Attenborough and empire of ants

TV Natural World: Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants review – another fascinating insight into the insect world Our greatest naturalist gives the impression he would spend all day watching ants fight, if he could. Plus: Still Open All Hours catches the mood of the post-Christmas lull  Tim Dowling Fri 29 Dec ‘17 06.00 GMT The Jura mountains on the Swiss-French border give their name to the Jurassic period, thanks to the limestone strata first identified there. They are also home to a lot of ants, which may not sound that exciting at first; ants are everywhere. In Natural World: Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants (BBC2), Sir David Attenborough kneels in the snow over an ant mound, looking cold. The nest contains hibernating wood ants, waiting out the freezing Jurassic winter, kept warm by the slow decomposition of their spruce needle mound. At the first sign of spring, sentry ants pop out for a look around, but these specific wood ants are more famous for what they don’t do. Generally speaking, wood ants like a fight. The ants from a single colony are all related, thanks to their queen mum, and when they meet other wood ants from a neighbouring nest, they go to war, piercing rivals with their mandibles and squirting formic acid into the wounds to dissolve their enemy’s innards. It is a tremendously costly way of doing business, although the winners get to eat the losers. Attenborough’s ants don’t do that – they are on friendly terms with other nests, and are thus able to form super colonies half a billion ants strong, spread over more than a thousand mounds linked by 100km of trails. Which is not to say these wood ants abjure violence in all its forms. They are quite capable of hunting down a wolf spider, killing it and dragging it back to their nest. The super colony, says Attenborough, “makes hundreds of millions of kills every year”. They will take down caterpillars, beetles, even butterflies. It takes a lot of work to make fascinating television out of what is, essentially, a bunch of ants, but the narrative arc of their breeding habits is indeed extraordinary. Deep in their mounds the queens – up to a million per super colony – start laying. Their first eggs will produce the next breeding generation – a sort of royal household. These ants, males and females both, will sprout wings. After the larvae hatch, the worker ants head out to collect food, hunting more spiders or farming aphids, which excrete a sticky honeydew that ants love. Meanwhile, the identical, but decidedly less cooperative wood ants on the other side of the mountain are still busy killing each other. One gets the impression that if he could, Sir David would spend all day lying on the grass, watching ants fight. Maybe he did. Once the winged royal family hatch, they fly off and mate. The males die almost immediately afterward; the females shed their wings and become queens. At this point, regular wood-ant queens pursue a high risk strategy, infiltrating a field ant colony and keeping a low profile, but the super colony affords plenty of opportunity for queens to start a new life elsewhere, or just stay at home. The ability to film ants going about their business in extreme close-up requires specialist equipment – a one-off contraption called Frankencam – or Frank for short. Frank has come a long way since Attenborough first encountered it 12 years ago, but it is basically still a long mechanical arm with a tiny camera at one end, employing a miniature lens exactly like the one in your phone. As ever, the back end of the programme was a tribute to those tireless operators who endure bad weather, extreme tedium and ants in their pants in order to get these difficult shots. Hats off.  Leroy (James Baxter) and Granville (David Jason). Photograph: BBC/Gary Moyes Open All Hours, starring Ronnie Barker and David Jason, ran for 26 episodes between 1973 and 1985. Still Open All Hours (BBC2), a sequel which kicked off with a 2013 Boxing Day special, has now topped this: the latest series will bring it to 27 episodes. In the updated version, Jason’s Granville – spookily channelling Dame Maggie Smith – has inherited his uncle’s shop, although the ghost of the old man still manifests itself as a greedy and uncooperative cash register. This revisit is no doubt intended as a seasonal dose of fuzzy nostalgia, but over several series, the show has developed an airless, claustrophobic quality, even a faintly sinister atmosphere. The plot, such as it is, involves dreams of escape. Mr Newbold wants to be free of the attentions of Mrs Featherstone, and Madge plans to take Mavis to a hotel for Christmas. But these modest ambitions are cruelly thwarted; everything is restored to its default setting of quiet despair. A joke about unopenable Christmas crackers seems positively self-defeating. And everyone has to go to that terrible, terrible shop, because it is Still Open. For my money, this show perfectly catches the mood of the post-Christmas lull, but I imagine small children would find it scary. Topics Television Last night's TV David Attenborough reviews Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger most viewed tv & radio music film stage books games art & design classical back to top  jobs dating become a supporter make a contribution guardian labs about us work for us advertise with us contact us ask for help terms & conditions privacy policy cookie policy securedrop digital newspaper archive complaints & corrections all topics all contributors modern slavery act facebook twitter subscribe © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

