#exceptional preservation

I bet if I did this regularly I’d find some disagreements with exactly which fossils this program chose, but here’s a program covering their choices for 12 of the best-preserved fossils on Earth, including eggs, insects, pollen, nerve remnants, and so on. The study of how fossils are preserved is called Taphonomy and each of these would, in their own way, be an example of Exceptional Preservation.

From the million year old Mexican Beetle, to the crazy dinosaur eggs found recently, these are 12 BEST Preserved Fossils !

An Egg-strordinary Find --In southeast China, workers laying new sewage pipe were surprised to discover a clutch of fossilized dinosaur eggs at their worksite. 43 eggs were discovered, 19 of which were completely intact.

Rocks on the Lochs -- If you’re feeling old, check out this rock … it contains well-preserved fossils of life forms thought to have lived over a billion years ago. That’s billion with a ‘B’. These fossil-bearing rocks were found on the edge of a remote Scottish loch in 2011 … and it’s thought the life forms once lived at the bottom of lakes a billion years ago. While considered primitive, these organisms had specialized cell structures including a nucleus and could reproduce sexually, helping to speed up evolution. Scientists believe that land plants and green algae ultimately evolved from these organisms.

Scorpion Fossil -- An amazing fossil discovery, said to have been found by a farmer in a dirt pit dug by hand. This 2 centimeter male scorpion was unearthed in the amber-rich Chiapas Highlands of Mexico. Fossilized scorpions are rare, let alone complete ones. Taking a close look at these pictures by Francisco Riquelme revealed the entire body of the scorpion perfectly preserved in amber. From one angle, its tail seems poised to strike, like the animal could suddenly spring to life and burst out of its ancient tomb. The detail and clear features are really amazing. The specimen is tentatively dated between 15 to 23 million years old, and is considered a new species. Did you know more than 258 scorpion species have been found in Mexico?

Fossilized eggs the size of a button are said to contain the remains of the world’s oldest lizard embryos. Discovered in Thailand in 2015, scientists were able to peer inside the eggs by using synchrotron x-ray scanning … and it appeared the embryos were ready to hatch at the time of their death. Researchers had expected to find remains of a primitive bird species, or perhaps a small dinosaur inside the eggs … finding the ancient lizards was unexpected. About the size of sparrows eggs, they are hard-shelled, which is considered unusual for lizards. Dated at 125 million years old, the eggs belonged to a lizard related to the Komodo Dragon, which lived during the Cretaceous period. The ancient lizard species has yet to be named.

In 2015, outback Queensland was the site of a huge haul of fish fossils that dated back 100 million years. But one fish fossil in particular stood out … details in the fossil were so clearing defined, you can even make out its eye socket! No wonder it caught many people's eyes. That fish was a Cooyoo and measured nearly 10 feet long with teeth around an inch long. It also had a powerful tail, and researchers think it probably targeted larger fish. While scientists were jubilant about the find, the Cooyoo doesn’t seem all that happy. Then again, if you were fossilized for 100 million years, maybe you wouldn’t feel like whooping it up either!

Even if you don’t like insects, you might feel for this creature trapped in Burmese amber ages ago. This is a female scale insect from the Mesozoic period, and she’s carrying 60 eggs on her back in an effort to protect her offspring. In Bo Wang’s photo, you can see the eggs and freshly hatched nymphs encased in a wax coated egg sac located on the insect’s abdomen. This is actually the earliest evidence of insect brood care that dates to at least 100 million years ago. It’s a way of protecting their young from inclement conditions as well as from natural enemies. This amber fossil is very unique since fossilized examples of such animal behavior are exceedingly rare.

Apatemyids were a group of unique early placental mammals that lived during the first half of the Cenozoic, known from North America, Europe, and Asia. Due to their specialized anatomy their evolutionary relationships are rather murky (they were traditionally part of the convoluted mess that was "Insectivora"), but currently they're thought to be a very early offshoot of the Euarchontoglires, the branch of placentals that includes modern rodents, lagomorphs, treeshrews, colugos, and primates.

Living in what is now western Europe during the mid-Eocene, around 47 million years ago, Heterohyus nanus was a small apatemyid about 30cm long (~12") – although just over half of that length was made up of its tail.

Like other apatemyids it had a proportionally big boxy head, with large forward-pointing rodent-like incisors in its lower jaw and hooked "can-opener-shaped" incisors in its upper jaw.

Example of an apatemyid skull from the closely related American genus Sinclairella. From Samuels, Joshua X. "The first records of Sinclairella (Apatemyidae) from the Pacific Northwest, USA." PaleoBios 38.1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.5070/P9381053299

The rest of its body was rather slender, and fossils with soft tissue preservation from the Messel Pit in Germany show that it had a bushy tuft of longer fur at the end of its long tail.

But the most distinctive feature of apatemyids like Heterohyus were their fingers, with highly elongated second and third digits resembling those of modern striped possums and aye-ayes. This suggests they had a similar sort of woodpecker-like ecological role, climbing around in trees using their teeth to tear into bark and expose wood-boring insect holes, then probing around with their long fingers to extract their prey.

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The evolutionary origins of modern amphibians are still a bit murky, but one of the most likely possibilities is that they evolved from a group of temnospondyls known as amphibamiformes. (Or, at least, that frogs-and-salamanders evolved from them. Caecilians might be a different type of temnospondyl.)

And a recent discovery adds a little bit more evidence to that hypothesis.

A new specimen from the 309-million-year-old Late Carboniferous Mazon Creek fossil deposits in Illinois, USA, shows some soft-tissue impressions around the body of a terrestrial amphibamiform* — most notably showing its toes, with chunky rounded fleshy pads at the end like those seen in many modern amphibians.

Fossil trackways already suggested that some terrestrial temnospondyls had chunky toes, but up until now all known soft-tissue impressions only showed the slender tapering toes of aquatic forms. This is the first direct fossil evidence of toe pads, and hints that a lot of modern amphibians' soft-tissue features may have actually had a very ancient origin.

(*A more precise identification couldn't be made, but it shows some similarities to both Doleserpeton and Pasawioops.)

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