Ediacaran Animal Fossils Found?

Large spinose microfossils in Ediacaran rocks as resting stages of early animals

1. Phoebe A. Cohena,1,
2. Andrew H. Knollb,1 and
3. Robin B. Kodnerc

-Author Affiliations

1.
Departments of aEarth and Planetary Sciences and
2.
bOrganismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138; and
3.
cFriday Harbor Laboratories, University of Washington, Friday Harbor, WA 98250

1.

Contributed by Andrew H. KnollMarch 2, 2009 (sent for review December 9, 2008)

Abstract

Large (>100 μm), profusely ornamented microfossils comprise a distinctive paleontological component of sedimentary rocks deposited during the Ediacaran Period (635–542 million years ago). Smaller spinose fossils in Paleozoic rocks have commonly been interpreted as algal cysts or phycomata, but the Ediacaran populations differ from modern algal analogs in size, shape, ultrastructure, and internal contents. In contrast, cysts formed during the diapause egg-resting stages of many metazoans share features of size, ornamentation, and internal contents with large ornamented Ediacaran microfossils (LOEMs). Moreover, transmission electron microscopic observations of animal-resting cysts reveal a 3-layer wall ultrastructure comparable to that of LOEM taxa. Interpretation of these distinctive Ediacaran microfossils as resting stages in early metazoan life cycles offers additional perspectives on their functional morphology and stratigraphic distribution. Based on comparisons with modern marine invertebrates, the recalcitrant life stage represented by LOEMs is interpreted as an evolutionary response to prolonged episodes of bottom water anoxia in Ediacaran shelf and platform environments. As predicted by this hypothesis, the later Ediacaran disappearance of LOEM taxa coincides with geochemical evidence for a marked decline in the extent of oxygen-depleted waters impinging on continental shelves and platforms. Thus, the form, diversity, and stratigraphic range of LOEMs illuminate life cycle evolution in early animals as influenced by the evolving redox state of the oceans.

Dude. I'll get the paper once I am at work tomorrow.

Bay Area Scientific Computing Day

The Bay Area Scientific Computing Day (BASCD) is an annual informal gathering to encourage the interaction and collaboration of researchers in the fields of scientific computing and computational science/engineering from the San Francisco Bay Area. This event provides a great venue for junior researchers to present their work to the local community, and for the Bay Area scientific and computational science/engineering communities at large to interchange views on today's multidisciplinary computational challenges and state-of-the-art developments.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of BASCD. For this occasion, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which organized the first BASCD in 2000, will host the event on site on Saturday, May 9, 2009.

The event will feature presentations by researchers from institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area. There will also be opportunity for poster presentations.

Organizers:

Robert Crockett
Esmond Ng

Administrative Support:

Rachel Lance
Yeen Mankin

Venue

Location: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Building 66 Auditorium
Date: Saturday, May 9, 2009

Program Agenda

Current Speakers:

* Jim Bremer (UC Davis), "Efficient Discretization of Boundary Integral Equations on Domains with Corners"
* Anwei Chai (Stanford University), "Compressed Sensing and Imaging: A Comparative Study"
* Mark Hoemmen (UC Berkeley), "Communication-avoiding iterative methods"
* Nicole Lemaster (Sandia Lab), "Adaptive Load Balancing for Component-based PDE Solvers"
* Kamesh Madduri (LBNL), "High Performance Computing for Massive Graph Analysis"
* Chris Rycroft (LBNL), "Real-time control of mixing in dense granular flow"
* Mike Singer (LLNL), "TBA"

Poster Presentations:

Those interested in presenting a poster presentation should email Robert Crockett, rkcrockett-at-lbl-dot-gov, by the deadline of April 17. Please include title and abstract. There are a limited number of slots available, and those selected will be notified the following week.

The final agenda will be available soon.

Registration

No registration fees are required for participiation in the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day.

All participants of the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day must register in order to gain site access at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Go here to register.

Additional Information

Site Access

All participants must sign up at the registration page in order to visit Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and attend the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day.

Directions

The Bay Area Scientific Computing Day will be held in Building 66 Auditorium, which is located at the east end of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Building 66 is easily accessible from the Strawberry Canyon Gate. A map of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is available.

General information on directions to Lawrence Berkeley National can be found at http://www.lbl.gov/Workplace/Transportation.html.

To get to the Strawberry Canyon Gate from I-80: Click here for directions from Google Map.

To get to the Strawberry Canyon Gate from CA-24: Click here for directions from Google Map.

Weather in Berkeley

Current weather information and forecast can be found at http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Berkeley.html.

Previous Bay Area Scientific Computing Days

2000 - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
2001 - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2002 - Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore
2003 - University of San Francisco
2004 - Stanford University
2005 - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
2006 - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2007 - Stanford University
2008 - University of California, Berkeley

A nontrivial amount is HPC. I will probably not be attending because of Team Phoenicia testing, but I strongly encourage people to do so. If you want to network into the HPC/scientific computing world. this is one of the good ways to do so.

Link in the title like always.

Wilkins Ice Sheet Breaks Away

An ice bridge which had apparently held a vast Antarctic ice shelf in place during recorded history shattered on Saturday and could herald a wider collapse linked to global warming, a leading scientist said.

"It's amazing how the ice has ruptured. Two days ago it was intact," David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, told Reuters of a satellite image of the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula.

The satellite picture, from the European Space Agency (ESA), showed that a 40 km (25 mile) long strip of ice believed to pin the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place had splintered at its narrowest point, about 500 meters wide.

"We've waited a long time to see this," he said.

The Wilkins, now the size of Jamaica or the U.S. state of Connecticut, is one of 10 shelves to have shrunk or collapsed in recent years on the Antarctic Peninsula, where temperatures have risen in recent decades apparently because of global warming.

The ESA picture showed a jumble of huge flat-topped icebergs in the sea where the ice bridge had been on Friday, pinning the Wilkins to the coast and running northwest to Charcot Island.

"Charcot Island will be a real island for the first time in history," Vaughan said.

Vaughan, who landed on the flat-topped ice bridge on the Wilkins in January in a ski-equipped plane with other scientists and two Reuters reporters, said change in Antarctica was rarely so dramatic. It was the first -- and last -- visit to the area.

The loss of the ice bridge, jutting about 20 meters out of the water and which was almost 100 km wide in 1950, may now allow ocean currents to wash away far more of the Wilkins shelf.

"My feeling is that we will lose more of the ice, but there will be a remnant to the south," said Vaughan. Ice shelves float on the water, formed by ice spilling off Antarctica, and can be hundreds of meters thick.

Nine other shelves have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic Peninsula in the past 50 years, often abruptly like the Larsen A in 1995 or the Larsen B in 2002 further north.

There goes that one. It's been expected for a while though.

I have wonder how long until we are doing a death watch on the Ronne and Ross Ice Shelves...

Buy Antarctic Peninsula Properties now!

(and ditch the coastal ones elsewhere)

New Russian Launcher in the Works? Or Another Kliper?

ussian Space Agency Roscosmos has chosen a team consisting of Samara Space Center (TcSKB Progress), RSC Energia and the Makeev Rocket Design Bureau to develop a new medium-class booster.

The rocket will launch from the yet-to-be-built Vostochny cosmodrome in the far east of Russia. It should be able to boost manned and cargo spacecraft, as well as space station modules, to low-Earth orbit.

According to Roscosmos requirements, the new launcher should be able to send up to 20 metric tons of payload into a 200 kilometer (120-mile) altitude orbit. The team beat out Khrunichev and its Angara modular booster.

According to industry sources, the winning project is essentially an upgrade of the venerable Soyuz booster. It would be a two-stage launcher. It will reportedly feature an oxygen/kerosene first stage and a second stage using an oxygen/hydrogen fuel combination.

