At some point between the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) and and that of Richard II (1377-1399), two lions lived in the Tower of London. They were part of a Royal Menagerie that was kept at the Tower for some 600 years, until the animals were moved to the London Zoo in the 19th century. There are a couple of reasons that these medieval lions are particularly interesting. First, they were part of a population of Barbary lions -- a north African lion subspecies known for their long, dark manes which has been extinct in the wild since the 20th century. And second, their skulls were recovered during an excavation at the tower's moat in the 1930's.

These skulls have recently been subject to carbon dating, which identified them as coming from the era mentioned above, as well as genetic testing, which may prove to be of great benefit to some lions in the future.

Continue reading "The Tower Lions" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's just plain weird.

I wonder if there's a connection? The obvious link would be if bats feed on bees (or honey), which I suppose some do, but I doubt that's it.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It isn't just new species of insects and bacteria that are being discovered. Every once in a while we get something like this:

New Species of Mammal

A new species of mammal has been discovered in the mountains of Tanzania, scientists report.

The bizarre-looking creature, dubbed Rhynochocyon udzungwensis, is a type of giant elephant shrew, or sengi.
The cat-sized animal, which is reported in the Journal of Zoology, looks like a cross between a miniature antelope and a small anteater.

It has a grey face, a long, flexible snout, a bulky, amber body, a jet-black rump and it stands on spindly legs.

The story goes on to tell that these creatures are called shrews because their smaller cousins were thought to resemble shrews when first discovered. Personally,I don't think they look like much of anything.

A little aardvarkish, I suppose. But only a little. Anyway, these creatures are more closely related to elephants and rhinos (and, it turns out upon further reading, aardvarks) than they are shrews. The story concludes:

Tanzania's Udzungwa Mountains are biodiverse-rich. In addition to this new species, a number of other new animals have been found there, including the Udzungwa partridge, the Phillips' Congo shrew, and a new genus of monkey known as Kipunji as well as several reptiles and amphibians.

Dr Rathbun [who discovered the new species] said it was vital the area and its inhabitants in this biodiversity "hotspot" were protected.

Hera, hear. Let's hope there are many more such finds to be made.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Even if we do discover extraterrestrial life one day, I doubt we'll ever find any forms of life more bizarre than some of the creatures we have right here on Earth. Look at these non-terrestrial life-forms, for example.

And these are just part of a much larger undersea creepfest. After you look at enough of these images, you can almost start smelling the things. I don't mean to be critical, but there are some plug-ugly fish living on this planet.

This one is still my favorite, however.

Via InstaPundit.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How can gangs of tiny mice take out an albatross 300 times their (individual) weight? I guess it helps that the bird just kind of sits there:

The scientists describe a brutal attack to illustrate the finding that chicks didn’t seem to fight against the attackers. “No chicks displayed appropriate behavioral responses to attacks, even though mice had eaten through the body wall of one filmed albatross chick and were consuming the contents of the chick’s abdominal cavity,” they write in a report of the research published in the journal Biology Letters.

By late September 2004, 100 of the 256 monitored albatross chicks had died. Before the mouse attacks, all the chicks were apparently healthy, suggesting the rodent thugs didn’t target weak or sick individuals.

Warning: the video may be a little disturbing for bird-lovers. (That was quick. Now it appears that the video is gone.)

Not responding to being devoured would be what I would call a significant evolutionary maladaptation. These birds need to get serious about self-defense.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Probably not. But then again...

Wildlife scientists have re-opened the cryptic case of a carnivore that resembled a striped coyote and vanished from its Australian haunt nearly 80 years ago.

While the scientists think chances are slim that the so-called Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) still roams the island off the coast of Australia, they can’t help but turn over every possible leaf to look for evidence of the elusive animal.

The last wild Tasmanian tiger was killed between 1910 and 1920, and the last captive one died in 1936 at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania, Australia. In 1986, the creature was declared extinct. The extinction marked the demise of the only member of its family, Thylacinidae, and the world’s largest marsupial (pouched) carnivore. It weighed about 65 pounds and had a nose-to-tail length of six feet.

However, rumored sightings of the creature continue to emerge from the island's ancient forests.

Moreover, it turns out that some scat samples collected in the 50's probably came from one or more Tasmanian tigers, even though the animals were thought to be long gone from the wild by then. If there are a few of them somehow still out there, it's actually an encouraging sign that they leave so few traces. The more stealthy they are, the more likely they are to go on as a species. Anyhow, here's hoping.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This blog has been around for several years now, and it's long past time we adopted an official mascot. (Don't ask me why; it just is. Sheesh.)

Anyhow, I nominate this newly discovered South American frog who went to all the trouble of evolving itself into a color scheme highly compatible with the CSS styles used by this blog, not to mention my retro 70's blacklight aesthetic sensibilities. A purple frog is such a good idea that had one not existed, we would have to invent it. This creature has shown a lot of initiative in saving us that trouble.

So without further ado, I give you the Frog of the Future.

The remote area where the frog was found is a veritable cornucopia of biodiversity:

Including the new species, the scientists observed 467 species at the two sites, ranging from large cats like panthers and pumas, to monkeys, reptiles, bats and insects.

Of the 467 species observed, 24 were completely new species. Normally when there's talk of finding a whole bunch of new species, we're talking insects. Not this time. Dung beetles and ants are only part of a picture that includes purple frogs and armored catfish -- which is not a new discovery, but rather a species previously believed extinct. This is huge -- it's like a mini, land-based Galapagos.

