Let me see you shake your tail feather

We've known for some time now that dinosaurs had feathers and that the theropod dinosaurs were the ancestors of modern birds. The proof is quite overwhelming - particularly the large number of feathered dinosaur fossils found in recent years in China. And then, last year, the first dino-feathers trapped in amber were discovered near Grassy Lake in Alberta - dating from the Late Cretaceous period. And they told a fascinating story.

"We're finding two ends of the evolutionary development that had been proposed for feathers trapped in the same amber deposit," said Ryan McKellar of the University of Alberta. The team's find confirms that individual filaments progressed to tufts of filaments from a single origin, called barbs. In later development, some of these barbs can coalesce into a central branch called a rachis. As the structure develops further, further branches of filments form from the rachis. "We've got feathers that look to be little filamentous hair-like feathers, we've got the same filaments bound together in clumps, and then we've got a series that are for all intents and purposes identical to modern feathers," says Mr McKellar. "We're catching some that look to be dinosaur feathers and another set that are pretty much dead ringers for modern birds."

We also now know that feathers appeared much earlier in dinosaur evolution than first thought. Fossils of Ornithomimus edmontonicus - which looked something like ostriches but were not previously known to have feathers - have recently been found to have hundreds of traces of filaments along the body and limbs. Moreover, as the team reported in Science, while one of the two adult skeletons showed evidence of possessing a pennibrachium = a forelimb bearing long feathers that form a winglike surface - the third specimen, a juvenile dinosaur about 1-year-old, lacked this structure, although it still had numerous feathers along its body. This marks the first time that wings and feathers have been identified in ornithomimosaurs. "Our specimens are currently the most primitive dinosaur to show winglike structures," says Dr Darla Zelenitsky, a geoscientist at the University of Calgary in Canada, "And because ornithomimosaurs were fairly large, weighing 150 kilograms or more, these earliest wings did not initially evolve for flight - they were obviously not flyers or gliders. Moreover, O. edmontonicus does not appear to have developed its full plumage until it reached the adult stage, which suggests that the wings and feathers served some sort of adult reproductive function such as courtship and brooding."

Meanwhile, another study of a 150 million year old dinosaur fossil has revealed it had multi-coloured feathers. The research, published in the journal Science, compared the structures which determine colour in living bird feathers with those in the fossil. "This would be a very striking animal if it was alive today," said Yale University's Professor Richard Prum, co-author of the report. It is believed the colours would have helped the dinosaur attract a mate. Anchiornis huxleyi is a four-winged dinosaur which lived in the late Jurassic Period in China. Researchers chose this particular fossil to work on because the feathers were so well preserved.

And why shouldn't dinosaurs have been colourful beasts? Just look at modern birds, reptiles and amphibians. But, more than that, look at how dynamic our modern animals are. Doesn't it seem likely that dinosaurs were just as active in their competition, mating and sexual attraction displays?

Well, another recent study suggests proof of exctly that. In an issue of the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, three paleontologists posit that fossilised oviraptors possessed structural features that are characteristic of those found in modern birds with ornamental tails. For example, in the early oviraptor Similicaudipteryx, the last caudal vertebrae (the tip of the “tailbone”) are fused into a structure known as a “pygostyle," which was long thought to be a feature exclusive to modern birds. There is no evidence that Similicaudipteryx was a flying species, and the authors suggest that the bone and muscle structures that can be discerned from the fossil remains are consistent with those seen in birds with tail displays that don't aid in flying but do functional as flashy ornaments, such as peacocks, turkeys, and birds of paradise (note that these birds are not completely flightless, the tails just don't contribute to optimal flight). Some species do indeed favour form over function, and apparently the trend may have started way back in the Mesozoic.

These assertions are, of course, subject to scepticism due to the limitations of the fossil record. This is part of science - publishing new perspectives or conclusions and allowing the scientific community to contribute further analyses and information, ultimately either supporting or discarding the idea. What is unquestionable, however, is that this paper signifies just how far palaeontology has come in recent years. New finds and new technology have yielded broader and deeper information about the details of what dinosaurs actually looked like, how they moved, and how they might have interacted in their ancient world.

Sources:

SciLogs
ScienceMag
BBC News
BBC Science

The Museum of Natural Curiosity

Note: These photographs are rubbish and were taken without flash on my crappy phone. They will be replaced with better shots as I get them in.

