How could it be anything else ?

Spent too much time trying to understand wobbling tops, and it's left me with a woozy head. So without further ado, here are this week's tall tales.

Chicken feet and horse feathers
Specialized teeth and many of them in the same mouth - it is often great fun to look at Heterodontosaurus and see how the dinosaurs independently invented something that is one of the defining features of mammals. Guess what else ? Heterodontosaurids had feathers ! While feathered dromaeosaurs from China are .. err.. old hat, this latest fossil has raised a confusing little storm. All the feathered dinosaurs found thus far (and this includes those Oxford Street red-tailed hawks) are saurischians - the "lizard-hipped" kind of dinosaurs - which carry the popular image of being fast and deadly and carnivorous. This is the first time that one of the slower, herbivorous, bird-hipped dinosaurs has been found with feathers, or long filamenty things that might have been feathers anyway. The dino known as Tianyulong confuciusi - pretty darned confuciusing, methinks.

Another microraptor has been found, but this time it's North American. Yet another example of 'looking closely' winning over 'digging deeper', the specimen was rediscovered after sitting in a museum for 25 years. Hesperonychus ('evening claw') was a raptor the size of a small bird, possibly climbed trees and glided down off them. This fossil could shed more light on the famous "Did they take off by running fast on the ground ?" vs. "Did they leap off trees ?" debate - also known as the Airplane vs. Hang-glider question. What ever it did though, it sure wasn't chicken.

Blunderful life
This one is my favorite story of the week, mostly because I recently finished reading Wonderful Life, and because I can use bizarrely functional machines (read 'animals') to justify some of the bizarre things I've been guilty of building. Like some of the other Burgess Shale creatures, this one too was initially thought to be many different animals - the mouthparts, 'legs' and shell were each classified as other less strange creatures. Until recent work by Desmond Collins and colleagues recognized it as a new giant predatory shrimp: Hurdia, a larger relative of the one called Anomalocaris, but with a wackier covering shell (this is a Burgess Shale creature after all !). Here's the Science article. And a picture so you can write in and disagree about whether it looks like a Klingon spaceship.


Gannet get any worse ? Whale, it can
Remember the video of gannets dive-bombing a baitball, from a couple of weeks ago ? It turns out that the Great Sardine Run produces even more fantastic behavior. If you thought seabirds swimming around underwater alongside sharks to catch fish was strange, check this video out ! Fish packed into a ball, being troubled from the surface by gulls, from underneath by penguins, and along comes a humpback ... this is easily the most beautiful video I've seen in a long, long time - and that's no red herring. Just be warned that you might grin so hard you fall off your chair.

Honey, I bashed up the hive
Another connection to a past Llamasaurus tale. The Goualougo chimps are monkeying around some more. This time though, they're not taking it out on termites, but saving their engineering talent and patience to get a sugar fix. And willing to bash away at a hive hundreds of times with a heavy club. Which seems a terrible thing to do to such unselfish animals as bees. Oh, the things some folks will do to satisfy a sweet tooth ...

Lighten up !

KT sent in this essay. He warns that it is "1) a first draft only of an amusing musing and 2) it was three-and-a-half years ago and some specimens mentioned herein no longer are on display". Thanks KT, for the musings and the photographs !

I spent time this morning's volunteer shift walking from wall to case to hall to case to back to hall to sign... tracing holes in skulls.
The more generations the genotypic and by skull phenotypic timeline, over time, in general, the more holes in the head. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, archaeopteryx, cynodonts, birds, mammals... The longer the lineage, the more holes in the head.

