* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Saturday, September 6, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    ITV Studios Launches New Entertainment Label – Global Bulletin – IMDb

    ITV Studios Unveils Exciting New Entertainment Label

    TS Entertainment bringing Malibu Jack’s to former Owensboro mall – Lane Report

    TS Entertainment Launches Malibu Jack’s at Former Owensboro Mall Location

    Jenny Han Dropped a Major ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Easter Egg Revealing [SPOILER] – yahoo.com

    Jenny Han Just Unveiled a Huge ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Easter Egg That Changes Everything [SPOILER]

    Liam Payne’s Cousin Ross Harris Honors Late Singer With Emotional Song ‘Bones’ – yahoo.com

    Liam Payne’s Cousin Ross Harris Honors Late Singer with Emotional New Song ‘Bones

    Country music star apologizes after drunken show ends with cops taking him down: ‘I’m not OK’ – PennLive.com

    Country Music Star Apologizes After Drunken Show Ends in Police Intervention: ‘I’m Not OK

    Comanche Nation Entertainment closes casino near Devol – KSWO 7News

    Comanche Nation Entertainment Closes Casino Near Devol in Surprising Move

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Coherent Joins LLNL’s STARFIRE Diode Technology Working Group to Advance Inertial Fusion Energy – GlobeNewswire

    Coherent Partners with LLNL’s STARFIRE Team to Drive Breakthroughs in Inertial Fusion Energy

    Gene Associated With Deadly Heart Disease in Golden Retrievers Identified – Technology Networks

    Breakthrough Discovery Uncovers Gene Behind Deadly Heart Disease in Golden Retrievers

    Monkey Island LNG Picks ConocoPhillips’ Liquefaction Technology – Hart Energy

    Monkey Island LNG Selects ConocoPhillips’ Advanced Liquefaction Technology for Next-Gen Energy Solutions

    Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd. (CRDO) Surpasses Q1 Earnings and Revenue Estimates – Yahoo Finance

    Credo Technology Group Surpasses Q1 Earnings and Revenue Expectations

    The Economist is hiring a science and technology correspondent – The Economist

    Exciting Opportunity: Become Our Next Science and Technology Correspondent!

    Blockchain lender Figure Technology seeks to raise up to $526M in IPO (FIGR:Pending) – Seeking Alpha

    Blockchain Lender Figure Technology Sets Sights on $526M in Thrilling IPO Launch

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    ITV Studios Launches New Entertainment Label – Global Bulletin – IMDb

    ITV Studios Unveils Exciting New Entertainment Label

    TS Entertainment bringing Malibu Jack’s to former Owensboro mall – Lane Report

    TS Entertainment Launches Malibu Jack’s at Former Owensboro Mall Location

    Jenny Han Dropped a Major ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Easter Egg Revealing [SPOILER] – yahoo.com

    Jenny Han Just Unveiled a Huge ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Easter Egg That Changes Everything [SPOILER]

    Liam Payne’s Cousin Ross Harris Honors Late Singer With Emotional Song ‘Bones’ – yahoo.com

    Liam Payne’s Cousin Ross Harris Honors Late Singer with Emotional New Song ‘Bones

    Country music star apologizes after drunken show ends with cops taking him down: ‘I’m not OK’ – PennLive.com

    Country Music Star Apologizes After Drunken Show Ends in Police Intervention: ‘I’m Not OK

    Comanche Nation Entertainment closes casino near Devol – KSWO 7News

    Comanche Nation Entertainment Closes Casino Near Devol in Surprising Move

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Coherent Joins LLNL’s STARFIRE Diode Technology Working Group to Advance Inertial Fusion Energy – GlobeNewswire

    Coherent Partners with LLNL’s STARFIRE Team to Drive Breakthroughs in Inertial Fusion Energy

    Gene Associated With Deadly Heart Disease in Golden Retrievers Identified – Technology Networks

