Evolution – Page 2 – artdiamondblog.com

Giant Bee “Feared Extinct” Is Found Alive

(p. D2) It’s been 38 years since scientists last spotted the insect known as Wallace’s Giant Bee, a rare species found only in a group of Indonesian islands called the North Moluccas. With a wingspan of 2.5 inches and a body the size of a human thumb, it’s considered the world’s largest bee, and was feared extinct.

Those fears can now be somewhat laid to rest. In January [2019], an international team of conservationists found a Megachile pluto, as the species is called, in the wild.

For the full story see:

Douglas Quenqua. “Still Bite-Size: A Bee Absurdly Big, And Surprisingly Alive.” The New York Times (Tuesday, March 5, 2019 [sic]): D2.

(Note: bracketed year added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 21, 2019 [sic], and has the title “The World’s Largest Bee Is Not Extinct.”)

Observations of Non-Credentialed Citizens Add to “Scientific” Knowledge

(p. D5) In 1811, a 12-year-old girl named Mary Anning discovered a fossil on the beach near her home in southwestern England — the first scientifically identified specimen of an ichthyosaur, a dolphin-like, ocean-dwelling reptile from the time of the dinosaurs. Two centuries later, less than 50 miles away, an 11-year-old girl named Ruby Reynolds found a fossil from another ichthyosaur. It appears to be the largest marine reptile known to science.

Ms. Reynolds, now 15, and her father, Justin Reynolds, have been fossil hunting for 12 years near their home in Braunton, England. On a family outing in May 2020 to the village of Blue Anchor along the estuary of the River Severn, they came across a piece of fossilized bone set on a rock.

“We were both excited as we had never found a piece of fossilized bone as big as this before,” Mr. Reynolds said. His daughter kept searching the beach, he added, “and it wasn’t long before she found another much larger piece of bone.”

They took home the fragments of bone, the largest of which was about eight inches long, and began their research. A 2018 paper provided a hint at what they’d found: In nearby Lilstock, fossil hunters had discovered similar bone fragments, hypothesized to be part of the jaw bone of a massive ichthyosaur that lived roughly 202 million years ago. However, the scientists who’d worked on the Lilstock fossil had deemed that specimen too incomplete to designate a new species.

Mr. Reynolds contacted those researchers: Dean Lomax, at the University of Bristol, and Paul de la Salle, an amateur fossil collector. They joined the Reynolds family on collecting trips in Blue Anchor, digging in the mud with shovels. Ultimately, they found roughly half of a bone that they estimate would have been more than seven feet long when complete.

. . .

Dr. Lomax said that this discovery also highlighted the importance of amateur fossil collectors. “If you have a keen eye, if you have a passion for something like that, you can make discoveries like this,” he said.

Ruby Reynolds said: “I didn’t realize when I first found the piece of ichthyosaur bone how important it was and what it would lead to. I think the role that young people can play in science is to enjoy the journey of exploring as you never know where a discovery may take you.”

For the full story see:

Kate Golembiewski. “Huge Ocean Reptile From Dinosaur Days.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 30, 2024): D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 17, 2024, and has the title “An 11-Year-Old Girl’s Fossil Find Is the Largest Known Ocean Reptile.” Where there is a difference in wording between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Lomax co-authored an article with Justin Reynolds and Ruby Reynolds that described and named the huge ocean reptile:

Lomax, Dean R., Paul de la Salle, Marcello Perillo, Justin Reynolds, Ruby Reynolds, and James F. Waldron. “The Last Giants: New Evidence for Giant Late Triassic (Rhaetian) Ichthyosaurs from the UK.” PLOS ONE 19, no. 4 (2024): e0300289.

Economical Parrots Decline an Immediate Smaller Treat to Be Able to Trade a Token for a Bigger Treat

(p. D3) Chalk up another achievement for parrots, . . . .

Anastasia Krasheninnikova and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany tested four species of parrots in an experiment that required trading tokens for food and recently reported their findings in the journal Scientific Reports.

. . .

A metal hoop could be traded for a piece of dry corn, the lowest value food, a metal bracket for a medium value sunflower seed and a plastic ring for the highest value food, a piece of shelled walnut.

The birds were then offered various choices, like a piece of corn or the ring. They all reliably chose to forgo the corn and take the ring. Then they were able to trade the ring for a piece of walnut.

They also did well choosing a bracket instead of the corn, and in other situations where the token was of higher value than the food.