So now all we need is a name for our mascot. It will temporarily be known as Phil Jr. until somebody comes up with something catchier.

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

How about:

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Overeating kills.

Or maybe it should be "always chew your food." But by golly, there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Continue reading "The Once and Future World(?): Pliestocene Park II" »

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

First, the Cave Bear, now Neanderthal Man.

German and U.S. scientists have launched a project to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome, the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said Wednesday.

When the sequencing of the cave bear was announced last month (Only last month! The world is moving fast on this.) it was explained how they were able to extract useful DNA information from old samples once thought to be hopelessly contaminated.

In the past scientists have found it next to impossible to extract useful DNA from such old samples. While some information was thought to remain, broken and scattered, most of the DNA in these old samples was microbial contamination.

So, hoping that there would be enough DNA within these samples to learn something, DOE scientists used a brute force high throughput sequencing approach that was developed for sequencing modern samples. It worked. 6% of the sample was broken pieces of cave bear DNA. That was enough to get a complete sequence. A piece of DNA was found here, a piece there, and then it was reassembled using dog DNA as a template.

Presumably they'll use Homo Sapiens as the template this time.

I love what U.S. geneticist Edward Rubin had to say about the project.

Firstly, we will learn a lot about the Neanderthals. Secondly, we will learn a lot about the uniqueness of human beings. And thirdly, it's simply cool.

Heh. Exactly.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 05:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We are a big step closer to Jurassic-Park-style species resurrection.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute has sequenced the DNA for the extinct Pleistocene cave bear species. In the past scientists have found it next to impossible to extract useful DNA from such old samples. While some information was thought to remain, broken and scattered, most of the DNA in these old samples was microbial contamination.

So, hoping that there would be enough DNA within these samples to learn something, DOE scientists used a brute force high throughput sequencing approach that was developed for sequencing modern samples. It worked. 6% of the sample was broken pieces of cave bear DNA. That was enough to get a complete sequence. A piece of DNA was found here, a piece there, and then it was reassembled using dog DNA as a template.

...within that [6%] fraction, there was a range of genomic sequence types, including fragments of 21 genes, identified by comparing the cave bear sample to the complete dog genome sequence that exists in the public databases. Dogs and bears, which diverged some 50 million years ago, are 92 percent similar on the sequence level.

Unfortunately, the scientists involved don't think it will be possible to use this method to resurrect dinosaurs. The current theoretical limit of this technology is said to be 100,000-year-old samples, perhaps longer for frozen samples. I wonder though if it would be possible to do this with the T-rex soft tissue that was recently recovered complete, perhaps, with blood vessels and cells.

"We picked cave bear as an initial test case ancient DNA target because the samples we used in the study are roughly the same age as Neandertals," Rubin said. "Our real interest is in hominids which include humans and the extinct Neandertal--the only other hominid species that we have to compare with humans. Our nearest living relative is the chimp and that's five million years of divergence. Although we are very similar on a sequence level, there are obvious phenotypic differences. Next, we would like to access and evaluate genomic information about other hominid species, Neandertals in particular, as they represent probably our closest prehistoric relative."

None of these scientists are thinking about cloning a Neanderthal. One or two ethical issues come to mind. But, a full sequence of the Neanderthal DNA would be a gold mine for the study of human prehistory. There is interest also in sequencing the Flores Man - the newly discovered "hobbit" species that is thought to descend from Homo erectus. Comparing these sequences with modern humans and with other close relatives like Chimpanzees will reveal much about human evolution.

While human cousins will remain safely extinct, most of us would love to see the cave bears brought back. In fact, within the 100,000-year limit, there's a whole menagerie of animals that the world would come to see.

Scientists have created the first new mammal family since 1974, when the bumblebee bat was discovered. Say hello to the southeast asian rock rat, laonastes aenigmamus, a previously undiscovered rodent which is said to resemble a cross between a rat and a squirrel, but which is in fact a fairly distant relative of any other currently living rodent.

So what kind of intensive field work led to this amazing discovery? Years of turning over rocks and cutting through Asian thicket, no doubt.

Well, not exactly.

Biologist Robert Timmins reports that he stumbled across the rock rat on sale as a snack food in Laos.

Sometimes the process of discovery can only be described as delicious. I'm not quite sure whether this is one of those times.

(via GeekPress)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Britain's "Frozen Ark" project boarded its first endangered passengers on Monday: an Arabian oryx, a Socorro dove, a mountain chicken, a Banggai cardinal, a spotted sea horse, a British field cricket and Polynesian tree snails.

The "ark", a project by three British institutions, doesn't include any living animals, but hopes to collect frozen DNA and tissue specimens from thousands of endangered species.

Like Noah, the scientists harbour hopes of repopulating the Earth.

This approach is similar to cryonics, but the aim is to preserve whole species rather than individual organisms. In both cases, it is assumed that the future holds the key to restoring that which we have lost (or in this case, are losing.)

This project assumes that, in the future, we will have the technology to restore these lost species, and to generate new populations of them. It also assumes that we will have — or have the ability to create — a suitable habitat for them. To support a project such as this may involve believing that the present is not all it should be, but one could not possibly get behind such an endeavor without believing that a better future is possible.

Prediction:

Most of us reading this will live to see the restoration of at least one "extinct" species of animal.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:37 PM | Permalink