DAVID Attenborough AND THE GIANT ELEPHANT

Sunday  10.12 2017  9.00pm-10.00pm BBC ONE NEW David Attenborough investigates the remarkable life and death of Jumbo the elephant - a celebrity animal superstar whose story is said to have inspired the movie Dumbo. Attenborough joins a team of scientists and conservationists to unravel the complex and mysterious story of this large African elephant - an elephant many believed to be the biggest in the world. With unique access to Jumbo’s skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History, the team work together to separate myth from reality. How big was Jumbo really? How was he treated in captivity? And how did he die? Jumbo’s bones may offer vital clues. Arriving in London Zoo in 1865, Jumbo fast became a firm favourite of Queen Victoria and her children, and was nicknamed the Children’s Pet. Yet behind the scenes, this gentle giant was living a double life - smashing his den, breaking his tusks and being pacified by large amounts of alcohol given to him by his keeper Matthew Scott, who had a deep empathy for animals, developing a particularly strong and near mystical bond with Jumbo. Then, quite suddenly, London Zoo caused public outrage by selling Jumbo to PT Barnum’s circus in America where he travelled with his devoted keeper to start a new life. But while his time in America turned him into star with 20 million people coming to see him, his life ended tragically and mysteriously. As well as Jumbo’s skeleton, Attenborough explores the lives of wild elephants to explain Jumbo’s troubled mind, and he discovers how our attitude to captive elephants has changed dramatically in recent years.

ORIGIN OF FLOWERS HAS BEEN DISCOVERED.

Flowering plants emerged on the planet over 160 million years ago - but it has never been entirely clear how these angiosperms came from their predecessor, gymnosperm ferns. New genetic analysis of the Amborella, a shrub with deep evolutionary roots, shows that there was a genomic doubling around 200 million years ago. The results were published today in Science from the Amborella Genome Project, which is a collaboration between scientists at various international universities, the National Science Foundation, and is hosted by Penn State University. There are over 300,000 known species of flowers alive today, but their evolutionary history hasn’t been overly obvious. They essentially exploded, leaving hardly any fossil evidence about the transition period. Charles Darwin actually described the wildly successful emergence of angiosperms an “abominable mystery.” The Amborella is a shrub found in the biodiversity wonderland of New Caledonia. It occupies the understory of the forest and has been described as the most basal angiosperms, as it is the closest relative of the first flower and has undergone very little evolutionary change since its emergence. Because of these factors, it is very desirable for evolutionary biologists and the Amborella Genome Project (AGP) was formed to sequence and learn more about its evolutionary history. Once the flower was fully sequenced, the researchers compared the genetic code to that of more than twenty other plants. The AGP has yielded evidence that around 200 million years ago, some extant seed plants experienced a genomic doubling, which gave them twice as many genes. The research team believes the product of this was the first angiosperm, from which all others would come. Over the course of their evolution, flowering plants gained about 1179 novel genes that are not found in any other species of plant. With a wealth of new genes and gene families, the plants were able to make unique structures, such as vessel elements. These are dead cells that form channels to draw water up through the xylem. Though some of the most ancestral flowers have 21 groups of transcription factors (known as MADS-Box genes) that encode for the actual flower, the Amborella was discovered to have 36. Most of the results confirmed previous suspicions that the researchers had about the evolution of the flower, but there was a big surprise in the mitochondrial DNA, which is about six times larger than any other plant’s mtDNA genome, at 3.8 million base pairs long and divided into five chromosomes. Researchers found an explanation for the length when they found complete mtDNA sequences of three types of green algae, one moss, and individual genes from other flowering plants. Even more strangely, none of that information seems to function within the plant. The researchers suspect that when the plant becomes injured, it is able to take up foreign mtDNA from other nearby plants and integrate it with its own. However, since it doesn’t seem to have much of a purpose, they aren’t sure why this happens. It is possible that many plants do this, but don’t spare the resources to keep anything that is nonfunctional. If this is the case, then Amborella is still very unique in that regard. Because Amborella is the oldest common ancestor for all plant life on Earth today, including much of what we eat, gaining a better understanding of how its genomic function will allow us a clearer picture of the evolutionary past, and we could also apply the information to other plants whose histories are not as well understood.