I enjoyed the tracing, about fifteen minutes. Added, changed since I last was here: a frog or toad skeleton, some snake skeletons... cool. Mammals and birds don't have as many physical holes in their skulls, you note correctly, yet different the holes are, too, and don't forget that birds and mammals are more recent lineages than the former, but still with us some are. Through the various skulls finer branches of the lineage may be traced. I appreciate the Probainognathus jenseni cross between Romer and the D.T.&.M. exhibit space into mammals... the Cassowary skull, the big horn sheep skull, and the Stegoceras vaiidus skull: all butters. The Rhyncocephalian control. Throughout time trends lightness of skull, perhaps by weight as well as volume. Specialization, natural selection, time... whatever incremental service the incremental holes in the in the head shifting and growing provided promoted and survived. Insects had existed for hundreds of millions of years then all of a sudden took wing. A lighter, more agile head, over time, would mean easier lunch and insects able to literally take off certainly would have initiated a cycle with ancient amphibians and reptiles flying and snapping each round. Who is to say'? No one I've ever heard of has ever been then. Air happened, and that was light, and new lineages evolved to live in air, in or on land, and, for some, in the air, and for some still the sea; yes? (must I research this?)-and in those on land after insects there is this trend over time: more holes and,maybe, for most, lighter skulls.

For hundreds of millions of years; traceable in the trained in I am halls. Mouth holes, eye holes, nostril holes, then ear holes, down into the lower jaw holes, the skull inside the skin uncovering the top of the head underneath holes, which don't necessarily uncover a brain. Animals with skulls have brains---and every brain can be smart enough to exist and survive in the conditions of its species' natural economy, naturally, or else the species' skull itself would not be with us now as aren't many skull's species, lines, and lineages I traced through the halls of the museum earlier today. The human skull is thick, hard, and completely encases the brain, its holes for our taste and food and smell, for our sight and our hearing. The brain itself does not lie exposed softness yet under skin and soft tissue directly but feels through those sense's orifices. Covered thus, the human brain cannot in any way be said to truly touch the universe, its holey lightheaded mysteries speculation and theory but only under skull: thick, hard, but with some senses. Better reception for sense use may lead to increased holey-ness over time, if selected for. I therefore encourage all of us humans to fully use and engage our common senses, for to survive as a species we may truly need to like... well: how else to say it? Like: we need another hole in the head."

Look Ma, No Hands

Another week, another fish story. This one's about a little fish with big fang-like teeth. Except that the teeth aren't teeth, they're extensions of the jaw bones. And I used to think a tooth was a tooth was a tooth. Move over all ye zebrafish, here comes the "Smilodon" fish.

Drinking like a fish can make you reel a bit, but try drinking like an elephant sometimes. Elephants in the Kalahari Desert have been observed using their trunks to skim clean water off the surface of waterholes -- another example of good honest science being done by natural history film units. What big trunks they have, see how they skim !

I can attest to the peskiness of baby macaque monkeys - these little bounders would often get too close to sleepy students, promptly get scared and run back wailing to their mums, following which the said mums would bring reinforcements and start fights with you. Remind you of human toddlers ? Well, this should convince you how little we differ from our primate cousins - apparently baby monkeys throw tantrums, which their mothers usually ignore, unless someone's watching ! So the next time you see kids bawling their heads off in a crowded supermarket, have a care - they're just monkeying around.

Haven't seen Bucky around in a while, and I hope it's not because of these folks. I caught these two red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis oxfordstreeticus) last Sunday, enjoying the sun like most other Cambridgers. And with the trees still leafless, even an utter dunce like me managed to spot and photograph them - almost like Birdwatching for Dummies. Now all we need are some names for these local dinosaurs: I'm sure you can come up with less appalling ones than Manny the (mani)raptor (and his mate Womanny), so do write in with your suggestions and save these poor birds from needless cruelty !

Cheerio, and have a lovely week.

Inimitable contrivances

Yet another week where the stories all seem to center around fish ... and me running out of stale jokes. Send me some, dear readers, while you chew over this new basket of fish tales.

We've all heard of binocular vision, but this fish has eyes like telescopes. While every other animal has eyes with lenses that focus light and make images on a retina, deep sea denizens called spookfish are absolutely unique in their optics - they use reflecting mirrors instead ! Most astronomical telescope makers prefer mirrors instead of lenses, since they tend to be more efficient at collecting faint amounts of starlight and produce sharper distortion-free images. The first person to highlight the advantages of mirrors over lenses was Isaac Newton - but of course, he had no clue that the same design was being used for millions of years, solving a very similar problem in the low-light environment of the deep ocean. This story appeared around January 2009, but I bring it up because it showed up in this week's episode of Material World, a science show on BBC Radio. Material World is one of the best radio/podcast science program available, and features great stories, lively debates and bad puns galore. Another fantastic weekly science radio show is Quirks & Quarks, on CBC's Radio One. Check them out, and look through the large archive of previous shows that you can listen to -- one of the best ways to get through mind-numbing tasks.

