Are There Alternate Biochemistries Lurking On Earth?

Mono Lake has a bizarre, extraterrestrial beauty. Just east of Yosemite National Park in California, the ancient lake covers about 65 square miles. Above its surface rise the twisted shapes of tufa, formed when freshwater springs bubble up through the alkaline waters.

Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a geobiologist, is interested in the lake not for its scenery but because it may be harbouring alien life forms, or “weird life”. Mono Lake, a basin with no outlet, has built up over many millennia one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth. Dr Wolfe-Simon is investigating whether, in the mud around the lake or in the water, there exist microbes whose biological make-up is so fundamentally different from that of any known life on Earth that it may provide proof of a shadow biosphere, a second genesis for life on this planet.

Arsenic is chemically close to phosphorus. While phosphorus is a primary building block of life on Earth — an essential component of DNA and ATP, the energy molecule — arsenic is a deadly poison. In Mono Lake there are micro-organisms that live with arsenic. But they don’t incorporate it into their biology.

Dr Wolfe-Simon has theorised that there may be life that chose an “evolutionary pathway” to utilise arsenic. If such microbes existed, it could suggest that life started on our planet not once but at least twice. In turn this would help to support the idea that life is much more likely to have started elsewhere in the galaxy.

“There is life ‘as we know it’ and there is life ‘as we don’t know it’. What would that look like? I am trying to give us a framework to work with to help us look for what ‘we don’t know’, the particular framework of arsenic,” she says.

Dr Wolfe-Simon has taken samples from the mud and the waters of the lake and is performing a series of multiple dilutions — hugely increasing the levels of arsenic and reducing residual phosphorous to zero. She adds sugar, vitamins and other nutrients to encourage organisms to grow and tests the results.

Her experiments are not yet over but she is quietly pleased with the progress she is making. “We have some very exciting data,” she says. The results should be published by the end of this year.

hmmmm. What do you guys think?

Exciting data can be interpreted in many ways.

KT Extinction Jury Reviewed: Chicxulub Guilty

There is a lot of bluster out there about the recent paper in Science about the KT Extinction. An international panel of scientists went over the KT extinction data as presented by the Impactists and Vulcanists, those that favoured the Chicxulub Impact or the Deccan Traps as the killers for the end Cretaceous Extinction. That panel was made of 41 scientists and it was international in character. In the end, they stated that the KT Extinction was overwhelmingly backed with evidence that the Chicxulub Impact was what did the deed.

One of the very crucial arguments that the Vulcanists have been using is that the ecosystems of the Maastrichian had been under stress from the Deccan Traps. The panel found that for the 500k years prior to the end of the Cretaceous, the ecosystems of the world hadn't changed much. If the Vulcanists were right, there ought to have been a prolonged change that caused the ultimate collapse. There wasn't anything that was really major that took place. No gradual grind or collapse as the Deccans spewed their foulness into the world's atmosphere. As I noted before, dinosaur fossils have been found on the Indian subcontinent between the basalt layers from the Deccan Traps signifying that the DTs were not even capable of wiping out the local dino population, let alone the world's. However, this study confirms that and then some.

There are a handful of things that I was not aware of:

"There are also monster submarine landslides along the entire East Coast of the U.S. from the massive earthquake triggered by the impact," [Norris] said.

Very worth highlighting:

In some sites close to the impact, around the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, there are two spherule-bearing layers, at times separated by sediment a few meters thick, and some of the recent controversy stems from this apparent duality. The lower layer consists of coarser particles including spherules and shocked minerals, and the upper layer consists of finer particles and has a higher iridium content.

"Reports of multiple horizons with elevated iridium concentrations fairly close to the Chicxulub crater have led to a lot of confusion, and suggestions of multiple impacts," said fellow author Greg Ravizza, a marine and environmental geologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "A key point that cannot be ignored is that data from several sites far away from the Chicxulub crater provide no evidence of multiple large impacts. This observation lends very strong support to the careful stratigraphic synthesis in our paper demonstrating the very complex, and frequently disturbed, character of the sections closest to the Chicxulub crater."

And:

The panel was able to discount previous studies that suggested that the Chicxulub impact occurred 300,000 years prior to the KT extinction. The researchers say that these studies had misinterpreted geological data that was gathered close to the Chicxulub impact site. This is because the rocks close to the impact zone underwent complex geological processes after the initial asteroid collision, which made it difficult to interpret the data correctly.

