236-million-year-old Triassic fossil reveals earliest known butterfly, moth scales

Paleontologists associated with different institutions in Argentina, along with a scientist from the U.K., have identified specks of scales from lepidopterans—a family of winged insects including several species of butterflies and moths—in samples of dung recovered from an excavation site at Talampaya National Park, located in the Argentina's western La Rioja Province.
Digging at the national park began in 2011, revealing that the area had once served as a communal latrine used by many animals, including large plant-eaters, who returned regularly to urinate and defecate.
Researchers collected dung samples from the Talampaya site and sent them to different institutions for analysis. One of these samples ended up at the Regional Center for Scientific Research and Technology Transfer of La Rioja, where the team behind this new study made the discovery.
Researchers examined the sample using multiple methods and determined it to be around 236 million years old—dating to the middle of the Triassic period and just 16 million years after the end-Permian extinction, which wiped out roughly 90% of Earth's animal species.
Among the contents, paleontologists found tiny scales, each about 200 microns long, which they identified as belonging to a lepidopteran. Previous research has estimated that Lepidoptera first evolved around 241 million years ago. However, until now, the oldest known physical evidence of their existence dated back only to about 201 million years ago.
This left a significant 40 million-year gap between their predicted origin and the earliest fossil record, making it difficult for scientists to confirm when these insects first appeared and how they fit into early ecosystems.
However, the new discovery by the team in Argentina helps fill in a key gap in the evolutionary record of Lepidoptera. It also led to the identification of what may be a previously unknown species, which the researchers have named Ampatiri eloisae.
The researchers noted that, based on the age of the fossil, the newly identified species likely belonged to a subgroup called Glossata—meaning it would have had a proboscis similar to the long, tube-like mouthparts used by modern moths and butterflies to feed on liquids like nectar.
During the Triassic period, forests were made up only of conifers and cycads, as flowering plants had not yet evolved. These nonflowering plants produced sugary droplets to aid pollination—small treats that would have provided an ideal food source for early insects with proboscises.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Q7tP0o9pU5E
It is estimated that the proboscis first appeared between 260 and 244 million years ago, soon after the mass extinction event. This suggests that the distinctive feeding structure of butterflies likely developed not from feeding on flowers, but for accessing these ancient nectar-like secretions.
This key adaptation probably enabled early butterflies and moths to thrive by feeding on sugary pollination drops, ultimately setting the foundation for their future interaction with flowering plants, which wouldn't evolve until nearly 100 million years later.
The study of the discovery has been published in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences

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CNN

an hour ago

• CNN

A hunt for ghostly particles found strange signals coming from Antarctic ice. Scientists are still trying to explain them

