Tuesday - February 07, 2012
doggy face
Posted by Drew458
on 02/07/2012 at 10:11 AM
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Permalink • Wednesday - February 01, 2012
A Simple Solution
It’s February!
It’s going to hit 60°F here today. Unreal.
Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. If that little fatso sees his shadow, we get 6 more weeks of winter, even though we haven’t had any yet. I think not Phil. I think you need to move on ...
The standard .22-250 is a bona fide 700-800 yard varmint cartridge, which means it’s accurate enough to hit critters the size of a bottle of shampoo at those distances and turn them into mincemeat. A long standardized wildcat version called the .22-250 Ackley Improved takes a lot of the body taper out of the round and gives it a steeper shoulder angle. This gives the reloader a bit more room for more gun powder, which in turn gives slightly higher velocities. But this is a custom made rifle, so you would be smart to also get a top quality barrel with a faster than normal rifling twist and a slightly longer, tight and parallel throat built in. That lets you seat big (for the caliber; eg 80-90 grains) a bit further out for even more powder capacity and thus velocity, and it all adds up to make the Ackley version a 1000 yard squirrel gun. Also suitable for eliminating pesky groundhogs, even in the “dead of winter”. In some parts of Texas, I hear they use the .22-250 to hunt deer with. Wisconsin too? I hope those that do so are good enough hunters to go for the head shot on still deer at close ranges; I’m not positive that even the heavier non-frangible bullets (60gr Nosler Partition)are enough for a body shot but they might be.
For just about everything you’d ever want to know about this cartridge, go here. And here is a “white mist” .22-250 video that’s safe for tender stomachs.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/01/2012 at 12:27 PM
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Permalink • Sunday - January 29, 2012
D’oh, a Deer
Sunday night, driving down to my cleaning work in Flemington, on the hill just outside of the downtown area, I saw a rather magnificent buck. I’ve seen the old boy before, he lives in the area. A couple of farms are at the top of the hill, and then a home or two with a large yard, and then you head down the steep hill to the Flemington Mews apartment village where all the illegals live ... and there were the deer. Old Mr. Buck pushing his 3 or 4 does across the street. This time he stopped right in the middle of the road and waited for his ladies to cross. And I counted his tines ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. On each side. Son of a gun, a 10 pointer, right here in suburbia. And then they were off into the darkness. My guess he’s a 5 year old, as his belly is nearly as tall as the backs of his does.
Nice life for deer, here in suburbia. As long as they learn to stay away from traffic, they can live a pretty good life.
Son of a gun, though, a 10 pointer! Holy cow.
Posted by Drew458
on 01/29/2012 at 11:32 PM
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Permalink • Thursday - January 19, 2012
Where’s My Preciousssss?
I was waiting for this. FARK.com was down yesterday for the SOPA protest. I couldn’t remember the source.
The Cleveland Zoo has entered the race for the most disgusting animal on the planet.
It’s called an ‘Aye-aye.’
Of course, FARKERS weighed in:
This is the reason I don’t drink tequila anymore. I woke up next to one of these and she wouldn’t stop calling for weeks.
They’re like Lovecraftian squirrels.
“I don’t know what it is, but it keeps asking for ‘Precious’”
Dobby? Is that you? You’ve really let yourself go.
Posted by Christopher
on 01/19/2012 at 07:19 AM
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Permalink • Saturday - January 14, 2012
Stone Age Pussy
Not your everyday house cat. Not even close.
This is a Manul, Otocolobus manul an animal also known as Pallas’s Cat. This cat descended from the proto-small-feline Leopard Cat about 5-10 million years ago and has not changed since. Manuls live in the southern central Siberian area, from a bit south of Lake Baikal into Mongolia, and westward to Tibet and the southern ‘stans; it’s a steppe cat. It’s no bigger than a regular house cat, but this is a wild animal.
Lot’s more pics and info at Wiki and at ArkSpace. And a brief overview here.
“Don’t get them wet, and never, ever feed them after midnight.”
Posted by Drew458
on 01/14/2012 at 03:24 PM
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Permalink • Tuesday - January 03, 2012
More Than Just Another Fish Story
“This is evolution in action.” [Somebody call Ann Coulter, quick.]
World-first hybrid shark found off Australia
Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world’s first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.
The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.
“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination,” Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP.
“This is evolution in action.”
