New species of pseudo-horses living 37 million years ago
Researchers at the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country describe two palaeotheriidae mammals that lived in the subtropical landscape of Alava
2021-07-06
(Press-News.org) Although hypomorph mammals (or equids) are currently represented by only one genus ('Equus') and just a handful of species of horses, donkeys and zebras, they were more diverse during the Eocene epoch (between 56 and 33.9 million years ago). One of the most widespread groups in Europe, which was an archipelago at that time, were the palaeotheriidae, named after the genus 'Palaeotherium', described in 1804 from fossils originating in the quarries of Montmartre (Paris) by the famous French naturalist George Cuvier.
The international Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology has recently published a paper on a study led by Leire Perales-Gogenola describing two new species of palaeotheriidae mammals that inhabited the subtropical landscape of Zambrana (Álava) 37 million years ago. Together with their collaborators from the UPV/EHU's Vertebrate Palaeontology research group, they described the new species 'Leptolophus cuestai' and 'Leptolophus franzeni', naming them in memory of the palaeontologists Miguel Ángel Cuesta from Palencia, and Jens Lorenz Franzen from Bremen, specialists in mammal fauna of the Eocene epoch in Europe.
Palaeotheriidae (or pseudo-horses) were represented across the European archipelago by more than half a dozen genera, more than half of which were endemic to the Iberian island, and became extinct during the climatic-biological crisis of the Eocene-Oligocene transition, also known as Stehlin's 'Grande Coupure'. Palaeotheriidae were mammals similar in terms of body shape to today's horses, but smaller in size. "Can one imagine animals similar to horses with three toes, the size of a fox terrier, a Great Dane and a donkey living in a subtropical landscape in Alava? Many of these pseudo-horses have been described at the Zambrana site," said one of the team members Dr Ainara Badiola. "Examples of them are the 'Pachynolophus zambranensis' and 'Iberolophus arabensis' species, which were first specified in this palaeontological enclave".
The two new species not only expand the fossil record and the biodiversity of palaeotheriidae fauna, but also display dental features atypical for equids of the Eocene. "Their molars have a very high crown and are covered with a thick layer of cementum. This type of dentition, also present in other endemic Iberian palaeotheriidae, could be indicative of a difference in environmental conditions between the Iberian and Central European areas, with more arid conditions or less dense or closed forests and the presence of more open areas in Iberia," explained Perales-Gogenola.
At the end of the Eocene in Europe, forests of an intertropical type gradually disappeared, giving way to plant communities of a more temperate type with more open areas. Modern horses or equids appeared in Europe later on during the Miocene (23-5.3 Ma). Their dentition, with very high crowns, is adapted for eating vegetation with a high grit content (grasses). The new species 'Leptolophus cuestai' from the Upper Eocene site at Zambrana (Álava) also displays molars with atypically high crowns, similar to those of some of the earliest equids in Europe.
In addition to its palaeobiological interest, the diverse fossil association of mammals from Zambrana, which comprises primates, rodents, marsupials, carnivores, artiodactyla and perissodactyla, provides new information on the climatic and environmental changes that occurred in Europe and in our environment over geological time.
The UPV/EHU's Vertebrate Palaeontology group is currently immersed in the description of more palaeotheriidae material, which could facilitate the description of new genera and species with unusual dental features among the equoid perissodactyla.
INFORMATION:
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-07-06
Big hydropower plants are an important source of clean and cheap electricity for many countries in Southeast Asia. However, dams harm the environment and have dire consequences on local communities. Building more dams would therefore pose major trade-offs between electricity supply and environmental protection.
A team of scientists based in Singapore showed that these two challenges can be decoupled. Their study, titled "Solar energy and regional coordination as a feasible alternative to large hydropower in Southeast Asia", recently published in Nature Communications, showed that there are more sustainable pathways to a clean energy future (refer to figure below).
Building on high resolution mathematical models of the Thai, Laotian, and Cambodian ...
2021-07-06
Researchers from Skoltech and the Mental Health Research Center have found 22 lipids in the blood plasma of people with schizophrenia that were associated with lower symptom improvement over time during treatment. These can help track resistance to medication that affects over a third of patients. The paper was published in the journal Biomolecules.
