{"id":12709,"date":"2017-10-29T11:36:56","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T16:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=12709"},"modified":"2017-10-29T11:36:56","modified_gmt":"2017-10-29T16:36:56","slug":"that-long-strange-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2017\/10\/29\/that-long-strange-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"That Long, Strange Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

A mere salamander is becoming a celebrity millennia after its death. From “Exceptional soft tissues preservation in a mummified frog-eating Eocene salamander<\/a><\/em>,” J\u00e9r\u00e9my Tissier, Jean-Claude Rage, Michel Laurin, PeerJ<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

The \u2018Phosphorites du Quercy\u2019, in southwestern France, include numerous karstic fissures in-filled by phosphatic sediments rich in vertebrate remains (Legendre et al., 1997<\/a>;\u00a0P\u00e9lissi\u00e9 & Sig\u00e9, 2006<\/a>). Almost all remains appear as classical disarticulated fossil bones, but a few of them (a salamander, anurans and snakes) are spectacular cases of exceptional preservation; the animals are entirely mineralized, including the skin, in three dimensions. Unfortunately, these \u2018mummies\u2019 were collected in the 19th century and their precise provenance and geological age are unknown. However, it is suspected that they come from the late middle or late Eocene (Laloy et al., 2013<\/a>;\u00a0Tissier et al., 2016<\/a>).<\/p>\n

<\/i>Until recently, only the external morphology of the \u2018mummies\u2019 was known. However, recent tomographic studies showed that the skeleton is preserved within the \u2018mummies\u2019 of the frog\u00a0Thaumastosaurus gezei<\/i>\u00a0(Laloy et al., 2013<\/a>) and of the salamander\u00a0Phosphotriton sigei<\/i>) (Tissier et al., 2016<\/a>). The specimen of\u00a0P.\u00a0sigei<\/i>\u00a0includes a large part of the trunk (preserved posterior to the shoulder girdle), the anterior portion of the tail and the proximal portions of the hind limbs (Fig. 1A<\/a>). The right side of the trunk is crushed. Diagnostic external features include the absence of scales, the presence of costal grooves visible on the left side, and the presence of a longitudinally slit-shaped cloaca.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And from the abstract:<\/p>\n

Indeed, the digestive tract contains remains of a frog, which represents the only known case of an extinct salamander that fed on a frog, an extremely rare type of predation in extant salamanders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I suppose that makes the frog a bit of a celebrity as well. Cool stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A mere salamander is becoming a celebrity millennia after its death. From “Exceptional soft tissues preservation in a mummified frog-eating Eocene salamander,” J\u00e9r\u00e9my Tissier, Jean-Claude Rage, Michel Laurin, PeerJ: The \u2018Phosphorites du Quercy\u2019, in southwestern France, include numerous karstic fissures in-filled by phosphatic sediments rich in vertebrate remains (Legendre et \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12710,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12709\/revisions\/12710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}