Colin Simpfendorfer, a partner in Morgan’s research from James Cook University, said initial studies suggested the hybrid species was relatively robust, with a number of generations discovered across 57 specimens.
The find was made during cataloguing work off Australia’s east coast when Morgan said genetic testing showed certain sharks to be one species when physically they looked to be another.
The Australian black-tip is slightly smaller than its common cousin and can only live in tropical waters, but its hybrid offspring have been found 2,000 kilometres down the coast, in cooler seas.
It means the Australian black-tip could be adapting to ensure its survival as sea temperatures change because of global warming.
Let’s see ... sharks have been around for how long? Oh right. Sharks have been around for HALF A BILLION YEARS, and the ones we see today have been in their current form for about 100 million years, give or take a millenium. And in all that time the oceans must have never warmed up or cooled down even a degree, how many ice ages be damned, because now, when one bunch of dorks in dinghies finds the results of an aquatic redneck family get-together, suddenly it’s emergency evolution driven by one and only one possible reason. 
Climate change and human fishing are some of the potential triggers being investigated by the team, with further genetic mapping also planned to examine whether it was an ancient process just discovered or a more recent phenomenon.
If the hybrid was found to be stronger than its parent species—a literal survival of the fittest—Simpfendorfer said it may eventually outlast its so-called pure-bred predecessors. [Drew: wouldn’t that be a littoral survival of the fittest? Or is that too shallow a jest?]
“We don’t know whether that’s the case here, but certainly we know that they are viable, they reproduce and that there are multiple generations of hybrids now that we can see from the genetic roadmap that we’ve generated from these animals,” he said.
“Certainly it appears that they are fairly fit individuals.”
The hybrids were extraordinarily abundant, accounting for up to 20 percent of black-tip populations in some areas, but Morgan said that didn’t appear to be at the expense of their single-breed parents, adding to the mystery.
In other words, this kind of shark, long considered to be several different species, has always interbred - that would cover the “multiple generations” part and the “extraordinarily abundant” part - but Science (cue Heavenly Trumpets) just never noticed it before. But WTF, let’s not admit that, and instead blame Global Warming. And probably George Bush, by next week.
Dorks in dinghies ... chum, but with pocket protectors.
PS - Simpfendorfer??? Sounds like some kind of 4 1/2 string electric guitar for that special musician in your life. Yeah, my sense of humor is that bass.
Posted by Drew458
on 01/03/2012 at 03:52 PM
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Permalink • Saturday - December 31, 2011
Here Kitty Kitty
Posted by Drew458
on 12/31/2011 at 06:06 PM
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Permalink • Tuesday - December 20, 2011
It Figures, Right?
In the inbox from reader Dave, a quick game of Name That Group
What a bunch of animals
We’ve all heard of
a herd of cows,
a flock of chickens,
a gaggle of geese,
and a pride of lions.
Some of us also know that you can have
a murder of crows,
and even an exultation of doves (cue heavenly music).
But what about baboons? The loudest, foulest, stupidest primate out there?
yeah, these red-assed idiots. What do you call a bunch of them all making a mess together?
Posted by Drew458
on 12/20/2011 at 02:12 PM
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Permalink • Wednesday - October 26, 2011
Mid-Morning Cuteness
A rare white wombat has been nursed back to health, in Ceduna, Australia, after being found alone and unwell a month earlier, according to local media.
The southern hairy-nosed wombat was found close to death, dehydrated and exhausted, by shearers working on a remote property.
Polar isn’t the only white wombat around; there is another one named Stuart Little being cared for at a shelter in Cardinia. They are very rare though.
Polar
Stuart Little
There are 3 species of wombat and all of them live in Australia and Tasmania. Wombats are a dog sized marsupial, growing to about a meter in length and about 50-75lb. They have slightly opposable thumbs on their front feet and get by by digging and burrowing in the ground. Wombats have a very slow metabolism and usually take up to 2 weeks to digest a meal of grass, bark, and roots. They are fairly plentiful and usually nocturnal so they are not often seen. You may not shit a brick if you see a wombat, but he will. Wombats are famous for excreting very dense cubical feces. The Southern Hairy-nosed Wombat is the smallest of the three species, and lives only in the southernmost part of central South Australia. Wombats have a couple of evolutionary adaptations. As marsupials, the females have pouches, but those are on backwards. This keeps the dirt out when they do all that burrowing. Wombats are also a bit physically imbalanced, having extra heavy bones and cartilage in the back, which, along with a stumpy little tail, protects them from predators when they’re nosing into a hole in the ground. Perhaps for this reason wombats also always exit a burrow hind end first. Wombats are pretty mellow, but are strong enough to lay a hurtin’ on people, and have been known to bite and attack when threatened.
