Earthling Bulletin #17

by Piter Kehoma Boll

Skull of Jianchangosaurus yixianensis, a new therizinosaur from China with an unusual dentition. Photo extracted from Pu et al. 2013. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063423.g003

News

• Study links insecticide use to invertebrate die-offs. Well, it was kind of expected, don’t you think?
• Brazil’s treatment of its indigneous people violates their rights. It’s really a shame what Brazil’s government do to native peoples.
• Thousands of ancient trees at risk, Woodland Trust warns.  It’s an epidemy.
• IUCN Criteria for ‘Red List’ of Endangered Ecosystems Detailed. Good news for conservation!
• Now We Know What Early Earth Smelled Like. Take a look to find out!
• Plant Knowledge: They Can Smell, Sense Color, Spy a Fly. A Nice analysis about the plants’ ability to feel the world around them.
• Pre-historic tortoises lived in Amazon. Ignore the genus written without initial capital letter and no italic…

Blog

• Top Cats: How Pumas and Other Apex Predator’s Populations Affect The Big Biodiversity Picture. A view about how top predators shape ecosystems.
• Balancing nutrient diets determines how ecosystems age. Biotic and abiotic factors go together.
• Insect-Eye Digital Camera Sees What You Just Did. Low resultion, but highly sensitive to movement.
• Who-oplocephalus: Is Euoplocephalus ‘real’? Oh, fossil taxonomy is always a mess!
• Nature is Not Ambidextrous. The mystery and consequences behind the left-handed chemistry in life.
• Birds arrange eggs in their nests to better detect imposters. “Hmm… someone moved my stuff.”
• Mosses Make Two Different Plants from the Same Genome, and a Single Gene Can Make the Difference. Plants n and 2n individuals can be a matter of one single gene, cool, huh?
• Why Penguins Cannot Fly. Do you have any clue?
• Giardia sucks! An anatomy of a sucker. Since I was once infected by this little fellow, it interests me a lot!
• How Safe is Recreational Marijuana? Will it ever be a final word on it?
• Can Humans Survive Mass Extinction? A subject that always fascinated me.

Books

• What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses. A nice book about plant senses in a real scientific analysis. Worth reading!

Scientific Articles

• Platyhelminthes or just Platyhelminth-like? Phylogenetic relationships of the main turbellarian groups. In Portuguese, but it’s worth reading!
• Origin of an Assemblage Massively Dominated by Carnivorans from the Miocene of Spain. Quite an uncommon situation.
• Colour Constancy Across the Life Span: Evidence for Compensatory Mechanisms. It’s more in your brain than in your eyes.
• How do foragers decide when to leave a patch? A test of alternative models under natural and experimental conditions. “That’s enough, let’s move!”
• Risk avoidance in sympatric large carnivores: reactive or predictive? A cool study about the way cheetahs avoid lions and spotted hyaenas.
• Scientific Foundations for an IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. The paper!
• Euoplocephalus tutus and the Diversity of Ankylosaurid Dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous of Alberta, Canada, and Montana, USA. Are we going to bring back old, abandoned genera?
• Sweet Puppies and Cute Babies: Perceptual Adaptation to Babyfacedness Transfers across Species. Too cute puppies make babies less cute to you?
• Shake a Tail Feather: The Evolution of the Theropod Tail into a Stiff Aerodynamic Surface. A nice study about how the tail evolved from primitive theropods to extant birds.
• Two New Cave-Dwelling Species of the Short-Tailed Whipscorpion Genus Rowlandius (Arachnida: Schizomida: Hubbardiidae) from Northeastern Brazil, with Comments on Male Dimorphism. I always love descriptions of new species!
• An Unusual Basal Therizinosaur Dinosaur with an Ornithischian Dental Arrangement from Northeastern China. Jianchangosaurus yixianensis, our new Segnosaurus?
• Molecular phylogeny of Geoplaninae (Platyhelminthes) challenges current classification: proposal of taxonomic actions. When you see it…

Earthling Bulletin #16

by Piter Kehoma Boll

News

• ‘Small Bandit’ Carnivorous Dinosaur Found. Actually “some vertebrate” would be a better statement. Anyway, meet Dahalokely tokana.
• Aussie scientistis sequence koala genome. Nice! Welcome to the team, mate!
• ‘Coelacanth’ Genome Unlocked. Not only koala, koela… I mean coelacanth too!
• DNA Study links indigenous Brazilians to Polynesians. Aha! I knew it!
• Brain Shape Confirms Controversial Fossil as Oldest Human Ancestor. So Sahelanthropus tchadensis is our grampa.
• Oldest Dinosaur Embryo Fossils Discovered in China. Very old little dinos.
• Beautiful Striped Bat Identified as Entirely New Genus, the unusual Niumbaha.