    Breakthrough Discovery Uncovers Gene Behind Deadly Heart Disease in Golden Retrievers

    Monkey Island LNG Picks ConocoPhillips’ Liquefaction Technology – Hart Energy

    Monkey Island LNG Selects ConocoPhillips’ Advanced Liquefaction Technology for Next-Gen Energy Solutions

    Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd. (CRDO) Surpasses Q1 Earnings and Revenue Estimates – Yahoo Finance

    Credo Technology Group Surpasses Q1 Earnings and Revenue Expectations

    The Economist is hiring a science and technology correspondent – The Economist

    Exciting Opportunity: Become Our Next Science and Technology Correspondent!

    Blockchain lender Figure Technology seeks to raise up to $526M in IPO (FIGR:Pending) – Seeking Alpha

    Blockchain Lender Figure Technology Sets Sights on $526M in Thrilling IPO Launch

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home Science

The last turn of ‘Ezekiel’s Wheel’ honors a fossil hunter

November 7, 2023
in Science
The last turn of ‘Ezekiel’s Wheel’ honors a fossil hunter
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

The last turn of 'Ezekiel's Wheel' honors a Yale-affiliated fossil hunter

Graphical abstract. Credit: Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.10.024

The mystery of Ezekiel’s Wheel—the extinct sea creature, not the Biblical vision—may have taken its final turn, thanks to Yale paleontologists. In so doing, the researchers have also finally put a scientific name to the favorite fossil of a beloved amateur fossil hunter.

Samuel J. Ciurca Jr., who died in 2021, was a curatorial affiliate of the Yale Peabody Museum for many years. He collected tens of thousands of fossils, primarily from the Silurian rocks of upstate New York and southern Ontario, Canada. He donated more than 11,000 fossil sea scorpions, called eurypterids, to the Peabody Museum—the Ciurca Collection in the Peabody’s Division of Invertebrate Paleontology.

One of these, which is perhaps the largest complete eurypterid ever discovered, is a specimen, 1.25 meters in length, of the giant pterygotid Acutiramus macrophthalmus, which will be on display when the Peabody re-opens to the public in 2024 after a multi-year renovation.

But while the vast majority of Ciurca’s fossils are eurypterids—extinct sea scorpions found throughout most of the world in rocks ranging in age from 465 to 250 million years—his favorite fossil was something else entirely. Something unidentified.

He called it Ezekiel’s Wheel, after the Old Testament reference to the prophetic vision of a warrior in a wheeled chariot. Ciurca discovered 10 specimens of the unknown animal in Ontario, starting in the mid-1990s.

“He inscribed the back of the best specimen, the first example he discovered, with the words, ‘the most beautiful fossil ever found,'” said Derek Briggs, the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and a longtime associate of Ciurca.

The small specimens consist of a circular aggregate of radiating tubes arranged in two or more levels—thus the “wheel” nickname. The length of the tubes is as much as three-quarters of an inch.

“Ezekiel’s Wheel has long been a mystery,” Briggs said. “Several years ago, a then-graduate student of mine, Nicolás Mongiardino Koch, tried to figure out what it was as a class project for my course ‘Extraordinary Glimpses of Past Life.'”

“He made significant progress on a solution, but additional specimens that came to light when we acquired more of Sam’s collection after he died added important new information.”

“With a new investigation,” Briggs added, “we now have an answer to the mystery.”

In a new study published in the journal Current Biology, Briggs and Mongiardino Koch, who is now at the University of California at San Diego, identify Ezekiel’s Wheel as a 420-million-year-old representative of a group still found in the modern oceans, known as hemichordates.

Although hemichordates are now rare, their ancestors were quite abundant. The most common were known as graptolites, and they were often found in Paleozoic plankton; graptolite fossils play an important role in correlating sedimentary sequences in research.

Less common ancient hemichordates were creatures called cephalodiscids, which are still alive today. Both their living and extinct forms lived exclusively on the seafloor—or so it was thought.

