In the history of the first modern mammals (i.e., marsupials and placentals), during the Cretaceous, Europe is almost a Terra incognita. No fossils are known between 125 and 84 million years (my), and very few up to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (65 my). In the Cenomanian (99 my) of Charente-Maritime, the discovery of the scientist team from the Muséum1 (CNRS) and the University of Rennes 12 thus provides important information on the early history of these mammals in Europe. The discovery consists of a few teeth, collected after screenwashing of 5 tons of sediment. They belong to a new tiny mammal, named Arcantiodelphys marchandi, which is one of the oldest and most primitive marsupial known in the world. It is also the oldest known representative of the modern therians in Europe.
This discovery is the result of a research program of the University of Rennes 1 on the vertebrates from the Cretaceous of Charentes, in collaboration with the MNHN.
Arcantiodelphys marchandi improves our knowledge of the earliest stages of the marsupial history, so far known mostly from North American fossils. Its main significance is that the beginning of the marsupial history also involved Europe. Furthermore, it confirms faunal links between North America and Europe during the mid-Cretaceous. It is from these primitive marsupials from the “Euramerican” Cretaceous that the modern marsupials colonized the southern landmasses, South America and mainly Australia where they are nowadays well diversified. Opossums and kangaroos are extant representatives of this very old northern origin of the marsupials.
This is a video about carrion crows in Japan, using traffic to open nuts.
Yesterday, there was a BirdLife conference about birds in urban environments in the museum. Since very recently, more people live in the world´s cities and towns than in the countryside. This affects birds as well.
In the museum cinema, there was a lecture by urban planner Angelique Mergler on green urban planning; mentioning parks in New York City and Paris.
After her came biologist Marcel van der Tol from Zoetermeer town. His subject was 50 breeding bird species in Oosterheem. Oosterheem is a new neighborhood being built, with a park and ponds. Mr Van der Tol advises Zoetermeer local authorities on how to plan Oosterheem so that there will be at least 50 breeding bird species there.
Van der Tol said 23 species would almost certainly breed in Oosterheem. They include robin, collared dove, wood pigeon, moorhen, coot, mallard, tawny owl, kestrel, dunnock, chiffchaff, willow warbler, long-tailed tit, blackbird, song thrush, starling, wren, house sparrow, short-toed treecreeper, lesser whitethroat, blackcap, blue tit, great tit, magpie, jay, jackdaw, carrion crow, pheasant, and great crested grebe.
Species which might nest in Oosterheem as well, if helped by a little luck and authorities’ effort, include ring-necked parakeet, swift, sparrowhawk, great spotted woodpecker, green woodpecker, whitethroat, greenfinch, reed warbler, garden warbler, cuckoo, mute swan, and Egyptian goose.
Finally, a category of bird species which would be hard to attract to Oosterheem, which would require real luck and/or effort: long-eared owl, barn owl, stock dove, kingfisher (first nest ever in Zoetermeer this year), grey lag goose, oystercatcher, black-headed gull (there is a breeding colony of 500 couples elsewhere in Zoetermeer), common tern, icterine warbler, sedge warbler, black redstart, pied wagtail, bluethroat, reed bunting, linnet, tree sparrow, barn swallow, house martin (one breeding colony elsewhere in Zoetermeer), sand martin, goldfinch, pied flycatcher, spotted flycatcher, grey heron, tufted duck. And the hobby, with one couple nesting in Zoetermeer town centre now.
To get the maximum number of bird species to Oosterheem, authorities need to provide things like a nesting sandy wall for sand martins, and nest boxes for house martins.
Bird Atlas needs your bird records – Especially Ireland, Wales & Scotland: here.
Scientists discover new deep sea life off NZ coast
Wed, 4 Nov 2009
A deep-sea marine biodiversity survey of seamounts on the Chatham Rise has produced a bounty of new species.
The finds were made by National Institute of Water Atmospheric Research (Niwa) research vessel Tangaroa, on 18-day voyage in July along the Chatham Rise.
The rise stretches for 1000km from near the South Island eastward.
The finds include a coral genus Narella and nicknamed “Rasta” because of its long white dreadlock-like branches; a tiny squat lobster measuring 1cm across; and some specimens of sea urchin which are commonly known as Tam O’Shanters due to their similarity to the Scottish hat.
