Some 20-30 million years ago, a salamander in what is today the Dominican Republic had a very bad day.
But its misfortune has sparked a knowledge trifecta for scientists from Oregon State University (OSU) and the University of California at Berkeley. It's the first salamander fossil ever to be found encased in amber; it's from a never-before-seen and now extinct species; and it confirms that salamanders once lived in the Caribbean, a place they are not found today.
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The crime scene paints a grim picture for the poor salamander, which was just a baby. It got into a skirmish of some kind and had a leg bitten off, and then it somehow became stuck for eternity in a resin deposit.
The scientists were stunned by their find.
"There are very few salamander fossils of any type, and no one has ever found a salamander preserved in amber," said George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus in the OSU College of Science, in a press release. "And finding it in Dominican amber was especially unexpected, because today no salamanders, even living ones, have ever been found in that region."
The researchers, who have just published their findings about the new salamander in the journal Paleodiversity, have named the creature Palaeoplethodon hispaniolae.
The family in which the salamander belonged, Plethodontidae, is common in North America, especially the Appalachian Mountains. But the newly discovered salamander did not have distinctive back- or front-leg toes (see artist's conception above). Instead, it had a kind of webbing that might have made it a not terribly expert climber, when compared to some species today, the scientists said. As a result, they say, the salamander may have lived in smaller trees or on tropical flowering plants.
The team found its all-star specimen in an amber mine in a mountainous region between Puerto Plata and Santiago.
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Questions yet to be answered, the researchers say, include why the salamanders disappeared and how they came to be on the island in the first place.
"They may have been killed by some climatic event, or were vulnerable to some type of predator," said Poinar, of the animals' disappearance.
As for their presence on the island, the scientist say the salamanders may trace back 40-60 million years ago, to when today's Greater Antilles were still joined to North and South America. Perhaps they simply stayed with the islands as they drifted. Or they may have crossed a land bridge at periods of low sea or even drifted to the islands on debris such as logs.
This is the first-ever discovery of a salamander preserved in amber, from an unlikely spot -- the Caribbean, where all salamanders are now extinct.
Sept. 15, 2011 --
A stunning array of prehistoric feathers, including dinosaur protofeathers, has been discovered in Late Cretaceous amber from Canada. The 78 to 79-million-year-old amber preserved the feathers in vivid detail, including some of their diverse colors. The collection, published in this week's Science, is among the first to reveal all major evolutionary stages of feather development in non-avian dinosaurs and birds. In this slide, an isolated barb from a vaned feather is visible trapped within a tangled mass of spider's web.
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"These specimens were most likely blown into the tacky resin, or were plucked from an animal as it brushed against resin on a tree trunk," lead author Ryan McKellar told Discovery News. "The fact that we have found some specimens trapped within spider webs in the amber would suggest that wind played an important role in bringing the feathers into contact with the resin," added McKellar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The feather filaments shown here are similar to protofeathers that have been associated with some dinosaur skeletons.
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McKellar and his team made the discovery after screening over 4,000 amber samples from Grassy Lake, Alberta. The amber, collected by the Leuck family, is now housed at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. The researchers ruled out that the inclusions were mammal hairs, plant or fungal remains based on their structure. Some dinosaur fossils retain skin impressions, so the scientists could match dinosaur protofeathers (hair-like projections) to some of the objects within the amber. Here, a feather is visible near a plant bug. The high number of coils in the this feather suggests it could have come from a water-diving bird.
The translucent tree resin provides a window into feather evolution, from non-avian dinosaurs to birds. "Part of what makes this particular set of feathers interesting is that we find the very simple Stage I and II feathers alongside advanced feathers that are very similar to those of modern birds, Stages IV and V," McKellar said. The researchers aren't yet certain why feathers first evolved, but the density of the protofeathers suggests that they helped dinosaurs with regulating temperature. Dinosaurs such as Troodon or Deinonychus may have produced the feathers. The cork-screw shaped structures in this slide are the tightly coiled bases of feather barbules.
As feathers continued to change, they developed tufts, barbs, branching features, little hooks, and more. Some of the most advanced feathers in the collection are comparable to those of modern grebes. They appear to help diving, indicating that some of the prehistoric birds were divers. McKellar suspects the marine birds might have been Hesperornithiformes, a specialized flightless diving bird from the Dinosaur Era. This is a white belly feather of a modern grebe, showing coiled bases comparable to those seen in the Cretaceous specimen.
Some of the feathers appear transparent now, but would have been white in life. A range of colors for the feathers is evident, though, with grays, reds and various shades of brown preserved. This, and prior research, suggests that non-avian dinosaurs and prehistoric birds could be quite flashy. The pigment within this fossilized feather suggests it would have originally been medium- or dark-brown in color.
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In an accompanying "Perspectives" article in Science, Mark Norell points out that the dinosaur Sinosauropteryx is thought to have had a reddish banded tail, while Anchiornis likely possessed a striking black body, banded wings and a reddish head comb. Norell, chair and curator of the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology, told Discovery News that the newly discovered feathers are "very exciting." Here, a feather barb within Late Cretaceous Canadian amber shows some indication of original coloration.
Some dino aficionados have wondered if DNA could be extracted from the feathers. "Almost anything is possible," Norell said, quickly adding that most DNA-extraction studies have been conducted on much younger amber, dating to around 20-30 million years ago, and even those led to questionable results. "Maybe bits and pieces could be identified, but not the whole genome." Shown are 16 clumped feathers in Late Cretaceous amber.
People with amber objects, such as jewelry, also probably don't have prehistoric feather inclusions, since such items are extremely rare and dealers isolate the best pieces. Nevertheless, McKellar said, "There is some hope that you could have small feather fragments that have been overlooked." An unpigmented feather and a mite in Canadian Late Cretaceous amber.