The new launch system is intended for the Advanced Crew Transportation System (ACTS) planned by Roscosmos to replace the Soyuz and Progress spacecraft. Roscosmos promises to name a winner in the ACTS competition early next week. The first launch of the new booster with an unmanned payload is planned for 2015, and the first manned mission is targeted for 2018.

We'll see if this is the real deal or not.

Ordovician Extinction Caused by Gamma Ray Burst?

A new study has suggested that a brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago, and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again in the future.

Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses. According to a report in National Geographic News, the new computer model shows that a gamma-ray burst aimed at Earth could deplete the ozone layer, cause acid rain, and initiate a round of global cooling from as far as 6,500 light-years away.

Such a disaster may have been responsible for the mass die-off of 70 percent of the marine creatures that thrived during the Ordovician period (488 to 443 million years ago), suggests study leader Brian Thomas, an astrophysicist at Washburn University in Kansas.

The simulation also shows that a significant gamma-ray burst is likely to go off within range of Earth every billion years or so, although the stream of radiation would have to be lined up just right to affect the planet.

Currently WR104, a massive star 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, is in position to be a potential threat, according to Thomas.

Study author Thomas’ former graduate advisor, Adrian Melott, first proposed in 2004 that a gamma-ray burst near Earth wiped out Ordovician life.

Since then, both researchers have been tackling pieces of the puzzle.

According to their newest models, gamma radiation from a nearby burst would quickly deplete much of Earth’s protective ozone layer, allowing increased ultraviolet radiation (UV) from the sun to reach the surface.

In the longer term, chemical reactions in the atmosphere would produce dark, nitrogen-based gases that would block the sun’s heat and trigger global cooling, even as the gamma rays continued to deplete ozone and let in UV rays, the authors suggested.

Some of the pollution would fall as damaging acid rain, which can severely disrupt ecosystems.

From what I can see here, this looks like its just a sim. Do they have any field work to support their assertion? Anyone have this paper? Or is it even a paper at all?

Still More Team Phoenicia News

We have added AirGas as a sponsor. This is huge. Free LOX and Helium to pressurize the tanks. This was the single largest cost we had.

I'm down in Menlo Park bending metal today.

More Team Phoenicia News

So, some news. We have Online Metals as a sponsor now: they've worked out a sweet deal for the metal parts we need for the structure. We also have a good chunk of the rocket structure fabbed for the first rocket. Second rocket parts being shipped. Third after we've fabbed the second.

The prototype engine is complete save for two nipples.

heh. We have another major sponsorship to announce. We'll save it for tomorrow. I want to make sure I have their permission first.

WOO!

ahem.

WHOA! Sponges Are *NOT* Your Relatives

Since the days of Charles Darwin, researchers are interested in reconstructing the "Tree of Life", and in understanding the development of animal and plant species during their evolutionary history. In the case of vertebrates, this research has already come quite a long way. But there is still much debate about the relationships between the animal groups that made their apparation very early in evolutionary history, probably in the late Precambrian, some 650� million years ago. An international research group led by LMU Munich Geobiology Professor Gert Wörheide and colleagues from France and Canada has now managed to explain the relationships between some of these very early animal groups with a high degree of confidence. In the most comprehensive study of its kind, the researchers show that all sponges descended from a unique sponge ancestor, who in turn was not the ancestor of all other animals. That means that humans did not descend from a sponge – like organism either, as some scientists have put forward. Moreover, the results also suggest that the nervous system only evolved once in animal history.

The most ancient animal groups (phyla) include the Porifera (sponges), Placozoa, Cnidaria, and Ctenophora (comb jellies). The sponges are extremely simply built, and have no organs. The placozoans also have a very simple structure. They have a flat, disk-shaped body, and no organs either. Comb jellies, the ctenophores, are life forms that resemble jellyfish. The true jellyfish, however, are part of the cnidarians, a phylum that also includes corals and sea anemones. The exact relationships among these early animal groups are still controversial, as different research groups have often obtained conflicting results. In particular, results from morphological studies, which look for structural similarities between different organisms, frequently contradict the results from molecular biological studies. The latter explore the functions of genes, and deduce phylogenetic relationships from gene sequences.

Aiming to resolve these controversies, a group of international scientists led by Hervé Philippe (Université de Montréal, Canada), Gert Wörheide (LMU Munich, Germany) and Michael Manuel (University of Paris, France) performed the most comprehensive study to date and investigated 128 genes from a total of 55 species – including nine poriferans, eight cnidarians, three ctenophores and the single known species of placozoans. Their analyses were based on a relatively new approach called phylogenomics, which determines the evolutionary relationships of life forms by comparing large datasets of gene sequences. Together with biochemists, evolutionary and computational biologists from Germany, France and Canada, the team analyzed more than 30,000 amino acid positions. Using computer analyses, the researchers then estimated a phylogenetic tree that displays how related the studied animals are.

One of the most significant outcomes of this study is new evidence that all species of sponges are descendants of a single ancestor. On the other hand, Bilateria, which include worms, mollusks, insects, and vertebrates, did not descend directly from this "spongy" ancestor. "If the ancestral animal would have had a sponge-like organization or body, as some earlier molecular studies repeatedly claimed, then we would all be descendents of such sponge-like organisms," explains Wörheide. "This proposition generated a lot of attention in the past. But our results clearly disagree with it." The analyses also revealed that ctenophores and cnidarians most likely belong to a common group. "This group, the "coelenterates", is most closely related to the bilaterians," explains Wörheide. "Our results support, after much controversy, a hypothesis that was already formulated back in 1848."

My head's going to pop here.

Implications?

Anapsid Diapsid Wars NOT Over!

Hat tip to Paleoblog.

Sauropods Were Not Dinosaurian Giraffes

A fondly-held belief about long-necked sauropods, the giant four-footed dinosaurs beloved of monster movies and children, is most probably untrue, a dino expert said on Wednesday.

At the zenith of the dinosaurs' reign, some sauropods evolved necks of extraordinary length -- more than nine metres (29.25 feet) in the case of the Mamenchisaurus, a titan of the Late Jurassic period around 150 million years ago.

Prevailing wisdom has it that these leviathans used their necks like giraffes today. They reached up high into the trees, munching leisurely on forest canopy that was out of reach for rival herbivores.

Not so, says a paper appearing in Biology Letters, a journal published by Britain's prestigious Royal Society.

It argues that giant sauropods most probably preferred to feed horizontally, rather than vertically, on the grounds of energy cost.

Australian evolutionary biologist Roger Seymour did a simulation of how much blood pressure a gigantic sauropod would need in order to place its head vertically.

He then calculated how much energy the creature would require in order to pump around blood at this high pressure.

"It would have required the animal to expend approximately half of its energy intake just to circulate the blood," says Seymour.

"A vertical neck would have required a high systemic arterial blood pressure. It is therefore energetically more feasible to have used a more or less horizontal neck to enable wide browsing while keeping blood pressure low."

There are sauropod experts and I'll defer to them. I'm skeptical: there have been no long necked mammalians that were NOT intended to go into the trees, sooo...

This also sounds rather familiar for some reason. *shrugs*

A New Method of Carbon Sequestration

New research shows that for millions of years carbon dioxide has been stored safely and naturally in underground water in gas fields saturated with the greenhouse gas. The findings – published in Nature today – bring carbon capture and storage a step closer.

Politicians are committed to cutting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to slow climate change. Carbon capture and storage is one approach to cut levels of the gas until cleaner energy sources are developed.

But the risks around the long-term storage of millions of cubic metres of carbon dioxide in depleted gas and oil fields has met with some concern, not least because of the possibility of some of the gas escaping and being released back to the atmosphere. Until now, researchers couldn't be sure how the gas would be securely trapped underground.

