Speculative Evolution

The official tumblr of the Speculative Evolution forum! Speculative biology is simultaneously a science and form of art in which one speculates on the possibilities of life and evolution.

[vcreatures]

Cerebrum nasus is a medium sized quadruped with a unique adaptation to navigate a world that seldom has light. While equipped with eyes that can pick up ultraviolet light, the Cerebrum Nasus “sees” it’s world through it’s large multifaceted nose. This large fleshy organ holds multiple nostrils to pick up the slightest of shifts in scent. It also can emit and register as an electroreceptor. Communication between individuals is also processed through the organ via electric fields.

This melon will become vibrant during mating season as a way to attract and will accompany a unique electo-song as a way to entice females. Each song is unique to the individual and is entirely inaudible.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Borealopelta markmitchelli

By Maya Jade McCallum, on @hauntedmech

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Name: Borealopelta markmitchelli

Name Meaning: Northern Shield

First Described; 2017

Described By: Brown et al.

Classification: Dinosauria, Ornithischia, Genasauria, Thyreophora, Eurypoda, Ankylosauria, Nodosauridae, Nodosaurinae

Borealopelta is an exciting recently described Nodosaurid that is remarkable because it was essentially mummified - the osteoderms, skin, and even color were preserved in three-dimensions. The fossil was so heavy and so buried in its environment that it actually broke under its own weight, but luckily the pieces were kept and transported successfully. Borealopelta was found in the Clearwater Formation of Alberta, Canada, living about 110 to 112 million years ago, in the Albian age of the Early Cretaceous. Borealopelta had died on the shore of the Western Interior Seaway and was washed out to sea after death, buried on the ocean floor quickly (topside - down) with very little distortion, making the fossil look like how the dinosaur looked when it was alive. 

Photo by Machairo, CC BY-SA 4.0 

Borealopelta shows the positioning of armor when the animal was alive, a unique thing for an Ankylosaur which usually aren’t preserved articulated enough to know with this level of precision. In addition to that, the osteoderms had keratin sheaths over them, indicating the spikes and other structures were even longer in life than they were in typical ankylosaur fossils. In fact, this probably applies to most armor structures in dinosaurs, indicating that things like Triceratops had amazingly long horns. Since these structures - in both groups of dinosaurs - were primarily sexually selected ones (meaning, they got so ridiculous because other dinosaurs found them sexy), the sheathes wouldn’t have been really used for defense very much, though they would have been capable of doing so.

By Nobu Tamura, CC BY-SA 4.0

Borealopelta was preserved with pigmentation - a structure usually only found in things like small birdie dinosaurs (with Psittacosaurus as a notable excpetion) - indicating this dinosaur would have been reddish-brown colored, with countershading for camouflage in its environment, though it’s difficult to tell what sort of environment that would have been since the animal was washed out to sea. The armor on its back that wasn’t so extensively keratinized (ie, not the big shoulder spikes, but the bumpy osteoderms all over) probably would have allowed it to defend itself, since the camouflage indicates it would have been hunted by prey (why hide if nothing is chasing you?). This dinosaur was recently discovered, and hopefully more research of it will show us even more about Borealopelta and other Ankylosaurs. 

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borealopelta

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Dakotornis cooperi

By Scott Reid on @drawingwithdinosaurs

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Name: Dakotornis cooperi

Status: Extinct

First Described: 1975

Described By: Erickson

Classification: Dinosauria, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Paraves, Eumaniraptora, Averaptora, Avialae, Euavialae, Avebrevicauda, Pygostylia, Ornithothoraces, Euornithes, Ornithuromorpha, Ornithurae, Neornithes

Dakotornis is our last miscellaneous Neornithean! Known from the Bullion Creek Formation of North Dakota, it lived sometime between 61 and 56 million years ago, between the Selandian and Thanetian ages of the Paleocene of the Paleogene. Known from very limited remains, it was first thought to be another wading bird - but it can’t be definitively assigned to any sort of group or lifestyle. 

Sources:

Mayr, G. 2009. Paleogene Fossil Birds. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. 

http://fossilworks.org/bridge.pl?a=taxonInfo&taxon_no=39574

[primatologistinthemaking-deacti]

Media Representations of Animals Are Distorting Our Perception of Their Extinction Risk

Ubiquitous images of many animals are leading us to believe that some of the world's most endangered species are thriving in the wild.