Scientists are trying to solve a decade-long mystery by determining the identity of anomalous signals detected from below ice in Antarctica. The strange radio waves emerged during a search for another unusual phenomenon: high-energy cosmic particles known as neutrinos. Arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos, neutrinos are often called 'ghostly' because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, and can go through any kind of matter without changing. Over the past decade, researchers have conducted multiple experiments using vast expanses of water and ice that are designed to search for neutrinos, which could shed light on mysterious cosmic rays, the most highly energetic particles in the universe. One of these projects was NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, experiment, which flew balloons carrying instruments above Antarctica between 2006 and 2016. It was during this hunt that ANITA picked up anomalous radio waves that didn't seem to be neutrinos. The signals came from below the horizon, suggesting they had passed through thousands of miles of rock before reaching the detector. But the radio waves should have been absorbed by the rock. The ANITA team believed these anomalous signals could not be explained by the current understanding of particle physics. Follow-up observations and analyses with other instruments, including one recently conducted by the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, have not been able to find the same signals. The results of the Pierre Auger Collaboration were published in the journal Physical Review Letters in March. The origin of the anomalous signals remains unclear, said study coauthor Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University. 'Our new study indicates that such (signals) have not been seen by an experiment … like the Pierre Auger Observatory,' Wissel said. 'So, it does not indicate that there is new physics, but rather more information to add to the story.' Larger, more sensitive detectors may be able to solve the mystery, or ultimately prove whether the anomalous signals were a fluke, while continuing the search for enigmatic neutrinos and their sources, scientists say. Detecting neutrinos on Earth allows researchers to trace them back to their sources, which scientists believe are primarily cosmic rays that strike our planet's atmosphere. The most highly energetic particles in the universe, cosmic rays are made up mostly of protons or atomic nuclei, and they are unleashed across the universe because whatever produces them is such a powerful particle accelerator that it dwarfs the capabilities of the Large Hadron Collider. Neutrinos could help astronomers better understand cosmic rays and what launches them across the cosmos. But neutrinos are difficult to find because they have almost no mass and can pass through the most extreme environments, like stars and entire galaxies, unchanged. They do, however, interact with water and ice. ANITA was designed to search for the highest energy neutrinos in the universe, at higher energies than have yet been detected, said Justin Vandenbroucke, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The experiment's radio antennae search for a short pulse of radio waves produced when a neutrino collides with an atom in the Antarctic ice, leading to a shower of lower-energy particles, he said. During its flights, ANITA found high-energy fountains of particles coming from the ice, a kind of upside-down shower of cosmic rays. The detector is also sensitive to ultrahigh energy cosmic rays that rain down on Earth and create a radio burst that acts like a flashlight beam of radio waves. When ANITA watches a cosmic ray, the flashlight beam is really a burst of radio waves one-billionth of a second long that can be mapped like a wave to show how it reflects off the ice. Twice in their data from ANITA flights, the experiment's original team spotted signals coming up through the ice at a much sharper angle than ever predicted by any models, making it impossible to trace the signals to their original sources. 'The radio waves that we detected nearly a decade ago were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,' Wissel said. Neutrinos can travel through a lot of matter, but not all the way through the Earth, Vandenbroucke said. 'They are expected to arrive from slightly below the horizon, where there is not much Earth for them to be absorbed,' he wrote in an email. 'The ANITA anomalous events are intriguing because they appear to come from well below the horizon, so the neutrinos would have to travel through much of the Earth. This is not possible according to the Standard Model of particle physics.' The Pierre Auger Collaboration, which includes hundreds of scientists around the world, analyzed more than a decade's worth of data to try to understand the anomalous signals detected by ANITA. The team also used their observatory to try to find the same signals. The Auger Observatory is a hybrid detector that uses two methods to find and study cosmic rays. One method relies on finding high-energy particles as they interact with water in tanks on Earth's surface, and the other tracks potential interactions with ultraviolet light high in our planet's atmosphere. 'The Auger Observatory uses a very different technique to observe ultrahigh energy cosmic ray air showers, using the secondary glow of charged particles as they traverse the atmosphere to determine the direction of the cosmic ray that initiated it,' said Peter Gorham, a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. 'By using computer simulations of what such a shower of particles would look like if it had behaved like the ANITA anomalous events, they are able to generate a kind of template for similar events and then search their data to see if anything like that appears.' Gorham, who was not involved with the new research, designed the ANITA experiment and has conducted other research to understand more about the anomalous signals. While the Auger Observatory was designed to measure downward-going particle showers produced in the atmosphere by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, the team redesigned their data analysis to search for upward-going air showers, Vandenbroucke said. Vandenbroucke did not work on the new study, but he peer-reviewed it prior to publication. 'Auger has an enormous collecting area for such events, larger than ANITA,' he said. 'If the ANITA anomalous events are produced by any particle traveling through the Earth and then producing upward-going showers, then Auger should have detected many of them, and it did not.' A separate follow-up study using the IceCube Experiment, which has sensors embedded deep in the Antarctic ice, also searched for the anomalous signals. 'Because IceCube is very sensitive, if the ANITA anomalous events were neutrinos then we would have detected them,' wrote Vandenbroucke, who served as colead of the IceCube Neutrino Sources working group between 2019 and 2022. 'It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos,' Wissel said. Oddly enough, a different kind of neutrino, called a tau neutrino, is one hypothesis that some scientists have put forth as the cause of the anomalous signals. Tau neutrinos can regenerate. When they decay at high energies, they produce another tau neutrino, as well as a particle called a tau lepton — similar to an electron, but much heavier. But what makes the tau neutrino scenario very unlikely is the steepness of the angle connected to the signal, Wissel said. 'You expect all these tau neutrinos to be very, very close to the horizon, like maybe one to five degrees below the horizon,' Wissel said. 'These are 30 degrees below the horizon. There's just too much material. They really would actually lose quite a bit of energy and not be detectable.' At the end of the day, Gorham and the other scientists have no idea what the origin of the anomalous ANITA events are. So far, no interpretations match up with the signals, which is what keeps drawing scientists back to try to solve the mystery. The answer may be in sight, however. Wissel is also working on a new detector, the Payload for Ultra-High Energy Observations or PUEO, that will fly over Antarctica for a month beginning in December. Larger and 10 times more sensitive than ANITA, PUEO could reveal more information on what is causing the anomalous signals detected by ANITA, Wissel said. 'Right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries,' Wissel said. 'I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should be able to better understand these anomalies which will go a long way to understanding our backgrounds and ultimately detecting neutrinos in the future.' Gorham said that PUEO, an acronym that references the Hawaiian owl, should have the sensitivity to capture many anomalous signals and help scientists find an answer. 'Sometimes you just have to go back to the drawing board and really figure out what these things are,' Wissel said. 'The most likely scenario is that it's some mundane physics that can be explained, but we're sort of knocking on all the doors to try to figure out what those are.'

