Tiny, irregularly shaped fossils from South Australia could be the oldest remains of simple animal life found to date.
By Jonathan Amos

Mount Semeru, seen with an ash plume, is the highest volcano on the Indonesian island of Java and has been in a constant eruption since 1967. It lies at the southern end of the Tengger caldera, which contains smaller volcanoes Mount Bromo and Mount Batok (both seen in the foreground), and several others.

Photograph by John Stanmeyer, National Geographic.

DINOSAURS were shape-shifters. Their skulls underwent extreme changes throughout their lives, growing larger, sprouting horns then reabsorbing them, and changing shape so radically that different stages look to us like different species.

This discovery comes from a study of the iconic dinosaur triceratops and its close relative torosaurus. Their skulls are markedly different but are actually from the very same species, argue John Scannella and Jack Horner at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.

Wikimedia Commons - Mark from the UK.

“We have these macrofossils turning up in a world that was purely microbial,” says Stefan Bengtson, a palaeozoologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and a co-author on the report. “That’s a big deal because when you finally get big organisms, it changes the way the biosphere works, as they interact with microbes and each other.”

The colonial macrofossils found in Gabon -- El Albani

The dinosaur, whose name translates to mean “grinding-mouth, wrinkle-eye,” was most likely an herbivore that ate the ferns and conifer trees found as fossils in the same rock layer. A basal hadrosauroid, the find included partial skull bones, several vertebrae and fragments of the ribs.

A rendering of Jeyawati rugoculus. (Credit: Artwork by Lukas Panzarin)