125 million year old herbivorous dinosaur discovered

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/new-species-of-125-million-year-old-herbivorous-dinosaur-discovered/article18071294.ece

New plant species found

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/new-plant-species-found-in-eastern-ghats/article18075036.ece

How extinct humans left their mark on us

Most people in the world share 2-4% of DNA with Neanderthals while a few inherited genes from Denisovans, a study confirms.

Denisovan DNA lives on only in Pacific island dwellers, while Neanderthal genes are more widespread, researchers report in the journal Science.
Meanwhile, some parts of our genetic code show little trace of our extinct cousins.
They include hundreds of genes involved in brain development and language.
"These are big, truly interesting regions," said co-researcher Dr Joshua Akey, an expert on human evolutionary genetics from the University of Washington Medicine, US.
"It will be a long, hard slog to fully understand the genetic differences between humans, Denisovans and Neanderthals in these regions and the traits they influence."

Siberia cave

Studies of nuclear DNA (the instructions to build a human) are particularly useful in the case of Denisovans, which are largely missing from the fossil record.
The prehistoric species was discovered less than a decade ago through genetic analysis of a finger bone unearthed in a cave in northern Siberia.=read more =bbc link=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35835126

Worlds first snake had legs?

‹ ›
Nighttime was the right time for the world's first snakes, according to a new study that found these slithery reptiles were once nocturnal predators with tiny back legs complete with ankles and toes.

The study, published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, also concludes that the first snakes likely emerged 128 million years ago in a warm and forested part of the then supercontinent Laurasia. (Laurasia included what are now North America, Europe and Asia.)

Photos: Iridescent Beauties of the Animal World

The research helps to clear up many long-standing debates over the earliest snakes.

"While snake origins have been debated for a long time, this is the first time these hypotheses have been tested thoroughly using cutting-edge methods," lead author Allison Hsiang of Yale University said in a press release.

She continued, "By analyzing the genes, fossils and anatomy of 73 different snake and lizard species, both living and extinct, we've managed to generate the first comprehensive reconstruction of what the ancestral snake was like."

Hsiang and her team identified similarities and differences between the 73 species, and used this to create a large family tree for snakes. They further noted some of the major characteristics of snakes throughout time.

Video: How Snakes Got Their Venom

The researchers believe that snakes originated on land as opposed to water, which had previously been theorized. The emergence of snakes during the Early Cretaceous coincided with the rapid appearance of many species of mammals and birds.

As for what the first snakes ate, the researchers believe that they could take on almost anything, but not super big prey like what some of today’s snakes can handle. That's because the early snakes hadn't yet evolved the ability to use constriction as a form of attack, like today’s boa constrictors.

The "ancestral" snake's nocturnal ways passed on to many generations, so that diurnal or day-living snakes didn’t show up much until around 50-45 million years ago. That’s when Colubroidea — the family of snakes that now make up over 85 percent of living snake species — came onto the scene. Colder night temperatures probably led to the daytime ways of these snakes.

How Snakes Lost Their Legs

As the years went on, the little legs of the snakes got in the way of their slithering and gradually disappeared. Vestiges of their existence, however, still remain in many snakes, such as in modern boas and pythons.

Snakes are some of the planet's most successful animals in terms of their worldwide distribution. While many species are threatened or endangered, it's not for lack of travel time on the part of snakes.

The researchers note that snakes can travel across ranges that are over 68 square miles in size. To put this into perspective, the figure is 4.5 times greater than the ranges of lizards. Many snakes also live in aquatic habitats now, showing how versatile these reptiles can be in adapting themselves to challenging environments.

Photo: Recreation of the first known snake. Credit: Julius Csotonyi

Tags SNAKES SNAKE REPTILES REPTILE ANIMAL EVOLUTION ANIMAL BEHAVIOR ANIMAL ANATOMY ANIMAL ANIMALS
DISCOVERYnewsletter

The Táchira Predator-Tachiraptor admirabilis

The Táchira Predator

An international scientific group found the archaeological remains of a completely new species of dinosaur in the west of Venezuela, as announced Wednesday the Royal Society Open Science journal.

