Saturday 25 March 2017

It’s not just Nessie — the first dinosaurs came from Scotland

The first dinosaurs may have originated in Scotland, suggests research contradicting the belief that they were from the southern hemisphere.
Saltopus elginensis roamed the part of the earth that is now northeast Scotland millions of years ago. The claim is one of the conclusions of the first detailed re-evaluation of dinosaur evolution for 130 years.
Until now many scientists have subscribed to the view that the first dinosaurs emerged about 237 million years ago on the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which became the southern hemisphere.
However, the latest analysis, which will be published next week in Nature, -read more

New plant species in Romania

Introducing Ferula mikraskythiana (Apiaceae), a whole new species of flowering plant recently discovered in Romania.
Ladies and gentlemen! SOR/BirdLife Romania is proud to present the latest cellular sensation to hit the botanical world – Ferula mikraskythiana! That’s right, scientists have now confirmed that a brand new species of flowering plant has been discovered in Romania.
The new discovery is a member of the Apiaceae family – a large family of mostly aromatic flowering plants, counting more than 3,700 species and including culinary favourites such as celery, carrot, parsley, coriander, cumin, dill and fennel. The specific epithet of this new member refers to the ancient Greek name of the historical region Scythia Minor or Lesser Scythia (Mikrá Skythia or Μικρὰ Σκυθία) where this species was found. A region known today as Dobrogea. Its closest relative is Eriosynaphe longifolia, a rare species from the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Ukraine, southern Russia, and western Kazakhstan. It was previously thought that the latter was alone in its genus, but this discovery shows that, in fact, both species belong to a broader Ferula genus.

New plant species discovered in Tibet

Chinese scientists have found a new plant species belonging to the genus Sorbus in Zayu county, Southwest China's Tibet autonomous region, and their findings have been published by the Nordic Journal of Botany.
Researchers Yin Zhijian and Zhao Mingxu, from China Forest Exploration & Design Institute in Kunming, joined in a comprehensive exploration team to study the Cibagou National Nature Reserve in Zayu in 2013 to find the new species.
The genus Sorbus now has more than 250 species, widely spreading throughout the temperate regions of Asia, Europe and North America. China has 67 species and 43 of them are endemic, according to Flora of China.
Many species of the genus could be used as ornamental plants with beautiful flowers and the pomes.
The Cibagou reserve covers an area of about 101,400 square kilometers and spans an elevation of 1,500 to 6,167 meters above the sea level. Few researchers had collected specimens in the reserve -read more

A new species of hard coral from the World Heritage-listed Lord Howe Island, Australia

The discovery of a new species of hard coral, found on Lord Howe Island, suggests that the fauna of this isolated location in the Tasman Sea off south eastern Australia is even more distinct than previously recognised.
In a recent paper in ZooKeys, Prof. Andrew Baird and Dr. Mia Hoogenboom from James Cook University, Townsville Australia and Dr. Danwei Huang from the National University of Singapore, describe the new species Cyphastrea salae.
"The animal itself is quite non-descript from a distance, although it is beautifully symmetrical up close like most corals," says Dr. Hoogenboom. "But we believe this is the first of many new hard coral species to be found in this World Heritage-listed marine protected area."
Lord Howe Island is famous for its many unique plant and animal species, known from nowhere else on Earth, including at least four species of palms, nine reef fish and 47 algae. However, the coral fauna remains largely unexplored, particularly using modern genetic techniques.-read more

Protist parasites contribute to the stability of rainforest ecosystems

Tropical rainforests are one of the most species-rich areas on earth. Thousands of animal and plant species live there. The smaller microbial protists, which are not visible to the naked eye, are also native to these forests, where they live in the soils and elsewhere. A team of researchers formed by Micah Dunthorn, University of Kaiserslautern, examined them more closely by analyzing their DNA. They discovered many unknown species, including many parasites, which may contribute to the stability of rainforest ecosystems. These results have now been published in the scientific journal -read more

3 New Snakes Found, One Named for Underworld Monster

Picture of a snakeThe quest to build a family tree for Earth’s most diverse snake genus has uncovered three new species—one of which is named after Cerberus, the monster guarding the Greek underworld’s gates.
At first glance, Atractus cerberus doesn’t look especially imposing. The brown and yellow snake doesn’t get much longer than 12 inches, and it lives an unassuming life along the borders of forests within Ecuador’s Pacoche Wildlife Refuge, hiding under rocks and logs.
But just a few miles down the road from the snake’s habitat, more than 1,200 acres of forest have been stripped bare—the footprint for the Refinery of the Pacific, a massive oil refinery that’s been under construction since 2008. The denuded landscape reminded the researchers who discovered the snake of the underworld. And like Cerberus, the newfound snake “guarded” hell’s gates.-read more

