A botanist has discovered a new species of plant in eastern Brazil whose branches bend down upon bearing fruit and deposit seeds on the ground, often burying them in a covering of soft soil or moss. This trick is an example of geocarpy, a rare adaptation to survival in harsh or short-lived environments with small favorable patches. The adaptation ensures seedlings germinate near their parents, helping them stay within the choice spots or microclimates in which they thrive. One well-known practitioner of geocarpy is the peanut, which also buries its fruit in the soil [PDF].
Posts Tagged ‘new species’
Newly Discovered Plant Bows Down and Buries Its Own Seeds
New “Evil Spirit” Dino Bridges Evolutionary Gap
What’s the News: The oldest recovered dinosaurs, including two-legged predators like Herrerasaurus, tromped around Argentina and Brazil some 230 million years ago. But exactly what happened after those beasts is a mystery: paleontologists have puzzled over an evolutionary gap in the fossil record between these early creatures and the more complex theropods, a suborder of bipedal dinosaurs—including Tyrannosaurus rex—that eventually comprised all dino carnivores. In the rocks of New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch, paleontologists have discovered the skull and vertebrae of a new dinosaur species that may fill this evolutionary gap. Dubbed Daemonosaurus chauliodus, this up-to-five-feet long, 205-million-year old predator has characteristics of both the first dinosaurs and the more advanced predators. As Hans-Dieter Sues, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., told National Geographic, the skull is unusual because “it has a … short snout and these monstrous front teeth. That’s a kind of skull structure for a predatory dinosaur that’s really unexpected for this early point in time.”
New “Thunder Thighs” Dino Had a Mighty Kick
When it come to dinosaurs, names say a lot: “tyrant lizard king” sums up the towering stature and carnivorous ways of Tyrannosaurus rex, and “arm lizard” gestures toward the Brachiosaurus‘s long front legs. And the same is true for the newest discovered dinosaur species, which has been dubbed “thunder-thighs.” That’s because scientists think its muscular thighs were so strong that it used them to boot its enemies.
The official name of this new sauropod species is Brontomerus mcintoshi. The first name is Greek for “thunder-thighs,” and the species name honors the Wesleyan University physics professor and amateur paleontologist Jack McIntosh. This dino is believed to have bigger leg muscles than any other sauropod.
A team of American and British scientists discovered the dinosaur in a quarry in Utah, and published their findings in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. Fragments from two skeletons were found: one from an adult (believed to be the mother) and a juvenile. These specimens are roughly 110 million year old, and the larger one would have weighed in at six tons and measured over 45 feet long.
Photos: The Glamorous New Species of Papua New Guinea
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DISCOVER: 10 Science Hotspots–Where Mother Nature Reveals Her Secrets
First Marine Census Describes the Wonders–and Troubles–of the Seas
Marine scientists have completed the first ever census of the myriad creatures living in the world’s deep blue seas, a monumental accomplishment that took 2,700 researchers 10 years to accomplish. While the scientists didn’t count every single fish head, they now know more than ever before about what kinds of life inhabit the oceans, what lives where, and the number of creatures that remain. They hope that this sound science will produce sound decisions on environmental policy and fishery management.
The Census of Marine Life was officially launched in 2000. After a decade of work, some of the most interesting findings are the delineations of the ocean’s unknowns. For example, the Census upped the estimate of the number of known marine species to nearly 250,000, but still couldn’t estimate the total number of species in the ocean. It might be millions, the report says, or tens or hundreds of millions, when all the ocean’s microbes are accounted for.
A Toothy Bird With a 17-Foot Wingspan Once Ruled the Air
Here’s a new creature for the record books. In Chile, paleontologists have found the fossilized remains of a huge, toothy bird whose wingspan stretched 17 feet across. That means the bird, Pelagornis chilensis or “huge pseudoteeth,” had one of the longest wingspan ever recorded–a wingspan that was about as long as a giraffe is high.
This newly named species belongs to a group known as pelagornithids, birds that had bony tooth-like projections and long beaks. The well-preserved fossil that researchers turned up belonged to a bird that weighed about 64 pounds and had relatively light, thin-walled bones, according to the description published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It cruised the skies between 5 and 10 million years ago.
Meet Concavenator, the Humpbacked Dinosaur
Dinosaur bodies are covered in all sorts of spikes, horns, plates that were used for defence, combat and identification. But sometimes, these body parts are so bizarre that their purpose is a mystery. The latest in these strange projections belongs to Concavenator, a new giant predator with two spikes sticking up from the vertebrae just in front of its hips. They would probably have given the dinosaur a strange hump on its back.
Read the rest of this post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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Image: Raúl Martín
How Many Tiny Frogs Can Dance on the Tip of a Pencil?
Behold its minute majesty.
The micro frog’s moniker is Microhyla nepenthicola. It grows to just a half-inch long or less. It lives in pitcher plants, and it’s the smallest Old World frog species ever found. (The only smaller frog in the entire world is found in Cuba.)
Dr Indraneil Das of the Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation at the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak said the sub-species had originally been mis-identified in museums. “Scientists presumably thought they were juveniles of other species, but it turns out they are adults of this newly-discovered micro species,” he said [Reuters].
