Unearthed: Life Recorded in Fossils

Several mass extinctions have occurred throughout Earth’s history, where many types of organisms have gone extinct around the world within a relatively short time.

The winners and losers of these catastrophic events can sometimes be surprising. Nautiloids, like Cenoceras shown here, lived in seas of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods alongside the superficially similar ammonites.

Both were tentacled creatures inhabiting spiral-chambered shells, but whereas species of nautiloids still swim today in the Indo-Pacific seas, every species of ammonite went extinct in the mass extinction that also killed the dinosaurs.

At first this might seem counterintuitive: nautiloids were far less abundant, had fewer species and showed less diversity in shell shape than ammonites. However, research has shown that they fed on different prey.

The ammonites’ prey collapsed during the extinction event, while the nautiloids were able to keep feeding, allowing them to survive until today.

The success of some creatures means we can use them for more than just studying the biology of the organisms themselves.

Gryphaea are such a common fossil in Jurassic rocks throughout the UK that they have been given a name in folklore, ‘devil’s toenails’, and even used in folk medicine.

But their commonality gave British palaeontologist Arthur Trueman and subsequent generations of geologists something better than an unpalatable concoction: they were a perfect case study of evolution.

It was possible to trace the change in form of Gryphaea through different species up the rock record and to conclude that increasingly broader and flatter shells helped the organism stay more stable in the mud they lay on, resisting sinking.

Common creatures not only chart evolution, but also helped one man make the very first chart – or map – of British geology.

William Smith (1769-1839) was a canal engineer who came up with a unique insight that allowed him to link layers of rocks across the country, and distinguish ones that were only superficially similar but could be millions of years apart in time.

He used the fossils of sedimentary rock layers as a ‘signature’, including these ammonites from the Blue Lias Formation found in Somerset.

These correlations allowed Smith to create and publish the first geological map of England and Wales in 1815.

If it took a fish to colonise land, then it took a dinosaur to colonise the skies.

Although insects had been doing it for millennia, the first vertebrates to fly were likely creatures like this Archaeopteryx.

Widely considered the first birds, they also had many features left over from their time as land-dwelling dinosaurs, including teeth, a bony tails and claws on the hands.

Only about a dozen decent specimens of Archaeopteryx exist, and all come from one quarry in Germany that provides exceptional preservation.

The Natural History Museum’s specimen came via local doctor Karl Häberlein, who acquired the specimen as part payment for a medical bill by one of the quarrymen.

He later sold it along with the rest of his fossil collection to provide a dowry for his daughter.

Evolution has helped animals develop new adaptations and colonise revolutionary new environments, from the land to the sky. However, sometimes advantages come not in being bigger and stronger, but by shrinking in size.

Island dwarfism is a phenomenon where large animals evolve smaller body forms when isolated on islands.

This helps conserve scarce resources, but is also possible because there are fewer predators in these places, meaning being big has less of an advantage.

Pioneering palaeontologist Dorothea Bate (1878-1951), who spent 50 years working at the Natural History Museum, discovered several examples of island dwarfism that evolved on many Mediterranean islands during the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million – 11,700 years ago).

These included pygmy deer, elephants and this miniature ‘mouse goat’, adults of which reached only 50 centimetres at the shoulder.

At the same time as some mammals were shrinking on islands in the Mediterranean, others were becoming extremely large. This example was found in Ilford, near London, in 1863.

It is a steppe mammoth that lived around 200,000 years ago, and was one of the largest mammoth species to ever exist, reaching up to four metres tall with tusks nearly three metres long.

Given how recently mammoths lived, compared to most creatures on this list, and their excellent preservation, in some cases it has been possible to extract samples of DNA.

While scientists have used this to learn more about how different groups were related to each other, and to modern elephants, it has also led to the tantalising possibility of bringing mammoths back from extinction.

Perhaps the museum of the future will have a real mammoth on display next to impressive skulls like this one?