Borealopelta is an exciting recently described Nodosaurid that is remarkable because it was essentially mummified - the osteoderms, skin, and even color were preserved in three-dimensions. The fossil was so heavy and so buried in its environment that it actually broke under its own weight, but luckily the pieces were kept and transported successfully. Borealopelta was found in the Clearwater Formation of Alberta, Canada, living about 110 to 112 million years ago, in the Albian age of the Early Cretaceous. Borealopelta had died on the shore of the Western Interior Seaway and was washed out to sea after death, buried on the ocean floor quickly (topside - down) with very little distortion, making the fossil look like how the dinosaur looked when it was alive.
Photo by Machairo, CC BY-SA 4.0
Borealopelta shows the positioning of armor when the animal was alive, a unique thing for an Ankylosaur which usually aren’t preserved articulated enough to know with this level of precision. In addition to that, the osteoderms had keratin sheaths over them, indicating the spikes and other structures were even longer in life than they were in typical ankylosaur fossils. In fact, this probably applies to most armor structures in dinosaurs, indicating that things like Triceratops had amazingly long horns. Since these structures - in both groups of dinosaurs - were primarily sexually selected ones (meaning, they got so ridiculous because other dinosaurs found them sexy), the sheathes wouldn’t have been really used for defense very much, though they would have been capable of doing so.
By Nobu Tamura, CC BY-SA 4.0
Borealopelta was preserved with pigmentation - a structure usually only found in things like small birdie dinosaurs (with Psittacosaurus as a notable excpetion) - indicating this dinosaur would have been reddish-brown colored, with countershading for camouflage in its environment, though it’s difficult to tell what sort of environment that would have been since the animal was washed out to sea. The armor on its back that wasn’t so extensively keratinized (ie, not the big shoulder spikes, but the bumpy osteoderms all over) probably would have allowed it to defend itself, since the camouflage indicates it would have been hunted by prey (why hide if nothing is chasing you?). This dinosaur was recently discovered, and hopefully more research of it will show us even more about Borealopelta and other Ankylosaurs.
Dakotornis is our last miscellaneous Neornithean! Known from the Bullion Creek Formation of North Dakota, it lived sometime between 61 and 56 million years ago, between the Selandian and Thanetian ages of the Paleocene of the Paleogene. Known from very limited remains, it was first thought to be another wading bird - but it can’t be definitively assigned to any sort of group or lifestyle.
Sources:
Mayr, G. 2009. Paleogene Fossil Birds. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Sharks have a secret weapon in their snouts that helps them hunt prey. It’s an organ that can sense faint electrical signals given off by other, delicious creatures. Now, engineers in Indiana have made a new material for electronics that mimics the shark’s sensor. It even works in salt water, which is usually a harsh environment for electronics. (Drop your smartphone in the ocean, for instance, and that’s the end of the phone.)
The new device may be useful in ways from studying marine life to building new tools for submarines. It’s made from a substance called samarium nickelate, or SNO. And it can detect some of the weakest electric fields found in the sea.
Thrips are tiny
insects, typically just a millimetre in length. Some are barely half
that size. If that’s how big the adults are, imagine how small a thrips’
egg must be. Now, consider that there are insects that lay their eggs inside the egg of a thrips.
That’s one of them in the image above – the wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne. It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale.
Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp
– complete with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals – is
actually smaller. At just 200 micrometres (a fifth of a
millimetre), this wasp is the third smallest insect alive* and a miracle
of miniaturisation.
The wasp has several adaptations for life
at such a small scale. But the most impressive one of all has just been
discovered by Alexey Polilov from Lomonosov Moscow State University,
who has spent many years studying the world’s tiniest insects.
Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest
nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For
comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has
850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the wasp can fly,
search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.
On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s
neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a
cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache
of DNA. Without it, the neurons shouldn’t be able to replenish their
vital supply of proteins. They shouldn’t work. Until now, intact neurons
without a nucleus have never been described in the wild.
And yet, M.mymaripenne has thousands of them. As it changes
from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural
nuclei until just a few hundred are left. The rest burst apart, saving
space inside the adult’s crowded head. But the wasp doesn’t seem to
suffer for this loss. As an adult, it lives for around five days, which
is actually longer than many other bigger wasps. As Zen Faulkes writes,
“It’s possible that the adult life span is short enough that the
nucleus can make all the proteins the neuron needs to function for five
days during the pupal stage.”
Radiocarbon dating of the dogs’ bones shows they were 1,500 years older than thought, zooarchaeologist Angela Perri said April 13 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The previous age estimate was based on a radiocarbon analysis of burned wood found in one of the animals’ graves. Until now, nearly 9,300-year-old remains of dogs eaten by humans at a Texas site were the oldest physical evidence of American canines.
Ancient dogs at the Midwestern locations also represent the oldest known burials of individual dogs in the world, said Perri, of Durham University in England. A dog buried at Germany’s Bonn-Oberkassel site around 14,000 years ago was included in a two-person grave. Placement of the Americas dogs in their own graves indicates that these animals were held in high regard by ancient people.
An absence of stone tool incisions on the three ancient dogs’ skeletons indicates that they were not killed by people, but died of natural causes before being buried, Perri said.