Last night we staged our first ever properly live Museum of Curiosity at London's Natural History Museum. I say 'properly' as the BBC radio show is recorded in front of an audience so, technically, that could be called 'live'. However, the radio shows don't usually get broadcast until a month or so after they're recorded so there's time to edit, tweak and to make them as good as we possibly can. This was a 'proper' live event in that what you saw was what you got; there was no such safety net. I think it's fair to say that the audience got something very special indeed.

We couldn't have hoped for a more sparkling panel of guests. The radio show normally has three guests and lasts for half an hour. This has always been something of a frustration as each guest is fascinating enough to devote half an hour (or more) to. In fact, we usually record two hours' worth of material and it's absolute hell for producers Rich Turner and Dan Schreiber to have to whittle it down to just 30 minutes and to lose so much good stuff that never makes it to air. For this live show, however, we had no such restrictions and so we were able to put on two hour long shows featuring two amazing panels.

Part One featured comedian, writer and host of It is Rocket Science, Helen Keen, the museum curator's curator Professor Richard Fortey and the legend that is Sir Terry Pratchett.

Part Two starred the Natural History Museum's 'Fly Girl' Dr Erica McAlister, the magnificent Dave Gorman and former First Sea Lord and 'ruler of the Queen's Navy' Admiral Lord Alan West, Baron West of Spithead - a man who has the best after-dinner stories of anyone I've ever met.

The show was steered brilliantly as ever by our boss, the legendary Mr John Lloyd, and by Dan Schreiber taking his first ever turn in the curator's hotseat previously filled by Jimmy Carr, Bill Bailey, Dave Gorman, Humphrey Ker, Sean Lock and Jon Richardson.

The show - staged in the cathedral-like main hall and punctuated occasionally by roars from Dippy the Diplodocus - ran from 7.30pm to 10pm during which the audience was treated to tales of monstrous 2 metre long millipedes, Superman's desk ornaments, the prehistory of Discworld, parasitic flies, the man who ate the heart of a king, Darwin's pet tortoise, Naval slang, cursed lockets, nefarious goings-on inside a whale, flying stick insect eggs, the Piltdown cricket bat and the seaweed expert who was mistakenly sent to Bletchley Park but who, by a twist of fate, ended up helping us win the war. Fascnating, hilarious stuff in the tradition of The Museum of Curiosity and our sister show QI. And the audience seemed to love it.

At 10pm 'The Museum of Natural Curiosity', as we'd called the show, had to come to an end but we still had a few more treats for those who could stay a little longer. Scientist, comedian and TV presenter Simon Watt - best known for fronting Inside Nature's Giants - did a very funny set about why we should stick up for ugly animals that don't get the same love as pandas and other 'charismatic mega-vertebrates'. And then comedian and TV presenter Eric Lampaert of How to Survive a Disaster Movie gave us 10 minutes of bizarre but brilliant stand-up on the subject of early Man. The evening was the rounded off with 15 minutes of Q and A with John and a selection of the guests: Helen, Erica, Dave and Alan.

A wonderful evening spent with tremendous people. Will we do another one? I sincerely hope so.

An open letter to Jasmin H

I'm sure, by now, that you've seen the letter below, penned by Jasmin H, a home-schooled 14-year-old from Scargill in New Zealand, and published in the October 3rd edition of The Northern Outlook:

I decided that, rather than ridicule her as so many websites are doing - it's probably not her fault, people, and she's 14 - I'd write her letter:

Hi Jasmin

I read your letter in the newspaper and decided that I would write a letter to you. I should start by saying that I'm not homosexual and I have no agenda in writing this letter. I'm a married man, an ex-cop in his 50's, with three grown up kids in their 20s. Nor am I anti-religion (though I have no faith myself) and would never belittle your beliefs if you have any. I won't be impolite or, in any way, rude or bullying. You're obviously a smart young lady and feel strongly enough and well-informed enough to write letters to newspapers. All I'm asking you to do is read this letter and look at a few sources of information that maybe you haven't seen before. I hope that's okay.

I was a little bit confused by your letter. You say in your final paragraph that you don't believe in evolution. I wonder why that is, considering the weight of evidence for it. If, as I suspect, you are a person of faith, there is no reason why your faith and evolution have to be mutually incompatible. After all, the Catholic church and the Church of England and many other branches of Christianity accept evolution as fact. They simply argue that God created the process. I can't prove that they're wrong! You obviously know something about the subject because, throughout the letter, you talk about evolution as if it does exist, using phrases like 'our level of intelligence should have evolved somewhat' and 'if homosexuality spreads, it can cause human evolution to come to a standstill' and 'the ducks will have evolved further than we have'. Perhaps you're more undecided, rather than disbelieving? I'd like to think that you have an open mind.