Naturally-occurring carbon dioxide can be trapped in two ways. The gas can dissolve in underground water – like bottled sparkling water. It can also react with minerals in rock to form new carbonate minerals, essentially locking away the carbon dioxide underground.

Previous research in this area used computer models to simulate the injection of carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs in gas or oil fields to work out where the gas is likely to be stored. Some models predict that the carbon dioxide would react with rock minerals to form new carbonate minerals, while others suggest that the gas dissolves into the water. Real studies to support either of these predictions have, until now, been missing.

To find out exactly how the carbon dioxide is stored in natural gas fields, an international team of researchers - led by the University of Manchester - uniquely combined two specialised techniques. They measured the ratios of the stable isotopes of carbon dioxide and noble gases like helium and neon in nine gas fields in North America, China and Europe. These gas fields were naturally filled with carbon dioxide thousands or millions of years ago.

They found that underground water is the major carbon dioxide sink in these gas fields and has been for millions of years.

Dr Stuart Gilfillan, the lead researcher who completed the project at the University of Edinburgh said: "We've turned the old technique of using computer models on its head and looked at natural carbon dioxide gas fields which have trapped carbon dioxide for a very long time."

"By combining two techniques, we've been able to identify exactly where the carbon dioxide is being stored for the first time. We already know that oil and gas have been stored safely in oil and gas fields over millions of years. Our study clearly shows that the carbon dioxide has been stored naturally and safely in underground water in these fields."

I have my doubts about carbon sequestration, but I'd like to see some test runs (which I am sure tehy'll do) prior to anything being done.

RIP SGI

Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:RACK), a leading provider of servers and storage products for medium to large-scale data centers, today announced its agreement to acquire substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (NASDAQ: SGIC) for approximately $25 million in cash, subject to adjustment in certain circumstances, plus the assumption of certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets.

$25 million is diddly squat.

End of an era. There's nada distinctive for SGI to reemerge from Rackable (a la Cray).

This has also been a looooong time coming.

so...

No real posts today. April 1st can be fun, but it cheapens oh so much if you have something big to announce. Big announcements tomorrow. Team Phoenicia and otherwise.

Honda Improves BMI

I have no sound on the work computer atm, so IDK what they are saying.

The research wing of Honda Motor has co-developed a brain machine interface (BMI) system that allows a person to control a robot through thought alone.

The system, which was developed with the Japanese government-affiliated Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International and precision equipment maker Shimadzu, builds on previous work announced three years ago towards a possible future where devices can be controlled by thought.

In 2006 Honda and ATR researchers managed to get a robotic hand to move by analyzing brain activity using a large MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner like that found in hospitals.

The latest work is a step more advanced and measures the electrical activity in a person's brain using electroencephalography (EEG) and blood flow within the brain using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to produce data that is then interpreted into control information. It requires no physical movement.

The system was not demonstrated on Tuesday but Honda did release a video of experiments. It shows a controller sitting in a chair with a large hemispheric scanner over his head, like the sit-down hair dryers you find in hair salons.

Both the EEG and NIRS techniques are established but the analyzing process for the data is new. Honda said the system uses statistical processing of the complex information to distinguish brain activities with high precision without any physical motion.

In the video, the controller is shown one of four cards -- right hand, left hand, foot and tongue -- and asked to visualize making a corresponding movement. After being shown the card for the right hand he visualizes moving that hand but physically remains completely still. After an indeterminable period Honda's Asimo robot, to which the system is hooked-up, raises its right hand.

Honda claims a 90 percent success rate using this method to correctly analyze thoughts.

If this works out we're one step closer to a very, very SFnal world.

New Compnonent to the Permian Extinction?

The largest mass extinction in the history of the earth could have been triggered off by giant salt lakes, whose emissions of halogenated gases changed the atmospheric composition so dramatically that vegetation was irretrievably damaged. At least that is what an international team of scientists have reported in the most recent edition of the "Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences" (Dokladi Earth Sciences). At the Permian/Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago about 90 percent of the animal and plant species ashore became extinct. Previously it was thought that volcanic eruptions, the impacts of asteroids, or methane hydrate were instigating causes. The new theory is based on a comparison with today's biochemical and atmospheric chemical processes. "Our calculations show that airborne pollutants from giant salt lakes like the Zechstein Sea must have had catastrophic effects at that time", states co-author Dr. Ludwig Weißflog from the Helmholtz-Center for Environmental Research (UFZ). Forecasts predict an increase in the surface areas of deserts and salt lakes due to climate change. That is why the researchers expect that the effects of these halogenated gases will equally increase.

The team of researchers from Russia, Austria, South Africa and Germany investigated whether a process that has been taking place since primordial times on earth could have led to global mass extinctions, particularly at the end of the Permian. The starting point for this theory was their discovery in the south of Russia and South Africa that microbial processes in present-day salt lakes naturally produce and emit highly volatile halocarbons such as chloroform, trichloroethene, and tetrachloroethene. They transcribed these findings to the Zechstein Sea, which about 250 million years ago in the Permian Age, was situated about where present day Central Europe is. The Zechstein Sea with a total surface area of around 600.000 km2 was almost as large as France is today. The hyper saline flat sea at that time was exposed to a predominantly dry continental desert climate and intensive solar radiation - like today's salt seas. "Consequently, we assume that the climatic, geo-chemical and microbial conditions in the area of the Zechstein Sea were comparable with those of the present day salt seas that we investigated," Weißflog said.

n their current publication the authors explain the similarities between the complex processes of the CO2-cycle in the Permian Age as well as between global warming from that time and at present. Based on comparable calculations from halogenated gas emissions in the atmosphere from present-day salt seas in the south of Russia, the scientists calculated that from the Zechstein Sea alone an annual VHC emissions rate of at least 1.3 million tonnes of trichloroethene, 1.3 million tonnes of tetrachloroethene, 1.1 million tonnes of chloroform as well as 0.050 million tonnes of methyl chloroform can be assumed. By comparison, the annual global industrial emissions of trichloroethene and tetrachloroethene amount to only about 20 percent of that respectively, and only about 5 percent of the chloroform from the emissions calculated for the Zechstein Sea by the scientists. Incidentally, the industrial production of methyl chloroform, which depletes the ozone layer, has been banned since 1987 by regulation of the Montreal Protocol.

"Using steppe plant species we were able to prove that halogenated gases contribute to speeding up desertification: The combination of stress induced by dryness and the simultaneous chemical stressor "halogenated hydrocarbons" disproportionately damages and destabilize the plants and speeds up the process of erosion," Dr. Karsten Kotte from the University of Heidelberg explained.

Based on both of these findings the researchers were able to form their new hypothesis: At the end of the Permian Age the emissions of halogenated gases from the Zechstein Sea and other salt seas were responsible in a complex chain of events for the world's largest mass extinction in the history of the earth, in which about 90 percent of the animal and plant species of that time became extinct.

According to the forecast from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), increasing temperatures and aridity due to climate change will also speed up desertification, increasing with it the number and surface area of salt seas, salt lagoons and salt marshlands. Moreover, this will then lead to an increase in naturally formed halogenated gases. The phytotoxic effects of these substances become intensified in conjunction with other atmospheric pollutants and at the same time increasing dryness and exponentiate the eco-toxicological consequences of climate change.

The new theory could be like a jigsaw piece that contributes to solving the puzzle of the largest mass extinction in the history of the earth. "The question as to whether the halogenated gases from the giant salt lakes alone were responsible for it or whether it was a combination of various factors with volcanic eruptions, the impact of asteroids, or methane hydrate equally playing their role still remains unanswered," Ludwig Weißflog said. What is fact however is that the effects of salt seas were previously underestimated.

