Speciation Quantified: 1 Species = 1023 J

High temperatures near the equator speed up the metabolisms of the inhabitants, fueling genetic changes that actually lead to the creation of new species.

To put a number on it, it takes about 10²³ - that is a 1 followed by 23 zeros - of energy units called joules to generate a new species of foraminifera plankton.

The helps explain why more living species seem to exist near the equator, a scientific observation made even before naturalist Charles Darwin set sail to South America on the H.M.S. Beagle nearly two centuries ago.

"From a scientific perspective, we can now quantify biodiversity in terms of energy," Allen said. "This will help efforts to identify and model areas for protection and conservation."

Using a mathematical model based on the body size and temperature-dependence of individual metabolism, the researchers made specific predictions on rates of speciation at the global scale. Then, using fossils and genetic data, they looked at rates of DNA evolution and speciation during a 30-million-year period in foraminifera plankton, a single-celled animal that floats in the ocean.

Researchers compared arrivals of new species of this type of plankton with differences in ocean temperatures at different latitudes ranging from the tropics to the arctic. The results agreed closely with predictions of their model.

"It takes more energy than all the fossil fuel people burn on the planet in a year to form one new species of plankton," said Dr. Andrew Allen. "In terms of conservation, this really highlights that biodiversity does have a price, and the price is very high."

The paper that this press release refers to is annoyingly not posted on the PNAS site yet, but it is probably related to this work

Cartoon © S. Harris

New Cave Species Found In Israel

Hebrew University Photo by Sasson Tiram

Discovery of eight previously unknown, ancient animal species within "a new and unique underground ecosystem" in Israel was revealed today by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers.

From the Hebrew University press release:

The researchers said the discovery came about when a small opening was found, leading to a cave extending to a depth of 100 meters beneath the surface of a quarry in the vicinity of Ramle, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The quarry is operated by cement manufacturer Nesher Industries.

The cave, which has been dubbed the Ayalon Cave, is "unique in the world," said Prof. Amos Frumkin due to its isolation from the outside world -- the 2.5 km cave's surface is situated under a layer of chalk that is impenetrable to water.

The invertebrate animals found in the cave – four seawater and freshwater crustaceans and four terrestial species – are related to but different from other, similar life forms known to scientists. The species have been sent to biological experts in both Israel and abroad for further analysis and dating. It is estimated that these species are millions of years old. Also found in the cave were bacteria that serve as the basic food source in the ecosystem.

The animals found there were all discovered live, except for a blind species of scorpion, although Dr. Dimentman is certain that live scorpions will be discovered in further explorations and also probably an animal or animals which feed on the scorpions.

Mysterious Arctic Skull

A mysterious skull discovered on the edge of the Arctic Circle has sparked interest in what creatures roamed Baffin Island in the distant past, and what life a warming climate may support in the future.

From CNEWS.com:

Andrew Dialla, a resident of Pangnirtung, Nunavut, says he found the skull protruding from the frozen tundra during a walk near the shore with his daughter about a month ago.

The horned skull is about the size of a man's fist. It resembles a baby caribou skull, except at that age, a caribou wouldn't have antlers, researchers and elders have pointed out.

Its discovery has caused a stir in Canada's Eastern Arctic. Pictures of the skull, sent over e-mail, have prompted residents to speculate whether the skull might belong to a long-extinct deer or sheep that inhabited the land millions of years ago when the climate was much warmer.

Meanwhile, Dialla is considering shipping the skull south to be examined by Richard Harrington, a distinguished retired paleontologist from Ottawa's Museum of Nature. Harrington has spent over a decade helping to excavate an ancient beaver pond on Ellesmere Island in Canada's High Arctic.

That site, estimated to be four million years old, contained the remains of a now-extinct species of beaver, as well as vanished species of deer, horses, wolverines and bears.

Note: this innocuous post seems to have created a bit of a ripple on the list servers. Once we come up with a reasonable taxonomic assignment I’ll post it here.

TA DA! As we all suspected: A caribou!