Incidentally, you might be interested to know that ducks have been around for a very long time; the fossil record suggests that they were around during the age of dinosaurs - or at least their ancestors were.

 

That's an artist's impression of a species called Vegavis, which belonged to an order of birds called Anserifomes, which includes waterfowl. Within this order, Vegavis is most closely related to true ducks and geese of the family Anatidae. Vegavis fossils have been found in Cretaceous rocks 65 million years old.

Julia Clarke of North Carolina State University used computer tomography (CT) scans to get a good view of the rock-encased fossil and concluded that the partial skeleton was a new species and very important to the story of avian evolution. "We now know that duck and chicken relatives coexisted with dinosaurs", she says. "This does not mean that today's chicken and duck species lived with dinosaurs, but that the evolutionary lineages leading to today's chicken and duck species did." Clarke's findings provide proof that cousins of living bird species co-existed with dinosaurs. Before the classification of Vegavis, the fossil record of living bird lineages in the Cretaceous period was very unreliable.

Ducks have been around a great deal longer than humans ... they've had more than a 60 million year head start on us. But, despite this advantage, I'd argue that they're not really more advanced  than we are. Yes, they pair up and nest together but don't most humans do that too? And we have marriage - a consciously made commitment between two people who love each other, whatever their genders happen to be. Ducks only have a primal instinct to pair bond. It really isn't a valid comparison as things differ from species to species.

And you might be surprised to learn that ducks engage in homosexual behaviour too; about one in 10 mallard couples are homosexual, which isn't too far off the figures for humans. Ducks also regularly indulge in 'attempted rape flights' when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. They also engage in necrophiliac homosexual behaviour (see here). So I'm not entirely convinced that they are a good role model for us humans; by comparison, two people loving and caring for each other is surely a vast improvement!

You also say that, after 2000 years, we should be cleverer than our ancestors but the reality is that you and I are no cleverer than the Romans were. There's been no significant development in human brains in just two millennia. People aren't cleverer today; they simply have access to more information. I couldn't build the Colosseum. Could you? And yet someone did built it all those years ago without books or the Internet. I know more than my grandfather did because I have instant access to almost the whole of human knowledge, but I'm no smarter than my grandad. I'm certainly not smarter than original thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci or Isambard Kingdom Brunel or James Watt or Isaac Newton; imagine what they might have achieved if they'd been able to Google! Da Vinci had ideas about flight hundreds of years ahead of his time; if he'd have been able to talk to other flight pioneers around the world by Skype or email or Twitter, we'd have had jet planes by the 17th century. Knowledge is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

And the most wonderful thing about knowledge is that it's available to us all unless it's deliberately withheld. The greatest gift you can give a child is a sense of wonder and an enquiring mind. Out there, right now, are 14 year olds like you who will one day cure cancer and put humans on Mars and alleviate poverty and suffering. And they will do all that by learning; by reading as much as they can and making reasoned and intelligent choices about what to believe based upon the weight of evidence. I hope that you will do the same, Jasmin. I hope that you will never let closed-minded people with blinkered views deny you the opportunity to achieve whatever you are capable of achieving. Ignorance, in its true sense of 'lacking knowledge', really isn't bliss at all.

I also hope that you'll come to see that it's not a sin to love someone, or to want to spend your life with someone, who just happens to be the same gender. Homosexuality isn't a disease or an illness; it won't 'spread' as you suggest. You can't catch a dose of Gay. It's been around as long as humans have been around - there just seems to be more of it these days because society is becoming more enlightened and less intolerant. People can come out more openly than ever before. The children of gay couples don't automatically become gay themselves and many heterosexual couples choose not to have children.

We are all born gay or straight or bisexual. We can no more choose who we fall in love with than a duck can choose to lay square eggs. Do you have any gay friends? How would you feel if your best friend or one of your relations 'came out'? It wouldn't stop them being the person they always were, would it?

If we all want to live in a peaceful society free from fear, persecution, prejudice and harm, then the foundation stones we need to set in place are knowledge and mutual respect. We should all strive to be less judgemental. In an ideal world, we should all make the effort to understand each other and ensure that we never treat others in ways that we ourselves wouldn't want to be treated.

THAT's enlightenment.

Warm wishes

S
x

P.S. If this all turns out to be a practical joke or a 'Poe', ignore everything I've said, okay?

