Forgotten women of Paleontology: Margarita Toro, Science, Memory, Truth, and Justice

Posted on by under Earth Science

 

On March 24, 1976, Argentina’s armed forces took control of the government. The coup was part of Operation Condor, a coordinated system of political repression between South American dictatorships, with the support of the United States, to eliminate leftist opposition and consolidate authoritarian regimes throughout the region.

Margarita Toro’s forced exile in 1976 was part of a broader pattern of political persecution that targeted Argentina’s scientific community during the last civic-military dictatorship. Long before the 1976 coup, scientists had been vulnerable to ideological purges. In 1957, during the “Liberating Revolution”, paleontologist Noemi Cattoi was forced to resign as Head of the Palaeontology Section at the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences (MACN) for her Peronist affiliation. In 1966, during the Noche de los Bastones Largos (Night of the Long Batons), law enforcement agents violently suppressed professors and students at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, destroying laboratories and libraries in the process.

Margarita Toro in Bolivia. From Alonso, 2021

Margarita Toro was born on October 17, 1947, in Tarija, Bolivia, into a large, modest family. At the age of six, she moved with her family to Salta, Argentina. In the mid-1960s, she enrolled at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Salta, which was then part of the National University of Tucumán. In 1972, the faculty was incorporated into the newly established University of Salta (UNSa), where Margarita earned her degree in Geology in 1974.

Her strong social commitment led her to become an activist with the Popular Left Front (FIP), led by Abelardo Ramos. In the early morning of March 24, 1976, a military patrol stormed her house and took her, blindfolded and gagged, to prison along with other detainees. She was released shortly afterward on the condition that she leave the country. She first traveled to Tarija and then to La Paz, Bolivia. That same year, she joined the Bolivian Geological Survey, where she worked until 1984.

After returning to her professional career, her early research focused on Lower Ordovician fossils, particularly those well preserved on San Bernardo Hill, near the city of Salta. She later pursued a career in teaching, delivering lectures in palaeontology and stratigraphy. Among her most notable contributions are being the first to document eurypterids in Bolivia, discovering the oldest Cooksonia record in South America, and pioneering the study of conodonts to establish paleogeographic correlations with Australia.

Plaque in honor of the victims of state terrorism from UNSa. Image Credit; UNSa

In 2001, on the anniversary of the bloody military coup, Margarita wrote a letter about her experience: “On the way, I reflected on my life; I was just a young professional, a college professor, who had graduated about two years earlier. I don’t know if I had fulfilled my father’s hopes—among other things, that I would be a role model for my seven younger siblings—and that’s what troubled me the most… I didn’t have time.”

After a lifetime dedicated to training geologists and paleontologists, she was named Professor Emerita of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in 2003. Margarita died in La Paz on January 12, 2015.

The civil-military dictatorship lasted from 1976 to 1983. CONICET, the nation’s primary scientific institution, became a site of systematic persecution: investigators, grant recipients, and administrative personnel were removed on ideological grounds. Across the country, thousands were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, while many others were forced into exile.
It is estimated that approximately 30,000 people disappeared. As we commemorate 50 years since the last coup d’état in Argentina, we continue to demand Memory, Truth, and Justice.

References:

Alonso, R. N. 2021. Vida y obra de la paleontóloga Margarita Toro [Life and work of the paleontologist Margarita Toro]. In Guereschi, Alina; Martino, Roberto & Ramos, Victor (Eds.), La Mujer en la Geología (Publicación Especial 14, pp. [133-139]). Asociación Geológica Argentina.

Toro, M. y Pérez, H. 1977. El primer registro de euryptéridos para el Ordovícico de Bolivia. GEOBOL, Informe interno N°. 6a, La Paz

Garaño, S. y Bekerman, F. (Coords.); Lamaisón, M. (Ed.). 2023. El CONICET en dictadura: Efectos del terrorismo de Estado en la ciencia argentina y formas de reparación. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/libros/pm.6684/pm.6684.pd

D’Antonio, D. 2006. Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo y la apertura de un camino de resistencias. Argentina, última dictadura Militar 1976-1983. In Revista de Estudios sobre la Cultura Latinoamericana, No 2, pp. 29-40.

 

 

The tale of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis and body size evolution in alvarezsaurids

Posted on by under Earth Science

Alnashetri cerropoliciensis. Image credit: Gabriel Díaz Yantén

Alvarezsauridae represents a distinctive lineage of small-bodied theropod dinosaurs, mainly known from the Jurassic to Cretaceous period of Asia and South America. Initially interpreted as flightless stem birds, the clade is characterized by a unique suite of skeletal adaptations, including a lightly constructed skull with numerous small teeth confined to the anterior snout, and short but massive forelimbs featuring a hypertrophied first digit (thumb) and reduced lateral digits.

