

The icthyosaurs(fish-lizards) — which resembled dolphins even more strongly than the short-necked plesiosaurs — were dominant marine reptiles in the Triassic and early Jurassic. Some small species had freakishly large frisbee-sized eyes (for reasons revealed in the NS article). But some had bodies to match — and this is relatively recent news too. It was only in 2004 that an icthyosaur — Shonisaurus — the size of a fin whale (the second-largest living animal) was found in British Columbia.

Why were neither of these creatures in “Sea Monsters”? The icthyosaurs died out for unknown reasons by the time “Sea Monsters” was. . . er . . . “filmed”. So had the largest pliosaurs.

The New Scientist article also features a difficult to find but stunningly informative and useful family tree and size comparison chart for the four groups. Make sure to blow that puppy up so you can actually read it.

One final note . . bear in mind that the animals in the New Scientist tree (and our current maximum size estimates for particular groups) represent what we know based only on the fossils we’ve happened to find. There may have been many more varieties of huge marine reptiles in these four groups — or maybe another major group – and any of them could be larger or weirder than we’ve ever imagined. Good specimens may never have fossilized properly, purely by chance. The fossils may be buried in rock layers that aren’t currently much exposed at the surface, and are waiting miles underground to be exposed thousands or millions of years hence (or never). Or long ago they may have weathered out and eroded back into the sea whence they came or been sucked down into the mantle and obliterated.  Odds are we are seeing only a slim fraction of what once existed.

And that is true for all life, especially in the squishy-little-creature category of which I’m such a fan. Biologists, perhaps even more than historians, have reason to lament our inability to time travel. Oh, what wonders we might see if we could. The fossil record, with all its glorious variety, is the merest hint of the splendor that really was, that really happened, and that we will never, never know.

. . . and she knows how to use them. The harvestman (daddy long legs) Phalangium opilio. Credit: Dschwen/Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 2.5 License. Click for link.

Sometimes evolution moves quickly and groups of organisms change radically over very short spans of geologic time. Think of modern horses, which evolved from dog-sized creatures over the course of the last few tens of millions of years. Or take humans — we only evolved about 150,000 years ago, and if you look at our ancestors ca. 3 million years BP, you’d find yourself looking at an unfamiliar face indeed. But sometimes, when a particular organism hits on a successful niche, it changes hardly at all.

I’ve previously mentioned that sharks and mosses fall into this category. But this week I found an interesting story about some amazing harvestman fossils that show they are in the same boat. Harvestmen, also called daddy long legs, are arachnids like spiders or scorpions. Scientists recently found two new species in fossils from north central China that date from 165 million years ago. That’s right — the Jurassic, When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth.

The two new species, described by Selden and his colleagues in an upcoming Naturwissenschaften, were entombed in fine-grained volcanic ash that fell in what is now north central China about 165 million years ago. The harvestmen — and the ash — either dropped into a lake or were washed there soon after the ash fell, Selden notes. Little is left of those ancient harvestmen: The fossils are, for the most part, 3-D outlines of fragile bodies that disappeared long ago. Those tiny molds, however, preserved even small details of the creatures, including their mouthparts, genitals and the joints of their legs.

You just gotta love German science journal names. Wait . . . genitals? Yes. According to scientist Paul Selden, one of the authors of the paper, the details are so fine and the organism so similar to existing harvestmen, we can tell that if you saw one of the fossilized species wander through your back yard today, you wouldn’t even look at it twice. And this is a creature that once may have scuttled underneath T. rex or Stegasaurus!

I can’t publish the photo here for copyright reasons, but head on over to Science News to see the fossil and read the rest of the article and make sure to embiggen that fossil photo — twice.  With enough time, it is amazing what low-probability events can happen.