New Polacanthid Found In Utah

From KLS.com:

Utah bone diggers have uncovered what could be the largest and heaviest armored dinosaur on the planet. The dino appears to be a new species and has yet to be named.

With a six foot forearm and stretching 25ft. the new Polacanthid is three times the size and weight of an armored dinosaur called Gastonia. At more than 10-thousand pounds, even a pack of Utahraptors couldn't turn this thing over. As for a new species, if it gets a name?

Dr. Reese Barrick: "Something that includes tank, or monster, or mountain, or something."

Born This Day: Louis Agassiz

May 28, 1807 - Dec. 14, 1873

(Jean) Louis (Rodolphe) Agassiz was a Swiss-born U.S. naturalist, geologist, and teacher who made revolutionary contributions to the study of natural science with landmark work on glacier activity and extinct fishes. Agassiz began his work in Europe, having studied at the University of Munich and then as chair in natural history in Neuchatel in Switzerland. While there he published his landmark multi-volume description and classification of fossil fish.

In 1846 Agassiz came to the U.S. to lecture before Boston's Lowell Institute. Offered a professorship of Zoology and Geology at Harvard in 1848, he decided to stay, becoming a citizen in 1861. His innovative teaching methods altered the character of natural science education in the U.S. Link

More info HERE

Sea Spider Evolution With Bite

Homology of arthropod anterior appendages revealed by Hox gene expression in a sea spider. 2006. Muriel Jager et al. Nature 441: 506-508

Just when it looked like biologists had finally settled on the true placement of sea spiders on the evolutionary tree, a new study of these bizarre arthropods has come to a dramatically different conclusion. The findings may bring scientists a step closer to understanding how evolution produced today's immense diversity of invertebrates.

Link

From John Bohannon at ScienceNow:

Biologists traditionally place the sea spider within the same group as spiders and scorpions because its frontal grabbing appendages are similar to arachnids' muscular mouth appendages, called chelicerae. But whereas chelicerae grow out of the middle part of arachnid heads, sea spider grabbers seem to sprout from the front. Because the only arthropods with appendages mounted on the front of their heads are extinct species from 500 million years ago, it seemed likely that sea spiders are living fossils that have retained an extra head segment adorned with appendages.

The living fossil theory got a boost last fall with a study of sea spider development led by Amy Maxmen, a biologist at Harvard University who found that the nerves that control the larvae’s frontal grabbers are wired up to the frontmost part of the brain rather than to the middle, as they are in arachnids.

But a new study by Muriel Jager of the expression of the gene called ‘Deformed’ indicates that sea spider frontal grabbers are indeed modified versions of the chelicerae of today's spiders rather than primitive frontal appendages from days of yore. The strange positioning of the grabber nerves may be due to a rearrangement of the brain during sea spider evolution rather than an extra head segment lost in all other arthropod species.

New Russian Mammoth Discovered

X-Men © Marvel Comices; created by Jack Kirby (who should have a truck full of money generated from new movie delivered to his estate but which is probably not getting a darn cent) & Stan Lee. Scan by me.

Fishermen in Siberia have discovered the complete skeleton of a mammoth - a find which Russian experts have described as very rare.

From the BBC News:

The remains appeared when flood waters receded in Russia's Krasnoyarsk region. The mammoth's backbone, skull, teeth and tusks all survived intact. It appears to have died aged about 50.

Alexander Kerzhayev, deputy director of the museum in the small town of Novoselovo, says it is the most significant find he can remember.

Despite the undoubted significance of this latest find, there is some bad news.

Mr Kerzhayev says his museum has neither the equipment nor the money to dig out the mammoth. At the moment, his best option may be to remove only parts of the skeleton.

Mr Kerzhayev admits it would be a pity just to leave the mammoth where it is, on the shore of a reservoir, but he says: "No one seems to care."

Continental Drift & The Rheic Sea

Origin of the Rheic Ocean: Rifting along a Neoproterozoic suture?. 2006. J.B. Murphy et al., Geology: Vol. 34: 325–328.

