In the depths of the Pacific Ocean, several never-before-seen species of worm have been found that have a remarkable defense mechanism. Take, for example, the newly named species Swima bombiviridis. Thousands of meters below the sea, a tiny worm wriggles through the darkness, its dozens of paddle-shaped bristles moving in beautiful coordination. Suddenly, a hungry predator appears. The worm releases a glowing green sac, and the fish homes in on this bright new trophy. By the time the fish realizes the sac is no meal, the worm is long gone [ScienceNow Daily News].
Of the seven new species described in a paper in Science, five drop luminescent “bombs” that researchers think distract their predators, allowing the worms enough time to wriggle away backward. Study coauthor Greg Rouse explained that a common ancestor of the species had gills that appeared to be “in exactly the same places as the bombs”, from which the bombs could have evolved. “The gills (of their relatives) can fall off very easily so there’s a similarity of being detachable, but for some reason the gills have transformed to become these glowing little detachable spheres” [BBC News].
(more…)
Just when it seemed that there were no more mysteries left in the wild parts of the planet, scientists have turned up a new species of bird–an odd-looking creature that has been named the Barefaced Bulbul because of its mostly bald head. The never-before seen songbird was spotted in a remote forest in Laos, and the find provides a cheerful contrast to the steady drumbeat of endangered species news. Despite the ever-spreading imprint of humanity on this small planet, scientists keep discovering new species, even among relatively conspicuous classes of vertebrates like mammals and birds [The New York Times, blog].
The new bulbul is about the size of a thrush, and sports olive green feathers on most of its body. But it has a bald, pink face with just one line of feathers that ornaments its head like a mohawk. Hardly a shy and retiring bird, the bald-headed bulbul foraged and noisily moved about the researchers during the day, making them wonder how this eye-catching bird went undiscovered for so long. “Certainly one reason is that the bird appears to be truly restricted to some very harsh and inaccessible terrain in Indochina” [Discovery News], said Peter Clyne of the Widlife Conservation Society.
(more…)
The oldest known tree-dwelling vertebrate lived 30 million years before the dinosaurs, scientists have found. The animal, known as Suminia getmanovi, had opposable thumbs and long hands, which would have allowed it to live in trees, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
A team of researchers found that Suminia, which lived about 260 million years ago, had disproportionately long arms and slender, curved fingers that were well-adapted to grabbing tree branches. But perhaps most importantly, one finger on each hand and foot was “opposed” to the rest, much like a thumb. “It’s the first time in the fossil record that we’ve seen evidence of an opposable thumb,” [said lead researcher Jorg Frobisch], adding that the creature was an early ancestor of mammals [BBC News]. The 12 well-preserved Suminia skeletons the scientists analyzed, which were found in Russia the 1990s, predate by 100 million years what was previously thought to be the earliest tree-dwelling animal.
(more…)
The latest evidence that the ancient Indonesian “hobbit” was a distinct species of hominid, and not just a deformed pygmy, comes from the soles of its feet. Ever since researchers discovered the fossils of a three-foot-tall hominid with a chimpanzee-sized brain on the Indonesian island of Flores, debate has raged over how to interpret the bones. Now, a new study supports the theory that the hobbit, Homo floresiensis, was a species that split from our human lineage early in evolutionary history, and developed its strange shape in the isolation of the island. Other experts agree that evidence is accumulating that H. floresiensis was, in fact, a bona fide species.
In the new study, published in Nature, researchers found that the hobbit’s foot was surprisingly long in relation to the body, and that it had other ape-like features. The navicular bone, which helps form the arch in the modern foot, was especially primitive, more akin to one in great apes. Without a strong arch — that is, flat-footed — the hominid would have lacked the springlike action needed for efficient running. It could walk, but not run like humans. Weighing the new evidence, the research team led by William L. Jungers … concluded that “the foot of H. floresiensis exhibits a broad array of primitive features that are not seen in modern humans of any body size” [The New York Times].
(more…)
A small dinosaur that once roamed northeastern China was covered with a stiff, hairlike fuzz, a discovery that suggests feathers began to evolve much earlier than many researchers believe — maybe even in the earliest dinosaurs [AP]. A newly discovered fossil sporting traces of feather-like structures surprised researchers, because it belongs to the ornithischian group of dinosaurs. All previous fuzzy dinosaurs have been found in the saurischian group–specifically among therapods, which includes carnivores like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. “Finding a Chinese dinosaur with feathers is not remarkable, but finding one on the wrong side of the dinosaur family tree is,” says Lawrence Witmer, a vertebrate paleontologist [Science News].
Finding proto-feathers on both side of the family tree suggests that the feature may have evolved around 220 million years ago in a common ancestor for ornithischians and saurischians; previously, researchers posited that the first feathered dinosaurs appeared around 150 million years ago. This has raised the question of whether many more of the creatures may have been covered with similar bristles, or “dino-fuzz” [BBC News].
(more…)
On a Norwegian island within the Arctic Circle, researchers have unearthed the fossilized remains of a marine monster they call “Predator X.” The 50-foot beast is a new species of pliosaur, and researchers say the enormous reptile ruled the Jurassic seas some 147 million years ago…. “Its anatomy, physiology and hunting strategy all point to it being the ultimate predator – the most dangerous creature to patrol the Earth’s oceans” [New Scientist], the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo said in a breathless press release.