Blog

• Why Rodents Can’t Throw Up, In Case You Were Wondering. Poor poisoned guys…
• There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Living Fossil’. True story.
• “Just a Theory”: 7 Misused Science Words. Everyone should read it!
• Why a Near-Death Experience Isn’t Proof of Heaven. That’s it!
• Dinosaurs and their ‘exaggerated structures’: species recognition aids, or sexual display devices? Darren Naish always with nice texts!

Scientific Articles

• White Sharks (Charcharodon carcharias) Scavenging in Whales and Its Potential Role in Further Shaping the Ecology of an Apex Predator. Quite an interesting behavior, I think.
• A Cross-Taxon Analysis of Insect-Associated Bacterial Diversity. Who and why they are there?
• Before the Endless Forms: Embodied Model of Transition from Single Cells to Aggregates to Ecosystem Engineering.  Complex, but amazing work on evolution of multicellularity.
• An Abelisauroid Theropod Dinosaur from the Turonian of Madagascar. And here is the paper about Dahalokey.
• The Evolution of Bat Vestibular Systems in the Face of Potential Antagonistic Selection Pressures for Flight and Echolocation. More about evolution!
• When Can Clades Be Potentially Resolved with Morphology? A good read for phylogeny lovers!
• Identification of Polynesian mtDNA haplogroups in remains of Botocudo Amerindians from Brazil. Now we must review human migration!

(Maybe this will be the last Earthling Bulletin, since I apparently was abandoned by my two colleagues… Anyway, let’s see…)

Earthling Bulletin #15

by Piter Kehoma Boll

(Sorry again for the kind of small bulletin. It’s been a hard time to dedicate much time to the blog! =/ )

Tetrahymena thermophila, a ciliate with seven sexes! Picture by Robinson R (2006), extracted from blogs.plos.org/biologue/

News

• Insect Wings Shred Bacteria to Pieces. That’s quite amazing, don’t you agree?
• Human Brain Cells Make Mice Smart. And those cells were not neurons!
• “New” Antarctica Bacteria Now Said to Only Be Contaminant. That’s why must be careful about telling things…
• Life Found Deep inside Earth’s Oceanic Crust. Even rocks at the bottom of the sea are full of life.
• Playing Roulette with Seven Sexes. What about belonging to a species having seven different sexes? And you couldn’t find out how.
• Trilobites Foun With Mysterious Markings. A classical fossil, now with camouflage.

Blog

• Will we ever regenerate limbs? Newts laugh at us.
• Good news about sharing scientific research. More about Open Access, at least in the United States.
• What Happens When Forest Elephants are Wiped Out in an Ecosystem? If you think that trees would be happy, you’re wrong.
• The Narcissism of De-Extinction. A nice text to all those who just want it, but don’t think about it.
• A Museum Chapel for Microscopic Biodiversity, because vertebrates are only a tiny fraction of life.
• Does Music Lessons Make You Smarter? I like the way the text approaches the moralist idea of not accepting that something like art may not be as useful outside itself as other things.
• 5-Million-Year-Old Saber-Toothed Cat Fossil Discovered. Its name is Rhizosmilodon.

Art

• Evolution of Horse, by Chen Yu. A nice cladogram available for download in a good resolution.

Books

• Biobiblioteca, for facebook users, a facebook page with several ebooks about Biology, Astronomy, Sci-Fi and science in general to download. Take a look!

Scientific Articles

• Doom of the elephant-dependent trees in a Congo tropical forest. Remove the elephants and the trees will die.
• Biophysical Model of Bacterial Cell Interactions with Nanopatterned Cicada Wing Surfaces. A way to shred microscopically.
• A New Machairodont from the Palmetto Fauna (Early Pliocene) of Florida, with Comments on the Origin of the Smilodontini (Mammalia, Carnivora, Felidae). Here you can find the description of the brand new Rhizosmilodon.
• Mating Type Determination in Tetrahymena: Last Man Standing and Selecting One of Several Mating Types through Gene Segment Joining and Deletion in Tetrahymena thermophila. The papers about the seven-sexed ciliate.

