Oceanic oddities

It's 2019.  We've explored the world, right? Fear not, there is some fun to be had in poking under the sea.  

The common claim that 95% or so of the ocean is unexplored is a distortion. According to the blog Deepsea News, this is the percentage of the ocean floor not yet seen by humans or cameras. Still, in 1.39 billion cubic kilometers of ocean, a lot of things can be hiding.

Two British naturalists, Michael J. Nicoll and E.G.B. Meade-Waldo, might have had the weirdest encounter on record in December 1905. They were experienced scientists, best known for their work in ornithology but with the wide interests and expertise common for naturalists in those days. Both were Fellows of the Zoological Society of London.

The encounter came during a research cruise aboard the yacht Valhalla. At 10:15 AM, the yacht was off the coast of Brazil, fifteen miles east of the mouth of the Parahiba River. As the two naturalists looked out over the ocean, Nicoll saw something unusual. He asked Meade-Waldo, "Is that the fin of a great fish?"

Meade-Waldo looked and saw a fin he described as "dark seaweed-brown, somewhat crinkled at the edge." The visible part was rectangular, perhaps two feet high and six feet long. The distance between the fin and the observers was approximately a hundred yards.

Meade-Waldo trained “a powerful pair” binoculars on the strange object. As the two naturalists watched, there rose just ahead of the fin a small head on a long neck. Meade-Waldo described the neck as "about the thickness of a slight man's body, and from seven to eight feet was out of the water; head and neck were all about the same thickness ... The head had a very turtle-like appearance, as also the eye. It moved its head and neck from side to side in a peculiar manner: the color of the head and neck was dark brown above, and whitish below - almost white, I think."

Nicoll wrote, "Below the water we could indistinctly see a very large brownish-black patch, but could not make out the shape of the creature." Meade-Waldo recorded seeing a large body under water “behind the frill.”

The encounter lasted several minutes before the animal dropped astern of the Valhalla. Being under sail, the yacht could not come about. Meade-Waldo wrote later, "I shall never forget poor Nicoll's face of amazement when we looked at each other after we had passed out of sight of it ... "

Nicoll marveled, “This creature was an example, I consider, of what has been so often reported, for want of a better name, as the ‘great sea-serpent.’”

That was the only time the two men saw the creature. At 2:00 AM the next morning, though, three crewmembers reported spotting the same or a similar animal, almost entirely submerged.

The two men wrote up their encounter, and the Zoological Society's Proceedings carried their account of "a creature of most extraordinary form and proportions." Another version appears in Nicoll's 1908 book Three Voyages of A Naturalist.

There seems no reason to doubt the veracity or the powers of observation of these two men. A century after their encounter, the question remains: what was it that they saw?

Both were convinced it was an animal, but could not say what kind. The witnesses did not notice any diagnostic features such as hair, pectoral fins, gills, or nostrils.

While Nicoll admitted it was "impossible to be certain," he theorized the creature was a mammal. He wrote, "the general appearance of the creature, especially the soft, almost rubber-like fin, gave one this impression."

Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans wrote he’d seen conger eels rush about with head and forebody above water.  There are a few reports describing what the witnesses thought were giant eels. Four Irish fisherman claimed to have caught a nineteen-foot eel in 1915. Three years earlier, Captain Ruser of the German steamship Kaiserin Augusta Victoria had reported a giant eel off England. He described it as eighteen inches thick and twenty feet long. In 1971, English fisherman Stephen Smith was in the area of Ruser’s 1912 sighting when he claimed to have seen an eel more than twenty feet long. He described the head as resembling a conger eel’s but four times as large. Smith told an interviewer, “I have fished all over the world, but never have I seen something like this.”

There are also reports where the animal involved was not specifically called an eel but was described as eel-shaped. One such case occurred in 1947, when the Grace liner Santa Clara collided with a sea serpent. The ship’s officers described the animal as brown in color and perhaps sixty feet long.

What about Nicoll’s theory of a mammal? To begin with, there is no known mammal, living or extinct, which looks like the creature described in this incident. If we venture into the realm of possible unknown mammals, one option is a huge elongated seal. However, we have no fossil records indicating that a seal with a genuinely long neck ever existed, much less one with a dorsal fin.

Some cryptozoologists suggest sea serpents are surviving prehistoric snakelike whales, or archaeocetes, like those in the genus Basilosaurus. These, while elongated in form, did not have long necks. It’s possible a long-necked form evolved, but the available fossil record points the other way. Whale necks got progressively shorter, not longer, after the archaeocetes.

One group of animals that always come up in sea serpent discussions are the plesiosaurs. These Mesozoic reptiles (reptiles, not dinosaurs) make good sea serpent candidates in one respect: they had necks ranging from long to absurdly long. Will Cuppy, an American humorist, once wrote that plesiosaurs “might have a had a useful career as sea serpents, but they were before their time. There was nobody to scare except fish, and that was hardly worth while.” We know from fossils that plesiosaurs could not rear their necks high above the water, but the fairly low angle shown in a sketch in Nicoll’s book seems plausible.

Unfortunately, the fossil record for plesiosaurs and the other marine reptiles with similar body plans does not continue past the time of the K-T impact and the extinction of the dinosaurs. The famous case of the coelacanth has demonstrated that it’s possible for an animal to survive for a long time without leaving a fossil record, or, more precisely, without leaving one in places where humans have looked. A lot of land area remains unexplored by paleontologists, as does the entire sea floor. (Sasquatch proponents like to point out that, according to the fossil record, gorillas do not exist.)

