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sciencesoup:

Prehistoric Colours

We typically think of the fossil record as a black and white view into the prehistoric world, but some fossils show that dinosaurs, fish, early insects and even ancient plants were very colourful creatures indeed. A team led by Yale University paleogeologist Maria McNamara have analysed spectacularly coloured fossils of beetles that lived 15–47 million years ago—and these fossils have preserved not only shape and structure, but also the colours of the beetles’ exoskeletons. Many other fossils use pigment traces to generate colour, which bounces light off a chemical, but the beetles’ colours are far richer because they are generated through a phenomenon called structural colouration, in which light bounces off nanometre-scale surface geometries. By analysing the fossils under an electron microscope, McNamara and her team found that the colours had shifted slightly during the fossilisation process—specifically, they had been redshifted , so a blue beetle would have become slightly greener, and a yellow one would have become slightly oranger. After correcting for this shift, the team can envision the beetles’ flashy metallic exoskeletons just as they looked when they were alive. These colours also give clues about how the beetle lived, allowing the researchers to determined whether they served visual functions like thermo-regulation or communication.

(Image Credit: Wired)

So basically prehistory looked like the 80s.

sciencesoup:

Bone-Eating Worms

Lurking deep in the world’s oceans, eyeless, mouthless, stomachless worms feast on the bones of whales and all manner of dead sea creatures. Boneworms, of the genus Osedax, are about 3 centimetres long and were first discovered on a whale carcass in 2002. The worms begin as microscopic larvae that drift through the dark water, using chemical cues to locate carcasses on the sea floor. They settle on the bones and begin to grow: one end grows into feathery appendages that extract oxygen from the water, and the other end grows into root-like appendages that dig a cavity in the bone and insert themselves like tiny blades of grass. Acid-secreting enzymes are abundant in these roots, and the acid breaks down the bone and allows the worm to digest proteins and lipids. However, only females develop to adult size: males are only 1 millimetre and attach themselves to the females for the sole purpose of fertilising her eggs—then the new larvae drift off to find more bones, and the lifecycle begins again. Researchers have determined that there are more than 15 different types of boneworm within the Osedax genus, and have hypothesised that the worms may have evolved 45 million years ago, about the same time as the first open-ocean whales, or 130 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs when immense reptiles roamed the seas.

(Image Credit)

It’s amazing that we can know so much about such a small creature that was discovered so recently.