I know it must seem like I get a real kick out of spot­ting other’s taxo­nomic mis­takes and point­ing them out here, but really I’d be a much hap­pier man if it wasn’t neces­sary. All it would take would be for journ­al­ists to double check their terms before going to press, or to make sure they got their pieces proof read by someone famil­iar with the sub­ject. It’s the BBC’s turn again this time, and in the midst of what is, oth­er­wise, an excel­lent piece about recent pion­eer­ing work on determ­in­ing the col­our of dino­saur feath­ers, by using an elec­tron micro­scope to exam­ine the shape and struc­ture of fos­sil­ised melano­somes. There’s noth­ing at all wrong with most of the art­icle. In fact, go and read it now; I’ll wait.

See? It’s all very inter­est­ing; well researched, and well writ­ten, and it avoids the two most grat­ing errors sci­ence pieces in the main­stream media usu­ally make; mak­ing it sound like this has over­turned everything we’ve pre­vi­ously thought about the sub­ject, and giv­ing ‘equal time’ to some wacko who dis­agrees with the research. So, yes, it’s a great piece. With one small error:

A rel­at­ively benign mis­take to make while sat at a desk in a nice com­fort­able office, but there are scen­arios where you might want to be a little more care­ful in check­ing your definitions…

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Oh, oh, oh! This is an excit­ing one! Earlier this year, when the dis­cov­ery that Komodo Dragons (Varanus komod­oen­sis) are venom­ous was pub­lished, I idly wondered if any dino­saurs were as well. Komodo Dragons and dino­saurs are not closely related, so there was no reason to make that leap, bey­ond the fact that they are (or, in the case of dino­saurs, were) both large ter­restrial rep­tiles, and that I want it to be true.

Well, it turns out I might yet be onto a win­ner with that one. A recent pub­lic­a­tion by Enpu Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sci­ences doc­u­ments fossil evid­ence that Sinor­ni­tho­saurus, a small Creta­ceous thero­pod from what is now China, pos­sessed a venom­ous bite. The venom gland itself, being soft tis­sue, has not been pre­served¹, but the skull con­tains a cav­ity that Gong believes could have con­tained one. More con­vin­cingly, the animal had long, grooved upper teeth, like those used by extant rear-​​fanged snakes to inject venom into prey, with voids above them, which could have func­tioned as local reservoirs.

Not everybody’s con­vinced, and I’d cat­egor­ise the evid­ence as ‘strongly sug­gest­ive’ rather than a slam-​​dunk, but it’s fas­cin­at­ing stuff and lends a big pile of cred­ib­il­ity to an idea that I really want to be true.

Check out Ed Young’s longer and bet­ter cov­er­age, over at Not Exactly Rocket Sci­ence.

1. Which is not to say that soft tis­sue can never leave fossil evid­ence, in fact Sinor­ni­tho­saurus is also fam­ous for being one of the first dino­saurs to be dis­covered with fos­sil­ised feather-​​impressions, merely that it is sig­ni­fic­antly rarer. [↩]

A couple of years ago I wrote about the extinc­tion of the Baiji — or Yangtze River Dol­phin — and now, as the BBC reports, it looks like another large inhab­it­ant of the Yangtze is on the verge of fol­low­ing it, if it hasn’t already done so.

One of only two extant spe­cies of Pad­dle­fish, the Chinese Pad­dle­fish (Pseph­urus gla­dius,) which, with repor­ted sizes up to 7m long, may also be the world’s largest fresh­wa­ter fish¹ has not been detec­ted at all on a recent sur­vey. The team do admit that it’s quite pos­sible for isol­ated indi­vidu­als to have escaped detec­tion due to the sheer size of the area sur­veyed, but point out that the envir­on­ment can no longer sup­port a viable breed­ing pop­u­la­tion, and that unless some spe­ci­mens can be caught in time to begin a cap­tive con­ser­va­tion pro­gramme the spe­cies is doomed.

It’s depress­ing to be writ­ing about the extinc­tion of another large, eco­lo­gic­ally import­ant spe­cies so soon after the Baiji — doubly so since it was nat­ive to the same river sys­tem — and it’s no com­fort at all to know that there will have been plenty of other, less-​​visible (but no less tra­gic) extinc­tions in the same period, or that this is unlikely to be the last.