New crab species found climbing in Hong Kong trees

- Crabs do more than swim and scuttle across the beach. They climb trees.
Scientists found a new species of mangrove crab climbing in trees along the eastern coast of Hong Kong. Specimens were collected from branches between five and six feet high.
The species, Haberma tingkok, boasts a dark brown upper shell, or carapace. Its long, thin legs are light brown, and its claws, or chelipeds, are a brownish orange.-read more

Sea otters ahead of dolphins in using tools

Sea otters use rocks to crack open shellfishSea otters may have been using stone tools for thousands or even millions of years, according to scientists.
It appears otters learned how to use tools long before other marine mammals.
Sea otters are often seen floating on their backs, using rocks to break open shellfish for food.
A genetic study of more than 100 wild sea otters living off the Californian coast suggests their ancestors living millions of years ago showed this behaviour.
Dolphins in Australia have been seen to use sponges to protect their noses when scouting for fish on the sea floor.
However, this seems to be a relatively new invention, happening less than 200 years ago.
Dr Katherine Ralls of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, US, said they were surprised to find sea otters using tools were not -read more

Major shake-up suggests dinosaurs may have 'UK origin'

T Rex SkullThe first dinosaurs may have originated in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly in an area that is now Britain.
This is one of the conclusions of the first detailed re-evaluation of the relationships between dinosaurs for 130 years.
It shows that the current theory of how dinosaurs evolved and where they came from may well be wrong.
This major shake-up of dinosaur theory is published in this weeks's edition of the journal Nature.
The reassessment shows that the meat eating beasts, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor, have been wrongly classified in the dinosaur family tree.
One of the implications is that dinosaurs first emerged 15 million years earlier than previously -read more

Dinosaur crater's clue to origin of life

Yucatan PeninsulaThe crater made by the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs is revealing clues to the origins of life on Earth.
Scientists have drilled into the 200km-wide Chicxulub crater now buried under the Gulf of Mexico.
They say its rocks show evidence of having been home to a large "hydrothermal system", where hot fluids flowed through cracks and fissures.
Similar systems, generated by impacts on the early Earth, could have helped kickstart the first lifeforms.
The hydrothermal system at Chicxulub may have been active for two million years or more, the scientists say.
Dr David Kring, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, is one of the researchers who discovered and reported the crater's location.
"The impact generated a very large subsurface hydrothermal system," he told BBC -read more

Saturday 18 March 2017

2 New 'Clown' Frog Species Discovered in the Amazon

So Cute! 2 New 'Clown' Frog Species Discovered in the AmazonScientists recently described two new species of clown tree frogs — brightly patterned amphibians from the Amazon region — and this classification re-evaluated how the frogs were previously identified. The clown frog group, named for its vibrant colors, was formerly thought to contain only two species: Dendropsophus leucophyllatus and Dendropsophus triangulum. But researchers looked more closely at the frogs, which are distributed widely across Ecuador, Guyana, French Guiana, Suriname, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia. The scientists used genetic analysis to identify the two new species, and determined that there could be as many as nine distinct species of Amazonian clown frogs in total, according to a new study. [40 Freaky Frog Photos]read more

Saturday 11 March 2017

New dinosaur species found in New Mexico

Paleontologists believe they’ve discovered a brand new species of dinosaur, in New Mexico.
Sebastion Dalman, a paleontologist and research associate at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, says he was studying the fossils and things weren’t adding up. Dalman was finding things he’s never seen before, and it turns out he discovered and entirely new species.
“I said yeah, this is something new. This is not Taurusaurus, this is not Triceratops or any of this. This is a new, entirely new species from New Mexico,” said Dalman.
This new species hasn’t been named yet. The name will come after the discovery has been verified by other scientists, and it will get its name from the location it was found.-READ MORE AND SEE VIDEO

Bird-eating spiders?! 3 new species of giant tarantulas discovered

Three new species of massive, furry “birdeater” spiders have been discovered, with dozens more stricken from the grouping.
In a new paper published in the open-access journal ZooKeys, researchers cleaned house on the genus Avicularia, a group of hairy tarantula spiders that was, in the words of lead study author Caroline Sayuri Fukushima, “a huge mess.”
Fukushima, a researcher at the Instituto Butantan in São Paulo, Brazil, and her colleagues sorted out the genus, which was first described in 1818. They narrowed the number of Avicularia species from more than 50 to 12, including three new species of Avicularia that hadn’t been noted before. They named one of these species after Maria Sibylla Merian, a naturalist born in 1647 who famously painted an illustration of an Avicularia spider eating a bird. [See Amazing Photos of Goliath Birdeater Spiders]
“This illustration gave origin to the name of the genus and the popular name birdeater spiders,” Fukushima told Live Science in an email. “People [in] that time did not believe in her observations, saying that a spider eating a bird was a female fantasy. But now we know she is right!”-READ MORE AND SEE 28 PHOTOS

