Science & Technology
But radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis later revealed that the frozen specimen was actually a 46,000-year-old horned lark.
The bird was discovered by fossil ivory hunters near the village of Belaya Gora in northeastern Siberia. They then brought it to scientists Nicolas Dussex, Love Dalén and their team of experts at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, who confirmed the bird's classification.
Their research was published in the journal Communications Biology on Friday.
"This finding implies that the climatic changes that took place at the end of the last Ice Age led to formation of new subspecies," Dalén told CNN, suggesting that the icy avian corpse might be the ancestor of two of today's lark species, including one type found in northern Russia and the other in the Mongolian steppe.
The bird's remarkable condition is primarily thanks to its frozen burial site, but Dussex admits this particular case is extraordinary.
"The fact that such a small and fragile specimen was near intact also suggests that dirt/mud must have been deposited gradually, or at least that the ground was relatively stable so that the bird's carcass was preserved in a state very close to its time of death," he said.
The permafrost of Siberia, a layer of ice and soil that covers much of the region, has brought forth a number of paleontological marvels. Last year, Dalén and Dussex began a study on an 18,000-year-old canine that was dug up at the same site as the lark. But despite its near-perfect preservation, they could not conclude whether the mammal was a dog or a wolf.
Comment: See also:
- Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes
- In Cambrian Explosion Debate, Intelligent Design Wins by Default
- Arctic island mammoth shows strongest evidence yet of human slaughter and butchering
- 28,500 year old fossil site supports date for dog domestication during Ice Age
- The Truth Perspective: Are Cells the Intelligent Designers? Why Creationists and Darwinists Are Both Wrong
- The Truth Perspective: Mind the Gaps: Locating the Intelligence in Evolution and Design
Reader Comments
You know RC.. it just blows me away when i really listen to the stories being told in nusery rhymes. I was agast 2 decades ago realizing how stupid adults were to write n publish n read such scary stories for our babies. Mind Boggling.. and we scratch our heads why society is so fucked up!!?!
Just yesterday, I was biking out in the woods, I saw - first time in my life - what are called 'Horned Larks, ' which are a Canadian & Great Plains dwelling species. Supposedly their extremest winter range takes them into Georgia, but there (here) they were , ~400? miles south of their most extreme winter range. I've got to believe that all the big storms up North are the cause.*
Bird:[Link][Link] ; Range: [Link] [Link] love critters!
RC
*Cold snowy winters in northern half of contiguous US usually result in us having an unusually warmer and drier winter, as this one has been.
See:
Northwest Colorado records storm's highest snow total - 40 inches over weekend
A snow monitoring site northeast of Steamboat Springs near the Routt and Jackson county border reported the highest amount of snowfall in the state over the weekend with close to 40 inches of...