Scientists have found a seafood feast in the fossilised stomach remains of two plesiosaurs, long-necked aquatic predators that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
The find suggests these animals had a much more balanced diet than once thought, which researchers say probably explains why they survived for so many millions of years.
Australian researcher Professor Stephen Wroe, of the University of Sydney, and colleagues report their findings in today’s issue of the journal Science.
Plesiosaurs are carnivorous reptiles with an unusually long neck.
Those in the elasmosaur family have the longest neck of all, at more than twice the length of the body and tail put together.
Their large number of relatively small but very sharp teeth are well suited to grasping slippery and free-swimming fish or squid.
And studies of fossilised gut contents from North American plesiosaurs suggest this is what they ate.
Scientists just presumed their long necks must have been some kind of adaptation to catching agile fish and squid, says Wroe.
But the new research has found that the plesiosaur’s long neck also allowed the animal to feed on bottom-dwelling life.
“Their diet is much more balanced that we’d imagined,” Wroe says.
Looking into the stomach
Wroe and colleagues analysed the fossilised stomach remains of two plesiosaurs that lived around 100 to 110 million years ago found recently in marine deposits in northwestern Queensland.
One stomach was full of crushed clams and snails while the other contained pieces of clam.
The researchers also found a piece of fossilised plesiosaur poo which confirms the plesiosaur had eaten the seafood, rather than the plesiosaur remains containing seafood by accident.
“[The poo] was largely made up of crushed up mollusc shell,” says Wroe.
He says the fact that plesiosaurs could eat such a diverse diet might help to explain why the animals were so successful.
“Long-necked plesiosaurs were around for at least 135 million years and that’s quite a success story,” he says.
A female great white shark has completed the first documented round-trip ocean crossing by a shark, swimming farther than any other known shark, according to a new study.
Nicole, as the shark is being called, traveled from Africa to Australia and back—a total of 12,400 miles (more than 20,000 kilometers)—in nine months. The feat also set a second record: fastest return migration of any known marine animal.
The shark’s approximately 6,900-mile (11,100-kilometer), 99-day swim from South Africa to Australia was tracked with an electronic tag that had been attached on November 7, 2003. The device had been set to pop off on a specific date in late February 2004.
After floating to the surface, the tag told a satellite the details of its journey.
The information was then automatically relayed to scientists’ e-mail accounts.
On the day the tag was scheduled to transmit its data to the satellite, New York-based shark researcher Ramón Bonfil eagerly booted up his computer to get the scoop.
“When I opened the Web site and saw the map with the tag transmitting from the coast of Australia, I just couldn’t believe it,” said Bonfil, who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). “It was exactly what I wanted one of the sharks to do.”
The news only got better: Six months later zoologist Michael Scholl called Bonfil from South Africa and said the shark had returned from Australia.
Scholl, the founder of the White Shark Trust, had identified the shark’s unique fin markings in a series of photographs of Nicole—named after Australian actress and shark lover Nicole Kidman.
From The Scotsman: basking shark on endangered species list.
Bush White House declares torture vital to US security policy
By Patrick Martin
7 October 2005
In an extraordinary declaration of the brutality of American foreign policy, the Bush administration denounced a Senate vote to bar the use of torture against prisoners held by the US military.
Responding to the passage of an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill—approved by an overwhelming 90-9 vote Wednesday, the White House said the proposal would “restrict the president’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice.”
The statement indicated that Bush would veto the entire appropriation, providing $440 billion to fund military operations for the next fiscal year, rather than accept the restrictions on interrogation techniques spelled out in the Senate amendment.
The 90-9 vote came on an amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican and former prisoner of war in Vietnam.
McCain, a fervent supporter of the war in Iraq, has opposed the use of torture in military facilities like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, because it damages US foreign policy interests and could become the pretext for subjecting captured American military personnel to the same techniques in retaliation.
McCain’s amendment had the backing of two dozen former generals and admirals, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili and former Secretary of State and JCS chairman Colin Powell.
The new animation by Mark Fiore is on the Internet; here.
Its subject is various scandals in the Republican party in the USA. Like the scandals around Tom DeLay and Bill Frist; and the Valerie Plame-Iraq “WMD” scandal around Karl Rove and Lewis Libby (Libby update, January 2007: here).
