The Science of Biological Evolution (no politics or religion)

I'd guess food preservation. I recently watched a youtube series on the Legions and how they were quite well supplied. However, I'm sure a soldier would want to preserve what he couldn't immediately eat, especially that nice fat mutton from the flock his cohort stole on their invasion route. Thrown into a bag of salt in their pack, it would keep for days, maybe weeks.

And sodium won't be as detrimental to your blood pressure, as crypto will!

Salt as an investment?
I'd suggest taking that with 'a grain of salt'.
One grain only.

I feel my observation that the current salary of a corporal in the British army would be about 40 tonnes of salt may have got missed in the fold, which would be a shame.

It got missed in the salt mines of time.

existential reffing gets my attn .

Paleontologists solve decades’ old mystery about plesiosaur skin texture

Scaly or smooth? That has long been one of paleontology’s enduring questions about the plesiosaur. While experts know details about its diet, size, and general habitat, the aquatic reptile’s skin characteristics have remained a mystery. But for the first time ever, researchers at Sweden’s Lund University have analyzed a rare plesiosaur specimen’s fossilized soft tissue samples, and now believe they can finally answer the decades’ old question: In actuality, the 183-million-year-old dinosaur relative’s skin had a bit of both.

“The classic life reconstruction of plesiosaurs (Plesiosauria), incorporating a long neck, compact body, and four propulsive flippers, has not changed for nearly 200 years. However, the actual external appearance of these famous Mesozoic reptiles is largely unknown,” explained the team in their paper published on February 6th in the journal, Current Biology.

Paleontologists have previously examined fossilized soft tissues from other prehistoric marine reptiles, including ancient sea turtles and ichthyosaurs. With only around eight known fossil tissue samples to date, plesiosaurs have proven much more difficult to study. As New Scientist explained on Thursday, this is especially true given that most examples belong to museums that prohibit the use of potentially destructive imaging tools. But paleontologists finally got their chance with a fossil set known as MH7—although it took years to get to that point.

MH7’s 85-year-journey from excavation to laboratory analysis began in 1940, when German paleontologists first discovered its fossils inside a quarry. Due to the ongoing dangers of World War II, MH7 was subsequently reburied in a garden to protect it from accidental damage. Researchers exhumed the fossils yet again after the end of the war, but this time transported them into safekeeping at Urwelt-Museum Hauff in the nearby town of Holzmaden.

In 2020, the Lund University paleontologists finally arranged to assemble and prepare the 183-million-year-old, 11.5-foot-long MH7 for its first-ever detailed tissue examination. Researchers first treated and sterilized thin sections of fossil using a mixture of ultrapure water and ethanol. They then placed the demineralized samples onto slides, and examined the selections using techniques including transmitted light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, electron backscatter diffraction, and infrared microspectroscopy.

The team originally theorized the skin might possess the dolphinlike, scaleless qualities of an ichthyosaur, but were surprised at what they found: areas of both scaly and smooth skin. More specifically, it appears that its flippers featured scaly sections, while the rest of its body and tail was scaleless. Researchers theorize the textured flippers allowed the animal to better move along the seafloor while hunting for prey, and the smoother portions reduced drag while swimming. Taken altogether, it’s likely that plesiosaur skin looked like a mixture of what can be found on today’s green sea and leatherback turtles.

It’s a combination that paid off for the plesiosaur. Although the tail skin suggests a smooth body, the scales “along the trailing edges of the flippers undoubtedly fulfilled some functional role,” the team wrote, adding that the overall anatomy “conferred a selective advantage for plesiosaurs during their protracted evolution as one of the most successful” ancient flippered reptiles.