“Here, we report isolated bones (ischium and tibia) of a small new theropod, Tachiraptor Admirabilis, which differs from all previously known members of the group by an unique suite of features of its tibial articulations.” says the investigation.

Since the remains were found in the Venezuelan region of Táchira, the dinosaur was named “Tachiraptor admirabilis”, or Great Táchira Predator.

The group was formed by scientists from Brazil, Venezuela, the United States and Germany. According to their investigation, the “Tachiraptor” could be an ancestor of the T-Rex.

The rests of the Táchira Predator were found after a 20-year investigation in La Quinta formation. The scientists expect that new dinosaur species will be found in the formation within the years.

Two rare bee species discovered on Cornwall nature reserve

Two rare species of bee have been discovered on a nature reserve in Cornwall, a wildlife trust says.

Cornwall Wildlife Trust said the tormentil nomad and the tormentil mining bees had been found at its Bartinney reserve near Sennen.

Both are moorland species that had seen "dramatic declines" since the 1970s, it said.

The mining bee collects tormentil pollen to feed larvae, and the nomad bee steals the mining bee's nests.

Underground chambers

Both species were discovered during a survey being carried out by Paddy Saunders for Natural England.

He said: "The tormentil mining bee needs lots and lots of flowering tormentil very near to nest sites, from which to collect pollen to feed their larvae that live in small chambers slightly underground.

"The nomad bee is a 'cuckoo' bee and goes into the nests of tormentil mining bee and steals its nest and stored pollen."

He added: "It needs a big tormentil mining bee colony to sustain a population of the nomad, so it is a super rare bee.

"The fact that Bartinney Nature Reserve supports both these rare bees is very significant."

Liz Cox, from the trust, said staff and volunteers were "absolutely delighted" two such important species had been found.-READ MORE-http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-29177916

New spider species discovered in garden near Longreach, scientist 'excited' by venom's potential applications

A new species of spider discovered in western Queensland has a venom that could potentially be useful in the production of pharmaceuticals, a scientist studying the animal has said.

The tarantula, which is yet to have been given a scientific name, was discovered in a garden on a property near Longreach.
Queensland Museum's Dr Robert Raven said the Longreach species was one of 20 from across Australia that he was currently studying.
Dr Raven said it was important to know more about the Longreach species because its venom may be useful for medicinal purposes.
"These things have killed dogs and cats quite easily, and anything that affects a dog or a cat is particularly very exciting from the point of view of looking at pharmaceutical applications for the venom," he said.
Dr Raven says tarantulas have been found in the Longreach area for decades.
But he said identifying them as a different, undescribed species is a new conclusion.
"There have been collections that have made from the Longreach area dating back into the 1930s, but we have only recently come to the conclusion that it is a different species to the other ones," he said.
"Longreach is about the point where everything starts - and the exciting thing about Longreach is that it has some amazing cultural things, and natural history is no different.
"It is an interesting changeover point for natural history just around there."
Dr Raven has been studying spiders for almost 40 years, and said more research was needed to find out more about the new species.-READ MORE-http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-17/new-spider-species-discovered-in-western-queensland/5749078
"They are tarantulas, and they are on a protected list with Parks in Australia," Dr Raven said.
"The thing is that people like these things because they are so big, they get them into the markets and they sell them for about $250 each for a medium-sized specimen.
"So as these things are being taken out of the wild, we are actually heavily depleting what's a fairly limited

