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While usually it's just the bony and hard bits that fossilize, some amazing fossils preserve much, much more than that. In this episode we delve into the many weird ways that the fossil record can preserve things like skin, organs, blood and more… and the weird things that scientists have done when they found them.
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Discussion of dead animals, eating very old meat, blood and proteins and gushy body bits, placentas and dead animal babies.
Images From the Episode (Kinda)
Images From the Episode (Kinda)
References
References
Yashina, S., Gubin, S., Maksimovich, S., Yashina, A., Gakhova, E., & Gilichinsky, D. (2012). Regeneration of whole fertile plants from 30,000-y-old fruit tissue buried in Siberian permafrost. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(10), 4008-4013.
Legendre, M., Bartoli, J., Shmakova, L., Jeudy, S., Labadie, K., Adrait, A., ... & Claverie, J. M. (2014). Thirty-thousand-year-old distant relative of giant icosahedral DNA viruses with a pandoravirus morphology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(11), 4274-4279.
Carpenter, Kenneth. "How to make a fossil: Part 2—Dinosaur mummies and other soft tissue." The Journal of Paleontological Science 7 (2007): 1-23.
Franzen, J. L. (1985). Exceptional preservation of Eocene vertebrates in the lake deposit of Grube Messel (West Germany). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B, Biological Sciences, 311(1148), 181-186.
Gaudin, T. J., Emry, R. J., & Morris, J. (2016). Skeletal anatomy of the North American pangolin Patriomanis americana (Mammalia, Pholidota) from the latest Eocene of Wyoming (USA). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press.
Greenwalt, D. E., Goreva, Y. S., Siljeström, S. M., Rose, T., & Harbach, R. E. (2013). Hemoglobin-derived porphyrins preserved in a Middle Eocene blood-engorged mosquito. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(46), 18496-18500.
Lindahl, T. (1993). Instability and decay of the primary structure of DNA. nature, 362(6422), 709-715.
Franzen, J. L., Aurich, C., & Habersetzer, J. (2015). Description of a well preserved fetus of the European Eocene Equoid Eurohippus messelensis. PloS one, 10(10), e0137985.
Franzen, J. L., Gingerich, P. D., Habersetzer, J., Hurum, J. H., Von Koenigswald, W., & Smith, B. H. (2009). Complete primate skeleton from the middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: morphology and paleobiology. PLoS one, 4(5), e5723.
https://greatplainsdinosaurs.org/leonardo/
Tweet, J. S., Chin, K., Braman, D. R., & Murphy, N. L. (2008). Probable gut contents within a specimen of Brachylophosaurus canadensis (Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous Judith River Formation of Montana. Palaios, 23(9), 624-635.
Murphy, N. L., Trexler, D., & Thompson, M. (2007). “Leonardo,” a mummified Brachylophosaurus (Ornithischia: Hadrosauridae) from the Judith River Formation of Montana. Horns and Beaks, 117-134.
Drumheller, S. K., Boyd, C. A., Barnes, B. M., & Householder, M. L. (2022). Biostratinomic alterations of an Edmontosaurus “mummy” reveal a pathway for soft tissue preservation without invoking “exceptional conditions”. Plos one, 17(10), e0275240.
https://blog.statemuseum.nd.gov/blog/dakota-dinomummy
Schweitzer, M. H., Suo, Z., Avci, R., Asara, J. M., Allen, M. A., Arce, F. T., & Horner, J. R. (2007). Analyses of soft tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex suggest the presence of protein. science, 316(5822), 277-280.
Schweitzer, M. H., Wittmeyer, J. L., & Horner, J. R. (2007). Soft tissue and cellular preservation in vertebrate skeletal elements from the Cretaceous to the present. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 274(1607), 183-197.
Guthrie, R. D. (2013). Frozen fauna of the mammoth steppe: the story of Blue Babe. University of Chicago Press.
https://www.uaf.edu/news/archives/timeline/chapter3.html
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