World’s first known fossil of grasshopper eggs discovered in Eastern Oregon

Earlier this month, scientists described what they believe to be the world’s first fossil of prehistoric grasshopper eggs. The grapefruit-sized fossil containing more than 50 grasshopper eggs was first found in 2012 at the Sheep Rock Unit at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Eastern Oregon. For several years, the fossil was mistakenly thought to be of ant eggs until Nick Famoso, a paleontologist hired at the monument in 2016, had doubts about their origin. The specimen was sent to the University of Oregon where CT scans helped reveal tell-tale clues about its structure that confirmed it was a grasshopper that laid them nearly 30 million years ago in a landscape that’s very different from what’s there today. Famoso is the paleontology program manager and curator at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. He joins us to talk about the significance of this fossil find and the name he helped give it to pay tribute to the first superintendent of the John Day national monument.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Earlier this month, scientists in Oregon announced that they’d found what are believed to be the world’s first fossilized prehistoric grasshopper eggs. The tiny eggs, a clutch of more than 50 of them, were actually found back in 2012 at the Sheep Rock unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. But they were misidentified at first and it was not until recently that CT scans revealed the truth. A grasshopper laid them nearly 30 million years ago. Nick Famoso is the paleontology program manager and curator at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

He joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.

Nick Famoso: Hi. It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Miller: How were these eggs first found?

Famoso: When the eggs were first found there, what we usually do in the field is go out onto a landscape and look for whatever’s on the surface. We’re not digging a quarry, trying to find new things. So our collections manager here, Chris Schierup, was out walking out on this particular outcrop and saw a little hand-sized boulder or rock that was kind of hanging out on the surface. [He] picks it up and says, “Whoa, those are those little weird white things that we find and there’s a bunch of them here.” This seems important. So he picked it up, wrapped it up in some toilet paper and then brought it…

Miller: Toilet paper is the official archaeology paper?

Famoso: (laughing) No, it’s really common in paleontology to use just plain old, single or double ply toilet paper to help protect our fossils. It’s better than you think. So then we brought it back here to the visit center about seven miles away and it just kind of sat there in collections for a couple of years until we finally got it cataloged and started doing some research on it.

Miller: Is that common, to have things you find, just sit on shelves for some number of years before you can actually take it out and really investigate it?

Famoso: Unfortunately, that’s the truth. It does take a long time to get to things. It’s much easier to collect fossils than it is to clean them up and get them ready to do research. Our fossil preparer does a lot of work cleaning them up. Not in this particular case but that’s a really common thing. I’ve been working for museums that have things sitting in collections for over 100 years. So it’s a thing that happens.

Miller: So often I’m reminded - I think I mentioned this in the show before - of the scene at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where there’s this entire adventure and then the last thing is it just gets wheeled to this enormous warehouse, like a Walmart distribution center. And there it’s good because people aren’t going to get their faces melted. But it’s amazing to think just how much stuff has already been found. And we are waiting to find out what magic it holds. Can you describe what this actually looks like?

Famoso: Yeah. So the fossil itself is sitting in a greenish-brown, sandy clayish rock, and the whole rock itself is maybe about the size of a grapefruit. And on the very top of it, there’s a tiny pedestal sticking out of it that maybe sticks up about an inch. And in that little pedestal are what you can see on the surface - about 20ish little white grasshopper eggs, fossilized grasshopper eggs. Now, those eggs, I oftentimes joke and say they look like tic-tacs or rice grains or something like that because they’re pure white for the most part, most of the time and they’re just all arranged and this two inch diameter area in this radial pattern. And they’re all just kind of laid out there in really good shape and you just kind of look at it. You don’t really know what it is at first and then when you start to think about it, you see all these little spherical, elliptical structures in there. It’s just really cool.

Miller: Do you remember when you saw the eggs for the first time?