Even if one assumes, though, that very large and widely distributed animals vanished from the fossil record while surviving in the flesh, the dorsal fin poses another problem. We have no fossils of plesiosaur-type beasts – and some of these are amazingly well preserved – which show any sort of dorsal fin. With their broad, turtle-like bodies, plesiosaurs did not need such fins for stability. It’s not impossible that a few species might have developed a fin for sexual display or some other purpose, but there is no evidence this took place.

Meade-Waldo, while he did not compare his animal to any known species, did refer back to the sea monster sighting made from the frigate HMS Daedalus in 1848. Witnesses in that incident described an animal sixty feet long or more, resembling "a large snake or eel."

Richard Ellis, whose 1994 book Monsters of the Sea is an excellent survey of the whole matter of marine cryptids, has offered a relatively conventional explanation for the Valhalla incident. Ellis, an expert on giant squid, theorized that a very large specimen swimming tentacles-first (which squid can do), could present a suitably strange appearance if it was holding one arm above the water. The description of the eye and mouth could result from misinterpretations of details on the arm or merely from imagination, since even expert observers can make errors when excited.

This explanation, as ingenious as it seems, is hard to picture in reality. First, Meade-Waldo must have made a much bigger mistake than just the details on the head, since he specifically described a large body aft of the fin. To offer the appearance Ellis suggests, the squid would have to swim on its side, keeping one fin partly exposed and one limb constantly above the surface. It must have held that unnatural and pointless position for several minutes. It might be possible for a squid to do this (or it might not – we know very little about them), but it seems impossible to explain why it would do so.

Can there be large seagoing animals still unknown to us? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is a well-founded and scientific “yes.” Until recently, the Indopacific beaked whale (a.k.a. Longman’s beaked whale), Mesoplodon pacificus, was known from two weathered skulls found on beaches 73 years and thousands of miles apart. No one knew what the living animal looked like, or even if the species still existed, until one beached intact in Japan in 2002. Perrin’s beaked whale, Mesoplodon perrini, was described from stranded specimens in 2002. 
A new beaked whale was found in Alaska in 2016. A new species of whale has been discovered based on a body, 7.3m long, that floated ashore on the Pribilof Islands.  This is just marvelous. I follow news of new and unidentified whales all the time, and I never heard a word about this, although it's apparently known to Japanese fishers, so it must have a range that spreads to the west.    This isn't a case where someone had it in hand and decided that its features or DNA warranted a split of a known species, as was the case with Balaenoptera omurai in 2003. This species was confirmed by DNA work, which resulted in reordering of its genus, but it began with a brand-new discovery from the field, when a biology teacher called in a seal researcher he knew who said, "This is weird," and then she called in a cetologist. Other previously collected (misidentified) skeletons have been located. 
The published abstract from Marine Mammal Science begins thus:
Philip A. Morin, et. al.There are two recognized species in the genus Berardius, Baird's and Arnoux's beaked whales. In Japan, whalers have traditionally recognized two forms of Baird's beaked whales, the common “slate-gray” form and a smaller, rare “black” form. Previous comparison of mtDNA control region sequences from three black specimens to gray specimens around Japan indicated that the two forms comprise different stocks and potentially different species...

Wilson's whale. Note the white underside in the top picture.(I believe the picture, copied from Heuvelmans here, to be out of copyright: if anyone knows differently, please tell me). 

Type D (Wikimedia Commons)


The full description with  the full scientific name has not yet been published. 

The megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios), up to sixteen feet long, was unknown until 1976, when one was snagged accidentally in a sea anchor. In this case, “unknown” means “completely unknown.’ Despite its size, its slow speed, and its distinctive appearance (the megamouth looks like a living blimp and resembles no other shark) there were no sighting reports, no strandings, nothing before that chance encounter.

Other sizable marine animals are apparently still at large. From my book Shadows of Existence (2006)

Two researchers who manned the submersible Deepstar 4000 on a 1966 probe of the eastern Pacific, for example, had an uncomfortably close encounter with an awesome denizen of the deep.  They were motoring along at a depth of 4,000 feet in the San Diego Trough when a dark-colored, mottled fish estimated to be thirty to forty feet long swam right up to the eighteen-foot sub.  The fish studied the craft with eyes "as big as dinner plates," then moved off, much to the relief of the startled aquanauts. 

Automatic cameras lowered into the same area took pictures of a large fish identified as a rare Pacific sleeper shark.  If this was what the Deepstar met, it would be, by far, the largest sleeper shark ever seen. 

The witnesses, pilot Joe Thompson and oceanographer Dr. Eugene LaFond, doubted their visitor was a shark.  Both men described a round tail like a grouper's rather than a sharklike tail.  Additionally, the eyes described were much too large for a sleeper shark.  

In the fascinating new book Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling (Da Capo Press, 2008) Andrew Darby chronicles the long and often bloody interactions between humans and whales. He also includes this item in his discussion of the now-closed whaling center on King George Sound in Albany, Western Australia. In the 1970s, when whalers like Captain George Cruikshank followed sperm whales with sonar, they often watched something they couldn’t identify in the 4000-meter-deep Albany Canyon.

"'The mystery bugger,' they called it...They would pick it up always at the same spot, and follow it by sonar as it cruised through the canyon, leaving a larger imprint on the screen than a whale. The creature would almost break the surface and then disappear. It was no air breather. It might have been a giant squid, or a giant shark. They never found out." (p.96)

Then we have Marvin. Off a Shell Oil rig near Santa Barbara,in 1966, a colonial invertebrate (that's the best guess) was filmed by an underwater camera. It was estimated at 15 feet long and moved by turning itself so its screw-like shape could pull it through the water. That sounds incredible, but here's the film (copyright unknown, fair use claimed) 

Now we come to one of my favorites, Wilson's whale.