 

Sources: Live Science, 600 Co  

 

Even more rubbish art

British artist Mark Oliver's Litter Bugs are made entirely from scraps from old book covers, old broken sunglasses and other grabage. He describes their appearance in terms of adaptive evolution: "A creature whose instinctual and physical qualities have adapted so uniquely to the modern urban environment that it has rendered itself, by nature of camouflage, virtually invisible in its normal habitat." Mark even goes so far as to give them a common name and a scientific name, which often reflects the types of materials from which they are made. The Prophet Moth has a body formed from pieces of a Holy Bible cover, the Conductor Bug is built out of old metal gears and, appropriately, copper conductors, and a number of old, torn encyclopedia pages are the foundation for the Reference Moth's body and wings. Glorious aren't they? You can see more at the Litter Bug website here.

 

Thanks to my brother Si Colgan for alerting me to the site.

Tinysaurus Cutenex

A new dinosaur has been discovered in South Africa that is quite tiny and quite odd. In a report published yesterday in the online journal ZooKeys, Paul C. Sereno, a palaeontologist at the University of Chicago and a dinosaur specialist, described the strange anatomy of the newfound member of the heterodontosaur family and gave the new species the name Pegomastax africanus, or “thick jaw from Africa.” He also apologised in an interview for not getting around sooner to this piece of research. The rock containing the fossil was original found in the 1960s.

Embedded in the rock were remains of a creature with a short parrotlike beak, one-inch jaws, sharp teeth and a skull no less than three inches long. The entire body was less than two feet in length and probably weighed less than a small house cat.

Pegomastax is a species of Heterodontosaur, early ancestors of the larger, more familiar dinosaurs that came later.



Cute eh? Read the whole story here.

The Ever-Changing Earth

A great little animation showing the evolution of the continents as we know them today with a prediction of what they will look like 100 million years from now.

World of (Spoil)Sport - Part 2

Here's another of those old chestnuts that still turns up on websites of fascinating ‘facts’.

If a flea were scaled up to the size of a man, it could jump over a skyscraper.

Oh really? Let's look at that one.

The largest species of flea, Hystrichopsylla schefferi (the mountain beaver flea), can grow to 10mm (around 3/8ths of an inch) for females and 6-7mm for the male (around quarter of an inch) but this is exceptional. Most species get no larger than 3.3mm (1/8th of an inch) in length and many are much smaller.

The average flea can jump approximately 197mm (7¾ins) vertically and a distance of 330mm (13ins) horizontally. Many sites claim that the flea can jump vertically ‘150 times its own body length’. That would, therefore, indicate a flea of 1.3mm in length. Mathematically, therefore, a flea that is scaled up to be 1.82m (6ft) tall could also jump vertically 150 times its length, which is around 274.3m or 900ft. Impressive eh? Possibly … but it is only going to get ‘superflea’ over the shorter skyscrapers. It wouldn’t clear the Empire State Building (381m or 1,250ft), or the Eiffel Tower (320m or 1,050 ft) or even the London Shard (309m or 1,020ft). There are 137 skyscrapers worldwide that are over 274.3m or 900ft tall and hundreds of other man-made structures like TV masts and broadcasting towers that are way over 304.8m or 1000ft high ... so the myth is already crumbling.

But this is all academic anyway as the laws of physics would prevent any such thing from occurring. It’s all a matter of scaling.

  

Imagine that you run a dice factory. Each die measures 10mm by 10mm by 10mm and each one weighs 1g. The dice are packed in boxes 100mm by 100mm by 100mm. Therefore, you can fit 1000 dice in each box by having 10 layers, each made up of 100 dice arranged in 10 rows of 10. But look what’s happened as we’ve scaled up: The box is only 10 times taller, 10 times wider and 10 times deeper than a single die. However, the box now weighs 1000 times more than a single die. As things get bigger, their weight increases to match their volume, not their size. So if we scaled up a flea by a factor of just 10 we’ve now got a flea that’s 10 times longer, fatter and taller but which weighs 1000 times more than it did. And a 1.3mm flea scaled up by a factor of 100 would still be only 130mm in length but would weigh a million times more than a normal flea.

Its muscles, meanwhile, have only got 100 times bigger in length, breadth and height. Suffice to say, people who are much more clever at maths than I am have worked out that a six feet tall flea would weigh enough to ensure that it couldn’t jump any higher than you or me.