Famoso: Yeah, I do. I was working with my collections manager and I took a look at the specimen because he was just about to catalog it and thought it was really cool. And I came in and looked at it and was like, “Wow, that’s really bizarre!” And we had previously identified all these as ant eggs or ant pupa or something like that when we found them in isolation. But when we found this cluster, I was like, “I don’t know if that’s really what these are.” So then I kind of had this drive and whatever to say, “I gotta figure out what these things are.” I’ve been a scientist for most of my life so I have a love of trying to figure this sort of thing out. It just kind of inspired me to try to work on this as much as I could.

Miller: My understanding is that you are really an expert in ancient horses as opposed to ancient invertebrates or grasshoppers. So, who did you turn to?

Famoso: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I had a colleague of mine from UC Berkeley, reach out to me about doing a field trip up here a couple of years ago. And because he’s a new professor he wanted to bring a bunch of students up. He brought a student up named Jaemin Lee who was, still is, a PhD student down there at Berkeley. And he was working on plants and had some interest in insects. Turns out that people who study fossil plants also, kind of, study fossil insects. And he looked at this with me and he said, “You know, I think that this is a really cool thing.” And I said, “Oh, well, would you be interested in helping me work on it?” And he said, “Absolutely.”

So then we started collaborating together on this project and we got a lot of good work done. Then, of course, we brought it to UofO. That was a big help to using their micro CT scanner down there at the Knight campus. The scans that their CT tech Angela, who’s a co-author, did for us, just came out amazing and we learned so much about the specimens from those scans.

Miller: Well, how do you distinguish an almost 30 million year old grasshopper egg from a fossilized ant egg?

Famoso: Most things in paleontology, you joke and you say, “Well, just because it looks that way,” right? And to some extent in a more scientific way, that is kind of true. When we looked at the size of these particular eggs, [they were] almost double what most ants produce. And you might think, “Oh well, maybe it was just a big ant.” And climate indicators suggest that it was pretty similar to today. So, maybe that wasn’t really the case. But really what was the nail in the coffin was the overall shape of them being a little bit more elliptical and curved. And that is something that is characteristic of modern grasshopper eggs, that they lay their eggs underground.

Miller: Huh, that actually is another surprise to me though, that you could rely on modern day grasshoppers. In other words, evolutionary changes have been slow enough that you can assume that they’re relatively similar?

Famoso: Yeah, and things like this probably evolved multiple times in different groups, a thing called “convergent evolution.” So it’s entirely possible that this is a different lineage than what’s alive today. But we see the body plan of modern grasshoppers going back over 300 million years. So it’s an effective body plan and it’s an effective egg laying strategy. And nature just kind of keeps coming back to this a few times over the last 300 million years. But it’s kind of cool that we can see that happen.

Miller: What is the significance of that to you, that no one had ever found fossilized grasshopper eggs anywhere?

Famoso: Once we figured that out and, particularly, once we figured out that we had an egg pod that we could learn something about, it just blew my mind. I mean, there’s so much that we can learn about the evolution of these animals and their behavior and their ecology, particularly at that stage in life, being an egg instead of as an adult. That’s virtually unheard of. And it was something…especially when we were digging through the literature as much as we could and we just couldn’t find anything that was definitively even close to this, I just realized wow, this is really important and significant and it has such implications for the entire modern entomology, right? Knowing that this behavior goes back at least 30 million years is just baffling and amazing.

Miller: What does it mean that these eggs were found at the John Day Fossil Beds?

Famoso: Part of the reason that we’re a national monument is because we have an extraordinarily long fossil record from the age of mammals, and the fact that we have such an amazing preservation rate and the type of preservation that we get in these layers. A lot of that’s because of the volcanic activity that we see from all over the region. So that includes down by the Nevada border, over in the Cascades, and other places that don’t even exist anymore. So it just speaks to the significance of the fossil beds themselves and of the rock layers that we have out here in this part of Oregon. It’s just such a cool place with so much amazing diversity and types of fossils.

Miller: What would it have taken for these eggs to become fossils as opposed to just decomposing, let alone getting eaten by a bug or something. But let’s assume that they were going to not get eaten. But how do they not just dissolve?