The number of links and bits are enormous. I really missed out yesterday by dealing with VCs rather than having time to blog about this. Look at Revisiting Chicxulub and Asteroid Killed Off the Dinosaurs. I'll add a link to the science abstract as soon as I can see it.

There's an awesome website using the google earth plug-in for the effects of the impact here.

Even so, I doubt that Dr Gerta Keller will concede defeat. :)

Out Courting VCs Yesterday...

...blogging to now continue.

Chinese Experimental Space Station Module Delayed to Next Year?

China has postponed the next step in its ambitious space station programme until 2011 for technical reasons, state media said Wednesday.

China had originally planned to place the Tiangong-1 space module in orbit late this year and undertake experimental docking manoeuvres in subsequent missions, Xinhua news agency cited rocket designer Qi Faren as saying.

But the initial launch has now been delayed by a year due to "technical reasons", Qi said, without elaborating.

Qi was speaking to the media on the sidelines of a meeting of a legislative advisory body, which convened on Wednesday, two days before the start of the annual session of China's rubber-stamp parliament.

China became the third nation to put a man in space when Yang Liwei piloted the one-man Shenzhou-5 space mission in 2003.

In September 2008, the Shenzhou-7, piloted by three "taikonauts" or astronauts, carried out China's first space walk.

The Tiangong-1, or "Heavenly Palace," is seen as the building block of China's maiden space station.

Weighing about 8.5 tonnes, it would provide a "safe room" for Chinese astronauts to live in and conduct research in zero gravity.

After being placed in orbit, the Tiangong-1 would dock with the unmanned Shenzhou-8 spacecraft in the country's first space docking -- a feat to be controlled remotely by scientists on the ground.

Qi said Shenzhou-9 and Shenzhou-10, carrying two to three astronauts, would also dock with the orbiting module in successive years.

He said other key technologies being worked on in the space station programme include the replenishment of propellant, air, water and food for the space module as well as a life support system.

no time.

That Thar Be Ice: Mars Loaded With Subsurface Deposits

A radar map of ice deposits in one locale.

Putin: We Are Developing the PAK-DA (Strategic Bomber)

(Probably a fan wank of a picture rather than a real concept)

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Monday that Russia will build a new strategic bomber, a move that comes as the nation tries to upgrade its aging military arsenal.

Putin said in televised remarks that work on the bomber must follow the development of a prospective stealth fighter, which made its maiden flight in January and was hailed by the government as a big step in military modernization efforts.

"We won't limit ourselves to just one new model," Putin said at a government meeting that focused on military aviation. "We must start work on a prospective long-range aircraft, our new strategic bomber."

Putin didn't mention any details in his public remarks, but said that the development of new aircraft engines, materials for aircraft construction and electronics will be the top priorities.

The chief of the Russian long-range aviation, Maj. Gen. Anatoly Zhikharev, said earlier this year that a prospective new bomber must join the air force in 2025-2030. Zhikharev said the new aircraft should replace the Soviet-built Tu-95 and Tu-160 strategic bombers.

While the first flight of the new stealth fighter, the T-50, was cheered by the government, observers noted that it came nearly two decades after the first prototype of the U.S. F-22 Raptor took to the air.

No images of the prospective new Russian strategic bomber have been published, but some commentators said it might follow the design of the U.S. B-2 bomber, which also made its first flight more than 20 years ago.

Military analysts said that new Russian weapons programs have suffered from post-Soviet industrial degradation that badly affected the production quality and slowed down new developments.

We'll see. The PAK-FA made a maiden flight. We will see if the PAK-DA does. The PAK-FA is not close to production and despite some analyses, is not a close competitor to the F-22. It should be noted that the US is working on this as well. However, Congress has killed it. A few times. Only for it to come back again. The B-2 is getting long in the tooth, even more so the B-1, and let's not discuss the B-52...

Russian PAK-FA Prototype Avionics

The PAK-FA's prototype has the same avionics as the Su-35. Don't make too much out of this like the China Military Report does. Prototypes often have temporary avionics put in place while their development runs in parallel to the airframe's work.

Boeing's Phantom Ray UCAV

Polar Bears Speciated From Brown Bears 150kya?

A rare, ancient polar bear fossil discovered in Norway in 2004 is yielding a treasure trove of essential information about the age and evolutionary origins of the species whose future is now seen as synonymous with the devastation wrought by climate change.

