Halloween at the International Cryptozoology Museum

Get a free tour, or come as Bigfoot and get a free book! Readers of this blog know that I often ask people to support the ICM. It does not matter what you think of particular "cryptids" or even cryptozoology in general. There is nothing like this museum in the world, and if it were ever to fail, its collection, including thousands of one of the kind items, would be a terrible loss to both the sociology and the science of cryptozoology/zoology.

You know, I have occasionally thought of dressing as Bigfoot and being seen just as an experiment to see what the news coverage looks like (I'm 6'4" and could do a reasonable sasquatch impression.) But I'm not going to do it because Colorado has a huge population of elk/deer/bear/moose hunters who might not be able to resist the temptation to become famous by nailing a legendary ape.

Amber holds keys to past

What can amber from India, 50 million years old, tell us about our pasts? Ask Dr. David Grimaldi, who's been finding hundreds of insect species in it. He told NPR's Science Friday:
"Well, we can actually see transitional forms between living and other extinct things. So fossils actually are important for evolutionary research. It tells us a lot about the origins of the Asian fauna. And this particular deposit, I find probably the most interesting aspect of it is that the resin, the amber, was actually formed from a type of tree called dipterocarps. And today, these types of trees are the dominant tree in Southeast Asia. And there had been some controversy about the age of tropical forests. And this is a unique discovery in terms of helping to date the age of tropical forests."

No dinosaur DNA (of course, the amber is too young anyway), but the large lumps of amber being pulled out of a lignite mine are time capsules of evolution.

China to launch space lab by 2020

It's often been suggested that China be added to the partners of the International Space Station, but thechnical and political reasons have kept that from happening. The Chinese aren't going to do a full-blown space station, on the scale of the ISS, but they are planning a human-inhabitaed laboratory by 2020, with a test version to be launched by 2016.

Amazon produces a new species every three days

On average, a new species was described out of the Amazon region every three days for the last ten years, according to the World Widlife Fund. Ecologist Meg Symington: "What we say now, and we're very conservative, is one in 10 known species is found in the Amazon." Discovered in the Amazon from 1999 to 2009 were 637 plants, 257 fish, 216 amphibians, 55 reptiles, 16 birds and 39 mammals.
COMMENT: And some people STILL say cryptozoologists are wasting their time looking for new animals?

Scientis have fun with Dracula orchids andGoblin spiders

Entomologists and botanists like a cool name as much as anyone. A group of orchids famed for luring fruit flies to pollinate them by looking and smelling like mushrooms (the flies' natural preference) are classified in the genus Dracula. Goblin spiders are a very numerous group of small arachnids. Plenty of new species are being added to the spiders, the orchids have proven attractive to some previously unknown species of flies.
But why Dracula? Lorena Endara of the University of Florida explains, "Carlyle Luer, who later segregated Dracula from Masdevallia, sees these orchids as little bats flying in the forest since the flower faces down and the triangular sepals and the long sepaline tails display parallel to the ground."
Happy Halloween!

Non-science digression: farewell to Superman, the last hero

OK, I officially hate what DC is doing to Superman. Do these people remaking him as dark and edgy and angsty have no respect whatever for an iconic character? He may be, as Batman once called him, an "overgrown Boy Scout," but the comics world needs at least ONE hero who still believes in right and wrong and isn't a borderline psycho. You know, someone people would actually look up to? Superman was the last of those heroes. The 12-year-old boy in me weeps.

New "sneezing monkey" discovered

Scientists in the jungles of Myanmar have discovered a new primate called the "sneezing monkey" because its nostrils are turned up, so it sneezes out water when it rains. Seriously. I'm trying to figure out the evolution of that trait.
But it's another reminder that we are still finding new species all over the planet, and not just bugs and mice.

Tardigrades survive in space

I'm sure I did a post on this once before, but I can't find it, and events today brought it to my mind. Tardigrades are strange little multilegged beasties with the ability to survive dehydration and other extremes by essentially curling into a little ball and shutting down like a robot turning itself off until conditions get better. A surprising entry on the list of "Things that WON'T kill Tardigrades" is exposure to outer space. Vacuum and solar/cosmic radiation should kill anything more complex than a basic microbe (or the Andromeda strain, for you Michael Crichton fans), but tardigrades have survived even those conditions. Oh, and nuclear radiation won't kill them either....

Last flight of the Discovery

The space shuttle orbiter Discovery has a date set for its final flight. After some minor repairs induced a launch slip, NASA has set 1 November as the date for the STS-133 mission to the International Space Station. Six astronauts will deliver a module for storage and experiments, plus the first human-like robot in space, Robonaut 2. Two EVAs (spacewalks) are planned. Then the orbiter will retire, after 39 successful missions.

Godspeed, Discovery. You've been a great ship.

More at risk of extinction, but we know how to help

A new report saying one of every five vertebrates (fish excepted) is at some degree of risk also highlights success stories. The authors of the study, led by the United Nations Environment Programme, estimate 18% more species would be at risk without conservation efforts. Success stories include the whooping crane, Przewalski's horse, the California condor, and humpback whale. The best way to help: habitat conservation. It can be expensive, but it does work. As Ana Rodrigues of France's Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive put it, "Conservation is working, there is just not enough of it. Now is the time to scale up conservation."