Late Cretaceous alvarezsaurids (Campanian–Maastrichtian, ~70 Ma), such as Mononykus, display a highly derived morphology that includes enlarged orbits—suggestive of enhanced visual capacity. In contrast, earlier-diverging representatives—such as Alnashetri cerropoliciensis (~95 Ma) from the Early Cretaceous of Patagonia—exhibit a markedly different bauplan, characterized by proportionally longer forelimbs and larger teeth.

Anatomy of A. cerropoliciensis based on the new specimen MPCA Pv 377. From Makovicky et al., 2026.

The fragmentary holotype of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis was initially described in 2012. Now, a more complete specimen (MPCA Pv 377), discovered by Dr. Sebastián Apesteguía in 2014 from the Candeleros Formation at the Cerro Policía locality within the La Buitrera Paleontological Area (Río Negro Province, Argentina), provides critical new data on the biogeographic origins and evolutionary pathways of Alvarezsauridae. The skeleton is nearly complete, missing only the skull roof, distal caudal vertebrae, and right-side elements. This new finding also sheds light on the paleoecology of the La Buitrera fauna.

Skeleton prepared for photography. Image credit: Dr. Sebastian Apesteguía.

Alnashetri had a relatively long arm, with a thickened first finger (digit I), which was considerably more robust than the other two, and a keeled claw (instead of a flexor tubercle), indicating a significant change in the musculature of the hand. Histological analyses indicate that the specimen was at least four years old when it died, with a slowed growth rate suggesting that it was nearly adult. Additionally, the presence of medullary bone around the medullary cavity, which is found in many modern female birds and theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex, suggests that the new Alnashetri specimen was female.

With an estimated body length of just seventy centimetres (approximately half of which is the tail) and a mass of roughly two kilograms, Alnashetri was much smaller than contemporary theropods such as Buitreraptor, which was almost two metres long. This significant size difference suggests that the two species had different ecological niches, with Alnashetri probably preying on small vertebrates and insects in the arid Candeleros Formation ecosystem.

Neck and thoracic vertebrae of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis. Image credit: Dr. Sebastián Apesteguía

This new study by an international team of researchers led by Dr. Peter J. Makovicky provides critical insight into the sequence of character acquisition within Alvarezsauridae and reveals that miniaturisation evolved independently, potentially in response to distinct ecological pressures. Furthermore, recent research on the evolution of early alvarezsaurids suggests that the origin of the clade predates the final breakup of Pangaea. This is evidenced by the identification of a potential specimen from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of Wyoming as a probable alvarezsaurid, together with Calamosaurus foxi from the Early Cretaceous of England.

 

References:

Makovicky, P.J., Mitchell, J.S., Meso, J.G. et al. Argentine fossil rewrites evolutionary history of a baffling dinosaur clade. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10194-3

Makovicky, P. J., Apesteguía, S. & Gianechini, F. A. A new coelurosaurian theropod from the La Buitrera fossil locality of Río Negro, Argentina. Fieldiana Life Earth Sci. 2012, 90–98 (2012).

Makovicky, P. J., Apesteguía, S. & Agnolín, F. L. The earliest dromaeosaurid theropod from South America. Nature 437, 1007–1011 (2005).

Meet Spinosaurus mirabilis

Posted on by under Earth Science
Spinosaurus mirabilis illustration

Illustration of Spinosaurus mirabilis. Image credit: Dani Navarro

The Spinosauridae comprises a distinctive clade of large, tetanuran theropods known from the Berriasian to the Cenomanian periods in Africa, South America, Europe, and Asia. This group is characterized by an elongated, narrow skull, robust forelimbs equipped with a hooked thumb claw, and elongate neural spines that likely supported a dorsal sail. The ecology of spinosaurids has been a subject of debate since the initial discovery of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus in 1911. Although Stromer’s original description of Spinosaurus was published in 1915, a more complete and detailed picture of its anatomy, evolutionary relationships, and biogeography began to emerge only in recent decades, with the discovery of additional fossils recovered from nearshore deposits along the African margin of the Tethys Sea. Spinosaurus mirabilis, a new specimen from an inland basin in the central Sahara, represents the first new species of spinosaurid to be identified in over a century.

Sheathed bony head crests in extinct and living dinosaurs. Image credit: Todd Green.

Spinosaurus mirabilis is characterised by a prominent, scimitar-shaped bony crest which extends well above the top of its skull. The holotype (MNBH JEN1), a fragmentary skull including the right premaxilla, both maxillae, fused nasal crest, part of the right dentary, and five maxillary teeth, was found in Sirig Taghat (meaning “no water, no goat” in Tamasheq), Jenguebi area, Agadez Region, Republic of the Niger, Farak Formation. Several specimens of S. mirabilis were found in fluvial sediments with rebbachisaurid and titanosaurian remains. One specimen (MNBH JEN4) preserves a nearly complete tibia, enabling a direct comparison of the size and relative proportions of S. mirabilis with specimens of S. aegyptiacus. Based on this comparison, the individual is estimated to have reached 8 meters in length at the time of its death.

