Species keep coming out of Peru

In the Peruvian Amazon, the rate of "major" animal discoveries is impressive: one new bird a year and one new mammal every four years. There are plenty of invertebrates as well: one find I mentioned in an earlier post was the toothy "Tyrannosaurus leech" (Tyrannobdella reina). As this article points out, the nation is taking meaningful conservation measures, with 15 percent of its lands under some level of protection. It's also a land undergoing rapid development, though, with 16 percent of the territory included in mining concessions. Conservationists are fighting to make sure the most critical spots are saved, noting that there are no doubt more species there we don;t even know about yet.
COMMENT: As in the United States, it's not reasonable to expect all public lands will be protected: economic welfare and conservation will sometimes be at odds. The balancing act will never be simple, although requiring greener methods of extraction and restoration can help.

The South Atlantic Anomaly

Here's another fun Skeptoid post. The South Atlantic Anomaly, unlike the Bermuda Triangle it's sometimes (unsupportably) linked to, is a real phenomenon, a quirk in the Van Allen belts that maintains a cloud of high-energy particles at an altitude low enough to concern the operators of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Some spacecraft have sensitive instruments turned off when they approach the Anomaly. While pseudoscientists link it to the strange 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, that's not supportable, either. Commercial aircraft operate at far too low an altitude to be affected.

What was the Bell Island Boom?

Atmospheric phenomena have always fascinated me. We are still learning about strange, gigantically powerful phenomena like sprites and elfs (not elves) in the upper atmosphere. One awesome phenomenon we have confirmed is the superbolt, a long-lasting lightning bolt from the top of a thundercloud to the ground, with 100 times the power and brightness of a normal bolt. Skeptoid host Brian Dunning here details a superbolt strike, blamed on a secret superweapon by some conspiracy types, that shook Newfoundland in 1978. It destroyed appliances, killed chickens, and left holes in roofs. No wonder it had people puzzled and alarmed.

Homo sapiens much older than thought?

The general theory, until recently, was that our own species evolved only some 200,000 years ago, a half-million years after the migration out of Africa. Teeth found in Israel, though, may complicate this picture considerably. According to Israeli researchers, the teeth are from "modern" humans - but are 400,000 years old. While the discoverers are cautious (they will keep digging, looking for skulls and bones that might reinforce their theory) and other anthropologists think the claim isn't proven yet, the find raises the possibility that the first H. sapiens arose in what would become known as the Holy Land. That might mean one group of ancient humans pushing out from Africa settled this region and eventually developed into a new species - us.

More on ancient human from Russia

Readers may remember the announcement made in March that a finger bone from a Russian cave represented a new species of human. Now we have learned more about the "Denisovans," as the writers have nicknamed these people from 41,000 years ago. Among other findings: some of their DNA shows up in modern people from Melanesia. That's a long way from southern Siberia, and complicates questions about human origins and migrations. As one researcher put it, "Instead of the clean story we used to have of modern humans migrating out of Africa and replacing Neanderthals, we now see these very intertwined storylines with more players and more interactions than we knew of before."
COMMENT: Also, this indicates the Denisovans may have migrated south, which increases speculation by cryptozoologists that they may not be extinct, and may represent the almas, reported primates generally described as primitive humans of some sort, from the Pamirs.

Book Review: True Giants

TRUE GIANTS
Is Gigantopithecus Still Alive?
Mark A. Hall and Loren Coleman
Anomalist Books, 2010

In True Giants, Coleman and Hall tackle a question that's hung around the edges of primate cryptozoology without being fully addressed: Are sasquatch and its ilk (assuming they exist) the tallest primates on Earth, or could there be an additional species, presumably a modern descendant of Gigantopithecus blacki, that forms the basis for worldwide legends of giants 9-20 feet tall? I greatly respect Coleman, and Hall is a researcher of prodigious skill, but this slender volume didn't change my thinking on this.
The authors admit up front that we don't know what kind of skeletal structure works in such an animal. To me, practical knee joints are especially hard to visualize: human knees are problematic even for people of ordinary height and chronically troubled for very tall people. Giraffes manage their True Giant-like height with fairly normal mammalian knees but have four to spread the weight over.
The authors suggest a honeycomb bone structure for lightness, but there's no precedent for a true birdlike honeycomb structure in mammals: you have to postulate a long line of evolution we know nothing about for a change this radical. It seems a stretch even though, given that we have nothing of G. blacki but fossil jaws and teeth and the entire fossil record of the modern species of chimpanzee and gorilla could be held in a man's two hands, our picture of primate ancestry is a long way from complete.
Gigantopithecus is viewed by anthropologists, almost unanimously, as a heavily built knuckle-walker. If this is correct, it would take a lot of evolving to get to any sort of upright ape and a lot more for the True Giant. Giganto's gorilla-like posture is basically implied from the sheer size indicated by its sparse fossils, so this common scientific belief does not quite rise to the level of established fact. The late Grover Krantz argued the spread of the fossil jaws indicated upright posture, but leading Giganto expert Russell Ciochon rejected this, and very few people in the scientific community are open to the idea.
Implausibilities and new structures certainly arise in mammals, but scattered eyewitness reports and footprints are not enough to make me take the True Giant possibility seriously. I commend the authors for tackling a difficult subject and sparking debate, and cryptozoologists should read this book for an understanding of the "high end" of unidentified-primate reports.

Top 10 Cryptozoology stories of 2010

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman has released his Top 10 Cryptozoology Stories of the year. They include discovery of two large and impressive new species, a monkey and a monitor lizard: the repeated misdentifications of ordinary animals with mange as something bizarre (not sure those really belong here); publications of new theories, including the DNA results from the pursuit of Sumatra's mystery ape, the orang-pendek; the continued success of Loren's pride and joy, the International Cryptozoology Museum; a new photo from Loch Ness and a spate of sasquatch-type reports from North Carolina; and the capture of a live saola in Vietnam.
COMMENT: I'm sick of the mangy corpses, although Loren has a point in that they do keep making the news.