Predator X swept through the seas some 147 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs walked the land. The creature swam with its four flippers, and relied on its crushing jaw power to bring down its prey–lead researcher Joern Hurum estimates that its had 33,000 pounds per square inch bite force. Says Hurum: “With a skull that’s more than 10 feet long you’d expect the bite to be powerful but this is off the scale…. It’s much more powerful than T-Rex” [Reuters]. Hurum has said that a previously discovered fossil pliosaur was big enough to chomp on a small car. He said the bite estimates for the latest fossil forced a rethink. “This one is more like it could crush a Hummer,” he said [Reuters]. Hurum theorizes that the 45-ton predator feasted on fish and marine reptiles, including ichthyosaurs and long-necked plesiosaurs.
(more…)
North America’s newest dinosaur had the makings of a monster: razor-sharp claws, a runner’s body, and similarities with the Velociraptor of Jurassic Park infamy. If only it’d been bigger than a chicken [National Geographic News]. The four-pound Hesperonychus elizabethae has claimed the title of the smallest carnivorous dinosaur to have tromped on North American soil. Study coauthor Nick Longrich says that while Hesperonychus was a fierce hunter, only small creatures learned to fear it. “My guess is that it was a small-game hunter, taking down mammals and birds and baby dinosaurs” [Reuters], he says.
The identification of the new genus and species wasn’t based on a new fossil find. The tiny bones—originally assumed to come from a youngster—had languished in a collection at the University of Alberta in Edmonton for 25 years before Longrich and a fellow researcher decided to take another look at them. On closer examination, they noticed that the pelvis was fused, an indication that the 75-million-year-old dino that it came from had reached maturity and stopped growing [Scientific American].
(more…)
With the cause of a rampantly deadly bat illness still unknown, biologists have no solution to the problem but have proposed at least a quick fix that may be able to slow it down. At least half a million bats throughout the northeast United States have died from white-nose syndrome (WNS), a fungal infection that was first observed only two years ago. The fungus is thought to grow on bats’ facial skin and flight membranes, possibly causing them to starve. No one knows where the fungus came from, or if it is what is directly killing the bats. But in caves where it has been observed, bats have suffered morality rates ranging from 75 to 100 percent [Scientific American]. With the cause of the fungus not yet determined, researchers worry about the fate of bats, which play an important role in controlling the populations of insects that can damage wheat, apples and dozens of other crops [AP].
While it won’t solve the problem, a temporary stop-gap is now being considered that would place battery-operated heated boxes inside bats’ hibernation caves, and may give the animals the energy they need to fight off, or at least survive, the fungal infections [Scientific American]. The idea is based on the fact that the bats with WNS appear emaciated, as if they’ve starved to death during their winter hibernation; researchers theorize that afflicted bats rouse from hibernation more often than normal bats and thus burn more fat to stay warm [AP]. When they temporarily stir, the bats’ body temperature and metabolism spike.
(more…)
A bizarre fish discovered off the coast of an Indonesian island has officially been declared a new species, and given a name that researchers say celebrates its oddity: Histiophryne psychedelica. The creature, a type of frogfish, has beige and pink stripes swirling away from its eyes, and has leg-like fins on both sides of its body. But researchers writing in the journal Copeia say the psychedelic fish uses those fins in a form of locomotion never before seen in fish.
When the fish was first spotted by scuba divers off the coast of Ambon island last year, the divers described it moving away from them in a series of short hops, its pelvic fins pushing it off the sea bed with each bounce. “The overall impression” says the Copeia research paper, was of “an inflated rubber ball bouncing along the bottom” [BBC News].
(more…)
In a coal mine in Colombia, researchers have unearthed the fossilized remains of the mother of all snakes, a nightmarish tropical behemoth as long as a school bus and as heavy as a Volkswagen Beetle [Los Angeles Times]. The new species, named Titanoboa cerrejonensis, is related to modern boa constrictors, but those descendants are puny in comparison to their primordial ancestor. Titanoboa grew up to 43 feet long and weighed about 2,500 pounds, researchers say, making it the largest snake on record.
The researchers used a known mathematical relationship between the size of vertebrae and the length of the body in living snakes to estimate the size of the ancient animal [BBC News]. Researchers say the ancient boa lived in the wet, tropical rainforest about 60 million years ago, and may have dined on giant turtles and primitive crocodiles–the fossilized remains of those animals were found near the snake fossils. But the extinct snake isn’t just interesting because of its superlative size; researchers also used it to investigate the Earth’s climate in the snake’s day.
(more…)
The paleontologists didn’t understand what they’d found when they first unearthed the fossil of a primitive whale nine years ago. Philip Gingerich was thrown off by the jumble of adult and fetal-size bones. “The first thing we found [were] small teeth, then ribs going the wrong way,” Gingerich said. Later, “it was just astonishing to realize why the specimen in the field was so confusing” [National Geographic News]. The answer to the riddle, he soon realized, was that the fossil represented a pregnant female proto-whale and her unborn calf.