Dr. Edward A. Wilson was a painter/naturalist on board the 1901-04 Discovery expedition to the Antarctic, led by Robert Falcon Scott. In 1902, Wilson painted an unknown whale with a high, slender dorsal fin and a solid black back, with no orca-type eyepatch observed. (One image does indicate a white underside.) I wrote in the chapter on mystery cetaceans in my 2006 book Shadows of Existence that the distinctive markings of an orca could not have been overlooked, and Richard Ellis and Dr. Darren Naish reviewed that chapter for me without objecting to that statement. Now I wonder. 

What made me wonder was the paper by Pitman, et. al., on an orca called Type D.  Type D, it seems, is a rarely observed but very distinctive orca that may be a separate species.  It's relatively small for an orca, and has  a tiny eyepatch and no gray dorsal "cape" marking.  In other words, it's not a perfect match to Wilson's whale - he'd have had to miss the eyepatch in his observations -  but it looks more like it than any creature yet documented.  

The dates of sighting are given as 28 and 29 January: Discovery stopped at Cape Crozier on 22 January and reached and named King Edward Land on 30 January, so my amateur reckoning puts them between 76 and 77 South. This creates a problem. The Type D has not definitely been identified below 60, and Robert Pitman told me in correspondence he can't imagine it goes below 65 or so - the water is just too cold for it. As for the visual match, Pitman writes, "Intriguing speculation but it would be difficult to say with any certainty - just not quite enough in the illustrations to be convincing."  He doesn't have an opinion on what Wilson's whale was, though he notes that, at the time, there was thought to be just one species of orca (heck, a hundred years after Wilson that's still what we thought) and it wasn't clear whether Wilson was saying his whale was not an orca (I have to get Wilson's book on the expedition).Anyway, Wilson's whale is a mystery. I thought for a bit there I'd solved it, but no.  If it was a Type D orca, it was way out of its range, and if it was some other orca, then Wilson could hardly have missed the markings.  So what was it? An odd orca of another type, one with minimal markings? An unknown type orca? Something else entirely?   

In 1998, employing a statistical technique used in biology to estimate the diversity of animal populations, Oxford University’s Dr. Charles Paxton calculated the likely number of marine animals measuring two meters (six and a half feet) or longer still awaiting classification. While Paxton admitted this technique is inexact, based as it is on the discovery rate and total number of such species found so far, his estimate of 47 species was an eye-opener.

Paxton thought the oceanic types still to be found included mainly whales and sharks, although he allowed for the possibility that some might be totally new types of animals. Meade-Waldo and Nicoll, were they here to speak to us, would no doubt agree on that point.

We must wait and see what answers the next hundred years will bring.

REFERENCES

Anonymous. 2003. “Whale species is new to science,” BBC News World Edition, http://news.bbc.co.uk, November 19.

Australian Museum. 2003. “Longman’s Beaked Whale,” Fact sheet.

Baker, Mary L. 1987. Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises of the World. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co.

Carwardine, Mark. 1995. Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises. New York: Doring Kindersley.

Dalebout, Merel. 2003. Personal communication, October 28.

Dalebout, Merel, et. al. 2003. “Appearance, distribution, and genetic distinctiveness of Longman’s beaked whale, Indopacetus pacificus,” Marine Mammal Science 19:3, p.421.

Dalebout, Merel, et. al. 2002. “A new species of beaked whale Mesoplodon perrini sp. n. (Cetacea: Ziphiidae) discovered through phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial DNA sequences,” Marine Mammal Science 18:3, p.577.

Ellis, Richard. 2003. Personal communication, November 22. Also 2000, March 10.

Ellis, Richard. 2003. Sea Dragons. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.

Ellis, Richard. 1998. The Search for the Giant Squid. New York: Lyons Press.

Ellis, Richard. 1994. Monsters of the Sea. New York: Knopf.

Gould, Rupert T. 1930. The Case for the Sea Serpent. London: Philip Allan.

Harrison, Paul. 2001. Sea Serpents and Lake Monsters of the British Isles. London: Robert Hale.

Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1968. In the Wake of the Sea Serpents. NY: Hill and Wang.

Meade-Waldo, E.G.B., and Nicoll, Michael J., 1906. "Description of an Unknown Animal Seen at Sea off the Coast of Brazil," Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, p.719.

Nicoll, Michael J. 1908. Three Voyages of a Naturalist. London: Witherby and Co.

Molloy, R. 1915. “A Queer Tale of Flanagan and the Eel off Dalkey Sound,” publication title unknown, August 28. Available at http://www.clubi.ie/dalkeyhomepage/ee.html.

Pitman, Robert. 2003. Personal communication, October 27. Also 1997, April 3.

Pitman, Robert, 1999. “Sightings and Possible Identity of a Bottlenose Whale in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Indopacetus pacificus?” Marine Mammal Science 15(2), p.531.

Pitman, Robert. 1987. “Observations of an Unidentified Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon Sp.) in the Eastern Tropical Pacific,” Marine Mammal Science 3(4), October, p.345.

Ralls, Katherine, and Robert L. Brownell, Jr. 1991. "A whale of a new species," Nature, April 18.

Taylor, L.R., Compagno, L.J.V., and Struhsaker, P.J. (1983). “Megamouth - a new species, genus, and family of lamnoid shark (Megachasma pelagios, family Megachasmidae) from the Hawaiian Islands,” Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, vol. 43, p.87.

