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An evaporite sequence from ancient brine recorded in Bennu samples
No full textAbstract: Evaporation or freezing of water-rich fluids with dilute concentrations of dissolved salts can produce brines, as observed in closed basins on Earth1 and detected by remote sensing on icy bodies in the outer Solar System2,3. The mineralogical evolution of these brines is well understood in regard to terrestrial environments4, but poorly constrained for extraterrestrial systems owing to a lack of direct sampling. Here we report the occurrence of salt minerals in samples of the asteroid (101955) Bennu returned by the OSIRIS-REx mission5. These include sodium-bearing phosphates and sodium-rich carbonates, sulfates, chlorides and fluorides formed during evaporation of a late-stage brine that existed early in the history of Bennu’s parent body. Discovery of diverse salts would not be possible without mission sample return and careful curation and storage, because these decompose with prolonged exposure to Earth’s atmosphere. Similar brines probably still occur in the interior of icy bodies Ceres and Enceladus, as indicated by spectra or measurement of sodium carbonate on the surface or in plumes2,3.Copyright © This is a U.S. Government work and not under copyright protection in the US; foreign copyright protection may apply 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The linked file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
Phylogenomics and the rise of the angiosperms
Get PDFAbstractAngiosperms are the cornerstone of most terrestrial ecosystems and human livelihoods1,2. A robust understanding of angiosperm evolution is required to explain their rise to ecological dominance. So far, the angiosperm tree of life has been determined primarily by means of analyses of the plastid genome3,4. Many studies have drawn on this foundational work, such as classification and first insights into angiosperm diversification since their Mesozoic origins5–7. However, the limited and biased sampling of both taxa and genomes undermines confidence in the tree and its implications. Here, we build the tree of life for almost 8,000 (about 60%) angiosperm genera using a standardized set of 353 nuclear genes8. This 15-fold increase in genus-level sampling relative to comparable nuclear studies9 provides a critical test of earlier results and brings notable change to key groups, especially in rosids, while substantiating many previously predicted relationships. Scaling this tree to time using 200 fossils, we discovered that early angiosperm evolution was characterized by high gene tree conflict and explosive diversification, giving rise to more than 80% of extant angiosperm orders. Steady diversification ensued through the remaining Mesozoic Era until rates resurged in the Cenozoic Era, concurrent with decreasing global temperatures and tightly linked with gene tree conflict. Taken together, our extensive sampling combined with advanced phylogenomic methods shows the deep history and full complexity in the evolution of a megadiverse clade.</jats:p
Misconceptions: A Card Deck for Fertility Conversations
Get PDF(Mis)Conceptions is an eighteen-month Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project exploring the cultural history of fertility health and especially pregnancy ambiguity: the common experience of not knowing whether a pregnancy is established or viable. engagement element uses history and art to open broader questions about trying for parenthood today.
To accomplish this the project is creating a deck of conversation cards using the western tarot as a structuring device, whilst foregrounding questions, themes and images that explore people’s experiences of trying to become parents today, whether biologically or otherwise.The linked file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
Collecting and cataloguing the world: the botanical collections of Hans Sloane (1660–1753)
No full textBotanical collections assembled before the widespread adoption of the ‘Linnaean’ system of binomial naming often have nomenclatural significance, are increasingly utilized to investigate genetic and environmental change, and are important sources for the history of science and medicine. However, such early collections may be difficult to access and interpret, and few have machine-readable metadata or images. The natural history collections of Hans Sloane (1660–1753), assembled between the 1680s and his death in 1753, constitute the de facto foundation collections of the Natural History Museum, London. This study analyses Sloane’s Herbarium and ‘Vegetable Substances’ which make up the largest surviving components of Sloane’s natural history materials and the largest pre-Linnaean botanical collection in existence. The collections contain specimens contributed by hundreds of people from over 70 countries and territories worldwide. New data sets are presented that enable novel research and a comparison of their parts. The data provide details of the people and places mentioned in these sources, along with a complete transcription of the Vegetable Substances catalogue, and new folio-level metadata for the entire Herbarium. The results provide precise estimates of the scale of the collections (8812 surviving specimens of the Vegetable Substances, and 121 506 specimens in the herbarium) and demonstrate their heterogeneity, reflecting their complex histories. Aspects of the collections’ histories can be read from the data and reveal some of the organization and management practices that shaped the collections as we have them today. However, we show that there is frequent ambiguity and uncertainty in the provenance of specimens, while the human histories connected with their assembly are often opaque, embedded in the trading networks of colonialism and enslavement. These data permit analyses of the collections at scale for the first time, yet also suggest that multi-disciplinary approaches are required to fully unlock such historical collections.Copyright © 2025 The Trustees of the Natural History Museum. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permitsunrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow theposting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. The linked file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
Ipomoea tiliacea (Convolvulaceae) seeds stranded on the south-west coast of Ireland
No full textThree 4 mm drift seeds collected from St Finan’s Bay on the south-west coast of Ireland were cultivated to produce climbing plants with cordate to trilobed leaves. The sequence of the Internal Transcribed Spacer region of ribosomal DNA of these plants provided a match for Ipomoea tiliacea (Willd.) Choisy. This plant is native from the Bahamas to southern Brazil, commonly occurring in maritime regions of the mainland and islands. This is the first record of seeds of this species likely to have been carried across the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean. Records of this plant, elsewhere in Europe, require confirmation.Copyright (c) 2024 Dan Minchin, Claire Griffin, Mark Carine. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The linked file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
New evidence for the intentional use of calomel as a white pigment
