12,000-year-old swamp brimming with bones reveals the ecosystem of the dodo

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

by Natural History Museum

An 1832 description of a swamp said that that it was so full of extinct animal bones that you only had to stick your hand in the water to retrieve them. Inspired by this a group of international researchers, including the Natural History Museum's Dr. Julian Hume, went in search of it.

Remarkably the team succeeded and in 2015 the swamp was re-discovered near Mare la Chaux in Mauritius. Now, a collaboration between the National Heritage Foundation and landowner Constance la Gaieté Co Ltd. has been set up resulting in the first excavation at the site.

The area has already lived up to its reputation and yielded many bones belonging to extinct Mauritian animals. Incredibly the team have found a huge diversity of species represented in the fossil record and bones at a density of around 600 per cubic metre, much higher than the other known fossil localities on Mauritius.

Dr. Hume says, "This is one of the most exciting fossil excavations I have worked on. We are literally peeling back the history of Mauritius layer by layer. The sheer volume of remains, including extinct giant tortoises, giant skinks and Dodos, a culturally significant bird to Mauritius and global icon of extinction, we have found has been incredible."

Dr. Delphine Angst, a paleontologist specializing in fossil birds from the University of Bristol, added, "This is very exciting because for the first time we have dodo bones that are well-dated and associated through time with other animals and plants."

Continued

Birds of a fibula

August 3, 2016 by Jon Tennant, Plos Blogs

Over the last 20 years, there has grown insurmountable evidence that birds are the direct modern descendants of dinosaurs. Eagles are dinosaurs. Pigeons are dinosaurs, annoyingly. Even penguins are weird, swimming dinosaurs.

The data supporting this comes from a whole range of scientific domains, from the discovery of thousands of feathered dinosaurs in the fossil record to chemical and biological analysis of these fossils at a molecular level. As science progresses in terms of technical capability, what we can glean from the fossil record increases too, and we learn more about the link between dinosaurs and birds.

A hugely advancing research field at the moment is in embryonics and genetics. What does this have to do with dinosaurs, you might ask (don't even think about mentioning Jurassic Park..) Well, it's a good point. We don't have any dinosaur DNA, and we have very few fossilised embryos. But wait! If modern birds are dinosaurs, then that means we actually have a lot of dinosaur DNA and their embryos! This means we can start asking a whole range of new questions about the evolution and origins of birds from dinosaurs.

Recently, an international team of researchers took on the task at looking at developmental links between dinosaurs and modern birds. There is an old and quite controversial saying that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny', which means that the growth or development of an individual can be a reflection of the evolution that has occurred along its lineage. Wouldn't it be cool if we could see that in birds and their dinosaur ancestors?

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