Urban-Ramirez, Jose. 1992. “First Record of the Pygmy Beaked Whale Mesoplodon Peruvianus in the North Pacific,” Marine Mammal Science, October, p.420.

Wood, Gerald L.  Animal Facts and Feats.  Sterling Publishing Co., New York, 1977.

Yamada, Tadasu. 2002. “On an unidentified beaked whale found stranded in Kagoshima,” paper from the National Science Museum, Tokyo, December 25.

A Beautiful New Dunkleosteus model from Mojo

Review: Mojo Dunkleosteus

By Matt Bille

As founder of the coolest site on FaceBook and a fanatical Dunkleosteus terrelli fan, I am pleased to report the newest Dunk on the market is a beautiful model.  At under 8 inches long, it’s about the same size as the Safari dunk but smaller (and less expensive) than the CollectA Dunk I consider the gold standard for mass-produced models.  It has no articulated parts but is done in a swimming pose that, added to careful detailing, gives it a lifelike appearance.  As with the CollectA fish, this is clearly an organic living creature, unlike some Dunk illustrations we’ve all seen that look like an armored head with the boring parts sort of stuck on. 

I need to start with the usual disclaimer: I’m not an ichthyologist, paleontologist, or (God knows) an artist. So my comments are thoughts and suggestions, not a hard-science critique. I have messaged the maker twice to ask questions and never heard back, so let’s go. 

The handsome green and yellow body with some countershading, a little reminiscent of a speckled trout, is plausible and looks great. It resembles Charles R. Knight’s classic painting of the critter.  As in most Dunk models, the artist set the rounded dorsal fin well back on the body.  The mouth is open, as is the law for all Dunk models (why make them if you don’t show off God’s own staple remover)?  The biting plates and head look great, although the sclerotic rings might have been set half-a-millimeter deeper.

There comes a point in any Dunk modeler’s life where he or she must make judgement calls, and some of the ones on display here are especially interesting.  The striations or folds on the body, indicating the allowance for movement by the skin, are carried considerably further back (all the way to the region of the anal fin), than in most Dunks. Indeed, most models either show these only at the cephalic joint (as with the with CollectA) or not at all.  No one has enough information to say “this is what Dunk skin looks like," so let's accept it as a maybe. The striations are sculpted, as every bit of this model (such as the fin rays) is, with precision. This Dunk has none of the pebbly-osteoderm-laden appearance of the CollectA or Schleich types, and no hint of the very large scutes on the Schleich model (the online information for a seller of that Dunk says, "authenticated model by the paleontologists of the Museum of Natural History," but I really would like to ask that artist about the scutes). 

The paired fins show the “wrists” reaching out further from the body than in all the other models I have.  There are illustrations of D. terrelli showing it this way, but they are definitely in the minority. However, we don’t have a Dunk fin, nor the cartiliginous skeleton of one, nor the outline of one, and some articles describe the pectoral fins as stenobasal (narrow based), so again the choice is reasonable. The pectoral fins are set a bit further back than the CollectA artist chose to place them.

On the tail, I do have strong opinions. I’ve never liked the symmetrical or almost-symmetrical eel-like tail idea: it just doesn’t seem to have enough surface area for the speed and maneuverability this heavily armored predator needed to catch prey like sharks. The most recent paper on this plumped for a more heteroceral tail, which I think more likely to be correct.  But we don’t KNOW this for sure, and some specialists still think this type of model is accurate. You could say the tail here is eel-like with just enough asymmetry to hint Dunk evolution might have started on the path to a more prominent upper lobe when the Frasnian-Famennian extinction event punched the arthrodires in their armored noses and the Hangenberg event left them on the bone heap of history.  I am also not a hydrodynamicist, but I know something of aerodynamics, so I’m big on control surfaces, given that the fins and tail had to propel/maneuver a head and forebody that by itself could weigh a ton.

The bottom line is that I don’t think anything, except perhaps the tail, is wrong with this Dunk, and again it’s just gorgeous.  Artists and scientists have many different interpretations of the species’ body plan and appearance, and unless we find impression fossils of something closer to the Dunk than its ubiquitously-cited little cousin Coccosteus, it’s going to stay that way. You might say it's now my favorite small model: the Safari Dunk is lovely, too, but this has more texture, and I think the dorsal armor on the Safari goes a little too far back, to where it might impede vertical movement.)  This is a great toy and display model, and, selling at only $11.95 on Amazon, a major addition to anyone’s lineup.

Photos by Matt Bille, Mojo and CollectA Dunkleosteus
(use of Steve Brusatte's superb book on dinosaurs is meant as a homage and is not an endorsement)

References: 

Lauren Cole Sallana and Michael I. Coatesa,”End-Devonian extinction and a bottleneck in the early evolution of modern jawed vertebrates,”  PNAS, https://www.pnas.org/content/107/22/10131

Neil Shubin, et. al., “The pectoral fin of Tiktaalik roseae and the origin of the tetrapod limb,” 2006, Nature volume 440, pages 764–771

Zerina Johanson, “Vascularization of the osteostracan and antiarch (Placodermi) pectoral fin: similarities, and implications for placoderm relationships,” Lethaia, 02 January 2007, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1502-3931.2002.tb00077

"Dunkleosteus Schleich Dinosaur Scale Model," https://www.dinosaurcorporation.com/dunkleosteus2.html

G. C.Yioung, “The relationships of placoderm fishes,” September 1986, Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society,  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1986.tb00876 

Can light go faster than light?