Studies suggest that up to 34% of people living with schizophrenia can be resistant to two or more antipsychotic medications used to treat the disorder. Individual responses vary greatly, and there are no satisfactory biomarkers of treatment response yet, which can often turn finding the right medication into a painful ...
2021-07-06
TAMPA, Fla. (July 6, 2021) - All it takes is three consecutive nights of sleep loss to cause your mental and physical well-being to greatly deteriorate. A new study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine looked at the consequences of sleeping fewer than six hours for eight consecutive nights - the minimum duration of sleep that experts say is necessary to support optimal health in average adults.
Lead author Soomi Lee, assistant professor in the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida, found the biggest jump in symptoms appeared after just one night of sleep loss. The number of mental and physical problems steadily got worse, peaking on day three. At that point, research shows the human body got relatively used to repeated sleep loss. But that all ...
2021-07-06
Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Daowei Lin, Zhixiao Han, Yanni Fu, Xiaoqiu Zhu, Jin Li, Hui Xu, Jing Wen, Fei Wang and Mingyan Guo from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, China, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China and University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA discuss how interscalene brachial plexus block combined with general anesthesia attenuates stress and inflammatory response in arthroscopic shoulder surgery.
In arthroscopic shoulder surgery, general ...
2021-07-06
Singapore, 7 July 2021 - In 1966, The Beatles cemented the plight of lonely older people in the popular imagination with the iconic 'Eleanor Rigby', a song that turned pop music on its head when it stayed at number one on the British charts for four weeks. Today, the impact of loneliness in old age on life and health expectancy has been categorically quantified for the first time in a study by scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School (Singapore), Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan) and their collaborators, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
"We found that lonely older adults can expect to live a shorter life than their peers who don't perceive themselves as ...
2021-07-06
Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Xiao'en Shi, Xu Zhang, Xinlu Zhang, Haizhen Guo and Sheng Wang from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China discuss the integration of reactive oxygen species generation and prodrug activation for cancer therapy.
The combination of chemotherapeutic drugs and reactive oxygen species (ROS) can improve cancer treatment outcome. Many ROS-generation strategies can specifically consume tumor-inherent oxygen and generate ROS, resulting in amplified ROS level and aggravated hypoxia. Therefore, the ROS generation strategy can integrate with prodrug activation strategy to realize synergetic therapy.
In recent years, stimuli-responsive nanomedicines have ...
2021-07-06
Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars. However, for the first time, a team led by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Arianna di Cintio, has shown using numerical simulations that this is not always the case. The results of the study were recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
Using sophisticated simulations of the whole of the Local Group of galaxies, including the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy and their respective satellite ...
2021-07-06
By analyzing the genomes of 99 species of vinegar flies and evaluating their chemical odor profiles and sexual behaviors, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology show that sex pheromones and the corresponding olfactory channels in the insect brain evolve rapidly and independently. Female flies are able to recognize conspecific males through their specific odor profiles. Interestingly, closely related species show distinct differences in odor profiles, which helps to prevent mating between different species. Males, in turn, chemically mark females during mating so that they become less attractive to other males. The ...
2021-07-06
July 6, 2021 - Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has a major impact on the lives of affected patients and families. But it doesn't necessarily lead to an increased risk of marital instability, as two-thirds of patients with TBI are still married to the same partner 10 years after their injury, reports a study in the July/August issue of the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation (JHTR). The official journal of the Brain Injury Association of America, JHTR is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.
For marriages that do end, divorce most often occurs within the first year after TBI, according to the new research by Flora M. Hammond, MD, of Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, and colleagues. "Our data dispel ...
2021-07-06
The onset of the Indian summer monsoon has been predicted three months ahead for the last 40 years with the highest precision up until today. The result indicates longer seasonal forecasts based on machine learning may be a way to mitigate the consequences of an erratic monsoon system under future global warming. Dr. Takahito Mitsui and Dr. Niklas Boers of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK Potsdam), Germany, published the results in Environmental Research Letters. The work is part of the European TiPES project, Coordinated from The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and PIK Potsdam.
Millions of people as well as natural habitats depend on the ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] New species of pseudo-horses living 37 million years ago
Researchers at the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country describe two palaeotheriidae mammals that lived in the subtropical landscape of Alava