When I was a kid it was an article of scientific fact that Archaeopteryx was the first bird-like creature known to man. Scientific knowledge, however, never stands still. Our understanding of the relationship between dinosaurs and birds continues to evolve, and this paper in Nature Communications presents a newly discovered creature from China, Eosinopteryx, which opens up whole new areas of investigation.
I found out about this story here. I’m not entirely sure why an expert in Vertebrate Palaeontology such as Dr. Dyke should be based at the National Oceanographic Centre, but I am allowing myself a small amount of alumnus pride.
A Discovery Channel press release brings the exciting news of the first ever live film of the Giant Squid, Architeuthis dux, in its natural habitat. A program featuring the film is due to be broadcast (presumably in the US first) on January 27th. Deep Sea News has some speculation as to where the film is likely to have been shot, and who was responsible for this triumph of natural history film-making.
Rumors that the squid was seen holding up a placard that read, “Thanks Jeff & China, the checks are in the mail”, have been hotly denied by Discovery.
Most of today has been spent touring around South Devon.
First we stopped off in Dawlish to take in the true extent of Brunel’s craziness in building a major railway line along the sea shore, and meet the famous flock of Australian black swans.
Next we headed on to Totnes to catch the South Devon Railway up the Dart Valley to Buckfastleigh. There were a couple of school parties riding the rails today. The first group we saw were all in costume as witches and wizards (including several of the teachers). A young man in Harry Potter glasses asked Kevin who he was dressed as. “I’m an American Tourist”, he answered. I guess I should have told them that I know a flying monkey (as all of the best Wicked Witches do).
At Buckfastleigh there is an otter and butterfly sanctuary. I was really impressed by the butterflies — their collection stood up well compared to the one I’m familiar with in Kuranda, Queensland. As for the otters, well, we died of cute, as one does. These two are Canadian otters, which are slightly bigger than the British variety, and apparently capable of taking down a seagull should one venture too close.
It’s National Coming Out Day. I don’t have a lot to tell you right now, but a little fellow from Wellington, New Zealand is causing a bit of a storm amongst ornithologists. Biologically this bell bird is female (don’t ask about bird chromosomes, they are not like ours), but he’s strutting his stuff like a boy bird, and even has some natty male plumage. Yeah, it looks like birds can be trans (or maybe intersex) too.
Parthenogenisis as a means of creating a female-only culture has been mooted in a number of feminist SF books, including Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and the Holdfast Chronicles by Suzy McKee Charnas. But could it work?
Well there’s one reptile species, the New Mexico whiptail lizard, that is entirely female. Also, biologists working in zoos have known for some time that various species of sharks, reptiles and birds can get pregnant without male intervention. That includes animals as large as a Komodo Dragon. However, it was uncertain whether this was natural behavior or a stress reaction brought on by living in zoo conditions. Now Naturereports that two species of viper have been proven to exhibit parthenogenesis in the wild. Unlike the whiptail lizard, these are species that normally reproduce sexually, but are now known to use parthenogenesis as well. Those serpents, eh? Always causing mischief for the Patriarchy.
As far as I know, no mammal has ever been seen to exhibit parthenogenesis. Also, given the mammalian chromosome structure, any child of a virgin birth would be female.
Things have been a bit heavy around here for the past few days, so I figured that you folks deserved some light relief. Here it is.
For the benefit of those of you who didn’t click through, it appears that squid, the smaller varieties thereof anyway, can indeed fly. They use the same jet propulsion system that they use under water. The biologists concerned think that they developed this ability because flying takes less energy than swimming, and perhaps to escape predators.
Now all they need to do is work out how to achieve escape velocity.
My former colleagues at Southampton University’s Department of Oceanography have been awesome again. They have just been involved in an expedition to study deep sea hydrothermal vents in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. The team discovered many new species, including new varieties of yeti crab (Kiwa hirsuta) and the absolutely gorgeous octopus pictured here. These creatures live around 2,400m down. More details here.
It is a holiday, I have found time to write. Yay! Have a book review. This is for The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski, which is a very strange book. It took me several chapters before I understood what I was supposed to be reading, or possibly found a way of approaching the book that made it readable. Once I had done so, however, I appreciated a lot of its inventiveness.
By the way, if you are interested in the biology of intelligence I heartily recommend this article about some of the smartest creatures of the planet: octopuses.
First we thought that dinosaurs were cold-blooded, just like modern-day lizards. Then we thought that they might be warm-blooded. Then we realized that, short of cloning one, it was impossible to prove it one way or another. Or is it?
A team of researchers at Caltech have come up with a cunning technique that involves measuring concentrations of carbon and oxygen isotope in sauropod teeth. In an article in the latest issue of Science they report measurements for Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus, revealing that the giant beasts had blood temperatures in the range 36° – 38°C.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), this hasn’t solved the mystery. You see, the bigger and animal is, the hotter it gets. Elephants have warmer blood than we do (which I guess may explain why they are no longer hairy). Calculations for sauropods suggest that their blood should be up around 40° – 45°C, which would cook their innards. So clearly they had some means of keeping cool. Or maybe they kept their blood warm in a different way than we do. It is all, still, very mysterious.