1. it is cur­rently not clear — and now may never be — whether the animal spends it’s entire life in fresh water [↩]

Yes, you read that right; in the second new liz­ardly dis­cov­ery I’ve read about this week — this time at the excel­lent Not Exactly Rocket Sci­ence — it turns out that not only are Komodo Dragons (Varanus komod­oen­sis) 3m long car­ni­vor­ous liz­ards with razor-​​sharp, ser­rated teeth that can run at 20km/​h, but they’re also venom­ous. You know, in case all that other stuff wasn’t enough to give you nightmares.

It was thought for dec­ades that Komodo Dragons relied on the vir­u­lent cock­tail of bac­teria present in their mouths to infect and weaken prey when they bit them, so that they could hunt them down over a few days and fin­ish the job. It turns out that, while their mouths cer­tainly are ran­cid, they have an even nas­tier weapon in their arsenal.

Brian Fry of the Uni­ver­sity of Mel­bourne, tipped-​​off by the dis­cov­ery in 2005 that a close rel­at­ive of the Dragon (Varanus varius, the Lace Mon­itor) has venom glands, took an MRI of the head of a Komodo Dragon and demon­strated con­clus­ively that it too is venom­ous. The venom in ques­tion is com­plex, but seems mainly tailored to increase blood loss from the gap­ing wounds left my the Dragon’s razor-​​like teeth and char­ac­ter­istic ‘backward-​​jerk’ bit­ing motion, caus­ing massive blood loss in the vic­tim, weak­en­ing them and often lead­ing quickly to shock, and then to death. It’s worth not­ing that even where the blood-​​loss is not suf­fi­cient to kill the vic­tim, going into shock within sight of a hungry 3m car­ni­vore prob­ably will be.

Komodo Dragons being the largest extant rep­tiles, and me being me, the first thing I thought of when I read about this was the pos­sib­il­ity that some dino­saurs may also have evolved a venom­ous bite, and I was pleased to see that I’m not alone; there a dis­cus­sion of the sub­ject in the com­ments at Not Exactly Rocket Sci­ence. Unfor­tu­nately, they agree with me: the idea is a bit of a stretch (OK, a lot of one,) since Komodo Dragons aren’t closely related to dino­saurs, and there are no known venom­ous examples of the closest extant rel­at­ives of dino­saurs: the birds. What this does show, how­ever, is that it’s quite pos­sible for rep­tiles — even large ones — to be venom­ous without provid­ing any skeletal or dental evid­ence of the fact. So our con­clu­sion has to be that some dino­saurs may have been venom­ous, but that we have no good reason to believe that they were.

The sand­fish (Scin­cus scin­cus) is a spe­cies of desert skink that has a nifty trick for evad­ing pred­at­ors (or just the hot sun): it sub­merges itself in the sand and lit­er­ally swims though it — thus the name.

The spe­cies has always been known to be an excep­tional bur­rower, but recent exper­i­ments util­ising x-​​ray imagery have shown that it doesn’t dig using it’s limbs as one might expect, but holds them fast against its body while using grace­ful side-​​to-​​side undu­la­tions to push itself for­ward, much like a snake swim­ming in water. Check out the video the research­ers have pos­ted online; it’s really quite impressive.

The thing I really love about dis­cov­er­ies like this is that it really high­lights just how diverse and incred­ible life on Earth is. It doesn’t mat­ter how out­land­ish some­thing sounds; if its a viable way of get­ting around, find­ing food, catch­ing food, or eat­ing food, then some­thing, some­where is almost cer­tain to be doing it.

Also, the BBC has an extremely cute image of one sur­fa­cing.

OK, this is get­ting out of hand now. I mean, it was out of hand before, but it just got passed the point where even I can stay quiet about it. It’s like we’ve just passed the event-​​horizon of some new kind of pub­li­city black hole and are now tum­bling help­lessly towards a sin­gu­lar­ity of over­state­ment where, rather than the laws of phys­ics, it’s our sense of pro­por­tion that breaks down.

If you’re not sure what I’m talk­ing about, take a look at this You­Tube clip, and see if you can guess.

Edit: Unfor­tu­nately, You­Tube have removed the video in ques­tion for ‘terms of use viol­a­tion.’ It was a trailer that described a TV pro­gram on the His­tory Chan­nel as the most import­ant event in 47 mil­lion years. It was utterly over the top.

Seen it? Any ideas?