The skull of S. mirabilis resembles that of S. aegyptiacus, but the snout end has a slightly different shape. The tip of the premaxilla arches more prominently, and the expanded distal end of the dentary is subquadrate rather than oval. Posteriorly, the snout becomes shallower toward the orbit, with dorsal and ventral margins that remain parallel rather than diverging.Surface details suggest that the bony crest in S. mirabilis was enveloped and likely extended by a keratinous sheath with its own vascular supply, based on extant avian analogs such as Casuarius.

Surface detail and internal vascular canals of the crest in Spinosaurus mirabilis, From Sereno et al., 2026

The study led by Paul Sereno identified three distinct phases in the evolution of spinosaurids. The first, which originated in the Jurassic period, produced an elongated skull designed for catching fish that soon diverged into separate species. During the second phase, in the Early Cretaceous, spinosaurids became dominant predators around the margins of the Tethys Sea. The final phase began just before the Late Cretaceous. The Atlantic opened, and spinosaurines reached maximum size as shallow-water ambush specialists confined to northern Africa and South America.

 

References:

Sereno, P. C., Vidal, D., Myhrvold, N. P., Johnson-Ransom, E., Ciudad Real, M., Baumgart, S. L., Sánchez Fontela, N., Green, T. L., Saitta, E. T., Adamou, B., Bop, L. L., Keillor, T. M., Fitzgerald, E. C., Dutheil, D. B., Laroche, R. A. S., Demers-Potvin, A. V., Simarro, Á., Gascó-Lluna, F., Lázaro, A., & Gamonal, A. (2026). Scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation. Science, 391(6787). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adx5486

Fabbri, M., Navalón, G., Benson, R.B.J. et al. Subaqueous foraging among carnivorous dinosaurs. Nature (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04528-0

HONE, D. W. E. and HOLTZ, T. R. (2017), A Century of Spinosaurs – A Review and Revision of the Spinosauridae with Comments on Their Ecology. Acta Geologica Sinica, 91: 1120–1132. doi: 10.1111/1755-6724.13328

‌

Top fossil discoveries of 2025

Posted on by under Earth Science

Shri rapax sp. nov. From Moutrille et al., 2025.

Fascism is spreading. We face an unprecedented era of scienticide, genocide, and normalized cruelty. Yet, as Milan Kundera reminds us, “Man’s struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1979). Against this dystopian backdrop, researchers worldwide are leading a vital resistance: the fight to preserve and advance knowledge.

Here is my very biased list of the most outstanding discoveries of 2025.

  • Duonychus tsogtbaatari.

Therizinosauria is a group of unusual theropod dinosaurs known from Cretaceous deposits in Asia and North America. The clade exhibits unique features, including lanceolate teeth, a rostral rhamphotheca, and a broad, opisthopubic pelvis. Some of those characteristics are associated with a shift in dietary preferences and an adaptation to herbivory. But the most striking feature, as exemplified by the large-bodied Therizinosaurus from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia, is the presence of tridactyl (three-fingered) hands with three large claw-like unguals.

Duonychus tsogtbaatari,  a new specimen from the Upper Cretaceous Bayanshiree Formation (Cenomanian to Santonian) of southeastern Mongolia, sheds light on the evolution of digit reduction in avetheropods and the implications for feeding behavior associated with large claws in therizinosaurs.

  • Baminornis zhenghensis.
extended data figure 1

Holotype of Baminornis zhenghensis. From Chen, et al.,, 2025.

Baminornis zhenghensis, from the Late Jurassic Zhenghe Fauna, is an early Jurassic bird. The new specimen exhibits a unique combination of characters, including a fused, dorsally-curving pygostyle longer than metacarpal II, a boomerang-shaped furcula with an interclavicular angle of 65°, a semilunate carpal lacking contact with metacarpal III, and an ischium lacking both the obturator and posterior processes.

The presence of derived features in Baminornis, the first Jurassic short-tailed avialan, indicates that the avialan lineage diverged significantly earlier than previously thought.

  • Khankhuuluu mongoliensis.

Khankhuuluu mongoliensis. Image credit: : Julius Csotonyi/University of Calgary

Eutyrannosauria, the superfamily of carnivorous dinosaurs that includes the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex, dominated the Asian and North American terrestrial faunas during the latest Cretaceous.

Khankhuuluu mongoliensis roamed Mongolia around 86 million years ago. It had an estimated total body length of 4 meters (13 feet) and a weight of around 750 kilograms (1,650 pounds). The features that characterise Khankhuuluu mongoliensis include a shallow, rugose midline ridge on the nasal bone that extends along most of the vaulted region, and a small pneumatic recess at the anterior end of the lacrimal bone. The new species differs from Alectrosaurus in that metatarsal III lacks the hyperextension of the plantar distal articular surface.

  • Shri rapax.

Right manus of Shri rapax in distoventral view. Scale bar = 20 mm. From Moutrille et al., 2025.

