125 million-year-old fossil of giant venomous scorpion that lived alongside dinosaurs discovered in China
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
A known treasure trove of Early Cretaceous fossils has turned up a never-before-seen species of scorpion that lived around 125 million years ago.
The venomous scorpion was larger than many ancient — and modern — scorpion species. Researchers believe it would've been a key species in the food chain, gobbling up spiders, lizards and even small mammals that lived in its ancient ecosystem.
It is just the fourth terrestrial scorpion fossil to be found in China and the first Mesozoic-era scorpion fossil found in the country, researchers reported Jan. 24 in the journal Science Bulletin.
Most scorpions from the Mesozoic era (252 million to 66 million years ago) are preserved in amber. Fossilized scorpions are much rarer because these arachnids live under rocks and branches, where they're less likely to be trapped in sediment and fossilize, said study co-author Diying Huang, a researcher at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China.
The scientists found the fossil in the Yixian Formation, a hotbed of Early Cretaceous fossils in northeastern China. The team named the new species Jeholia longchengi. "Jeholia" refers to the Jehol Biota, the ecosystem of northeast China in the Early Cretaceous about 133 million to 120 million years ago, and "longchengi" refers to the Longcheng district of Chaoyang, China, where the fossil currently resides.
J. longchengi was roughly 4 inches (10 centimeters) long, making it something of a giant of its time. "Other Mesozoic scorpions are much smaller, most of them less than half [the size] of the new species," Huang told Live Science in an email.
Related: What if a giant asteroid had not wiped out the dinosaurs?
J. longchengi has a pentagonal body and rounded spiracles, which are the openings in its body that allowed it to breathe. These characteristics are similar to those found in some families of modern-day scorpions that inhabit other parts of Asia. But unlike those families, J. longchengi has fairly long legs and slim pedipalps, or pincers, that lack spurs along a segment called the patella.
RELATED STORIES
—World's tiniest cat was a palm-sized tiddler that lived in China 300,000 years ago
—Scientists discover rare venom-spraying scorpion in Colombia
—Enormous skull of 200-million-year-old giant dinosaur discovered in China
Fossils of many other animals — including dinosaurs, birds, mammals and insects — have been found in the Jehol Biota, suggesting a complex food web. Larger mammals and dinosaurs may have preyed upon J. longchengi, while the scorpion's diet may have included insects, spiders, frogs and even small lizards or mammals, the researchers wrote in the study.
The scorpion's mouthparts aren't preserved in the fossil, though, so it's hard to know for sure what they ate. Discoveries of additional fossil specimens could clear up the species' role in the ecosystem and its place in the food web, the researchers wrote.
"If placed in today's environment, it might become a natural predator of many small animals, and could even hunt the young of small vertebrates," Huang told China's state run Xinhua news agency.
The fossil is being stored at the Fossil Valley Museum in Chaoyang, China.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
Viking's silver treasure, an ancient Korean crown and three more discoveries
The summaries below were drafted with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists in our News division. All linked stories were reported, written and edited by McClatchy journalists. Throughout history, cultures have left behind a trail of breadcrumbs for archaeologists to follow. New sites and artifacts are found all the time, revealing forgotten secrets of the past. Here are some of the latest discoveries: 1,400-year-old crown — still decorated with insect wings — found in South Korea In Gyeongju, South Korea, archaeologists uncovered a 1,400-year-old crown adorned with jewel beetle wings from the Silla Kingdom. This ornate crown, found in a burial site, is a first-of-its-kind discovery in the region. The crown's intricate decorations, including gold beads and jade pieces, highlight the craftsmanship of the era. | Published May 22 | Read More | Hobbyist studying old map notices odd mark that leads to medieval find in Sweden In Derome, Sweden, a hobby archaeologist discovered the remains of a medieval monastery using an 18th-century map and modern technology. The site, likely dating back to the late 12th century, revealed thick walls and pillar foundations. This find sheds light on the region's monastic history and the Order of Cistercians. | Published May 22 | Read More | Students locate ancient Roman army camp beyond empire's northern border. See it In the Netherlands, university students discovered a rare ancient Roman military camp beyond the empire's northern border. Using computer models and LiDAR surveys, they confirmed the presence of Roman walls and a moat near Hoog Buurlo. | Published May 28 | Read More | Viking-era silver treasures found on farm in Sweden and restored. See them shine In Täby, Sweden, archaeologists unearthed a collection of Viking-era silver treasures, including arm rings, necklaces and coin pendants. The site, occupied for 500 years, also revealed structures from the Viking Age. The silver collection is notable for its size and preservation. | Published May 30 | Read More | Ancient waste shows surprising 'luxury' food item was not only for Roman elite In Pollentia, Mallorca, researchers found evidence of thrushes, a luxury food item, being sold by street vendors in ancient Rome. The discovery in a cesspit challenges the belief that thrushes were exclusive to elite banquets. This find suggests that thrushes were a common part of the urban diet in Roman times. | Published June 3 | Read More | McClatchy News continues to follow the discovery of intriguing archaeological discoveries from around the globe. Check back to see the latest finds.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Why does NASA's Perseverance rover keep taking pictures of this maze on Mars?