If they are presenting this as the singular cause of the PT Extinction, then I do believe that they are mistaken. They state that they are unsure whether it was the singular killer or part of the mob that was raised and led by the Siberian Traps. I ssupect this is just yet another reason why the Permian Extinction was such a monster. More later.

ISS: Space Beauty

Vyazniki Biotic Assemblage of the Terminal Permian

A. G. Sennikov1 Contact Information and V. K. Golubev1 Contact Information
(1) Paleontological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences,
Profsoyuznaya ul. 123, Moscow, 117997, Russia

Received: 30 January 2006

Abstract A new unique and diverse biotic assemblage of the terminal Permian has recently been discovered in the town of Vyazniki (Central Russia). The Vyazniki terrestrial community is transitional between Permian and Triassic ones and represents the last, so far unknown stage of the global ecological crisis of the continental biota at the Permian-Triassic boundary. The successive development of land biotic crisis in the Late Permian, which was followed by mass extinction at the Permian-Triassic boundary, and long, successive postcrisis development and specialization of new Triassic groups as well as rearrangement and diversification of the biotic assemblage composition and community structure suggest predominance of intrinsic, biotic causes of this crisis, realized in destabilization, alteration, and new stabilization of continental communities and ecosystems.

The authors interpret that the Vyazniki Biotic Assemblage as an example of the transition from Permian to Triassic faunas or in the very least a post gorgonopsid-pareiasaur assemblage. That may be true, but I suspect that this may be a case of a local fauna only that may have spread as the opportunity presented itself. It may represent a refugium too.

They also suggest that Russia may have a contiguous Upper Permian to Lower Triassic geological set of stages.

More later.

Japan to North Korea: Launch and We'll Shoot It Down

Japan gave its military the green light on Friday to shoot down any incoming North Korean rocket, with tensions high ahead of a planned launch that the US and allies say will be an illegal missile test.

Japanese and US warships have already deployed ahead of the April 4-8 window, when the secretive North has said it will launch a communications satellite -- warning that shooting it down would be seen as an act of war.

But South Korea, Japan and the United States have all warned the North that any launch would be unacceptable, amid fears the regime is actually intending to test a long-range missile that could reach North America.

Russia -- which with the two Koreas, China, Japan and the US is part of a six-party forum working on the North's nuclear disarmament -- urged Pyongyang not to carry out the launch, saying there was no need to "ignite passions".

The security council in Japan, officially pacifist since the end of World War II, decided ahead of time to shoot down any incoming missile that could hit its territory rather than wait until a launch.

"The security council this morning decided to issue a destruction order in advance," said Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada. "We will do our best to handle any flying object from North Korea."

Now. How will the whack jobs react?

The Japanese have the same missile we used to knock-out that satellite, btw. It would be useful if they did it instead of us because then it would not be an excuse to start something with South Korea, or so goes my 30 second mental analysis.

paleo Query: Basal Most, Earliest Archosaur?

While pondering the alternate Permian that we are working on, I was wondering...what is the basal most archosaur? I know its supposed to have appeared prior to the PT Extinction absed on a passing reference. However, what is it? What fossil has been identified as the basal most archosaur and how derived in that sucker relative to other diapsids?

Can anyone point me to a paper?

WTF?! Over!

Rep. Michele Bachmann has introduced a bill that would prohibit the president from signing on to a global currency, despite congressional testimony from Obama administration officials that they would reject any proposal to replace the dollar.

In hearings earlier this week, the Republican congresswoman called on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to denounce the idea that the United States might adopt any other currency. Both men did.

Bachmann's bill, introduced Wednesday, proposes a constitutional amendment "to prohibit the President from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States."

During Tuesday's hearing, Bachmann pointed to recent remarks from Russia and China as part of the basis for her concern — comments suggesting that countries which have used the dollar as their reserve currency might begin to consider other sources. But those decisions, which would be made by foreign governments, would be unaffected by any congressional legislation, and would have no impact on U.S. currency decisions.

Is she completely out to lunch? Does she even have a clue what a reserve currency is?

I mean, I'm no economist or expert on that sort of thing, but ... damn Teh Stoopid is loose and infectious again.

If Not For Mother Nature and Her Pesky Crustaceans!

It is another nail in the coffin of using ocean fertilisation to cool the planet. Early results from the latest field experiment suggest the technique will fail.

"I think we are seeing the last gasps of ocean iron fertilisation as a carbon storage strategy," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University.

Earlier this month, the controversial Indian-German Lohafex expedition fertilised 300 square kilometres of the Southern Atlantic with six tonnes of dissolved iron. The iron triggered a bloom of phytoplankton, which doubled their biomass within two weeks by taking in carbon dioxide from the seawater. Dead bloom particles were then expected to sink to the ocean bed, dragging carbon along with them.

Instead, the bloom attracted a swarm of hungry copepods. The tiny crustaceans graze on phytoplankton, which keeps the carbon in the food chain and prevents it from being stored in the ocean sink. Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research reported that the copepods were in turn eaten by larger crustaceans called amphipods, which serve as food for squid and fin whales.

[...]

Lohafex researchers say the results suggest that using iron fertilisation to increase the ocean carbon sink would rely on a complex chain of events, making it difficult to control. The Southern Ocean is thought to be the planet's largest ocean carbon sink. But most of the northern half of the region is low on silicic acid, ruling it out as an option for carbon fertilisation.

The researchers tried to provoke a second bloom by fertilising the same patch of ocean three weeks later, with no success – most probably because the water was already saturated in iron.

"It seems that if it is possible to fertilise enough ocean to make a difference to climate, we would need to turn vast ocean ecosystems into giant plankton farms," says Caldeira.

So much for that idea...

2050: Who Won't Be Latino on Cinco De Mayo?

University of Washington demographers who analyzed 2000 census data contend that because of the way the census was structured many Hispanics or Latinos were eventually lumped into a category called "some other race." So many were placed in that category that it was the third-largest group behind whites and blacks in the census. This led to mistaken reports last year that whites, as opposed to non-Hispanic whites, were projected to be a minority in the U.S. by 2050. Actually, whites – including Hispanic whites – are expected to comprise upwards of 70 percent of the population in 2050.

"The truth is many people probably can't accurately report the origins of their ancestors," said Anthony Perez, lead author of a new study and a UW post-doctoral fellow in sociology and the university's Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. His co-author is Charles Hirschman, a UW professor of sociology and former president of the Population Association of America. The research appears in the March issue of the journal Population and Development Review.

"We have a fair degree of knowledge about where our parents and grandparents came from," said Perez. "But with every generation the number of our ancestors doubles and it is difficult to know the ethnic and racial details of all of them. Many people might have more ethnic or racial groups in their backgrounds than they imagine."

Most Americans, except for recent immigrants, probably descended from multiple geographic, ethnic and racial origins, and the United States was multi-ethnic and multi-racial from the start, the researchers contend.

"With the exception of indigenous people, everyone came from somewhere else. They were immigrants," said Perez. "Frontier societies absorbed many indigenous people and we also have a long history of interracial unions between Americans of European and African descent. It is not just Barack Obama, but most of us are a bunch of 'mutts' from different cultures and backgrounds."

All of this led to what is called Americanization, or the blending away of the specific ancestries that people brought with them. Typically Americanization begins with immigrants coming to the U.S., settling in neighborhoods with their compatriots and retaining their ethnic roots. But within a generation, they or their children learn English, intermarry with other Americans of different backgrounds and their ancestral ties begin to fade. With several more generations, most Americans begin to lose track of their increasingly complex family trees.