Famoso: Yeah and that is what makes this even more spectacular. The odds against this are so high that you have to have a rapid burial, with no oxygen in the environment [so that] bacteria can’t thrive to start eating away at whatever organic material is there. Usually hard parts are more likely to fossilize because they’re already partially inorganic anyway. Our bones and our teeth are mostly inorganic stuff. So that’s why we find so much of that. Even the exoskeletons of insects are more likely to preserve for a similar reason. You also need to have a place where there’s not a lot of high energy, like from a stream. So usually lake beds are really good. And that’s what’s really bizarre about this environment is that this is the sort of sediment you would see next to a creek or a river or something that would have flooded.

So it was obviously buried low enough that they didn’t get swept away by a flood event. And it was quick enough that it was able to completely cover those areas and keep all the oxygen and other things out from trying to eat away at these. Now, the organic matter did eventually transition into inorganic matter as water came through and changed the chemical structure of everything and left little geode-like structures that are, in fact, what we see now as the eggs. But the likelihood of that happening is probably a tenth of a percent or a hundredth of a percent likelihood to happen.

Miller: How much do we know about what these grasshoppers would have been? All you have, it seems, are the eggs. How much can you piece together from them?

Famoso: There’s not a lot that we can tell about the adult other than by comparing it to modern equivalents. And there is a species of, I think it’s a rice grasshopper that is known from the Indian subcontinent. But the adults are maybe four to seven inches long, depending if they’re male or female. So they’re not massive insects, but they’re bigger than most of the ones that we typically see here. But it’s totally normal for modern size and those eggs are spot-on the same size as those particular ones. And the way that they laid the eggs is almost identical to the way that those particular insects laid their eggs. So, the idea is [that] they look the most like that one. Therefore, the simplest answer is they’re probably a lot like that particular species.

Miller: How much do we know about what the land where these were found would have been like when they were laid? And now it’s not that far from Kimberly or Spray or Dayville. What was that like 29 million years ago?

Famoso: We do know from a lot of other lines of evidence that this was a hardwood forest with occasional clearings and openings, not very meadowish yet. But these were more like New England-style trees from that sort of forest. But it was a little warmer than now, a more stable environment. But the soil had to have been moist enough to allow for these insects to be able to lay their eggs in that sediment. So we know that it was a little bit more moist and a little bit warmer and probably more consistent from this time of year into summer than what we see now. There definitely were seasons back then, but probably not as hard of changes as we see now and definitely a lot of rivers and streams and creeks kind of crisscrossing this old forest 29 [million] to 30 million years ago.

Miller: These eggs were named after a man named Benjamin Ladd who was the first superintendent of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument when it became a national monument. I understand that you met him for at least a little bit close to the end of his life. What was he like?

Famoso: Ben was an outstanding human being. He was always very kind and he loved this park. He was a superintendent here from 1975 until about 1993 and he still lived in the area locally up until he passed away in 2017. I started here in 2016 and Ben frequently would come in and just see how the new staff were doing. He’d just come back to my office and he’d say, “Hey, Nick, how’s it going? How are you liking the new job? How are all these things going?” And he had a very personable way of approaching us, all of the program managers, especially and the new superintendents that had come since he had retired. And just in general, he was a very kind person and did a really good job to build a lot of relationships out here in Eastern Oregon with a lot of the local agencies and local landowners.

Miller: And now the first grasshopper eggs are named after the first superintendent. Before we say goodbye, how does a find like this tantalize you about what else is out there?

Famoso: We never know what’s out there. That’s why we have an internal mandate here to go out and preserve those paleontological resources and check on them and consistently monitor and inventory all of these sites that we have in the park. Because you never know. Every site that you have is just as likely to produce something rare as any other. I, personally, haven’t found anything this exciting since I’ve been here. But in the last decade and a half, there’s been the first weasel, first fisher, first hoofed carnivore found in this region, on this side of the Rocky Mountains, almost every couple of years. There’s a new paper coming out describing those sorts of things. And you just never know what’s hiding out there. And that’s why getting out and collecting everything the right way and the proper way, as professional scientists, is so important.

Miller: Nick, thanks very much.

Famoso: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Miller: Nick Famoso is the paleontology program manager and curator at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

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