Scientists discover ‘legless, headless wonder’ that predated the dinosaurs
A 444 million-year-old specimen of a primitive marine anthropod was fossilized “inside-out,” with its muscles and guts preseserved in ancient sediment, scientists say. (University of Leicester)
(LEICESTER, UK) — Paleontologists are marveling over the unique fossil of a marine species that predated the dinosaurs, according to new research.
The fossil, dated to about 444 million years ago, contained a new species of arthropod that fossilized inside-out, according to a paper published in the journal Palaeontology last week.
The discovery was described by researchers as a “legless, headless wonder,” according to a statement from the University of Leicester.
The “exceptionally preserved” euarthropod was found with its muscles, sinews, tendons and guts all preserved in “unimaginable detail,” said Sarah Gabbott, a professor at the University of Leicester’s school of geology and lead author of the paper, said in the statement.
“Remarkably her insides are a mineralised time-capsule,” Gabbott said, adding that the specimen’s head and legs were lost to decay over hundreds of millions of years.
The new species was dubbed “Keurbos susanae,” or “Sue” — after the mother of the woman who discovered it. Researchers are certain it is a primitive marine arthropod, but the precise evolutionary relationships remain “frustratingly elusive,” Gabbott said.
The fossil was located on Soom Shale, a band of silts and clays about 250 miles north of Cape Town, South Africa. At the time the strata was laid down, a “devastating” glaciation had wiped out about 85% of Earth’s species — one of the “big five” mass extinctions in Earth’s history, the researchers said.
But the marine basin where Sue was found was somehow protected from the worst of the freezing conditions and provided shelter for a community of “fascinating” species, according to the paper.
“This fossil is just so beautifully preserved there’s so much anatomy there that needs interpreting,” Gabbott said. “Layer upon on layer of exquisite detail and complexity.”
The sediments that trapped the specimen were extremely toxic, the researchers said. The water contained no oxygen, but hydrogen sulphide — described as not only “stinky” but deadly — was dissolved in the water, the researchers said.
An unusual chemical alchemy may have been responsible for the unique way Sue was fossilized, the researchers hypothesized.
About 85% of the animals on Earth today are arthropods — including shrimps, lobsters, spiders, mites, millipedes and centipedes, the paper stated.
The downside to Sue’s unique fossilization is it makes it hard to compare the specimen with other fossils of similar species of the time.
“So it remains a mystery how she fits into the evolutionary tree of life,” according to the researchers.
President Donald Trump’s freeze of U.S. foreign humanitarian aid and shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development is having devastating consequences globally, several humanitarian nongovernmental organization leaders told ABC News.
“The United States Government provides about 70% of all funding for HIV and AIDS globally, and so pausing any of that is a big shock to the system,” said Christine Stegling, a deputy executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and an assistant secretary-general of the United Nations.
While Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week the State Department can offer waivers for some of the most critical aid efforts to continue, Stegling said there is confusion over how to implement the waivers and what programs qualify.
“Community clinics are closed because communities are not sure what the guidance is, and they’re not sure what costs can be covered, and they’re afraid that they will be asked to repay services that they have charged to U.S. government contracts,” Stegling told ABC News.
Stegling warned that if the Trump administration halts all funding to HIV and AIDS programs, more than six million people could die of AIDS-related causes by 2029.
“These are people’s lives that are really at risk here that we need to consider as we’re thinking about the future,” Stegling said.
Since the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine has been the top recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, according to USAID. Yuriy Boyechko, the founder and president of Hope for Ukraine, works with U.S.-funded organizations to provide firewood to Ukrainian civilians living on the front lines.
“Firewood is a lifeline right now for the people in Ukraine,” Boyechko told ABC News. “They don’t have electricity, they don’t have gas. They rely on firewood to keep them warm in freezing temperature[s], and they rely on their firewood to cook their meals.”
Boyechko said that unless other organizations can step in and distribute that wood, Ukrainians will be left in the freezing cold.
“It’s created a lot of distrust inside of the population inside of Ukraine because we [have] always been relying on [the] United States,” Boyechko said. “[The] United States got our back in the darkest period of time, and now, since USAID is pulling away, a lot of people [are] losing hope.”
Search for Common Ground, a global peace-building organization, receives about 40 percent of its funding from the U.S. CEO Shamil Idriss said the aid freeze has hurt their work in eastern Congo, where a war has reemerged.
