Global Warming Cycles Threaten Endangered Primate Species

ScienceDaily (Oct. 29, 2009) — Two Penn State University researchers have carried out one of the first-ever analyses of the effects of global warming on endangered primates. This innovative work by Graduate Student Ruscena Wiederholt and Associate Professor of Biology Eric Post examined how El Niño warming affected the abundance of four New World monkeys over decades.

Wiederholt and Post decided to concentrate on the way the oscillating weather patterns directly and indirectly influence plants and animals in the tropics. Until the research by Wiederholt and Post, this intricate network of interacting factors had rarely been analyzed as a single system. "We know very little about how climate change and global warming are affecting primate species," explains Wiederholt. "Up to one third of primates species are threatened with extinction, so it is really crucial to understand how these changes in climate may be affecting their populations."

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Fossils of North America's smallest dinosaur identified

By John Johnson Jr.

October 21, 2009

Scientists have found the fossilized remains of the smallest dinosaur yet discovered in North America, a house-pet sized creature that would have scurried between the legs of its larger relatives.

The new species, Fruitadens haagarorum, weighed less than 2 pounds and was about 28 inches long, scientists say.

The tiny dinosaur would have been an agile and fast runner, said study coauthor Luis Chiappe, director of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum's Dinosaur Institute. It had to be nimble to survive the hazardous time in which it lived, the late Jurassic period 150 million years ago, which was ruled by giant meat-eaters such as the allosaurus.
 

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It's all in the wrist: Humans lack a knuckle-walking ancestor (EARTH Magazine)

October 1, 2009
Zahra Hirji


Though counterintuitive, scientists have turned their attention away from the feet and to the wrist and forearm to better understand how humans evolved upright walking, or bipedalism. African apes are humans’ closest living relatives, and because these apes knuckle-walk, some paleoanthropologists have suggested that African apes and humans share a knuckle-walking ancestor. A new study, however, reveals that lumping the locomotion of all African apes together is a mistake: Knuckle-walking may have evolved more than once in the ape lineage. Therefore, the researchers say, humans probably did not evolve from a knuckle-walker but instead from a more general tree-dweller.

All African apes — gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos — knuckle-walk. The scientists who think that humans have a knuckle-walking heritage bolster the claim by pointing to the fact that modern and ancient humans, or hominins, such as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), retain several wrist and forearm features that are supposedly knuckle-walking adaptations, says Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and co-author of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Oldest Skeleton of Human Ancestor Found (Ardipithecus ramidus)

Another article on Ardi, from National Geographic

Oldest Skeleton of Human Ancestor Found

Amie Shreeve
Science editor, National Geographic magazine
October 1, 2009

Move over, Lucy. And kiss the missing link goodbye.

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.

The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed "Ardi." (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.)

The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.

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Fossil finds extend human story - Meet Ardipithecus ramidus

BBC NEWS | Science + Environment | Fossil finds extend human story

An ancient human-like creature that may be a direct ancestor to our species has been described by researchers.

The assessment of the 4.4-million-year-old animal called Ardipithecus ramidus is reported in the journal Science.

Even if it is not on the direct line to us, it offers new insights into how we evolved from the common ancestor we share with chimps, the team says.

Fossils of A. ramidus were first found in Ethiopia in 1992, but it has taken 17 years to assess their significance.

The most important specimen is a partial skeleton of a female nicknamed "Ardi".

The international team has recovered key bones, including the skull with teeth, arms, hands, pelvis, legs, and feet.

But the researchers have other fragments that may represent perhaps at least 36 different individuals, including youngsters, males, and females.

One of the lead scientists on the project, Professor Tim White from the University of California, Berkeley, said the investigation had been painstaking.

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Baby mammoth yields secrets after 40,000 years in Siberian tundra - Times Online

Baby mammoth yields secrets after 40,000 years in Siberian tundra - Times Online

A baby woolly mammoth that died after being sucked into a muddy river bed 40,000 years ago has revealed more prehistoric secrets of how the species survived in its icy habitat.

The mammoth, known as Lyuba, was about a month old when she died in the Siberian tundra, where she remained until she was discovered by reindeer herders three years ago. Her body was so well preserved in the permafrost that her stomach retained traces of her mother’s milk, and scientists identified sediment in her mouth, trunk and throat — suggesting that she suffocated while struggling to free herself from the mud.

The mammoth has taught researchers much about the species that they had been unable to glean from fossils and other less well-preserved finds, including how brown fat cells on the humped back of the head helped to maintain body temperature. The calf, found in the Arctic Yamal peninsula of Russia, weighed about 110lb, and was about the size of a large dog.