This blending has dramatically transformed Native Americans and Hawaiian-Pacific Islanders, most of whom acknowledge multiracial heritage. At the same time, very few whites and blacks acknowledge common ancestry on censuses and surveys.

"The low levels of racial mixture reported by whites and blacks represent an astounding loss of memory or a reluctance to acknowledge such mixing," said Perez. "One-fifth of African-Americans identified multiracial origins in the 1910 census and researchers think that number probably is low. Yet in Census 2000, just 2 percent of blacks and 0.4 percent of white acknowledge shared ancestry. The blurring of memories over many generations, the stigma of race mixing and a long history of segregation and political polarization have probably contributed to the amnesia of shared ancestry among many white and black Americans.

"Whites are notoriously inconsistent about the specifics of ethnic identity. We don't put a lot of stock in their answers because they often change their minds on follow-up questions. There also is inconsistency between parents and their children. The majority of whites have multiple ancestries and some will pick theirs on the basis of cuisine, a favorite relative or trends. And who isn't Irish on St. Patrick's Day?" he said.

heh. Avrora's friends are 2 mixed black-white kids (Brady and Savanna), three Latino kids (Stefano, Erica and Brianna), two African American girls (Maya and Emani (sp)), and two white boys (Nicholas and Ty). Her nemesis/rival is another blonde pasty girl like herself. I find myself delighted by that fact. The kids are really charming and I suspect that her dating pool is, when vetted by a shotgun, going to be similar.

What label will be on my grandkids? I do know: Bairds. Beyond that? DK, DC. :D

New State of Matter Found?

Hallmarks of an exotic state of matter called a supersolid have been spotted in a gas of ultracold rubidium atoms. In the same piece of matter, researchers found signs of the seemingly disparate properties of both solidity and superfluidity, the frictionless flow of atoms.

Reporting March 18 at a meeting of the American Physical Society, Dan Stamper-Kurn described two telltale signs that suggest this weird state of matter may indeed be a supersolid. The new matter is “a gas, which is superfluid, and also shares properties of a solid,” said Stamper-Kurn, of the University of California, Berkeley. If confirmed, a rubidium supersolid could help scientists better understand the properties of this strange state of matter.

“What we’ve seen is an ability to describe a peculiar state of nature,” comments Paul Grant, a former visiting scholar at Stanford University and IBM research staff member emeritus. If the researchers are able to extend their “interesting basic physics” results to come up with new ideas and applications, Grant says, “there may be a Nobel Prize there.”

A supersolid is defined by two seemingly contradictory properties. The atoms inside it are arranged in a crystalline, regular pattern, like any solid, but at the same time, the atoms are able to flow through the supersolid in an unrestricted way.

kewl!

Russia Orthodox Church Deacon: Xenophobia is KEWL

The increasing number of marriages between ethnic Russians and members of other nationalities and faiths threatens the survival of the Russian nation and should be actively opposed by the Russian Orthodox Church and all those concerned about the fate of this community, according to Deacon Andrey Kurayev.

In an interview posted on the “Russkaya nedelya” portal today, the influential churchman says that such marriages helped expand the membership of the Russian nation “when our faith was strong” but now threaten it because the faith of most Russians who enter into such unions is “weak.”

And that means that in contrast to a century ago when most such marriages led the non-Orthodox partner to convert to Christianity and the non-Russian to re-identify with the dominant ethnic community, now that means that it is often the case that the trends are going in the opposite direction.

That is serious, Kurayev argues, because the number of interethnic marriages in Moscow alone has risen from one in six at the end of Soviet times to one in four now, and they have changed in their composition as well, with the share of ethnic Russian women marrying members of Caucasus and Central Asian nationalities rising significantly.

Although Kurayev devotes most of his argument to religious and ethnic values, he makes it clear that he is concerned about the racial consequences of such marriages. “If defending a population of white bears,” he says, “is considered permissible, “then why should anyone be gladdened by the disappearance of anthropological differences?”

Moreover, he continues, “geneticists have calculated that the last blonde on our planet will be born 150 years from now somewhere in Finland”

If xenophobia is kewl, so too is outright stupidity.

James and I have pointed out why the "beige planet" isn't going to happen.

However, I have encountered this with a relative of my wife's. She really didn't like the idea that Lyuda had married a nonSlav and moved away from her homeland (not in that order). She even offered to take in Lyuda and Avrora if they'd come back (and ditch me). That individual and I have reached some accommodation since then, but ... it's still a sticky bit.

I've known more than a few Ukrainian men to have the same grumbles over Lyuda, too, but they're just sore looooooooooooooooooooooooosers. ahem. ;)

I have to admit that Avrora does not think of herself as Ukrainian or Russian, even though she's 3/8's and 1/8 respectively. She's Pure Product of America in her precocious lil mind. It's her California, darnit!

FWIW, she's also 1/8 Italian, 1/8 Irish, 1/8 German, and a plethora tof Scottish, French and other traces...possibly even Native American since we were pre 1700 exiles here.

Triceratops Gregariousness Confirmed?

Until now, Triceratops was thought to be unusual among its ceratopsid relatives. While many ceratopsids—a common group of herbivorous dinosaurs that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous—have been found in enormous bonebed deposits of multiple individuals, all known Triceratops (over 50 in total) fossils have been solitary individuals. But a new discovery of a jumble of at least three juveniles the badlands of the north-central United States suggests that the three-horned dinosaurs were not only social animals, but may have exhibited unique gregarious groupings of juveniles.

"This is very thrilling," says Stephen Brusatte, an affiliate of the American Museum of Natural History and a doctoral student at Columbia University. "We can say something about how these dinosaurs lived. Interestingly, what we've found seems to be a larger pattern among many dinosaurs that juveniles lived and traveled together in groups."

In 2005, Brusatte and colleagues found and excavated a site that contained multiple Triceratops juveniles in 66-million-year-old rocks in southeastern Montana. The geological evidence suggests that at least three juveniles were deposited at the same time by a localized flood, and this suggests that they were probably living together when disaster struck. This find indicates that Triceratops juveniles congregated in small herds, a social behavior increasingly identified in other dinosaur groups, such as Psittacosaurus, a small cousin of Triceratops that lived in Asia.

"We don't know why they were grouped together or how much time they spent together," says Joshua Mathews of the Burpee Museum of Natural History and Northern Illinois University, who led the project. "Herding together could have been for protection, and our guess is that this wasn't something they did full time."

Y'know, I could have sworn that Triceratops was confirmed to have lived in herds if not large ones...but what the heck, maybe not.

FRAAAAAAAAAACK!

I can't believe I stayed up to watch that.

Oh well, Amanda's reaction ought to be very, very amusing.

Well, it's done. Maybe someday I'll write up what I would have done instead. lol

Chimps Working Hard for Their Honey

Via Nat Geo.

Nifty Anomalocaris Page

I was looking for a rendering of Hurdia and found this website. Go look!

Hurdia victoria: Yet Another Anomalocarid

Hurdia victoria was originally described in 1912 as a crustacean-like animal. Now, researchers from Uppsala University and colleagues reveal it to be just one part of a complex and remarkable new animal that has an important story to tell about the origin of the largest group of living animals, the arthropods. The findings are being published in this week's issue of Science.

The fossil fragments puzzled together come from the famous 505 million year old Burgess Shale, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in British Columbia, Canada. Uppsala researchers Allison Daley and Graham Budd at the Department of Earth Sciences, together with colleagues in Canada and Britain, describe the convoluted history and unique body construction of the newly-reconstructed Hurdia victoria, which would have been a formidable predator in its time.