Earthling Bulletin #14

by Piter Kehoma Boll

You have sex, lose your penis and it grows back the day after. That happens with this sea slug. Photo by Matthew Oldfield, extracted from nature.com

News

• Sea slug loses pensis after sex but grows another the next day. Sex can have bizarre adaptations.
• Russian Meteor Largest in Century. The Solar System is playing extinction.
• The Joy of Fungal Sex: Penicillin Mold Can Reproduce Sexually, Which Could Lead to Better Antibiotics. Sex on your bread can save lifes, how weird is that?
• What Are Dogs Saying When They Bark? Maybe more than we can perceive.
• Bumblebees Sense Electric Fields in Flowers, so they can avoid flowers whose nectar has already been collected!
• Genes mix faster than stories. An interesting analysis!
• Scientist Unravel Mystery of Flying Squid. There are four lessons to learn.
• Newt Finding Might Set Back Efforts to Regrow Human Limbs. What once was thought to be an ancestral character, now seems to be actually a novelty.
• Convergent Evolution: Hyenas Offer Clues to he Human Past. It’s worth reading!
• ‘Monster’ goldfish have long prowled Lake Tahoe, scientists say. Don’t throw your pets in lakes!

Blog

• Poposaurus, Postosuchus, and th Dinosaur Mimic Croc Walk. If you think it is a dinosaur, look again.
• Conservation triage: Which species should be saved? It’s hard to have to chose.
• When cats are outlawed, what animals should replace them as pets? Yes, cats can be an environmental problem sometimes, but they are the cutest thing yet.
• Snowed In. A possible new genus of beetles.
• Do Insects Have Fat? A doubt I had for years.
• Do Non-Human Animals Like Human Music? Another intriguing question!

Art

• Sky-blue with yellow fringe, a Neotropical cockroach, by Arthur Anker. An amazing insect!
• Corpse Flower, by RSN. Now he draws plants too!
• Megaloceros giganteus, by Renata Cunha. She is always impressive!

Scientific Articles

• Interactions between sea urchin grazing and prey diversity on temperate rocky reef communities. I kinda like those kind of studies!
• Faltering lemming cycles reduc productivity and population size of a migratory Arctic goose species. Oh, those lemmings…
• Predatory beetles facilitate plant growth by driving earthworms to lower soil layers. Ecosystems are amazing.
• Crocodyliform Feeding Traces on Juvenile Ornithischian Dinosaurs from the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) Kaiparowits Formation, Utah. Birds and crocs are an ancient issue.
• High Humidity Leads to Loss of Infectious Influenza Virus from Simulated Coughs. How ’bout that?
• Tremulatory and Abdomen Vibration Signals Enable Communication through Air in the Stink Bug Euschistus heros. Singing and stinking!

Earthling Bulletin #13

by Piter Kehoma Boll

For the first time, the strange four-strand DNA has been found in cells! Picture by Jean-Paul Rodriguez, extracted from nature.com

News

• Zoologger: The first solar-powered vertebrate. A charming salamander has also made some deals with algae!
• Four-strand DNA structure found in cells. DNA four-strand form was already known in lab, but for the first time it was found in cells.
• Letters of Alfred Russel Wallace Go Online. Because we cannot forget the co-author of the theory of natural selection.
• Eat Less by Altering Your Food Memories. You may get satiated just by remembering food. How cool is that, huh?
• Critically Endangered Mexican Gray Wolf Released into Arizona Wild. We wish good look to our fellow!
• Dog’s dinner was key to domestication. A change in wolves’ digestion seems to have originated our friends.
• Synthetic double-helix faithfully stores Shakespeare’s sonnets. It would be interesting to transcript and translate such a DNA strand.
• Almost Extinct Brazilian Bird Observed in Nest for the First Time.  The Stresemann’s bristlefront, Merulaxis stresemanni has been recorded in video!
• Dung Beetles Use Milky Way to Guid Movement. This is the first species to be known to do so!