The 47.5 million-year-old mother represents a transitional phase in whale evolution before the behemoths had fully committed to a life in the ocean deeps, researchers say. The findings lend credence to the idea that early whales — protocetids — were amphibious animals that fed in the oceans but came ashore to sleep, mate and give birth [Nature News]. Researchers reached this conclusion because the fossilized fetus was positioned with its head near the birth canal. While all large land mammals are typically delivered headfirst, so they can breathe during their birth, all modern cetaceans are born tail first to ensure they don’t drown during delivery [Science News].
(more…)
The surprising find of a freshwater, tropical turtle fossil in Arctic Canada suggests that the first turtles to migrate from Asia to North America may have taken the most direct route, swimming and island hopping straight through the Arctic Ocean. This was possible, researchers say, because the Arctic was warmer and ice-free 90 million years ago, when carbon dioxide levels were extraordinarily high. “The fossil record is giving us more and more information about how ancient animals responded to a warming world,” [says] geophysicist John Tarduno…. “They moved toward the poles” [Wired News].
The freshwater turtle was able to survive in the ocean, Tarduno says, because of a floating freshwater highway that led from Russia to Canada. Numerous rivers from the adjacent continents would have poured fresh water into the ancient Arctic sea…. Fresh water, which is lighter than marine water, may have rested on top of the salty ocean water allowing animals such as the turtle to migrate with relative ease [Telegraph].
(more…)
Anthropologists have conducted a new analysis of skulls from the so-called “hobbit” fossils found in an Indonesian cave in 2003, and say their results add more evidence that the fossils come from a hitherto unknown race of tiny people. The researchers compared the hobbit skulls to those of modern humans and apes, as well as the fossil brain cases of early human ancestors. “The shape of the skull is consistent with what we would expect for a small archaic Homo,” said Karen Baab [National Geographic News], lead author of the new study.
When paleontologists unearthed a cluster of strange, hominid skeletons on the island of Flores, they had little idea that they were about to start a fierce debate that would divide the field of anthropology. But soon the researchers declared that the 18,000-year-old fossils came from people who were only three feet tall, and who were actually a different species of hominid, which researchers called Homo floresiensis. “These hobbits – hominids – appear to have survived when modern humans were all over the Earth at this time,” Baab said [The Guardian]. Since then, debate has raged over whether the hobbits were indeed an unknown species, or whether the individuals found in the cave were just modern humans with a disease that stunted their growth and gave them small brains, a condition called microcephaly.
(more…)
On the slopes of the Wolf volcano at the northern tip of one of the Galapagos Islands prowls a pink iguana, which until recently had entirely escaped the notice of the island’s visitors–including the eagle-eyed Charles Darwin. But now researchers have spotted the rosy reptile and declared it a new species, which diverged from the Galapagos’s other land iguana species about 5.7 million years ago. Says lead researcher Gabriele Gentile: “What’s surprising is that a new species of megafauna, like a large lizard, may still be [found] in a well-studied archipelago” [National Geographic News].
The creature was first noticed by park rangers on the island of Isabela in 1986, but researchers only began to study the animal in the last few years. A genetic analysis revealed that the pink iguana was quite distinct from the two known land iguana species, but the date of their genetic divergence poses a puzzle. “At 5.7 million years ago, all of the western islands of the archipelago did not exist,” said Gabriele Gentile…. “That’s a conundrum, because it’s now only inhabiting one part of Isabela that formed less than half a million years ago” [BBC News]. In fact, even the oldest parts of the current archipelago may be less than five million years old, researchers say. One possible explanation is that volcanoes that are now underwater may have been above the waves millions of years ago, allowing some marine iguanas to clamber onto those shores and begin evolving.
(more…)
Three prehistoric turtle fossils dating from 220 million years ago have provided new evidence to fuel the debate over how the turtle‘s remarkable shell evolved. The fossils, which were found in southwestern China, show turtles with fully developed shells on their bellies, but nothing above on their backs. Says researcher Xiao-chun Wu: “Since the 1800s, there have been many hypotheses about the origin of the turtle shell. Now we have these fossils of the earliest known turtle. They support the theory that the shell would have formed from below as extensions of the backbone and ribs, rather than as bony plates from the skin as others have theorised” [Telegraph].
Researchers write in their paper in Nature [subscription required] that they named the new species Odontochelys semistestacea, which means toothed, half-shelled turtle. Wu and his coauthor Chun Li say the fossils support the theory that the lower shell, called the plastron, evolved first, and that the upper shell, called the carapace, formed later. This process corresponds with the shell formation seen in turtle embryos and hatchlings [Telegraph].
The new research contradicts the other main theory regarding the evolution of the turtle shell, which holds that the shell evolved from bony plates on the skin that broadened and fused together to form the turtle’s armor. The entire structure would then fuse to the underlying ribs and backbone. (Modern reptiles, such as crocodiles, have these bony plates, as did some dinosaurs, such as ankylosaurs.) The newly studied Odontochelys specimens, however, showed no signs of bony skin plates [LiveScience].
(more…)