“There are three new corals that we are confident are new species from the area,” said scientist Di Tracey. …
Three surveys of the Graveyard region since 2001 have revealed high levels of biodiversity, and many undescribed species.
They include benthic macroinvertebrates — animals without backbones that are larger than millimetre long — such as corals, sponges, seastars, snails, lobsters, clams, and marine worms.
The first survey alone showed 15 percent of the species collected were unknown in the New Zealand region, plus 14 species new to science. Six new species of lace coral were discovered in the second survey in 2006.
Seamounts can be ecologically valuable as hotspots of biodiversity and economically valuable and they are often the target of commercial fishing.
But the Chatham Rise — where the fishing industry wiped out the commercial viability of the orange roughy through overfishing — is also being targeted by miners eyeing its multi-billion dollar phosphate resources.
Widespread Energy and its parent company Widespread Portfolios applied in August 2007 for a prospecting licence over a 3048 square kilometre area of the rise.
It hoped that 100 million tonnes of phosphorite (rock phosphate) valued at more than $50 billion can be scraped off the seabed.
And an Auckland company Chatham Phosphate Ltd has applied for another 71,750sq km around the Widespread prospect.
The two-legged meat-eater would have measured about 3m long and weighed up to 60kg.
The palaeontologists used computed tomography (CT) techniques to generate a 3D image of the delicate skull to investigate its internal structure in meticulous detail.
Dr Angela Milner, associate keeper of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, told BBC News: “This is a unique specimen. It is the only one of its kind known in the world.”
She added: “It was quite a surprise when our analysis showed we had the oldest known relative of T. rex.
“Fossils collected a century ago can now be studied again with the benefit of much greater knowledge of dinosaurs from around the world.”
Originally described in 1910 as a new species of Megalosaurus, the fossil was presented to the museum in 1942.
The skull had been unearthed during excavations for a reservoir close to Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire.
Dr Milner said that despite obvious differences between the skulls of Proceratosaurus and T. rex - such as their divergent sizes - the two shared many similarities.
“If you look at the animal (Proceratosaurus) in detail, it has the same kinds of windows in the side of the skull for increasing the jaw muscles,” she told BBC News.
“It has the same kinds of teeth - particularly at the front of the jaws. They’re small teeth and almost banana-shaped, which are just the kind of teeth T. rex has.”
“Inside the skull, which we were able to look at using CT scanning, there are lots of internal air spaces. Tyrannosaurus had those as well.”
Although the skull has attracted much interest because of its exquisite preservation, it has not been closely studied until now, thus, its link to the tyrannosaurs remained undiscovered.
“This is still one of the best-preserved dinosaur skulls found in Europe,” said co-author Dr Oliver Rauhut from the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology in Munich.
“It is really surprising that it has received so little attention since its original description.”
Scientists have launched an excavation project to dig up Britain’s oldest dinosaur after it spent more than 210 million years entombed in rock.
The condontosaurus antiquus
No, it is Thecodontosaurus antiquus
is the oldest known dinosaur in Britain and one of the oldest in the world.
A rock specimen discovered at Tytherington Quarry in South Gloucestershire in the 1970s contains the fossilised remains of the so-called Bristol Dinosaur.
Scientists at the University of Bristol were finally able to begin the excavation project after securing a grant of £295,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The Bristol Dinosaur project will last three years and will see a complete skeletal reconstruction of the dinosaur attempted for the first time.
During the Triassic period, the kangaroo-sized, plant-eating species lived in herds grazing on the lush islands around what is now Bristol.
The outlines of these islands can still be seen today in the shape of the land - Bristol’s Downs were one such island.
(Nov. 2, 2009) — Ever since the Falklands wolf was described by Darwin himself, the origin of this now-extinct canid found only on the Falkland Islands far off the east coast of Argentina has remained a mystery. Now, researchers reporting in the November 3rd issue of Current Biology who have compared DNA from four of the world’s dozen or so known Falklands wolf museum specimens to that of living canids offer new insight into the evolutionary ancestry of these enigmatic carnivores.
“One of the big draws for an evolutionary biologist is that this species had a big influence on Darwin’s ideas about how species evolve,” said Graham Slater of the University of California, Los Angeles, noting that Darwin recognized differences between the East Falkland and West Falkland wolves as evidence that species are not fixed entities. But the wolves’ circumstances were also just downright puzzling.