Incidentally, scaling works the other way too. If you dropped a flea from the roof of a building 100 feet high, it would probably survive the fall. However, if you jumped from the same building, you’d be chutney. Here’s why: If you divide an animal's length, breadth, and height by a factor of 10; its weight is reduced to a thousandth of its original weight, but its surface area i.e. the side that’s facing downwards, only by a hundredth. So the smaller it gets, the higher its surface area becomes in relation to its weight. After a while, air resistance begins to be a more powerful factor than the pull of gravity.

The only fact we can say is true is that, if fleas built their own flea-sized skyscrapers, they could probably jump over them.

I'll never eat a whole wing ...

An extraordinary fossil has turned up in Australia. The primitive bird (it still had teeth) Pelagornis lived around 5 million years ago and is believed to have been one of the largest, if not the largest, bird ever to fly. Its wingspan was a staggering 6 metres. That's just short of 20 feet. Or, if you want a visual, about the same as the height of a fully-grown giraffe. Here's an artist's reconstruction:

I've also shown it alongside a reconstruction of a Hatzegopteryx just to give you an idea of how big the prehistoric pterosaurs could get. Here's another Hatzegopteryx along with its cousin the better-known Quetzacoatlus:

To think that I used to be impressed by the sight of a heron or a swan in flight. These guys make everything we have today seem kind-of tame, don't they?

A Bit of a Chat ... Part 2

As promised, here's Part Two, in which the conversation ranges from Neanderthal gestation times to my fascination with names, puggles and platypus, crowd-sourced publishing, Scientology, alternative names for the seven dwarves, and living with three nipples ...

Tomorrow we'll have the third and final instalment which spotlights Ken's highly individual impressions of Queen Elizabeth II, and we discuss the Cornish language, tax avoidance, nicknames as a form of power, dumbed-down science shows, the lack of eccentrics on TV, and what happens when Disney cosplayers get wet.

Enjoy!

Beetles and Lizards and Bugs, oh my!

Wonderful close-up and often humorous wildlife photography by Igor Siwanowicz:

DON'T call him 'Chicken'

Yutyrannus huali is a newly-discovered early Cretaceous dinosaur from the rich Chinese fossil beds. He is the great granddaddy of Tyrannosaurus rex and could well have handled himself, don't you think?; Credit: Brian Choo

When the dinosaur groups first evolved feathers, we have seen many Chinese examples of small chicken-like reptiles from Cretaceous and Jurassic times. Now, like a rampant bus charging through the ancient records, we have a one and a half ton giant with stubbly feathers. No way could this beast flop through the air.

He's a tyrannosauroid with one large and two small very complete fossils, again from Liaoning Province in China. The specimens are 125 million years old, almost twice the age of the Tyrannosaur dynasty. That means they are ancestral, basal tyrannosaurids! With three fingers on huge feet, the feathers are long and filamentous on its back.

The name given is Yutysaurus huali, meaning he is a beautiful feathered tyrant. Xing Xu, Kebai Wang, Ke Zhang, Qingyu Ma, Lida Xing, Corwin Sullivan, Dongyu Hu, Shuqing Cheng & Shuo Wang decided to name him as such in the current publication of the journal Nature. They hail from Shenyang and Beijing Universities, University of Alberta and the Zhucheng Dinosaur Museum in Shandong.

Tail section fossil of Yutyrannus huali; Credit: Mr ZANG Hailong

The fossil beds in Liaoning are rich, with Beipiaosaurus the biggest feathered relative found so far. Yuty comes in at 40X the mass of that previous record-holder, becoming the largest feathered dinosaur species discovered to date.

At the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, Xing Xu believes it is, "possible that feathers were much more widespread, at least among meat-eating dinosaurs, than most scientists would have guessed even a few years ago." Of course poor old Tyrannosaurus rex, 60 million years later, had lost his heirloom of feathers and he also had to make do with only two fingers.

Skull fossil of Yutyrannus huali; Credit: Mr ZANG Hailong

The down-like feathers on these specimens would have been used for insulation, being densely-packed, but no notion of flying near-relatives is being entertained.

We have to remember that hair/fur hadn't yet been "invented" (ie. evolved by the later mammal-like reptiles), so the feather was one of the very few possibilities for keeping out the cold. Whether colour or decorative displays at mating time would involve the feathers is yet another flight of fancy we can all have a piece of this Easter.

Source: Earth News

101 People to Meet before You (or they) Die - Pilot Episode

Here's a little slideshow I've made of the pilot episode of 101 people to Meet before You (or they) Die. It was first broadcast on Resonance FM104.4 (London) on 30th April 2012.