Giant squid found snd deiced

New Zealand scientists defrost giant squid after catching ,Scientist Kat Bolstad, left, from the Auckland University of Technology, and student Aaron Boyd Evans examine a rare giant squid in Wellington, New Zealand. The colossal squid, which weighs 350 kilograms (770 pounds) and is as long as a minibus, is one of the seas most elusive species. Picture: AP Source: APIT was a calm morning in Antarctica’s remote Ross Sea, during the season when the sun never sets, when Capt. John Bennett and his crew hauled up a creature with tentacles like fire hoses and eyes like dinner plates from a mile below the surface.A colossal squid: 350 kilograms, as long as a minibus and one of the sea’s most elusive species.It had been frozen for eight months until yesterday, when scientists in New Zealand got a long-anticipated chance to thaw out the animal and inspect it - once they used a forklift to maneuver it into a tank.The squid is a female, and its eight arms are each well over a metre long. Its two tentacles would have been perhaps double that length if they had not been damaged.Kat Bolstad, a squid scientist from the Auckland University of Technology who was leading a team examining the creature, described it as “very big, very beautiful.”“This is essentially an intact specimen, which is almost an unparalleled opportunity for us to examine,” she said. “This is a spectacular opportunity.”Many people around the world agreed: About 142,000 people from 180 countries watched streaming footage of the squid examination on the Internet.Reach...Bolstad works on a colossal squid as it is defrosted at Te Papa labs in Wellington. The squid was caught by a fishing boat longline in the Antarctic over the summer and kept on ice until scientists worked to thaw it out to begin examining the specimen. Picture: AFP Colossal squid sometimes inhabit the world of fiction and imagination, but have rarely been seen in daylight.Remarkably, Capt Bennett and his crew on the San Aspiring toothfish boat have caught two giant squid. Their first, hauled in seven years ago, is on display in New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa.Capt Bennett said there was so much excitement about his previous catch, he thought he had better save the latest one for research.“It was partly alive, it was still hanging onto the fish,” Capt Bennett recalls.“Just a big bulk in the water. They’re huge, and the mantle’s all filled with water. It’s quite an awesome sight.”Susan Waugh, a senior curator at Te Papa, said scientists hope to find out more about where the creature fits in the food chain, how much genetic variation there is among different squid types, and basic facts about how the colossal squid lives and dies.Giant...Scientists had to use a forklift to move the frozen squid into the tank. Picture: APShe said scientists plan to further assess the condition of the squid before determining whether to preserve it for public display.Mr Bolstad said it’s possible that ancient sightings of the species gave rise to tales of the kraken, or giant sea-monster squid.She said sperm whales often eat colossal squid and are known to play with their food, and sailors may have mistaken that for epic battles.“On the other hand, we don’t really know what the grog rations were like at that time at sea, either,” she said.“So it may be that we’ve got a bit of a fisherman’s story going on there, too.” 

Spinosaurus-more information

Listen to the Story

All Things Considered4 min 36 secDownloadTranscriptiWorkers at the National Geographic Museum in Washington grind the rough edges off a life-size replica of a spinosaurus skeleton.Mike Hettwer/National GeographicThere once was a place on Earth so overrun with giant, meat-eating predators that even a Tyrannosaurus rex would have been nervous. One predator there was even bigger thanT. rex, and scientists now say it's apparently the only aquatic dinosaur ever found.The swimming monster is called Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. It was 50 feet long — longer than a school bus, and 9 feet longer than the biggest T. rex.“It just goes to show ... that evolution is pretty tricky, and does all sorts of weird and wonderful things. And that's what makes the living world — and even the dead parts of the living world — so amazing.- Thomas Holtz, paleontologist, University of MarylandA replica of its skeleton is being assembled in a cavernous room at the National Geographic Society in Washington D.C. As workmen worked to finish erecting the exhibit, I walked around the beast with paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim from the University of Chicago. He collected the bones and, along with Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, determined that it was indeed a swimmer.Ibrahim describes the place in North Africa where this spinosaurus lived 97 million years ago as a "river of giants.""Big predatory dinosaurs, giant fish, crocodile-like predators. In fact, the place was really pretty predator-heavy, so I call it the most dangerous place in the history of our planet," Sereno says.It was swampy, with many rivers. Now it's a desert, where Ibrahim looks for dinosaur bones. But he didn't find spinosaurus's bones, exactly. They found him.But first, more about the dinosaur: It takes up most of the room. Its jaw is long, with interlocking front teeth like a crocodile's — good for catching fish, very big fish. Then there are the pits in the bones of its jaw. "These openings house pressure receptors to detect movement of prey underwater," says Ibrahim.iWho's your daddy? A model of the Cretaceous predator spinosaurus gets rock star treatment during a photo shoot for the October issue of National Geographic.Mike Hettwer/National GeographicSpinosaurus's nostrils are back near its eyes — better for breathing while half-submerged. It has a long, serpentine neck. Its long front legs are tipped with footlong claws. "Probably used to tear apart prey into bite-size chunks," Ibrahim says gleefully. Along its back, the dinosaur has 7-foot-tall bony spines that stick up like a picket fence. In life, they supported an enormous sail-like crest.The hips and back legs are narrow and small, considering all the weight they carried. On land, spinosaurus probably shuffled on all fours — a lousy walker, but a great swimmer. Plus its bones are solid, not hollow like most dinosaurs'. That suggests that, as in whales and penguins, the bones of spinosaurus acted as ballast. And its feet are wide, like a wading bird's.Ibrahim's voice in describing this creature has a new-father's pride. Actually, not so new — as he writes in this week's issue of the journal Science, he and his team spent years examining each of the skeletal characteristics that led them to conclude that this dinosaur was made for swimming.Now, it was well-known that big swimming reptiles existed in prehistoric times. But dinosaurs are a very different order of animal than reptiles, and nobody had an inkling that dinosaurs could swim until this one turned up.In fact, spinosaurus bones were first discovered 100 years ago, by a German scientist in Egypt. The find puzzled researchers. "A lot of the skeleton was missing," explainsThomas Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland. "It was sort of a mystery dinosaur, and the mystery was furthered when all the specimens were destroyed during World War II."

