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.

Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art_ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment/

Scientists have identified some of the earliest cave paintings produced by humans.The artworks are in a rural area on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi.Until now, paintings this old had been confirmed in caves only in Western Europe.Researchers tell the journal Nature that the Indonesian discovery transforms ideas about how humans first developed the ability to produce art.Australian and Indonesian scientists have dated layers of stalactite-like growths that have formed over coloured outlines of human hands.Early artists made them by carefully blowing paint around hands that were pressed tightly against the cave walls and ceilings. The oldest is at least 40,000 years old.This painting, from Bone, is of a variety a wild endemic dwarfed bovid found only in Sulawesi, which the inhabitants probably huntedThere are also human figures, and pictures of wild hoofed animals that are found only on the island. Dr Maxime Aubert, of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, who dated the paintings found in Maros in Southern Sulawesi, explained that one of them (shown immediately below) was probably the earliest of its type.At the top of the worn painting is a faint outline of a human hand. Below it is possibly the earliest depiction of an animal"The minimum age for (the outline of the hand) is 39,900 years old, which makes it the oldest hand stencil in the world," said Dr Aubert.Continue reading the main story

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This find enables us to get away from this Euro-centric view of a creative explosion that was special to Europe”Prof Chris StringerNatural History Museum"Next to it is a pig that has a minimum age of 35,400 years old, and this is one of the oldest figurative depictions in the world, if not the oldest one," he told BBC News.There are also paintings in the caves that are around 27,000 years old, which means that the inhabitants were painting for at least 13,000 years.In addition, there are paintings in a cave in the regency of Bone, 100 km north of Maros. These cannot be dated because the stalactite-like growths used to determine the age of the art do not occur. But the researchers believe that they are probably the same age as the paintings in Maros because they are stylistically identical.The discovery of the Indonesian cave art is important because it shows the beginnings of human intelligence as we understand it today.Continue reading the main story1. Click on links that appear in the video below to explore the story in more depth with Pallab on location in caves in Britain.2. Return to the main video by clicking on the box/image, bottom right.Continue reading the main storyINTERACTIVE VIDEO A new way of watching video – click or touch on the panels when they appearContinue reading the main storyProduction by Julius Peacock, Anna-Marie Lever and John LawrenceThis interactive video is optimised for use in Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers on PC and Mac, as well as Chrome and Safari on iPads. It will not display in Internet Explorer browsers, on iOS or Android mobile devices, or Android tablets.Continue reading the main storyTruly humanArt and the ability to think of abstract concepts is what distinguishes our species from other animals - capabilities that also led us to use fire, develop the wheel and come up with the other technologies that have made our kind so successful.Its emergence, therefore, marks one of the key moments when our species became truly human.The dating of the art in Sulawesi will mean that ideas about when and where this pivotal moment in our evolution occurred will now have to be revised.Compare the painting above from Bone with the one immediately below, which is from El Castillo cave in northern Spain, and dated to be 37,300 years old by researchers at Bristol University.The Sulawesian and Spanish paintings look very similar, and they are both about the same age.For decades, the only evidence of ancient cave art was in Spain and southern France. It led some to believe that the creative explosion that led to the art and science we know today began in Europe.But the discovery of paintings of a similar age in Indonesia shatters this view, according to Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London."It is a really important find; it enables us to get away from this Euro-centric view of a creative explosion that was special to Europe and did not develop in other parts of the world until much later," he said.Continue reading the main story

