Hibernating Species Less Likely to Go Extinct?

The best way to survive the ill-effects of climate change and pollution may be to simply sleep through it.

According to a new study published in The American Naturalist, mammals that hibernate or that hide in burrows are less likely to turn up on an endangered species list. The study's authors believe that the ability of such "sleep-or-hide" animals to buffer themselves from changing environments may help them avoid extinction.

The idea that sleepers and hiders may have a survival advantage first arose from a study of the fossil record conducted by Dr. Lee Hsiang Liow of the University of Oslo. That study found that sleep-or-hide mammals seem to last longer as species than other mammals.

In this latest study, Liow and colleagues from the Universities of Oslo and Helsinki wanted to see if this trend holds for mammals living today.

Using a database of over 4,500 living mammal species, Liow and his team identified 443 mammals that exhibit at least one sleep-or-hide behavior. Their list includes tunneling and burrowing animals like moles and chipmunks, as well as animals that can periodically lower metabolic rates like squirrels, bats and bears.

The sleep-or-hide list was then compared with "Red List" of threatened species compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. As the researchers suspected, sleep-or-hide species are less likely appear in any of the IUCN's high-risk categories. The pattern holds even under controls for other traits that may influence extinction rates, such as body size (smaller animals generally have lower extinction rates) and geographic distribution.

There are some interesting implications here.

Potentially, if the Lystrosaurs were burrowers as I believe is suspected could they and other species that were estivators/hibernators or had low metabolic requirements - ie could handle long fasts like crocs can - simply survived because they had lower, much lower constant energy intake requirements. Munch up through the lesser nasty season and then dig in. Or wait it out (if you are croc esque).

That would turn on its ear the idea that endothermy had anything to do with the PT Extinction. Since the gorgons had turbinates, IMNSHO, that was the case anyways, but...

Just. Not. Right.

A college class based entirely around Blizzard's real-time strategy game StarCraft has opened at UC Berkeley, according to a course listing found by StarCraft Wire.

The class will begin with a lecture on topics "from the viewpoint of pure theory to the more computational aspects of how exactly battles are conducted." Following the lecture, replays of students' battles will be "analyzed," and "homework" will be assigned.

(o.O)

While fun, ummm, does this really need to be a class?

Simulating Exoplanet HD 80606b's Weather

(nicked from systematic)

Astronomers have observed the intense heating of a distant planet as it swung close to its parent star, providing important clues to the atmospheric properties of the planet. The observations enabled astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to generate realistic images of the planet by feeding the data into computer simulations of the planet's atmosphere.

"We can't get a direct image of the planet, but we can deduce what it would look like if you were there. The ability to go beyond an artist's interpretation and do realistic simulations of what you would actually see is very exciting," said Gregory Laughlin, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Laughlin is lead author of a new report on the findings published this week in Nature.

The researchers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to obtain infrared measurements of the heat emanating from the planet as it whipped behind and close to its star. In just six hours, the planet's temperature rose from 800 to 1,500 Kelvin (980 to 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit).

Known as HD 80606b, the planet circles a star 200 light years from Earth, is four times the mass of Jupiter, and has the most eccentric orbit of any known planet. It spends most of its 111.4-day orbit at distances that would place it between Venus and Earth in our own solar system, while the closest part of its orbit brings it within 0.03 astronomical units of its star (one astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the Sun). The planet zips through this dramatic close encounter with its star in less than a day.

At the closest point, the sunlight beating down on the planet is 825 times stronger than the irradiation it receives at its farthest point from the star. "If you could float above the clouds of this planet, you'd see its sun growing larger and larger at faster and faster rates, increasing in brightness by almost a factor of 1,000," Laughlin said.

Spitzer observed the planet for 30 hours before, during, and just after its closest approach to the star. The planet passed behind the star (an event called a secondary eclipse) just before the moment of its closest approach. This was a lucky break for Laughlin and his colleagues, who had not known that would happen when they planned the observation. The secondary eclipse allowed them to get accurate measurements from just the star and thereby determine exact temperatures for the planet.