Yahoo

9 hours ago

• Yahoo

The seven strangest historical discoveries made in 2025

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. No matter how many books and TV documentaries are made appearing to give a definite account of life in ancient civilizations, the ongoing work of historians and archaeologists means that the story of the past is never finished. There are always new discoveries being made – here are seven of the most surprising. A form of ancient sunscreen could have helped Homo sapiens survive a period of intense environmental stress that killed off the Neanderthals, scientists have suggested. The two species existed alongside each other for millennia until about 40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals disappeared. The reason for their demise is not entirely clear, but one factor may have been the shift of the Earth's magnetic poles that occurred around that time. Known as Laschamps excursion, this phenomenon lasted 1,000 years and weakened Earth's magnetic field to about 10% of its current strength, leading to a massive increase in solar radiation. Researchers in Michigan have found evidence that Homo sapiens developed what may have been protective strategies: they took shelter in caves and ramped up their extraction of the pigment ochre, perhaps because they were using it to paint their bodies. Needles and awls unearthed at Stone Age sites also indicate the use of tailored clothes – which would have kept them warmer too, enabling them to travel further for food. But there is little evidence that the Neanderthals adapted in such ways. Solar radiation can damage sight and lead to birth defects and infant deaths – so protection from it would "have conferred significant advantage", said Raven Garvey, who co-authored the study. The eruption of Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago buried Herculaneum and Pompeii under a thick layer of ash, which preserved everything from its residents to the frescoes in their villas. Numerous bodies have been excavated, but one is more unusual than most: that of a young man who was found lying in his bed – and whose brain appeared to have been turned to glass. When this was observed in 2020, such a phenomenon had never been seen before, and scientists were baffled as to how it could have occurred. Now a team have come up with a possible explanation. For glass to have formed, the tissue would have had to have heated very rapidly until it liquefied, then cooled fast enough to prevent crystals forming as it solidified. Analysis of fragments of the man's brain has shown that it was heated to 510C, before fast-cooling. The pyroclastic flows from the volcano did not get that hot; nor would they have allowed for rapid cooling. However, the ash cloud that swept through the town first would have been far hotter. This heat, says the study, could have evaporated the water in the man's brain, causing it to explode into tiny pieces. The cloud would then have rapidly cleared, allowing the fragments to cool and vitrify. We think of gladiators being made to fight tigers, lions or bears as a staple of the Roman circus. But though the Romans wrote about such spectacles and depicted them in frescos and mosaics, there has never been any direct physical evidence for their existence – until now. Archaeologists have analysed wounds on the hip bone of a gladiator who died in England in the 3rd century AD, and concluded that their shape is "consistent" with the bite marks of large cats, with lions being the closest fit. The skeleton was one of dozens unearthed 20 years ago in a cemetery in York. Most belonged to well-built young men, and had been decapitated; their bones bore marks of injuries inflicted by blades; one had been shackled; and DNA tests indicated that they came from all over the Roman empire. All of which led the team to conclude that they were gladiators. The researchers do not think that this gladiator was killed by the lion bite, however, but that he'd been injured already and was dragged off at the point of death – which "must have been absolutely terrifying", said Tim Thompson, one of the study's authors. Given the difficulty of transporting big cats, the find also underlines the importance of York in the Roman world. Archaeologists have been startled to find evidence that humans lived on Malta some 8,500 years ago. The findings, published in Nature, mean that the seafaring abilities of hunter-gatherers must be rethought. Previously, it was assumed that journeys of such length across the Mediterranean only started following the invention of boats with sails. The archaeologists, from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, believe that they arrived in dug-out canoes, having undertaken a journey in open water of at least 100km, some of which (given the