It’s a TV show about a fossil. Ser­i­ously. Gran­ted, it’s a pretty inter­est­ing, par­tic­u­larly com­plete fossil of a 47 mil­lion year-​​old trans­it­ive prim­ate called Ida (who was a mem­ber of a spe­cies we’ve called Dar­winius masil­lae), which is some­thing you don’t exactly see every day. But still: a fossil.

It’s not going to change the world, it’s not going to revolu­tion­ise the way we think about ourselves and it most cer­tainly is not the miss­ing link (which is — as I under­stand it — a term no ser­i­ous palae­on­to­lo­gist would use any­way.) But some­how, the media have got hold of it as some kind of world-​​changing event and are run­ning with it, real­ity be damned. The hype machine has been in full swing for about a week now and, if this video is to be believed, is show­ing no signs of slow­ing down. If it wasn’t quite so depress­ing, it’d be quite amaz­ing how much they can make of so little.

Hat tip to Carl Zim­mer over at The Loom for this and other sens­ible writing about Darwinius.

The Gob­lin Shark is a fas­cin­at­ing — not to men­tion slightly freaky-​​looking — creature, and this is a great video of one doing it’s thing, includ­ing some good foot­age of it’s sig­na­ture pro­trus­ible jaw. Take a look after the fold.

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A while ago I wrote about Carl Zim­mer’s use of the col­lo­quial name daddy-​​longlegs when refer­ring to har­vest­men, and how it hurt the inter­na­tional access­ib­il­ity of his writ­ing. Hon­estly, it wasn’t a big deal at the time (although it did bring in a celebrity com­menter!) and it looks utterly insig­ni­fic­ant com­pared to this. I’m going to assume that Dr Andrew Ross is as com­pet­ent as his pos­i­tion of col­lec­tion man­ager of fossil inver­teb­rates and plants at the Nat­ural His­tory Museum in Lon­don would sug­gest — which is very — and that he simply wasn’t care­ful enough about his use of words in inter­view. Dur­ing the course of the art­icle, he refers to this har­vest­man spe­ci­men both as a spider and in a round­about way as an insect as well. Not only are both incor­rect, but they’re also mutu­ally exclus­ive. It’s a real shame that given the oppor­tun­ity to get the word out and edu­cate the pub­lic a little, a senior employee of the Nat­ural His­tory Museum man­aged, instead, to mis­in­form the pub­lic through some­thing as simple as poor word choice.

Luck­ily there was a safety net this time; the BBC’s journ­al­ist, Rebecca Morelle, clearly knows her stuff, and she pre-​​empts his com­ments with the cor­rect defin­i­tion; that har­vest­men are arach­nids that are closely related to, without actu­ally being, spiders. I just can’t help feel­ing that it shouldn’t fall to a journ­al­ist to cor­rect the expert she quotes.

Photo from The Metro.

I don’t know: no sooner do I start to think I might be doing OK at this tax­onomy thing, than someone comes along and knocks me right back down to peg one (to mix my metaphors.)

On Monday, I was able to spot the error in Kevin Z’s WTF without even think­ing about it¹ (Ech­in­o­derms are not a sub­set of Insecta; they’re a phylum all their own, and while I can never keep up with whether Insecta is a class or a sub-​​phylum this week, I do know for sure that it doesn’t con­tain an entire other phylum. Oh, and it’s not even like Insecta is a sub­set of Ech­in­o­der­mata; it’s part of Arthropoda)

So there I was, feel­ing pretty good about myself, when Carl Zim­mer comes along and (amidst an entirely fas­cin­at­ing art­icle) hits me with some­thing I never expec­ted: one quarter of all mam­mal spe­cies are accoun­ted for by bats!

That’s stag­ger­ing. I had no idea they were so suc­cess­ful or so diverse. I’d always thought of them as being slightly odd out­liers on the graph of mam­mal sur­vival strategies; I mean, stretch­ing your arms out hugely and flap­ping around using sonar to catch insects is just so far from what you expect mam­mals to do that it didn’t even occur to me that a sig­ni­fic­ant pro­por­tion of them might be doing it anyway.

Obvi­ously a quarter of all spe­cies is not even remotely the same thing as a quarter of all indi­vidu­als, but still — how did I not know this? I guess I just haven’t been pay­ing attention.

1. Well, obvi­ously not entirely without think­ing about it. [↩]

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