The extreme temperature swing observed by Spitzer indicates that the intense irradiation from the star is absorbed in a layer of the planet's upper atmosphere that absorbs and loses heat rapidly, Laughlin said.

Coauthor Jonathan Langton, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSC, fed the Spitzer data into a hydrodynamic model of the planet's atmosphere to predict its response to the intense heating. Langton's simulation shows the global storms and shockwaves unleashed in the planet's atmosphere every 111 days as it swings close to its star.

"The initial response could be described as an explosion on the side facing the star," Langton said. "As the atmosphere heats up and expands, it produces very high winds, on the order of 5 kilometers per second, flowing away from the day side toward the night side. The rotation of the planet causes these winds to curl up into large-scale storm systems that gradually die down as the planet cools over the course of its orbit."

wow.

Triceratops Battle Scars

How did the dinosaur Triceratops use its three horns? A new study published in the open-access, peer reviewed journal PLoS ONE and led by Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, located on the campus of The Webb Schools, shows that the headgear was not just for looks. Battle scars on the skulls of Triceratops preserve rare evidence of Cretaceous-era combat.

"Paleontologists have debated the function of the bizarre skulls of horned dinosaurs for years now," said Farke. "Some speculated that the horns were for showing off to other dinosaurs, and others thought that the horns had to have been used in combat against other horned dinosaurs. Unfortunately, we can't just go and watch a Triceratops in the wild."

If Triceratops fought each other with their horns, wounds from this combat would be preserved in the fossil bones. So, Farke joined forces with paleontologists Ewan Wolff of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin and Darren Tanke of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in order to search museum collections throughout North America for evidence of these injuries. The researchers focused on the skulls of Triceratops and a closely-related dinosaur, Centrosaurus.

"If Triceratops and Centrosaurus only used their horns and frills for showing off, we would expect no difference in the rate of injury for both animals," stated Farke. Instead, the team found that the squamosal bone, which forms part of the frill, was injured 10 times more frequently in Triceratops than in Centrosaurus. He added, "The most likely culprit for all of the wounds on Triceratops frills was the horns of other Triceratops."

Other paleontologists had also noted abnormalities in the skulls of horned dinosaurs, but later work found that at least some of these supposed injuries were caused by random, non-traumatic bone resorption similar to osteoporosis. Additionally, previous researchers only focused on a handful of specimens. The new study included over 400 observations, which were analyzed statistically to detect differences between Centrosaurus and Triceratops.

"In the past individual remains have been used to reconstruct the story of ancient injuries," said co-author Wolff. He continued, "I think this research shows the great potential of looking at injury patterns, even less obvious ones, to provide appropriate conclusions. The features we studied were very subtle and in many cases had been overlooked."

"Our findings provide some of the best evidence to date that Triceratops might have locked horns with each other, wrestling like modern antelope and deer," said Farke. The researchers speculate that many of the injuries they observed may have been caused by misplaced horn thrusts from rival animals. Similar injuries are occasionally seen in modern horned animals.

The size and shape of the horns varied among different horned dinosaurs, and the researchers hypothesize that different horn shapes indicate different kinds of combat. Furthermore, some evidence suggests that certain species may have evolved different kinds of horns in order to reduce the risk of traumatic injury.

At least it wasn't a war wound like what Joel and Ross taunted me about at Nellie's in LC a looooong time ago. Much to their dismay at the results. *snorks*

Anyways, the paper is here. The guilty scientist is here.

State Failure is On the Russian Mind

Drawing on the information models of D.S. Chernyavsky, scholars at the Moscow Institute of Applied Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences have concluded that Russia is rapidly entering a period of “semi-collapse,” in which large parts of the country will either fall under the influence of other countries or separate completely.

According to the model they have employed, “the North, the Eastern and part of Western Siberia will fall under the influence of the US, that Sakhalin and the Kuriles ‘will go’ to Japan, that part of the Far East will fall ‘under China, that a Muslim enclave will arise in the Middle Volga, and that a North-West Republic will emerge around the Kola Peninsula.”