We all know the speed of light is universal.  You can slow it down a bit by passing light through selected materials in a lab, but you can't affect its velocity in free space. You can't make it speed up. And you certainly can't make it go backwards.  
The science gang at University of Central Florida says, "Yes, you can."  
We're far from knowing all the applications of this yet, but maybe that Star Trek faster-then-light "subspace" communication system? Wouldn't it be cool if we could do that in regular space, keeping contact with future starships traveling near light speed? 
(I know, getting to a significant fraction of light speed is a long way off. But I've been to the DARPA 100-year Starship conference and listened to very smart people who are sure it can be done, and in more ways than one.) 
In the meantime, this could bring breakthroughs in communications and a lot of other fields. Also, it's just cool.  

Hooray for Rocket Lab

The lack of an affordable small launcher has been a huge hindrance in development of small satellite and microsatellite capability.  While the 10cm CubeSats can be launched for as little as $100k thanks to companies like NanoRacks (which ships them to the International Space Station, where they are ejected overboard), larger microsats (defining those here as under 100kg) have fewer options, and almost always as a secondary payload. Secondaries launch when the primary payload is ready and go to a similar orbit. That's fine for basic experiments like radiation measurement, but it crimps the possible utility of satellites needing specific orbital altitudes and inclinations, and it prevents timely launch to add coverage for a natural disaster, a military crisis, etc.  Being the primary payload will often cost much more than the satellite: the innovative Pegasus, which in the 1990s gave us relatively affordable and very flexible aircraft-based launch, is still available, but rarely flies, in part because the Pegasus XL costs over $40M. Other small launchers have struggled: I think the count of failed proposals and ventures in the last two decades is likely to top 100. 
Now Electron, from Rocket Lab, has its first Defense Dept business, for $5.7M to launch three microsats. Hopefully this is a breakthrough. There is only room for a few of the many current ventures, and carrying U.S. military payloads successfully is a major mark of prestige and reliability for a new launcher. The Air Force, for the first time ever, requested money in the FY19 budget to fly payloads on small launchers. A recent attempt to build a small airlaunched vehicle by DARPA ended in disaster when the untried propellant exploded, but the agency has established the Small Launch Challenge, which will hopefully fly payloads on short notice this year.  (I never got the need for relying on a nasty new propellant: the Navy proved in 1958 you could do the same thing with solids.)
Whatever comes, the small launcher sector looks like it's finally on the way to being an established industry. Fingers crossed. 

How big is a T. rex?

Well, the animatronic wonder ("Rexy" in in the original Jurassic Park was a good 40 feet long and could tower 20 feet tall. She needed twelve handlers and weighed around 13,000 pounds (even more wet).     Sue, the world's most famous fossil, was probably about the same length and heavier (maybe 18,000 lbs plus) She took 30,000 labor hours to free, clean, and reassemble. She (the gender is not certain) stands about 13 feet high. The Field Museum proudly points out you're seeing the real skeleton, not a cast, although the head on said skeleton is a cast because they couldn't mount the 600-lb skull without the whole thing crashing down.  But the real skull is right there on display. I have not met Sue, but she is on my bucket list for sure.  
Sue starred in one of my favorite fantasy series, The Dresden Files: one of the magic rules in Jim Butcher's series is that zombie are more powerful the older the body or skeleton is.  When zombies attack Chicago, wizard Harry Dresden knows just where to find a skeleton he can animate to mop the city streets with them... 
Then there's Scotty.  Originally found in Canada in 1991 and teased out over decades from hard rock, the skeleton finally assembled (about 65 percent of it is there) indicates an animal that might have been several feet longer than Sue and a thousand pounds heavier.    The "might have been" is important if you think size matters, since we don't have as much of Scotty as we do of Sue, who was 90 percent complete.  And we really don't know how big an average adult was (some think Sue is in this category), or what might have been the size of an outlier.
Just say they were big. But it's sad they're extinct.   

The Stormtrooper spiders

Scientists have placed four newly discovered species of tropical spider in a new genus, Stormtropis - stormtrooper.  They are orange-ish rather than white, but they are almost impossible to tell apart, hence the name.  (Alas, none of these species have a chrome phase that could be named for Captain Phasma.)  It is not known yet whether these spiders have any special problems with accuracy when they strike at prey. 

This isn't the first species named from Star Wars, and surely will not be the last. This article counts 9 so far. An example is the weevil Trigonopterus chewbacca from New Zealand, which is not tall by any standards but has scales that look a little like brown fur.  An extinct giraffe ancestor whose horns reminded someone of Queen Amidala's hair was described in 2015 as reminded paleontologists of Queen Padmé Amidala's "swooping headgear," leading them to name their discovery Xenokeryx amidalae.  

Robert Goddard and the Space Age

Robert Goddard would not live to see the modern space age, but long enough to see its potential.  He had begun the liquid fuel rocket era with a launch exactly 93 years ago in Massachusetts.  He worked on increasingly sophisticated rockets on shoestring budgets until WWII, when he developed Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) for rockets allowing heavily laden planes to lift off.  He saw the recovered remains of von Braun's V-2and knew what was ahead for space exploration. He also knew he could have supplied the U.S. with equivalent rockets if he'd had the backing and funding.  "I don't think he ever got over theV-2," one acquaintance said.
But what he DID do was more than enough to cement his place as a founder of the modern space era. Countless patents on guidance, control systems, better rocket engines, etc. formed the technical  underpinnings of the American space effort.
Happy birthday, Doc.  You were ahead of all of us.