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If Sulawesi is anything to go by a crucial part of the human story could be right under our noses”Dr Adam BrummGriffith UniversityThe discovery of 40,000-year-old cave paintings at opposite ends of the globe suggests that the ability to create representational art had its origins further back in time in Africa, before modern humans spread across the rest of the world."That's kind of my gut feeling," says Prof Stringer. "The basis for this art was there 60,000 years ago; it may even have been there in Africa before 60,000 years ago and it spread with modern humans".Dr Adam Brumm, who is the co-leader of the Sulawesi research, believes many well-known sites in Asia, and as far away as Australia, contain art that is extremely old but which has not yet been accurately dated."If Sulawesi is anything to go by, where cave art was first recorded over half a century ago but was assumed to be young, a crucial part of the human story could be right under our noses" he said.Dr Muhammad Ramli, an archaeologist working with the Makassar branch of Indonesia's Preservation for Heritage Office, said that the Sulawesian paintings in Maros were being eroded by the pollution coming from an upsurge in local industrial activities."In the beginning of the 1980s, there were a lot of cave paintings on this site in the form of hand stencils, as you can see right now. Presently, a lot has been damaged."There is a strong necessity to conduct conservation studies in order to find the best way of preserving these sites so that the paintings may last," he told BBC News.Continue reading the main storyFollow Pallab on TwitterFootage and still pictures for the interactive video courtesy of: University of Bristol for the Spanish cave drawing still, Maxime Aubert for the Indonesian cave drawing stills, Kinez Riza for the Indonesian cave footage and the still of the mammoth sculpture, the National Museum and Research Centre of Altamira for the Spanish cave footage and Auscape for Australian cave art still. The video was filmed at Kents Cavern in Torquay. http://www.kents-cavern.co.uk/

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Sharks can be 'social or solitary'

The most feared predators in the sea have individual personalities that affect how readily they socialise, according to a study by UK scientists. Individual sharks, studied in groups of ten, showed consistent social habits - either forming groups with other sharks or finding camouflage on their own. When a group was shifted into a new environment, individual sharks showed the same patterns of behaviour. This is the first study to show that sharks have their own personalities. The research was done in large tanks at the Marine Biological Association of the UK, in Plymouth, in collaboration with the University of Exeter. The findings appear in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology. Strategies for safety Ten different groups, each containing ten small spotted catsharks, were each studied in three different situations. Some were complex environments with lots of rocks and other features, and some were simple tanks with gravel on the bottom. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote Imagine if we took ten work colleagues and plonked them in a bar, and observed which individuals sat together over the course of an evening” Prof William Hughes University of Sussex Even though the overall number and size of sub-groups among the ten sharks often changed between environments, the individual sharks that tended to form big groups continued to do so, no matter what the situation. Similarly, the more antisocial specimens remained on their own, or in much smaller groups. "The results were driven by different social preferences, that appeared to reflect different strategies for staying safe," said lead author Dr David Jacoby, a behavioural ecologist now working at the Institute of Zoology in London. "Well-connected individuals formed conspicuous groups, while less social individuals tended to camouflage alone, matching their skin colour with the colour of the gravel in the bottom of the tank," Dr Jacoby said. Prof William Hughes, an animal behaviour expert at the University of Sussex, said he was impressed by the level of detail in the results. "They recorded which shark was hanging around with which other sharks, on a number of occasions across two days - so they got a very, very detailed picture of the social relationships," he told BBC News.-READ MORE-http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29448192

Satellites detect 'thousands' of new ocean-bottom mountains

Ocean floor The new gravity data gives us our clearest view yet of the shape of the ocean floor It is not every day you can announce the discovery of thousands of new mountains on Earth, but that is what a US-European research team has done. What is more, these peaks are all at least 1.5km high. The reason they have gone unrecognised until now is because they are at the bottom of the ocean. Dave Sandwell and colleagues used radar satellites to discern the mountains' presence under water and report their findings in Science Magazine. Sonar gondola Using ship-borne echosounders is expensive and time-consuming "In the previous radar dataset we could see everything taller than 2km, and there were 5,000 seamounts," Prof Sandwell told BBC News. "With our new dataset - and we haven't fully done the work yet - I'm guessing we can see things that are 1.5km tall. "That might not sound like a huge improvement but the number of seamounts goes up exponentially with decreasing size. "So, we may be able to detect another 25,000 on top of the 5,000 already known," the Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher explained. Jump media player Media player help Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue. Dietmar Müller: We know much more about the topography of Mars than we know about the seafloor Knowing where the seamounts are is important for fisheries management and conservation, because it is around these topographic highs that wildlife tends to congregate. The roughness of the seafloor is important also as it steers currents and promotes mixing - behaviours that are critical to understanding how the oceans transport heat and influence the climate. But our knowledge of the seafloor is poor; witness the problems they have had searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet MH370, which is believed to have crashed west of Australia.-READ MORE-http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29465446