Dromaeosauridae is a clade of highly specialised small- to mid-sized theropod dinosaurs closely related to birds. Their fossils have been found in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, and Antarctica. The group is characterized by the presence of long, three-fingered forelimbs that ended in sharp, trenchant claws, and a tail stiffened by the elongated prezygapophyses.

Shri rapax is the second species of the genus Shri (named after Palden Lhamo, a Buddhist deity, the principal protectress of Tibet). The specific name refers to the enlarged falciform pollex ungual found in this species, along with its associated raptorial behaviour. The holotype, a nearly complete skeleton, was originally preserved with a skull that has subsequently been lost.

  • Joaquinraptor casali.

Joaquinraptor casali. Image credit: Andrew McAfee – Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The Cretaceous beds of Patagonia contain the most comprehensive record of non-avian theropods from the Southern Hemisphere. This includes Megaraptora, a clade of medium-sized, highly pneumatized theropods characterized by elongated skulls and formidable manual claws on digits I and II.

Joaquinraptor casali is a large-bodied megaraptorid from the Upper Cretaceous (Coniacian–Maastrichtian) Lago Colhué Huapi Formation of south-central Chubut Province, in central Patagonia, Argentina. The holotype (UNPSJB-PV 1112) is a partially articulated skeleton that includes a disarticulated partial skull (right maxilla, skull roof and braincase, probable right postorbital and quadrate, both dentaries, and in situ and isolated teeth), complete or nearly complete axial and appendicular skeletons, and numerous fragments.

  • Zavacephale rinpoche.

Z. rinpoche. From Chinzorig et al., 2025.

Pachycephalosaurians, with their distinctive domed heads, are an enigmatic group of small ornithischian dinosaurs. Most pachycephalosaurid remains are known from the Late Cretaceous of North America, Asia, and possibly Europe. Notable species include Pachycephalosaurus, Stegoceras, and Stygimoloch.

Zavacephale rinpoche from the Lower Cretaceous Khuren Dukh Formation of Mongolia, is the oldest and most complete pachycephalosaurian skeleton ever found. The genus name is derived from the Tibetan word ‘zava’, meaning ‘root’ or ‘origin’, and the Latin word ‘cephal’, meaning ‘head’. The specific name, ‘rinpoche’ (meaning ‘precious one’ in Tibetan), refers to the domed condition of the skull.

  • The Nanotyrannus debate is settled.

Snout of Nanotyrannus. Image credit: N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences

Tyrannosaurus rex is the most iconic dinosaur of all time. However, despite its status, the fossil record of T. rex is controversial, particularly about the taxonomic identity of specimens hypothesised to be juveniles. In recent decades, a major and heated debate has centered around Nanotyrannus lancensis, a  small tyrannosauroid discovered in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana. Most paleontologists rejected Nanotyrannus as a valid genus and considered all specimens were juvenile or subadult Tyrannosaurus rex. But a recent study by L. Zanno and J. Napoli shed light on the controversy.
The team found an exceptionally well-preserved and somatically mature tyrannosaur skeleton from the Hell Creek Formation that shares autapomorphies with the holotype specimen of Nanotyrannus lancensis.

  • Huayracursor jaguensis 

Selected bones of Huayracursor jaguensis holotype. From Hechenleitner et al., 2025.

The Triassic deposits of Argentina, renowned for their diverse tetrapod assemblage, offer crucial insights into dinosaur origins by preserving some of the oldest dinosaurs ever discovered. These skeletal records of early dinosaurs document a time when they were not numerically abundant, and they were still of modest body size (Eoraptor had a slender body with an estimated weight of about 10 kilograms).

Huayracursor jaguensis was a primitive sauropodomorph, an early member of the highly successful herbivorous lineage that later produced long-necked giants like Argentinosaurus and Patagotitan. Phylogenetic analysis places it within the Bagualasauria group. The holotype (CRILAR-Pv 151) is an articulated partial skeleton composed of cranial and postcranial material. The genus name combines the Quechuan word “huayra,” meaning “wind,” with the Latin “cursor,” meaning “runner.” The species name is derived from the village of Jagüé in La Rioja, which lies 40 kilometers from the discovery site at Quebrada Santo Domingo.

 

References:

Kobayashi et al., (2025), Didactyl therizinosaur with a preserved keratinous claw from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia, iScience  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.112141

Chen, R., Wang, M., Dong, L. et al. Earliest short-tailed bird from the Late Jurassic of China. Nature 638, 441–448 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08410-z 

Voris, J. T., Zelenitsky, D. K., Kobayashi, Y., Modesto, S. P., Therrien, F., Tsutsumi, H., Chinzorig, T., & Tsogtbaatar, K. (2025). A new Mongolian tyrannosauroid and the evolution of Eutyrannosauria. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08964-6

Moutrille, L., Cau, A., Chinzorig, T., Escuillié, F., Tsogtbaatar, K., Ganzorig, B., Mallet, C., & Godefroit, P. (2025). A new bird-like dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Mongolia with extremely robust hands supports niche partitioning among velociraptorines. Historical Biology, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2025.2530148