Blog

• Will Grey Parrots Share? Personality is a complex feature even in parrots!
• Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral, by Mike Taylor. Excellent article!
• Can Explanations Make Learning More Difficult? An interesting and revolutionary way to think.
• Gut Microbes Contribute to Mysterious Malnutrition. It’s not only our own DNA that defines our body.
• Healing the Brain with Snail Veenom. Conotoxins seem to be a pot of gold for medicines!
• Corridors Critical for India’s Big Cats. Habitat fragmentation is a major issue for endangered species and corridors uniting this fragments are essential for their survival.
• The strangest cancer in the world. Tasmanian devils are threatened by a scary contagious cancer. 😦
• Secret of the Dinosaur Sexes Locked in Bone. Medullary Bone may hold the key.
• Tweet to Learn. You can indeed learn a lot by using twitter! By the way, Earthling Nature is on Twitter too! 😉
• Echidna ejaculation is a little one-sided. Take a look at the most bizarre penis in the animal kingdom!
• How to Cross the Deep Sea: Stepping Stones of Mollusk Poop. The mysterious deep sea life is indeed very connected to the surface.

Art & Books

• The *New* Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs. Take a look and compare how our view of dinosaurs has changed! You can find it at Amazon, here!
• Kangaroos, Australia, by Gordon Fellows. Beautiful shot!

Scientific Articles

• Intracapsular algae provide fixed carbon to developing embryos of the salamander Ambystoma maculatum. The article about the “photosynthetic” salamander.
• Quantitative visualization of DNA G-quadruplex structures in human cells. The paper about the four-strand DNA.
• The more polluted the environment, the more important biodiversity is for food web stability. Unfortunately it seems to work against the flow.
• A New Azhdarchid Pterosaur from the Late Cretaceoous of the Transylvanian Basin, Romania: Implications for Azhdarchid Diversity and Distribution. Our new fossil guy is called Eurazhdarcho langendorfensis.
• Reduced plumage and flight ability of a new Jurassic paravian theropod from China. Eosinopteryx’s plumage indicates that deinonychosaurs occupied a wider range of niches than previously thought.
• Gender identification of the Mesozoic bird Confuciusornis sanctus. Because some small details can show you who is a boy and who is a girl.
• Evolutionary Applications, with a special issue relating cancer and evolution.
• Hailstones: A Window into the Microbial and Chemical Inventory of a Storm Cloud. There are more bacteria living inside the clouds than you imagine.
• Consumption with Lagre Sip Sizes Increases Food Intake and Leads to Underestimation of the Amount Consumed. More tips for losing weight!
• The First Metriorhynchid Crocodylomorph from the Middle Jurassic of Spain, with Implications of Evolution of the Subclade Rhacheosaurini. This month has plenty of interesting fossil findings!

Earthling Bulletin #12

by Piter Kehoma Boll and Rafael Nascimento

The new venomous primate species Nycticebus kayan. Photo by Chi’en C. Lee. Extracted from wildborneo.com.my

News

• Brain cells made from urine. With no need for Stem cells! Quite cool, right?
• Quest for Kenya’s Desert Warthog, the least understood large animal.
• Ancient fungi found in deep-sea mud. Penicillium, found from your bread to the bottom of the sea.
• Newly Discovered Cave Weta Species Endangered by Coal Mining. And how many still unknown have already been extinct?
• Controversial claim puts life on land 65 million years early. Was the Ediacaran fauna terrestrial?
• King Crabs Poised to Wipe Out Rare Antarctic Ecosystem of Invertebrates. One more environmental tragedy…
• Art of cheese-making is 7,500 years old. And it was mozzarella since the beginning.
• Boys and Girls May Get Different Breast Milk. Amazing, don’t you think?
• Kayan Loris, New Species of Primate with Toxic Bite. One more astonishing discovery!
• Gold “Mining” Termites Found, May Lead Humans to Riches. And you didn’t like them because of what they do to the forniture.
• Spider that Builds its Own Spider Decoys Discovered. Natural selection always amazing.
• 12 Obvious Science Findings of 2012. Kinda funny!

Blog

• The Fungus in Your Cheese Is Having Weird Sex. Well, cheese is a weird thing, but delicious anyway!
• I is for Irritator. An irritating palaeontological fate.
• Beyond the Childhood Dinosaur Phase: Why Dinosaurs Should Matter to Everyone. We are what we are because of them.
• Hiding Out With the Cuttlefish. Some talking about this impressive mechanism to change color.
• Don’t pee on it: Zinc emerges as new jellyfish sting treatment. Nothing better than feeling something on yourself to start acting.
• Why do so many tropical ants sting, while those in Boreal latitudes never do? A very intringuing question!
• A Mayfly in December. I wish insects were better known here in Brazil too.