Operation Maneater

8pm Sun 28 Sep 2014 CHANNEL4 Duration 47:23 Polar bears are causing havoc in isolated communities on the shores of Canada's Hudson Bay. Mark Evans arrives in the town of Churchill hours after an attack has left two people with serious injuries and a bear dead. He joins the Polar Bear Alert Team as they transport a captured bear by helicopter to a release site outside of town. And in the Inuit town of Arviat, Mark works with wildlife officers to test an aerial drone early warning system, a military grade ultra-loud speaker to deter bears and a controversial experiment to place meat out on the tundra to divert bears away from town. About the programme Mark Evans explores the latest attempts to protect humans and deadly predators from each other-a series of programs worth a study.-see more-http://www.channel4.com/programmes/operation-maneater

New snake species found in Ganjam named after Odisha

BHUBANESWAR: A new species of snake, found by a group of herpetologists and snake lovers in Odisha last year, has been named after the eastern state as Lycodon Odishii, becoming the latest addition to the list of 297 species of snakes found in the country. The Russian Journal of Herpetology, an international science journal, has published a research paper on the new species in its latest edition published on Friday. "For over 218 years, scientists from across the world were identifying the snake with juveniles of Lycodon Jara. Several attempts to differentiate the snake were made in the past, but proved unsuccessful due to lack of proper documentation. We worked for a year and a half and finally concluded that this was a new species," said the research paper's author Subhendu Mallik, who is also secretary of Snake Helpline, a voluntary organization working for the rescue and rehabilitation of snakes.The green-coloured snake has a bright white collar on its neck and twin spots on each scale except the collar. The new species, the common name of which is Subhendu's wolf snake, has several similarities with Lycodon Jara. Scientists used to believe that the juvenile Jara has a collar and as it grows old, the collar disappears. Volunteers of Snake Helpline found the snake in Berhampur in Ganjam district in 2013. "The female snake had a collar. That struck us because how could an adult Jara have a collar? We started our research on the species," said Mallik. A detailed examination of the specimen showed clear morphological differences of at least 12 characters, he added.

Existence of rare and new species found

Researchers have found the existence of some rare species of birds, Slender Billed Gull and Red Phalarope, and the Jungle Glory butterfly in the country's forest reserves. Of them, the Jungle Glory butterfly was spotted at Tanchi area of Bandarban hill district when researchers were updating the Red List of Species in Bangladesh for this year. Prof Monwar Hossain of Jahangirnagar University's zoology department said this particular type of butterfly was last seen in the country some 132 years ago in forests in the Sylhet region. The findings were unveiled at the 1st preliminary species assessment sharing workshop on updating species Red List of Bangladesh, held at the capital’s Spectra Convention Centre in the capital yesterday. The Red List estimates the risk of extinction of a certain species which will help to set conservation plans and priority. Two British military officials, Marshall GFL & Lionel de Niceville have documented the existence of Jungle glory butterfly in Bangladesh in their joint book named – Butterflies of India, Burma and Ceylon – published in 1882 by the British Museum. “Later, many researcher had conducted several research on butterflies but never found the Jungle Glory in the country’s natural habitats,” added Monwar, who is also involved with updating the Red List. Habitat loss by changing pattern of climate and forest ecosystem, and human intervention in forest has been considered as some of the primary reasons for the extinction of such species from the ecosystem, he added. Meanwhile, the two birds’ species named Slender Billed Gull and Red Phalarope has been found in the country for the first time at the Padma River near Rajbari district in April and Slender Billed Gull has been seen at Teknaf area during last winter respectively. Apart from this, the research team has also found a huge colony of particular type of bat, popularly known as the flying fox, at Altadighi area of Dinajpur district. ‘The flying fox colony consists of more than 1000, was found at a single compound at the area which was not seen before in the country,” said Prof Kamrul Hasan of zoology department of Jahangirnagar University. Living together in a crowded space, the flying fox colony is unusual and indicates that these mammals like other bats has been suffering from an inadequate habitat and as a result of gradually depleting large trees and homestead forest in the country, he added. The Updating Species Red List of Bangladesh Project was jointly taken by the IUCN and the Forest Department and will end by 2015. In 2000, the IUCN published a Red List of Fauna Species in Bangladesh, covering the status of 895 species under five categories – mammals, birds, amphibians, fish and reptiles. According to the list, different types of species including Gangetic ghorial, saltwater crocodile, hoolock gibbon, phayre’s leaf monkey, ritha fish, pungus fish and baghair fish were labelled as “critically endangered” due to the loss of their habitat and food scarcity. The new Red List initiative has included two more categories – butterfly and crustacean (snails, crabs and shrimps), and the number of species will be increased to around 1,700. Of them, the rese - See more at: http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2014/sep/30/existence-rare-and-new-species-found#sthash.9shxG70J.dpuf