October 22 is Wombat Day in Australia.
Posted by Drew458
on 10/26/2011 at 09:03 AM
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Permalink • Wednesday - October 19, 2011
Lock Your Doors Christopher!
Dozens Of Wild Animals Escape In Ohio
Ohio authorities are on the hunt for dozens of escaped wild animals.The animals, which include lions, tigers and grizzly bears, among many others, escaped their enclosures. The owner of the exotic zoo was found dead.
Authorities say they are shooting to kill and have, so far, killed about 20 or so of the 40 or more animals.
Police say they have already killed some bears and wolves. But they are still getting a flood of reports coming in from people who have spotted wild animals along nearby highways.
Staffers from the Columbus Zoo are at the scene helping to tranquilize and capture the animals rather than seeing them shot.
Area schools have been closed for safety.
Flashing signs on the highways in eastern Ohio warned motorists Wednesday: Exotic animals on the loose. Call 911.
Schools shuttered and some frightened residents said they were hunkering down in their homes as sheriff’s deputies hunted lions, tigers, leopards and grizzly bears that escaped from a preserve after the death of the owner.
Police have not yet said how Terry Thompson died, but Zanesville Mayor Howard Zwelling told CNN Wednesday that Thompson freed the animals from their pens and then shot himself.
Thompson owned 48 exotic animals. About 30 to 35 of them had been found, said Muskingum County Sheriff Matt Lutz. Those that had escaped from their pens were put down.
Zwelling said he received calls from people who were concerned that the animals had been killed. He said authorities were trying to use tranquilizers whenever possible to save their lives.
Thompson had his run-ins with the law. He pleaded guilty earlier this year to federal charges of possessing illegal firearms, including five fully automatic firearms, and had just been released from prison.
In nearby Licking County, Sheriff Randy Thorp said he has activated the county SWAT team “who will be equipped with night vision and the necessary weapons to deal with any encounters with such animals.”
The menagerie of about 48 animals on the loose also includes wolves, giraffes and camels. Commuters reported seeing bears and wolves along Interstate 70.
For their sake I hope the SWAT team has something a whole lot more powerful than little M16s. Bull giraffes can weigh a couple of tons, and adults grizzlies are pretty good sized bears. But any rifle is better than no rifle at all, and the little 5.56 round will probably do for close up head shots.
The fences had been left unsecured at the Muskingum County Animal Farm in Zanesville, in east-central Ohio, and the animals’ cages were open, police said. They wouldn’t say what animals escaped but said the preserve had lions, tigers, cheetahs, wolves, giraffes, camels and bears.
More info here with pictures. Drat, once again the UK newspapers give better coverage to a story in the US than our own papers do!
Posted by Drew458
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Permalink • Saturday - October 01, 2011
One For The Birds
Recently extinct Haast’s Eagle evolved from crow sized bird to 33lb giant eagle in less than a million years. In the land animal free islands of pre-human New Zealand, it was a flying lion. Fill that niche baby!
Maori legend of man-eating bird is true
Creature that features in New Zealand folklore really existed, scientists sayA Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand. It was said to be named after its cry and to have “raced the hawk to the heavens”. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast’s eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago, shows their study in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei) was discovered in swamp deposits by Sir Julius von Haast in the 1870s. But it was at first thought to be a scavenger because its bill was similar to a vulture’s with hoods over its nostrils to stop flesh blocking its air passages as it rooted around inside carcasses.
But a re-examination of skeletons using modern technology, including CAT scans, by researchers at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch and the University of New South Wales in Australia showed it had a strong enough pelvis to support a killing blow as it dived at speeds of up to 80kph.
With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller’s sea eagle. And the bird’s talons were as big as a tiger’s claws. “It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child,” said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. “They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine.”
Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall. “In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation,” Dr Scofield said.
New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other continents in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago. As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle. “Haast’s eagle wasn’t just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird,” said Dr Scofield. “It was the equivalent of a lion.”