A paper published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. by researchers at the University at Buffalo, Penn State University, the University of Oslo and other institutions is filling in key pieces of the evolutionary history of polar bears and brown bears, including their response to past climate changes.

"Our results confirm that the polar bear is an evolutionarily young species that split off from brown bears some 150,000 years ago and evolved extremely rapidly during the late Pleistocene, perhaps adapting to the opening of new habitats and food sources in response to climate changes just before the last interglacial period," says Charlotte Lindqvist, PhD, research assistant professor in the UB Department of Biological Sciences and lead author on the paper with Stephan C. Schuster at Penn State's Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics.

"Very few polar bear fossils have been found, leading to widely varying estimates of exactly when and how polar bears evolved," explains Øystein Wiig, polar bear expert and co-author at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum. "Because polar bears live on the ice, their dead remains fall to the bottom of the ocean or get scavenged. They don't get deposited in the sediments like other mammals."

But in 2004, an Icelandic geologist found a rare, well-preserved, 110,000- to 130,000-year-old jawbone and canine tooth fossil in the Svalbard archipelago of Norway. This specimen was subsequently sent to Wiig for analysis.

UB's Lindqvist, who was working at Oslo's Natural History Museum as a postdoctoral researcher, extracted DNA from the sample after drilling into the bone and tooth to obtain the powder to analyze.

When she arrived at UB in 2008, she obtained tissue samples from modern polar bears and brown bears and began analyzing them at UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences after starting the collaboration with Schuster at Penn State.

This work resulted in the sequencing of the complete mitochondrial genome of the fossil; they then used that information to develop mitochondrial sequencing of the other bears and to construct phylogenies showing that the ancient polar bear evolved within the lineage of brown bears.

"Since the brown bears from Alaska's Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof Islands are the polar bears' closest relatives, it was crucial to include them in our study in order to more precisely date when polar bears appeared as a distinct species," Lindqvist explains. "The fact that our ancient polar bear lies almost directly at the splitting point between this unique group of brown bears and polar bears, that is, close to their most recent common ancestor of the two species, was very intriguing. It provided an ideal opportunity to ultimately settle the time of polar bear origin."

fascinating. No time to comment though.

Oops

I met the head of the US Patent office on Saturday.

Unfortunately, it was in a baby vomit covered shirt.

*sighs*

I'm sure I made a positive impression.

Rutan Clarifies His Criticism

My basic concern is that the real value of NASA's contributions that America realized in the 60s and early 70s is now being completely discarded. How can we rationalize a surrender of our preeminence in human spaceflight? In my mind, the important NASA accomplishments are twofold: 1) The technical breakthroughs achieved by basic research (not by Development programs like Constellation) and 2) The Forefront Manned Exploration that provided the inspiration for our youth to plan careers in engineering/science and that established the U.S. as the world leader in technology.

In short, it is a good idea indeed for the commercial community to compete to re-supply the ISS and to bring about space access for the public to enjoy. I applaud the efforts of SpaceX, Virgin and Orbital in that regard and feel these activities should have been done at least two
decades ago. However, I do not see the commercial companies taking Americans to Mars or to the moons of Saturn within my lifetime and I doubt if they will take the true Research risks (technical and financial) to fly new concepts that have low confidence of return on investment. Even NASA, regarded as our prime Research agency has not recently shown a willingness to fly true Research concepts.

For years I have stated that a NASA return-to-moon effort must include true Research content, i.e. testing new concepts needed to enable forefront Exploration beyond the moon. The current Ares/Orion does not do that. While I have been critical of Constellation for that reason, I do not think that NASA should 'give up' on manned spaceflight, just that they should be doing it while meeting the 1) or 2) criteria above.

Some backpedaling, but not much. He accuses the journalists of cherry picking his statements. Gosh. That never happens.

Once Again, Global Warming is Inevitable

China's top climate change negotiator has said the world's biggest carbon polluter has no intention of capping greenhouse gas emissions for the time being, state media reported Thursday.

Su Wei, who led China's negotiating team at the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen in December, said the country's carbon emissions had to increase because the economy was still developing, the China Daily said.

China "could not and should not" set an upper limit on greenhouse gas emissions at the current stage, Su told a meeting on climate change policy in Beijing on Wednesday.

mmm.