Oldest croc eggs discovered in dinosaur nest

Eggs of crocodile ancestor
The oldest crocodilian eggs known to science have been discovered in the cliffs of western Portugal.
They are so well preserved that they give an insight into the "mother croc" that laid them 152 million years ago.
The prehistoric crocodile ancestor would have spanned two metres, based on the size of the larger eggs, say palaeontologists.
Crocodilians arose some 200 million years ago, when they prowled the land with early dinosaurs.
Today, they are found throughout the world and are successful predators.
"The fact that they are from the Late Jurassic makes these eggs the oldest crocodilian eggs known so far," said João Russo of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal.
"This new discovery from Portugal extends the knowledge of this type of egg by approximately 40 million years."-read more

Robber fly: Hunting secrets of a tiny predator revealed

The mid-air hunting strategy of a tiny fly the size of a grain of rice has been revealed by an international team of scientists.
Holcocephala, a species of robber fly, is able to intercept and "lock on" to its prey in less than a second.
Researchers used high-speed cameras to show exactly how the fly positioned itself to capture a moving target in mid-air.
The results are published in the journal Current Biology.
Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido from Cambridge University explained that, normally, "when we think of hunting animals we think of excellent vision and speed, but when you're so very tiny, you have a very small brain and limited sensory capacity".
She added: "We wanted to know how [this fly manages] this predatory behaviour."
Dr Gonzalez-Bellido and her colleagues created a miniature outdoor studio - filming the fly from two angles to capture its movement in 3D.
They discovered that the fly maintained what they described as a "constant bearing angle" - keeping its prey in the centre of its field of vision. read more and see video

Saturday 4 March 2017

Researchers discover new penis-lacking microworm species

The microworm of Jaén whose males have no penisFound in the most arid areas in which there is little to no water, nematodes of no more than 1 mm feed on bacteria and help to mineralise soil and produce nutrients. In an orchard of Jaén, researchers have discovered a new species with a feature that makes them unique on the Iberian Peninsula: the males lack penises.

Read more -https://phys.org/news/2017-03-penis-lacking-microworm-species.html

What the geckos are telling us: new species point to conservation needs

Within the seemingly boundless Mysore Plateau of southern India, the newly-discovered Bangalore geckoella (Cyrtodactylus srilekhae) and Rishi Valley geckoella (Cyrtodactylus rishivalleyensis) pace – centred, unhurried, and only prone to flurries of action when strictly needed.
These two nocturnal, ground-dwelling geckos, described in Zootaxa by Dr. Ishan Agarwal, are members of the Cyrtodactylus collegalensis complex – a group of five species that inhabit seasonal forests across southern and western India. Members of this group are small, rarely measuring more than 60 millimetres (about two and a half inches) from snout to vent, and have smooth scales down their backs. The two new species, however, are unique in colour pattern, mitochondrial DNA and morphometric ratios (the ratios of one body measurement to another).-read more

New Dwarf Primate Found, Is Giant Among Its Kin

Sharp-eared researchers have detected the sounds of a previously undescribed species of dwarf bush baby deep in the African jungle.
The team noticed one of the calls didn't sound anything like the 18 known species of bush baby—a tiny, bug-eyed mammal also called a galago—living in western Angola's Kumbira Forest.
When the scientists finally spotted the primate, they discovered that it was 6.2 inches long, bigger than some other known dwarf galagos—in their words, a "giant among dwarfs." (Also see "New Species of Primate Is Named After 'Star Wars.'")-read more

New Species of Fern Discovered in Remote Maui Streams

A species of fern previously unknown to science has been discovered by botanists as they surveyed areas around remote waterfalls along the slopes of Haleakalā on Maui.
Named after the mountain on which it is found, Athyrium haleakalae was recently announced and described in a paper by Kenneth Wood of the National Tropical Botanical Garden and Warren Wagner of the Smithsonian Institution.
Athyrium haleakalae now represents the sixth single-island endemic fern or lycophyte taxon found on Maui.
Researchers say it is uniquely adapted to survive on vertical walls of streams, especially near waterfalls, and has the ability to withstand flooding torrents. Its small size, remote habitat and tendency to grow in such extreme areas may explain why it had been overlooked to date.
A. Mature plants of Athyrium haleakalae, showing habitat preference along concave hollow of stream, Hana Forest Reserve, East Maui, compared to B. Athyrium microphyllum, the only other member of its genus in Hawai‘i. PC: Hawaiʻi DLNR
The new fern species was found during botanical surveys around large, remote waterfalls and rugged plunge pools by botanists of the NTBG, the Plant Extinction Prevention Program, and Haleakalā National Park.  All of the organizations are dedicated to preserving biological diversity and stemming the tide of extinctions.
PEPP is a project of the Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit of the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. Its mission is to protect Hawai’i’s rarest native plants from extinction, and it is committed to reversing the trend toward extinction by managing wild plants, collecting seeds, and establishing new populations.-read more

