Grenzexcuseszone

Hescheleria by Zach Miller.

Granted, this is a cop-out.  I’m in the airport, on my way to meet Hescheleria and friends.  Hard to believe it has been over a year (well over in fact) that Zach sent me this drawing for use in my now infamously nonexistent post on thalattosaurs.  Perhaps by the time I get back I will finally have something interesting to say about these, the enigmaticist of hellasaurs–you know, anything could happen.

In the meanwhile, go check out the latest edition of the Boneyard over at Zach’s blog.  See you in a few weeks!

Looking For Shit on Google Earth

Naturally, shortly after reading about Fretwell and Trathan’s success locating emperor penguin breeding colonies by searching satellite imagery for Antarctic skid marks, I fired up Google Earth to have a shot at shite-site sighting myself.  Generally, Google Earth’s coverage of Antarctica is fairly low res, understandably.  So I was actually slightly surprised that plugging in the coordinates provided by Fretwell and Trathan yielded astonishingly good results.

Amazingly, a few of these are even among the newly discovered sites noted in the new study.

In fact, one wonders if there might yet be undiscovered colonies waiting to be found by intrepid Google Earth explorers, as has already been done with Roman villas, impact craters, and Cannabis plantations &c.

Next up: Google Earth, guano mining and seal hunting.

Crap of the Penguins

Dan Colen "Bird Shit" 2007

Honestly, I suppose the whole “of the week” thread is getting stale, microecos has never been been big on consistency.  But this is clearly the best research paper that will be published this week:

Penguins from space: faecal stains reveal the location of emperor penguin colonies

Peter T. Fretwell and Philip N. Trathan

Methods Using Landsat ETM satellite images downloaded from the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA), we detect faecal staining of ice by emperor penguins associated with their colony locations. Emperor penguins breed on sea ice, and their colonies exist in situ between May and December each year. Faecal staining at these colony locations shows on Landsat imagery as brown patches, the only staining of this colour on sea ice. This staining can therefore be used as an analogue for colony locations. The whole continental coastline has been analysed, and each possible signal has been identified visually and checked by spectral analysis. In areas where LIMA data are unsuitable, freely available Landsat imagery has been supplemented.

Results We have identified colony locations of emperor penguins at a total of 38 sites. Of these, 10 are new locations, and six previously known colony locations have been repositioned (by over 10 km) due to poor geographical information in old records. Six colony locations, all from old or unconfirmed records, were not found or have disappeared.

Main conclusions We present a new pan-Antarctic species distribution of emperor penguins mapped from space. In one synoptic survey we locate extant emperor penguin colonies, a species previously poorly mapped due to its unique breeding habits, and provide a vital geographical resource for future studies of an iconic species believed to be vulnerable to future climate change.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1466-8238.2009.00467.x

Satellites, penguin shit and important conservation biology data.  It does not get better than this folks.

Wordless Wednesday – Are You Mocking Me?

Research Publication Title of the Week – The Virtue of Modesty

Comparison of the five extant species of rhinoceros - Wikimedia Commons

ANALYSIS OF COMPLETE MITOCHONDRIAL GENOMES FROM EXTINCT AND EXTANT RHINOCEROSES REVEALS LACK OF PHYLOGENETIC RESOLUTION - Eske Willerslev, Marcus Gilbert, Jonas Binladen, Simon Ho, Paula Campos, Aakrosh Ratan, Lynn Tomsho, Rute da Fonseca, Andrei Sher, Tatanya Kuznetsova, Malgosia Nowak-Kemp, Terri Roth, Webb Miller  and Stephan Schuster

BMC Evolutionary Biology 2009, 9:95

doi:10.1186/1471-2148-9-95

From our irregular series, oh, nevermind.

Amidst the recent outcry over phylogenetic hype, it is nice to see some truth in advertising.  Sure one might quibble over whether the lack of a pattern is something that can be “revealed” but microecos never quibbles over semantics…

Semantics aside, what is tremendously cool about this paper is the recovery of mitochondrial genes from preserved soft tissues of the extinct woolly rhino, Coelodonta antiquitatis. Despite the overall lack of resolution among the clade, Willerslev and company recover strongly supported sister relationships between the two African rhinos (the white rhino, Ceratotherium simum and the black rhino, Diceros bicornis) and between the congeneric Javan and Indian rhinos (Rhinoceros sondaicus, R. unicornis).