Neo-Eocene or Neo-Oligocene. What's your poison?

Red Queen Hypothesis Backed?

The team observed viruses as they evolved over hundreds of generations to infect bacteria. They found that when the bacteria could evolve defences, the viruses evolved at a quicker rate and generated greater diversity, compared to situations where the bacteria were unable to adapt to the viral infection.

The study shows, for the first time, that the American evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen was correct in his 'Red Queen Hypothesis'. The theory, first put forward in the 1970s, was named after a passage in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen tells Alice, 'It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place'. This suggested that species were in a constant race for survival and have to continue to evolve new ways of defending themselves throughout time.

Dr Steve Paterson, from the University's School of Biosciences, explains: "Historically, it was assumed that most evolution was driven by a need to adapt to the environment or habitat. The Red Queen Hypothesis challenged this by pointing out that actually most natural selection will arise from co-evolutionary interactions with other species, not from interactions with the environment.

"This suggested that evolutionary change was created by 'tit-for-tat' adaptations by species in constant combat. This theory is widely accepted in the science community, but this is the first time we have been able to show evidence of it in an experiment with living things."

Dr Michael Brockhurst said: "We used fast-evolving viruses so that we could observe hundreds of generations of evolution. We found that for every viral strategy of attack, the bacteria would adapt to defend itself, which triggered an endless cycle of co-evolutionary change. We compared this with evolution against a fixed target, by disabling the bacteria's ability to adapt to the virus.

"These experiments showed us that co-evolutionary interactions between species result in more genetically diverse populations, compared to instances where the host was not able to adapt to the parasite. The virus was also able to evolve twice as quickly when the bacteria were allowed to evolve alongside it."

The team used high-throughput DNA sequencing technology at the Centre for Genomic Research to sequence thousands of virus genomes. The next stage of the research is to understand how co-evolution differs when interacting species help, rather than harm, one another.

Competition vs environment, competition vs opportunism. Perhaps evolution is a bit more complicated than a singular vector. So many posts to write, so little time.

Burt Rutan Blasts NASA Plan

Commercial space pioneer Burt Rutan has sharply criticized Obama administration proposals to outsource key portions of NASA's manned space program to private firms.

The White House wants NASA to use outside firms to develop and operate new rockets and spacecraft that would transport astronauts into orbit and beyond, functions that had previously been considered a core function of the agency. Mr. Rutan, a veteran aerospace designer and entrepreneur, in a letter addressed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, says he is "fearful that the commercial guys will fail" to deliver on the promises to get beyond low earth orbit, and that the policy risks setting back the nation's space program.

"That would be a very big mistake for America to make," according to the letter sent to lawmakers that is expected to be released Wednesday during a Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing on the future of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Such comments are unexpected from a maverick engineer long identified with pushing the boundaries of commercial space projects, and the man who designed the first commercial suborbital rocketship.

"From my past comments on NASA's" lack of direction and success, "an observer might think that I would applaud the decision to turn this important responsibility over to commercial developers," the letter says. However, he adds, that's "wrong."

oooooo!

If Burt is nuking the proposal, that's NOT a good sign. I really want to see that letter.

He's right though. NewSpace isn't ready...yet. We have a ways to go to get to the point where we will be and betting the farm on the noobs isn't a good idea. On the other hand, putting your eggs in a single basket isn't good either. If I were one of the law makers, I'd be looking hard at preventing Constellations canning and looking on how to ramp up NewSpace's capabilities in parallel. It'd be expensive though.

Cray Sweeps DoD HPC Contract Awards

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced it has won all three high performance computing (HPC) system awards by the Department of Defense (DoD) as part of its 2010 High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). The contract, worth more than $45 million including multi-year services, is the largest DoD HPCMP system award to a single vendor in the history of the program.

Under the terms of the contract, Cray will provide three of its next generation supercomputing systems to top DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers located throughout the United States. These centers include the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) located at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio; the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) in Fairbanks, Alaska; and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Cray supercomputers will be used to support basic and applied research, and product development and evaluation. These systems will help to protect the military through the development of new materials, fuels, armor and weapons systems, and assist long-term weather predictions to plan humanitarian and military operations throughout the world.

"To solve today's hardest research and development challenges, we have to employ leading-edge scalable software and the world's fastest supercomputers," said Mr. Cray Henry, director of the DoD's HPCMP. "We are excited to get the next generation Cray supercomputers working to solve our problems."