New footage of the most elusive orca

This is not the first time this animal has been observed, but it's a reminder that marine creatures can be elusive even when we know they exist.  Great video. We can't be sure if it's a separate species, subspecies, or ecotype, but the eminent Robert Pitman thinks we are on the way to describing a second species in the genus Orca (there have been proposals for new species before, including O. glacialis and O. nanus, but they really haven't caught on).  Orcinus orca has been thought for centuries to be a single species, but in this century it's become clear there are deep, if subtle, fault lines in the genus Orca, and the scientific discussion is just beginning.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/03/new-killer-whale-species-discov

The Type D made me wonder about the enigma called Wilson's whale, but the identification is far from certain.  

Orca (NOAA photo: I think Type C)

Here comes the (giant) sunfish

The ocean sunfish, mola mola, is one of the strangest things in the seas. It is enormous, the heaviest bony fish in the world at over two metric tons: it has, unusually for a bony fish, a hide that can deflect hand harpoons; and it is weird-looking, like a somewhat flattened blimp with fins.  The body seems absurdly short for all its size, as if the Creator got halfway through it and lost interest. (Or, for those old enough to remember, it looks like a subcompact car called the AMC Gremlin.)   It roams harmlessly through the oceans, slurping up zooplankton and (alas) plastic bags.  A new species, Mola tecta, slightly different and appearance and clearly distinct in DNA, was described in 2017 from specimens in the South Pacific. It was nicknamed the hoodwinker sunfish, in tribute to its hiding for so long in plain sight. What's new is that a specimen of M. tecta washed up on a beach in California, providing the first record of this animal in the Northern Hemisphere. The animal, over 2m long, has garnered media attention across the USA.  The hoodwinker's discoverer, Marianne Nyegaard, said of this far-ranging fish, "I couldn't believe it. I nearly fell out of my chair." What no one knows is whether this is a fluke, or there might be a population we don't know about.  

The Space Show and whale tracking

For those interested, I'm on tonight's live show at 7PM Pacific, 8 Mountain, and 10 Eastern talking about satellite tracking of whales. Calling in questions is encouraged! You can listen over the link or by phone (there’s no video feed of the guests) at

 

https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/20-feb-2019/broadcast-3271-matt-bille

 

on https://www.thespaceshow.com/content/listen-live

We use a software called OceanLens developed by Booz Allen Hamilton to of one humpback whale over 4 months. The data is from an experimental tag that shows the greatest depth reached between surfacing. The spreading pink object is the sound cloud radiated by a ship: 130 decibels right next to the ship, then spreading out and fading (this is at 2 KHz).  Data courtesy of Dr. Ari Leanander: the ship was not in the original data and was added in to show how the interactions between cetaceans and sound can be mapped.  I'm having some problems uploading it but will work on it.

(all material copyright 2018 Booz Allen Hamilton)

I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie

When horror met entomology (sort of) the result was pretty fun...  

I grew up with the giant bugs of the 1950s, seeing those movies on Creature Feature  on my local station in the 70s.  "Creature Feature...fiendish films for Saturday night. Creature Feature!" went the ads. 

Some of these movies were better, really, than they had any right to be.  Much credit goes to actors and directors who played everything straight, adding drama to the silliness.  Budgets and special effects varied widely (I forget the name of the one where “giant” grasshoppers walk across photos of buildings), and the cooperation of the military always helped, since seeing tiny models of tanks and planes turns off even kids.  

If filmmakers were using giant versions of real bugs, they could do rear-projection effects, although it was pretty obvious back then what was happening, and sometimes they made partial practical-effects pieces like a claw, foot, or head.  

The trend-setter, 1954’s Them! went to the trouble of building some giant ants that weren’t nearly as bad as they could have been.  It’s a decent movie in all respects, with the best idea being the little girl, lost in the desert, parents can’t be found, who reacts to the smell of formic acid by screaming “Them!”  

The Deadly Mantis (1957) was another good one, although you had to accept a mantis the size of a B-52 “thawing out” and reviving in the Arctic and heading south, somehow hitting DC and New York on the way (it died in New York, something countless performers can say.)   The mantis first wipes out an Eskimo village, a weird twist inasmuch as a disappearing Arctic village is claimed by Forteans as something that actually happened.  

Both movies (and most of their lesser imitators) had a handsome male scientist with a female daughter (Them!) or assistant (Mantis), although Them! gets props for having the daughter a scientist in her own right.  Them! wins on science, tossing in a few bits of real science on ants and radiation (indeed, one real scientist whose work was mentioned on screen threatened legal action, and the studio took the reference out) .

But both are fun – they still are.  Give them a look sometime.

Sleuthing Sharks in the Fishmonger's Stall

When I first started reading about sharks, back in the 70s, people talked about 300 species.  Then 350, then 400, and experts now make estimates of 440 all the way up to 470, with the usual allowances that some species may turn out to be variations of known species - and the reverse. 
Where do you find new sharks? 
Some are split out from studies of known species. 
Occasionally scientists just get lucky, as when the most spectacular modern discovery, the megamouth shark, was caught in a parachute being used as a sea anchor by a Navy ship in 1976. (What is truly weird about that is that some 70 specimens have been caught of found stranded since: where was it until 1976? You can't mistake it for any other shark.  Hmmm.....  an excellent article from Scientific American is found here.)
Many turn up in fishermen's catches.  Some are spotted at sea by scientists with fishing fleets or fishermen themselves.  

Megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios.) This one was found off Florida, a continent away from the first discovery in the Pacific. (Florida Museum of Natural History)

Sorting through the catch fishing boats haul to docks and markets, though, is probably the most  effective technique.  After all, that's how the most famous fish discovery in history, the coelacanth, turned up in 1938.
This article from Smithsonian collects many other examples. Most stunning is that one David Ebert has named 42 species of sharks, rays, and chimeras.  Others have found more new species, species in ranges we didn't know they inhabited, and species unseen for many years. No one had seen a smoothtooth blacktip shark for over a century before Rima Jabado of the United Arab Emirates found one in 2009. 