The concept for the show is that we introduce you to some of the world's most extraordinary people: explorers, scientists, artists, philosophers etc. The pilot episode focuses on Venezuelan discoverer and encyclopaedist Charles Brewer-Carias: a man who has led nearly 300 expeditions; has discovered over 100 species new to science; who may have found the world's oldest organism; and claims to know the location of the semi-mythical El Dorado. He is also, allegedly, the person upon whom the character of Charles Muntz (in the Disney/Pixar film Up) is based ... though he isn't a baddie.

Running time 60 minutes with musical interludes by Emperor Yes. Presented by Dan Schreiber. Written by Stevyn Colgan and Dan Schreiber. Music by Ash Gardner and Hugo Sheppard of Carl and the Saganauts. Produced by Dan Schreiber and Ash Gardner at House of Strange Studios.

 

This is a pilot and, as such, something of an experiment. We have already established that interviews by phone are problematic and that the show is better suited to a 30 minute format. But what do you think? We'd be very interested to hear your views. And your suggestions for people we should interview.

Never quite getting to the Alien Planet

I made a very good find today ... the entire 90 minute Alien Planet documentary.

Back in the early 1990s, I had (yet another) near-miss with a book project. A great friend of mine, John Coppinger, is a sculptor. He's the man who made Jabba the Hutt for Return of the Jedi and you've seen his creatures in many, many films. Here's John (far right - beard) on set and me with Jabba's face before painting:

Anyway, he and I had the idea of creating a book in which we visit alien worlds and meet creatures that have evolved to live on those worlds. The idea was that we would make the book educational; by showing how creatures have evolved elsewhere we could mirror how life has evolved here. The gimmick was that John would actually build the creatures (this was before CGI). So we put together some sample chapters and a few photos and illustrations like these:

And we got a bite! Dorling Kindersley liked it and negotiations began. Via them, John and I also ended up contributing some content to a Channel 4 Equinox show on aliens and I got to chat with people like Dougal Dixon and Professor Jack Cohen - the alien guys in the UK. Things went along merrily for a while ... but then the guy at DK we'd been dealing with jumped to another publisher and the lady who took over our project dropped it as she didn't believe in it. To add to our problems, the film Stargate appeared and effectively used exactly the same idea we'd had of a kind of 'subway' network of gateways allowing people to jump from world to world. And so the book died. That's the way things happen sometimes.

Then, a few years later in 1999, the BBC launched the groundbreaking Walking with Dinosaurs show and John was involved in sculpting dinosaurs for it. And we wondered whether it was worth pitching the idea of a 'Walking with Aliens'. After all, we had all of the research done and we'd designed the aliens. I also contacted a brilliant Australian artist called Alex Ries and asked if he wanted to be involved if we got it off the ground. You can see some of his extraordinary alien design work here. Here's a sample:

However, the BBC told us that they were already working on a 'Walking with Aliens' project with Dougal Dixon so we backed off. And that was that for the project. That said, whatever the BBC was planning didn't happen and the series never got made. However, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Discovery Channel was doing something along the same lines. They'd decided to make a CGI show based on the fantastic alien designs and illustrations of Wayne Douglas Barlowe.

Barlowe has designed creatures for many films. For example, he worked on both Hellboy films and designed the wildlife for Avatar. And, in 1993, he wrote a book called Expedition; a lavishly illustrated guide to the wildlife of another planet called Darwin IV. I have a copy and it's a staggeringly lovely thing. And it was this book that Discovery brought to life. I watched the show when it was on and loved it. I even bought the DVD. But now you can watch it all here for free. Enjoy!

P.s. I still have a great alien book project if anyone wants to publish it ...

The Colganology Podcast - Episode 1 - Waiter, there's a fish in my penis

A little podcast in words and pictures for people who don't want to read all the drivel I wrote in my last blogpost. 12 minutes of your life that you'll never get back.



Enjoy!

Chew before swallowing

An amazing fossil find from Eichstätt, a town in southern Germany, now described by Eberhard Frey and Helmut Tischlinger of the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe.

150 million years ago, a winged pterosaur called Rhamphorhynchus swooped low over sea to ctach a fish near the surface of a Jurassic ocean. But then a much larger fish - Aspidorhynchus - grabbed the pterosaur and pulled it under the waves. A fish within a pterosaur within a fish. Amazing.