In a blink of geologic time an eagle the weight of a squirrel evolved into a giant predator that fed on animals twice as big as humans. It grew so large it approached the physical limits of flight, a new study suggests. Before man arrived in New Zealand 700 years ago the land was dominated by birds. With no land mammals, the more than 250 avian species created an isolated and unique ecology.
Amidst this remote laboratory the Haast’s eagle was 40 percent larger than today’s record holder, the Harpy eagle, and topped the local food chain. The eagle fed largely on the moa, an extinct flightless bird somewhat like an ostrich. Bones from moa as large as 440 pounds (200 kilograms) bear the marks of the Haast’s talons. The eagle held its victim by its pelvis and killed it with a strike to the throat or head, researchers say.
In the new study, scientists examined DNA from 2,000-year-old fossilized bones of a Haast’s eagle and compared it to older specimens that at first glance seem utterly unrelated.
The Haast’s ancestors, it turns out, were the little eagle and the booted eagle. They were only about 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) when they crossed the waters from Australia to New Zealand. Within about a million years the predators evolved to as much as 33 pounds (15 kilograms) with a wing span of almost 10 feet (3 meters). For comparison, larger bald eagles today are close to 14 pounds (6.4 kilograms) and have a wing span around 6 feet (1.8 meters).
“We estimate that their common ancestor lived less than a million years ago. It means an eagle arrived in New Zealand and increased in weight by 10-15 times over this period,” Michael Bunce of McMaster University in Canada said Monday. “Such rapid size change is unprecedented in terrestrial vertebrates.”
Richard N. Holdaway, an extinction biologist and another member of the research team, explained that when the first ancestor of the Haast’s eagle arrived in New Zealand there was no competition for big meals like the moa. The larger the eagle the more offspring it could support because food was abundant if you were big enough to kill it. This became an avenue for survival that the once-small eagle employed to become sizeable quickly.
“With the largest individuals that could kill the largest prey being most successful at producing young, which themselves would be large birds by inheritance from their parents, the change in size within the species was probably rapid in geological time,” Holdaway told LiveScience.
The eagles grew so large in fact that they butted up against the limits of how much weight a bird can carry into the air.
“There is a body mass above which normal flapping flight becomes physically impossible,” said Holdaway, “Various studies have suggested that that occurs at a body mass of about 15 kilograms,” which is the estimated weight of the Haast’s eagle.
The Haast’s Eagle had relatively small wings for a bird with this body size, up to about 10 feet, making it less suited to endless soaring and better at living in the forests that covered the islands at that time.
“It was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size; so big in fact that its quills were twelve paces long and thick in proportion. And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him, the bird swoops down on him and eats him at leisure”
- Marco Polo, describing the Roc, 1280
Posted by Drew458
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Permalink • Saturday - September 24, 2011
Another unenforced law
Here’s a link to a story I saw in the MD paper I just linked to for the stink bug post.
Ospreys are raptors, fish hunting birds that live along the coast. For many years their numbers have been in steep decline, placing them on the Endangered Species list for most of my lifetime. In the past two decades they have started making a comeback up and and down the Atlantic coast, and are seen by many people as a bellwether of environmental pollution levels. Their decline was a strong factor in the whole DDT ban thing. Although ospreys are off of the ES list now, it is still a significant federal offense - a $15,000 fine minimum - to hunt, disturb, trap., poison, or molest these birds or their nests.
40 years of human assistance has also helped these birds get their population back up to somewhere near it ought to be. People get together up and down the coast to build nest platforms for them and sometimes even set aside low impact “osprey zone” areas. Ospreys do not live here all year; they fly to South America for the winter. Once outside the USA they are no longer protected.
There has been a pair of breeding ospreys out at the end of a pier in Anne Arundel County for more than half a decade now, watched over and written about by author Janie Suss.
The female osprey, Olive, was recently shot. Dead. On purpose. By two boys with BB guns. For shits and giggles. The male got away, but this year’s clutch of eggs was lost. Caught in the act by the author, the boys - who knew about ospreys and even knew these two birds by name - confessed. She called the police and had them arrested. Last week all 5 charges against the youths were dropped.
Read more about it here, or break the news softly to your children if you are one of the many parents who has read Oscar and Olive Osprey to your children.
As the osprey head south this year, we say goodbye forever to one special bird: Olive Osprey.
Like many of her species, she was shot. Not over Cuba or the Dominican Republic, where fish farmers consider osprey birds of prey. Olive was shot as she sat on her eggs in her nest in Southern Anne Arundel County, where she had been welcomed and had gained celebrity.