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. If you've spent any time perusing the carousel of raw images from NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, you might have stumbled across an odd subject: a tiny, intricate maze etched into a small plate, photographed over and over again. Why is the Perseverance rover so obsessed with this little labyrinth? It turns out the maze is a calibration target — one of 10 for Perseverance's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals instrument, otherwise known for its fun acronym, SHERLOC. This Sherlock Holmes–inspired tool is designed to detect organic compounds and other minerals on Mars that could indicate signs of ancient microbial life. To do that accurately, the system must be carefully calibrated, and that's where the maze comes in. Located on the rover's seven-foot (2.1-meter) robotic arm, SHERLOC uses spectroscopic techniques — specifically Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy — to analyze Martian rocks. In order to ensure accurate measurements, it must routinely calibrate its tools using a set of reference materials with specific properties. These are mounted on a plate attached to the front of the rover's body: the SHERLOC Calibration Target. "The calibration targets serve multiple purposes, which primarily include refining the SHERLOC wavelength calibration, calibrating the SHERLOC laser scanner mirror, and monitoring the focus and state of health of the laser," Kyle Uckert, deputy principal investigator for SHERLOC at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tells The target is arranged in two rows, each populated with small patches of carefully selected materials. The top row includes three critical calibration materials: aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN) on sapphire discs; the UV-scattering material Diffusil; and Martian meteorite SaU008, whose mineral makeup is already known and helps align wavelength calibration with real Martian geology. This is also where you'll find the maze. Why a maze? "SHERLOC is all about solving puzzles, and what better puzzle than a maze!" says Uckert. The purpose of the maze target is to calibrate the positioning of the laser scanner mirror and characterize the laser's focus, which requires a target with sharply contrasting spectral responses. The maze serves this purpose well." The maze is made of chrome-plated lines just 200 microns thick (about twice the width of a human hair) printed onto silica glass. "There are no repeating patterns and the spectrum of the chrome plating is distinct from the underlying silica glass," says Uckert. That makes it possible to measure the laser's focus and accuracy with extreme precision. If you look closely at the maze, you'll also notice a Sherlock Holmes portrait right at the center. While it's a cheeky nod to the instrument's name, it serves a practical function. "SHERLOC spectral maps can resolve the 200 micron thick chrome plated lines and the 50 micron thick silhouette of Sherlock Holmes at the center of the maze," Uckert notes. Like the portrait, the bottom half of the SHERLOC Calibration Target also serves a dual purpose: spectral instrument calibration and spacesuit material testing. It contains five samples of materials used in modern spacesuits, including some materials you might be familiar with, like Teflon, Gore-Tex, and Kevlar. And don't miss the "fun" target in this row — there's a geocache marker backing a polycarbonate target, and it does indeed have a tie-in to Sherlock Holmes. RELATED STORIES: — Perseverance rover's Mars samples show traces of ancient water, but NASA needs them on Earth to seek signs of life — Perseverance Mars rover finds 'one-of-a-kind treasure' on Red Planet's Silver Mountain — Perseverance Mars rover becomes 1st spacecraft to spot auroras from the surface of another world These materials are actively being tested under Mars conditions to determine how they hold up over time in situ, which is crucial for planning human exploration of the Red Planet. "Note that we use all of these materials to fine-tune SHERLOC," adds Uckert. "As a bonus, the spacesuit materials support unique science that will help keep future astronauts safe." Now, if all these Sherlock Holmes–related Easter eggs on the SHERLOC Calibration Target aren't enough for you, there's one final link. SHERLOC has a color camera as part of its instrumentation suite that sometimes images the target, and it's called the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering. Yes, SHERLOC's sidekick is called WATSON.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Beyond de-extinction and dire wolves, gene editing can help today's endangered species
Have you been hearing about the dire wolf lately? Maybe you saw a massive white wolf on the cover of Time magazine or a photo of 'Game of Thrones' author George R.R. Martin holding a puppy named after a character from his books. The dire wolf, a large, wolflike species that went extinct about 12,000 years ago, has been in the news after biotech company Colossal claimed to have resurrected it using cloning and gene-editing technologies. Colossal calls itself a 'de-extinction' company. The very concept of de-extinction is a lightning rod for criticism. There are broad accusations of playing God or messing with nature, as well as more focused objections that contemporary de-extinction tools create poor imitations rather than truly resurrected species. While the biological and philosophical debates are interesting, the legal ramifications for endangered species conservation are of paramount importance. As a legal scholar with a Ph.D. in wildlife genetics, my work focuses on how we legally define the term 'endangered species.' The use of biotechnology for conservation, whether for de-extinction or genetic augmentation of existing species, promises solutions to otherwise intractable problems. But it needs to work in harmony with both the letter and purpose of the laws governing biodiversity conservation. What did Colossal actually do? Scientists extracted and sequenced DNA from Ice Age-era bones to understand the genetic makeup of the dire wolf. They were able to piece together around 90% of a complete dire wolf genome. While the gray wolf and the dire wolf are separated by a few million years of evolution, they share over 99.5% of their genomes. The scientists scanned the recovered dire wolf sequences for specific genes that they believed were responsible for the physical and ecological differences between dire wolves and other species of canids, including genes related