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127 million-year-old baby bird rewrites dinosaur story

Matthew Loffhagen
Outer Places
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 10:50 UTC
Prehistoric Bird
© YouTube
Ever since the release of Jurassic Park, it's been common knowledge that dinosaurs share more than a few similarities with birds.

As the years have gone by, more data has proven that, contrary to popular belief, many dinosaurs were covered in feathers, giving them a far more avian look.

What's even less well known, though, is that there were actually some types of birds in existence in the time of the dinosaurs, which looked very similar to the airborne fowl that we're used to seeing today. A new paper, published in Nature Communications, shows off the findings of an analysis of an adorable tiny baby bird that was born (and subsequently died) around 127 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous period of Earth's history.
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Fish

Storm Emma's grisly aftermath: Beaches in east Yorkshire, UK blanketed by millions of dead sea creatures (PHOTOS)

Mark Duell
Daily Mail
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 15:42 UTC
Big tides and Storm Emma's gale force winds are believed to have caused the huge dump of sea creatures in East Yorkshire
Big tides and Storm Emma's gale force winds are believed to have caused the huge dump of sea creatures in East Yorkshire
Beachgoers were left shocked after a devastating scene of millions of sea creatures from fish to lobsters washed up on the shore.

Big tides and gale force winds from Storm Emma are believed to have caused the huge dump of animals along the East Yorkshire coast.

Shocking pictures from Fraisthorpe beach near Bridlington show tonnes of the creatures on the shore, with many people coming and filling buckets and boxes and carrying them away.

It comes after tens of thousands of dead starfish were also washed up at Ramsgate in Kent following the severe weather, with witnesses saying it looked 'like the armageddon'.

Comment: See also: Thousands of starfish killed by "unusually low sea temperatures" on the isle of Thanet, UK (VIDEO)

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Ice Cube

Thousands of starfish killed by "unusually low sea temperatures" on the isle of Thanet, UK (VIDEO)

Kathy Bailes
The Isle of Thanet News
Sat, 03 Mar 2018 12:00 UTC
starfish MME
© Nick Powell
More starfish and other marine life is likely to be washed up on isle beaches with the coming of the Spring tides.

Thousands of dead starfish were piled on beaches across the isle this morning (March 3) including at Ramgate, Dumpton, Westgate, Viking Bay and Palm Bay.

The severe cold spell is the cause as the starfish, which feed on molluscs, gather in great numbers around mussel beds. When strong currents pass through during a storm, the starfish can be lifted up and carried to the shore.

Thanet coastal warden Tony Ovenden said: "With the Spring tides coming up over the next few days there will be more evidence of the winter kill on our shores. The way the starfish have curled up is evident that the sudden drop in temperature killed them off.

Comment: See Also :

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Info

'Reverse speciation' - Raven species reverse Darwin's tree

Stephen Fleischfresser
Cosmos Magazine
Sun, 04 Mar 2018 17:18 UTC
Raven
© Stephencdickson/WikipediaA common raven, in its own way reconfiguring Darwinian thought.
A new study of the genetic make-up of ravens has revealed a startling and little-known side to evolution - "reverse speciation". And as science gradually becomes more aware of this phenomenon, researchers are finding it popping up everywhere, including in humans.

In 1837 (or possibly 1838) Charles Darwin sat aboard HMS Beagle and in his diary sketched the first evolutionary tree, depicting a single species branching out to become many, a visual representation of his ideas about descent with modification. This image is central to the modern understanding of evolution and the generally held belief that the most important evolutionary phenomenon is speciation - the forming of new species from a parent species.

But this might not be the whole story. Scientists are beginning to suspect that the evolutionary histories of some organisms aren't all about endless branching and speciation. Rather, some organisms have "reticulated histories", meaning their lines of descent form a network, with lineages occasionally coming together.

This, at least, is the conclusion of recent research on the North American common raven (Corvus corax) published in the journal Nature Communications. Lead author Anna Kearns, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Centre for Conservation Genomics in Washington DC, US, builds on years of research by her colleagues and co-authors to demonstrate that two lineages of common ravens have actually come together to form a new hybrid, which in certain places is replacing both parent species. This is known as "reverse speciation"'.
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Wolf

Aggressive coyotes attacking people in Westchester County, New York


Eyewitness News
Sun, 04 Mar 2018 13:04 UTC
Coyote
Police in Westchester County have been searching for aggressive coyotes responsible for attacks that have terrorized neighborhoods this week.

In Yonkers, police said one coyote was shot Thursday in the vicinity of Dunwoodie Golf Course, while another remains at large.

"The coyote did become aggressive with the police officer. Came out of the brush and bit that officer and then was shot at that time," said Kieran O'Leary of the Westchester County Police Department.

Police say around 2 p.m. Thursday, a coyote attacked a woman riding a bicycle on South County Trailway.

It missed her, biting her back tire instead.