“In order to avoid this outcome,” Georgy Malinetsky writes in his description of their findings in the current issue of “Computerra,” Russian “society will be required to devote extraordinary efforts.” His own description of the situation makes clear why that is so.

Russia, he says the scholars have concluded, currently faces two “unpleasant” possibilities. On the one hand, it faces the likelihood that the price for its major export commodities – oil and gas -- will continue to fall as current consumers seek alternative sources energy supplies.
As L. Badalyan and V. Krovorotov have concluded, Malinetsky points out, “when a serious deficit of any resource emerges, people will search and find a new one, and as a result, the price and importance of the one they had been using will fall dramatically,” an outcome that will hurt Russia more than most because its production of these things is already falling.

And on the other hand, European and American officials are not going to ignore the problems Russia now has and will have in the future. Instead, acting on the basis of notions likes like “Siberia ought to belong to all humanity,” they will get more involved and in ways that will threaten Moscow’s control over much of the country.

Hat tip to Window on Eurasia.

The idea of state failure, especially of large, seemingly powerful nations apparently is plaguing the Russian psyche these days. First there was the Russian prof that has been running around stating America is going to meltdown into multiple nations (see below). Now there is a prof stating that Russia might meltdown...again (link at top is a Google translation of his 'paper'). It could be that the dissolution of the Soviet Union has left scars. Actually, that's probable.

On the other hand, this may be a carrot and stick situation. The Russians are giving hope (The US will melt! Russia can rise in the aftermath!) and adding a bit of fear (Russia might collapse completely), so let's all rally around the flag, or rather The Leader, lest after him, the deluge. The 'artful' use of the ancient enemy of Europe and China plus the recent, hateful antagonist of America, is what really makes me think this is the case.

Perhaps I am wrong. What do you all think?

(chortle)

SecDef Smack Talk Towards the Russian Air Force

Regarding the escort of a Tu-160 strategic bomber from Moscow to Caracas by American F-15s and the Russian complaints.

"When they complained about our escorting their Black Jack bombers I just wanted to say that we just wanted to be there for search and rescue if they needed it."

zing!

Algae Lignin Discovery May Be Evolutionary Significant

Land plants' ability to sprout upward through the air, unsupported except by their own woody tissues, has long been considered one of the characteristics separating them from aquatic plants, which rely on water to support them.

Now lignin, one of the chemical underpinnings vital to the self-supporting nature of land plants – and thought unique to them – has been found in marine algae by a team of researchers including scientists at UBC and Stanford University.

Lignin, a principal component of wood, is a glue-like substance that helps fortify cell walls and is instrumental in the transport of water in many plants.

In a study published in today's issue of the journal Current Biology, lead author Patrick Martone and colleagues describe using powerful chemical and microscopic anatomy techniques to identify and localize lignin within cell walls of a red alga that thrives along the wave-swept California coast. Martone conducted the work described in the paper while a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of co-author Mark Denny, Professor of Biology at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station.

"All land plants evolved from aquatic green algae and scientists have long believed that lignin evolved after plants took to land as a mechanical adaptation for stabilizing upright growth and transporting water from the root," says Martone, an assistant professor in the UBC Dept. of Botany, where he is continuing his work on lignin.

"Because red and green algae likely diverged more than a billion years ago, the discovery of lignin in red algae suggests that the basic machinery for producing lignin may have existed long before algae moved to land."

Alternatively, algae and land plants may have evolved the identical compound independently, after they diverged.

"The pathways, enzymes and genes that go into making this stuff are pretty complicated, so to come up with all those separately would be really, really amazing," says Denny. "Anything is possible, but that would be one hell of a coincidence."

The team's finding provides a new perspective on the early evolution of lignified support tissues – such as wood – on land, since the seaweed tissues that are most stressed by waves crashing on shore appear to contain the most lignin, possibly contributing to mechanical support, says Martone.