Ibiricu, L.M., Lamanna, M.C., Alvarez, B.N. et al. Latest Cretaceous megaraptorid theropod dinosaur sheds light on megaraptoran evolution and palaeobiology. Nat Commun 16, 8298 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63793-5

Chinzorig, T., Takasaki, R., Yoshida, J., Tucker, R. T., Buyantegsh, B., Mainbayar, B., Tsogtbaatar, K., & Zanno, L. E. (2025). A domed pachycephalosaur from the early Cretaceous of Mongolia. Nature, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09213-6

Zanno, L.E., Napoli, J.G. Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus coexisted at the close of the Cretaceous. Nature 648, 357–367 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09801-6

Hechenleitner, E.M., Martinelli, A.G., Rocher, S. et al. A long-necked early dinosaur from a newly discovered Upper Triassic basin in the Andes. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09634-3

Christmas edition: Xmas love letters, Mary Stopes, and the discovery of the oldest flowers.

Posted on by under Earth Science

London, December 24th.

“…I am glad that you are saving all your kisses for me when I come. By that time I shall be starving for kisses – so terribly hungry that you must kiss me very gently at first, or I will die – as a too hungry man must be fed very little at first.”

The fragment of this passionate letter was attributed to Mertyl Meredith, a young geologist from the U.K. The letter is part of ‘Love-Letters of a Japanese’, published in 1911. The book follows the affair between Mertyl and Kenjiro Watanabe, a fellow geologist whom she had met previously in Munich. The exchange of letters between the two took place over three consecutive Christmases. But while the letters are real, the true identity of the infatuated young “Mertyl” is revealed in the book’s foreword, written by none other than Marie Stopes herself.
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on October 15, 1880. Her father, Henry Stopes, a brewer, architect and amateur paleontologist and archeologist, amassed the largest private collection of fossils and ancient stone tools in Britain. Her mother, Charlotte Carmichael, wrote British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege. The book, published in 1894, was a great influence on the early twentieth-century British women’s suffrage movement. They were both members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Marie Stopes (From Wikimedia Commons)

She enrolled at University College London, where she studied botany and geology. She graduated with honors after only two years and received the Gold Medal in Botany. Shortly after, she went to study at the University of Munich and received a Ph.D. in palaeobotany in 1904. During that time, she met Professor Kenjiro Fujii, a distinguished botanist at the Imperial University of Tokyo, the real “Kenjiro Watanabe”.
In 1907, she convinced the Royal Society to fund an excursion to Japan, where Marie discovered some of the earliest fossilised angiosperms and some fossil insects from the Cretaceous period. These ancient specimens were embedded in the coal faces of Hokkaido’s deepest mines.
The affair between Marie and Kenjiro did not end well. The passionate relationship directly inspired Stopes’s Love-Letters of a Japanese, a work she drafted prior to the groundbreaking release of Married Love.
In 1957, Marie Stopes was diagnosed with cancer. She died on October 2, 1958.

References:

FALCON-LANG, H.J. & MILLER, R.F. 2007. Marie Stopes and the Fern Ledges of Saint John, New Brunswick. In Burek, C.V. (ed.) The Role of Women in the History of Geology. Special

Falcon-Lang, H.J., 2008. Marie Stopes: Passionate about Palaeobotany. Geology Today, 24: 132-136.

Mortlake, G. N. (Ed.). (1911). Love Letters of a Japanese. Stanley Paul & Company.

On brains and the evolution of flight.

Posted on by under Earth Science

Water colour by the Reverend G. E. Howman (From Martill 2015)

Lagerpetids were small to medium-sized (less than 1 m long), cursorial, non-volant reptiles that lived during the Middle to Upper Triassic periods in Argentina, Brazil, Madagascar, and North America. The recognition of lagerpetids as the sister taxon to pterosaurs provides clues to study the origin of Pterosauria, its specialized body plan, and its flying abilities.

Pterosaurs were the first flying vertebrates. The oldest-known pterosaurs appear in the fossil record about 220 million years ago. Their reign extended to every continent, and they achieved high levels of morphological and taxonomic diversity during the Mesozoic. Most Triassic pterosaurs are small but already had a highly specialized body plan linked to their ability to fly: a shoulder girdle with a strongly posteroventrally enlarged coracoid braced with the sternum and laterally facing glenoid fossa; a forelimb with a pteroid bone and hypertrophied fourth digit supporting a membranous wing; and a pelvic girdle with a prepubic bone and strongly developed preacetabular process.

The evolution of the pterosaur brain. From Bronzati et al., 2025.

Pterosaur brains have been thought to resemble those of birds. Both share some features like a shortened olfactory tract, enlarged and repositioned optic lobes, and expanded cerebral and floccular lobes—some of which are thought to be convergent adaptations for flight. Unfortunately, it has been challenging to trace the evolution of the pterosaur brain due to the scarcity of fossils with well-preserved, three-dimensional cranial material. New cranial endocast data from the terrestrial lagerpetid Ixalerpeton polesinensis sheds light on the ancestral brain condition of pterosauromorphs prior to the evolution of flight.

