Museum fossils go to space

The recent launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket marked several historic milestones. The 21-year-old crew member Karsen Kitchen set a record for the youngest woman to cross the Kármán line, the boundary 62 miles overhead that separates Earth’s atmosphere from everything beyond it. It was the first time a NASA-funded researcher had left Earth on a commercially owned rocket. Thanks to that same researcher, it was also the first time that a fossilized snail, horse and early ancestor of modern primates went to space.

Rob Ferl is a geneticist who studies the effects of acceleration and zero gravity on plants, work that could one day help to establish an outpost on Mars. He’s been a professor at the University of Florida since 1980 and is currently serving as the inaugural director of the UF Astraeus Space Institute. Though he’s an avid pilot, Ferl has an immobilizing fear of heights. For him, the hardest part of the Blue Origin mission that launched Aug. 29 was the short walk from the launchpad to the rocket on a platform suspended more than 50 feet above the ground.

“I was worried that walking across the gantry to climb into that capsule would freak me out, and it came pretty close,” Ferl said.

Ferl had spaceflight sampling tubes containing small plants Velcroed to his legs. During launch, apogee and descent, he pressed down on plungers attached to each tube, which released a fixative that chemically froze each plant at the cellular level. Later, when he was back on Earth, he’d analyze the differences among the three groups. Ferl had joined the mission solely to conduct this experiment, but having spent his career studying how plants cope with space without having gone himself, he was also eager for the experience.

“Imagine being an oceanographer that’s never been on a boat, somebody who studies forests who’s never touched a tree, a paleontologist that’s never found a fossil. I’ve been a space biologist for 25 years. Now, I’ve finally been to space.”

Ferl wanted to share a piece of the once-in-a-lifetime experience with friends and colleagues, so he agreed to take a few items of personal and scientific value with him on the journey.

That’s how two 56 million-year-old jaw bones and the shell of a predatory moon snail that lived just before the Pleistocene ice ages found their way aboard New Shepard, cradled safely in Ferl’s personal gear.

Miniature horse and primate fossils selected for suborbital mission

The fossils came from the Florida Museum of Natural History and were carefully selected by Jon Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology, and Roger Portell, collection director of invertebrate paleontology.

“The fossils needed to be small to make the trip,” Bloch said. He also wanted something appropriately significant for the occasion. With more than 1.5 million specimens to choose from in the vertebrate paleontology collection, he decided to narrow down his choices to a short but formative chapter in Earth’s history called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, well known for the unusually small animals that lived during that time.

“It was an approximately 200,000-year period of intense global warming of the magnitude we’re predicting for modern climate change; although today it’s happening faster,” he said. “We see the first primates and horses right at this moment in exactly the same layer of rock.”

Global temperatures increased by 5 degrees Celsius to 8 C during this thermal hiccup. Up to 50% of marine microorganisms called foraminifera and dinoflagellates went extinct as the world’s oceans acidified. On land, mammals managed to get through the extinction event with fewer losses by getting smaller, thanks to a quirk of geometry called the square-cube law: When an object shrinks, its volume decreases more than its surface area. This makes it easier for smaller animals to dissipate heat than larger ones.

Some species shrank to as much as 30% of their original size during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. The oldest known primate, Teilhardina, could fit into the palm of a human hand. Named after the priest and paleontologist who discovered the first representative fossil of the genus, this tarsierlike creature had the first fingernails and shows up in the fossil record early on in the thermal event.

Fossils of this species and its closest relatives have also been found in Asia and Europe. Scientists think they crossed over high-latitude land bridges during this time of elevated temperatures. Their small size and wanderlust made them the obvious choice for the mission.

“The first primates were travelers,” Bloch said. “This was especially profound because this is the lineage that ultimately led to us.”

Bloch also chose to send the earliest known horse—Sifrhippus sandrae—into space, which was similarly small. During the warming event, it likely weighed just 8.5 pounds.

Both fossils were collected in the Wyoming Badlands on property managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

“Public lands in Wyoming record a long history of life on earth. Some of the best-known prehistoric animals once roamed this area of the West,” said BLM regional paleontologist Brent Breithaupt. “Fossils from Wyoming have been pivotal to our understanding of life on our planet.”

Nomenclaturally apropos snail hitches a ride

Portell, a restaurant manager turned banker turned paleontologist, took a slightly different approach when selecting a fossil.

“I was trying to think of something space-related, like star shells and moon snails,” he said.

Though the former bore a suitably apt name, Portell went with a 2.9 million-year-old moon snail, due in part to the strange and fascinating natural history of this group.

Moon snails get around using what’s scientifically referred to as a foot. But there’s little similarity between the sinusoidal undulations and contortions of a snail’s foot with the durable but intractable ones we use for locomotion. It’s also unlikely that you have the ability to expand your foot to four times its normal size and wrap it around your favorite snack to hold it still while a tongue coated in teeth and covered in acid bores a hole through the packaging. This is the moon snail’s preferred method of dining out.

They hunt other clams with the dogged persistence of a bloodhound and the whiplash speed of drying paint. Once it catches its quarry, practically the only thing that can dislodge it is the voracity of a bigger, hungrier snail that wants to steal its food.

The Florida Museum isn’t the first institution to send fossils into space. Small fossils of a bat, several dinosaurs, a crinoid, a hominid and a trilobite have also made the journey there and back.

Given that ours is still the only planet we know of that harbors life, stowaway fossils like these signify something incomparably unique: Earth’s journey from space dust to molten rock to calm sphere encrusted with self-assembling molecules that have accumulated enough knowledge to escape the pull of gravity that hitherto kept us grounded.

They’re also a timely warning. The cause of the Eocene temperature spike and associated extinction event is faithfully recorded in the bones of Teilhardina and Sifrhippus. When plants photosynthesize, they preferentially use the isotope carbon 12 to make sugar and create biomass, even though carbon 13 is also abundantly available. The fossils and sediment deposited during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum contain an unusually high percentage of carbon 12, which suggests that an extraordinary amount of organic material was released into the atmosphere during that time.

The likeliest culprit is volcanic activity ignited beneath the north Atlantic Ocean as North America and Europe pulled away from Greenland. Organic matter from preserved algae, photosynthetic cyanobacteria and the things that ate them were incinerated in vast, subterranean chambers filled with lava. The superheated gas rose in plumes that punched holes in the seafloor that are still visible today. It’s estimated that the amount of carbon released roughly aligns with the fossil fuel reserves we have and could still dig up.