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Man digging potatoes finds axe belonging to Ireland's first farmers

Man digging potatoes finds axe belonging to Ireland's first farmers
Published Date: 06 October 2009
Kilkenny People
By Staff Reporter

A RARE archaeological find, dating back 6,000 years has been made in South Kilkenny. A Stone Age neolithic axe head was found in Ballygorey, Mooncoin last week by a man out digging potatoes.

The axe was found in a field by Pat Dunphy, a Fine Gael councillor who was picking spuds for the evening dinner. “I thought when it came up first that it was piece off a combine harvester but when I turned it over, I knew it was something different,” he said.

It is the second axe found in Ballygorey. another local found one in the 1970s and it is now with the National Museum in Dublin. The land in this area is fertile and close to the River Suir and probably was an ideal area for early human settlements.

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Rare Evidence Of Dinosaur Cannibalism

Rare Evidence Of Dinosaur Cannibalism: Meat-Eater Tooth Found In Gorgosaurus Jawbone

ScienceDaily (2009-10-07) -- A Canadian researcher has found 70 million year old evidence of dinosaur cannibalism. The jawbone of what appears to be a Gorgosaurus was found in 1996 in southern Alberta. A technician at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Alberta found something unusual embedded in the jaw. It was the tip of a tooth from another meat-eating dinosaur. ...  
 
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Tweeting Ugandan gorillas make friends online

Tweeting Ugandan gorillas make friends online
26 Sep 2009 12:46:26 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Hereward Holland

BWINDI IMPENETRABLE FOREST, Uganda, Sept 26 (Reuters Life!) - Lurking deep in the mist-glazed forests of east Africa, Uganda's mountain gorillas are preparing to 'tweet' for their survival.

With the launch on Saturday of the "Friend a Gorilla" campaign, human fans will soon be able to follow the everyday drama of one of the few remaining 720 mountain gorillas online, far from the red ants, mud and tropical rain of their habitats.

When the friendagorilla.org site goes live, users will be able to access videos, pictures and rangers' blogs through websites like Facebook and Twitter, said Moses Mapesa Wafula, head of the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA).

They will also be able to follow their new friends via satellite tracking.

"By paying one dollar to Friend a Gorilla, everybody contributes to the conservation of this species," Wafula said.

Not everybody can afford the $500 price tag for a real gorilla trek but the fibre-optic tentacles of globalisation will make it possible for anyone to watch a mother grooming her children, juvenile males fighting for dominance or even feel the rush of being charged by a 500 pound (225 kg) silverback male.

Tourist receipts represent Uganda's second largest foreign exchange earner.

Organisers say the campaign is the first time social networking has been harnessed for conservation and hope it will generate $100,000 in the first three months and a further $350,000 within the first year.

Drafted in to help publicise the campaign, actor Jason Biggs, star of the American Pie comedies, said gazing into the eyes of a gorilla was like meeting an old friend.

"It was pretty surreal. I felt like when I made eye contact with the gorillas, it was like an out-of-body experience," Biggs told Reuters after a face to face encounter with one of the gorillas at Bwindi. "It was mind-blowing."

With around 370 mountain gorillas, Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park plays host to roughly half the global population, with the remainder scattered across volcanoes in nearby Rwanda and the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.

The gorilla's habitat is threatened by illegal logging for charcoal, timber and agriculture and are also poached for bush meat, UWA staff said.

Although the gorillas remain endangered, UWA has registered growth rates of 12 percent and watched the gorilla population double over the last 25 years, according to Wafula.

He said the money raised by the Friend and Gorilla campaign would contribute towards conservation efforts as well as help promote alternative livelihoods for people living in and around the park.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Story at http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LQ463489.htm

Miniature T-rex ancestor Raptorex kriegsteini

A fossil discovered in China is a forerunner of T-rex, with almost identical features but on a man-sized scale.

Video Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2009/sep/16/t-rex-raptorex-kriegsteini

A Very Remote Period Indeed: 2009 Loveland Stone Age Fair

Are you in/around Loveland, Colorado? The Stone Age Fair is this weekend, September 26-27.

A Very Remote Period Indeed: 2009 Loveland Stone Age Fair

Research suggests monkeys are heavy metal fans

BEIJING, Sept. 2 (Xinhuanet) -- Monkeys prefer heavy metal to classical music, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin whose findings are published this week in Biology Letters.

Scientists played a selection of music to a group of cotton-top tamarin monkeys but the only tunes that got a reaction were from the heavy metal band Metallica. They were seemingly disinterested in Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis and Bach, but after the dulcet tones of Master of Puppets by Metallica was played the tamarins calmed down.

