Two new species of wolf?

Wolves are the world's most widespread wild mammal, or they were before Homo sapiens decided that they had to go. All wolves are usually considered a single species, Canis lupus, with numerous subspecies. There is a debate about some types, like the tiny, supposedly extinct Japanese wolf (either Canis lupus hodophilax or C. hodophilax). Now a paper published in the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolution argues that two populations in India are, based on their mitochondrial DNA, distinct both from each other and from other wolf populations. They are therefore proposed as new species, C. himalayensis and C. indica. This finding, if verified, tells us canine evolution and relationships may be much more complex than we thought.

The Megafauna Murder Mystery

I've always been fascinated by how early North America was peopled and by what happened to all those really cool mammals - mammoths, mastodons, lions, and many far stranger species - that roamed the continent in prehistory. A new theory indicates that people may be innocent, or at least partly innocent, of the megafuna murder.
Numerous experts have supported the idea that all those megafauna were essentially hunted to extinction. I've always had a problem with the idea that this is the whole answer. Where, in historical times, is one example where we can say with certainty that indigenous people have hunted a an entire ecosystem of large, wide-ranging species to extinction? If all the largest animals in N. America were wiped out, along with their predators, why did Africa (until modern poaching) teem with elephants, rhinos, hippos, and the predators that fed on them? Humans had perhaps 2 million years to spread out and hunt in Africa, but only 13,000 years or so in N. America.

OK, enough editorial comment. Read for yourself why, according to a team led by James Kennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara, it looks likely a celestial body, most probably a comet, had a hand in the mass extinctions. I'm not sure from reading that that I would call it established fact, but it's certainly an intriguing possibility.

Thanks to Kris Winkler for this item.

New home for Tetrapod Zoology Blog

Dr. Darren Naish's superb blog, Tetrapod Zoology, has moved to a new address. Click on the title link above to keep up on the most interesting stuff from zoology and paleontology.

Meanwhile, on Mars....

Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log has a great roundup of new from and about the Red Planet. This includes the work of rovers Spirit and Opportunity, various plans for new missions and eventual human settlement, and an update on what appear to be giant sinkholes in the Martian surface. Steven Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Mars rover programs, was just honored by the National Space Society with its annual Von Braun Award.

All Creatures Great....

Experts with a U.S.-funded wildlife conservation program in war-ravaged Sudan have found a treeless island in the nation’s southern swamps that is home to “hundreds” of elephants. One participant, Tom Catterson, said, "We flew out of a cloud, and there they were. It was like something out of Jurassic Park.” The poachers who have ravaged Sudan’s elephants and other wildlife apparently never knew of this remote spot, whose location is being kept secret.

COMMENT: OK, this episode concerns a chaotic, poor, war-torn nation where travel was difficult and wildlife officers were few. But still… hundreds of elephants living unknown until now? The example will bring smiles, not only to wildlife conservationists, but to cryptozoologists who speculate on what else we might have missed.

...and Small

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise.”

The words of King Solomon come to mind amid new research on how army ants move efficiently over terrain which, from an ant’s point of view, is full of holes and other obstacles. The answer: living pothole-fillers. Scott Powell and Nigel Franks of the University of Bristol reported that ants of the species Eciton burchellii fill holes by climbing into them, adjusting their bodies to fit, and letting their sisters march over them. If the hole is too big, several ants will climb in. The behavior observed in Central and South America was duplicated in the laboratory, where ants marching over boards with holes drilled into them essentially took individual action to make the march of the colony more efficient. When the horde has passed, the “filler” ants clamber up and rejoin the march.

Dinosaur find - a swimming predator

Dinosaur trackways leading into water have been found before, but these have always belonged to herbivores. Was the water a refuge from predatory species? A 125-million-year-old fossil from northern Spain indicates otherwise. A trackway on what used to be a lake bed indicates at least one (still not identified) species of theropod (a member of the group including everyone's favorite. T. rex), could indeed swim after prey. Loic Costeur of France's Universite de Nantes led a team which just published its studies of tracks made in water about 3.5 meters deep, leaving marks of the dinosaur's clawed feet on the bottom. Costeur told CNN in an email that, "The animal used a pelvic paddle motion, much like living aquatic birds."

The Coastlines of Titan

NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its 31st radar mapping pass of Titan, Saturn's giant moon, and produced the startling image of a coastline with bays, channels, islands, and so forth that could well have been taken of Earth. The "water" is an inhospitable mix of methane and ethane, but the similarity of processes at work on two totally different worlds is amazing. See the title link above for the image.

Deep-sea surprise

It's not surprising to discover a new species on marine invertebrate, but scientists sending their ROV to explore the Pacific floor reported a new sea anemone from a very odd habitat. The new species has been found only in one place: living on a "whale fall," the carcass of a dead whale. Found 3,000 meters down, the small, dead-white species Anthosactis pearseae was compared in size to a human tooth. It's hardly a big or spectacular find, but it filled in a pixel, so to speak, in our very incomplete image of life in the depths. No anenome has ever been found on a whale fall, which creates a colony that may last 60 to 100 years as the bones slowly decompose.