“It’s really strange that the only native mammal on an island would be a large canid,” Slater explained. “There are no other native terrestrial mammals — not even a mouse. It’s even stranger when you consider that the Falklands are some 480 kilometers from the South American mainland. The question is, how did they get there?”
Possible explanations for the wolves’ presence on the islands, which have never been connected to the South American mainland, range from dispersal by ice or logs to domestication and subsequent transport by Native Americans. Ultimately, the Falklands wolf died out because it was perceived as a threat to settlers and their sheep, although fur traders took out a lot of the population as well.
Biologists have also puzzled over the Falklands wolf’s ancestry. It had been suggested that they were related to domestic dogs, North American coyotes, or South American foxes. Slater said the wolves were the size of a coyote, but much stockier, with fur the color of a red fox. They had short muzzles, just like gray wolves, and thick, wooly fur.
Slater’s team now reports that the Falklands wolf’s closest living relative is actually the maned wolf — an unusually long-legged, fox-like South American canid. The researchers also found that the four Falklands wolf samples that they examined shared a common ancestor at least 70,000 years ago, which suggests that they arrived on the islands before the end of the last ice age and before humans ever made it into the New World. That rules out the prevailing theory that Native Americans had anything to do with their presence on the islands.
“The biggest surprise was that the divergence of the Falklands wolf from its closest living relative, the maned wolf, occurred over 6 million years ago,” Slater said. “Canids don’t show up in the South American fossil record until 2.5 million years ago, which means these lineages must have evolved in North America. The problem is that there are no good fossils that can be assigned to the Falklands wolf lineage in North America.”
Given that maned and Falklands wolves split so long ago, there should be fossils of their close relatives in South America, Slater said. And in fact, the researchers may have a candidate: a species from Patagonia called Dusicyon avus, which went extinct 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. Slater says that’s a possibility that study coauthor Alan Cooper at the University of Adelaide in Australia is further investigating now.
Are US And European Plovers Really Birds Of A Feather?
(Nov. 2, 2009) — The Kentish-Snowy Plover, a small shorebird found in the US and Europe, is suffering from an identity crisis after scientists at the Universities of Bath and Sheffield found genetic evidence that the populations are, in fact, separate species.
Historically, biologists have classified the Kentish Plover, found in Europe, and its look-a-like, the Snowy Plover, from the US, as being different varieties from the same species due to their similar looks.
Whilst their true identity has been long debated by biologists, this is the first time that scientists have found proof that the birds actually belong to different species.
These new findings could prove important in the conservation of the Snowy Plovers, which are listed as threatened.
The scientists from the Universities of Bath and Sheffield analysed the DNA of 166 birds from two different American populations of Snowy Plover, four Eurasian populations of Kentish Plover, and one African population of a closely related species, the White-fronted Plover.
They found that the European birds were more similar to their African cousins than to their relatives in America, indicating that the bird population split and colonised America, where they became Snowy Plovers, before splitting again to produce Kentish and White-fronted plovers.
Dr Clemens Küpper, from the University of Bath’s Department of Biology & Biochemistry, explained: “Scientists have suspected for some time that these birds are from different species.
“Although they look similar, for them to have stayed as a single species they would have had to be able to breed with each other, but this wasn’t possible because they were separated by thousands of miles of water!
“For the first time we’ve shown that these birds have been separated for a long time and evolved in different directions.”
Newly Discovered Ankylosaur Dinosaur Is ‘Biological Version Of An Army Tank’
ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2009) — A husband and wife team of American paleontologists has discovered a new species of dinosaur that lived 112 million years ago during the early Cretaceous of central Montana.
The new dinosaur, a species of ankylosaur, is documented in the October issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. Ankylosaurs are the biological version of an army tank. They are protected by a plate-like armour with two sets of sharp spikes on each side of the head, and a skull so thick that even ‘raptors’ such as Deinonychus could leave barely more than a scratch.
Bill and Kris Parsons, Research associates of the Buffalo Museum of Science, found much of the skull of the newly described Tatankacephalus cooneyorum resting on the surface of a hillside in 1997. Because the skull was 90% complete, it was possible to justify this fossil as a new species.