"Monkeys interpret rising and falling tones differently than humans. Oddly, their only response to several samples of human music was a calming response to the heavy-metal band Metallica," said Professor Charles Snowdon, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Chicken-hearted Tyrants: Predatory Dinosaurs As Baby Killers

Chicken-hearted Tyrants: Predatory Dinosaurs As Baby Killers

ScienceDaily (Aug. 7, 2009)

Two titans fighting a bloody battle – one that often turns fatal for both of them. This is how big predatory dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus are often depicted while hunting down their supposed prey, even larger herbivorous dinosaurs. The fossils, though, do not account for that kind of hunting behavior but indicate that theropods, the large predatory dinosaurs, were hunting much smaller prey.

Dr. Oliver Rauhut, paleontologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, and his collegue Dr. David Hone surmise that giant carnivores like Tyrannosaurus preyed mainly on juvenile dinosaurs. "Unlike their adult and well-armed relatives these young animals hardly posed any risk to the predators," says Rauhut. "And their tender bones would have added important minerals to a theropod's diet. Now we hope for more fossils to be found that add new evidence to our hypothesis."

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Tyrannosaurus Rex Skull Replica, $224.95, Free Shipping

Survival of the Trendiest (AnnasBones.com)

This blog post from AnnasBones.com (@annasbones) begins with a reference to The Devil Wears Prada. Which is awesome.
Click here: http://annasbones.com/2009/09/07/survival-of-the-trendiest/

Did early humans evolve in Europe, not Africa? (NewScientist)

Did early humans evolve in Europe, not Africa?

Andy Coghlan, reporter

Received wisdom that modern humans emerged in Africa then dispersed across the rest of the globe is being challenged by skulls found in Dmanisi, a site in Georgia to the south of Russia.

Analysis of the skulls suggests that instead, small numbers of very early ancestors of modern-day humans may have migrated to Europe, where they evolved into Homo erectus, the immediate predecessor of modern Homo sapiens.

Then, Homo erectus filed back into Africa before eventually making the crucial transition to Homo sapiens. Some 1.8 million years old, the skulls resemble those of early ancestors of Homo erectus.

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Chimps imitate yawning animations (BBC)

Chimps imitate yawning animations

By Victoria Gill

Science reporter, BBC News

Yawning is so contagious that chimpanzees can "catch" it from cartoons, according to research.

Scientists from Emory University in Atlanta, US, have discovered that an animation of a yawning chimp will stimulate real chimps to yawn.

They describe in the Royal Society journal, Proceedings B, how this could assist in the future study of empathy.

The work could also help unravel if and how computer games might cause children to imitate what they see on screen.

Previous studies have already shown contagious yawning in chimpanzees - stimulated by video-recorded footage of yawns.

"We wanted to expand on that," explained Matthew Campbell, a researcher from Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center and lead author of the study.

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Chimpanzee Skull Replica, $124.95.

African great ape ancestor genome changed rapidly

Feb. 12, 2009
African great ape ancestor genome changed rapidly
By Leila Gray

The genome of the evolutionary ancestor of humans and present-day apes underwent a burst of activity in duplicating segments of DNA, according to a study to be published in Nature Feb 12, the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday.

"The new study shows big differences in the genomes of humans and great apes within duplicated sequences containing rapidly evolving genes. Most of these differences occurred at a time just prior to the speciation of chimpanzee, gorilla, and humans," said researchers Tomas Marques-Bonet and Jeffrey M. Kidd who headed the study. Both are fellows in the lab of Evan Eichler, UW professor of genome sciences, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and senior author of the paper.

"It is unclear why, but the common ancestor of humans, chimps and gorillas had an unusual activity of duplication," Kidd added. "Moreover, we don't yet know the functions of most of the genes that were affected by these duplications."

The great ape ancestors, from whom humans, gorillas and chimps descended, lived in Africa between 8 million and 12 million years ago. Most scientists think that the lineage that eventually led to chimps and humans diverged from the African great ape ancestors about 5 million to 7 million years ago.

"What's exciting for us to learn," Eichler added, "was that sequence duplication acceleration occurred in an era when other types of mutations had slowed within the hominid (human-like) lineage."

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End of civil war opens up Angolan 'Jurassic Park'

By Louise Redvers (AFP) – Aug 20, 2009

LUANDA — Angola is best known for oil and diamonds, but dinosaur hunters say the country holds a "museum in the ground" of rare fossils -- some actually jutting from the earth -- waiting to be discovered.

"Angola is the final frontier for palaeontology," explained Louis Jacobs, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, part of the PaleoAngola project which is hunting for dinosaur fossils.

"Due to the war, there's been little research carried out so far, but now we're getting in finally and there's so much to find.

"In some areas there are literally fossils sticking out of the rocks. It's like a museum in the ground."

The first reports of dinosaur remains in Angola were made in the 1960s, but a bloody liberation struggle against the Portuguese followed by three decades of civil war covered the country in landmines and made it a no-go zone for researchers.

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