Dear Kitty. Some blog

From British daily The Guardian:

Dinosaur with feathers and fangs prowled forests like a predatory turkey

Poison from the bird-like dinosaur’s fangs may have sent victims into shock, hampering their chances of escaping

* Ian Sample, science correspondent
*Monday 21 December 2009 20.00 GMT

The remains of a venomous, feathered beast that terrorised prehistoric forests like a predatory turkey have been unearthed by fossil hunters in northern China.

Palaeontologists uncovered a well-preserved skull and partial skeleton of the bird-like dinosaur, Sinornithosaurus, that lived in the region 128 million years ago.

The creature, a close relative of the velociraptor, had fangs similar to those seen in modern poisonous snakes and venomous lizards, such as the Mexican gila monster.

Analysis of the dinosaur’s fang-like teeth revealed grooves that could channel poison from glands set into each side of the creature’s jawbone, researchers said.

“This is an animal about the size of a turkey,” said Larry Martin, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of Kansas. “It’s a specialised predator of small dinosaurs and birds.”

The discovery, reported in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first evidence of a venomous relative in the velociraptor lineage.

The venom was probably not potent enough to be lethal, but may have sent victims into shock, hampering their chances of fighting back or escaping.

“You wouldn’t have seen it coming,” said co-author David Burnham. “It would have swooped down behind you from a low-hanging tree branch and attacked.”

“Once the teeth were embedded in your skin the venom could seep into the wound. The prey would rapidly go into shock, but it would still be living, and it might have seen itself being slowly devoured by this raptor,” Burnham added.

One of the beast’s close relatives was the four-winged glider, the microraptor, which some scientists believe may also have been poisonous. Sinornithosaurus’ fangs were long enough to penetrate thick feathers and pierce the skin beneath to a depth of half a centimetre, enough to get venom into the prey’s bloodstream.

From the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, USA:

At 2:25 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 20, one of Shedd Aquarium’s beluga whales, Naya, successfully gave birth to a male calf, with physical assistance from Shedd’s animal health and animal care experts. It is the first time a beluga whale calf has been successfully birthed with human assistance at Shedd, and only the fourth known in the zoo and aquarium community.

This video shows “A single Redwing, feeding on apples in the snow” (and a blackbird at the end).

From Duke University in the USA:

Mystery of golden ratio explained

DURHAM, N.C. — The Egyptians supposedly used it to guide the construction [of] the Pyramids. The architecture of ancient Athens is thought to have been based on it. Fictional Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon tried to unravel its mysteries in the novel The Da Vinci Code.

“It” is the golden ratio, a geometric proportion that has been theorized to be the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye and has been the root of countless mysteries over the centuries. Now, a Duke University engineer has found it to be a compelling springboard to unify vision, thought and movement under a single law of nature’s design.

Also know the divine proportion, the golden ratio describes a rectangle with a length roughly one and a half times its width. Many artists and architects have fashioned their works around this proportion. For example, the Parthenon in Athens and Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Mona Lisa are commonly cited examples of the ratio.

Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, thinks he knows why the golden ratio pops up everywhere: the eyes scan an image the fastest when it is shaped as a golden-ratio rectangle.

The natural design that connects vision and cognition is a theory that flowing systems — from airways in the lungs to the formation of river deltas — evolve in time so that they flow more and more easily. Bejan termed this the constructal law in 1996, and its latest application appears early online in the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics.

“When you look atwhat so many people have been drawing and building, you see these proportions everywhere,” Bejan said. “It is well known that the eyes take in information more efficiently when they scan side-to-side, as opposed to up and down.”

Bejan argues that the world – whether it is a human looking at a painting or a gazelle on the open plain scanning the horizon – is basically oriented on the horizontal. For the gazelle, danger primarily comes from the sides or from behind, not from above or below, so their scope of vision evolved to go side-to-side. As vision developed, he argues, the animals got “smarter” by seeing better and moving faster and more safely.

“As animals developed organs for vision, they minimized the danger from ahead and the sides,” Bejan said. “This has made the overall flow of animals on earth safer and more efficient. The flow of animal mass develops for itself flow channels that are efficient and conducive to survival – straighter, with fewer obstacles and predators.”

For Bejan, vision and cognition evolved together and are one and the same design as locomotion.The increased efficiency of information flowing from the world through the eyes to the brain corresponds with the transmission of this information through the branching architecture of nerves and the brain.