Her killers were neighborhood boys.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 prohibits such killings, and imposes a maximum penalty of $15,000 and 6 months in jail for each offense, even though they are misdemeanors ... and such penalties have been handed out in the recent past.
Ok, maybe you can’t fine children thousands of dollars for birdicide or put them on the chain gang, but they shouldn’t have walked off scott-free. Fine the parents perhaps? Something. Why bother to have laws if they aren’t going to be enforced? Heck, the EPA agents are armed. What on earth for, if not for things like this?
Posted by Drew458
on 09/24/2011 at 02:44 PM
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Permalink • Bugger Off
This time last year New Jersey was almost crusted in stink bugs. The evil little Asian Brown Marmorated Stink Bug has snuck into the USA on a shipping container opened up in Allentown PA, and they were “reeking” havoc across eastern PA and western NJ. People were sweeping bagsful of the little terrors with brooms, they were in and on everything, and the fruit and vegetable crops took a beating.
Stink bugs hibernate. When things finally warmed up this Spring, I was cleaning piles of them out of the ceiling fixtures at my offices every week. Here we go again, right, another year of bug plague.
WRONG. There have hardly been any stink bugs around all Summer. I don’t think we’ve had more than two in the house since April, and last year we were getting half a dozen in a day, regardless of any precautions we took or poisons we laid down. This year nature has provided us a weapon against this ChiCom offensive, and we have Praying Mantises (Manti??) everywhere. Big ones, very well fed.
I snapped the above picture just a little while ago. It’s crappy, but that’s because the Mantis is only a 4” bug and I had to set the camera on maximum zoom to get the shot. But other folks have made the same connection, and quite a number of people have captured really good footage. Funny though, I haven’t heard a word about this on the news, and we were getting daily reports on the Big Bad Bug Threat last year. (Gosh, I wonder whatever happened to the bed bug issue in New York City? Not a word there either)
Then she asked me a question that I didn’t know the answer to; “If the praying mantises that are also on my rose bushes are insect eaters, will they eat the stink bugs?”
“Well now, I don’t know”, I said. “Stink bugs are pretty stinky and nasty creatures, I can’t imagine the mantids would eat them but I’m not really sure.”
Later that afternoon, I received an e-mail from a longtime listener to “In the Garden with Andre Viette” that had an attached photo of (drum roll please) a praying mantis chowing down on a Brown Marmorated Stink Bug!
Whoa, what an amazing shot and what a coincidence that he caught it on “film” and happened to e-mail it to us the day I got this question!
Thanks to Nicholas R. of Copper Hill Images for these incredible photos! And thanks for clearing up the mystery of whether they eat stink bugs.
So it seems that praying mantises do find these nasty bugs rather palatable!
You can find several little videos of mantises eating stink bugs on YouTube, along with similar vids of bats and spiders chowing down on same. Just goes to show you how little the “experts” really know: last year at this time we were told that the Brown Marmorated Bastard had no natural predators in the USA, and it’s revolting aroma would protect it from most animals. B. S. They forgot to take into account that Nature is flexible, and to animals that eat bugs for a living, stink bugs are the olives on the smorgasbord of life.
Now the plague has shifted south to Maryland ...
Stinkbugs have been most severe from Prince George’s County to upper Baltimore County. So far, southern counties like Calvert and St. Mary’s have been largely spared. Next year will be different.
An entomologist at the University of Maryland warns that we can expect a plague of Biblical proportions in years to come. Next year, they’re anticipated to spread statewide, causing damage three times more severe.
A number of research projects are under way investigating natural predators of the stinkbug and the use against them of safe pesticides with short residual properties. Until then, swat them, stomp them or drown them in soapy water.
Dear Maryland: Get yourself as many Praying Mantis egg cases as you can, get some bats, and let the Wolf Spiders do their thing. And keep spraying.
The bug sellers don’t think that Mantises are that great a solution, but there has not been any widespread residential spraying going on here. Yes, it was a bad winter, but as I said there were tons of stinkers in the early Spring. Now there are none. And with all the rain, things have been growing like mad here, so you can’t say that there hasn’t been any food for them. What else can it be?
Um, could it be Satan poison? The EPA approved an emergency measure around the end of June that allowed farmers in this area to use just two sprayings per year of Dinotefuran, an insecticide used in Asia, and also allowed the use of the botanically derived poisons Pyrethrin and Azadiractin.