Were the algae of the Lower Paleozoic preadapted for life on land because of teh crashing of the waves? That's a fascinating thought!

New Metazoan Family Tree

A new and comprehensive analysis confirms that the evolutionary relationships among animals are not as simple as previously thought. The traditional idea that animal evolution has followed a trajectory from simple to complex—from sponge to chordate—meets a dramatic exception in the metazoan tree of life. New work suggests that the so-called "lower" metazoans (including Placozoa, corals, and jellyfish) evolved in parallel to "higher" animals (all other metazoans, from flatworms to chordates). It also appears that Placozoans—large amoeba-shaped, multi-cellular animals—have passed over sponges and other organisms as an animal that most closely mirrors the root of this tree of life.

"To make inferences about the origin of Bilaterians—animals with a bilateral symmetry, like humans—earlier studies suggested sponges, ctenophores (comb jellies), or a small, interesting group called Placozoa as the most basal or primitive animal," says senior author Rob DeSalle, Curator at the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History. "But our new analysis implies that the first major event in animal evolution split bilateral animals from all others, and our work firmly places Placozoa as the most primitive of the nonbilaterian animals."

very kewl. No time to comment.

Oh, other than here's gramma!

(Trichoplax)

Some Climate Damage is Already Irreversible

Many damaging effects of climate change are already basically irreversible, researchers declared Monday, warning that even if carbon emissions can somehow be halted temperatures around the globe will remain high until at least the year 3000.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years; that's not true," climate researcher Susan Solomon said in a teleconference.

Solomon, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., is lead author of an international team's paper reporting irreversible damage from climate change, being published in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

She defines "irreversible" as change that would remain for 1,000 years even if humans stopped adding carbon to the atmosphere immediately.

The findings were announced as President Barack Obama ordered reviews that could lead to greater fuel efficiency and cleaner air, saying the Earth's future depends on cutting air pollution.

Said Solomon, "Climate change is slow, but it is unstoppable" — all the more reason to act quickly, so the long-term situation doesn't get even worse.

Also a PNAS paper, but I can't see it still.

Obama Wants to Ban Space Based Weapons

President Barack Obama's pledge to seek a worldwide ban on weapons in space marks a dramatic shift in U.S. policy while posing the tricky issue of defining whether a satellite can be a weapon.

Moments after Obama's inauguration last week, the White House website was updated to include policy statements on a range of issues, including a pledge to restore U.S. leadership on space issues and seek a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites.

*sighs*

Study Disputes NorAm Comet MegaFauna Kill Hypothesis

New data, published today, disproves the recent theory that a large comet exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, causing a shock wave that travelled across North America at hundreds of kilometres per hour and triggering continent-wide wildfires.

Dr Sandy Harrison from the University of Bristol and colleagues tested the theory by examining charcoal and pollen records to assess how fire regimes in North America changed between 15 and 10,000 years ago, a time of large and rapid climate changes.

Their results provide no evidence for continental-scale fires, but support the fact that the increase in large-scale wildfires in all regions of the world during the past decade is related to an increase in global warming.

Fire is the most ubiquitous form of landscape disturbance and has important effects on climate through the global carbon cycle and changing atmospheric chemistry. This has triggered an interest in knowing how fire has changed in the past, and particularly how fire regimes respond to periods of major warming.

The end of the Younger Dryas, about 11,700 years ago, was an interval when the temperature of Greenland warmed by over 5°C in less than a few decades. The team used 35 records of charcoal accumulation in lake sediments from sites across North America to see whether fire regimes across the continent showed any response to such rapid warming.

They found clear changes in biomass burning and fire frequency whenever climate changed abruptly, and most particularly when temperatures increased at the end of the Younger Dryas cold phase. The results are published today [26 January] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

It's supposed to be up on PNAS' early edition, yet I can't seem to find it.

Russia Looking for Sevastopol Replacement in Abkhazia?

Russia plans to start building a naval base in Georgia's breakaway Abkhazia region this year, the leadership of the Black Sea province said Monday.