For the full story see:

James Gorman. “Parrots Think They’re Pretty Smart.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2018 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “Parrots Think They’re So Smart. Now They’re Bartering Tokens for Food.” Where there is a small difference in wording between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The paper published in Scientific Reports and mentioned above is:

Krasheninnikova, Anastasia, Friederike Höner, Laurie O’Neill, Elisabetta Penna, and Auguste M. P. von Bayern. “Economic Decision-Making in Parrots.” Scientific Reports 8, no. 1 (2018): 12537.

Repeated Interbreeding of Brown Bears and Polar Bears Illustrates Fuzziness of Defining a Species

(p. D1) Naturalists have been trying for centuries to catalog all of the species on Earth, and the effort remains one of the great unfinished jobs in science. So far, researchers have named about 2.3 million species, but there are millions — perhaps even billions — left to be discovered.

As if this quest isn’t hard enough, biologists cannot agree on what a species is. A 2021 survey found that practicing biologists used 16 different approaches to categorizing species. Any two of the scientists picked at random were overwhelmingly likely to use different ones.

“Everyone uses the term, but no one knows what it is,” said Michal Grabowski, a biologist at the University of Lodz in Poland.

The debate over species is more than an academic pastime. In the current extinction crisis, scientists urgently need to take stock of the world’s biological diversity.

. . .

(p. D4) As scientists gather more genetic data, fresh questions are emerging about what seem, on the surface, to be obviously separate species.

You don’t have to be a mammalogist to understand that polar bears and brown bears are different. Just one look at their white and brown coats will do.

The difference in their colors is the result of their ecological adaptations. White polar bears blend into their Arctic habitats, where they hunt for seals and other prey. Brown bears adapted for life on land further south. The differences are so distinct that paleontologists can distinguish fossils of the two species going back hundreds of thousands of years.

And yet the DNA inside those ancient bones is revealing an astonishing history of interbreeding between polar bears and brown bears. After the two lineages split about half a million years ago, they exchanged DNA for thousands of years. They then became more distinct, but about 120,000 years ago they underwent another extraordinary exchange of genes.

Between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago, the bears interbred in several parts of their range. The exchanges have left a significant imprint on bears today: About 10 percent of the DNA in brown bears comes from polar bears.

Beth Shapiro, a paleogeneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that the interbreeding most likely occurred when swings in the climate forced polar bears down from the Arctic and into brown bear territory.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “Defining A Species Is Open To Debate.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 20, 2024): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 19, 2024, and has the title “What Is a Species, Anyway?”)

The 2021 survey mentioned above was more fully detailed in:

Stankowski, Sean, and Mark Ravinet. “Quantifying the Use of Species Concepts.” Current Biology 31, no. 9 (May 10, 2021): R428-R429.

“Never Say Die” in Search of Species That We’ve Declared Extinct

(p. D1) Just a few years ago, it seemed like the scarce yellow sally stonefly had gone locally extinct.

In 1995, ecologists collected a single specimen of the aquatic insect in the River Dee near the Wales-England boundary, the species’ only known refuge. For the next two decades, every survey there failed to find another of the stonefly, which is only about a half an inch long.

“There had been so much work done to refind this beast,” said Craig Macadam, conservation director at the Invertebrate Conservation Trust, more commonly known as Buglife, a charity in Britain. “We were all beginning to give up hope.”

. . .

(p. D5) “When you actually see the animal alive in front of you and then the next year it’s gone, you feel like you’ve watched it disappear from Earth,” Mr. Davy-Bowker said. “Nobody could find it, so that was it. It just disappeared.”

But Mr. Davy-Bowker wouldn’t quit. In March 2017, during the season when the River Dee is at its coldest and deepest and stonefly nymphs are large, he put on chest waders and went in.

. . .

About 20 minutes into that day’s expedition, Mr. Davy-Bowker captured a living scarce yellow sally stonefly, upending 22 years of presumed local extinction.

“I couldn’t believe it. I was absolutely staggered, really,” he said. “I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to find it again. Never say die.”

. . .

Mr. Macadam, of the Buglife conservation charity, said the species’ rediscovery has rekindled hope for other critically endangered invertebrates that have gone missing.

“For me, it opened up the possibility that there is another species that we’ve declared extinct, that is still holding on somewhere,” he said.

For the full story see:

Marion Renault. “Don’t Believe Your Eyes.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 25, 2020 [sic]): D1 & D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Feb. 25, 2020 [sic], and has the title “‘Never Say Die’: Genetic Sleuths Rediscover Extinct Species.” Where there is a slight difference in wording in the last quoted sentence between the versions, the passage quoted above follows the online version.)

Australian Night Parrot Found Alive After Thought Extinct for 140 Years

(p. D3) Depending on whom you ask, the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine has either been extinct for nearly a century or has been just really good at hiding.