The three Cray supercomputers included in the 2010 DoD HPCMP procurement are expected to be delivered in the second half of this year, and will be the company's next generation supercomputing systems code-named "Baker." Featuring a new interconnect chipset known as "Gemini" and enhanced system software improving the performance, productivity and reliability of the system, Cray's planned "Baker" supercomputers build on the Cray XT system architecture of the world's fastest supercomputer and improve it in every dimension.

"We are incredibly honored that Cray supercomputers continue to play a prominent role in this important program," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "As a result of this award, Cray will provide the DoD with the supercomputing tools necessary for its scientists and engineers to research, develop, test and evaluate breakthrough technologies that will strengthen our national security. This award not only reinforces our leadership position in high performance computing, it also speaks to the exciting potential of our upcoming 'Baker' system."

Cray previously received a DoD HPCMP award in 2008, and with the 2010 award, Cray will have supercomputing systems at five of the six DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers in the U.S.

Commentary another time.

Pliocene Tropical Cyclone Modeling

More frequent tropical cyclones in Earth's ancient past contributed to persistent El Niño-like conditions, according to a team of climate scientists led by Yale University. Their findings, which appear in the Feb. 25 issue of the journal Nature, could have implications for the planet's future as global temperatures continue to rise due to climate change.

The team used both cyclone and climate models to study the frequency and distribution of tropical cyclones (also known as hurricanes or typhoons) during the Pliocene epoch, a period three to five million years ago when temperatures were up to four degrees Celsius warmer than today.

The team found that there were twice as many tropical cyclones during this period, that they lasted two to three days longer on average than they do now, and that, unlike today, they occurred across the entire tropical Pacific Ocean.

"The Pliocene is the best analog we have in the past for what could happen in our future," said Christopher Brierley, a Yale postdoctoral associate and an author of the study. "We wondered whether all these storms could have contributed to the warmer climate."

In fact, the team discovered a positive feedback cycle between tropical cyclones and upper-ocean circulation in the Pacific that explains the increase in storms and appears to have led to permanent El Niño-like conditions.

Today, cold water originating off the coasts of California and Chile skirts around the region of tropical cyclone activity on its way to the Equator, where it results in a "cold tongue" that stretches west off the coast of South America. During the Pliocene, however, the team found that this cold water could not avoid being hit by one of the many tropical cyclones, which would churn up and mix warmer water into it. This warming at the Equator led to changes in the atmosphere that in turn created more tropical storms—and the cycle would repeat.

The team hopes to study how much mixing could result from tropical cyclones in today's ocean waters—something that is hard to incorporate in global climate models, said Alexey Fedorov, an associate professor at Yale and lead author of the paper.

Fedorov cautioned that there is not necessarily a direct link between what happened during the Pliocene and what might happen in the future, as the team's results for this epoch differed in many respects from current projections for future global warming. For example, the existing consensus is that, while the number of intense hurricanes will increase, the overall number will actually decrease.

No time, but rather interesting.

New Brachiosaur Found

A team of paleontologists has discovered a new dinosaur species they're calling Abydosaurus, which belongs to the group of gigantic, long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged, plant-eating dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus.

In a rare twist, they recovered four heads – two still fully intact – from a quarry in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah. Complete skulls have been recovered for only eight of more than 120 known varieties of sauropod.

"Their heads are built lighter than mammal skulls because they sit way out at the end of very long necks," said Brooks Britt, a paleontologist at Brigham Young University. "Instead of thick bones fused together, sauropod skulls are made of thin bones bound together by soft tissue. Usually it falls apart quickly after death and disintegrates."

Britt is a co-author on the discovery paper scheduled to appear in the journal Naturwissenshaften.

The lead author is Daniel Chure, a paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument, who has no trouble boiling down the significance of the discovery.

"We've got skulls!" he shouted with sweeping hand gestures during a recent visit to the site.

BYU geology students and faculty resorted to jackhammers and concrete saws to cut through the hardened 105-million-year-old sandstone containing the bones. At one point the National Park Service called in a crew to blast away the overlying rock with explosives.

The skulls are temporarily on display at BYU's Museum of Paleontology, where visitors can also watch BYU students prepare other bones from Abydosaurus.