A 3D printed model of the C. hanseni skull discovered in Utah.

The cranial endocast of Ixalerpeton reveals modestly enlarged and laterally displaced optic lobes but lacks the enlarged floccular lobe of the cerebellum. The flocculus plays a crucial role in coordinating eye movements and tends to be enlarged in taxa that rely on rapid movements of the head and body. This condition in Pterosaurs has been hypothesized to be important for information processing related to flight. Using the endocranial morphology of Caelestiventus hanseni, a Late Triassic pterosaur from North America, the team led by M. Bronzati found  that cerebral hemisphere expansion and reduction of the olfactory tract already occurred among the oldest pterosaurs, 60 million years before similar changes occurred in non-avian paravians, prior to the origin of birds.

Birds have undergone remarkable encephalization, in which brain size has increased without corresponding changes in body size. Brain size has been correlated with major evolutionary innovations like cognition, flight, environmental adaptability, and enhanced sensory capabilities. The new data indicate that the later brain expansion in both birds and pterosaurs was likely more about enhancing cognition than about flying itself.

 

References:

Bronzati, M., Watanabe, A., Benson, R. B. J., Müller, R. T., Witmer, L. M., Ezcurra, M. D., Montefeltro, F. C., Baczko, von, Bhullar, B.-A. S., Desojo, J. B., Knoll, F., Langer, M. C., Lautenschlager, S., Stocker, M. R., Turner, A. H., Ingmar Werneburg, Nesbitt, S. J., Fabbri, M., Bronzati, M., & Watanabe, A. (2025). Neuroanatomical convergence between pterosaurs and non-avian paravians in the evolution of flight. Current Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.10.086

Ezcurra, M.D., Nesbitt, S.J., Bronzati, M. et al. Enigmatic dinosaur precursors bridge the gap to the origin of Pterosauria. Nature (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3011-4

Brooks B. Britt et al. Caelestiventus hanseni gen. et sp. nov. extends the desert-dwelling pterosaur record back 65 million years, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-018-0627-y

Forgotten women of paleontology: Estella Bergere Leopold.

Posted on by under Earth Science

Estella Leopold in 1938. Image credit: The Aldo Leopold Foundation

Paleoecological records suggest that the transition to agriculture marked a pivotal turning point in the environmental history of our planet. Tropical forests have been reduced by agricultural expansion associated with growing human populations, which has triggered soil loss due to deforestation and erosion. These changes eventually sparked a movement for responsibility, pioneered by the foundational works of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which sowed the seeds of modern environmental activism.
One of the most powerful statements in Leopold’s work is about the relationship between nature and community: ‘When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanised man, nor for us to reap the aesthetic benefits that it is capable of contributing to culture under science.”
These words had a profound effect on his youngest daughter, Estella.

Estella Leopold planting pine trees on the family farm in 1938. Image credit: University of Wisconsin Digital Collections.

Estella Bergere Leopold was born on January 8, 1927, in Madison, Wisconsin. She earned a degree in botany from the University of Wisconsin in 1948, followed by a master’s degree from the University of California in 1950, and then completed her doctoral studies at Yale in 1955 under the guidance of Paul Sears and Edward Deevey Jr., two pioneering palynologists in the United States.  Soon after her graduation, she became one of the few women who joined the US Geological Survey in Lakewood, Colorado, where she worked studying pollen taken from deep cores in the Rocky Mountains, Alaska, China, Eniwetok, and other atolls in the South Pacific.
Estella used pollen and other palynomorphs to study how plants responded to mountain building, volcanism, and climate change over the past 65 million years. Her research, on Miocene forests that grew on coral atolls, supported Darwin’s hypothesis that the corals had colonized subsiding volcanoes.

 

Estella B. Leopold (2012). Image credit: Aldo Leopold Foundation.

After working in the Florissant Valley, Colorado, she began leading field trips with ecologist Bettie Willard to show the extraordinary fossils that had been preserved there for 34 million years in volcanic mud and ash. To protect the area, she and her colleagues formed Defenders of Florissant in 1964. The group won one of the first explicitly environmental lawsuits against the US government. Like her father, she was an advocate for a “land ethic,” and that same year she was awarded the Conservationist-of-the-Year Award by the Colorado Wildlife Federation.

In 1974, she was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Two years later, Estelle Leopold became director of the Quaternary Research Center (QRC) at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2010, she received the Cosmos International Award in recognition of her professional career. Her acceptance speech emphasized that restoration is one way to interact with ecosystems, but not the only one, and that one of these ways involves carefully observing how they function.

She died on February 25, 2024.

References:

Leopold, Estella B.. Keeping the land alive and well : The 2010 International Cosmos Prize commemorative lecture. SANSAI : An Environmental Journal for the Global Community. 2011, 5: 5-18. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/143611

Dunwiddie, P., Strömberg, C. A. E., & Whitlock, C. (2024). Estella Bergere Leopold: Paleobotanist and conservationist extraordinaire. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(25). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2408242121

Leopold, A. (1949). A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford, 158(209), 178.