Source: Frey, E. and Tischlinger, H. (2012) The Late Jurassic Pterosaur Rhamphorhynchus, a Frequent Victim of the Ganoid Fish Aspidorhynchus? PLoS ONE 7(3): e31945. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031945

Stand still!

The earth is NOT rotating. And the Sun is going around the Earth. That's the claim of this extraordinary video. SCIENTISTS ARE LYING TO YOU.



If you don't have time to watch it, here's a precis of the content: 'The Earth isn’t rotating because if it was, we’d all be motion sick from moving at 1,000 miles an hour, which is very fast'. Repeat that about 50 times, intersperse some Christian rock music and some videos and you're good to go.

If you have half an hour to spare you could watch the video and be convinced. Or plait your own intestines. It'll be time just as well spent.

Yes, okay, it's probably a Poe. But it had some effort put into it and it generated a staggering 176 pages of comments on YouTube. I haven't read through them all but the always splendid Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) reports that at some point during the debate, the video's maker fernieboy100 is challenged by a a 12-year old astronomy enthusiast named Kaitlyn who asks ... 'What about Jupiter? Jupiter might have a small rocky core but it’s made of mostly hydrogen and helium, and we can see it rotating even though it’s pretty much all gas.'

fernieboy100 took several months to consider this new information and run more RC helicopter-based calculations before finally announcing:

'I, fernieboy100, am now an atheist who renounces my lord and savior Jesus Christ and his Holy word the Bible.'

Why is there never any middle ground with some people?

The oldest skeleton in the closet

A team of paleontologists has discovered the oldest animal with a skeleton. Called Coronacollina acula, the organism is between 560 million and 550 million years old, which places it in the Ediacaran period, before the explosion of life and diversification of organisms took place on Earth in the Cambrian.

This is a reconstruction of how Coronacollina would have appeared in life. Coronacollina remained in place on the sea floor, and may have used its spicules as support struts. Coronacollina resembles the Cambrian fossil sponge, Choia. The three raised points on the rim are evident, with a central hollow and four spicules extending from the cone rim.

The Ediacaran Period, named after the Ediacara Hills of South Australia, ranges 630-542 million years ago. The Cambrian Period, marked by a rapid diversification of life-forms on Earth as well as the rise of mineralized organisms, ranges 542-488 million years ago.

"Up until the Cambrian, it was understood that animals were soft bodied and had no hard parts," said Mary Droser, a professor of geology at the University of California, Riverside, whose research team made the discovery in South Australia. "But we now have an organism with individual skeletal body parts that appears before the Cambrian. It is therefore the oldest animal with hard parts, and it has a number of them - they would have been structural supports - essentially holding it up. This is a major innovation for animals."

Coronacollina acula is seen in the fossils as a depression measuring a few millimeters to 2 centimeters deep. But because rocks compact over time, the organism could have been bigger – 3 to 5 centimeters tall. Notably, it is constructed in the same way that Cambrian sponges were constructed.

"It therefore provides a link between the two time intervals," Droser said. "We're calling it the 'harbinger of Cambrian constructional morphology,' which is to say it's a precursor of organisms seen in the Cambrian. This is tremendously exciting because it is the first appearance of one of the major novelties of animal evolution."

According to Droser, the appearance of Coronacollina acula signals that the initiation of skeletons was not as sudden in the Cambrian as was thought, and that Ediacaran animals like it are part of the evolutionary lineage of animals as we know them.

Source: PhysOrg and lots more info at Astrobiology Magazine

Yet another NOT missing link

One of Creationisms' most favoured cries is 'Where are all the missing links?' It's the oft-heard claim that evolution cannot be true because of the lack of transitory forms.

Well, firstly, the term 'missing link' is just wrong. Creationists present the evolution of a species as a simple chain of events e.g. fish to amphibian, and claim that if the link between the two is 'missing' then there's no evidence. That's nonsense. To begin with, there may have been hundreds of transitory forms between fish and amphibian. Plus, this simplified view pre-supposes that every species is preserved.

The truth is that fossilisation is a very unlikely and chance event. Therefore, the fossil record, no matter how big it eventually gets, will only ever be a snapshot of the countless millions of lifeforms that existed on this planet before humans evolved. At present we have only discovered about 700 species of dinosaur. Compare that to the fact that there are over 4000 living species of mammal, 10000 species of bird and an estimated 8,000,000 species overall. Fossilisation may not have preserved the majority of species that have ever existed. Therefore, the likelihood that we will find even one unbroken evolutionary timeline in which every single transitory form is preserved is next to zero.

