PAUL SIEVEKING digs up some amazing discoveries from the age of the dinosaurs, as well as Britain’s earliest example of town planning and an Anglo-Saxon Christian cemetery, complete with tree trunk coffins.
DINOSAUR TAIL TRAPPED IN AMBER
The fluffy tail of a dinosaur has been found entombed in 99-million-year-old amber. Chinese palæontologist Lida Xing spotted the 6.5g specimen, the size of a dried apricot, at an amber market in Myitkyina, Kachin state, north-eastern Myanmar (Burma), near the Chinese border. The amber had already been polished for jewellery and the seller had thought the trapped specimen was plant material. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be the tail of a feathered dinosaur about the size of a sparrow. Lida Xing was able to establish where it had come from by tracking down the amber miner who had originally dug out the specimen. It adds to fossil evidence that many dinosaurs sported feathers rather than scales. The findings are published in the December issue of Current Biology. Fragments of dinosaur-era bird wings have been found preserved in amber before, but this is the first time part of a mummified dinosaur skeleton has been discovered. Microscopic examination and CT (computed tomography) X-ray scans confirmed that the tail had come from a flightless dinosaur and not an early species of bird. It belongs to a young coelurosaurian – a theropod, the large family of mostly carnivorous two-legged beasts to which Tyrannosaurus rex belonged. The feathers suggest it was chestnut brown and white. Chemical analysis showed that the soft tissue layer around the bones retained traces of ferrous iron – residue from the animal’s blood. BBC News, 8 Dec; [PA,CNN] newscientist.com, 9 Dec 2016.
DINOSAUR BRAIN FOSSIL
A brown pebble 4in (10cm) long, picked up by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks on a beach near Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, in 2004, has now been identified as the first fossilised dinosaur brain ever found. It is thought to have come from the plant-eating Iguanodon, which grew to 30ft (9m) and weighed four to five tons. It died in a swamp during the early Cretaceous period, about 133 million years ago, and its brain was ‘pickled’ (or mineralised) in mud at the bottom. The fossil retained distinctive features such as the meninges (a protective membrane surrounding the brain), blood vessels, collagen, and structures thought to represent the outer layer of nerve cells, or cortex. Typically in reptiles, the brain takes up about half the space in the skull because it is surrounded by a dense mass of blood vessels and vascular chambers; but the brain tissue appears to have been pressed directly against the skull, suggesting that some dinosaurs had larger brains than previously thought. If it was as tightly packed into the skull as it appears, this creature could have had a brain three times larger than expected; there again, the brain might have just collapsed against the skull as it decayed after death. National Geographic online, 27 Oct; D.Mail, 28 Oct 2016.
PAX BRITANNICA
What might be Britain’s oldest planned town has been discovered near Winterbourne Kingston in Dorset. Dubbed ‘Duropolis’ after the local tribe, the Durotriges, the 20-acre (8-ha) settlement dates to around 100 BC, 70 years earlier than Silchester in Hampshire, which in 2011 was indentified as Britain’s first pre-Roman planned town. Duropolis was an open settlement, one of the largest ever found in Britain, with no protective ditches or walls, set in fertile farmland. A geophysical survey has revealed at least 200 roundhouses. The discovery contradicts the prevailing idea that most Iron Age Britons lived in hill forts because of endemic inter-tribal warfare. D.Telegraph, D.Mirror, 17 July 2015.
TREE TRUNK COFFINS
Coffins made of hollowed-out tree trunks have been found at a previously unknown Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Great Ryburgh in Norfolk, thought to belong to a community of early Christians, suggested by the eastwest alignment of the graves, with the heads pointing west. It is the first time such “exceptionally” well-preserved wooden coffins dating from the seventh to ninth centuries AD have been found in England. Anglo-Saxon coffins rarely survive because the wood rots, and previous evidence has largely consisted of staining in the ground from decayed wood, as was the case with the Sutton Hoo ship [ FT350:12]; but waterlogged conditions in the Wensum river valley, combined with acidic sand and alkaline water, made perfect conditions for preservation. Some 81 dug-out coffins were discovered, made from oak trees split lengthways, with the body placed in one half and the other used as a lid. There were also six that were planklined, thought to be the remains of a more sophisticated type of burial involving box-like coffins with straight sides. D.Telegraph, D.Mail, 16 Nov 2016.