The word fossil can evoke the bones of the creature itself: tall T-Rex, small trilobites, medium-sized giant sloths. But life can be immortalized in another, more sinister way: in the traces that an organism leaves during its life. Some archaeological excavations are semi-poetic. Dinosaur footprints or burrows carved by ancient worms raise the question: who left them? Other archaeological excavations are less poetic but more mysterious. The existence of a small round lump or a small bone lump raises not one but two questions: who left it and where did it come from? In other words: pipe or vomit?
All fossils require some decomposition, but everything that animals ejected or threw up millions of years ago can be a real mystery. The first type, called coprolite, is more common and often looks exactly what you’d expect: brown lumps. But just like modern benches are a wonderful thing, old-fashioned benches can take many forms. Some curly brown fossils that may look like pipes are also called criminals Salah. (The Wilkes Formation in southwest Washington is a hoard of false ruins, Inorganically formed As mud and mud filled the hollow wood shavings.)
Less common than coprolite regurgitation or petrified vomit. “It’s rare to find direct evidence of who ate whom, or who vomited whom, in the fossil record,” said Brian Eng, paleontologist and filmmaker. Although the soft barns of ancient herbivores had less chance of geological immortality, the predatory bulls likely contained at least some bones, according to John Foster, curator of the Utah State Field House Museum of Natural History. .
Foster and colleagues describe the new hard fossil in a research paper recently published in the journal. palio. The regurgitalite just described is very small, about the length of a tree trunk, but it contains the scattered remains of at least two frogs and a salamander.
When Foster’s team first dug the rock, they didn’t think much about it. They worked in the famous Morrison Formation, Utah, a Late Jurassic site that contained hordes of dinosaur bones including sauropods. Diplodocus, whose phallus of the cross cannot withstand the ravages of time. But Foster and his colleagues focused on a little-known Morrison spot, which many plant fossils have given him the nickname. “electric board. There is still a lot to be found in this lineup, and some will be cold, “said Eng.
The researchers returned the sample to the museum, where it lay for a year amidst various puzzles – “things we couldn’t determine what,” Foster said. Some of these puzzles require two or three microscopic cycles to become clear. For example, one of the Salad Bar puzzles turned out to be a fossil water fleasThe wing veins initially looked like paper veins.
Using a microscope, Foster realized that what he saw were not plants at all, but piles of amphibian bones, some of which were only three millimeters long. And the bones did not come from a single tragically disassembled amphibian, but from loose piles of various amphibians. The frogs were very small, an inch or two at the most. “We knew we had at least two frogs,” Foster said. “We found at least one salamander bone.”
But then the real question comes to the champion. Foster paused, “to see if the thing threw up or passed out, basically.”
There are some visual cues. “Most of the coprolites you find are basically little ovals or little tubes or something,” Foster said. “They keep a kind of three-dimensional character.” But the bone mixture is flat, devoid of coprolithic features, and the surrounding rock has many lamellae, sedimentary deposits that likely accumulate around the small mound every year. But to be sure, the researchers had to do a geochemical analysis. An X-ray fluorescence scan of the sample revealed that the sample did not contain elevated levels of phosphorus, which generally indicates coprolite. The only increase in phosphorus was found in the bones, indicating that the phosphorus was not removed from the fossils during the process of metamorphosis into rock.
The sample contains several grains of a fuzzy gray mass, which does not contain phosphorus. Foster hopes to examine the fossil with a more precise machine at the University of Utah, allowing him to focus on a specific area. “He will be able to give us a good indication of an unknown substance,” Foster said.
But if he throws up the fossil, who throws up? Currently, the identity of the author has been lost over time. The researchers’ best guess was the fish, likely similar to modern puffins, due to the scales they found around the site. Other predators are also possible, such as turtles and semi-aquatic mammals, Foster said, but have not been found anywhere near the site. Anything larger, like a prehistoric alligator, wouldn’t bother a lemon-sized frog. “Pubs give us a window into what is happening in the ecosystem,” says Eng.
Engh, an ancient artist tasked with illustrating what reggaeton looks like in real life, has challenges ahead. He said that at first he was just going to show him how to eat fish. But then you will ask yourself all the questions about why this fish is eaten? And it won’t even show what the fish ate. ”For a preemptive answer to this question, Eng tried another diagram of a fish being bitten by a crocodile and jumping to defense, a way to distract a predator. crocodiles in this corner of the Morrison River, this version was also demolished.
The last illustration was inspired by mouth Poster: Bowfin fish approaching the forgetful frog from below, ready to be chewed. “I realized that I still wanted to flaunt the luxury, so I added another puffin in the background,” says Eng. When Engh’s wife, an evolutionary biologist who studies fish, reports that lungfish chew by wrapping everything they eat in a ball of slime and emptying it completely, Engh adds a sticky layer of mucus to the frog vomiting of her.
The bones inside the shell were not very fragmented, suggesting they may have only been partially digested by the predator. It is possible that predators took down the frog it swallowed or after digesting the frog’s flesh in an attempt to clean the frog’s bones, Foster said. Mucus bubbles, he added, would help the bones stick together and hold them together, perhaps isolating the bone from scavengers or microbes.
Foster was amazed that the fragile pile of fine, mostly hollow, bones had ever been preserved. But his favorite part of the fossils is the way he captures the interactions of modern-looking animals that lived 150 million years ago. “It kind of helps explain how not everything in the dinosaur age was really weird and weird,” Foster said. “Some of them are very familiar to us.” If we’re sitting by this Jurassic pond, says Foster, we’ve probably heard a chorus of frogs and perhaps even the distinctive sound of a carnivore throwing a frog that is no longer dancing.
–