A move to base warships in the separatist Black Sea province of Abkhazia would heighten tensions between Russia and Georgia following the war between the two in last summer. It also would deepen Western concerns about Russia's growing military presence in a region the United States, Europe and most of the world consider Georgian territory.

Russia recognized Abkhazia and another separatist province, South Ossetia, as independent nations after the August war broke out over South Ossetia, and has vowed to maintain thousands of troops in both regions.

The U.S. and EU accuse Russia of violating a cease-fire deal that limited the Russian military presence in the breakaway provinces after the war, which brought ties with Moscow to a post-Cold War low.

Russia, meanwhile, accuses the U.S. of encouraging a belligerent Georgia and has warned the West against helping rebuild the small nation's military.

Abkhazian President Sergei Bagapsh said the separatist region had agreed in principle to allow Russia to create a base for Black Sea fleet warships in Ochamchira, an Abkhazian port about 20 miles (32 kilometers) up the coast from Georgian-controlled territory, according to his spokesman, Kristian Bzhania. He said three was no written agreement but that Russia intends to begin building the base this year.

Bzhania spoke in Abkhazia's capital, Sukhumi, after the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted an unidentified Russian navy official as saying that Russia has decided to build a naval base in Ochamchira. The official said work on the project, including dredging, would start in 2009, but suggested it could take a few years to complete the base, the report said.

Interesting development. I wonder if it will pan out. Russia's facing a big crunch economically here.

Monday Militaria: Couple Kilowatt Laser Kills Drones

Last month, a small robotic plane flew into the skies over New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range. Tracking the drone was an experimental Humvee, equipped with a laser. The real-life ray gun then took aim at the drone, and began blasting. Soon, the drone had a hole burnt through it -- and was crashing down to the desert.

That laser is considerably less powerful than what is the traditional weapons grade laser has assumed to need. The key is kill speed. If it takes more than a certain amount of time, the laser isn't that useful. It would be interesting to see, and frankly vital for the Boeing project above, for the laser to be able to be installed in either existing combat vehicles (every Abrams, Bradley and Striker a beam jockey, man!) and to upgrade that kilowattage. If you can kill mortars with it and pair it with a low power laser spectrometer/lidar combo, you have a very interesting IED killer too.

LBNL HPC Related Post Doc Available

Summary
The LBNL Future Technologies Group (FTG) does research in high-performance computing (HPC) technology for petascale systems, including work in compilers, operating systems, runtime systems, performance analysis and modeling, benchmarking and performance engineering of scientific application programs. The overarching goal of the group is to enable computational science through the design and development of hardware and software systems that allow application scientists to more effectively use high-end machines. Members of FTG work closely with application scientists throughout the DOE Office of Science community (e.g., climate modeling, astrophysics, fusion simulation, life sciences and nanoscience), with faculty and students from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at U.C. Berkeley, and with staff in the NERSC production computing facility. Group members have access to leading-edge computing platforms as well as hardware prototypes of experimental systems. FTG members have a strong history of publications in top journals and conferences and have developed software systems that are broadly used outside the group. Specific areas of research being done by FTG include:

Performance analysis, modeling and benchmarking. The FTG performance activity works closely with hardware designers from industry and academia, providing workload information about network patterns and memory system usage to quantitatively drive architecture efforts. Specific projects include petascale system and application characterization, performance modeling and tools, and the usage of these facilities for system assessment and selection.

Novel programming models and supporting software. The FTG programming model activity works with the U.C. Berkeley Unified Parallel C (UPC) project team (http://upc.lbl.gov) on basic research and development of fast communication libraries, compiler optimizations for parallel languages, and future languages and language extensions for petascale systems.

Operating Systems for HPC. The FTG operating system (OS) activity develops production quality tools such as checkpoint-restart software, and performs research into future OS designs that balance key functional features with the need for lightweight control over hardware resources such as multi-core processors.