The Sound of Little Dinosaur Feet

Paleontologists working just a couple hours' drive from my house, in Morrison, Colorado (west of Denver) report an exciting and unusual find: tracks of baby dinosaurs, in this case some species of Stegosaurus. The tracks are about the size of a U.S. half dollar and indicate the critters were somewhere around the size of human babies at that point. Morrison Natural History Museum director Matthew Mossbrucker says,"The tracks are so crisply preserved that I can imagine the sound of tiny feet splashing up water when the baby dinosaurs came to this ancient river to drink and cool down."

Note to readers

I hope you're still out there. You take a few days off for travel followed by illness, and you realize and awful lot of science has passed you by.

I promise to be more faithful about keeping you up to date on the wide world of science and technology.

By the way, we are coming up quickly on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik (October 4). That is two days before my birthday, and I always wish Mom has been able to rush it just a bit so I could share in the occasion. Anyway, the July issue of Air&Space includes a list of 50 ways to celebrate the occasion. I wrote them a letter reminding them they had missed the obvious: Read a book! Naturally, I recommend the most complete, yet concise explanation of those years:
The First Space Race
by Matt Bille and Erika Lishock
Foreword by Dr. James A. Van Allen
Texas A&M University Press
2004
Happy reading!

www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/2004/bille.htm

Life in the Wedell Sea

Hundreds of new species of invertebrates have been discovered in the Wedell Sea of Antarctica. Three German expeditions from 2002 to 2005, trawling at depths between 1,000 and 6,000 meters, found the marine life to be far richer than anyone expected. There are nearly 600 new species from just one group, the isopods (which resemble marine woodlice).

Accompanying the article above in The Economist is an editorial discussing just how complex this whole business of describing species really is. Whether a scientists uses morphology, reproductive isolation (aka the Biological Species Concept or BSC) or DNA, classifying and bounding a species remains a fuzzy business.
See:http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9191545

New Evidence: Past Water on Mars

The NASA rover Spirit, currently prowling Mars' Gusev Crater, has found a patch of sand that strongly indicates water was present at the site. The soil is 90 percent pure silica. Project scientist Steve Ruff of ASU explained that, on Earth, "the only way you can achieve that level of enrichment is by pumping water through rocks." Steve Squyres of Cornell University added, "It was astonishing."

The Eagle Soars

Amid all the bad news about extinction and conservation, we should not forget the successes. The American bald eagle has done so well it may be removed from the "Endangered" species list and downlisted to "Threatened."

Ready, AIM, NFIRE

Jonathan McDowell produces an informative and insightful chronicle of what's happening in space. In this entry, he reports on the status of two interesting smaller spacecraft, NASA's AIM science satellite and the MDA's NFIRE mission, along with the launch of two large new communications satellites.
(Okay, I put this in just so I could write that headline...)

New hummingbird from Latin America

Ornithologists with The Hummingbird Conservancy have a described a new species from Columbia, the very colorful Gorgeted Puffleg Eriocnemis isabellae. Actually, they were conducting a general biological survey and not specifically looking for new birds. As one co-discoverer remarked: “Though we expected to find new species of amphibians and new ranges for birds, the discovery of a new hummingbird was completely unexpected.” The species is threatened by slash-and-burn agriculture and the expansion of coca fields.

Bear kills moose - in driveway

Folks in Alaska are used to wildlife. (A story is that the air traffic controller at the Anchorage airport once told a taxiing pilot, "Bear left at the taxiway," and the pilot replied, "I see him.") But waking up to find a 500-lb grizzly (more properly, brown) bear killing an adult moose in the driveway. The Lyons of Homer, Alaska, found just that. This entry on Cryptomundo links to the videos the witnesses posted on the Internet.

The Birds and the Bats

Two groups of modern vertebrates, the birds and the bats, have mastered flight. They do it very differently, though. Geoffrey Spedding, a University of Southern California professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering (in other words, a professor at my alma mater), reported on wind tunnel studies by writing, "Bats seem to be mostly specialized for agile and maneuverable flight in complex environments." Bats have a complex twisting motion that provides some lift on the upstroke, while birds rely almost entirely on the downstroke.

Discoveries on distant planets

Scientists have succeeded in a new level of analysis of extrasolar planets, measuring the temperature on one gas giant at over 2,000 degrees C and mapping the swirling winds of another.

Spectacular death of a star

Some 240 million light-years from Earth, and thus about 240 million light years ago, a supermassive star (perhaps 150 times the mass of the Sun) exploded in a burst of energy whose brightness is startling to astronomers. The supernova in the constellation Perseus was not only huge but extraordinarily bright in the visible spectrum, leaving scientists scrambling to adjust their models for a new type of stellar death.