New species of shark found in Plymouth waters and it looks terrifying

thisoneA new species of shark has been found in Plymouth waters. The rare Crocodile Shark was found on a beach at Hope Cove near Plymouth.
The shark was spotted washed up by Steven Greenfields, who was out walking with his family

Read more at http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/new-species-of-shark-found-in-plymouth-waters-and-it-looks-terrifying/story-30174832-detail/story.html#aVDfRXxQiVgYwbSl.99

Scientists find dozens of new species in Gulf of Mexico after Deepwater Horizon oil spill

It may have been one of the world’s largest oil spill disasters but the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico appears to have had little effect on the ecosystem as dozens of new species of animals are living in the body of water.
A group of oceanographers from the research project the Deepend Consortium have been looking into the effects of the 2010 oil spill that leaked 3.19 million barrels of oil over the course of three months. What they discovered is that sea life is actually flourishing in the Gulf according to Quartz.com.-read more

Amazon forest 'shaped by pre-Columbian indigenous peoples'

Overview of a deforested area in the border of Xingu river, 140 Km from Anapu city in the Amazon rain forest, northern Brazil, 19 February 2005.Indigenous peoples who inhabited the Amazon before the arrival of European colonisers planted a vast number of trees, a new study argues.
They played an important role in the current composition of the forest, says the study.
Researchers found that species used for food or building materials were far more common near ancient settlements.
"So the Amazon is not nearly as untouched as it may seem," said Dr Hans ter Steege in the Netherlands.
Eighty-five species that produced Brazil nuts, cashew nuts, acai or rubber were also five times more likely to be dominant in mature forest than non-domesticated species.
The scientists reached their conclusions by comparing data on tree composition from more than 1,000 locations in the Amazon with a map of archaeological sites.-read more

Earliest evidence of life on Earth 'found'

One of the earliest living organismsScientists have discovered what they say could be fossils of some of the earliest living organisms on Earth.
They are represented by tiny filaments, knobs and tubes in Canadian rocks dated to be up to 4.28 billion years old.
That is a time not long after the planet's formation and hundreds of millions of years before what is currently accepted as evidence for the most ancient life yet found on Earth.
The researchers report their investigation in the journal Nature.
As with all such claims about ancient life, the study is contentious. But the team believes it can answer any doubts.
The scientists' putative microbes from Quebec are one-tenth the width of a human hair and contain significant quantities of haematite - a form of iron oxide or "rust".
Matthew Dodd, who analysed the structures at University College London, UK, claimed the discovery would shed new light on the origins of life.
"This discovery answers the biggest questions mankind has asked itself - which are: where do we come from and why we are here?-read more

Best ever' view of what a dinosaur really looked like

AnchiornisA dinosaur that lived 160 million years ago had drumstick-shaped legs much like living birds, according to palaeontologists.
The feathered dinosaur also had bird-like arms similar to wings.
Scientists used high-powered lasers to reveal invisible details of what the creature looked like.
The research could give insights into the origins of flight, which is thought to have evolved more than 150 million years ago.
Michael Pittman of the University of Hong Kong said the study was a landmark in our understanding of the origins of birds.
"In this study, what we've done is we've used high-powered lasers to reveal unseen soft tissues preserved alongside the bones of a feathered dinosaur called Anchiornis," he said.-read more

Mysteries of elephant sleep revealed

ElephantWild African elephants sleep for the shortest time of any mammal, according to a study.
Scientists tracked two elephants in Botswana to find out more about the animals' natural sleep patterns.
Elephants in zoos sleep for four to six hours a day, but in their natural surroundings the elephants rested for only two hours, mainly at night.
The elephants, both matriarchs of the herd, sometimes stayed awake for several days.
During this time, they travelled long distances, perhaps to escape lions or poachers.
They only went into rapid eye movement (REM, or dreaming sleep, at least in humans) every three or four days, when they slept lying down rather than on their feet.-read more

DNA clues to why woolly mammoth died out

Woolly mammothThe last woolly mammoths to walk the Earth were so wracked with genetic disease that they lost their sense of smell, shunned company, and had a strange shiny coat.
That's the verdict of scientists who have analysed ancient DNA of the extinct animals for mutations.
The studies suggest the last mammoths died out after their DNA became riddled with errors.
The knowledge could inform conservation efforts for living animals.
There are fewer than 100 Asiatic cheetahs left in the wild, while the remaining mountain gorilla population is estimated at about 300. The numbers are similar to those of the last woolly mammoths living on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean around 4,000 years ago.-read more