Duties
The candidate will participate in research projects to develop, analyze, and optimize performance of accelerator modeling codes on HPC computer systems and applications. This project will involve some of the following activities: analysis and optimization of serial and parallel application programs; benchmarking these codes on systems from single cores to large scale HPC systems; assisting the development of auto-tuning software components of interest to this project; assisting domain scientists in developing application codes.

Qualifications
Required: PhD degree in computer science, computational science or a related technical field is required. Excellent written and oral communication. Demonstrated ability to work independently, work collaboratively in an interdisciplinary team, and contribute to an active intellectual environment. Experience in: (1) high performance computing; (2) computer system performance analysis; and (3) performance analysis, modeling and benchmarking.
Desired: Experience in: (1) Fortran90; (2) particle-in-cell methods; (3) scientific computing in general.

Notes
All positions require the completion of a background check. This is a one-year term appointment with the possibility of renewal. Salary for post-doctoral positions depends on years of experience post-degree.

Link above.

Single Crusty Mars

Mars may be mythologically known as the Red Planet, but its topography can be as captivating as its celestial glow. Several striking features stand out with only a glance at a topographic map of Mars: the odd distribution of land on its surface and the equatorial string of giant volcanoes known as the Tharsis Rise. Since Mars has no plate tectonics, how these unique features formed has been a longstanding mystery. The answer, scientists now say, may be that instead of many plates sliding across the Red Planet’s surface as we have on Earth, the whole crust of crust moves as a single “shell.”

Earth’s surface consists of multiple tectonic plates, and their motion has produced an easily recognizable crustal dichotomy: Most of its land mass is in the northern hemisphere. Mars, on the other hand, does not have tectonic plates constantly shifting around its surface. Yet it does have its own crustal dichotomy, with most of its highlands concentrated in the southern hemisphere and lowlands predominating in the northern hemisphere.

The Tharsis Rise presents another mystery that plate tectonics can’t explain. Located more or less along the Martian equator, the Tharsis Rise contains four of the largest volcanoes in the solar system. Three of these, Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons and Ascraeus Mons, fall into a neat line. Scientists have long hypothesized that these mountains formed because of a mantle plume, similar to the one that created Hawaii.

There are two standing theories for the asymmetry of the landmass in the northern and southern hemispheres, says Shijie Zhong of the University of Colorado in Boulder. Either the asymmetry was caused by processes in the interior of Mars, or there was a giant impact in the northern hemisphere that then spewed ejecta into the southern hemisphere. Proponents of the internal, or endogenic, theory have suggested that Mars’ crust rotates like a shell around the planet’s interior.

Using 3-D models, Zhong and his collaborators proved that the “differential rotation” of a single plate was easily possible — provided that two necessary conditions were in place. First, you need “degree-one convection,” which entails one source of upwelling in a single hemisphere (in this case Mars’ northern hemisphere), so the other hemisphere will be devoid of volcanic activity. Also necessary is lateral variation, or the physical movement of the plate, which is often facilitated when there is lots of melt present.

Although this is difficult to test directly, Zhong’s shell model of Mars is “probably right,” says Francis Nimmo, a geologist at the University of California in Santa Cruz. “The one plume has extracted lots of melt, and it has a big effect,” Nimmo says.

Mars’ “shell tectonics,” therefore, could not only produce a crustal dichotomy, but could also explain the volcanoes of the Tharsis Rise — essentially, they would be the result of this single large source of upwelling.

hmmm...Interesting.

Antarctica Really Is Warming

That image ought to terrify the crap out of you.

The above link is to Nat Geo, but the scientists' press release is here.

Biomes of Millenia Gone By

Today

4000 BC

Last Glacial Maximum
(21 kya)

Hattip to Centauri Dreams.

Tropical Mountain Species Forced 67m Higher

When three undergraduates set off on an expedition in 1965 to trap moths on Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, little did they realise that they were establishing the groundwork for a study of the impacts of climate change.

New research led by the University of York has repeated the survey 42 years later, and found that, on average, species had moved uphill by about 67 metres over the intervening years to cope with changes in climate.