Now new research examining hundreds of reports from more than a century shows there is a good chance the thylacine may have persisted for a few decades longer in the most remote parts of Tasmania.

“There are pockets where the species could have maintained small populations,” said Barry Brook, a professor of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania.

One of the problems with the thylacine, and extinction in general, is it’s hard to prove something is truly gone. Australia’s night parrot for instance, was thought to be extinct for 140 years until its recent rediscovery.

. . .

For a study published . . . [online on March 18, 2023 [sic]] in the journal Science of the Total Environment, Dr. Brook’s team studied 1,237 Tasmanian tiger reports from 1910 onward. It classified these reports in terms of credibility.

For the full story see:

Joshua Rapp Learn. “When Did Tasmanian Tigers Actually Disappear?” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 2, 2023 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 7, 2023 [sic], and has the title “New Support for Some Extinct Tasmanian Tiger Sightings.”)

The study co-authored by Dr. Brook and mentioned above is:

Brook, Barry W., Stephen R. Sleightholme, Cameron R. Campbell, Ivan Jarić, and Jessie C. Buettel. “Resolving When (and Where) the Thylacine Went Extinct.” Science of The Total Environment 877 (June 2023): 162878.

Life Was Resilient Even in the Face of Earth’s Greatest Disaster

(p. D2) The asteroid moved 24 times faster than a rifle bullet as it struck Earth some 66 million years ago. Its supersonic shock wave flattened trees across North and South America, and its heat wave sparked incomprehensibly large forest fires.

The event lofted so much debris into the atmosphere that photosynthesis shut down. The non-avian dinosaurs disappeared. And nearly 75 percent of all species were extinguished.

. . .

But even at ground zero, life managed to return, and quickly.

New findings published in the journal Geology . . . [online on January 17, 2020 [sic]] revealed that cyanobacteria — blue-green algae responsible for harmful toxic blooms — moved into the crater a few years after the impact.

For the full story see:

Shannon Hall. “Small Survivors: They Were Left Off Killer Asteroid’s Hit List.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 18, 2020 [sic]): D2.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 1, 2020 [sic], and has the title “Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs Was Great for Bacteria.” Where the wording differs between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the usually more detailed wording of the online version.)

The findings published in Geology and mentioned above appear in the article:

Schaefer, Bettina, Kliti Grice, Marco J.L. Coolen, Roger E. Summons, Xingqian Cui, Thorsten Bauersachs, Lorenz Schwark, Michael E. Böttcher, Timothy J. Bralower, Shelby L. Lyons, Katherine H. Freeman, Charles S. Cockell, Sean P.S. Gulick, Joanna V. Morgan, Michael T. Whalen, Christopher M. Lowery, and Vivi Vajda. “Microbial Life in the Nascent Chicxulub Crater.” Geology 48, no. 4 (2020): 328-32.

Humans’ Adaptive, Flexible Intelligence Evolved Where Climate “Change Was Dramatic, Frequent, Unpredictable and Stressful”

(p. C9) In “Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History,” astrobiologist and professor of science communication Lewis Dartnell argues that “there is a clear causal chain taking us from the politics and socio-economic conditions of today, to their roots in historical agricultural systems, and then further back to the geological tapestry of the ground beneath our feet.”

. . .

The final sentence he offers as summation—“The Earth made us”—can be read two ways, capturing the parallel themes of “Origins.”

With emphasis on “us,” it refers to the origin of the genus Homo, a clade of naked apes giving rise to our species, H. sapiens, the greatest biological superpower of all time, one so potent that all others in our genus are extinct. Why did this emergence take place in the cradle of the East African Rift and nowhere else? And why did the arrival of our genus broadly coincide with the onset of high-frequency climatic swings about two million years ago? Mr. Dartnell concludes that this recently uplifted and intricately rifted landscape created a mosaic of habitats dominated by lakes that further amplified the climatic oscillations between dry-wet and hot-cool conditions. Change was dramatic, frequent, unpredictable and stressful. Thus “intelligence” became “the evolutionary solution to the problem of an environment that shifts faster than natural selection can adapt the body . . . driving . . . ever more flexible and intelligent behavior.”

For the full review, see:

Robert M. Thorson. “The Earth and Us.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 23, 2022 [sic]): C9.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraph, added; ellipses within paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 9, 2019 [sic], and has the title “‘Origins’ Review: The Earth and Us.”)

The book under review is:

Dartnell, Lewis. Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History. New York: Basic Books, 2019.

Crowdsourced Data on Elephants’ Response to Death

(p. D2) It was 2013 when Sanjeeta Pokharel first witnessed Asian elephants responding to death. An older female elephant in an Indian park had died of an infection. A younger female was walking in circles around the carcass.