“This is the first member of Ankylosauridae to be found within the Early Cretaceous Cloverly Geologic Formation,” said Bill Parsons, who characterized the fossil as a transitional evolutionary form between the earlier Jurassic ankylosaurs and the better known Late Cretaceous ankylosaurs.
The skull is heavily protected by two sets of lateral horns, two thick domes at the back, and smaller thickenings around the nasal region. “Heavy ornamentation and horn-like plates would have covered most of the dorsal surface of this dinosaur” said Bill Parsons.
“For years, Bill and Kris have been collecting fossils from a critical time in Earth’s history, and their hard work has paid off,” said Lawrence Witmer, professor of paleontology at Ohio University who was not involved with this study. “This is a really important find and gives us a clearer view of the evolution of armored dinosaurs. But this is just the first; I’m sure, of what will be a series of important discoveries from this team.”
Parsons also illustrated the dermal armour of this new species based on the theory by Museum of the Rockies paleontologist John R. Horner that there was an outer keratinous sheathing on it as found in modern turtle shells and bird beaks. In his new reconstruction, Parsons suggests that Tatankacephalus exhibited complex and colorful patterns rather than the dull appearance suggested in earlier ankylosaur portraits. “According to Horner’s theory, many other dinosaurs also had this kind of sheathing and also may have been diversely colored,” said Parsons.
As to its name, the broad, short horns on the back of its skull resemble the horns found on a modern buffalo skull and Tatankacephalus loosely translates as ‘Buffalo head.’ Parsons also noted, “of course any further allusions to the city of Buffalo are completely intentional as well.”
A team of British researchers have been rebuilding fossils of 300-million year old spiders using computer 3-D technology- they say they are providing a clearer picture of how some extinct species once lived on early Earth.
Professor Brasier, who is a palaeobiologist at the University of Oxford, said: “This amber is very rare. It comes from the very base of the Cretaceous, which makes it one of the oldest ambers anywhere to have inclusions in it.”
‘Sticky droplets’
He added: “These spiders are distinctive and leave little sticky droplets along the spider web threads to trap prey.
“We actually have the sticky droplets preserved within the amber. These turn out to be the earliest webs that have ever been incorporated in the fossil record to our knowledge.”
His studies revealed that the spider that spun the web is related to the modern day orb-web or garden spider.
Scientists think the web became trapped in conifer resin after a forest fire and then became fossilised inside the resulting amber.
Mr Hiscocks and his brother also found the fossilised remains of an Iguanodon jaw bone on the coastline.
A NEW species of dinosaur bone is believed to have been discovered at the Cotswold Water Park.
The fossilised remains of a giant plant-eating Sauropod dinosaur identified as Cetiosauriscus was uncovered during the restoration of a site which had been quarried by Hanson Aggregates.
Only a few bones of this type of dinosaur have ever been found in Britain and analysis of the bone indicates that it could belong to a group of Dinosaurs whose remains are very rarely found in the UK.
The Cetiosauriscus inhabited Northern Europe during the Middle Jurassic period 168 million years ago.
Several hundred pieces of bone, which were unearthed from the edge of a drainage ditch by palaeontologist Dr Neville Hollingworth, have been painstakingly pieced together over the last six months to form a giant 1.4m long leg bone.
Dr Hollingworth had to sift through several tons of clay to rescue the bones before the site was flooded.
He said: “There was a point when I wondered if I would recover all the pieces in time – although it took me over a week to get everything out of the ground it was worth it for such an exciting find.”
He added that it was most likely that the leg bone belonged to a Sauropod - the group of long-necked plant-eaters that includes the diplodocus.
“It may have fallen to the sea floor from a rotting carcass. The animal would have been almost 20m (65ft) long.
“What is most interesting is how the bone ended up in the Oxford Clay which is a marine deposit.
“The chances are that the land living animal was swept into the sea, perhaps by a flood where the carcass was eaten by scavengers. ”
Despite diligent searching no other bones of this giant reptile were found.
The Sauropod leg bone will be on display at the Fossil Fest, a family event being organised by the Cotswold Water Park Society on Sunday at the Four Pillars Hotel, South Cerney.
Paul Sereno - Dinosaurs: Phylogenetic reconstruction from Darwin to the present [Pharyngula]: here.
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