Like pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle, continents have split, drifted and merged again many times throughout Earth’s history, but geologists haven’t understood the mechanism behind the moves. A new study now offers evidence that continents sometimes break along preexisting lines of weakness created when small chunks of land attach to a larger continent.

Link

Throughout Earth’s history, there have been six major continental assembly and breakup events, about 500 million years apart. Currently the Earth is in breakup cycle in which the Atlantic and Indian oceans are opening.

The new study found that continents sometimes break along preexisting lines of weakness created during earlier continental collisions. Geologists had long suspected that break lines were created by the attachment of pieces onto larger land masses, but Nance and his co-authors were the first group to be able to prove this theory.

Link

How: The scientists used geochemical “fingerprinting” to show that the small pieces of land, which today are found in the Appalachians, were originally created in an ocean. The radioactive element Samarium, which breaks down into various types of the element Neodymium, was used to determine the age of the rock (about one billion years). The amount of each element was typical of rock created in the ocean, away from larger continental masses.

Where & When:

About 650 million years ago – when the first jellyfish evolved – North America, South America and Africa were stuck together as one large continent called Gondwana, with some smaller islands floating on a neighboring continental plate. Over time, these islands collided with the large group of continents and were attached to it in a process called accretion.

About 525 million years ago, that land mass broke apart, with North America on one side and South America, Africa and the small island pieces on the other. The two plates drifted apart, forming the Iapetus Ocean.

Twenty-five million years later – at the time of the first fish and land plants – the strip of land that used to be the small islands broke off South America and Africa and began moving across Iapetus towards North America. This movement closed the Iapetus Ocean while at the same time opening the Rheic Ocean.

Ohio U. press release HERE

Mark Dion's Dino Room

Link

Eric Gelber at www.artcritical.com has a long article about a installation in NYC by Mark Dion. Here’s a excerpt written in ‘Art-Critic-Speak’:

“The white cube is always present but this obscene amassing of consumer crap would leave less of an impression if everything was behind a glass display. These “dinosaurs” have little to do with real dinosaurs, and Dion emphasizes the fact that our understanding of the world is a product of capitalism. Recognizability trumps knowledge. Therefore, the solace we received throughout our childhood from imaginary forms that signify dinosaurs was preparation for a life of impossible longings and willful ignorance. Signifiers are not what they signify and the signified is always absent.”

“…Preparation for a life of impossible longings and willful ignorance”? It goes on like this for some time, most of it only making sense to other art critics.

Thanks to Mike Skrepnick for pointing this out.

How The Whale Lost His Legs

Developmental basis for hind-limb loss in dolphins and origin of the cetacean bodyplan. 2006. J. G. M. Thewissen, et al., published on-line, PNAS May 22.

Ambulocetus; reconstruction of an early close cousin of whales. © Carl Buell.

From the NSF press release:

Reseachers report that ancient whales--four-footed land animals not unlike large modern dogs--evolved into graceful, streamlined swimmers through a series of small genetic changes during the whales' embryonic development.

Thewissen and his colleagues began by exploring the embryonic development of whales' cousins, the dolphins. These creatures are intriguing because for a brief time during development they do sprout hind limbs, which quickly vanish again as the embryos reach the second month in a gestation period that lasts about 12 months.

In most mammals, explains Thewissen, "a series of genes is at work at different times, delicately interacting to form a limb with muscles, bones, and skin. In dolphins, however, at least one of the genes drops out early in the race ultimately leading to the regression of the animals' hind limbs. By analyzing dolphin embryos, Thewissen showed that the dropout is a gene called "Sonic Hedgehog," which is important at several stages of limb formation.

In whales, however, the story is more complex. Between 41 million and 50 million years ago, whales' hind limbs did shrink greatly as the former land animals began a return to the sea. But their legs showed no change in the basic arrangement and number of bones, which proved that Sonic Hedgehog was still functioning. Its loss must have come later. The dramatic loss of Sonic Hedgehog expression was not the genetic change that drove hind limb loss in whales.

Instead, Thewissen and his colleagues conclude, whales' hind limbs regressed over millions of years via "Darwinian microevolution": a step-by-step process occurring through small changes in a number of genes relatively late in development.