Comment: See also:

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Attention

Signs and Portents: Strange newborn calf in East Java, Indonesia has face resembling Persian cat

Bridie Pearson-jones and Victoria Bell
Daily Mail
Sat, 03 Mar 2018 19:26 UTC
This bizarre footage shows a newborn calf in Indonesia with a rare deformity that makes his face resemble that of a Persian cat
This bizarre footage shows a newborn calf in Indonesia with a rare deformity that makes his face resemble that of a Persian cat
This bizarre footage shows a newborn calf in Indonesia with a rare deformity that makes his face resemble that of a Persian cat.

The video, which was posted last week, shows baffled locals in the village of Pendil in the Probolinggo district, gathering around and bottle feeding the newborn.

Although the legs and body are the same as a cows, the face is unique and its nose pronounced inwards giving it a flattened appearance.

In the video, local people gathered to see and film the calf on their mobile phones, and one man is seen feeding it with a bottle of milk.

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Binoculars

North Pole gull brought in by the 'Beast from the East' to Weymouth, UK

Stuart Winter
Express (UK)
Fri, 02 Mar 2018 17:50 UTC
Ross's gull at Lodmoor RSPB (Dorset)
© Peter CoeRoss's gull at Lodmoor RSPB (Dorset)
Ross's gull measures little more than a blackbird but is adapted to life in some of the most inhospitable seas on Earth, searching for food on the edge of the polar ice cap.

It breeds in Northern Greenland, Canada as well as Siberia and only rare drifts southwards.

Yet over the past few days, the snowy white gull has been delighting twitchers at the RSPB's Lodmoor reserve in Dorset.

For many, Ross's gull is the most beautiful of its family, with its dove-like features, diamond-shaped tail and white plumage suffused with pink.

They only turn up in exceptional circumstances every few years, and the arrival of bird on the South Coast even got mentioned in dispatches from the Met Office this week.

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Wolf

Rottweiler mauls baby girl to death in Inverell, Australia

Megan Palin
news.com.au
Sat, 03 Mar 2018 13:22 UTC
canine attack
© Angela Antunes / CC by 2.0
A baby girl has been mauled to death by a pet dog in the outback town of Inverell, New South Wales.

The one-year-old child died after being attacked by the family's rottweiler this afternoon.

Emergency services were called to a home on Greaves Street, Inverell, about 2.20pm.

"On arrival officers found the child suffering critical injuries," a NSW Police statement read.
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Ice Cube

Super-colony of 1.5 Million Adélie penguins discovered on Danger islands, Antarctica

Julissa Treviño
Smithsonian
Fri, 02 Mar 2018 16:17 UTC
Super-Colony of 1.5 Million Adélie Penguins discovered on Danger island, Antarctic
© Thomas Sayre-McCord, WHOI/MITQuadcopter aerial imagery of Adélie penguin breeding colonies on Heroina Island, Danger Islands, Antarctica
Captured in satellite images, the white stretches of penguin poop stood in stark contrast to the brown rocky surface of Danger islands, a remote archipelago located off the northernmost tip of the Antarctic peninsula. It's not commonly thought to be a popular penguin spot, but the poop was a telltale sign that the black and white birds waddled nearby.

Even so, as Jonathan Amos and Victoria Gill report for BBC News, when scientists ventured out, what they found surprised them: Around 1.5 million Adélie penguins were thriving in these far flung nesting grounds, grouped in some of the largest known colonies of the birds in the world.

A team of scientists led by ecologist Heather Lynch of Stony Brook University in New York first spotted signs of penguin activity in 2014 when using an algorithm to search through images from the Landsat satellite, a craft jointly managed by the USGS and NASA. Though Landsat does not offer particularly clear images, the researchers were surprised when they saw such a large area spotted with penguin poop, Robert Lee Hotz reports for The Wall Street Journal. A year later, another team visited the location and discovered a far larger population of Adélie penguins than they had ever imaged.

Comment: While we are seeing a decline and mass mortality events in some species, others seem to be thriving, and unsurprisingly, as we enter an ice age, in those adapted to cold:


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X

The terrifying phenomenon plummeting species towards extinction

David Derbyshire
The Guardian
Sun, 25 Feb 2018 03:00 UTC
Dead Antelope
© ReutersDead saiga antelopes in a field in Kazakhstan.
There was almost something biblical about the scene of devastation that lay before Richard Kock as he stood in the wilderness of the Kazakhstan steppe. Dotted across the grassy plain, as far as the eye could see, were the corpses of thousands upon thousands of saiga antelopes. All appeared to have fallen where they were feeding.

Some were mothers that had travelled to this remote wilderness for the annual calving season, while others were their offspring, just a few days old. Each had died in just a few hours from blood poisoning. In the 30C heat of a May day, the air around each of the rotting hulks was thick with flies.

The same grisly story has been replayed throughout Kazakhstan. In this springtime massacre, an estimated 200,000 critically endangered saiga - around 60% of the world's population - died. "All the carcasses in this one of many killing zones were spread evenly over 20 sq km," says Kock, professor of wildlife health and emerging diseases at the Royal Veterinary College in London. "The pattern was strange. They were either grazing normally with their newborn calves or dying where they stood, as if a switch had been turned on. I've never seen anything like that."
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