For example, we may never find fossils of all of the forms that have existed between the bear-like animals that re-entered the sea and their descendants, the modern whales. But we do have some of those transitory forms and modern whales undeniably do have disarticulated, atrophied and utterly useless hip bones still embedded in their flesh. The question is ... why? The physical evidence is clearly there that the ancestral whale had a pelvis. And the only reason it would need a pelvis is if it once had legs. And why would God create an animal to live in the sea but give it lungs so that it can drown? Perhaps the commonsense reason that whales have lungs is that they didn't always live in the sea. You don't need every 'missing link' to see what's strikingly obvious.

Evolution is a blind process of chance mutation where an advantageous change may get carried over into future generations and become the norm throughout a species. Consequently, you have to look at fossils with the right mindset. Animals and plants aren't 'trying' to improve. Nor are living things aiming towards some perfect design. Consequently, there are blind alleys where a species doesn't make it. The path from ancestral horse to modern horse isn't a linear progression of species getting ever bigger as some older text books erroneously show, like here:

The true picture is rather more complicated. The evolution of the horse is a story of successes and failures. It isn't a simple linear progression towards an ideal and so the simplistic idea of a chain and missing links doesn't hold up. Here's a more accurate diagram:

Secondly, as I said, some of the 'missing links' have been found. It's just that the hardcore Creation lobby simply chooses to ignore them or they simply don't know about them because they don't read Evolutionist 'propaganda' i.e. properly researched scientific papers. If you want missing links, they are there in abundance. Take Tiktaalik roseae for example. Tiktaalik was something like a crocodile and something like a fish, having features of both. Tiktaalik represents a transitional form; although it had gills rather than lungs, the fossils show clearly that it had bony 'hands' that evolved to allow it to haul itself along on land. and, when compared with the fossils of creatures like Panderichthys and Acanthostega, we can see a clear development of form from fin to foot. Not every step - if you'll pardon the pun - is there yet but there's is evidence of a slow and steady change.

We also find transitional forms in terms of animal behaviour too. As you doubtless know, hermit crabs don't have shells of their own and, instead, inhabit the discarded shells of sea snails such as whelks and winkles etc.. The earliest identifiable crab fossils are found in the Jurassic Era, some 145-200 million years ago and, at that time, one of the most prolific kinds of mollusc in the sea were the ammonites; a now extinct order of animals related to modern day nautilus and octopus. And guess what? Hermit crabs used their shells too. We have the fossils.

I enjoy intelligent debate. So I address these questions to the Creationist movement: Why do fossils exist of crabs using the shells of extinct marine animals? Surely if the world is only 5000 years old then there would still be ammonites in the sea and hermit crabs wouldn't have needed to migrate to sea snail shells. And why would God create hundreds of species of ammonite and then wipe them all out? And how? Surely 'the flood' cannot be blamed as we still have many species of crab and fish. The ammonites couldn't have drowned could they? Not like whales can.

Source: Julia Whitty at Deep Blue Home. My thanks to the lovely Dr Helen Scales for making me aware of this.

An evolution film that evolves

How do you make an authentic evolution animation? Quite simply: you allow it to evolve. Tyler Rhodes, a student in the animation program at Virginia Commonwealth University, wanted to create an animation that wasn’t simply linear, but instead represented the true ‘tree-like’ process of evolution. So he enlisted the help of elementary school students from William Fox Elementary School and the Patrick Henry School of Science & Art, and involved them in a type of game.

“Much like the whispered game “telephone” where one person whispers a message down the line until it’s very different by the end due to small “mutations” along the way, I would create a game of telephone using visual imagery,” he explained.

Tyler began the game by sketching a nondescript salamander-like creature:

He then had various groups of students make copies of this sketch, knowing that the copies would contain subtle differences. The natural variation in the ‘progeny’ created from the first salamander sketch was used to determine the survival of the fittest. Tyler would ‘kill off’ 98% of the organisms and start the process again, this time working from the sketches that ‘survived’. In subsequent iterations he would throw out curveballs like desertification or a volcanic explosion (subsequent to the sketching), which would help the group decide which animals were best suited to survive. They would then take these environmental changes into account when sketching their next creatures.

There was a total of 6 generations, after which time Tyler digitally cut out the images and animated them with his own music and sound effects from the children. The finished product is an evolution video that is completely unique, refreshing and altogether entertaining.



Story: Carin Bondar for Scientific American.

So THAT'S what happened #2

More delicious nonsense from Fake Science.