{"id":58567,"date":"2019-08-02T09:33:27","date_gmt":"2019-08-02T13:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=58567"},"modified":"2025-09-30T10:49:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T14:49:14","slug":"filling-fossil-record","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/filling-fossil-record\/","title":{"rendered":"Filling in the Fossil Record"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Filling in the Fossil Record\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Hell hunter and devil digger. When Arjan Mann names a species, he doesn\u2019t mess around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of his PhD research into carboniferous period creatures, the Carleton Earth Sciences<\/a> student identified two new species. The two species date from about 310 million years ago, when the ancestors of modern reptiles, birds and mammals were moving permanently on to land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first he named Diabloroter<\/em> \u2014 devil digger. Mann studied the specimen at the Field Museum in Chicago, where it had been preserved in a devilishly red latex peel. Its hard skull is similar in structure to modern animals that burrow, digging into the earth by compacting soil with their heads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second of the two creatures was an elongated, short-limbed animal that would have moved by sidewinding \u2014 much like a modern snake. He called it Infernovenator<\/em> (hell hunter) to stick with the hellish theme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Arjan
Arjan Mann<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Known as recumbirostrans \u2014 or colloquially as microsaurs \u2014 the two creatures were preserved in the Francis Creek Shale at Mazon Creek, Illinois. The site is about a 90-minute drive south of Chicago and has been attracting palaeontologists and collectors since the early 1900s. A boom in private collecting that began in the 1960s depleted it of its most obvious specimens and palaeontologists moved along to more productive locations.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cResearchers grew disinterested after Mazon Creek became really heavily collected,\u201d says Mann.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a hassle to actually find specimens without having to pay for them, and some collectors didn\u2019t want to sell. They were like extreme hobbyists, with huge collections of hundreds of thousands of concretions. Lots of invertebrates, worms and fish \u2014 it would be their life\u2019s joy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Arjan<\/figure>\n\n\n

Extremely Rare Early Reptiles<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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But tetrapods \u2014 organisms with four limbs, such as early reptiles or amphibians \u2014 are extremely rare there.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cOne in a million concretions at Mazon Creek is a tetrapod,\u201d says Mann. \u201cIt\u2019s not worth the bang for your buck to go and collect there for a field season. Researchers prefer to go to Carboniferous sites like Joggins, Nova Scotia, or Permian age sites in the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

But as collectors depleted Mazon Creek\u2019s most readily available riches, they accumulated a cache of fossils. Many of those collectors have since passed away, and some of their heirs have donated these fossil collections to local museums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll of these organisms are just sitting in the museum already,\u201d says Mann, whose interest in palaeontology was sparked as a child when his mother worked at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto while she was doing her master\u2019s and he had the freedom to explore the galleries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe idea with this project was to go and look at what\u2019s been collected over the years, revise the old fauna, and include this new data. The two species described are just the first of many that will be coming out from the site.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Arjan<\/figure>\n\n\n

Filling in the Fossil Record<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Creatures such as Diabloroter<\/em> and Infernovenator<\/em> could help fill in some of the blank spaces in the fossil record and build a better understanding of how and when creatures migrated permanently from the sea on to the land. That shift was facilitated by an amnion \u2014 a membrane that keeps fluid around an animal\u2019s eggs so they don\u2019t need to be in water to reproduce, a trait that reptiles, birds and mammals all share.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s a matter of debate as to whether these animals are actually reptiles or not,\u201d says Mann. \u201cIf they are, they insinuate that the diversification of early amniotes \u2014 whose descendants include us \u2014 happened way earlier than previously thought. That would be a pretty big finding.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Arjan Mann\u2019s research was co-authored with his supervisor, Prof. Hillary Maddin<\/a>, and appeared in The Zoological Journal of the Linnaen Society<\/a> in May 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hell hunter and devil digger. When Arjan Mann names a species, he doesn\u2019t mess around. As part of his PhD research into carboniferous period creatures, the Carleton Earth Sciences student identified two new species. The two species date from about 310 million years ago, when the ancestors of modern reptiles, birds and mammals were moving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":58583,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[13],"cu_story_tag":[1919],"class_list":["post-58567","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_story_type-research-discovery","cu_story_tag-faculty-of-science"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"blueprint"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/58567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/58567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97400,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/58567\/revisions\/97400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=58567"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=58567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}