Smoothtooth blacktip shark. (Source and copyright unknown: educational fair use claimed).

Humans, scientists and laypersons alike, are fascinated with sharks. Sometimes it's because sharks are beautiful and amazing: sometimes it's because people still believe all sharks are like the one in Jaws (despite the late Peter Benchley's spending the rest of his life on shark conservation). 
Shark fishing is often an unsustainable business, or an illegal one, but a shark that's on display in a market is gone, and there's no point in not gleaning knowledge from it. Shark biologists agree on one thing: we haven't found them all. 

If you want to see the most amazing photographs of these creatures and meet them closeup, Shark by photographer Brian Kerry  (National Geographic, 2017) is a stunning book. 

Other sources: 
"Rediscovery and redescription of the smoothtooth blacktip shark, Carcharhinus leiodon (Carcharhinidae), from Kuwait, with notes on its possible conservation status"
Alec B. M. Moore, et. al.,   
Marine and Freshwater Research 62(6) 528-539 https://doi.org/10.1071/MF10159

 Published: 24 June 2011 .
Matt Bille, "The Still-Puzzling Coelacanth," Shadows of Existence, Hancock House, 2006. 
Florida Museum, :Megamouths," https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/discover-fish/sharks/megamouths/

Website warning: my old website is dangerous

My older books show a website at www. mattwriter .com. This domain slipped past me somehow and now has red flags about virus warnings. DO NOT GO THERE.  Go to www.mattbille.com. 

Apologies,
Matt 

New species all over

"Marbled crayfish are a globally expanding population of parthenogenetically reproducing freshwater decapods."  
OK, that's almost scary. It sounds like an old science fiction movie. However, not science fiction, just science, one of the never-ending rush of new species of all types.  The crayfish ranks, for example, added these two from Indonesia,among many others in the past year.  
The big splash of the last couple of years (yea, I'm cheating by expanding the timeline) was the Tapanuli organutan, a population of several hundred orangs in northern Sumatra overlooked until 1997, then identified in 2017 as a separate species.  They are highly endangered, which unfortunately is not a big surprise.  A Chinese-run company's new dam will rip up a good portion of the animals' habitat. Pongo tapanuliensis is the third species of orangutan. Dr. Marina Davila-Ross, who co-authored the description, remarked, “I was surprised about the extent to which the Tapanuli orangutans differed genetically, morphologically as well as behaviorally from the Sumatran and Bornean orangutans."  Alas, the other two she mentioned are not in any better shape, conservation-wise. 
You'd think the heavily populated modern nations are about picked over, but even where new species seem unlikely, they are not unheard of.  This recap by the BBC on the finds of naturalist Steve Trewhella notes a new wasp (2014) worms, etc., among other critters, in the UK.  In the U.S., a charmingly named new slug (Hemphillia skadei) - Skade being the daughter of the two Idaho biologists who turned it up.  The year 2017 brought a real rarity for the U.S., a new bird, also from Idaho, a crossbill named  Loxia curvirostra (for a curved beak used for probing into pine cones for seeds( by ecologist Craig Benkman.  

Crossbills occur over most of the world, and there are many species, but the most poetic thing about them, is, well, this poem, by Longfellow.

The Legend of the Crossbill

On the cross the dying Saviour

Heavenward lifts his eyelids calm,

Feels, but scarcely feels, a trembling

In his pierced and bleeding palm.

And by all the world forsaken,

Sees he how with zealous care

At the ruthless nail of iron

A little bird is striving there.

Stained with blood and never tiring,

With its beak it doth not cease

From the cross 't would free the Saviour,

Its Creator's Son release.

And the Saviour speaks in mildness:

'Blest be thou of all the good!

Bear, as token of this moment,

Marks of blood and holy rood!'

And that bird is called the crossbill;

Covered all with blood so clear,

In the groves of pine it singeth

Songs, like legends, strange to hear. 

What lurks beneath Antarctic ice?

The first answer, of course, is "a continent."  Get out to the huge ice shelves, though, and the sea in places goes down to 4,000m or So. This interesting article, though lacking in examples and scientific detail, recounts how Aussie scientists probed those depths and found, not only the expected collection of weird fish and invertebrates, but species that seemed to have evolved there into something a little different than their counterparts in other oceans.  That was unexpected;  although we have interesting Antarctic examples like the antifreeze-blooded fishes,  it's generally been held that warm, food-rich waters are the best places for evolution and speciation. Mother Nature springs another surprise... i'll have to look for some more detailed articles from the scientific press. 

Book Review: Rocket Men

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon 

Robert Kurson

2018

It's hard to express how much I enjoyed Rocket Men. I was an "Apollo kid" and something of a space historian myself, so I knew the story, but what the author does here is make us FEEL it. The astronauts, of course, take center stage (including Anders, who is kind of the forgotten man on this mission), but the key Earth-based figures, including the administrators who argued and finally approved (with fingers crossed) a very rushed first mission around the Moon, the families, and others - all are brought to life. The technical aspects are well explained and very clearly described. There's an odd point where we switch to the views of unnamed cosmonauts and back in the same paragraph, and the background events of a turbulent year, which are very well described, could have been better tied in to NASA activities. These are quibbles, though. The author, not a space expert by training, puts us into the capsule with excellent descriptions of life for three men in a can. A couple of memorable bits to me were 1) the Saturn V liftoff (except for the wording that there were "explosions" of fuel and oxidizer, which might just have been a bit of hyperbole). I have seen a Saturn V launch, albeit from 10 miles, and I understand the booster technology, and I think he nails it, and 2) the description of an oft-overlooked bit of most space voyages, the recovery: this book captures the drama and the humor of the events that started with the scary but very clean reentry. Well done, sir, VERY well done. Everyone interested in space history and the lunar race will want this book.

