Remains of New York woman missing for 28 years found in wall

By Francesca Trianni

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The remains of a New York schoolteacher who disappeared nearly 28 years ago have been discovered hidden in a false basement wall in the house where she lived with her husband, police said on Tuesday.

JoAnn Nichols was 55 years old when her husband James reported her missing in 1985, police in Poughkeepsie, New York, said. He died in December of natural causes, they added.

The remains were found when a contractor was asked to clean out the wood-frame house in Poughkeepsie, about 65 miles north of New York City. The house was filled with hoarded items and garbage, they said.

The remains were identified as belonging to the missing woman on Monday through dental records.

James Nichols told detectives he last saw his wife when he left for work at IBM in December 1985, according to Poughkeepsie Journal archives.

Her body was discovered wrapped in a sheet and plastic bag, tied with rope and placed in a fetal position inside a plastic container that was found in a false wall, said Kari Reiber, the county's medical examiner.

The location where she was found was enclosed, which might have helped hide the body's existence, she said.

"There might have not been any odor, even if she was there for a long time," Reiber said.

An autopsy revealed that Nichols, who taught first grade, died of blunt head trauma, Reiber said.

"She was struck in the head," she said. "It is being ruled a homicide."

After Nichols went missing, her husband was never ruled out as a suspect, said Poughkeepsie Police Captain Paul Lecomte.

Nichols taught her last class on December 20, 1985, when school let out for the winter holidays. The next day, she failed to show up for a salon appointment, according to the local newspaper's archives.

The couple had one child, who drowned at age 25, three years before Nichols' disappearance.

(Reporting by Francesca Trianni; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and David Brunnstrom)

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Fossil remains may contain the world’s first bird specimen

The Aurornis xui on this fossil might be history's first bird. (Thierry Hubin, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural …

A fossil largely forgotten inside a Chinese museum might actually contain the world’s first bird.

Nature magazine reports that the Aurornis xui specimen was technically discovered by a Chinese farmer several years ago. But it had remained unidentified until paleontologist Pascal Godefroit stumbled across the fossil last year in the museum at the Fossil and Geology Park in Yizhou.

“In my opinion, it's a bird,” Godefroit, who is at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, told Nature. “But these sorts of hypotheses are very controversial. We’re at the origins of a group. The differences between birds and [nonavian] dinosaurs are very thin.”

Godefroit and his team of researchers have written a paper on the Aurornis xui that was published in the latest issue of Nature, where it is described as the "most primitive" bird specimen yet discovered.

So, why is there a debate on whether the specimen should be considered the world’s first bird?

First of all, the Aurornis xui, aka Aurora, most likely didn’t actually fly. Instead, it’s believed its four wings were used to help it glide through forests during the late Jurassic period about 150 million to 160 million years ago.

Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles in California, told Nature that he believes the Archaeopteryx is still the first known “bird” in history, describing Aurora as “something that’s very close to the origin of birds, but it’s not a bird.”

In addition, Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum of London said for now it’s impractical to distinguish which of the two species were in fact birds.

"There's such a gradation in features between them that it's very difficult to tell them apart,” Barrett told Science News. Aurornis xui "is certainly an older member of the bird lineage than Archaeopteryx, and it's fair to call it a very primitive bird. But what you call a bird comes down to what you call a bird, and a lot of definitions depend on Archaeopteryx."

Nonetheless, Godefroit said the Aurora has hip bones that strongly resemble modern birds. And because the feather fossils are not well preserved, researchers cannot say for certain that the 3-foot-long Aurora was a glider rather than a full-fledged flier.

Its length puts it at about the same size as other modern-day pheasants. However, the Aurora is described as having razor-sharp teeth, claws and a long tail that make it sound far more formidable than your average bird.

In April 2012, the remains of a giant feathered dinosaur were discovered in China, marking it as the oldest known feathered dinosaur in history. It was estimated to have lived about 10 million years after Aurora.

In addition, Godefroit says Archaeopteryx is more closely related to nonavian dinosaurs, meaning that birds would have needed to experience two separate forms of evolution to become the flying creatures they are today.

Interestingly, the answer to the debate might lie in the same museum where Aurora was discovered. Godefroit says hundreds of unclassified fossils remain there and at other nearby institutions.

“The biodiversity of these small, birdlike dinosaurs was incredible,” he said.

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