Now fish oil is supposed to be great for the brain, but methinks it can't really be that good: after all, it didn't help the fish that ended up in the jar of oil, right ? (Give me a break, folks - it's been a hard week). However, fish were swimming about with their cranial computers long before anything even considered crawling out of the water. A recent fossil find looks at the mineralized brain of a 300 million year-old iniopterygian (an extinct relative of sharks and ratfishes) from Kansas, imaging its fossilized optic nerves and auditory regions in fantastic detail. But wait, these sharks were swimming around in Kansas ?? They must have had rocks for brains !

One of the most spectacular annual rituals in the marine world is the Great Sardine Run. Every year millions of sardines congregate in the warm currents off the South African coast, in turn attracting hordes of hungry predators all eager for the treat. The dolphins first herd the sardines into huge whirling masses called 'baitballs', at which point sharks join in the festivities, as do Cape gannets that dive-bomb the baitballs from the air and swim underwater picking out fish ! The sight of a gannet swimming around nonchalantly alongside sharks and dolphins is quite unforgettable - and if at first you find it unbelievable, you can watch the video again and again: packing into sardines, or gannet get any worse ?


I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
- W B Yeats, Song of the Wandering Aengus

Someday I'd like to experiment and see how well "berries on a thread" work to catch fish. In the meantime, our nearest dearest relatives have figured out how to land an easier (perhaps tastier) catch. While tool use among chimpanzees is old news, a recent paper shows fascinating evidence of technology development - a small group of Central African chimps seem to have invented some nifty new tools to fish for termites. First a termite-fishing primer: find yourself a nice termite mound; then poke some holes in it with a stick. Next, insert a flexible stem into the hole and wait for some termites to angrily bite into it. Withdraw, slurp up those proteins and repeat. However, if you're a chimp with a Goualougo Triangle education, you would first chew on the stem to flare the end out - that way you can catch up to 10 times as many termites, see. As the old saying goes, teach a chimpanzee to fish and you feed him for life.

I wonder if I could get them to fix my bicycle one of these days.

A very ancient and fish-like smell

Heard a number of fish stories this week, at least three of which are worth repeating.

The Gogo formation, an ocean reef that ended up in the middle of the Australian desert, has thrown up another fi.. err .. funny fossil. Except that this fossil apparently sat around in a museum for about 30 years before being reinterpreted (did I hear something about going slow & looking closely ?) Placoderms were armored fish, distantly related to today's sharks and bony fishes, that swam around during the Devonian, and died out in the same great extinction that took out the trilobites. This placoderm was an early arthrodire, a variety with even more armor than usual, and some neat features like a movable neck and armor plates instead of teeth. A bit like how a medieval knight out for a swim might look (sans horse and lance perhaps). What makes this particular find fascinating is the presence of fossil embryos inside some of the fish, and what might have been some kind of claspers for use in mating. Read all about the convergent evolution of claspers, or how to keep that fish from getting away.

Throw in sex, and one thing usually leads to another. In this case, I was led to a story from last year that illustrates the next chapter in the tale: live birth. Head-down baby whales last week, pregnant placoderms this time (and I thought water birthing was a fad). Gogo read about Attenborough's mother fish.

So it looks like the ichthyosaurs were just reinventing yet another old strategy. Time for this week's question: how many times did live birth get invented as animals went in and out of water ? Write in with your lists, readers and contributors !

Legged like a man and his fins like
arms! Warm o' my troth! I do now let loose
my opinion; hold it no longer: this is no fish
- The Tempest, Act II, Scene 2

This next fish only sat on a shelf for about 17 years, but is a catch worth bragging about. It walks on the sea floor, swims about with jet propulsion, but balls up and bounces along the seabed every once in a while. And in spite of a face to launch a thousand squids, this anglerfish holes up in tiny crevices and ambushes curious wanderers. Histiophryne psychedelica, or how I learnt to stop tripping and love the snorkel. Now in technicolor.