Science

The 500-Pound 'Chicken From Hell' Likely Ate Whatever It Wanted

They had been in a museum in Munich that was bombed by Allied planes. Scientists were left with just drawings and, over time, a few more bones that surfaced in Africa. Until recently, paleontologists figured the creature must have lived on land and snagged fish out of rivers — like a giant heron with teeth.

Science

Maybe Dinosaurs Were A Coldblooded, Warmblooded Mix

"But we were wrong," Holtz says. "It just goes to show, you know, that evolution is pretty tricky and it does all sorts of weird and wonderful things. And that's what makes the living world — and even the dead parts of the living world — so amazing."

Science

Fossil Fans Get Their Dino-Fix Before Smithsonian Renovates

But no more amazing than the way Ibrahim found this new specimen. It started in 2008 in Morocco. A local fossil hunter showed him an odd chunk of bone, a dinosaur bone, but one that puzzled him. Ibrahim didn't make much of it at the time. Then, several years later, he was visiting colleagues at a museum in Italy."My Italian colleagues said, 'We have something you have to see. It just arrived here. It's a partial skeleton; it was spirited out of North Africa. We don't really know where it came from.' "Ibrahim looked at the bones. "And my jaw just dropped," he remembers. "There were just long spines, skull bones, leg bones, and I thought, 'This is amazing.' "He saw something familiar in the bones. "It looked exactly like that chunk of bone I had seen in Morocco several years earlier," he says. "And I thought, 'You know what? This could actually be the same skeleton.' And so I thought, 'All I need to do now is travel back to Morocco and find this one man in the middle of the Sahara.' "Ibrahim laughs when he remembers this; his Italian colleagues thought he was crazy.But if he could find that fossil hunter, maybe he could find the rest of the bones. So, during several trips to Morocco, Ibrahim searched for the guy with the fossils. No luck. He didn't know the man's name, only that he had a mustache. Then last year, Ibrahim was drinking a cup of mint tea in a Moroccan cafe. He says he was ready to quit searching. He looked up and there was a man dressed in white walking by — with the mustache. It was the fossil hunter.Ibrahim stopped him, and begged the man to show him where that first chunk of bone had come from. He said the Italians wanted to repatriate the bones in their possession to the right place — he had to be sure this was, indeed, the source of those bones.The man agreed to drive Ibrahim into the desert. They stopped and climbed partway up a mountain, to a hole that had been dug in the rock. And there was the rest of the dinosaur's skeleton.Scientists now know what the real Spinosaurus aegyptiacus looked like — and that it swam. The Moroccan and Italian bones have been reunited, and will go back to Morocco. And now we know that Earth, apparently, once was home to a 50-foot, swimming, carnivorous dinosaur.dinosaurstyrannosaurus rexpaleontology