Thoughts on cryptozoology

As I've said before, I like cryptozoologists, although I don't count myself as one.  Their resolute optimism can be contagious.  I wish those hunting sasquatch or Nessia all the luck in the world.  I also wish, though, that they did things a little differently. 

Something that should be discussed in cryptozoology is how much background or work someone needs to be credible. (This may apply in other fields - Philip Klass once complained that people thought a few evenings of reading made a UFO expert - but cryptozoology is my favorite oddity, so that's where I'm going.) I ruminate on this this because a lot of people write/post on cryptozoology who are smart and curious but don't know things like ecology and evolutionary biology. Lack of classes in such things has obviously not stopped a lot of people, including me, from writing on the topic. I've written on other topics, like microsatelltie design and Martian soil, where I have no degrees or recent classes, either.  So I'm not saying, "Only write if you're a zoologist."
 My suggestion is that, if you are planning to write on cryptozoology, you owe it to all those interested in the topic to do some reading or talk to some scientists or take some relevant science classes - in short, to do some research outside cryptozoological books and websites and be able to address why a species is likely to exist, where it might plausibly exist, etc. Otherwise, don't waste your time or readers' time. 

The other thing that strikes me about cryptozoology is: Is there any field of endeavor in which people spend so much time re-debating old claims/evidence? P-G film, McNab’s Nessie photo, on and on.... there ARE old things that still puzzle some people. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to take the Valhalla sea creature out of the “Unexplained ” file. But you reach a point where everything that could reasonably be relevant has already been said. Log it as a data point and move on to what’s new. Maybe someone will discover something that explains this old sighting or that old photo (the sea creature nicknamed "Trunko," a longtime discussion topic laid to rest by recent discovery of old newspaper accounts, is a great example). If that happens, great,  but well-discussed evidence fifty or a hundred years old is not, by itself, going to yield new insights. Many smart, capable people get caught up in re-debating old stuff forever. 

There ARE plenty of undiscovered animals out there. New birds, sharks, and even mammals are described every year. So let's search for new worlds.  

Pretty Amazing Space: 2019 Starts With Succcesses

This year has kicked off with amazing feats in space exploration. Above are NASA images of the asteroid Bennu and the weird little rock/ice conglomeration called Ultima Thule.  

How did we get them, and what else was going on this month in space? Glad you asked.

NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) Osiris-Rex reached the near-Earth asteroid Bennu and sent back spectral analysis (which proved the existence of water), stunning photos, and, soon, a sample of the surface, which will leave the asteroid’s minuscule gravity for a long journey to arrive on Earth in 2013.  It’s in orbit surveying the asteroid to help engineers plan out the tricky phase of approach and landing.  (That gravity is so minuscule the spacecraft can orbit as close as 1.4 kilometers, a record for close orbit of any natural object.) 

I’ve already written of how NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) control room went nuts on New Years’ Day with the arrival of the New Horizons probe at a little bilobate object (it has basically one round object stuck on top of another, giving it sort of a bowling-pin appearance) in the Kupier belt known as 2014 MU69 and nicknamed Ultima Thule.   New Horizons studied Pluto in 2015 and kept going, a tribute to the program’s engineers and technicians. 

There have been a few oddly negative comments made in the media by people who felt 1) there was too much national pride (flags, etc.) about New Horizons, and 2) the use of "Ultima Thule" was wrong because the term had been adopted by a handful of white-supremacy morons.  I don't get either one: New Horizons was paid for  by American taxpayers and built by Americans, and the fact space exploration benefits all humankind doesn't make it wrong to recognize the nation that made it happen. As to the Roman-era term Ultima Thule (rougly, "most distant land"), there's no way to prevent ANY term from being appropriated by racists.  There's no reason or point to carping about it. 

x

China, meanwhile, soft-landed a probe and rover on the far side (NOT THE DARK SIDE!) of the Moon.  The Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft to pull off a soft landing on the side of the Moon away from human sight (and direct radio communication).  The China National Space Administration (CNSA) reported the vehicle, which launched four weeks ago, entered lunar orbit December 12 in preparation for the landing. Once down, it deployed a suite of instruments to study the lunar surface, radiation, etc., sending back some great pictures at the same time.  Then it sent out the rover, Yutu-2 (Jade Rabbit 2: Jade Rabbit had been landed by the e Chang’e-3 spacecraft in 2016, but was short-lived) to explore further.  The lander kept in touch with Earth via Queqiao, a Chinese relay satellite already parked at Earth-Moon Lagrange point 2.  Designers of Chang’e-4 even made space for a sealed biology experiment with two kinds of seeds (including, of course, potato "eyes") and silkworm cocoons.  Pretty impressive.

To infinity and beyond!

NASA reaches the "Ultima" destination

NASA's New Horizons probe has extended human reach to a place never explored: Ultima Thule, a Kupier Belt object shaped like a big bowling pin.  In addition to the close flyby and the photos and data, one thing to remember is that the solar system may be big, but this is well beyond the normally accepted boundaries, over 6.5 billion km from here.   It's about 20km long, and it was intercepted (remember, you have to HIT a spot marked from Earth as only a dot on a telescope photo) a good 10 hours, as light/radio travels, from the receiving stations here at home.  We humans can do some remarkable stuff.. Let's do more.