[primatologistinthemaking-deacti]

Declining central American frog species are bouncing back

Source: Vanderbilt University Medical Center

“"It’s a hopeful, optimistic chapter,“ said Louise Rollins-Smith, PhD, associate professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, and a co-author of a study recently published in the journal Science.A collaborative group of investigators at multiple institutions showed that the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis continues to be as lethal now as it was more than 10 years ago. 

The antimicrobial defenses produced by frog skin, however, appear to be more effective than they were before the fungal epidemic began.Rollins-Smith and her colleagues began studying how frogs combat B. dendrobatidis in Panama in 2004. For several years, Douglas Woodhams, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow on her team, and laboratory manager Laura Reinert made multiple trips to Central America to collect samples of frog skin secretions.

At the time, the fungal disease was spreading eastward from Costa Rica through Panama."There was a predictable wave of pathogen moving to new populations,” said Rollins-Smith, who also traveled to Panama in 2010. “It gave us the opportunity to collect samples from populations of animals that had already encountered the epidemic and from the same species in places where the epidemic had not yet occurred."The researchers found that skin secretions from frogs in areas with endemic (established) disease were more effective against the fungus compared to skin secretions from frogs that had not been exposed to the disease.” 

Read more via Science Daily 

Photo Credit: Louise Rollins-Smith 

[primatologistinthemaking-deacti]

Male-female differences linked to risk of extinction, new study finds

Standing out from the opposite sex comes at a cost -- and this could make all the difference in the world.

[alphynix]

Ergilornis rapidus, a 1.2-1.5m tall bird (4′-5′) from the Early Oligocene of Mongolia (~33-28 mya). Closely related to modern cranes, trumpeters, and limpkins, it was part of an extinct group called eogruids – flightless birds which existed across Eurasia for a large portion of the Cenozoic from roughly 40-3 million years ago.

Although the earliest known eogruids were smaller and less specialized, and may even have still been somewhat capable of flying, later forms like Ergilornis had highly reduced wings, long legs adapted for running, and convergently ostrich-like feet with only two toes each.

[cedar-glade]

one of many species of Black Witches’ Butter

Exidia nigricans or formerly known as Exidia plana  

With Ohio’s spring torrential downpours, the temperate forest patches around Cincinnati are becoming a plethora with classic jelly fungus in good form. 

This species is fairly difficult to Identify if you are new to Exidia genera, like I am.

Exidia glandulosa is the more common Black Witch’s Butter and for this reason, it is always associated with photos similar to this one on a brief google search. In truth the way we can macro-id this species involves it’s fruiting form when it starts forming or when it dries out entirely. In these cases we see blocklike morphology of the fruiting body or, when finishing this fruiting stage of the life cycle, plate like blocks. Read more.

Given the tightly-lobed, brain-like morphology with brown pre colour turning dark black later still retaining ridges. We can rightfully assume that Exidia nigricans ,P. Roberts (2009), is our candidate. Read more on issue. Other blogs with similar topic. 

More jelly?

Photos taken at Trillium Trails, Cincinnati, Ohio

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Electricity sensor harnesses a shark's secret weapon

A new “quantum” material mimics the sensors that help a shark sense its prey. Like a shark, it can detect tiny electric fields.

Sharks have a secret weapon in their snouts that helps them hunt prey. It’s an organ that can sense faint electrical signals given off by other, delicious creatures. Now, engineers in Indiana have made a new material for electronics that mimics the shark’s sensor. It even works in salt water, which is usually a harsh environment for electronics. (Drop your smartphone in the ocean, for instance, and that’s the end of the phone.)

The new device may be useful in ways from studying marine life to building new tools for submarines. It’s made from a substance called samarium nickelate, or SNO. And it can detect some of the weakest electric fields found in the sea.

[femmenietzsche]

How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas - Not Exactly Rocket Science

Thrips are tiny insects, typically just a millimetre in length. Some are barely half that size. If that’s how big the adults are, imagine how small a thrips’ egg must be. Now, consider that there are insects that lay their eggs inside the egg of a thrips.

That’s one of them in the image above – the wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne. It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale. Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp – complete with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals – is actually smaller. At just 200 micrometres (a fifth of a millimetre), this wasp is the third smallest insect alive* and a miracle of miniaturisation.

The wasp has several adaptations for life at such a small scale. But the most impressive one of all has just been discovered by Alexey Polilov from Lomonosov Moscow State University, who has spent many years studying the world’s tiniest insects.

Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.

On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache of DNA. Without it, the neurons shouldn’t be able to replenish their vital supply of proteins. They shouldn’t work. Until now, intact neurons without a nucleus have never been described in the wild.