limited speed of such vessels) must have been in darkness. The island is so small and isolated, the presumption had been that it could not have sustained a population that wasn't growing its own food. But carbon dating of charcoal, found in hearths outside a cave complex in the north of the island, indicates that hunter-gatherers were there a millennium before farming became widespread. Other evidence at the site shows that these ancient people hunted meat, in the form of deer, birds and seals; they also cooked sea urchins, crab and fish. The Romans came into so much contact with lead – via everything from their paints to their coins, water pipes and drinking vessels – that historians have long speculated that lead poisoning could have hastened the fall of their empire. Now, a study has shown that there were also high levels of lead in the air they breathed – enough, in fact, to have affected brain development. Romans' mining of lead and their smelting of lead ore to obtain silver would have released vast amounts of lead into the atmosphere. To gauge the scale of this, a team in the US analysed residues trapped in ice that formed between 500BC and AD600. Their findings indicate that levels of the neurotoxin in the air increased sharply in around 15BC, and remained high for two centuries. They then used atmospheric models to map the pollutants' spread, and modern health studies to assess its impact. Their results showed that, at its peak, the lead pollution across Europe (believed to be the first widespread industrial pollution) was severe enough to cause a two-to three-point drop in IQ. That might not sound much, but, "when you apply [it] to essentially the entire European population, it's kind of a big deal", said co-author Nathan Chellman. In our "always on" world, there is a feeling that no one is getting enough sleep; and that the time we spend staring at screens is preventing us from sleeping well. Yet according to recent research, we get more – and better – sleep than our ancestors in pre-industrial times are likely to have done. For a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists in Canada analysed data on the sleep patterns of 866 people in 54 sleep studies from around the world – from the residents of big cities to the members of hunter-gatherer tribes. They found that the participants living in industrial societies slept more, clocking up an average of 7.1 hours a night compared with just 6.4 in the less industrial societies. And they also found there had been no significant decline in sleep in Westernised places over the past half-century. The study also revealed that people in these societies tend to get more efficient sleep – meaning they are asleep for more of the time they spend in bed (88% compared with 74%). The researchers suggest modern living conditions are simply more conducive to restful sleep: "We don't have to fend with rival human groups at night or predators," said David Samson. But if that is the case, why then do so many people in the West seem to wake up feeling exhausted? This may be due to the study's other main finding, which is that people living in industrialised countries have a less regular circadian rhythm: their sleep patterns don't match the natural cycles of light and dark. When the Romans invaded Britain, they found the natives strange, says The Times. Their warriors painted themselves blue; and they had moustaches – a concept so foreign to Romans, they had no name for it. Perhaps worst of all, Roman scribes recorded that Celtic rebellions against Roman rule were often led by women. This would have seemed outlandish in Rome, where women were legally owned by their fathers and their husbands, and had no role at all in public life. But while the existence of female warriors such as Boudicca is not in doubt, historians have long distrusted these accounts, suspecting the extent of female power and influence was overstated, to make Celtic societies seem completely barbaric. Now, however, archaeologists at Trinity College Dublin and Bournemouth University have backed up the scribes' observations. The research was based on the remains of 57 people unearthed at an Iron Age cemetery in Dorset. By tracing mitochondrial DNA (which is only passed on by women), the team established that most of the female members of this community were related and all descended from a single woman; by contrast, there was considerable diversity in the male Y chromosomes, suggesting that the men came from lots of different families. This, the study says, indicates that men moved into their wives' community on marriage – a pattern known as matrilocality – perhaps because land and wealth passed down through the female line. The grave goods found back up this theory: the higher status items tended to have been buried with women.

