- What paleontological discoveries in Russia have been made recently?

- The Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences marks 90 years this year, and today we have specialists in a wide variety of organisms — from bacteria to primates. Every year we go on several dozen expeditions to different regions of Russia. There are a lot of interesting and important finds.

This is the frozen mummy of Lemming from Yakutia, and the cemetery of ancient whales in Crimea, and the Mesozoic mammals of Siberia, and tropical birds from the island of Olkhon on Lake Baikal, and a giant pliosaurus from the Saratov region, and various amazing insects (we have a very strong scientific school of paleoentomologists), vendobionts with traces of body regeneration, ancient microorganisms several billion years old and much more.

- Were there remains of dinosaurs among your finds?  Which of their species lived in Russia?

- Dinosaurs lived almost "from pole to pole", the benefit of the mild warm climate of the Mesozoic allowed. They dominated on land for 135 million years, among them were dwarfs and giants, toothy predators and peaceful vegetarians, nimble feathered poison frogs with wings and armored slow-moving. More than 1000 species are described, and many more will be found, including in Russia.

In the 1990s, many skeletons with imprints of integumentary formations that were found in China presented scientists with a big surprise. It turned out that they belong to dinosaurs, which were covered with feathers and down. Moreover, one group turned out to be an ancestor for modern birds. That is, from the point of view of zoological systematics, dinosaurs did not die out.

It so happened that for a long time dinosaurs were not found in Russia. Imagine the end of the 19th century, the times of “dinosaur fever” or “bone war” - in the United States there is a real hunt for bones of dinosaurs, scientists compete in the number of described types of dinosaurs. And there were no finds on the vast territory of the Russian Empire, since only the central regions where the Central Russian Sea was located in the Mesozoic were well studied.

In the XX and XXI centuries, the location of dinosaurs were discovered in Siberia, the Far East, the Crimea, the Volga region and even in the suburbs. Recently, we found in the Kemerovo region near the village of Shestakovo, Chebulinsky district, a mass grave of small herbivorous dinosaurs - psittacosaurs. In this burial were both cubs and seasoned adults. Apparently, a whole family group drowned there. Now this lizard, the Siberian psittacosaurus, is depicted on the coat of arms of the region.

Another heraldic animal was a small feathered dinosaur kulindadrome: it is placed on the coat of arms of the Chernyshevsky district of the Transbaikal Territory. This small lizard is well preserved: there were both bones and prints. In addition to feathers, he also has prints of scales - integumentary formations of various types on one animal!

  • Mesozoic Hall - Dinosaur Hall - in the Paleontological Museum. Yu.A. Orlova
  • © PIN RAS

In Western Siberia, a giant long-necked lizard of the Siberian titans, stegosaurs, as well as a Kilesk, a distant relative of the famous tyrannosaurus, were found. In the Far East, tyrannosaurs themselves lived and their prey - large semi-aquatic duckbill dinosaurs - amurosaurus, olorotitan and kerberosaurus. In Buryatia, a giant lizard was found from the group of tengrisaur sauropods, in the Volga region near Ulyanovsk - the Volgatitan. Recently re-described mountain ash found in Crimea from a group of primitive ornithopods. Small predatory coelurosaurs and a giant lizard, related to diplodocus, are known from the Moscow Region.

The discovery of “polar” dinosaurs in Yakutia turned out to be the most interesting - this is the northernmost point of their distribution in the early Cretaceous period. The remains of not only adult individuals of sauropods, but also of their cubs were found there, that is, dinosaurs not only migrated to the northern regions, but also multiplied there.

- What findings were made in Crimea thanks to the construction of the Tavrida highway and the opening of the cave of the same name?

- Tauris Cave was opened in the summer of 2018. The first fossil bones were discovered by cavers. In the same year, the Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with the Crimean Federal University and the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, organized the first excavations. After them, it became clear that this unique location - the oldest cave fauna of vertebrates in the Crimea and in Russia in general, about 1.8 million years old, was discovered in it.

  • Tauris Cave. At the entrance well
  • © Pavel Oksinenko

It has many ancient species - saber-toothed cat homotherium, giant hyena, Etruscan bear, Etruscan wolf, southern elephant, rhinos, horses, deer, giant camel, antelopes, bull leptobos and eobison, porcupines and so on. Giant hyenas and other predators used the cave as a den and shelter.

But the most significant find was the bones of the giant ostrich pachistrutio, which reached 3.5 m in height and weighed up to 450 kg. It was the largest bird of all time in the Northern Hemisphere. He was a contemporary of the oldest people in Europe, and it is likely that the remains of the earliest members of the genus Homo will also be found in the cave. This, of course, will be the greatest scientific achievement.

  • Fossil bones of large mammals from Tauris Cave
  • © Paleontological Institute. A.A. Borisyaka RAS

- Why do scientists believe that the remains of people can be found in the cave of Tauris?

