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Thursday, 1 September 2016

Shoebill Stork Interlude

Whilst I finishing preparing a forthcoming post about how my favourite dinosaur can be likened to mid-90s Celine Dion, have a little look at the Shoebill Stork, an extant bird found in the swamps of Sudan and Zambia.

Birds are the only living descendants of dinosaurs today, and when you look at the Shoebill it's not a hard link to see. Don't worry though, there's no danger of your Zambian safari turning into Jurassic Park Hell as Shoebills only like to chow down on lungfish, turtles and small crocodiles, and at 3.8 feet tall are probably not going to tip your jeep over. Their beaks can grow up to a very accommodating 24cm, which makes me somewhat jealous - imagine all the food you could fit in there all in one go.
Gotta love that smile.

Sunday, 5 June 2016

Britney Spears is not a Neanderthal

 I have a fear of meeting Britney Spears. Yes I know, it’s completely irrational, but it’s a feeling I’ve had since I was a teenager, and one that I’ve never been able to shake. Here is someone who has worked tirelessly her entire adult life to bring me joy - album after album, breakdown after breakdown – and so what the hell would I bring to the relationship, supposing that one day we were to meet? I have nothing to offer Britney, and that is why I am yet to accept any of her invitations to collaborate. Perhaps if one day I  could be responsible for a pop behemoth as mighty as “…Baby One More Time” then I might feel worthy enough to join forces.

  Successful homo sapien relationships – such as the one eluding me and Britney - are based on our ability to collaborate and co operate, and it is arguably these traits that have defined the human success story. In his book “Sapiens”, Yuval Noah Harari tracks the homo sapien’s rise from just another insignificant animal 200,000 years ago to the supreme rulers of the planet. He attributes this world domination to our ability to co operate both flexibly and in large numbers.  Of course, other species show that they are able to co operate in large numbers – bees and ants do this immaculately, but they are incapable of being flexible. And then there are those animals that can co operate flexibly – elephants, monkeys – but not in large numbers. Although, I suppose if you sat 1,000 monkeys in front a typewriter and asked them to type for infinity, eventually one of them would produce a chapter from Genesis.

   Harari concludes that what allows the homo sapien species to do both lies in our special super power – our imaginations. Our species is the only one to have developed imagination, and we have used this ability to imagine to create what Harari calls ‘fictional stories’ – our legal systems, the idea of nationalism, the multitude of religious groups, and economics – ‘here, this piece of paper can be exchanged for goods and services!’ Homo sapiens have succeeded so dramatically because our ability to imagine and believe in these abstract concepts have allowed us to work cooperatively in large numbers. Other animals can only really react to things on face value, but as a collective group we can use our imagination to enable us to work within intellectual constructs that do not really exist.  


  So we’re the leading divas in the Animal Kingdom because we’re great at making things up and having our peers believe us.  But what about the cousins we’ve lost along the way?  One of the anthropological areas of study that has always fascinated me is the discovery of other species within the Homo genus. The evolutionary journey from our primate ancestors to where we are today has so far involved the discovery of seven other Homo species, all of which are now extinct.

   At 2.5 million years old, Homo Habilis is widely believed to be the oldest of the Homo groups, with its larger skull making it markedly different to its Australopithecus counterparts at the time. The other Homo groups all share the same unique features -  being able to walk upright on two legs, possessing large brains, and inventing and using tools make this group pretty special. Homo heidelbergensis (which sounds like something you might catch on holiday in an Austrian brothel) is thought to be the direct link to Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens.  350,000 years ago, a group of Homo heidelbergensis migrated into Europe and evolved in Neanderthals, another group wandered into Asia and became Denisovans, and those that stayed in Africa evolved into Homo sapiens. Here is a simplified family tree showing our journey:


 Of all the extinct Homo groups, it is the European wanderers Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals, that seem to have generated the most press. Bad press. Their name is synonymous with idiot chauvinistic behaviour, and if you’ve ever been down to Wetherspoons in Angel, Islington on a Friday night, you’ll know what I mean.