Although the first fragments were described nearly one hundred years ago, they were assumed to be part of a crustacean-like animal. It was not then realised that other parts of the animal were also in collections, but had been described independently as jellyfish, sea cucumbers and other arthropods. However, collecting expeditions from in the 1990s uncovered more complete specimens and hundreds of isolated pieces that led to the first hints that Hurdia was more than it seemed. The last piece of the puzzle was found when the best-preserved specimen turned up in the old collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC. This specimen was first classified as an arthropod in the 1970s and 80s, and then as an unusual specimen of the famous monster predator Anomalocaris.

The new description of Hurdia shows that it is indeed related to Anomalocaris. Like Anomalocaris, Hurdia had a segmented body with a head bearing a pair of spinous claws and a circular jaw structure with many teeth. But it differs from Anomalocaris by the possession of a huge three-part carapace that projects out from the front of the animal's head.

"This structure is unlike anything seen in other fossil or living arthropods," says Ph.D. student Allison Daley, who has been studying the fossils for three years as part of her doctoral thesis.

"The use of the large carapace extending from the front of its head is a mystery. In many animals, a shell or carapace is used to protect the soft-parts of the body, as you would see in a crab or lobster, but this structure in Hurdia is empty and does not cover or protect the rest of the body. We can only guess at what its function might have been."

This has been quite the year for anomalocarids, hasn't it? Any renditions up and about yet? Found one.

Just How Basal ARE Feathers for Dinosaurs?

An Early Cretaceous heterodontosaurid dinosaur with filamentous integumentary structures

Xiao-Ting Zheng1, Hai-Lu You2, Xing Xu3 & Zhi-Ming Dong3

1. Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, Lianhuashan Road West, Pingyi, Shandong, 273300, China
2. Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, 26 Baiwanzhuang Road, Beijing 100037, China
3. Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 142 Xiwai Street, Beijing 100044, China

Correspondence to: Hai-Lu You2 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to H.-L.Y. (Email: youhailu@gmail.com).

Top of page
Abstract

Ornithischia is one of the two major groups of dinosaurs, with heterodontosauridae as one of its major clades. Heterodontosauridae is characterized by small, gracile bodies and a problematic phylogenetic position1, 2. Recent phylogenetic work indicates that it represents the most basal group of all well-known ornithischians3. Previous heterodontosaurid records are mainly from the Early Jurassic period (205–190 million years ago) of Africa1, 3. Here we report a new heterodontosaurid, Tianyulong confuciusi gen. et sp. nov., from the Early Cretaceous period (144–99 million years ago) of western Liaoning Province, China. Tianyulong extends the geographical distribution of heterodontosaurids to Asia and confirms the clade's previously questionable temporal range extension into the Early Cretaceous period. More surprisingly, Tianyulong bears long, singular and unbranched filamentous integumentary (outer skin) structures. This represents the first confirmed report, to our knowledge, of filamentous integumentary structures in an ornithischian dinosaur.

1. Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, Lianhuashan Road West, Pingyi, Shandong, 273300, China
2. Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, 26 Baiwanzhuang Road, Beijing 100037, China
3. Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 142 Xiwai Street, Beijing 100044, China

Link at the top is to the paper. First seen at Chinleana, but also at Not Exactly Rocket Science and on Yahoo News.


Since I first came across them, I have found the heterodontosaurs to be absolutely fascinating. The fact that they are now in Laurasia and made it to the Cretaceous, is just plain kewl. After all, here's a dinosaur that had freakin canines! (well, sorta canines) After ceratopsians, they're my favorites.

Why is the dating so loosely constrained?

For the phylogeny geeks:

Solid State Lasers Reach Militarily Useful Power Threshold

Reaching new heights with its scalable building block approach for compact, electric laser weapons, Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) has produced the most powerful light ray yet created by an electric laser, measured at more than 105 kilowatts (kW).

The company claimed ownership of this record by completing the final demonstration milestone of the U.S. military's Joint High Power Solid State Laser (JHPSSL) program, Phase 3. The achievements included turn-on time of less than one second and continuous operating time of five minutes, with very good efficiency and beam quality. Last year, Northrop Grumman reported reaching a JHPSSL Phase 3 power level of 15.3kW in March and a power level of 30kW in September.

"Our modular JHPSSL design makes it straightforward to scale laser weapon systems to mission-required power levels for a variety of uses, to include force protection and precision strike missions for air-, sea- and land-based platforms," said Dan Wildt, vice president of Directed Energy Systems for Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector.

"This achievement is particularly important because the 100kW threshold has been viewed traditionally as a proof of principle for 'weapons grade' power levels for high-energy lasers. In fact, many militarily useful effects can be achieved by laser weapons of 25kW or 50 kW, provided this energy is transmitted with good beam quality, as our system does. With this milestone, we have far exceeded those needs."

The next step is to weaponize this demonstrator. That could be done in as little as 5 years, but I doubt it will. While there are countermeasures for lasers, they're a lot less effective than people think. It will also take time and up the cost of the per round firings. It will be possible to saturate a defense like this, but it's going to be expensive to do that too. The goal ought to be to make these weapons smaller (if those tiles are like the oens here at work, that demonstrator is 9 ft by 9 ft) and make them ubiquitous across all major combat fighting vehicles. Then you have a chance of saying "if it flies, it dies." OTOH, even with the truck version they are talking about now, aircraft are going to have issues if they come above the horizon...

Elephant Shark's Fascinating Genome (with color vision too!)

he elephant shark, a primitive deep-sea fish that belongs to the oldest living family of jawed vertebrates, can see color much like humans can.

This discovery, published in the March 2009 issue of Genome Research, may enhance scientists' understanding of how color vision evolved in early vertebrates over the last 450 million years of evolution.

"It was unexpected that a 'primitive' vertebrate like the elephant shark had the potential for color vision like humans. The discovery shows that it has acquired the traits for color vision during evolution in parallel with humans," said Byrappa Venkatesh, Ph.D., who with David Hunt, Ph.D., headed the research team responsible for this surprising discovery.

Dr. Venkatesh is a scientist at Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), while Dr. Hunt is based at the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London (UCL).

The research team found that the elephant shark had three cone pigments for color vision and, like humans, it accomplished this through gene duplication.

Dr. Venkatesh said that the finding underscores the research utility of the elephant shark, which IMCB scientists proposed in 2005 as a valuable reference genome to understand the human genome.

In a separate paper titled, "Large number of ultraconserved elements were already present in the jawed vertebrate ancestor," published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution in March 2009, the research team reported that they had discovered that the protein sequences in elephant shark were evolving at a slower rate than in other vertebrates.

This finding indicates that the elephant shark had retained more features of the ancestral genome than other vertebrates belonging to the same evolutionary tree and hence was a useful model for gaining insight into the ancestral genome, in which the human genome also has its roots.

heh. heh. heh. Anyone see the scary bit? :) Lots of kewl bits set though.

China: Importing Nations Should Shoulder China's Carbon Pollution

China appealed Monday to exclude its giant export sector in the next treaty on climate change, saying rich countries buying its products should bear responsibility for emissions in manufacturing.

"It is a very important item to make a fair agreement," senior Chinese climate official Li Gao said during a visit to Washington.

Climate envoys from China, Japan and the European Union were holding talks with US President Barack Obama's administration as the clock ticks to a December conference in Copenhagen meant to draft a post-Kyoto Protocol deal.

But hopes were fading of reaching a comprehensive treaty, with the United States still working out the scope of its new commitment to fighting global warming under Obama.

Developed nations demand that growing developing countries such as China and India take action under the new treaty. They had no obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, leading Obama's predecessor George W. Bush to reject it.

Some statistics say China has now surpassed the United States as the top emitter of carbon emissions blamed for global warming. But Li said that up to 20 percent of China's emissions were from producing exports.

"We are at the low end of the production line for the global economy," Li told a forum.