- Early humans were a common element in the fauna of large mammals, large vertebrates. Like large predators and carnivorous species, they migrated along with large ungulates, on which their diet depended. Knowing the migration paths of ancient mammals, we can also assume the migration paths of ancient people. Based on these considerations, it can be assumed that in this cave or nearby will be found the remains of the oldest representatives of our family.

- Which of the oldest known creatures lived on the territory of modern Russia?

- The very first were, as elsewhere, microscopic bacteria that appeared more than 3.5 billion years ago. Paleontologists find numerous stromatolites - petrified layered colonies of cyanobionts, known under the former name - “blue-green algae”.

The first multicellular inhabitants of the territory of Russia were Vendobionts from the Winter coast of the White Sea of ​​the Arkhangelsk region. They had a skeletal soft body of relatively large sizes - up to 1 m.

  • Reconstruction of the Vendian Sea with Vendobionts. L.M. Tolpygin, 1983
  • © PIN RAS

They lived 555 million years ago and were not much like later organisms, since they differed from them in the type of symmetry, internal structure, and nature of growth. And they grew isometrically, that is, without changing the proportions - for ease of understanding, this can be compared with printing with an increase in the document on the copy machine.

The White Sea location is unique, since the local biota is different in composition from the Vendobionts that were found in England, China, Canada, Australia and Namibia.

  • The cliffs of the Winter coast of the White Sea - the location of the Vendian minerals
  • © Paleontological Institute. A.A. Borisyaka RAS

- Tell us about the work of Russian paleontologists abroad. What successes did expeditions bring to Mongolia, Cuba, and Vietnam?

- In Mongolia, our joint expedition has been working for 50 years. During this time, thousands of articles and hundreds of books have been written. Mongolia has become one of the most studied countries from the paleontological point of view, and dinosaurs are its famous brand. The main discovery of recent years has become the new location of the Mesozoic mammals.

We usually don’t think that more than two-thirds of the history of our own class — the mammalian class — passed in the Mesozoic during the reign of reptiles. This means that most evolutionary acquisitions in mammals arose at that time. Underground, water, woody and even planning forms have appeared. Therefore, the study of Mesozoic mammals is very important.

  • Excavations of Mesozoic mammals in Mongolia
  • © Paleontological Institute. A.A. Borisyaka RAS

So, recently we found that the ancient predators of the gobiconodon had not one, but several changes of molars. This trait is not characteristic of modern mammals, which is genetically programmed. But the gobiconodons somehow overcame this ban, which means that there is the possibility of “turning off” the corresponding control gene.

In 2018, we organized a joint expedition to Cuba, explored the asphalt location of Las Breas de San Felipe in the province of Matanzas. In this area, bitumen is still pouring onto the surface. They became a trap for different types of animals - from a variety of rodents to giant sloths, crocodiles and giant running owls of Orniemegalonics.

In 2019, we worked with our Cuban colleagues in the cave location of El Abron, where we collected thousands of bones of small mammals, birds, and lizards. There are already interesting results - the first fossil representative of small endemic birds of the Todi genus and the first fossil find of local legless lizards are described.

In Vietnam, we started working this year, visited two cave locations. Numerous fossils of Pleistocene and modern species have been discovered, including anthropoid and monkey monkeys, elephants, rhinos, tapirs, pigs, deer, various predators, rodents and bats.

  • Analysis of bone deposits from Lang Trang Cave
  • © Paleontological Institute. A.A. Borisyaka RAS

The main objective of the work in Cuba and Vietnam is historical paleoecology. Based on fossil forms, we draw conclusions about the historical dynamics of the state of different groups of endemic animals in vulnerable tropical ecosystems.

- The Paleontological Museum operates at your institute. What is his story?

- Our museum was created in 1937 as a special scientific unit of the institute. At first, he was on Bolshaya Kaluga Street, now Leninsky Prospekt, occupying the same building as the Mineralogical Museum. The museum was very popular - pioneers, Red Army soldiers, and congress delegates came to it.

The core of the collection was large exhibits: skeletons of the Perm lizards mined at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by the paleontologist Vladimir Amalitsky, presented by the American millionaire Andrew Carnegie, a cast of a diplodocus dinosaur, skeletons of mastodons and rhinos from Kazakhstan, including giant indricotherium, as well as mammoth and cave bears.

  • North Dvina Gallery at the Paleontological Museum. Yu.A. Orlova, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences: skeleton of the Late Perm scutosaurus (Scutosaurus karpinskii).
  • © PIN RAS

At the end of the 1940s, paleontologist, philosopher and writer Ivan Antonovich Efremov brought from the expedition to Mongolia the skeletons of a tarbosaurus, sauroolof and other dinosaurs, after which the museum became crowded in the old house. Academician Orlov, the successor to the founder of our institute, Academician Borisyak, achieved the decision of the USSR Council of Ministers on the construction of a new building. So in Moscow appeared one of the largest and richest paleontological museums in the world.