WHITBAIT FOUND DEAD IN THOUSANDS

Bemused walkers found "hundreds of thousands" of whitebait fish trapped in a tidal pool.
It is the second time a shoal has been trapped in the same pool, near Plymouth, in less than two weeks.
And unusually high numbers of whitebait have also been causing the sea off west Dorset to bubble as mackerel chase the whitebait for food, causing them to jump in the air.
Peter Wilkes and his fiancé Carla Hosking were out enjoying a Sunday morning stroll in Plymouth with their 20-month-old son James when they thought they saw the pool at Firestone Bay looking as if it had "iced over".
On closer inspection, they found that it was the reflection of thousands of small dead fish which had become trapped in the shallow water.
"We saw the pond and it looked almost iced-over," said railway station worker Mr Wilkes. "A lot of people were taking photos and we went down to take a closer look. There were little girls trying to push the fish back into the tidal pool to keep them alive. There were hundreds of thousands of whitebait. I would say about 90 per cent of them were dead. Some were still flapping about on the concrete or swimming about over the dead ones lying at the bottom of the pool. I don't think the others will survive very long.
"A lot of people were saying the fish might have run out of oxygen. We did notice there was a froth around a lot of the fish.."
Guy Baker, communications officer for the Marine Biological Association, said sand eels had been known to be caught in the tidal pool. He said this was the season for mackerel to be hunting small fish and could have chased them into the shallow waters. Spring tides are also bigger at this time of year, so the fish may have simpl

Read more: http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Onlookers-confusion-thousands-whitebait-fish/story-22818756-detail/story.html#ixzz3Bt6K5WKT

N.L. fossil shows earliest evidence ever of animals with muscles

A fossil that was discovered on Newfoundland could be the oldest complex animal and the earliest evidence of muscular tissue in the world.
The fossil, dating from about 560 million years ago, was discovered in the Port Union area on the Bonavista Peninsula in 2009 by a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and Memorial University in St. John's.

This artist reconstruction of the organism shows its bundles of fibres in a four-fold symmetrical arrangement, similar to modern Cnidarians like jellyfish and sea anemones. (Submitted by Martin Brasier)

"It's amazing, because it is completely different from everything we'd seen before in the rocks in Newfoundland, both down at Mistaken Point [on the southern Avalon] and up on the Bonavista Peninsula," said Jack Matthews, an Oxford PhD candidate in geology. "Whereas everything else is what we call a frondose organism, this is completely different.  "And we believe we've interpreted that it is a Cnidarian, so, of a similar nature to modern jellyfish, and corals, and sea anemones."-READ MORE

ECOVIEWS: How do scientists know they have found a new species? Read more: ECOVIEWS: How do scientists know they have found a new species? |

Q. I thought we were losing species worldwide, but I have read about DNA being used to discover a new salamander, lizard, flower, etc. How do scientists know when they have found a new species not already known to science?

A. We are indeed losing species on a global scale at a much faster rate than we discover new ones. Reports of discoveries of new species can be misleading, because all of them were already here. They just had not yet been identified by humans, which leads to the answer to the question.

The first step in discovering a new species is knowing which ones have already been documented. It typically takes an expert in a particular taxonomic group to recognize a species as new to science. Ecologists who explore regions where they are not familiar with the plants and animals read field guides about the flora and fauna. Such books have photographs or drawings and written descriptions of size, color, and general appearance of species. They include information about geographic ranges and the ecology of species. Examining museum specimens to learn about variations among species in a taxonomic group can also be important, as can a thorough review of scientific journals that might refer to the group of organisms in question.

The most likely places for new species to be discovered are unpopulated regions, especially in the tropics. For example, new species of bats are continuing to be described in Madagascar; a new monkey has been found in Tanzania; and a new species in the violet family was reported this year in the Philippines. To know the species were new, the scientists describing them had to be familiar with the particular taxonomic group and know traits of every known species in the world that could be related to it.

Read more: ECOVIEWS: How do scientists know they have found a new species? | Aiken Standard
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Exotic grains from cosmos identified

Scientists may have identified the first known dust particles from outside our Solar System, in samples returned to Earth by a Nasa space mission.
A team of scientists, with the help of more than 30,000 worldwide citizens, has identified seven exotic grains.
The material was captured by the Stardust spacecraft and brought back to Earth in 2006.
The region between stars - interstellar space - is not entirely empty, but is filled with microscopic particles.
The material that forms interstellar dust is a product of the aeons of stellar birth, evolution and death that went into building our cosmic neighbourhood.
These molecules originated in the extremely hot interior of other stars and were expelled into interstellar space where they condensed into tiny rocks as they cooled down.
Having these particles on Earth means that scientists can characterise them in unprecedented detail. The composition and structure of the collected samples could help explain the origin and evolution of dust in space.-READ MORE

Laquintasaura Venezuelae: Bird-Hipped Dinosaur is First to Be Discovered in Venezuela

A new dinosaur species has been discovered in Venezuela – the first ever to have been found in the South American country.