“Cognition is the name of the constructal evolution of the brain’s architecture, every minute and every moment,” Bejan said. “This is the phenomenon of thinking, knowing, and then thinking again more efficiently. Getting smarter is the constructal law in action.”

While the golden ratio provided a conceptual entryway into this view of nature’s design, Bejan sees something even broader.

“It is the oneness of vision, cognition and locomotion as the design of the movement of all animals on earth,” he said. “The phenomenon of the golden ratio contributes to this understanding the idea that pattern and diversity coexist as integral and necessary features of the evolutionary design of nature.”

In numerous papers and books over past decade, Bejan has demonstrated that the constructal law (www.constructal.org) predicts a wide range of flow system designs seen in nature, from biology and geophysics to social dynamics and technology evolution.

More snow expected for this afternoon.

Still much open water, in the Rhine and the big canals.

On the river bank, six great cormorants on a landing, and one on small boat.

My apple peels attract scores of black-headed gulls, mallards, a few coots, and one juvenile herring gull.

Galeirão, Fulica atra, Coot from Jose Viana on Vimeo

This is a Dutch TV video about a wounded swift, nursed with a special harness by veterinarians in Israel.

More about that is here.

Swifts in Leiden, the Netherlands: here.

After a night of freezing, today there was still more open water than I expected. Maybe because there is quite some wind as well.

There were lots of snow during the night and much of the day.

In the botanical garden, great tits and blue tits. Also a long-tailed tit.

A robin. A bunch of greenfinches in a coniferous tree.

This video is about Maui forest birds, including the Maui parrotbill.

By Chris Hamilton in The Maui News in Hawaii:

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Survey shows endangered Maui parrotbill population doing well

WAILUKU, Maui - The critically endangered Maui parrotbill is apparently doing quite well, perhaps even thriving, in the The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii’s Waikamoi Preserve, according a report issued this week.

Nature Conservancy scientists estimated there are about 20 of the chunky yellowish, insect-eating birds per square kilometer in the windward preserve near the summit of Haleakala. That means the estimated population of about 500 is holding steady or possibly even increasing, said Nature Conservancy of Hawaii spokesman Grady Timmons on Friday.

“It was very encouraging because they only have a natural habitat of about 19 square miles, all located in East Maui,” Timmons said.

How much the parrotbill population increased is difficult to say, the scientists said, since the last survey was not as extensive. But they said they are certain that the numbers are as good or getting better.

The bird, which is a member of the Native Hawaiian honeycreeper species, has been relegated to the higher elevations since its natural habitat has been damaged over the years by agriculture and development, he said. Avian flu, malaria and rats that eat the birds’ eggs also have taken a toll, Timmons said.

Ornithologist Dusti Becker, who is project coordinator for the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project, said she was surprised by the results of the population survey, which she led.

“I didn’t expect that there would be that many birds there,” she said.

A previous study had placed the density of the bird population at about half of what the most recent survey found. However, scientists cautioned that the findings were limited to a two-week survey done in September.

Still, the survey area is 400 acres between the Waikamoi Stream and Koolau Gap, and the two-person teams reported hearing or seeing dozens of parrotbills, including juvenile birds.

“We can say with confidence that Waikamoi hosts a breeding population,” said Nature Conservancy Maui Director Mark White.

The scientists hypothesized that Nature Conservancy efforts in recent years to fence off the preserve from wild pigs and goats and remove invasive plants and replace them with native species likely contributed to the parrotbill population hike. For instance, native shrub cover in Waikamoi has tripled in the past 15 years.

And the parrotbills mostly eat grubs found in the shrubs’ fruit, according to the report.

The Waikamoi Preserve is 5,230 acres. The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii has been managing the property, which is owned by Haleakala Ranch, since the nonprofit received a permanent conservation easement from the ranch in 1983.

About 25 percent of the parrotbill population is found in Waikamoi and most of the rest is in the Hanawi Natural Area Reserve in East Maui, also on the slopes of Haleakala.

The birds were once found throughout Maui and Molokai. The parrotbill is only 5 to 6 inches long and gets its name from the parrot shape of its bill. The birds are olive green on top and have a yellowish belly and distinctive yellow stripe over their eyes.

The bills, which Timmons compared to can openers, are incredibly strong and able to pry open bark to reach insects and grubs.