The area where my little cottage is located is rather off the beaten track. The road outside is unsurfaced, so we don’t get much traffic, and at the end of the road there is an open space that is grassed and surrounded by trees. It had some nice snowdrops earlier in the year, which made it seem like actual woodland. I think of it as the village green.
Today as I was heading into town I heard a noise that sounded like an electric hammer being fired in short bursts. There was no sign of men working, and the noise came from up in the trees. I looked up, and sure enough there was a black and white bird hammering away at the tree. It is the first time I have ever seen a woodpecker in the wild, let alone one actually at work. I think I like it here.
Friday was spent looking around Carins, and flying down to Sydney. Saturday was spent walking around Sydney. Kevin and I have been very touristy. Here are a few highlights.
The Golden Century in Sydney is still my favorite Chinese restaurant in the world, both for quality and value for money.
Sydney Aquarium is now even more awesome than last time I went. I could spend all day in there. Of course it helps that I like fish, but unless you have a phobia you really should experience their Shark Tunnel. I should note that the Nurse Sharks they have in the tank are relatively wussy as sharks go, and are unlikely to try to eat you should you encounter one in the wild, but boy do they look bad.
We spent a lot of time around Sydney taking photographs. In particular Kevin took a lot of pictures of the monorail when we rode it. No one rushed up to us to try to stop us doing it and take our cameras away. There was no suggestion that we were somehow helping international terrorism by our shutterbug activities. It was like living in a free country again. Such a welcome change from the UK and USA.
Talking of photos, Kevin has left me with a large pile of them. Also some video. I will process them as and when I can. But I will also have a lot of work to catch up on when I get home.
Today Kevin and I were up before dawn (and before the fruit bats went to bed) to catch a boat out to the Barrier Reef. It was along and very tiring day,but absolutely worth it as far as we are concerned.
The boat we chose was the SeaStar. We chose it because it offered one of the highest times actually on the reef of any of the cruises on offer — a combination of a fast boat and concentration on reef time rather than tourism. The SeaStar and her crew certainly delivered on this. Indeed, given how exhausted we both are, we could perhaps have done with a little less reef time. But we have only one day on the reef, so we wanted to make the most of it.
Some of you, I am sure, will have no great interest in swimming around a coral reef looking at fish. That’s OK. But for us it was an awesome experience — more so for Kevin as he’s never been here before. Me, I just love the sea, and fish. I am, to be rather corny about it, in my element here.
There are downsides, of course. We are sunburned. This was probably inevitable. We are fairly careful with the sunscreen, but once you go in the water it washes off. The crew gave out wet suits to help protect us, but they didn’t cover the lower legs and we both have badly burned calves because those are bits of you that poke above the water a lot when you are snorkeling.
We do have photos (including, as requested by a certain Hugo-winning podcast editor), one of me in a wetsuit (it is not a pretty sight). However, these do need processing, and the underwater cameras we bought shoot film rather than digital so they will have to wait until we get home.
Today Kevin and I took the train up to Kuranda, a village in the rainforest in the mountains above Cairns. We have ridden on one of the world’s great scenic railways, communed with fruit bats, eaten kangaroo pie, found a zoo dedicated to all things poisonous in Australia, and hung around with some exceptionally beautiful butterflies. Kevin took a lot of photos, which I will process eventually. For now here’s a detail from one of them.
Hmm, teh intrawebs appear to have been busy of late.
– The European Union has caught up with the fact that Wikipedia articles can tell lies about you and there’s nothing you can do about it. There is muttering about legislation.
– At Knowledge Problem Mike Giberson reports on the power of anecdote. Kevin and I are often frustrated at how often fannish online debate is derailed by someone insisting that something that is generally agreed to be broadly correct must be utterly false because his personal experience contradicts it. The UK press commented on how often the participants in the leader debates during the election used personal anecdotes (“I met someone who…”) to make policy points. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts have decided to study this problem, designing an experiment to test the power of anecdote to overcome statistical evidence. To make it tough for the anecdotes they used accountants as their subjects, and yet the anecdotes still proved more powerful. Human beings are scary creatures.
– In Barcelona researchers are using virtual reality to put men’s minds into women’s bodies. Quick, someone grab Rush Limbaugh and stick him on a plane to Spain.
– Forbidden Planet International points me to a Financial Times article about the current state of the Tintin franchise. Ignore the gossip and scroll down to the sorry tale of Bob Garcia who has been fined €50,000 for publishing small-press books about Tintin. French fans have an appeal going to help Bob pay. You can find them on Facebook.
