Andrea Porto Carreiro Campos, Rodrigo Tomazetto de Carvalho, Lorian Cobra Straker, Leonardo Tavares Salgado & Marcos Farina (2019)
Combined microscopy and spectroscopy techniques to characterize a fossilized feather with minimal damage to the specimen.
Micron (advance online publication)
Highlights
The ultrastructure characterization of fossil feathers can be performed using conventional Scanning Electron Microscopy combined with High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy.
Even with the fossilization process, it is possible to detect with relative conventional techniques the presence of molecules form the feather matrix, like melanin and Keratin.
The use of combined analytical microscopy methods can contribute significantly to the study of fossils generating precise results with minimum damage to the original sample.
Abstract
The study of fossil feathers has been revitalized in the last few decades and has contributed significantly to paleontological studies of dinosaurs and birds. Specific morphological and physicochemical characteristics of the microscale structures of feathers and the protein keratin are key targets when preserved during the fossilization process. Keratin is a fibrous protein that composes some hard tissues such as hair, nails and feathers. It is part of the so called intermediate filaments inside keratinocyte cells and is rich in sulfur containing amino acid cysteine. To date, different microscopy and analytical methods have been used for the analysis and detailed characterization and classification of feathers. However, in this work we showed that analytical optical and electron microscopies can be quick and precise methods with minimal effects on the sample during analysis. This association of different approaches on the same sample results in correlative data albeit in different length scales. Intracellular bodies called melanosomes originally present in melanocyte cells were identified with Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), and had well-defined orientation and a mean aspect ratio comparable to melanosomes extant in dark feathers. The detection of sulphur in melanosomes via Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy both in SEM and TEM shows that, along the fossilization process, sulphur from the degraded keratin matrix could have been trapped inside the melanosomes. Chemical groups that make up keratin and melanin in the fossil sample were detected via FT-IR Spectroscopy and Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy (CLSM). The use of combined analytical microscopy techniques can contribute significantly to the study of fossils generating precise results with minimum damage to the original sample.
Ian V. Caldas & Carlos G. Schrago (2019)
Data partitioning and correction for ascertainment bias reduce the uncertainty of placental mammal divergence times inferred from the morphological clock.
Ecology and Evolution (advance online publication)
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Bayesian estimates of divergence times based on the molecular clock yield uncertainty of parameter estimates measured by the width of posterior distributions of node ages. For the relaxed molecular clock, previous works have reported that some of the uncertainty inherent to the variation of rates among lineages may be reduced by partitioning data. Here we test this effect for the purely morphological clock, using placental mammals as a case study. We applied the uncorrelated lognormal relaxed clock to morphological data of 40 extant mammalian taxa and 4,533 characters, taken from the largest published matrix of discrete phenotypic characters. The morphologically derived timescale was compared to divergence times inferred from molecular and combined data. We show that partitioning data into anatomical units significantly reduced the uncertainty of divergence time estimates for morphological data. For the first time, we demonstrate that ascertainment bias has an impact on the precision of morphological clock estimates. While analyses including molecular data suggested most divergences between placental orders occurred near the KâPg boundary, the partitioned morphological clock recovered older interordinal splits and some younger intraordinal ones, including significantly later dates for the radiation of bats and rodents, which accord to the shortâfuse hypothesis.
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Laiming Zhang, William W. Hay, Chengshan Wang & Xue Gu (2019)
The evolution of latitudinal temperature gradients from the latest Cretaceous through the Present.
Earth-Science Reviews (advance online publication)
Latitudinal temperature gradients are a defining characteristic of the climate system. Using thermometric indicators, including Î18O, plant and animal fossils, glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether (GDGT) proxies, and clumped isotope estimates, we document marine and terrestrial temperature gradients for the latest Cretaceous, Late Paleocene-Early Eocene, Early Oligocene, Pliocene, and Recent. The changes in gradients reflect the transition greenhouse to icehouse conditions. The evolution of latitudinal temperature gradients in marine and terrestrial realms are similar but has some distinctive differences. Marine temperatures are generally warmer than those on land. Except for the Late Paleocene-Early Eocene, the marine records show distinct inflection points at ~30 and ~50 latitude indicating the existence of frontal systems in the ocean. Except for the Late Paleocene-Early Eocene, the marine records show an increasingly steeper trend, from latest Cretaceous through Recent, being most pronounced after the early Oligocene greenhouse-icehouse transition. This trend reflects the increasing intensity of high-latitude and polar cooling as the icehouse state developed. During the Late Paleocene-Early Eocene the oceans were characterized by slightly warmer tropics and much warmer higher latitudes than at present. The continents have generally had tropical temperatures like those of today, varying by <5âÂC. Higher latitude temperatures cooled during the latest Cretaceous, became much warmer during the Late Paleocene-Early Eocene, then cooled during the Early Oligocene and have become increasingly colder since then. The results suggest that there is a climate thermostat mechanism, probably related to greenhouse gas concentrations, that ameliorates tropical warming by redistributing warmth to the poles in the greenhouse world. That mechanism broke down as greenhouse gas concentrations declined resulting in the conversion from greenhouse to icehouse conditions.