to body size and coat color. CRISPR gene-editing technology allows scientists to make specific changes in the DNA of an organism. The Colossal team used CRISPR to make 20 changes in 14 different genes in a modern gray wolf cell before implanting the embryo into a surrogate mother. While the technology on display is marvelous, what should we call the resulting animals? Some commentators argue that the animals are just modified gray wolves. They point out that it would take far more than 20 edits to bridge the gap left by millions of years of evolution. For instance, that 0.5% of the genome that doesn't match in the two species represents over 12 million base pair differences. More philosophically, perhaps, other skeptics argue that a species is more than a collection of genes devoid of environmental, ecological or evolutionary context. Colossal, on the other hand, maintains that it is in the 'functional de-extinction' game. The company acknowledges it isn't making a perfect dire wolf copy. Instead it wants to recreate something that looks and acts like the dire wolf of old. It prefers the 'if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck' school of speciation. Disagreements about taxonomy – the science of naming and categorizing living organisms – are as old as the field itself. Biologists are notorious for failing to adopt a single clear definition of 'species,' and there are dozens of competing definitions in the biological literature. Biologists can afford to be flexible and imprecise when the stakes are merely a conversational misunderstanding. Lawyers and policymakers, on the other hand, do not have that luxury. In the United States, the Endangered Species Act is the main tool for protecting biodiversity. To be protected by the act, an organism must be a member of an endangered or threatened species. Some of the most contentious ESA issues are definitional, such as whether the listed species is a valid 'species' and whether individual organisms, especially hybrids, are members of the listed species. Colossal's functional species concept is anathema to the Endangered Species Act. It shrinks the value of a species down to the way it looks or the way it functions. When passing the act, however, Congress made clear that species were to be valued for their 'aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people.' In my view, the myopic focus on function seems to miss the point. Despite its insistence otherwise, Colossal's definitional sleight of hand has opened the door to arguments that people should reduce conservation funding or protections for currently imperiled species. Why spend the money to protect a critter and its habitat when, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, you can just 'pick your favorite species and call up Colossal'? Biotechnology can provide real conservation benefits for today's endangered species. I suggest gene editing's real value is not in recreating facsimiles of long-extinct species like dire wolves, but instead using it to recover ones in trouble now. Projects, by both Colossal and other groups, are underway around the world to help endangered species develop disease resistance or evolve to tolerate a warmer world. Other projects use gene editing to reintroduce genetic variation into populations where genetic diversity has been lost. For example, Colossal has also announced that it has cloned a red wolf. Unlike the dire wolf, the red wolf is not extinct, though it came extremely close. After decades of conservation efforts, there are about a dozen red wolves in the wild in the reintroduced population in eastern North Carolina, as well as a few hundred red wolves in captivity. The entire population of red wolves, both wild and captive, descends from merely 14 founders of the captive breeding program. This limited heritage means the species has lost a significant amount of the genetic diversity that would help it continue to evolve and adapt. In order to reintroduce some of that missing genetic diversity, you'd need to find genetic material from red wolves outside the managed population. Right now that would require stored tissue samples from animals that lived before the captive breeding program was established or rediscovering a 'lost' population in the wild. Recently, researchers discovered that coyotes along the Texas Gulf Coast possess a sizable percentage of red wolf-derived DNA in their genomes. Hybridization between coyotes and red wolves is both a threat to red wolves and a natural part of their evolutionary history, complicating management. The red wolf genes found within these coyotes do present a possible source of genetic material that biotechnology could harness to help the captive breeding population if the legal hurdles can be managed. This coyote population was Colossal's source for its cloned 'ghost' red wolf. Even this announcement is marred by definitional confusion. Due to its hybrid nature, the animal Colossal cloned is likely not legally considered a red wolf at all. Under the Endangered Species Act, hybrid organisms are typically not protected. So by cloning one of these animals, Colossal likely sidestepped the need for ESA permits. It will almost certainly run into resistance if it attempts to breed these 'ghost wolves' into the current red wolf captive breeding program that has spent decades trying to minimize hybridization. How much to value genetic 'purity' versus genetic diversity in managed species still proves an extraordinarily difficult question, even without the legal uncertainty. Biotechnology could never solve every conservation problem – especially habitat destruction. The ability to make 'functional' copies of a species certainly does not lessen the urgency to respond to biodiversity loss, nor does it reduce human beings' moral culpability. But to adequately respond to the ever-worsening biodiversity crisis, conservationists will need all available tools. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Alex Erwin, Florida International University Read more: If it looks like a dire wolf, is it a dire wolf? How to define a species is a scientific and philosophical question How redefining just one word could strip the Endangered Species Act's ability to protect vital habitat One green sea turtle can contain the equivalent of 10 ping pong balls in plastic Alex Erwin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