This is the first demonstration that climate change is affecting the distributions of tropical insects, the most numerous group of animals on Earth, thus representing a major threat to global biodiversity.

University of York PhD student I-Ching Chen – first author of the new study – said: "Tropical insects form the most diverse group of animals on Earth but to-date we have not known whether they were responding to climate change. The last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR4 Report showed a gaping hole in the evidence. Our new study is good in that it increases the evidence available, but it is potentially bad for biodiversity."

Professor Thomas added: "Large numbers of species are completely confined to tropical mountains, such as Mount Kinabalu: many of the species found by the expeditions have never been found anywhere else on Earth. As these species get pushed uphill towards cooler conditions, the amount of land that is available to them gets smaller and smaller. And because most of the top of the mountain is bare rock, they may not be able to find suitable habitats, even if the temperature is right. Some of the species are likely to die out."

The New Expedition in 2007 was joined by Henry Barlow, one of the members of the original survey, whose life-long enthusiasm for moths helped I-Ching Chen, who is from Taiwan, to come to terms with the sheer diversity of moths she had to identify.

The study is published in the latest edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

That's to be expected, though I have to say I am surprised at the height they have already climbed. I really, really hope we don't go into a Huber scenario for the tropics. That'd be...bad.

First Thought Was Wrong

It's not an extant Ostracoderm, only an armored, tree climbing catfish.

Sphenodon-Zealandia Submersion Controversy

The fossil of a lizard-like New Zealand reptile has been identified by a team of scientists from UCL (University College London), University of Adelaide, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The fossil, dating back 18 million years, has triggered fresh arguments over whether the continent was fully submerged some 25 million years ago.

Today, the endangered New Zealand tuatara (Sphenodon) is a lizard-like reptile that is the only survivor of a group that was globally widespread at the time of the dinosaurs. The tuatara lives on 35 islands scattered around the coast of New Zealand, mainland populations having become extinct with the arrival of humans and associated animals some 750 years ago.

The oldest known Sphenodon fossil dates to the Pleistocene era (around 34,000 years old), while the new discovery dates to the Early Miocene some 19 to 16 million years ago (Mya).The fossil, of jaws and dentition closely resembling those of the present-day tuatara, bridges a gap of nearly 70 million years in the fossil record of the group between the Late Pleistocene of New Zealand and the Late Cretaceous of Argentina.

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team says that its findings offer further evidence that the ancestors of the tuatara have been on the landmass since it separated from the rest of the southern continents (Gondwana) some 82 Mya.

Lead author Dr Marc Jones, UCL Cell and Developmental Biology, says: "It has been argued that New Zealand was completely submerged during the Oligo-Miocene drowning of the continent some 25 to 22 million years ago (Mya). However, the diversity of fossils now known from the Miocene (St Bathans Fauna of the Manuherikia Group) suggests it is more likely that enough land remained above the water to ensure the survival of a number of species, such as frogs, kauri trees and several modern freshwater insects, as well as the tuatara."

"The fossil also provides the first direct evidence that the ancestors of the tuatara survived in New Zealand despite substantial climatic and environmental changes, such as a global temperature drop of some eight degrees celsius around 14 million years ago (Mid-Miocene).

"Between the Late Oligocene and earliest Miocene (35 to 22 Mya) a global sea-level rise submerged much of New Zealand, but the question is, by how much? If the continent of Zealandia was completely submerged, the Sphenodon would have had to recolonize it by ocean rafting. If we look at the transoceanic capabilities of modern Sphenodon, it can swim, but only short distances; it is able to survive without food for several months, but dehydration would be a serious problem for a long journey because of high rates of water loss through the skin. Furthermore, there is currently no evidence of a population outside New Zealand at that time.

uh. I thought it had been established that not all of Zealandia subsided already simply because of the nontherian mammal fossils found there not too long ago, but more evidence is always good. It'd ahve been even kewler if Zealandia had stayed above water altogether though.