And yet, M.mymaripenne has thousands of them. As it changes from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural nuclei until just a few hundred are left. The rest burst apart, saving space inside the adult’s crowded head. But the wasp doesn’t seem to suffer for this loss. As an adult, it lives for around five days, which is actually longer than many other bigger wasps. As Zen Faulkes writes, “It’s possible that the adult life span is short enough that the nucleus can make all the proteins the neuron needs to function for five days during the pupal stage.”

Dang

[typhlonectes]

Indigo Milkcap (Lactarius indigo)

Compared to other colors found in nature, true blues are pretty rare—but the indigo milk cap has just that! This vibrant mushroom gets it color from a pigment that is a derivative of guaiazulene, a dark blue crystalline hydrocarbon. You would think that its blueness is a marker for toxicity, but the mushroom is actually edible—although its color fades to a grayish hue when it’s cooked.

photograph by Dan Molter

via: American Museum of Natural History

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Dogs lived and died with humans 10,000 years ago in the Americas

Dogs unearthed at sites in Illinois were older than originally thought.

A trio of dogs buried at two ancient human sites in Illinois lived around 10,000 years ago, making them the oldest known domesticated canines in the Americas.

Radiocarbon dating of the dogs’ bones shows they were 1,500 years older than thought, zooarchaeologist Angela Perri said April 13 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The previous age estimate was based on a radiocarbon analysis of burned wood found in one of the animals’ graves. Until now, nearly 9,300-year-old remains of dogs eaten by humans at a Texas site were the oldest physical evidence of American canines.

Ancient dogs at the Midwestern locations also represent the oldest known burials of individual dogs in the world, said Perri, of Durham University in England. A dog buried at Germany’s Bonn-Oberkassel site around 14,000 years ago was included in a two-person grave. Placement of the Americas dogs in their own graves indicates that these animals were held in high regard by ancient people.

An absence of stone tool incisions on the three ancient dogs’ skeletons indicates that they were not killed by people, but died of natural causes before being buried, Perri said.

Some researchers have proposed that whoever made the first excursions into the Americas arrived on dog-powered sleds.  People had reached South America at least 15,000 years ago (SN: 12/26/15, p. 10), well before ancient people buried dogs at Illinois’ Koster and Stilwell II sites. It’s unclear whether humans reached South America via coastal or inland routes. But no dog remains have been found in northwestern North America, where the earliest settlers crossing a land bridge from Asia would have entered the New World.  Either those people had no dogs, or they and their furry companions stayed on the land bridge, possibly blocked by two massive ice sheets, until rapidly moving inland around 10,000 years ago (SN: 2/16/08, p. 102), Perri said.

“As much as we want to believe that dogs initially pulled us into the New World, that may not have been the case,” Perri said.

[mindblowingscience]

This Bizarre Fish Hides a Nasty Switchblade on Its Cheek

The scientists who discovered the strange feature are calling it a “lachrymal saber,” but for the predators who dare to mess with this type of stonefish, the unique switchblade just means trouble.

“We report on the discovery of a remarkable defensive specialization in stonefishes that was identified during a [genetic] study of scorpionfishes and their relatives,” opens a new study detailing the strange animal, now in the science journal Copeia.

A “remarkable defensive specialization,” indeed. When predators approach or attempt to eat this resourceful creature, the boney switchblade suddenly appears. The University of Kansas researchers who discovered the lachrymal saber say it could act as a visual deterrent, or as a literal pain the mouth: any larger fish who dares to swallow the stonefish is in for a rather unpleasant surprise. But it’s also possible that the switchblade is used in fights between members of the same species.

Continue Reading.

[wildcat2030]

What if we're not Earth's first big civilization? - Futurity

Consider the Silurian Hypothesis: How do we really know there weren't previous industrial civilizations on Earth that rose and fell long before humans appeared?