Crazy-Looking Redbearded Monkey Turned Up in Colombia
The good news: After decades of wondering whether this immaculately bearded monkey really existed, but not being able to confirm it because of never-ending violence in Colombia, scientists say they’ve finally found evidence of the Caqueta titi monkey. The bad news: Because of habitat destruction, the cat-sized redbeard primate is critically endangered.
The new species joins about 20 other titi monkeys known in the Amazon basin. They appear to be monogamous to a level that puts humans to shame, says expedition leader Thomas Defler, whose study (pdf) appears in Primate Conservation. The Caqueta monkey couples have about one child per year that they raise together, and that isn’t the end of their absurd adorableness. (more…)
16,000 Feet Under the Sea: Deepest Hydrothermal Vent Discovered
Want to know what early or extraterrestrial life might look like? You might try looking at Earth’s extremes: the coldest, highest, and deepest places on our planet. One unmanned research vehicle just tried the last of these strategies, and took samples from a hydrothermal vent plume 16,000 feet under the sea–about 2,000 feet deeper than the previous record-holding vent.
A research team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and including scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory studied three hydrothermal vents, found along an underwater ridge in the Caribbean called the Mid-Cayman Rise. They published their findings yesterday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hydrothermal vents are usually found in spots where the Earth’s tectonic are moving away from each other, creating a weird zone of raw chemistry. A mixture of hot vent fluids and cold deep-ocean water form plumes, which can contain dissolved chemicals, minerals, and microbes. Instead of searching the entire 60-mile-long ridge with the vehicle, the team scouted for chemicals from the plume to zero-in on the vents.
“Every time you get a hydrothermal system, it’s wet and hot, and you get water and rocks interacting. Wherever this happens on the seafloor, life takes advantage,” said geophysicist Chris German of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “Every time you find seawater interacting with volcanic rock, there’s weird and wonderful life associated with it.” [Wired]
A Toothy Predator of the Prehistoric Seas: Meet the Leviathan Whale
Twelve million years ago, one sperm whale was king. Between 40 and 60 feet in length the beast scientists named Leviathan melvillei wasn’t any bigger than today’s sperm whales, but look at those teeth!
As described in a paper published in Nature today, Olivier Lambert discovered the whale’s fossils in a Peruvian desert. The creature’s name says it all:
[It] combines the Hebrew word ‘Livyatan’, which refers to large mythological sea monsters, with the name of American novelist Herman Melville, who penned Moby-Dick — “one of my favourite sea books”, says lead author Olivier Lambert of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. [Nature News]
The prehistoric sperm whale may have eaten baleen whales, and its largest chompers are a foot long and some four inches wide. For all the details, check out Ed Yong’s post on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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Image: Nature
Borneo’s Wild New Species: A “Ninja Slug,” the World’s Longest Bug, & More
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A flying frog that changes colors, a stick insect that’s a foot and a half long, and a “ninja slug” that shoots “love darts.” These are among the 120 new species discovered or described over the past three years on the lush island of Borneo–the Southeast Asia island divided between Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei.
On Earth Day, the conservation group WWF released a report on some of the recent discoveries in a 54-million-acre nature preserve known as the Heart of Borneo. WWF ecologist Adam Tomasek says that on an average, three new species were found every month.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Slugs?
This colorful green and yellow slug species, named Ibycus rachelae, was discovered atop high mountains in the Malaysian section of Borneo. The slug has a tail three times the length of its head, and it wraps the tail around itself when it is resting. From the Ariophantidae family, this unusual species makes use of so-called ‘love darts’ in courtship. Made of calcium carbonate, the love dart is harpoon-like which pierces and injects a hormone into a mate, and may play a role in increasing the chances of reproduction [Guardian].
Image: Peter Koomen / WWF
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Fill Up Your Backyard Bird Feeder, Create a New Species
For one species to diverge into two, you typically need physical separation so that two populations can breed independently and evolve in different ways. That may happening to the blackcap warblers of Central Europe, Martin Schaefer says in a new Current Biology study, thanks to … bird feeders.
The birds are native to Germany and Austria, and migrate in the winter. Blackcap migration routes are genetically determined, and the population studied by Schaefer has historically wintered in Spain. Those that flew north couldn’t find food in barren winter landscapes, and perished [Wired.com].
Miniature T. Rex Was a Man-Sized Monster
Call it an evolutionary beta test. About 125 million years ago a dinosaur stalked the world, and this predator had a familiar shape: It stood on strong back legs but had runty forelimbs, had a whip-like tail, and had a disproportionately large head with vicious teeth. But while that sounds like a description of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, this beast actually lived 35 million years before T. rex–and it was only 9 feet tall.
The discovery of the new species, which has been named Raptorex kriegsteini, has upended previous theories about how the king of the lizards evolved. Says study coauthor Stephen Brusatte: “The thought was these signature Tyrannosaurus features evolved as a consequence of large body size…. They needed to modify their entire skeleton so they could function as a predator at such colossal size” [The New York Times]. Instead, it appears that these features evolved in the early ancestors of T. rex, and that over the epochs the animals simply scaled up.