“It turns out Sam’s fossil is a very unusual cephalodiscid which evolved a conical structure that we interpret as a float—it is the only cephalodiscid known to have colonized the plankton,” Briggs said.

The researchers named it Rotaciurca superbus: “rota,” which is Latin for “wheel,” “ciurca” after the fossil hunter who thought it was beautiful, and “superbus,” the Latin word for “splendid.”

They assigned Rotaciurca superbus to a new family, Ezekielidae, highlighting its status as an extinct fossil cephalodiscid outside the living group.

More information:
Derek E.G. Briggs et al, A Silurian pseudocolonial pterobranch, Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.10.024

Citation:
The last turn of ‘Ezekiel’s Wheel’ honors a fossil hunter (2023, November 6)
retrieved 6 November 2023
from https://phys.org/news/2023-11-ezekiel-wheel-honors-fossil-hunter.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : Phys.org – https://phys.org/news/2023-11-ezekiel-wheel-honors-fossil-hunter.html

Tags: 'Ezekiel's‘Wheelscience
Previous Post

STEM Career Days boost high school students’ career aspirations in STEM fields, study finds

Next Post

French love letters confiscated by Britain finally read after 265 years

Blending art, culture and native plants at Wakamatsu – Mountain Democrat

Discover the Harmony of Art, Culture, and Native Plants at Wakamatsu

September 6, 2025
The Two-Body Problem for Women in Science – Nautilus | Science Connected

The Two-Body Problem for Women in Science – Nautilus | Science Connected

September 6, 2025
How AI and Automation are Speeding Up Science and Discovery – Berkeley Lab News Center (.gov)

How AI and Automation Are Accelerating Breakthroughs in Scientific Discovery

September 6, 2025

American Trust Investment Services Serves as Exclusive Placement Agent in $9 Million Follow-On Offering for Nova LifeStyle, Inc. – Morningstar

September 6, 2025
Coherent Joins LLNL’s STARFIRE Diode Technology Working Group to Advance Inertial Fusion Energy – GlobeNewswire

Coherent Partners with LLNL’s STARFIRE Team to Drive Breakthroughs in Inertial Fusion Energy

September 6, 2025
EA SPORTS™ and New York City FC Extend Partnership to Power the Future of Football Fandom in NYC – New York City FC

EA SPORTS™ and New York City FC Join Forces to Transform Football Fandom in NYC

September 6, 2025
News – Ancient DNA Pinpoints Culprit Responsible for World’s First Pandemic – Archaeology Magazine

Ancient DNA Reveals the True Cause of the World’s First Pandemic

September 5, 2025
Fears of US recession as economy adds just 22,000 jobs – The Times

Fears of US recession as economy adds just 22,000 jobs – The Times

September 5, 2025
Musiq Soulchild Surprises Fan’s Bride With “Dontchange” Wedding Serenade – yahoo.com

Musiq Soulchild Captivates Wedding Guests with Heartfelt Serenade of “Don’tchange

September 5, 2025
States fight feds over future of school mental health services – Courthouse News Service

States Clash with Federal Government Over the Future of School Mental Health Services

September 5, 2025

Categories

Archives

September 2025
MTWTFSS
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930 
« Aug    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (809)
  • Economy (827)
  • Entertainment (21,704)
  • General (16,879)
  • Health (9,868)
  • Lifestyle (840)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (829)
  • Politics (834)
  • Science (16,038)
  • Sports (21,326)
  • Technology (15,808)
  • World (808)

Recent News

Blending art, culture and native plants at Wakamatsu – Mountain Democrat

Discover the Harmony of Art, Culture, and Native Plants at Wakamatsu

September 6, 2025
The Two-Body Problem for Women in Science – Nautilus | Science Connected

The Two-Body Problem for Women in Science – Nautilus | Science Connected

September 6, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version