Legged like men, though, was whoever left these footprints. And left-legged too. Escape from bad onomatopoeia, and run away to read about this leap of evolution.

You can never run away too far however, especially if you're a crocodile. Hoping to confound the bearings of these persistent navigators, humans are now resorting to magnets, because the theory out there is that crocodiles somehow use magnetic fields to find their way back home from hundreds of miles away. As far as I've been able to find out though, there doesn't seem to be any serious study reporting the use of magnetic compasses in crocodiles ... if you know of any sources write in and make a crocodile-fan happy. As for whether the magnets will actually work to confuse them, my money's on the archosaurs. As one Thai proverb goes, don't teach a crocodile to swim.¹

This of course says the same thing as that old Roman saw - piscem natare doces - you're teaching a fish to swim. Evidently it isn't just old jokes and fish fins that get recycled.

--
1) สอนจระเข้ว่ายน้ำ (son jarakeh wai-naam)

If Nature had intended us to fly, she would have given us fingers

You cannot learn to fly by flying. First you must learn to walk, then to run, then to climb, then dance.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche should perhaps have added swimming to that list - but then again, there are more things on earth than are dreamt of by philosophers, so on to this week's list.

Here is a lecture on the evolution of flight by John Maynard Smith. Maynard Smith started off as an aeronautical engineer designing planes during World War II, but is much more famous for his work in using game theory to understand animal behaviour. This lecture is especially fun because Maynard Smith applies basic aerodynamics to make a pretty deep observation about the evolution of flight in animals. Flying, as far as we know, independently evolved four times: among insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats. Maynard Smith shows how a tail is necessary for flight stability, and how as the ability to fly develops, all four groups seem to have moved to shorter tails and more complicated flight controls for better maneouvrability. I was delighted to look at the fossil of the bat Icaronycteris this week, and see how bats had long tails too when they evolved during the Eocene !

In comparison, animals seem to have independently evolved aquatic lifestyles many more times. My list so far has ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, whales & dolphins, seals (?), elephants ... and I'm surely missing some (Can you think of any more ? Write in and let me know !) I wonder if aerodynamics also constrains the evolution of swimming animals. Anyway, what we do know from this past week are more details of the path that whales took, about all the walking and running and giving-birth-head-first that they did before taking to the water like a .. err ... like a fish: here's the tale of the good mother whale. Or an awful limerick - take your pick.

Whale was once a land-lubber
Who would wallow in pools and slumber.
Slowly, his hands became fins
So his legs he traded in
For some flukes and a coat of blubber.

Bears don't fly, but they surely know how to walk, and run, and swim very well. I was brought up to believe that the Jungle Book song couldn't be true, but bears can dance too ! And get themselves some bare necessities while they're at it: a sort of fish slapping dance.

If all this makes you feel bad for the poor salmon though, you might just be looking out for family -- so cheer up and have a whale of a week.

A Jawful of Ears

Been 'earing a lot of things this week. First off, an article for biologically-challenged physicists about echolocating bats & dolphins that I found from Sep 2007. Evidently, dolphins reverted to the older listen-through-your-jawbone formula - do jawbones work better as acoustic antennas in water ? Those clicks and whistles do a lot more than just find food though. Take a look at this beautiful set of videos from lifeonterra.com: Ocean Acrobats gets both thumbs and both toes up.

Elephants, which of course can never make up their minds about anything ⁽¹⁾, pick up low-frequency sounds through their feet and then pass them on to their ears. Now some primates want to use these signals to lure marauding pachyderms to safety: Elephantine Valentine messages ?

Now I've heard of cats climbing trees, but catfish climbing up trees sounds a little ... fishy. Not content with inventing radio communication, some catfish apparently decided to go out on a limb. They're launching satellites next, as you read this.

And, here's Bucky !










--
^{1) KT, who has often said.}