“The typical story line with endangered forest birds is one of decline,” said Sam Gon, The Nature Conservancy’s senior scientist and cultural adviser. “To have an endangered bird maintain its population and perhaps even show signs of increasing is very encouraging and cause for celebration.”

Nature Conservancy scientists noted that the po’ouli bird, which lived in the same preserve, may be extinct. The last pair of po’ouli birds was last seen in 2004.

For more information, go online to mauiforestbirds.org.

Koala

From the University of New South Wales in Australia:

Loud and lazy but didn’t chew gum: Ancient koalas

Skull fragments of prehistoric koalas from the Riversleigh rainforests of millions of year ago suggest they shared the modern koala’s “lazy” lifestyle and ability to produce loud “bellowing” calls to attract mates and provide warnings about predators.

However, the new findings published as the featured cover article in the current issue of The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology suggest that the two species of koalas from the Miocene (24 to five million years ago) did not share the uniquely specialized eucalyptus leaf diet of the modern koala (Phascolarctos cinereus).

The shift to a wholly eucalyptus diet by modern koalas was an adaptation that probably came later as Australia drifted north, causing its rainforests to retreat and Eucalypts to become the dominant tree of most Australian forests and woodlands.

Modern koalas – the sole living member of the diprotodontian marsupial family Phascolarctidae –are among the largest of all arboreal leaf-eaters. To attain this remarkable condition on a diet of eucalyptus leaves, a notoriously poor and somewhat toxic food source, the tree-dwelling marsupials developed unique anatomical and physiological adaptations including specialized chewing and digestive anatomies and a highly sedentary lifestyle. The dramatic differences between the skulls of extinct and modern koalas, especially in the facial region, are probably related to the change to a tougher diet of eucalyptus leaves.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales and the CSIRO have drawn these conclusions after making dozens of detailed anatomical comparisons between the brush-tailed possum, the modern koala and the two fossil species (Litokoala kutjamarpensis and Nimiokoala greystanesi).

The fossil species were unearthed from the Riversleigh World Heritage site in Queensland, Australia. The comparisons reveal similarities in the back of the skull between the modern and fossil koalas, but substantial differences in their teeth, palate and jaws.

Koalas are most closely related among living marsupials to wombats but the two species diverged some 30-40 million years ago. Among fossil koalas there are 18 named species representing five genera spanning the period from the late Oligocene (37 million years ago) to the present.

However, they are generally scarce in the fossil record and most species are only known from a few isolated teeth or jaw fragments. Therefore, it has been difficult to develop an accurate picture of their behaviour, diet and evolution.

The researchers believe that the prehistoric koalas also shared with their modern cousins the ability to produce loud “bellows” based on similar large bony prominences – the auditory bullae – that enclose structures in the middle and inner ear. However the auditory bullae of the extinct Nimiokoala and Litokoala species are not as exaggerated as in the modern koala, according to team member UNSW Professor Mike Archer.

“Modern koalas are extremely sedentary and vocal animals,” says Archer, who is perhaps best known for leading research into the extraordinary Riversleigh fossil deposits in Queensland, which led to the site being listed on the World Heritage Register.

“They produce low frequency vocalisations that pass through vegetation and can be heard up to 800 metres away – far exceeding the home range limits of male koalas. The fossil koalas share similar large bony ear structures to the modern koala and would have been well adapted to detecting vocalisations in the rainforest environment of Riversleigh in the Miocene era.”

“In order to accommodate both the mechanical demands of their new diet, as well as maintaining their auditory sophistication, the koala underwent substantial changes to its cranial anatomy, in particular that of the facial skeleton,” says Dr Julien Louys of UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences. “The unique cranial configuration of the modern koala is therefore the result of accommodating their masticatory adaptations without compromising their auditory system.”

This video is called THE WATER BIRDS: WINTER PHOTOGRAPHS.

Temperature today stayed below zero all time.

Though ice flows are already growing, also in big canals, the river Rhine is still ice free.

I went to a point where a canal comes into the river, and where some waterbirds had gathered. I started throwing potatoe peels, apple peels, and pear peels into the water. The black-headed gulls and mallards immediately came to eat. Soon, a few coots arrived on the scene as well. However, the great crested grebes and great cormorants, being fish-eaters, did not bother.

A ring-necked parakeet, flying high overhead.

A few hundred meters further, in the canal near the anthropological museum, the same bird species came for the rest of the food. Also three semi-domestic geese, a semi-domestic duck, and juvenile and adult herring gulls this time.