minor musings on the macrocosm
Figure 3. Copulation duration in Cynopterus sphinx according to whether the female licks the male's penis (Licking) or not (No licking). Means and standard errors are shown. Vignette shows a female performing fellatio, drawn by Mei Wang. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007595.g003
Shocking silence on the interwebs on this one – or maybe I’m just not reading the right blogs?
Okay back to work.
I owe you a T-shirt. I’m sorry. It’s tough being both a perfectionist and a procrastinator, terribly difficult to get things done.
Anyway tenrecs get all over the internet now and then, lately now–over at Zooillogix. Far be it from me not to keep a good thing going, so why don’t we drop a little Afrothere roll call huh?
Tenrecs?
Check. [them's Little spikez, Big spikez, Fatty, and Uptown Streaky for those of you keeping track at home]
Elephant Shrew?
Sweet.
“Spitzmaus” (German for shrew) works out literally to “sharp mouse,” which is wholly badical. But you already knew that. Anyway to paraphrase Voltaire, hermano here is neither an elephant, nor a shrew. Nor a sharp mouse.
Golden Mole?
Word is bond. But not a really a mole. uh, okay. Hyraces?
Yikes. Nice grill yo. Moving right along…
Aardvark?
Hey, did you hear the one about the bipedal pangolin? Damnit, there’s no time! Stay focused…
Okay, okay, uh who have we got left?
Sirenian?
Well, dudelet I hate to break this to you, but you’re fired. I mean, extinct. But whatever, you’ll do.
Alright, I know I’m forgetting someone here. Think, think…
Oh yeah:
Nicked this one from Crappy Taxidermy which turns out to be the best thing going on the world wide web these days. You really ought to check it out.
Well, I suppose that wraps things up here. Pax.
DISCLAIMER: No animals weren’t not not harmed in the making of this blog post.
“That’s an otter.” The furry brown head slipped below the water just as I realized what I was looking at, leaving behind an ever-expanding set of concentric rings. My wife, perhaps justifiably, figured I was full of shite. After several frustrating minutes of fruitless searching I was beginning to feel like someone who had seen a sasquatch after a few beers, “no, no, I swear I saw it.”
Then, there it was. Three of them actually; frolicking, cavorting, chomping down fish with gusto and generally displaying that uniquely lutrine joy de vivre. They appeared to be herding fish into the chain-link erosion control barriers that line the bank of the heavily manicured, eutrophied waterway formerly known as Putah Creek. Every so often they would look at us and cough disapprovingly.
The wood ducks were not amused. The carp sucked air anxiously. The jumping galls bounced about like gutter punks. The jackrabbits raced to and fro like robotic hares off their tracks. The joggers trotted by powered by Lady GaGa oblivious to it all. All a few hundred meters away from my office on an unseasonably mild late July afternoon.
Man, does this read like an Oryctology post or what?
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!
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….
Too much? Sorry it’s really hot and my brain is addled–and uh, I mean, I was just following orders. Also, I’ve already beaten the “sexy little otter” joke to death right?
Anyway, far be it from me to try and tell you something about Puijila darwini the putative transitional seal taking his star turn in this weeks Nature (Rybczynski, Dawson and Tedford 2009). Brohan’s already got his own pimped out, interactive, 3D, trilingual website. I imagine the Twitter feed is in the works.
Um so rather than plagiarize the press-release here are some random, certainly minor, musings as I sit in 100 F Davis, CA and ponder freshwater proto-seals frolicking in a balmy Arctic lake one million score years ago today…
Melting Poles and the coming Paleontological Bonanza?
H.P. Lovecraft’s 1931 novella At The Mountains of Madness begins as a paleontological expedition to Antarctica and gradually (predictably) in an orgy of hallucinatory amoral undead tentacular horror and carnage. Two decades before, R. F. Scott’s infamously ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition succumbed to exposure and starvation rather than murderous ambulatory crinoids. However, as in the Lovecraft story, Scott’s mission was, in part to collect fossils from Antarctica in order to better understand the geological and biological history of the now-frozen continent. Some of these were recovered along with the remains of the crew: Scott had refused to abandon the collections, and the crew was dragging 35 lbs of Permo-Triassic plant fossils around with them until the bitter end. Around the same time, Carl Wiman and Eric Stensiö, among others were making important fossil discoveries at the opposite end of the globe on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen.
The pace of important fossil discoveries at high latitudes (including Antarctica and Spitsbergen as well as Greenland, Nunavut, and Siberia) has seemed to quicken–Tiktaalik and Kryostega providing just two recent, high-profile examples.
So far this has probably been driven by technological advances that make it easier to get to these remote locations and work under polar conditions. However, given recent climatic projections it’s interesting to wonder how a reduction in ice at the poles might affect polar paleontology. Not only might the recession of glaciers expose fossil bearing strata, but reduction of ice on land and sea might permit easier access to known localities.
I certainly don’t mean this as some kind of apologia for anthropogenic warming of the planet–obviously any paleontological rewards will likely come at deep expense to the living ecosystems in these regions. And rising global sea-levels might destroy important existing coastal fossil localities. Even under the most optimistic scenarios however, we will almost certainly sea a waning of ice at least in the Arctic. Indeed, despite of truth-bending denials by folks like George Will it’s already happening. It will be interesting, in a sick, doom-filled, quasi-Lovecraftian way to watch how a changing climate might reveal new secrets of our past…even if we don’t turn up evidence of a lost race of sentient malicious Paleozoic invertebrates.
Damn! I knew I should have taken Inuktikut instead of Latin
For a while now, I have been interested in the introgression of nonIndo-European languages into taxonomic nomenclature, especially those that derive from “indigenous” cultures (whatever that means…) Like Tiktaalik, “Puijila” is of Inuktikut origin, in this case referring to a small seal. Tiktaalik means “burbot”, a type of fish. I am, for the record, wholly in favor of this practice but if I was writing a paper about this in college I would probably raise the question of whether this amounted to some form of “cultural appropriation.” Incidentally, I like the fact that Puijila has some vague phonic resonance with the names of extant northern hemisphere seals (or phocine phocid phocoids for those of you keeping score at home) Phoca, Pusa, Pagophilus, Histriophoca. Whatever.
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