   But this reputation of the Neanderthal as lacking intelligence is misguided. 250,000 years ago Neanderthals appeared in Europe, and 40,000 years ago they were gone. Within that time frame of 200,000 years, Neanderthals survived in harsh northern landscapes, made tools, were successful hunters, and maintained emotional social relationships within their individual groups. Of all the species that have ever lived, this alone puts them up there in the intelligence stakes. The remains of 400 individual Neanderthals have so far been discovered, and from these we can piece together their way of life. Most of the bones found indicate an extremely difficult existence, one which was characterised by plenty of hand-to-hand combat and violence (again, just like a night in Wetherspoons)

    Neanderthals were physically bigger than their Homo sapien counterparts, but the remains of ten individual Neanderthals found in the Shanidar cave in Iraq indicate that, like us, the Neanderthals cared for their families and performed ritual funerals. 


One of the skeletons of an elderly male show deformity and bruising from an earlier point in his life, and tell us that he was cared for until his death. Another skeleton of a younger Neanderthal male was found in a grave marked deliberately by a pile of stones, indicating a ritual burial.


The arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe 45,000 years ago, and the extinction of Neanderthals just 5,000 years later has raised eyebrows. If we accept that Neanderthals were not unintelligent oafs but actually smart and emotional in the way that their Homo sapiens counterparts were, then the question becomes: what made us successful survivors, and the Neanderthals go extinct? For the answer to this, we must look back to collaboration and imagination.

 In his excellent book, “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body”, Steven Mithen examines the Neanderthal’s hunting technology, and asserts that although they understood animal behaviour, they were not able to make specialised hunting weapons to target different animals in different situations, unlike us who basically became great at it. Mithen suggests that the extra neural circuits present in the Homo sapien brain, which have ‘the capacity for metaphor, which underlines art, science and religion’ – were absent in the Neanderthals, and so they were unable to problem solve in the way that we are. Neanderthals were smart in so far as they were able to make tools, but they weren't imaginative enough to adapt these tools to solve problems.

  Our larger prefrontal cortexes give us a better working memory, and this in turn allows us to do perform tasks that other animals can’t. Anthropologist Alison Brooks cites the presence of trade networks and social networking (think Facebook, but with a lot of walking) in early Homo sapiens as a key reason for their success, and the absence of which as a possible reason for the Neanderthal demise. Other theories suggest that Homo sapien disease wiped out the Neanderthals, and there is evidence to suggest that some of us carry Neanderthal DNA, indicating some level of interbreeding between the two groups. Pat Shipman in her book “Invaders” argues that the creation of a man-wolf alliance between our Homo sapien ancestors and canines meant that a sort of awesome Batman and Robin tagteam was created to slay the competition in Europe at the time – bye Neanderthals, see ya European lions, adios European mammoths, get gone European hyenas! This strong relationship between man and dog still exists today, although I doubt that most dog owners use their dogs to go around killing things.

The fate of the Neanderthals, who were clearly an intelligent group in their own right, tell us a lot about what makes us special. By working collaboratively, and powered by our unique gift of imagination and abstract thought, we have achieved many unbelievable things. The snag comes in making sure that the power of our collaborative forces are used for good, instead of evil. I think we all remember Madonna's "Hard Candy"


Maybe I should return Britney’s call after all.

Wednesday, 17 February 2016

Titanoboa (the Whitney Houston of snakes)

 Sometime between 1690 - 1700 the term 'snake in the grass' was first used to describe a treacherous person, especially one who feigns friendship. Fast forward 300 or so years and I'm standing there in my living room, being accused by my mentally ill housemate of the same thing. Idioms and arguments aside, the homo sapien's fear and revilement of snakes has a long history, but maybe those Ophidiophobes should count themselves lucky that they don't live in the Paleocene epoch 58 million years ago  - cover your eyes, we're about to go big.