Art

• How People Explain Color Throughout the World. An amazing infographic about color perpection in different languages.
• How Many Species Are on Earth? Another interesting infographic.
• Spotted Eye Hoverfly, by Yousef Al Habshi, always showing amazing macro photos.
• Charonosaurus, by Andrey Atuchin. Great work at texture.
• Borissiakia betpakdalensis, by Roman Yevseyev. I usually dislike photomanipulation, but those made by him are very well done.
• IDougDinosaurs. Doug Hendersons pics for sale! (via Love in the Time of Chasmosaurus).
• Military Macaw, by Kristyn Janelle. Detailed work on feathers.

Scientific Articles

• Microstructured barbs on the North American porcupine quill enable easy tissue penetration and difficult removal. And it may inspire future biodevices.
• Primitive Wing Feather Arrangement in Archaeopteryx lithographic and Anchiornis huxleyi, an analysis of the wings of ancient birds and how they differ from modern ones.
• The evolution of writing. Could in fact the writing habit become extinct in a civilization which once had it?
• Preference of Leaders with Masculine Voices Holds in the Case of Feminine Leadership Roles. That’s quite interesting! But will drive some feminists insane…
• Insights from Characterizing Extinct Human Gut Microbiomes. Even the insides of our guts have a history!
• The First Freshwater Mosasauroid (Upper Cretaceous, Hungary) and a New Clade of Basal Mosasauroids. Our favorite aquatic lizards now in a freshwater version!
• Pilot Whales Attracted to Killer Whale Sounds: Acoustically-Mediated Interspecific Interactions in Cetaceans. We primates should be ashamed.

Earthling Bulletin #11

by Rafael Silva do Nascimento and Piter Kehoma Boll

Today’s the first anniversay of the blog! We would like to thank our visitors for helping in our humble first year of existence!

News

• Xenoceratops, the “alien” horned dinosaur found in Canada.
• New Iguanodontid found in coal mine in Spain, story from a national news website.
• Homo (Sans) sapiens: Is Dumb and Dumber Our Evolutionary Destiny? The lack of natural selection is starting to make us loose our sapiens!
• Life abounds in Antartic lake sealed under ice. Salty, cold and dark, but still cozy to some bacterial pals.

Blog

• Coming Soon: A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds. Matthew Martyniuk talks about his upcoming  unorthodox bird-watching book
• Review: All Yesterdays (Conway, Kosemen and Naish). SVPO overview on this new that might change the way we look at the past.
• Enter the hyperparasites -wasps that lay eggs in wasps that lay eggs in caterpillars. Ed Yong tells us about this parasite inception.
• What Makes a Paper Useful? Andrew Farke talks about  what all researchers want .

Art

• Palaeotherium magnum by Roman Yevseyev, magnific realistic recreation of this ancient ungulate.
• Cervus elaphus cherskii by Margarita Panova, her gallery in deviantArt is full of marvelous depictions of extinct cervids. Really worth take a look.
• Dsungaripterus by Michele The Sea, a bat-esque reconstruction of this pterosaur that gave it an life-like atmosphere.
• Ornithomimus by Paul Heaston, following the latest researchs on ostrich-like dinosaurs.
• Great green macaw (Ara ambiguus) by namu-the-orca. This gallery is known for the cetaceans pictures, but also shows that the talent is not restricted to them.

Scientific Articles

• Forearm orientation in Hadrosauridae (Dinosauria: Ornithopoda) and implications for museum mounts. Now the museum mounts must match the footprints.
• Empirical determination of physical controls on megafaunal footprint formation through neoichnological experiments with elephants. Giants used to study giants.
• Vocal Imitation in Parrots Allows Addressing of Specific Individuals in a Dynamic Communication Network. So Parrots mock each other to say “hey, I’m talking to you!”
• Heards Overhead: Nimbadon lavarackorum (Diprotodontidae), Heavyweight Marsupial Herbivores in the Miocene Forests of Australia. It’s like a fat giant koala on the trees!
• A genetically distinct lion (Panthera leo) population from Ethiopia. And you though we already knew everything about lions.