 

Halloween special XIII: Poe, Cuvier, and memento mori

Posted on by under Earth Science
Master of the macabre

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” This quote from the poem The Raven illustrates the profound and dramatic lyricism of one of the most influential authors in world literature: Edgar Allan Poe. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Writer, poet, and literary critic, Poe was the epitome of the artist tormented by his own demons. He was the master of terror and invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His dark landscapes, gothic mansions, and ancestral families steeped in madness function as powerful metaphors for the inevitable decay of everything around us. This is something he expresses in the introduction to his prose poem “Eureka”, where he articulates his ideas about the origin of the cosmos: “—In the Original Unity of the First Thing resides the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.” This universal sequence of birth and death is the ultimate memento mori: a reminder that extinction is the final destiny of all species, and even the Universe.

The Conchologist’s First Book by Edgar Allan Poe (1839)

One of his most successful publications, and certainly the most unusual, was “The Conchologist’s First Book“ (a more affordable and popular edition of Thomas Wyatt’s “Manual of Conchology“, published by Harper and Brothers, who used Poe’s name to avoid copyright issues). Although Poe only wrote the preface and introduction, he incorporated a new classification system based on the work of the renowned paleontologist and naturalist Georges Cuvier.
Poe was fluent in French and translated Cuvier’s scientific classification. Furthermore, he learned the scientific method and incorporated it into the creation of his famous detective, Auguste Dupin. His sharp and meticulous mind was the literary model for Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

llustration by Daniel Vierge of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 1870, From Wikimedia Commons

Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (1769-1832) is considered the founding father of paleontology and comparative anatomy. At the beginning of the 19th century, Cuvier published “Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe” (1812) where he introduced a revolutionary theory: catastrophism, which postulated that the history of life on Earth was marked by extinction events.

In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dupin uses a description by Cuvier of an orangutan, detailing the animal’s strength, ferocity, and ability to mimic other behaviors, to solve the murders of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Camille. Dupin’s analytical method echoes Cuvier’s theory, according to which all parts of a being are correlated. Later, in his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe himself draws a striking parallel between the scientific method and the writing process, using his most famous poem, “The Raven,” to illustrate his writing principles.

References:

Poe, Edgar Allan, ed. The First Conchologist’s Book; or, A System of Testaceous Malacology. Based on Thomas Wyatt’s Manual of Conchology. 1839.

Poe, E. A. (1841). The Murders in the Rue Morgue. https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/the_murders_in_the_rue_morgue.pdf

Baldellou, M. M. (2013). FORETELLING DARWINISM, REVISING RACE: POE’S SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE IN “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE”. REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 66, 127-135.

Once upon a time in New Mexico

Posted on by under Earth Science

The San Juan Basin, New Mexico. Photo credit: Daniel J. Peppe

Asteroids, as Neil deGrasse Tyson explains, are ancient remnants from our early solar system, wandering through space, potential bearers of life’s ingredients or agents of apocalyptic death.
In 1980, in a landmark lecture, U.S. physicist Luis Alvarez declared, “Lucifer’s Hammer killed the dinosaurs,” presenting the geochemical evidence he and his son had uncovered for a colossal asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous period. The following year, the Mexican oil company Pemex identified the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatán Peninsula as the site of this massive asteroid impact. The impact released an estimated energy equivalent of 100 teratonnes of TNT. Three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth disappeared, including non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles, ammonites, and planktonic foraminifera.

Paleogeography of North America during the late Campanian Stage of the Late Cretaceous (∼75 Ma). From Sampson et al., 2010

In recent decades, there has been a heated debate over whether the dinosaurs were in decline or whether they continued to thrive until they were abruptly wiped out by the asteroid impact, the main pulse of the K/Pg extinction. This controversy is worsened by a geographical bias, as most data comes from the Northern Hemisphere. The Naashoibito Member (San Juan Basin, New Mexico) provides a crucial piece of this puzzle, capturing a snapshot of the continent’s final dinosaur communities and their diversity at the Cretaceous boundary.

The emplacement of the Western Interior Seaway (about 99.5 Mya) split the North American continent into two separate landmasses: Laramidia (a long, narrow landmass from present-day Alaska to Mexico) and Appalachia (the eastern part of the continent). During the Campanian (83.6–72.1 million years ago), Laramidia had a high regional diversity, with distinct northern and southern faunas. In the Maastrichtian (72.1–66.0 Ma), those ecosystems became more uniform. The “homogenization” of those ecosystems could have pushed non-avian dinosaurs into a prolonged decline, setting the stage for their eventual extinction. A new study provides a new look at the last-surviving dinosaur-dominated ecosystems by presenting a revised geochronology of the Naashoibito Member (contemporaneous with the Hell Creek faunas) to test whether there were changes in faunal provinciality during the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.