“We had to freeze the mobilization in the east of the country that was intended to prevent recruitment into the rebel movement that is gaining ground there,” Idriss told ABC News. “Critically, we had to stop broadcasting on a network of radio stations in the east of the country that provide a lifeline for people. So literally, today, people are running in the wrong direction. They’re fleeing towards violence, rather than away from it.”
Idriss said his organization is making the case that its work aligns with the foreign policy priorities of the Trump administration and hopes to work with them, but the way in which the aid was immediately cut has caused concern.
“The stop work orders that we received across more than 30 programs and projects, no two were alike. Some of the information was inconsistent, ambiguous or even contradictory,” Idriss said. “Chaos has really ensued. We’re hopeful that, you know, cooler heads will prevail within the administration shortly.”
Noah Gottschalk, senior director for international advocacy at HIAS, said the Jewish refugee and immigrant aid organization has also experienced “total and complete chaos.”
“We’ve had to stop programs, for example, with survivors of violence against women in Latin America, in countries like Colombia, in countries like Ecuador, women who fled abusive partners, and the support that we provide them is often the difference between them being forced to maybe return to those abusive former partners, or becoming vulnerable to human trafficking,” Gottschalk told ABC News.
Gottschalk said he’s worried the freeze in humanitarian aid could have foreign policy implications.
“The U.S. abandoning some of the most desperate people in the world right now absolutely will create a vacuum, and I’m deeply concerned about who is going to fill that vacuum, whether it’s armed groups, whether it’s cartels, human traffickers,” Gottschalk said.
(LONDON) — Ukraine has accused Russia of committing a war crime after a Russian drone struck a military hospital in Kharkiv overnight.
Ukraine’s General Staff said the strikes were a “deliberate, targeted striking” of the hospital and that it appeared soldiers being treated there were injured. It said the medical center and nearby residential buildings were damaged as a result of a “defeat of” a Russian Shahed drone.
Photos from the scene appear to show damage to the hospital, with an entrance way demolished.
Russian drones also hit apartment blocks and a shopping mall in the center of Ukraine’s second largest city, killing at least two people and wounding 25, according to Kharkiv’s governor.
“War crimes have no statute of limitations. The relevant evidence will be transferred to the bodies of international criminal justice,” the General Staff wrote in a statement on the hospital attack.
Ukrainian cites are bombed by dozens of Russian drones every night, and this weekend has seen a particularly intense wave of attacks in civilian areas of major cities. Dnipro in southeast Ukraine suffered on Friday night heavy strikes that started major fires.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday said over the past week Russia had launched over 1,000 drones, nine missiles and over 1,300 guided aerial bombs, with most of Ukraine’s regions coming under attack. He said Ukraine had shot down a “significant number” of the drones and missiles.
“Russia is dragging out the war,” Zelenskyy wrote in a statement on X, saying Ukraine had shared information on Russia’s strikes with its allies and that it expects a “response from the United States, Europe and all our allies to this terror against our people.”
Russia has also intensified its ground offensive operations in recent days amid, according to Ukraine’s military, amid the ongoing efforts by the Trump administration to end the war.
Ukraine’s General Staff as well as Ukrainian military analysts report in the past few days Russia has launched some of the largest number of ground assaults since the start of the year.
“The number of enemy assaults has exceeded 200 times per day for the last three days,” Deep State, a blog account that tracks the war and is close to Ukraine’s military, wrote Friday. This is the highest three-day intensity of the year.”
It follows warnings this week by Zelenskyy that Russia is preparing to launch a major spring offensive, even as it tries to drag out negotiations with the Trump administration.
The Russian attacks are focused most of all in eastern Ukraine, in the direction of Pokrovsk, an important defensive hub that Russia has been trying to seize for more than 6 months.
Russian forces had scaled back their attacks in recent weeks in part due to poor ground conditions and apparently also worn down by extremely heavy losses. But it appears they are now renewing their offensive operations.
Ukrainian and western officials warned that President Vladimir Putin of Russia will try to use protracted negotiations as an opportunity to also advance on the battlefield, hoping to crack Ukraine’s defenses as the Trump administration weakens western support for Kyiv.
Russian Foreign Ministry / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images
(LONDON) — High-level delegations from the U.S. and Russia held talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday over the fate of Ukraine, the negotiations taking place without Kyiv’s participation.
The State Department said the talks were aimed to discuss ending the now three-year-long war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022 and followed sustained cross-border aggression from Moscow since 2014.
Tuesday’s meeting in Riyadh concluded after around five hours, according to the press pool covering the meeting, with the State Department saying the discussions represented “an important step forward” toward “enduring peace.”