I ought to write something more intelligent today, but I have had a frustrating evening struggling with really badly written web sites and I’m not in a good mood. In lieu of anything from me, here’s some other folks:
– Sam Jordison reviews Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven for The Guardian;
– The Independent gets the low down on gay animals, including talking to Bruce Bagemihl of Biological Exuberance fame;
– The Economist discovers that gender development is even more complicated than anyone thought;
It has been known for some time that some species are able to regenerate entire limbs if they lose them. However, one species of jellyfish, turritopsis nutricula, goes much further; it uses the same cell re-purposing technique to turn itself back into a polyp (its immature form), thereby re-starting its life-cycle. Apparently the jellyfish use this cunning technique when they need to travel in hostile environments, such as when hitching a ride on cargo ships. This has led some people to speculate that a similar process might be used to allow human beings to travel to the stars.
For this year’s Ada Lovelace Day I’d like to focus a little closer to home. Like many young proto-fans, I was very fond of dinosaurs while I was a kid. That may have been in part because I also happened to have an aunt who lived near Lyme Regis, one of the most famous fossil-hunting sites in the world. Why is it famous? Because it was in this little Dorset seaside town that the whole dinosaur story started.
Mary Anning was one of two surviving children from a poor Dorset family. Her father made a meager living by collecting interesting shells and other curiosities from the local beach and selling them to tourists. Mary and her brother, Joseph, were trained in the family business, and when Richard Anning died of consumption in 1810 Mary and Joseph had to take over. Mary was just 11 years old at the time.
The following year Joseph found what appeared to be the skull of a crocodile protruding from a cliff by the beach. Mary was fascinated and began the painstaking work of excavating it. When she had finished she became the owner of the first known fossil of an ichthyosaurus.
Further discoveries followed: a plesiosaurus, a pterodactylus. The scientific world began to take notice, and young Mary was obliged to defend herself from accusations of fraud. Despite having little formal education, Mary was able to hold her own and establish herself as a world expert in the new science of fossil hunting. But, as a woman of working class origins, she was unable to join the scientific establishment. Instead she continued her work at Lyme, interacting with scientists and wealthy patrons when they came to visit.
As a woman, Mary was unable to attend the Geological Society meetings where her discoveries were presented to the scientific world. Indeed, according to her Wikipedia article (which appears well researched and is heavily footnoted) she was not even mentioned when her discoveries were announced. As the Natural History Museum puts it: “William Buckland, Henry de la Beche and William Conybeare were some of the many scientists who owe their achievements to her.†(My emphasis). And because ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are only distantly related to the giant land-dwelling creatures of the time, you will still see Buckland credited as the discoverer of the first dinosaur, because his later find was of a land animal, Megalosaurus.
The picture accompanying this article is a portrait of Mary and her dog, Tray. As you can see, she has a bag to collect her fossils, and a hammer to extract them. As this BBC article reveals, that hammer can still be seen in the little town museum at Lyme Regis.
And to finish, here is a charming, if somewhat fanciful, animated film about Mary that I found on YouTube.
See, I take the morning off to get my hair done and all sorts of interesting stuff turns up. Here are some brief links.
– Neil has tweeted this, so you have probably all seen it, but some archaeologists working in Turkey have found a temple they believe to be 11,500 years old. That’s 6,000 years before Stonehenge was started. It is so old it predates the invention of pottery.
– Meanwhile archaeologists working on Crete have found a stone hand axe they believe to be 130,000 years old. That’s not so old for such an implement, except that Crete is an island in the middle of the Mediterranean, which leaves us wondering how the heck early humanoids got there.
– Jennifer Ouellette talks about the science of superheroes, and along the way has some interesting things to say about scientific accuracy in Hollywood.
– One of the things that always delights me is how simple mathematical rules can give rise to amazing complexity. Here’s a lovely story about the shapes of the beaks of finches studied by Darwin. (It also explains why we don’t see any “in between” beak shapes.)
There are many reasons I miss California, and one of them is that when I’m there I have the option to visit Monterey Bay Aquarium. I love the ocean, and I love its creatures. And especially I love squid. So here, in lieu of a visit to Monterey, I present a video made by some of their research people about the amazing Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid.
Via the magnificent Peggy Kolm I learn far more about pterosaurs than I knew there was to learn, including that I must not call them “dinosaurs”. This is a must read for anyone thinking of including such creatures in a story or screenplay.
My former colleagues at Southampton University’s Department of Oceanography have been awesome again. They have just been involved in an expedition to study deep sea hydrothermal vents in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. The team discovered many new species, including new varieties of 
For this year’s Ada Lovelace Day I’d like to focus a little closer to home. Like many young proto-fans, I was very fond of dinosaurs while I was a kid. That may have been in part because I also happened to have an aunt who lived near Lyme Regis, one of the most famous fossil-hunting sites in the world. Why is it famous? Because it was in this little Dorset seaside town that the whole dinosaur story started.