Some researchers have proposed that whoever made the first excursions into the Americas arrived on dog-powered sleds. People had reached South America at least 15,000 years ago (SN: 12/26/15, p. 10), well before ancient people buried dogs at Illinois’ Koster and Stilwell II sites. It’s unclear whether humans reached South America via coastal or inland routes. But no dog remains have been found in northwestern North America, where the earliest settlers crossing a land bridge from Asia would have entered the New World. Either those people had no dogs, or they and their furry companions stayed on the land bridge, possibly blocked by two massive ice sheets, until rapidly moving inland around 10,000 years ago (SN: 2/16/08, p. 102), Perri said.
“As much as we want to believe that dogs initially pulled us into the New World, that may not have been the case,” Perri said.
Many fossils of the long-tailed pterosaur Rhamphorhynchus have been found in marine deposits - so much that it has been theorised to be primarily aquatic - like a grebe or a cormorant.
I took the “aquatic rhamphorhynchoid” idea to its logical conclusion and illustrated Ichthyopteryx sp. a fully-aquatic descendant of this lineage. It looks quite plausible; I can picture heaps of them flopping about on beaches of remote islands. I wonder which lengths this line of evolution would extend to - if it was real. Just to clarify, this is not a real animal, but the product of an exercise in speculative-evolution.
BOTTOM TRAWLING IS DESTROYING DEEP-SEA FISH POPULATION
A new study using reconstructed catch data reveals that in the past 60+ years, the practice of towing giant fishing nets along the sea floor has caused the extraction of 25 million tonnes of fish that live 400 metres or more below sea level leading to the collapse of many of those fish populations.
The study is published in Frontiers in Marine Science.
Deep-sea fish species are targeted globally by bottom trawling. The fishspecies captured are often characterized by longevity, low fecundity and slow growth making them vulnerable to overfishing. Also, bottom trawling is known to remove vast amounts of non-target species, including habitat forming deep-sea corals and sponges.
Researchers examined the state of 72 deep-sea fish species caught by bottom trawlers around the world, many of which were exploited to unsustainable levels.
The fisheries were found to be overall under-reported by as much as 42%, leading to the removal of an estimated 25 million tons of deep-sea fish. Besides depleting deep-sea fish stocks, bottom trawling of deep fish does not generate much in the way of marketable fish. Immature individuals are thrown overboard because they generally don’t meet minimum size requirements, while non-targeted species caught as bycatch are also returned dead to the sea.
Just like lions, tigers and bears, certain kinds of seals have claws that help the animals grasp prey and tear it apart. X-rays show that the bones in these seals’ forelimbs look like those found in the earliest seals, a new study finds.
Ancestors of these ancient seals transitioned from land to sea at some point, preserving clawed limbs useful for hunting on land. But clawed paws in these northern “true seals,” which include harbor and harp seals, seem to be more than just a holdover from ancient times, says David Hocking, a marine zoologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Instead, retaining the claws probably helps northern true seals catch a larger meal than they could with the stiff, slippery fins of other pinnipeds such as sea lions and fur seals, Hocking and his colleagues report April 18 in Royal Society Open Science.
The call came one morning in the spring of 2013. The cemetery was a mess.
Charlotte Watson remembers it clearly. She works in the courts in New York City. She also runs an organization that protects a historic cemetery in rural Texas, where she grew up. Named Willow Wild, this cemetery sits on 36 hectares (90 acres) in Bonham. The site is about 130 kilometers (80 miles) northeast of Dallas. Someone in Bonham who regularly visited the cemetery was the first on the scene.
“Something terrible had happened,” Watson recalls — wild pigs!
They had barged in and uprooted wide patches of grass. It looked like someone had ripped out the grass and tilled the soil. No grave markers were knocked over, but “it looked really bad,” says Watson. “You couldn’t imagine [the grass] would grow back.”
For the next few weeks, wild pigs slept under the surrounding trees by day and slipped into the cemetery by night: They came to root in the soil for grubs. These thick white worms, which would grow up to become beetles, live several centimeters (a few inches) below the soil surface.
The invaders weren’t going to leave quickly on their own. Watson and her group had to face some tough questions about how to deal with these far-from-benign swine.
Texas is hardly alone in facing marauding pigs. These wild swine can be found in nearly every U.S. state. They’ve also been spotted in Canada, and many cross the border from Texas into Mexico. In the United States, they have become concentrated in southeastern states. They also wreak havoc in other countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia. In Germany, hordes of pigs dig up gardens in the suburbs of Berlin.
Wild pigs cause some $1.5 billion in damage every year in the United States, mostly to crops, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). They also pose a health hazard. Wild pigs carry at least 30 diseases and 37 parasites (organisms that live and feed on a living host). Some of these diseases and parasites can spread to other animals. They can also infect people who eat or breathe the germs. And when cornered, wild pigs can, though rarely, attack people. Last December, for instance, a feral pig attacked the German hunter who had shot it. The man would later die.
Wildlife biologists around the world want to understand these feral swine to halt the menace. They’re tracking the animals to understand their behavior and predict where they’ll go. Researchers are testing new traps, including some that send real-time video to smartphone apps.
Stopping the pigs is difficult, in part, because they’re canny. “They’re one of the smartest animals on the planet,” notes wildlife biologist Alan Leary. He works for the Missouri Department of Conservation in the state’s capital, Jefferson City. “We have to continually come up with new techniques to stay ahead of them,” he says.
The official tumblr of the Speculative Evolution forum! Speculative biology is simultaneously a science and form of art in which one speculates on the possibilities of life and evolution.