"The hardest bone I personally have worked on is a vertebra that was half-eroded before discovery and is so fragile that it crumbles if you look at it wrong," said Kimmy Hales, a geology major studying vertebrate paleontology at BYU. "The funnest project I have worked on was a set of five toe bones. Each toe bone was larger than my hand."

Analysis of the bones indicates that the closest relative of Abydosaurus is Brachiosaurus, which lived 45 million years earlier. The four Abydosaurus specimens were all juveniles.

Most of what scientists know about sauropods is from the neck down, but the skulls from Abydosaurus give a few clues about how the largest land animals to roam the earth ate their food.

"They didn't chew their food; they just grabbed it and swallowed it," Britt said. "The skulls are only one two-hundredth of total body volume and don't have an elaborate chewing system."

All sauropods ate plants and continually replaced their teeth throughout their lives. In the Jurassic Period, sauropods exhibited a wide range of tooth shapes. But by the end of the dinosaur age, all sauropods had narrow, pencil-like teeth.

Abydosaurus teeth are somewhere in between, reflecting a trend toward smaller teeth and more rapid tooth replacement.

No time to discuss...however, does anyone have the age of the fossils?

Grizzlies Moving Into Polar Bear Habitat in Manitoba

iologists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and City College of the City University of New York have found that grizzly bears are roaming into what was traditionally thought of as polar bear habitat—and into the Canadian province of Manitoba, where they are officially listed as extirpated. The preliminary data was recently published in Canadian Field Naturalist and shows that sightings of Ursus arctos horribilis in Canada's Wapusk National Park are recent and appear to be increasing in frequency.

"Grizzly bears are a new guy on the scene, competition and a potential predator for the polar bears that live in this area," says Robert F. Rockwell, a research associate at the Museum and a professor of Biology at CUNY. "The first time we saw a grizzly we were flying over the middle of Wapusk, counting fox dens, when all of the sudden Linda Gormezano, a graduate student working with Rockwell and a co-author of the paper, shouted 'Over there, over there—a grizzly bear.' And it wasn't a dirty polar bear or a moose—we saw the hump."

That sighting in August 2008 spurred Rockwell and Gormezano to look through records to get a better picture of the bear population in the park. There was no evidence of grizzly bears before 1996, not even in the trapping data from centuries of Hudson Bay Company operation. But between 1996 and 2008 the team found nine confirmed sightings of grizzly bears, and in the summer of 2009 there were three additional observations.

"The opportunistic sightings seem to be increasing," says Gormezano. "This is worrying for the polar bears because grizzly bears would likely hibernate in polar bear maternity denning habitat. They would come out of hibernation at the same time and can kill polar cubs."

Before this study, researchers thought that the barren landscape north of the Hudson Bay was an impassable gap in resources for potentially migrating grizzly bears. But some U. arctos horribilis have managed to move from their historic ranges in the Rockies, the Yukon, and Nunavut, probably because of their flexible, mixed diet of berries and meat. The potential gap was navigable, and now some grizzly bears have reached the abundant caribou, moose, fish, and berries found to the south in Canada's Wapusk National Park.

No time to comment.

Just Outside the Office

Clipped running a red at extreme speed in DT Oakland.

Dude.

TEH STOOPID! IT BURNS!

Island Dwarfing in Romanian Dinosaurs Confirmed

The idea of the small prehistoric beasts on Hateg Island, Romania, was proposed 100 years ago by the colourful Baron Franz Nopcsa, whose family owned estates in the area.

He found that many dinosaur remains on Hateg were half the size of their close relatives in older rocks in England, Germany, and North America.

The baron's theory has been tested for the first time by Professor Mike Benton at the University of Bristol, and six other authors from Romania, Germany, and the United States.

The team found that the Hateg Island dinosaurs were indeed dwarfs and not just young dinosaurs.

A favourite theme of evolutionary ecologists is whether there is an ''island rule'' - where large animals isolated on islands evolve to become smaller.

Three species of the Hateg dinosaurs - the plant-eating sauropod Magyarosaurus and the plant-eating ornithopods Telmatosaurus and Zalmoxes - are half the length of their nearest relatives elsewhere.

The team examined these three dinosaurs, each represented by many specimens. They found no evidence of any large bones such as they would expect to find in their normal-sized relatives.

More importantly, a close study of the bones confirmed that the dinosaurs had reached adulthood so they were not just underdeveloped youngsters.

Colorful baron? hmmm. Sounds like there's a story behind the science there.