WASHINGTON –On June 24, 2011, EPA approved, for emergency use, the insecticide dinotefuran (trade names Venom and Scorpion) on tree fruit to help manage populations of the brown marmorated stink bug, an invasive insect that has caused extensive yield losses in tree fruit production in the mid-Atlantic region. The approval, known as an emergency exemption, applies to Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Carolina and New Jersey. Under the exemption, producers of stone fruit (such as peaches, plums and cherries) and pome fruit (including apples and pears) are allowed to manage the brown marmorated stink bug with two applications of dinotefuran by ground equipment per season.
“EPA is very concerned about the impact of stink bugs on agricultural production and will continue to monitor the problem and provide growers safe and effective tools to help manage this pest,” said Steve Owens, assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. “We are committed to continuing to work closely with the agricultural community to address this very serious problem.”
Under the emergency exemption provision of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, states can petition EPA for the use of an unregistered pesticide on a temporary basis if it will help alleviate an emergency pest problem. Before approval, EPA must be able to support the use from a health and safety standpoint. EPA has assessed the risks of the exemption involving dinotefuran and has made a safety finding for the use. Dinotefuran is already approved for use on leafy vegetables.
Also, on June 21, 2011 EPA approved an additional use for an insecticide that may help manage stink bugs in organic production systems. The new product contains azadirachtin and pyrethrins, which are derived from botanical ingredients. This product is now approved for use on many crops where stink bug management is needed, and it can be used by organic farmers.
Dinotefuran is also a bee killer, and with the decline in honeybees lately it should be very carefully used. Azadiractin is a larval growth inhibitor map from the seeds of the Indian evergreen Neem tree, and pyrethrin is a straight up poison made from chrysanthemums.
But there aren’t really many farms near here. And yet the stink bugs are gone. I credit the manti.
Posted by Drew458
on 09/24/2011 at 01:30 PM
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Permalink • Friday - September 16, 2011
Changing Your Perceptions
While Peiper enjoys a bit of vacation, I’ll do what I can to run a few stories from Europe and the UK. “Enjoys” might be a bit sarcastic - he emailed me that the flight out was exhausting, and a big hassle with INS and airport security. Funny how some of these stories from Over There are really about things happening Over Here, but our news tends to be awfully thinned out; a lot of the interesting bits get lost along the way.
Dinosaur feathers found in amber
In science fiction, amber preserved the DNA that allowed rebirth of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. In real life, amber preserved feathers that provide a new image of what dinosaurs looked like.
“Now, instead of scaly animals portrayed as usually drab creatures, we have solid evidence for a fluffy coloured past,,” reports Mark A. Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Examples of ancient feathers ranging from the simple to the complex are now being studied. They were preserved in amber found in western Canada, researchers led by Ryan C. McKellar of the University of Alberta report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
Amber, hardened tree resin, preserved a mixture of feathers from 70 million years ago. Other feathers contained in amber dating to 90 million years ago are less diverse.
Specimens include simple filament structures similar to the earliest feathers of non-flying dinosaurs – a form unknown in modern birds – and more complicated bird feathers “displaying pigmentation and adaptations for flight and diving,” the researchers reported.
Indications of feathers have been found on much older fossils, and the new discoveries indicate feathers continued to develop into modern form before the extinction of dinosaurs, explained Norell, who was not part of the research team.
A separate report by Roy A. Wogelius of the University of Manchester, England, published online June 30 by Science, reports the finding of trace metals in feather fossils, suggesting their colours included black, brown and a reddish-brown.
“Despite many reports over the past decade of feathered dinosaurs and new birds from China, only now are we beginning to understand just how diverse feather types were” millions of years ago, Norell said.
Well imagine that! Big pink fluffy tyrannosaurus rexes, all cute and fuzzy, 10 tons of mobile mayhem stomping through the primordial forests looking to bite your head off. But happily! That’s going to take a bit of mental image adjustment.
Something to think about: 70 million years ago was practically yesterday in dinosaur terms, being darn close to the end of their run. Birds are believed to have been around for as much as 150 million years, so go figure. Here’s a bit more, a short paper with pictures on dino-birdies that does note that feathers were around before birds were, on critters known as coelurosaurian theropods.
Posted by Drew458
on 09/16/2011 at 11:48 AM
Filed Under: • Animals • Archeology / Anthropology •
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