 Immediately following Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event which closed the curtains on all non-avian dinosaurs (and a lot of the supporting actors from other species) much of the remaining life on Earth underwent a process of rapid diversification called 'adaptive radiation.' Birds, fish, snakes and mammals diversified into many various forms that we recognise today - horses, whales, iguanas, tunas, eels et al. Mammals would obviously go on to great things but recent fossil evidence in Colombia shows between 60-58 million years ago reptiles and snakes near the Equator grew to gigantic sizes due to extreme climate conditions. Enter, Titanoboa:


Titanboa is the largest species of snake ever discovered, and fossil disocveries in the Cerrejon Formation in La Guajira, Colombia, show that these bad boys grew up to 14.5 meters/48 feet long. Quite remarkably for a snake fossil finding, a Titanboa skull was recovered in the dig, as well as fossils from other monstrously large species, such as the Carbonemys, which is the largest turtle ever discovered, with a shell that measured 5.8 feet long! Imagine getting to spend the day in hanging out in a Paeleocene equatorial South American swamp - I don't know about you, but I'm packing pepper spray in my purse.


Titanboa spent most of its time underwater to support its massive frame, and would chow down on crocodiles and large fish in the few times it ate. Much like snakes today, and Whitney Houston in the early 1990s, the Titanboa could unlock its jaw to slay its prey.

 In 2012, a life sized statue was on show in New York's Grand Central:


The findings of Titanboa and Carbonemys tell us that equatorial South America recovered fairly quickly after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. The higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and higher temperatures also tell us that many animals and plants are able to cope with extreme tropical climates -  which is just as well considering the alarming global warming rate we are experiencing.

Ophidiophobes - you can open your eyes now.

Tuesday, 16 February 2016

Titanomyrma (Giant ant)

I was recently reminded of the importance of conflict resolution when my housemate and I had such a blazing row that a week later I am still in duck and cover position in the corner of my living room, removing shrapnel from my hair. Like many other fighting homo sapiens, we'd have been wise to learn from Dorylus Molestus, which despite having a latin name that sounds like an allegation against your grandma, is in fact a living genus of east African army ants. So wise is Dorylus that when two colonies of the same species meet, they usually change marching direction to avoid conflicts. Dorylus are the largest known extant ant species, with the queen growing to a whopping 8 centimeters.

The discovery of a similarly-sized 50 million year old queen ant fossil raised eyebrows due to its enormous size  and because it was found in Wyoming. Like Dorylus, the now-named Titanomyrma could grow up to 8 centimetres in length, and so is comparable size-wise to that of a modern hummingbird:

How giant ants ended up in both North America and Europe is the big question, and to find the answer we have to look again at the changing climates of the Eocene epoch in the Paleogene period. The hyperthermals were geologically brief periods of global warming 55.5 - 52 million years ago caused by a massive carbon release from thawing permafrost. This caused many ice free land bridges between Europe and North America, which allowed different animal and plant species to cross.over.  Titanomyrma would have crossed over in this period, and  its discovery in Wyoming tells us that Wyoming in the early Eocene had a climate similar to that of East Africa today.

Tuesday, 29 December 2015

Sarcosuchus ('flesh crocodile')

Sarcosuchus was ridiculous. Growing up to 39 feet long and weighing 8 tonnes, sarcosuchus make modern crocodiles look positively Toys 'R' Us by comparison.  For a fun juxtaposition, here's what a sarcosuchus head would look like stood next to a modern man in an Hawaiian shirt:


Our understanding of this true giant started in 1964, when a nearly complete skull was found in Niger, Africa. To make room for its 132 teeth, the head of the sarcosuchus was 6 foot alone!

Sarcosuchus lived 112 million years ago, in the mid-Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, and displayed a lot of the features and characteristics of their crocodilian descendants today. The sarcosuchus could not 'death roll' like modern crocodiles do, but had a bite that was so powerful that it didn't need to perform such acrobatics to prepare its meal. Such was its size that its only potential for competition came from the 49-foot dinosaur Spinosaurus, one of the fiercest and largest predators this planet has ever seen (Spinosaurus has a star turn in Jurassic Park III, if you remember.)