How do we really know that there weren’t civilizations on Earth before ours? A new paper addresses this question. Imagine if, many millions of years ago, dinosaurs drove cars through cities of mile-high buildings. A preposterous idea, right? Over the course of tens of millions of years, however, all of the direct evidence of a civilization—its artifacts and remains—gets ground to dust. How do we know there weren’t previous industrial civilizations on Earth that rose and fell long before human beings appeared? It’s a compelling thought experiment, and one that Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, take up in the International Journal of Astrobiology. Frank also considers the evidence in The Atlantic. The history of the world “Gavin and I have not seen any evidence of another industrial civilization,” Frank explains. But by looking at the deep past in the right way, a new set of questions about civilizations and the planet appears: What geological footprints do civilizations leave? Is it possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record once it disappears from the face of its host planet? “These questions make us think about the future and the past in a much different way, including how any planetary-scale civilization might rise and fall.” In what they deem the “Silurian Hypothesis,” Frank and Schmidt define a civilization by its energy use. Human beings are just entering a new geological era that many researchers refer to as the Anthropocene, the period in which human activity strongly influences the climate and environment. In the Anthropocene, fossil fuels have become central to the geological footprint humans will leave behind on Earth. By looking at the Anthropocene’s imprint, Schmidt and Frank examine what kinds of clues future scientists might detect to determine that human beings existed. In doing so, they also lay out evidence of what might be left behind if industrial civilizations like ours existed millions of years in the past. Human beings began burning fossil fuels more than 300 years ago, marking the beginnings of industrialization. The researchers note that the emission of fossil fuels into the atmosphere has already changed the carbon cycle in a way that is recorded in carbon isotope records. Other ways human beings might leave behind a geological footprint include: Global warming, from the release of carbon dioxide and perturbations to the nitrogen cycle from fertilizers Agriculture, through greatly increased erosion and sedimentation rates Plastics, synthetic pollutants, and even things such as steroids, which will be geochemically detectable for millions, and perhaps even billions, of years Nuclear war, if it happened, which would leave behind unusual radioactive isotopes

[cmkosemenillustrated]

Many fossils of the long-tailed pterosaur Rhamphorhynchus have been found in marine deposits - so much that it has been theorised to be primarily aquatic - like a grebe or a cormorant. 

I took the “aquatic rhamphorhynchoid” idea to its logical conclusion and illustrated Ichthyopteryx sp. a fully-aquatic descendant of this lineage. It looks quite plausible; I can picture heaps of them flopping about on beaches of remote islands. I wonder which lengths this line of evolution would extend to - if it was real. Just to clarify, this is not a real animal, but the product of an exercise in speculative-evolution.

www.cmkosemen.com

[todropscience]

BOTTOM TRAWLING IS DESTROYING DEEP-SEA FISH POPULATION

A new study using reconstructed catch data reveals that in the past 60+ years, the practice of towing giant fishing nets along the sea floor has caused the extraction of 25 million tonnes of fish that live 400 metres or more below sea level leading to the collapse of many of those fish populations. The study is published in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Deep-sea fish species are targeted globally by bottom trawling. The fish species captured are often characterized by longevity, low fecundity and slow growth making them vulnerable to overfishing. Also, bottom trawling is known to remove vast amounts of non-target species, including habitat forming deep-sea corals and sponges.

Researchers examined the state of 72 deep-sea fish species caught by bottom trawlers around the world, many of which were exploited to unsustainable levels.

The fisheries were found to be overall under-reported by as much as 42%, leading to the removal of an estimated 25 million tons of deep-sea fish. Besides depleting deep-sea fish stocks, bottom trawling of deep fish does not generate much in the way of marketable fish. Immature individuals are thrown overboard because they generally don’t meet minimum size requirements, while non-targeted species caught as bycatch are also returned dead to the sea.

Photo: Big-fined chimaera by EVNautilus YT 

Reference: Victorero et al., 2018. Out of Sight, But Within Reach: A Global History of Bottom-Trawled Deep-Sea Fisheries From >400 m Depth. Frontiers in Marine Science.

[sciencesourceimages]

Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day

by Jim Robbins / NY Times

High in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, an international team of researchers set out four buckets to gather a shower of viruses falling from the sky.

Scientists have surmised there is a stream of viruses circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel. Very little is known about this realm, and that’s why the number of deposited viruses stunned the team in Spain. Each day, they calculated, some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet.

See More Virus Photos

Most of the globe-trotting viruses are swept into the air by sea spray, and lesser numbers arrive in dust storms.

“Unimpeded by friction with the surface of the Earth, you can travel great distances, and so intercontinental travel is quite easy” for viruses, said Curtis Suttle, a marine virologist at the University of British Columbia. “It wouldn’t be unusual to find things swept up in Africa being deposited in North America.”

The study by Dr. Suttle and his colleagues, published earlier this year in the International Society of Microbial Ecology Journal, was the first to count the number of viruses falling onto the planet. The research, though, is not designed to study influenza or other illnesses, but to get a better sense of the “virosphere,” the world of viruses on the planet.

Read the entire article

Image above © Biophoto Associates / Science Source