Researchers have found the existence of some rare species of birds, Slender Billed Gull and Red Phalarope, and the Jungle Glory butterfly in the country's forest reserves.
Of them, the Jungle Glory butterfly was spotted at Tanchi area of Bandarban hill district when researchers were updating the Red List of Species in Bangladesh for this year.
Prof Monwar Hossain of Jahangirnagar University's zoology department said this particular type of butterfly was last seen in the country some 132 years ago in forests in the Sylhet region.
The findings were unveiled at the 1st preliminary species assessment sharing workshop on updating species Red List of Bangladesh, held at the capital’s Spectra Convention Centre in the capital yesterday.
The Red List estimates the risk of extinction of a certain species which will help to set conservation plans and priority.
Two British military officials, Marshall GFL & Lionel de Niceville have documented the existence of Jungle glory butterfly in Bangladesh in their joint book named  –  Butterflies of India, Burma and Ceylon – published in 1882 by the British Museum.
“Later, many researcher had conducted several research on butterflies but never found the Jungle Glory in the country’s natural habitats,” added Monwar, who is also involved with updating the Red List.
Habitat loss by changing pattern of climate and forest ecosystem, and human intervention in forest has been considered as some of the primary reasons for the extinction of such species from the ecosystem, he added.
Meanwhile, the two birds’ species named Slender Billed Gull and Red Phalarope has been found in the country for the first time at the Padma River near Rajbari district in April and Slender Billed Gull has been seen at Teknaf area during last winter respectively.
Apart from this, the research team has also found a huge colony of particular type of bat, popularly known as the flying fox, at Altadighi area of Dinajpur district.
‘The flying fox colony consists of more than 1000, was found at a single compound at the area which was not seen before in the country,” said Prof Kamrul Hasan of zoology department of Jahangirnagar University.
Living together in a crowded space, the flying fox colony is unusual and indicates that these mammals like other bats has been suffering from an inadequate habitat and as a result of gradually depleting large trees and homestead forest in the country, he added.
The Updating Species Red List of Bangladesh Project was jointly taken by the IUCN and the Forest Department and will end by 2015.
In 2000, the IUCN published a Red List of Fauna Species in Bangladesh, covering the status of 895 species under five categories – mammals, birds, amphibians, fish and reptiles.
According to the list, different types of species including Gangetic ghorial, saltwater crocodile, hoolock gibbon, phayre’s leaf monkey, ritha fish, pungus fish and baghair fish were labelled as “critically endangered” due to the loss of their habitat and food scarcity.
The new Red List initiative has included two more categories – butterfly and crustacean (snails, crabs and shrimps), and the number of species will be increased to around 1,700.
Of them, the rese
- See more at: http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2014/sep/30/existence-rare-and-new-species-found#sthash.9shxG70J.dpuf