American buys thylacine pelt at yard sale

Bill Warren paid five dollars for an old striped pelt at a yard sale. It turns out he bought what appears to be one of the few extant pelts from the thylacine, a dog-sized carnivorous marsupial believed extinct in 1936. Warren has no idea how old the pelt might be, beyond the fact the previous owner bought it 32 years ago. If genuine, it's worth thousands on dollars. One hitch: he can't sell it, because the US government has never taken the animal off the Endangered Species List.

A lot more water on the Moon

Last year, NASA's LCROSS experiment crashed an Atlas rocket stage into a crater near the lunar south pole. It took a long time to analyze the resulting data, but here it is. And the ejecta thrown up by the collision was five percent water that had been locked in icy soil. It's another important find indicating we can go back and establish a long-term scientific presence on our satellite - if we want to.

Progress toward international space cooperation

There have been important strides lately, and here are some more.

First, an international standard for docking rings and ports has been announced by the International Space Station Multilateral Coordination Board (MCB), including NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency; the European Space Agency; and the Canadian Space Agency: and two agencies from Japan.
http://www.onorbit.com/node/2585

Meanwhile, the Canadian Space Agency has charted its own path for future exploration:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1456

Canada is fleshing out its role in accordance with 2007's "The Global Exploration Strategy (GES)," being coordinated through the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG). Canada produced the GES along with agencies of Russia, the US, the UK, Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Ukraine, and ESA. European representatives are meeting now to follow suit
http://www.onorbit.com/node/2590

Renaming or un-naming dinosaurs?

Are Triceratops and Torosaurus the same or different species, and why does it matter? Paleontologist Jack Horner thinks they are the same, which poses a problem for the famed Peabody Museum - where visitors are greeted by a life-size sculpture identified as Torosaurus. It points up the challenge of naming species from often-fragmentary fossils. Yale paleontologist Nick Longrich, for example, is convinced Horner is wrong. Are the lumpers or the splitters right?

New species evolution in progress

One criticism of evolutionary theory is that we don't see species appearing. Well, not really so. We can trace recent explosions of diversity, like Africa's cichlid fishes, even if no one person could see it happen. Some experts think orcas of the Pacific Northwest are incipient species; that is, we have three populations of killer whales that are getting more and more different. Very surprisingly, the same species in the Antarctic may be doing the same thing. Now we have two species evolving so quickly humans are catching it in the act. Unfortunately, they are malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Passenger pigeon's relationships figured out posthumously

The passenger pigeon, often thought more closely related to the mourning doves than to other pigeons, was the most abundant bird in the world, maybe in all of history. Native Americans and, on a much larger scale, European settlers harvested this seemingly unlimited resource. If a flock took three days to pass overhead, what harm could nets, arrows, or even shotguns really do?
In a tragic lesson of conservation, we learned that no species is immune to overpredation. I've personally visited Martha, last of her species, now a sad, stuffed exhibit in the Smithsonian.
Long after the 1914 extinction (there are scattered reports indicating Martha was not the last, but there's no question the bird is gone for good), scientists have studied the species' DNA and found where it really belonged - with the other New World pigeons, but not very close to them. Ornithologist Kevin Johnson says, "This bird is pretty diverged from its nearest relatives, meaning it had a unique place in the world. It represented a unique lineage that's now gone."

New genus of tree described

While there are countless unknown plants and animals, you would think we at least had a pretty thorough catalog of the trees by now. Nope. A new genus of tree in the Aptandraceae family, a relative of the sandalwoods, has beend described from Honduras. The new genus Hondurodendron was described by American and Irish botany professors based on specimens from Honduras' El Cusuco National Park.

Sasquatch "Patty" is 42 today

42 years ago, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin produced film of a female sasquatch, nicknamed Patty. Their 16mm film is the most scrutinized amateur film in history except maybe for the Zapruder film of JFK's assassination. I still get stuck on the argument by the eminent late primatologist, Dr. John Napier (who thought sasquatch was likely real) that this film shows a creature whose lower half is humanlike while the upper half is apelike, and that's hard to accept despite the fact no one's ever found decent evidence of a hoax. This is either a tall guy walking deliberately oddly in an expertly made costume (not off the shelf) or the primate equivalent of a platypus (which does not make it impossible, only hard to accept). Neither explanation is clearly true to me, yet one of them must be....

A turtle from Antactica?

OK, not a live one. But 45M years ago, back in the Eocene, Antarctica was much warmer than today. Among its fauna, as documented by this recent find, were turtles. No modern turtles, or any other reptiles or amphibians, live on or near the southern continent. The only turtle that's really cold-adapted is the massive sea-going leatherback, which is seen high in the northern latitudes.

Science center fakes unicorn (it is fake, right?)

The Ontario Science Center in Toronto acts like it's taking this amateur video of a unicorn seriously, with a Unicorn Hotline to report sightings. It is, not surprisingly, all in good fun - a promotional gimmick for an exhibit about animals dubious and mythical. Our cryptozoological friends like sasquatch and Nessie are included along with unicorns, dragons, and the like in this exhibit. As a cryptozoological researcher, I can be dismayed when animals actually being looked for are lumped with those who never existed, but anything that draws people to a science center - and encourages them to think about the mysteries of the animal world - is a good thing. And the video is nicely done.