VISIT CARL’S EXCELLENT SITE FOR MORE ART & IDEAS

Dinos In Utah

Image Mike Miller/The Salt Lake Tribune

The Salt Lake Tribune has a nice article on vertebrate paleontology in Utah that name checks, Alan Titus, Jim Kirkland, Lindsay Zanno, and Scott Sampson.

Born This Day: Oliver Perry Hay

May 22, 1846 – Novemeber 2, 1930

Hay was an American paleontologist whose catalogs of fossil vertebrates greatly organized existing knowledge and became standard references. Hay's primary scientific interest was the study of the Pleistocene vertebrata of North America and he is renowned for his work on skull and brain anatomy. His first major work was his Bibliography and Catalogue of the Fossil Vertebrata of North America (1902), supplemented by two more volumes (1929-30). Hay also wrote on the evidence of early humans in North America. link

Harry Potter's New Dinosaur

Today paleontologist Robert Sullivan of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission will make an announcement of interest to both dinosaur lovers and Harry Potter fans.

Dr. Sullivan will announce a newly discovered dinosaur species, "Dracorex Hogwartsia", which salutes the fictional "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" in the Harry Potter books.

Astute Harry Potter fans already know the derivation of "Dracorex", as its root word in Latin can be found in the Hogwarts motto, "Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus", which translated into English means "Never tickle a sleeping dragon". Draco is Latin for "dragon" or "snake".

The dinosaur, a member of the pachycephalosaur family, had a flat skull with spiky horns, bumps and a long muzzle. Other pachycephalosaurs had domed foreheads. The original skull is on display at Children's Museum of Indianapolis

Three Sioux City, Iowa residents who found the 18-inch-long skull in South Dakota donated it to the museum in 2004, before it was named. "When we found the skull, all that was showing was a little of the snout and some teeth," said Steve Saulsbury, one of those who found the skull. "But as we excavated more of it, it was clear we had something unique." link

MORE INFO HERE

Kanerva's Calgary Zoo Dinos

Calgary Zoo T. rex (left) © Kipling West; Sinclair Tyrannosaurus, Glen Rose, Texas from here.

In 2004 Kipling West did this painting for the Artists Trust Auction in Seattle. When she posted the painting on her site she accompanied it with this statement, “In 1934 John Kanerva began his life’s work, building the first of more than 50 life-sized dinosaurs at the Calgary Zoo. They were cutting edge, but soon science progressed and made the models obsolete. They were replaced with models made from the Sinclair Oil Exhibit dinosaurs (1964-65 New York World's Fair) in 1983. Today, only one of the original dinosaurs remains. "Dinny", a 'Brontosaurus', was declared an Alberta Historical Resource in 1987.” (factual info from here).

That generated an interesting series of exchanges with Kanerva's grandson.

Paraphrasing an e-mail from Kipling’s hubby,Tom Bagley: “He appears to have been upset over who got credit for designing the old Sinclair Oil logo, the New York World's Fair dinosaurs and the newer dinosaurs at the current Zoo park. Kipling had stated the Calgary dinos were replicas of the models at the 1964/65 World's Fair Dinoland exhibit. This seems to be at least partially true, as the first models few do indeed share a striking resemblance with work that came from the Louis Paul Jonas shop, which did indeed manufacture copies that have been displayed around the continent. I recall climbing on a Triceratops model as kid in Niagara Falls in 1973, that was pretty much identical to the original World's Fair one, and to one of the two Triceratops currently on display at the Zoo. The later fiberglass models at the Zoo are obviously original works, which according to Kanerva's grandson were created locally by a firm called PML Exhibits.

Apparently a book is being prepared about the old dinos, but he seems to remain adamant that the claim about the World's Fair copies is totally wrong."

Read the exchange here: HERE.

And, just for fun, a photo of Tom in this younger days with his brother at the Calgary Zoo:

Photo © TomBagley

Dino painting © Kipling West.