Forbes

10 hours ago

• Forbes

Should We Be Worried About Bird Flu? Public Health Experts Say Yes

Battery hens sit in a chicken shed in Suffolk, England. (Photo by) You don't need me to tell you Covid-19 changed the world. While the pandemic did help expose structural inequalities and disparities, especially in the food system, the loss of life and livelihood has been one of the greatest tragedies of our lifetimes. I'm bringing this up because, if we ignore the lessons we should've learned from this pandemic, future disease outbreaks will be much, much worse. And I'm deeply concerned that, when it comes to avian flu—a.k.a. Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (HPAI) H5N1—we're on a dangerously wrong path. This virus typically affects birds, including poultry, and there's a current outbreak that has affected close to 150 million birds and devastated farms since 2022. Also concerningly, scientists have detected the virus in mammals in recent years—including dairy cows and humans—and learned it can spread between mammals, which significantly raises the outbreak risk. And since 2024, 102 cases of avian flu and 10 deaths have been reported in humans globally, a potentially staggering fatality rate. Many of these global cases over the past year and a half—about 70—have been in the U.S., which means the world's eyes are watching. And so far, this country's response has been nearly the polar opposite of what scientists call for, which puts everyone around the world in greater danger. 'We have so many tools, but they're not being used optimally—and they're not being used optimally by choice,' says Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an expert in global public health. 'We can change the trajectory of this if we actually take those best practices, take those tools, and use them optimally.' To be perfectly clear, there is currently no known person-to-person spread of avian flu and experts say the current public health risk is low, per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What this means, though, is that the time to prevent and contain this virus is right now. There's a very real possibility that avian flu could pose a greater threat in the future, and we can't be caught unprepared. The correct course of action involves vaccination, investments in public health, and global collaboration—all of which appear to be under threat given recent U.S. policy developments. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins' original plan to combat avian flu included US$100 million in research and vaccine development. But shortly after announcing it, she reversed course and told right-wing site Breitbart that vaccines were 'off the table.' Meanwhile, in May, the Trump-Vance Administration cancelled a massive contract with Moderna to develop a vaccination for humans against bird flu, and this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of the advisory committee that helps develop vaccine policy and recommendations for the CDC. 'I'm optimistic that they will continue to support the development of these vaccines. It would be a crime right now to stop it,' said Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who worked on an avian flu vaccine for cattle. Vaccines save lives. Just last month, early results from that experimental bird flu vaccine for cattle came back promising. The U.S. Department of Agriculture conditionally approved a vaccine for poultry this spring, and some countries, like China and France, already vaccinate poultry against H5N1. Even in humans, Finland last year became the first country to roll out bird flu vaccines among its population. Alternative courses of action, rather than vaccines, are devastating: In March, Kennedy suggested farmers 'should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it.' This, as former Kansas state veterinarian Dr. Gail Hansen put it, is a 'terrible idea' and a 'recipe for disaster.' Dr. Adalja did not mince words. If the past year has been a trial run for how the government might respond to the actual emergence of an avian flu pandemic, he says, 'we've failed this trial run.' Optimistically, on a global level, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been taking positive steps toward international collaboration: WHO's Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System closely monitors avian and other animal influenza viruses, and in May, member states approved an agreement to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to outbreaks and learn from mistakes made at the height of the Covid pandemic. But remember, the Trump-Vance Administration pulled the U.S. out of the WHO effective in 2026, and has revoked a variety of investments in global and domestic health programs. These decisions are not abstract, Dr. Adalja says: they 'make these types of events much harder to prepare for and much harder to control.' As Covid-19 made abundantly clear, viruses don't stop at national borders. Keeping the public healthy and preparing for pandemic risks simply must be more important than politicking. And when we're heading in the wrong direction, there is a moral obligation to sound the alarm—and to illuminate a better path forward.