No full textIn this work, we report the results of the in situ application of micro‐Raman spectroscopy to the analysis of two historic painted objects: a 15th‐century illuminated manuscript and a late 16th‐century portrait miniature. Both objects were unexpectedly found to contain calomel (Hg2Cl2), intentionally used as a white pigment. Calomel was a widespread and popular medicine until it fell out of use at the end of the 19th century due to its toxicity, and a material called ‘mercury white’ is referred to in 16th‐century technical literature on painting. However, although calomel has been recognised in the past as a degradation product of cinnabar in both wall and easel paintings, its deliberate use as a pigment on cultural heritage objects has only been documented recently in white areas painted on 17th‐century South American objects. The present study describes the first ever verified use of calomel as a white pigment on European works of art, both of which predate its documented use in South America.Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Journal of Raman Spectroscopy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The linked file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
An Upper Palaeolithic engraved human bone associated with ritualistic cannibalism
Get PDFCut-marked and broken human bones are a recurrent feature of Magdalenian (~17-12,000 years BP, uncalibrated dates) European sites. Human remains at Gough's Cave (UK) have been modified as part of a Magdalenian mortuary ritual that combined the intensive processing of entire corpses to extract edible tissues and the modification of skulls to produce skull-cups. A human radius from Gough's Cave shows evidence of cut marks, percussion damage and human tooth marks, indicative of cannibalism, as well as a set of unusual zig-zagging incisions on the lateral side of the diaphysis. These latter incisions cannot be unambiguously associated with filleting of muscles. We compared the macro- and micro-morphological characteristics of these marks to over 300 filleting marks on human and non-human remains and to approximately 120 engraved incisions observed on two artefacts from Gough's Cave. The new macro- and micro-morphometric analyses of the marks, as well as further comparisons with French Middle Magdalenian engraved artefacts, suggest that these modifications are the result of intentional engraving. The engraved motif comfortably fits within a Magdalenian pattern of design; what is exceptional in this case, however, is the choice of raw material (human bone) and the cannibalistic context in which it was produced. The sequence of the manipulations suggests that the engraving was a purposeful component of the cannibalistic practice, implying a complex ritualistic funerary behaviour that has never before been recognized for the Palaeolithic period.Copyright: © 2017 Bello et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
A new sauropod dinosaur hindlimb from the Lower Cretaceous Wessex Formation, Isle of Wight, UK
Get PDFThe Barremian-aged Wessex Formation of the Isle of Wight, UK, offers a globally significant glimpse into the sauropod dinosaur faunas of the early Cretaceous. These deposits have yielded specimens of several neosauropod lineages, such as rebbachisaurids, titanosauriforms (including some of the earliest titanosaur remains), and possible flagellicaudatans. Here, we report an undescribed sauropod partial hindlimb from the Wessex Formation (NHMUK PV R16500) and analyse its phylogenetic affinities. This hindlimb preserves the left tibia, astragalus and pes, lacking only a few phalanges. NHMUK PV R16500 can be diagnosed based on two autapomorphies: an unusually high distal end to midshaft transverse width ratio in metatarsals III and IV, and the presence of small bump-like projections located in the centre of the proximal articular surfaces of the unguals of pedal digits I and II. The phylogenetic affinities of NHMUK PV R16500 are uncertain: although our analyses recover it as an early-branching somphospondylan, a single character change moves it to close to Flagellicaudata when extended implied weighting is applied. The possibility of flagellicaudatan affinities for NHMUK PV R16500 implies a potential ghost lineage that survived the Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary; however, we present evidence that the somphospondylan position is more probable and should be preferred.Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor
Body size, shape and ecology in tetrapods
No full textAbstract - Body size and shape play fundamental roles in organismal function and it is expected that animals may possess body proportions that are well-suited to their ecological niche. Tetrapods exhibit a diverse array of body shapes, but to date this diversity in body proportions and its relationship to ecology have not been systematically quantified. Using whole-body skeletal models of 410 extinct and extant tetrapods, we show that allometric relationships vary across individual body segments thereby yielding changes in overall body shape as size increases. However, we also find statistical support for quadratic relationships indicative of differential scaling in small-medium versus large animals. Comparisons of locomotor and dietary groups highlight key differences in body proportions that may mechanistically underlie occupation of major ecological niches. Our results emphasise the pivotal role of body proportions in the broad-scale ecological diversity of tetrapods.This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The linked article is the published version if the article.NHM Repositor
Winchcombe: An example of rapid terrestrial alteration of a CM chondrite
Get PDFAbstract - Winchcombe is a CM chondrite that fell in England on February 28, 2021. Its rapid retrieval was well characterized. Within two polished sections of Winchcombe, terrestrial phases were observed. Calcite and calcium sulfates were found in a sample recovered from a field on March 6, 2021, and halite was observed on a sample months after its recovery from a driveway on March 2, 2021. These terrestrial phases were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. Calcite veins crosscut the fusion crust and therefore postdate it. The calcite likely precipitated in the damp environment (sheep field) where the meteorite lay for six days prior to its retrieval. The sulfates occur on the edges of the sample and were identified as three minerals: gypsum, bassanite, and anhydrite. Given that the sulfates occur only on the sample's edges, including on top of the fusion crust, they formed after Winchcombe fell. Sulfate precipitation is attributed to the damp fall environment, likely resulted from sulfide‐derived H2S reacting with calcite within the meteorite. Halite occurs as euhedral crystals only on the surface of a polished section and exclusively in areas relatively enriched in sodium. It was likely produced by the interaction of the polished rock slice with the humid laboratory air over a period of months. The sulfates, fusion crust calcite, and halite all post‐date Winchcombe's entry into the Earth's atmosphere and showcase how rapidly meteorite falls can be terrestrially altered.Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Meteoritics & Planetary Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Meteoritical Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repositor