Without knowing who would win in a sarcosuchus vs spinosaurus fight, what can be said with certainty is that both of these creatures were unable to use their awesome statures to survive the changing climate towards the end of the Cretaceous period. As the Earth's climate became drier, neither could adapt from their reliance of an aquatic habitat. Both went extinct roughly 90 million years ago, a good deal of time before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction came for pretty much every other living thing 25 million years later.

PS: Here's Nigel Marvin re-enacting what a human-sarcosuchus encounter might play out like. I love you, Nigel Marvin.


Tuesday, 22 December 2015

Megatherium Americanum (Giant Ground Sloth)

In terms of the Earth's  history, the Pleistocene Epoch (beginning 2.6 million - 11,000 years ago) was a particularly exciting period of development and change for mammals. The most recent Ice Age occurred, and within this time homo sapiens evolved to the beautiful beach babes that we are today. But most exciting of all was the rise and fall of the megafauna, giant beasts which roamed Australia and North and South America. Megafauna are classified as large or giant animals, and so elephants today fall under that category. (When they go extinct in about 5 minutes time, perhaps future generations will look at elephants in the same way that we look at megafauna of the Pleistocene epoch.)



 No Pleistocene megafauna has captured my imagination like Megatherium Americanum, the largest of the giant ground sloths that inhabited South America. There has been much debate on whether these beasts were omnivores, but what can be said with certainty is the 13 foot tall giants used their stature and massive claws to shred vegetation off of the plant life around them, much of which was unattainable to their short-arsed herbivore contemporaries. It's incredible to think that, despite weighing 4 tonnes, the megatherium were able to support that frame and walk on their hind legs. Still, I suspect many of us will manage a similar feat after the festive season has ended.

 What made the megatherium and other megafauna go extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch is hotly contested. The most popular theory points the finger at homo sapiens (again), as their global movements correlate with a rapid extinction of other species (again). In their excellent book 'Megafauna: Giant Beasts of Pleistocene South America', Farina, Vizcaino and De Juliis, cite evidence of a Lestodon sloth collarbone found in Uruguay with 87 human-made marks - chopping sawing, incisions and scraping. Whether this means that homo sapiens actively sought out and hunted megafauna, or whether the homo sapien nomads enjoyed an opportunistic find, it indicates an exciting period in our history where our ancestors shared a stage with these extinct beasts.

 Other theories come from a changing climate and extraterrestrial debris - that falling objects from space set areas of North America on fire and caused extreme climate disruption. This theory holds a lot of questions about our own sustainability, because it shows the devastating domino effect that occurs when food chains and ecosystems are disturbed.

                               

Anyway, more on Megafauna later - you won't believe the size of the Glyptodon armadillo!


Saturday, 12 December 2015

Anthropornis Penguin

Whether it's the online videos of them slipping and sliding all over the Antartic, or just their comical way of waddling around, penguins are one of nature's most popular animals, enjoying the sort of celebrity status that hippos used to have, before everyone realised that hippos are actually extremely aggressive (see also: Bill Cosby)

But whilst modern penguins are certifiably fun for Planet Earth - with an added cute factor that many of them mate for life - there's something a little less Disney about the Anthropornis penguin, a terrifyingly giant penguin that lived during the late Eocene epoch in the Paleogene period 37-45 million years ago. Fossil discoveries - including a 9cm tarsometatarsus (a bone found only in the lower leg of birds) suggest that this bird could have measured anywhere between 5.5 - 6.5 feet tall. By comparison, Emperor penguins are the tallest of the living penguin genus, at 3.5 feet tall.


I would love to be able to press a button and have a couple of hundred Anthropornis penguins come back to life and just waddle around, trying to inconspicuously blend into our crowd scenes. And seeing as they would have matched us at head height, a homo sapien vs anthropornis basketball match would make for interesting viewing.