Charles Knight's iconic, heroic woolly rhino

While neither of these relationships are surprising, the authors also found support for a sister relationship between the woolly rhino and the ridiculously adorable, critically endangered Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis).  This relationship has been postulated before, at least partly based on the fact that Dicerorhinus is unique among living rhinos in sporting luscious, auburn locks that put agent Scully to shame.  However, this hypothesis has been controversial and this new paper certainly leaves the door open for considerable improvement in our understanding of the evolutionary history of living rhinos.

One of the problems here is that today we are left with only a tattered remnant of the great perissodactyl radiation that produced some of the most impressive, perplexing and yes (ahem) EXTREME mammals that have ever existed.  Aside from the four rhino genera, a handful of tapirs (all in genus Tapirus) and a rather more respectable smattering of zebras, asses and kiangs (in the familiar, but rather lumpy genus Equus) are all that remains of this once diverse order.  In the recent analysis, relationships amongst the rhino couplets changed dramatically depending on whether tapirs or horses were used as the out-group, perhaps indicating a geologically explosive radiation of rhinos from their perissodactyl ancestors at some point in the Cenzoic.

Living rhinos on the brink - from Intl Rhino Foundation

Sadly, we stand to lose even more of this evolutionary majesty if the poaching and deforestation that imperil all living rhinos isn’t checked.  While the recovery of genetic material from the extinct woolly rhino is a remarkable achievement, it would be terribly tragic if scraps of keratin are all that future studies of rhino evolution have to go on.

But I hate to leave you on such a bitter note, so behold, the otherworldly wonder that is a baby Sumatran rhino:

Baby Rhino!

Fluvial Mudstones are the new Candy Girls

I once wrote a paper entitled “Applying the Principles of Stratigraphy in an Analysis of Melodrama.” Sadly, this was long before There Will Be Blood came out.

This video by Grizzly Bear reminds me of that paper, for several reasons, but, I’ll spare you the golemy details.  I dig the layers of metaphor though, puns possibly not intended.

Anyone recognize the location?  Anza Borrego or something?  And presumably those flags in the first scene are a paleo site right?

Props to Radov for leading me, indirectly, to this video.

Photo from cigarettesandredvines.com

Monophyly FAIL

Unless you have been living under a slab of oil shale, you will have already heard, read and seen quite a lot about the Eocene primate Darwinius masillae recently described in the online open-access journal PLOSone.  The blogosphere has been, ahem, a-twitter over the “hype” surrounding this important fossil–to the extent that some have even begun to decry the anti-hype hype–and it has provided fodder for some excellent satire.  Even the Old Gray Lady has weighed in.

In my forthcoming (’cough) book on the late 20th/early 21st C. social history of fossils (tentatively entitled Paleontology After Modernism) I discuss the role of flash-powered websites in the promotion of important fossil discoveries (see: Tiktaalik’s or Puijila’s).  Given that Darwinius already has its own book and not one, but two television specials, one of which is narrated by Sir David Attenborough, it comes as no surprise that it has its own flashy website too.

Unfortunately, it appears that the website creators did not bother to read the freely available publication they are trying to summarize, and instead chose to present a woefully outdated picture of primate evolution.  I’m sure Brian Switek will take them to tasks for trotting out the old “march of progress” canard,  and perhaps we can forgive the pervasive “Homo sapians” typo.

However, suggesting that primates “diversified into two key groups: the anthropoids and the prosimians” (see image at top of post) is misleading at best and, at worst, directly contradicts the argument laid out in the new paper.  “Prosimian” is term used to refer to various primates perceived to be um, primitive in their anatomy including lemurs, lorises and tarsiers.  However it has been well known for quite some time that this is not a natural group that can be split from the “anthropoid” monkeys and apes, but rather a paraphyletic group of animals including the direct ancestors of anthropoids, as well as animals only distantly related to anthropoids.

Exactly which “prosimians” are more closely related to anthropoids is a matter of debate, and one that this fossil may shed new light on, though, see Brian’s detailed critique of  the new paper.  It is certainly understandable that the LINK website designers would not want to go into the finer details of this debate, however there is no excuse for falling back on a “simplified” but outdated and erroneous picture of primate evolution.

I’m wholeheartedly in favor of trying to get the public excited about important scientific discoveries, even when it involves some minor exaggeration, disseminating misinformation on the other hand is simply inexcusable.

And don’t get me started on this….