Not a 'night owl' yet: Extraordinary bird fossil from Messel Pit suggests species still hunted by day

nature & planetPhys.orgc. 47 million years ago · Messel Pit, Germany

Not a 'night owl' yet: Extraordinary bird fossil from Messel Pit suggests species still hunted by day

from Phys.org

An exceptionally well-preserved, approximately 47-million-year-old owl fossil from the UNESCO World Heritage Site Messel provides new clues as to when owls became nocturnal. The newly described species Masillastrix blattophaga was likely still diurnal—as indicated by an iridescent cockroach in its stomach, as well as the structure of its feathers and wing bones. In their new study, published in the journal Current Biology, the Senckenberg researchers speculate that nocturnal behavior in owls only developed between the middle and late Eocene, some 47 to 34 million years ago.

explained

The Messel Pit is a fossil preservation site in Hesse, central Germany, dated to the Eocene epoch (about 47 Ma). The fossil-bearing rock unit is a geologic formation named the Messel Formation; its geographic range is restricted to the Messel pit. There, the formation unconformably overlies crystalline Variscan basement and its Permian cover (Rotliegend) as well as Eocene volcanic breccias derived from the basement rocks. The formation mainly comprises lacustrine laminated bituminous shale ("oil shale") renowned for its content of fossils in exceptional preservation, particularly plants, arthropods and vertebrates (e.g. Darwinius masillae).

From Wikipedia: Messel Pit (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗

how it works

Fossilized stomach contents show what an animal ate; the iridescent colour of insect shells also survives in structure. Combining diet, feather structure and bone shape lets researchers reconstruct when the bird was active.

so what

Night hunting shaped modern owls' silent flight and extraordinary hearing, yet the fossil shows these traits arrived long after owls themselves. Messel's oil-shale deposits preserve soft tissue and gut contents, so they reveal behaviour rather than just bones.

fun fact

The Messel Pit, a former oil-shale mine near Darmstadt, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995 for its exquisitely preserved Eocene fossils.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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