. . .

For a paper published Wednesday [May 18, 2022 [sic]] in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the scientists used YouTube to crowdsource videos of Asian elephants responding to death. They found reactions that included touching and standing guard as well as nudging, kicking and shaking. In a few cases, females had even used their trunks to carry calves, or baby elephants, that had died.

. . .

Combing through YouTube, the researchers found 24 cases for study.

For the full story see:

Elizabeth Preston. “Gray Mourning: All for One, and One for All: Crowdsourcing Grieving Elephants.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 24, 2022 [sic]): D2.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 17, 2022 [sic], and has the title “Elephants in Mourning Spotted on YouTube by Scientists.” Where the wording differs slightly between versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The paper in the Royal Society Open Science journal mentioned above is:

Pokharel, Sanjeeta Sharma, Nachiketha Sharma, and Raman Sukumar. “Viewing the Rare through Public Lenses: Insights into Dead Calf Carrying and Other Thanatological Responses in Asian Elephants Using Youtube Videos.” Royal Society Open Science 9, no. 5 (May 2022): 211740.

9,000 Years Ago 10,000 Humans Lived in the City of Catalhoyuk

The Catalhoyuk section of Four Cities appears germane to the question: how long have humans more or less like us existed on earth? Apparently at least 9,000 years. But only in the last few hundred years have some humans flourished. The bigger question is: what novel economic system has allowed the the flourishers to leapfrog previous humans?

(p. 16) Nine thousand years ago, the people of Catalhoyuk, maybe 10,000 of them, lived in cuboid clay houses packed against one another above the Konya Plain of south-central Turkey. Their dwellings were uniform, suggesting a highly regulated society: one or two rooms, painted in white or with red ocher designs. You exited not via a front door but by climbing a ladder to the roof. Much of life was lived up there: cooking, socializing, ambling along sidewalks that ran across the top of the city.

Let me say that again in case you missed it: This was 9,000 years ago. In terms of human society, that is just an imponderable span of time. The oldest of the books of the Hebrew Bible date to roughly 3,000 years ago; the pyramids of Egypt go back about 5,000 years. These were not prehumans or near relatives. They were like us: complex, organized, alive to meaning and living at a time beyond reckoning.

. . .

At Catalhoyuk, Newitz hangs out with Ruth Tringham of the University of California, Berkeley, who has devoted years to humanizing the remnants of this city of the dim past by focusing on one skeleton, of a woman she has dubbed Dido. Dido replastered her walls regularly, kept her home swept clean, covered the floor in reed mats and decorated the place with art: clay figures of animals and stylized human females. In other words: much like us.

Catalhoyuk was founded by pioneers of urban living. “When the earliest construction began,” Newitz writes, “many people coming to live at Catalhoyuk were only a generation or two removed from nomadism.” It was brand-new, this fixed settlement thing, but it proved remarkably successful. By the time Dido was born, the city was about 600 years old. I’m tempted to repeat a number yet again. Think of the settled, structured history Dido could look back on. As evidence of her awareness of the past, Dido, like everyone else in town, buried her ancestors in her home, beneath her bed. Some were given a special honor: Their skulls sat in niches in the walls. Dido could enjoy the comfort of her forebears’ empty eye sockets following her as she went about her daily chores. In other words: not so much like us.

. . .

Perhaps looking back 9,000 years can yield practical guidance on how to move forward from where we are. For me, the effect of reading “Four Lost Cities” was more meditative. This is a long, long, long ride we are on. Much is beyond our control. Humanity trundles on.

For the full review, see:

Russell Shorto. “In Ruins.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 14, 2021 [sic]): 14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 25, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Searching for Our Urban Future in the Ruins of the Past.”)

The book under review is:

Newitz, Annalee. Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Geology Scientists by a Large Majority Reject the Anthropocene as a New Epoch

(p. A1) The Triassic was the dawn of the dinosaurs. The Paleogene saw the rise of mammals. The Pleistocene included the last ice ages.

Is it time to mark humankind’s transformation of the planet with its own chapter in Earth history, the “Anthropocene,” or the human age?

Not yet, scientists have decided, after a debate that has spanned nearly 15 years. Or the blink of an eye, depending on how you look at it.

For the full story, see:

Raymond Zhong. “Geologists Say It’s Not Time to Declare a Human-Created Epoch.” The New York Times (Wednesday, March 6, 2024): A1 & A8.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 8 [sic], 2024, and has the title “Are We in the ‘Anthropocene,’ the Human Age? Nope, Scientists Say.”)