Turks and Cuckoos, or Divine Secrets of the Yahya Sisterhood vol. 1

Well I just don’t know what to think. First, Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya aka Assisted Living Dracula sends me a FREE copy of his beautiful 700 page full color magnum opus Atlas of Creation, vol. 1. But then, he gets my website banned in Turkey along with the rest of WordPress.com! Which is it Adnan, are we hermanos or what?

Man, first China now Turkey…is California the last bastion of sanity of earth? (yeah, that’s troll bait)

Ugh, what did you have for lunch? Cow blood?

Oh sure, we’ve ragged on Science Daily like all the cool kids do, but it remains an indispensable resource for staying on top of news-breaking science. And every once in while they deliver a priceless gem. To wit: “Bat Breath Reveals The Identity of a Vampires Last Victim.” Oh those stable istopists what will they drop into the mass spec next??

Turns out that vampire bats, like us statesers, have developed a taste for Bos taurus, aka “Bossie”, abundant, delectable wild game notwithstanding. The researchers sampled the carbon signature of vampire bat breath and found a signal that proved that the bats were getting their carbon from C4 grass, via cows, rather than native forage, via their natural prey of javelina and tapir who tend to feed more on C3 plants. I’m not sure if the researchers tested the alternate hypothesis that the bats were washing down their blood meal with a refreshing, C4 adulterated Sparks.

You hop on a plane to Central America and fall asleep waiting for a bus: turn to page 63.

You hop on a plane to New Jersey and can’t fall asleep waiting for a bus: turn to page 103.

Boneyard iii

Those ready for their biweekly dose of permineralization action: Boneyard ver. 3 is up at Laelaps. Conspicuously absent from the record are Brian’s own slough of recent paleopostage, so here’s a stratigraphic sample:

Things you don’t want to meet down in the sewer.

Psittacosaurus goes to the hairdresser and comes back with extensions.

Pterosaurian identity crisis.

Like this needs another link.

and,

Prosauropod jackpot.

You can’t write yourself out of prehistory Brian.  The boneyard heads over to When Pigs Fly Returns in two weeks.  See you there.

Genomics and the Incognitum

Four blind wisemen are examining a skull. The first grasps the tip of the tusk and shouts “it’s a spear!” The second feels the deep concave nasal cavity at the center of the skull and exclaims “no, it’s a cyclops, to be sure!” The third rubs the jagged molar and muses, “cyclopses don’t exist, but surely this was a fearsome carnivore.”

Then the fourth wiseman walks up and lightly taps the tip of the occipital condyle he probes the foramen magnum. Then he draws his finger up and across the low-domed skull and explores the depths of the nasal cavity. He carefully strokes each long conic incisor before moving deeper into jaw.  He traces each cusp and groove along each tooth. After some time, the fourth scientist quietly states, “It’s a proboscidean, specifically an American Mastodon (Mammut americanum) or something like it.”

LOL! Genomics takes the old fable of the blind man and the elephant to heart. Rather than studying genetic information by examining minute bits (like only 10,000 base-pairs or something), or ‘genes’ the genomicists examine entire organimsal genomes, the forest rather than the trees if you’d like (alt. getting complete sets is no mean feat, even from a living organism.

That makes the announcement of the sequencing of an entire Mastodon mitochondrial genome from a tooth wrenched from the Alaskan permafrost totally effing astonishing. And really, really cool. Even better it’s been published in PLoS and is free for all to ponder, ruminate and expound upon.

One application of whole-genome studies is evolutionary comparison between related organisms. In this case, the researchers compared the Mastodon genome with living Asian and African Elephants as well as with the previously published genome similarly ‘back of the freezer’ Mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius). Here’s their tree:

Rohland et al 2007 image links to original, larger version.

The also compared these genomes to elephants’ closest living relatives, Hyraxes and Dugongs (remind me to write about Afrotheria some time…), as well as compared the rate of genetic change in proboscideans with other mammals, including primates.

Snap! (Skull tip to Afarensis)

Hey, what’s that thing by Charles Peale’s foot? A meat grinder? To be continued?

What are you looking at?

If you were

a fly,

you’d be dead

by now.

Likely!

Last week we called human evolution into question, this week we’ve proven panspermia (or pardon, exogenesis).

Recent probes inside comets show it is overwhelmingly likely that life began in space, according to a new paper by Cardiff University scientists.

Those wacky scientists, what will they prove/disprove next!?

Seriously, don’t science journalists attend some kind of insufferable in-service where they discuss the use of phrases like “call into question” and “overwhelmingly likely” ?

The researchers calculate the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet at one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.

Hey for all I know the Oort cloud is lousy with cryophilic exobes, but clay, organic compounds, water and heat are not restricted to comets. And it would be nice to know how these startling odds were calculated!

Parasitoid Rex

Piss-poor photo of a parasitoid wasp ovipositing in an aphid.

Continuing with the ‘unsavory’ insect behavior theme, Carl Zimmer has a fascinating new article in the Times about parasitoid wasps. The article discusses the strange life cycle of Copidosoma floridanum (not the species pictured above) a wasp that targets cabbage looper caterpillars. Parasitoids, for those unacquainted with the term, are essentially parasites that kill their host, the most familiar pop-culture example being the chest-busting xenomorphs of Alien fame.

As Zimmer notes in the companion blog post over at the Loom, parasitoid wasps eating their hosts alive famously inspired Charles Darwin to question the notion of an all-loving God as the architect of creation. Of course enlightened types, like Ann Coulter, know that God gave us the mission of raping the planet so of course He would have thrown in a little animal-on-animal violence for fun.

A great many wasps adopt a parasitoid lifestyle, from the tiny aphid hunter pictured at top to the giant Tarantula Hawks (Pepsis) who paralyze their victims and drag them back to their lair to serve as a living larder for their larva. While all of this might strike us, and Chuck D., as very distasteful it’s important to remember that this is how these creatures make their living.  They’re no more or less dignified than tigers in the jungle or gulls at the dump. Or science writers, for that matter, but lo that all were as gifted as Carl Zimmer.

%$!& Shadows… A Pepsis wasp hunts for spiders among the leaf litter.