Science and the First Amendment

Patricia Princehouse from the Dept. of Philosophy just across the road from me at Case Western Reserve University gave a speech last week on Science and the First Amendment. Here’s an excerpt:

Science and the First Amendment
by PATRICIA J. PRINCEHOUSE

"People ask me, Why pour so much energy into protecting science education? Why not fight for literacy generally or any of a thousand other educational issues? I have two answers. One is easy: I know about evolution, so it makes sense that I would work on what I know best. The second is harder to grasp. And that is that freedom of religion is the bedrock foundation of liberty in this country. If we allow certain special-interest religious groups to co-opt the public school science classroom, to use it as a vehicle for converting children to religious views their parents don't hold, if we allow them to spout outright lies about the nature and content of science, what do we really have left? If you can lie about science and get away with it, you can lie about anything."

You can read the complete speech at tingilinde.

Thanks again to Sukie for the link to her husband’s excellent blog!

Back From The Dead

Outer Limits card from Datajunkie.

Recent news about the discovery of species previously thought extinct can be found by clicking these links:

Living Fossil Found In New Caledonia

Colombian Frog Believed Extinct Found Alive

Fossil Footprints Found In Alaska

From IOL.co.za:

Scientists found fossilised depressions and footprints in Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve in what is believed to be the first evidence of prehistoric wading birds probing for food, a geologist said on Friday.

The tracks and the feeding marks found in rocks formed from freshwater sediments were 65 million to 70 million years old, said Phil Brease, a geologist at Denali National Park.

Such evidence of prehistoric birds' feeding behaviour is difficult to find because the marks made in the mud disappear easily and the fossilised evidence often erodes, Brease said.

Geologists discovered the tracks and marks last summer, but confirmed the work over the winter after studying photographs and molds.

Denali National Park is an emerging hotbed of fossil findings. A team of geologists also discovered a fossilised footprint of a three-toed, meat-eating dinosaur known as a theropod.

Raptor Claw Found In Brazil

From LiveScience.com:

Ismar de Souza Carvalho said that a dinosaur claw found in Brazil likely belonged to an unknown group of dinosaurs that walked the Earth some 70 million years ago.

Photo:Renzo Gostoli

"The anatomic structure of this claw shows, quite possibly, the link between carnivore dinosaurs and birds that exist today,'' said Carvalho, a member of the Paleontological Investigation Center at Minas Gerais state university.

One expert expressed doubt that a claw fragment could prove the existence of a previously unknown dinosaur.

"This claw doesn't add particularly much to our knowledge of the origins of birds, but it does show that raptor dinosaurs were present in Brazil toward the end of the age of dinosaurs," Thomas R. Holtz, Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, said Friday.

"The claw is similar in shape to that of many other raptors, such as velociraptors. But from there we can't infer it is likely a similar dinosaur.''

Tiktaalik the Fishopod

Here's the link to Daeschler's 'interview' on The Colbert Report; it's about halfway down the page so you'll have to search that page. It'll get replaced as the show posts new videos so watch it quick!

A big thanks to Sukie for finding this for me!

Evolution Banned in Quebec Schools

'They don't want to hear this kind of stuff'

Teachers in some northern Quebec communities say they are being told not to talk about the theory of human evolution because it offends some Inuit people. Alexandre April, a teacher in Salluit, Que., said his school principal had told teachers not to discuss the issue.

However, when students asked questions, April said Thursday he answered them as a teacher and biologist, telling them about Darwin's theory. April said that's when he got the complaint.

"A mother called, and she said that I'd told her daughter that she was a monkey. It's not the way I presented it. Not at all. So I've been told not to do it again," April said.

April said he believes his students in the tiny Inuit community on Hudson Strait have the right to learn about evolution, just like all other Canadian students.


Link

"We are able to talk about evolution of animals, but nothing about the origin of man," April said, adding the school threatened him with disciplinary action.

In at least three communities where Pentecostal Christianity has gained prominence, the opposition to teaching Darwin's theory is strong. And according to one researcher, that kind of opposition is likely to spread.

From CBC.CA - Montreal