Just a quick post to link you to a really important study that I did a very quick painting for, of a truly weird ocean creature, that lived around 180 MILLION YEARS BEFORE the first dinosaurs!!

Bothriolepis aka the Beetle Mermaid.

This is #bothriopsis an ancient armored bony fish that swam earth’s oceans around 420 million yrs ago. A new study by paleontologist Yara Haridy pries at a deep dark evolutionary question: Why and how did bone evolve??

Her paper, which will blow your mind if you really take it in and ponder it, is open access and can be found here: Bone metabolism and evolutionary origin of osteocytes: Novel application of FIB-SEM tomography

To investigate the origin of bones, she and her collaborators innovated a new way to look at the microstructure of fossils at a scale never before seen. By using a GALIUM ION BEAM (cue laser sound fx) in combination with a SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE (cue computer robot boopbeepbop sfx) Haridy and colleagues were able to slice through samples of bone micron at a time, and scan each tiny slice as they blasted through the (incredibly tiny) fragments of fossil bone.

By digitally stacking up those tiny tiny tiny tiny slices Yara and her collaborators were able to build a 3d reconstruction of the spaces in bone where bone cells once lived at a level of detail never before seen!

Bone cells have incredibly tiny little tubes connecting them – called bone cell canaliculi – which allow bone cells to share resources and communicate with eachother. Understanding how these bone cells are connected is crucial to understanding how they functioned and how bone evolved, & they found something fascinating- an area of low density bone right around the space occupied by the bone cells.

This area of low density is observed in modern bone and it is the result if a CRUCIAL biological function: adding and removing minerals from the bone. When we mammals need to make milk for our babies, we get a lot of the calcium from our bones. When birds or reptiles lay eggs they pull minerals stored in their bones. When we work out really hard and use a lot of calcium ions to move our muscles some of that calcium can be pulled from our bones (drink yo milk yall). That awesome superpower you have to store and access minerals stored in your bones evolved around 450 million years ago in weirdo armored Beetle-Mermaid-lookin fish like Bothriolepis & its kin.

For anyone interested in my paleoart process on this piece, check out this post on my patreon!!

LETS ZAP SOME MORE FOSSILS YALL BWWAAVOOOMMPPHHHhhhh!!!

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