On Wednesday 5 October, Dutch Foreign Minister Bot (a member of the Christian Democrats, biggest party in the Rightist government coalition) said that the US Bush administration going to war in Iraq was maybe “not sensible”.
In parliament, as reported in daily NRC, Bot asked himself whether “it had been sensible that there has been an invasion by the occupying powers”.
He replied to himself: “The reply could be that it has not been sensible and that with other means, with diplomatic means, more might have been reached; and that it might have been better to continue investigation [by United Nations weapons inspectors]”.
This differs from earlier statements by the Dutch Balkenende administration.
Boris Dittrich, leader of D66, one of the two other government coalition parties, in a reaction said the Iraq war was indeed “wrong”.
Other ministers pressured Bot to backtrack, which he did for the sake of continuing the unstable unpopular Balkenende coalition.
However, meanwhile Bot had made the point, already made earlier by most people in The Netherlands and the other countries of the world, that Emperor Bush stands naked.
No matter how loudly Bush’s sycophants say, like in Hans Christian Andersen’’s fairy tale, that the emperor’s new clothes are colourful and splendid.
IMPRISONING 73-year-old ladies and 71-year-old retired vicars would at first sight seem to be the stuff of which Ealing comedies are made.
And even new Labour’s harshest critics - among which number this newspaper proudly counts itself - would have been reluctant - prior to the defeat of the Tories - to allege that it would be a likely tactic.
But, as certainly as night follows day, the labour movement’s tame clowns - otherwise known as the Labour Party leadership - have managed to confound us yet again.
New Labour seems not to be content with leading five-year-old children and pregnant mothers off in handcuffs during a recent round of so-called anti-terror arrests.
Nor, apparently, is it enough to conduct dawn raids on families who have committed no crime except to flee from torture to a country whose declared adherence to international treaties obliges it to shelter them.
Retired vicar Alfred Ridley was released from jail yesterday after serving 28 days for the dreadful crime of withholding 6 per cent of his annual council tax - a sum which, while of some significance to a pensioner, has absolutely no bearing on the state of the nation’s finances.
Fellow campaigner Sylvia Hardy was released prematurely from prison last week after a mystery donor paid her arrears against her will.
It is of great concern that the Labour Party was absolutely mute during the outrageous imprisonment of these two individuals.
Betrayed is the bitter and tragic story of the destruction of the Canadian Seaman’s Union in the early 1950s.
The CSU was a progressive union with a strong and united rank and file membership which had achieved the eight-hour day, paid sick leave and equal pay for “non-white” workers on board ships of the Canadian merchant fleet, which, at the time, was the fourth largest in the world.
During World War II, Canadian merchant seamen had paid a high price on the Atlantic convoys, with 1,600 seafarers losing their lives.
Their reward, four years later, was the plan to privatise the merchant fleet by the liberal government of Louis St Laurent and to diminish the hard-won CSU agreements covering working conditions on Canadian ships.
The CSU opposed the government plans and organised an international strike involving 90 vessels in 26 countries, including Britain, South Africa, Australia, British Guiana, Ceylon, New Zealand, Italy, Holland and many other ports worldwide.
The Canadian government, in collaboration with private Canadian and US shipping interests, then instigated a brutal and ideological campaign to discredit the CSU and its members.
At the start of the strike, dockers in many ports worldwide supported the Canadian seafarers against the shipowners’ attempts to replace CSU members with scab SIU crews.
Almost 40,000 people took part in BirdLife International’s EuroBirdwatch 2005, which took place last weekend (1-2 October).
During the pan-European event, around three million birds were observed.
Based on initial reports, the event looks set to have exceeded all previous records in terms of the numbers of participants involved and birds seen. …
Highlights in terms of species include observations of the globally threatened Lesser Kestrel Falco naumanni in Armenia, where Red-fronted Serin Serinus pusillus was also seen.
Observers in Andorra watched a Common Buzzard Buteo buteo eating a snake, whilst in Slovakia, an Osprey Pandion haliaetus was the highlight for many bird watchers. …
Plesiosaurs ate snails and clams
Bush White House declares 
Italian film maker Roberto Benigni is famous for Life is Beautiful, about a family of Italian Jews persecuted by Italian fascists and German Nazis. 
On Wednesday 5 October, Dutch Foreign Minister Bot (a member of the Christian Democrats, biggest party in the Rightist government coalition) 
Carry on regardless
A bitter betrayal