The talks between Moscow and Washington end a period of some three years — since President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Geneva before Russia invaded Ukraine — without senior-level engagement between the two nations.
The U.S. team was led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. The Russian negotiating delegation included Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the U.S. team agreed to establish “a consultation mechanism to address irritants to our bilateral relationship with the objective of taking steps necessary to normalize the operation of our respective diplomatic missions.” Rubio told the Associated Press the two sides agreed to restore embassy staffing as part of this normalization.
The two sides also agreed to appoint “high-level teams to begin working on a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible in a way that is enduring, sustainable and acceptable to all sides,” Bruce said, plus to “lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities which will emerge from a successful end to the conflict in Ukraine.”
“The parties to today’s meetings pledge to remain engaged to make sure the process moves forward in a timely and productive manner,” Bruce added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded to the talks while visiting Turkey, suggesting Russia was reviving ultimatums it issued as part of the peace talks that took place in the early stages of Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
“I have the impression that there are now some negotiations happening and they have the same mood, but between Russia and the United States,” Zelenskyy said at the Ukrainian embassy in Ankara.
“Again, about Ukraine without Ukraine,” he added. “It’s interesting, if Ukraine didn’t yield to ultimatums in the most difficult moment, where does the feeling come from that Ukraine will agree to this now?”
“I never intended to yield to Russia’s ultimatums and I don’t intend to now,” Zelenskyy said.
Lavrov and Rubio talked on the phone Saturday, according to the State Department, after a conversation between Putin and President Donald Trump last week.
While a spokesperson for Putin said the meeting would be “devoted” primarily to “restoring the entire range of Russian-American relations,” Bruce said that the meeting would be more narrowly focused on the “larger issue of Ukraine.”
After the Trump-Putin conversation, Bruce called the meeting the “second step to determine if the Russians perhaps are serious, and if they’re on the same page.”
Ukraine ‘will not recognize’ deal struck without it Zelenskyy was not invited to the meeting. Zelenskyy said Monday that Ukraine “cannot acknowledge any … agreements about us without us, and will not recognize such agreements.”
“Earlier, during the war, it was considered taboo to talk to the aggressor,” the Ukrainian president said.
On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists that Putin is prepared for negotiations with Zelenskyy “if necessary,” though again questioned the Ukrainian president’s legitimacy. Putin and his officials have repeatedly framed Zelenskyy as illegitimate, citing the delay to planned Ukrainian presidential elections necessitated by martial law.
Amid the flurry of diplomatic activity, French President Emmanuel Macron convened a meeting of European heads of government in Paris Monday ahead of the U.S.-Russia engagement.
Macron and Trump spoke via telephone for nearly 30 minutes prior to the European meeting, a White House official said. The official called the conversation “friendly” and said it included discussion of the war in Ukraine and the U.S.-Russia bilateral meetings Tuesday.
Mike Waltz, the White House national security adviser, said on Sunday he would “push back on … any notion that [Ukrainians] aren’t being consulted.”
“They absolutely are. And at the end of the day, though, this is going to be under President Trump’s leadership that we get this war to an end,” Waltz said, conceding “they may not like some of the sequencing that is going on in these negotiations.”
Zelenskyy himself was in the Middle East, where he met with officials in the United Arab Emirates Monday, with Tuesday meetings scheduled in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Zelenskyy said he would ask Saudi de facto leader and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about the U.S.-Russia meetings when in Riyadh.
The opening of White House-facilitated talks on peace in Ukraine came after Trump officials signaled potential terms for a deal in the lead up to, and during, the Munich Security Conference in Germany last week.
Ahead of the conference, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a return to Ukrainian borders before Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea “unrealistic.” That “illusionary goal” — and NATO membership for Ukraine — would not be promoted by the U.S., the secretary said.
Zelenskyy told Munich attendees that Ukraine must be assured of membership in “NATO, or a reliable alternative.”
He called for the building of the “armed forces of Europe” as the Trump administration presses for more European spending on defense.
Among the attendees of Macron’s hastily organized meeting in Paris, the prime ministers of the United Kingdom and Sweden said they would be open to contributing armed forces on the ground in Ukraine in a peacekeeping capacity after a potential deal is struck.
“If there is a peace deal [for Ukraine], and everybody wants a peace deal, then it’s got to be a lasting peace deal, not just a pause for Putin to come again,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in Paris.
“There’s also a wider piece here which is the collective security and defense in Europe, and here, I think we’ve got a generational challenge. We’ve all got to step up,” he added.
ABC News’ Molly Nagle, Patrick Reevell, Yulia Drozd and Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.