Von Braun's 1960 lunar plan (and a cool blog)

Larry Klaes has a very interesting blog, Paleo-Future, about predictions of the future from years past (it explains, for example, who predicted the personal jet-pack thing that I still want and can't have.) This example looks at a book by Wernher von Braun, written in 1960 and portraying a near-future lunar mission. Not surprisingly, a lot of it turned out to be right (he was predicting less than a decade, after all, and he was Wernher von Braun). He did think we'd be wearing advanced versions of the close-fitting Mercury-type space suits rather than the much bulkier suits that were really used.
COMMENT: Just plain love this blog. But I still want my flying car, too.

Gradeschool kids publish in scientific journal

You're never too young to be a scientist. A group of 8- to 10-year olds in England have published their research on bees. Biology Letters is, in fact, a serious peer-reviewed journal. The scientist who mentored the kids in their study of how bees use a combination of spatial and color cues to determine which flowers to visit writes, "They [the kids] asked the questions, hypothesized the answers, designed the games (in other words, the experiments) to test these hypotheses and analysed the data."
COMMENT: Just wonderful stuff. Reviewers wrote that, while the usual degree of statistical rigor and repetition from most papers was absent, the experiment was genuine, well designed and added to knowledge.

Hornet's exoskeleton generates electricity

They don't know exactly how the Oriental hornet's exoskeleton generates solar electricity, and they also don't know why. But icthyologists have confirmed that, somehow, the mix of pigments in the exoskeleton takes in sunlight and puts out electricity. It's not an efficient process, but no one knows why it exists at all. Did the hornet evolve this ability so it could carry an iPod? That makes as much sense as anything.

Nat Geo's ten weirdest new species

And some of them, like the little purple octopus and the sneezing snub-nosed monkey, are endearingly odd.

Chimp girls play with "dolls"

Among chimps in Kibale National Park, Uganda, some female juveniles use sticks as dolls, caring for them the way their own mothers tend to offspring. Males almost never do the same. Researchers are still working out the implications.
COMMENT: Maybe the boy chimps would get on board if their sticks were called "action figures."

Amino acids found in asteroid meteorites

Scientists have found amino acids, the building blocks of life, in meteorites from Sudan. This is not the first time that's happened, but it is the first time they turned up in meteorites that had been naturally subjected to temperatures of 1,100 degrees Celsius. There shouldn't have been any organic compounds left, and experts like NASA astrobiologist Daniel Glavin are not certain why. But this does make it more plausible that life COULD have come to Earth from elsewhere.

A Bontanist's Christmas: new species of mistletoe

Helixanthera schizocalyx is a new species of mistletoe, found growing wild in Mozambique. Not where you'd expect mistletoe to show up, is it?

New species discovered by Missouri high schooler

I love stories like this. A new species of flower was discovered in China by a visting American high school student. You're never too young to wonder about the world.

It's squidworm!

And it's really bizarre. Teuthidodrilus samae is one of the weirdest looking things on the planet, a marine worm 9cm long with two armlike appendages used for feeding, eight qrmlinke appendages used for breathing (yes, breathing), pink paddlelike appendages for propulsion, and, last but not least, a dozen frondlike sensory organs. You have to take a look at the image: words can't do it justice.

Top Ten New Species of the decade

Conservation International, with an assist from the BBC, has announced ten new species from the last decade. The list is a reminder of how much we're still learning about our world.
Big red jellyfish (Tiburonia granrojo) - a deepsea Pacific jellyfish a meter across.
Chan's megastick (Phobaeticus chani) - a stick insect over half a meter long
Grey-faced sengi (Rhyncocyon udzungwensis) - a comical-looking mammal from Tanzania
Kipunji (Rungwecebus kipunji) - also from Tanzania, the first new genus of monkey since the 1920s
Bamboo shark (Hemiscyllium galei) - a colorful-seafloor-walking species
Giant slipper orchid (Phragmipedium Kovachii) - a striking purple flower, 20cm across, from Peru
Pitcher plant (Nepenthes palawanensis) - a large new species from the Philippines
Langkawi bent-toed gecko (Cyrtodactylus macrotuberculatus)- a forest- and cave-dwelling species from Malaysia
Pygmy three-toed sloth (Bradypus pygmaeus) - a swimming sloth from a Caribbean island.

New lemur leaps into view

Primatologist Russ Mittermeier has seen a lot of species, and participated in the discovery of more than one. In Madagascar, some fifteen years ago, he spotted a member of the "fork-marked lemurs" - known for a black stripe on its back that forked on its face. He suspected the species was new, but didn't get to take another look until two months ago. He and his team captured a specimen, took genetic samples, and let it go. Based on an odd structure under the tongue, apparently used for lapping up nectar, Mittermeier thinks he has the world's newest primate species on his hands. The genes will tell.

the heavens and the Earth: Apollo 8 reading of Genesis

One of the most thought-provoking videos from the space program: the crew of Apollo 8 reads from the book of Genesis while showing their global TV audience the Moon. It doesn't matter if you're a Christian: the wonder of the moment touches everyone.

Two space anniversaries today

Courtesy of fellow space nut Larry Klaes, who points out December 15 is doubly significant:
40 years ago today: the first robotic spacecraft to land on another planet, when the Russian Venera 7 came down on Venus.
45 years ago today: The first time two manned spacecraft made a precise (within a meter or so) rendezvous in orbit, by Gemini 6 and 7.