Laquintasaura venezuelae was a dog-sized 'bird-hipped' dinosaur that lived shortly after the major extinction at the end of the Triassic Period, 201 million years ago.
Identified by scientists at the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Zürich, bones from four L. venezuelae were found together in the La Quinta Formation in Venezuela.
The creatures found ranged from 3 to 12 years old. Scientists believe they lived in small groups, making it the earliest example of social behaviour among ornithischians, or bird-hipped dinosaurs, which includes species like the stegosaurus and iguanodon.
Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra, co-author and palaeontologist at University of Zürich, said the known history of bird-hipped dinosaurs has many gaps as few specimens have been found: "This early -READ MORE

UK's deep sea mountain life filmed

Scientists have sent a remotely operated vehicle to film one of the UK's three undersea mountains, known as seamounts.

The Hebrides Terrace Seamount, off the west coast of Scotland, is higher than Ben Nevis, but its peak is 1,000m beneath the surface.
Prof J Murray Roberts, from Heriot-Watt University, and his colleagues filmed more than 100 species on its slopes.
They published their findings in the open access journal Scientific Reports.

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Corals will be exposed to more acidic seawater and their skeletons will dissolve away”

Prof J Murray Roberts Heriot-Watt University

Prof Roberts has now shared the footage from the dive exclusively with the BBC.

He and his team used a remotely operated submersible vehicle to explore and film the aquatic mountain slopes.
"These are vast structures in the ocean," Prof Roberts explained to the BBC.
"They're exciting because they grow up through the ocean and have steep sloping sides. [When] the currents hit the sides of the seamount and they stir up nutrients, they become really productive areas."
Prof Roberts and his colleagues watched from a ship-based laboratory while their rover explored the depths. READ MORE AND WATCH VIDEO LINK

New jellyfish discovered: giant venomous species found off Australia

READ MORE-WA specimen of new Irukandji jellyfish sparks particular scientific interest because it has no

An example of the Keesingia gigas jellyfish. Photograph: John Totterdell/MIRG Australia

A giant and extremely venomous jellyfish found off Western Australia’s north-west coast has researchers stumped because it appears to have no tentacles.
Keesingia gigas is one of two new species of Irukandji jellyfish recently discovered by the director of Marine Stinger Advisory Services, Lisa-ann Gershwin.
While Irukandji jellyfish are normally only the size of a fingernail, Keesingia gigas is the length of an arm and believed to cause the potentially deadly Irukandji syndrome.
The condition can cause pain, nausea, vomiting and in extreme cases, stroke and heart failure.
Gershwin said Keesingia gigas was first photographed in the 1980s, but a specimen was not captured until 2013, near Shark Bay by the marine scientist John Keesing, after whom the jellyfish is named.
Gershwin said in all of the photos the jellyfish did not appear to have tentacles and that the specimen was also captured without them.
“Jellyfish always have tentacles ... that’s how they catch their food,” she said. “The tentacles are where they concentrate their stinging cells.
“Some of the people working with it through the years actually got stung by it and experienced rather distressing Irukandji syndrome.”

Bolivia’s golden bat: one of six new species found by the Smithsonian’s Bat Detective

If you love new animal species and have an Internet connection, chances are you have already seen the beautiful new golden bat species, Myotis midastactus. What you may not know is that the striking, newly described bat species is just one of more than six species being described by Ricardo Moratelli, a scientist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Brazil) and post-doctoral fellow at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
Smithsonian Science asks Moratelli what it’s like to be a bat detective searching for new species.

Q: Is it difficult finding new bat species?

Moratelli: It can be. I have been working for the last 10 years on the taxonomy of bats of the genus Myotis, which is the most diverse genus of bats in the world. The genus is distributed worldwide and there are more than 110 species. However, my research is focused on the Neotropical (Latin American) species.READ MORE