Latest Cretaceous–early Paleogene terrestrial basins in western North America and their faunas. From Flynn et al., 2025

Ecological analysis shows that the Naashoibito dinosaurs were highly diverse, spanning many species, body sizes, and diets. This diversity matches that of earlier periods and suggests that dinosaurs continued to thrive in New Mexico until the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. The new study further indicates that temperature was a key factor of dinosaur distribution, with sauropods dominating warmer environments (southwestern North America), and hadrosaurines dominating the cooler temperate regions (modern Great Plains). These results emphasise the importance of abiotic factors in promoting heterogeneity in dinosaur-dominated ecosystems prior to the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.

References:

Flynn, A. G., Brusatte, S. L., Chiarenza, A. A., García-Girón, J., Davis, A. J., Fenley, C. W., Leslie, C. E., Secord, R., Shelley, S., Weil, A., Heizler, M. T., Williamson, T. E., & Peppe, D. J. (2025). Late-surviving New Mexican dinosaurs illuminate high end-Cretaceous diversity and provinciality. Science, 390(6771), 400–404. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adw3282

‌Dean, C. D., Chiarenza, A. A., Doser, J. W., Farnsworth, A., Jones, L. A., Lyster, S. J., Outhwaite, C. L., Valdes, P. J., Butler, R. J., & Mannion, P. D. (2025). The structure of the end-Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record in North America. Current Biology: CB. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.025

Sampson SD, Loewen MA, Farke AA, Roberts EM, Forster CA, Smith JA, et al. (2010) New Horned Dinosaurs from Utah Provide Evidence for Intracontinental Dinosaur Endemism. PLoS ONE 5(9): e12292. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0012292

Meet Huayracursor jaguensis, an early sauropodomorph from Argentina.

Posted on by under Earth Science

Huayracursor jaguensis. Image credit: Jorge Blanco

Dinosaurs likely originated in the Middle Triassic, but the earliest unambiguous dinosaur specimens are from the middle-late Carnian age, primarily in the Southern Hemisphere, with potential evidence in North America. This gap highlights a significant uncertainty in the geological and temporal context of early dinosaur evolution. The Triassic deposits of Argentina, renowned for their diverse tetrapod assemblage, offer crucial insights into dinosaur origins by preserving some of the oldest dinosaurs ever discovered. These skeletal records of early dinosaurs document a time when they were not numerically abundant, and they were still of modest body size (Eoraptor had a slender body with an estimated weight of about 10 kilograms)

Located along the Pacific margin of Southwest Gondwana, the narrow, NW-SE trending Triassic basins of western Argentina include the Santo Domingo Formation in La Rioja. Fossil assemblages from this formation, comparable to the Hyperodapedon–Exaeretodon–Herrerasaurus biozone, constrain its deposition to the late Carnian to Norian. This timeframe coincides with the Ischigualasto and Los Colorados formations. A newly recovered specimen from the base of the Santo Domingo Formation (Northern Precordillera Basin; Upper Triassic) provides the earliest evidence that body mass increase and neck elongation occurred synchronously in Sauropodomorpha, indicating that these pivotal traits emerged at the dawn of the dinosaur lineage.

Selected bones of Huayracursor jaguensis holotype. From Hechenleitner et al., 2025.

Huayracursor jaguensis was a primitive sauropodomorph, an early member of the highly successful herbivorous lineage that later produced long-necked giants like Argentinosaurus and Patagotitan. Phylogenetic analysis places it within the Bagualasauria group. The holotype (CRILAR-Pv 151) is an articulated partial skeleton composed of cranial and postcranial material. The genus name combines the Quechuan word “huayra,” meaning “wind,” with the Latin “cursor,” meaning “runner.” The species name is derived from the village of Jagüé in La Rioja, which lies 40 kilometers from the discovery site at Quebrada Santo Domingo.

The earliest known sauropodomorphs were small, bipedal animals, weighing around 10 kg with relatively short necks. Body mass estimates indicate that H. jaguensis weighed around 18.0 kg (~40 lb), surpassing the body mass predicted for othercontemporaneous sauropodomorphs (e.g., Buriolestes, Pampadromaeus, Saturnalia, Mbiresaurus, and Chromogisaurus). Furthermore, Huayracursor preserves a nearly complete cervical series, revealing a long neck compared to other contemporary specimens. This combination of features suggests that the acquisition of larger body size and neck elongation did not occur as separate, sequential events, but were already linked by the first appearances of dinosaurs in the Late Carnian.

 

References:

Hechenleitner, E.M., Martinelli, A.G., Rocher, S. et al. A long-necked early dinosaur from a newly discovered Upper Triassic basin in the Andes. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09634-3

Desojo, J.B., Fiorelli, L.E., Ezcurra, M.D. et al. The Late Triassic Ischigualasto Formation at Cerro Las Lajas (La Rioja, Argentina): fossil tetrapods, high-resolution chronostratigraphy, and faunal correlations. Sci Rep 10, 12782 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-67854-1