"We produce products and these products are consumed by other countries, especially the developed countries. This share of emissions should be taken by the consumers but not the producers," he said.

Ok. Easily done. It's called a carbon tariff. China won't like it. Not one bit. It'd be interesting to see their reaction though. ;)

Collapse of the State Still Weighs on the Russian Mind

The Russian Federation is likely to break apart into as many as 30 pieces by the middle of this century as that country’s accelerating demographic decline leads some of its smaller nationalities to take steps to try to ensure their own survival, according to a leading Moscow scholar.

In an interview posted online today, Anatoly Antonov, a professor of sociology, the family and demography at Moscow State University, says that widely believed assertions by government officials that Russia has been able to increase the birthrate “do not correspond to reality” (www.utro.ru/articles/2009/03/17/803591.shtml).

On the one hand, he continues, these assertions reflect the fundamental ignorance of many in government and out of the nature of demographic trends in Russia. And on the other, they serve as a self-serving justification for not doing what the country must do if it is to avoid disaster in the relatively near future.

Antonov says that the recent uptick in births reflects the echo of the baby boom of the late 1980s but that beginning in 2010, the number of women entering the prime child-bearing age cohort will decline significantly because far fewer were born in the 1990s. And as a result, the decline in the country’s population will begin to accelerate.

He argues that if nothing is done – and because the Russian government has no one in it who understands the need for action now, including the compelling need to make housing more available to young married couples, that possibility strikes him as unlikely – the population of the Russian Federation in its current borders will fall to 38 million by 2080.
Instead, what is likely to happen, the Moscow demographer continues, is that in 2015, five years after the collapse in the number of births begins, “bureaucrats will recognize the extent of the catastrophe and begin to shout that this financial crisis undermined the realization of all their plans.”

But by then, he suggests, it may be too late: “From 2010 to 2025, every succeeding generation of people entering marriage age will be ever smaller in comparison with the preceding one,” and “all this will produce an unbelievable contraction in the present coefficient of births” so that by 2025, half the population will not want children, and only 15 percent more than one.

Not much time to comment today. Meeting day! bleh!

Sinornithomimus dongi Herd? Flock? Found

Like teenagers at the mall, young dinosaurs may have wandered in herds—fending for themselves while adults were busy nesting, according to a new report on one of the world's best preserved fossil sites.

About 90 million years ago a herd of more than 25 birdlike dinosaurs got stuck in the mud at the edge of a drying lake and perished together in modern-day China, said study co-leader Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist.

Nearly complete skeletons of the plant-eaters were found at the Gobi desert site—some stacked on top of each other.

The dig site is etched with an ancient tragedy, said Sereno, who is also a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)

Plunge and scratch marks are preserved in the long-hardened mud, showing the young dinosaurs' futile attempts at escape.

The dinosaurs' flailing likely attracted predators that feasted on the meatiest parts of the young—the hips, Sereno said. Only hip bones are missing from the fossilized bodies.

Again, no time to comment...

(well, it was a herbivore!)

Hesperonychus elizabethae: NorAm's Itsy Bitsy Raptor

Massive predators like Albertosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex may have been at the top of the food chain, but they were not the only meat-eating dinosaurs to roam North America, according to Canadian researchers who have discovered the smallest dinosaur species on the continent to date. Their work is also helping re-draw the picture of North America's ecosystem at the height of the dinosaur age 75 million years ago.

"Hesperonychus is currently the smallest dinosaur known from North America. But its discovery just emphasizes how little we actually know, and it raises the possibility that there are even smaller ones out there waiting to be found," said Nick Longrich, a paleontology research associate in the University of Calgary's Department of Biological Sciences. "Small carnivorous dinosaurs seemed to be completely absent from the environment, which seemed bizarre because today the small carnivores outnumber the big ones," he said. "It turns out that they were here and they played a more important role in the ecosystem than we realized. So for the past 100 years, we've completely overlooked a major part of North America's dinosaur community."

In a paper published today in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Longrich and University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie describe a new genus of carnivorous dinosaur that was smaller than a modern housecat and likely hunted insects, small mammals and other prey through the swamps and forests of the late Cretaceous period in southeastern Alberta, Canada. Weighing approximately two kilograms and standing about 50 centimetres tall, Hesperonychus elizabethae resembled a miniature version of the famous bipedal predator Velociraptor, to which it was closely related. Hesperonychus ran about on two legs and had razor-like claws and an enlarged sickle-shaped claw on its second toe. It had a slender build and slender head with dagger-like teeth.

"It was half the size of a domestic cat and probably hunted and ate whatever it could for its size – insects, mammals, amphibians and maybe even baby dinosaurs," Longrich said. "It probably spent most of its time close to the ground searching through the marshes and forests that characterized the area at the end of the Cretaceous."

Fossilized remains of Hesperonychus, which means “western claw,” were collected in 1982 from several locations including Dinosaur Provincial Park. The most important specimen, a well-preserved pelvis, was recovered by legendary Alberta paleontologist Elizabeth (Betsy) Nicholls, after which the species is named. Nicholls was the curator of marine reptiles at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller and earned her MSc and PhD degrees at U of C. She passed away in 2004. The fossils remained unstudied for 25 years until Longrich came across them in the University of Alberta’s collection in 2007. Longrich and Currie focused on fossilized claws and a well-preserved pelvis for their description.

"The claws were thought to come from juveniles- they were just so small. But when we studied the pelvis, we found the hip bones were fused, which would only have happened once the animal was fully grown", Longrich said. "Until now, the smallest carnivorous dinosaurs we have seen in North America have been about the size of a wolf. Judging by the amount of material that was collected, we believe animals the size of Hesperonychus must have been quite common on the landscape."

NOTE (for some people): MAMMALS WERE NOT EATING ALL THE DINOSAURS OR OUTCOMPETING THEM.

ahem.

Even in the small critter niches.

Meet Predator X: a new pliosaur from Svalbard.

A giant fossil sea monster found in the Arctic and known as "Predator X" had a bite that would make T-Rex look feeble, scientists said Monday.

The 50 ft (15 meter) long Jurassic era marine reptile had a crushing 33,000 lbs (15 tonnes) per square inch bite force, the Natural History Museum of Oslo University said of the new find on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

"With a skull that's more than 10 feet long you'd expect the bite to be powerful but this is off the scale," said Joern Hurum, an associate professor of vertebrate paleontology at the museum who led the international excavation in 2008.

"It's much more powerful than T-Rex," he said of the pliosaur reptile that would have been a top marine predator. Tyrannosaurus Rex was a top land carnivore among dinosaurs.

The scientists reconstructed the predator's head and estimated the force by comparing it with the similarly-shaped jaws of alligators in a park in Florida.

"The calculation is one of the largest bite forces ever calculated for any creature," the Museum said of the bite, estimated with the help of evolutionary biologist Greg Erickson from Florida State University.

Predator X's bite was more than 10 times more powerful than any modern animal and four times the bite of a T-Rex, it said of the fossil, reckoned at 147 million years old. Alligators, crocodiles and sharks all now have fearsome bites.

The teeth of the pliosaur, belonging to a new species, were a foot (30 cms) long. The scientists reconstructed the reptile from a partial skull and 20,000 fragments of skeleton.

The pliosaur, estimated to have weighed 45 tonnes, was similar to but had more massive bones than another fossil sea monster found on Svalbard in 2007, also estimated at 50 feet long and the largest pliosaur to date.

"It's not complete enough to say it's really bigger than 15 meters," Hurum said of the new fossil.

No time to comment...just plain kewl.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Really good news coming. Hint up on Monday. Full blown double announcements soon. I am hoping more than double. *EFG* with a frakkin blink tag.

ESA Continues ExoMars Development Despite Concerns

The European Space Agency is proceeding with development of its ExoMars mission with an eye toward a 2016 launch, despite questions of funding and international participation that still loom over the program.

ExoMars was conceived as a way for the European Space Agency (ESA) to beef up its rover knowledge and experience. According to a presentation by ExoMars Project Scientist Jorge Vago to the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group in Arlington, Va., last week, the mission's primary technology objectives include entry, descent and landing with a large payload on Mars, demonstrating multikilometer mobility with a rover, and automatic drilling of the Martian surface down to a depth of two meters.

Hope that they get the funding...I also hope NASA gets enough funding for a rover during the same time frame.

LANL Maps Science Paper Downloads (kewl or creepy?)

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have produced the world's first Map of Science—a high-resolution graphic depiction of the virtual trails scientists leave behind when they retrieve information from online services. The research, led by Johan Bollen, appears this week in PLoS ONE (the Public Library of Science).

"This research will be a crucial component of future efforts to study and predict scientific innovation, as well novel methods to determine the true impact of articles and journals," Bollen said.

While science is of tremendous societal importance, it is difficult to probe the often hidden world of scientific creativity. Most studies of scientific activity rely on citation data, which takes a while to become available because both the cited publication and the publication of a particular citation can take years to appear. In other words, citation data observes science as it existed years in the past, not the present.

Bollen and colleagues from LANL and the Santa Fe Institute collected usage-log data gathered from a variety of publishers, aggregators, and universities spanning a period from 2006 to 2008. Their collection totaled nearly 1 billion online information requests. Because scientists typically read articles online well before they can be cited in subsequent publications, usage data reveal scientific activity nearly in real-time. Moreover, because log data reflect the interactions of all users—such as authors, science practitioners, and the informed public—they do not merely reflect the activities of scholarly authors.

Whenever a scientist accesses a paper online from a publisher, aggregator, university, or similar publishing service, the action is recorded by the servers of these Web portals. The resulting usage data contains a detailed record of the sequences of articles that scientists download as they explore their present interests. After counting the number of times that scientists, across hundreds of millions of requests, download one article after another, the research team calculated the probability that an article or journal accessed by a scientist would be followed by a subsequent article or journal as part of the scientists' online behavior. Based on such behavior, the researchers created a map that graphically portrays a network of connected articles and journals.

Bollen and colleagues were surprised by the map's scope and detail. Whereas maps based on citations favor the natural sciences, the team's maps of science showed a prominent and central position for the humanities and social sciences, which, in many places, acted like interdisciplinary bridges connecting various other scientific domains. Sections of the maps were shaped by the activities of practitioners who read the scientific literature but do not frequently publish in its journals.

The maps furthermore revealed unexpected relations between scientific domains that point to emerging relationships that are capturing the collective interest of the scientific community—for instance a connection between ecology and architecture.

"We were surprised by the fine-grained structure of scientific activity that emerges from our maps," said Bollen.

According to Bollen, future work will focus on issues involved in the sustainable management of large-scale usage data, as well the production of models that explain the online behavior of scientists and how it relates to the emergence of scientific innovation. This information will help funding agencies, policy makers, and the public to better understand how best to tap the ebb and flow of scientific inquiry and discovery.

We Iz In Ur Logz Trackin Ur Science! 43@r Uz!

Ecomorphological Selectivity Among Marine Teleost Fishes During the KT Extinction

Matt Friedman

Committee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago, 1025 East 57th Street, Chicago, IL 60637 and Department of Geology, Field Museum, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605


Abstract

Despite the attention focused on mass extinction events in the fossil record, patterns of extinction in the dominant group of marine vertebrates—fishes—remain largely unexplored. Here, I demonstrate ecomorphological selectivity among marine teleost fishes during the end-Cretaceous extinction, based on a genus-level dataset that accounts for lineages predicted on the basis of phylogeny but not yet sampled in the fossil record. Two ecologically relevant anatomical features are considered: body size and jaw-closing lever ratio. Extinction intensity is higher for taxa with large body sizes and jaws consistent with speed (rather than force) transmission; resampling tests indicate that victims represent a nonrandom subset of taxa present in the final stage of the Cretaceous. Logistic regressions of the raw data reveal that this nonrandom distribution stems primarily from the larger body sizes of victims relative to survivors. Jaw mechanics are also a significant factor for most dataset partitions but are always less important than body size. When data are corrected for phylogenetic nonindependence, jaw mechanics show a significant correlation with extinction risk, but body size does not. Many modern large-bodied, predatory taxa currently suffering from overexploitation, such billfishes and tunas, first occur in the Paleocene, when they appear to have filled the functional space vacated by some extinction victims.

A little more data...

HPC Giggle Factor

Joint think-tank from Russia and Belarus developed new high-density blade for SKIF supercomputers.

New blade will have capacity of 0.5-5 peta-flops, in other words, it will perform up to 5x1015 operations per second – 10-100 times more than existing SKIF supercomputer can perform.

New supercomputer’s blade hosts two multi-core processors Intel Xeon; memory with capacity between 6 and 12 gigabytes and unit for communication with other boards – all packed with very high density. Such density is impossible with common coolers, and scientists suggested a solution.

.5 to 5 petaflops from two Intel Xeons....

This is one of those point and laugh moments, folks.

Amazonian Amphibian Diversity Traced to Andes

Colorful poison frogs in the Amazon owe their great diversity to ancestors that leapt into the region from the Andes Mountains several times during the last 10 million years, a new study from The University of Texas at Austin suggests.

This is the first study to show that the Andes have been a major source of diversity for the Amazon basin, one of the largest reservoirs of biological diversity on Earth. The finding runs counter to the idea that Amazonian diversity is the result of evolution only within the tropical forest itself.

"Basically, the Amazon basin is a 'melting pot' for South American frogs," says graduate student Juan Santos, lead author of the study. "Poison frogs there have come from multiple places of origin, notably the Andes Mountains, over many millions of years. We have shown that you cannot understand Amazonian biodiversity by looking only in the basin. Adjacent regions have played a major role."

Santos and Dr. David Cannatella, professor of integrative biology, published their findings this month in the journal PLoS Biology.

The tale of how the tropics became so diverse is a rather complicated one indeed.

Caribbean Paleo Blog

All about Cenozoic vertebrate paleontology...in the caribbean! How kewl is that?

China's Real Space Plans

Everybody has a chip on their shoulder about something—many people have a whole bag of chips (or should that be a circuit board of chips?) I certainly have several, including people who won’t stand on the right and walk on the left on Washington Metro escalators (tourists!), drivers who don’t use turn signals, and just about any popular media article about the Chinese space program. The reason that media reports on China’s space program bug me is that they often seem to be out of phase with what is already known based upon Chinese reports and statements. That is still true, even as reporting on China’s human spaceflight program transitions from inaccurate stories about lunar ambitions to more accurate stories about Chinese space station plans.

The latest case in point concerns recent reports that China is beginning development of a new space station. The Chinese revealed the space station design on a New Year holiday television broadcast, around the same time that their first lunar robotic spacecraft smashed into the lunar surface. This was reported in numerous places in the western media as if it was a great revelation and a change in Chinese plans. The reality is that these plans, and the space station’s overall design, have been publicly known for nearly six months. Despite the way some in the western media have reported it, nothing has changed. In fact, popular media reporting about China’s future space plans seems more to reflect Western biases and fears than it does what the Chinese government is actually saying and doing. This is not a case of Chinese statements being unreliable; it’s a case of the Western media being inattentive.

I've known Dwayne for almost a decade now, iirc. He turns a mean phrase when it comes to space related matters, especially space history. He discusses China's real space plans (station, not moon) over at the Space Review: he also lambastes media for making silly claims about it too.