The Fossil Record

Be quiet, he can hear you.

The Great Grey Owl, one of the world's largest Strigiformes,  grows to an average of 24 to 33 inches tall, with a wingspan of almost 60 inches--but only weighs about as much as a quart of milk. Great Greys live in northern Europe and Asia, across Canada,  in Alaska and in the northern Rocky Mountains of the United States.  They  love to eat rodents and other small animals.  In the video below, one of these majestic modern-day raptors reveals how his head can act like a satellite dish to pick up the sounds of tiny creatures, even as they try to hide from him under the snow.

Learn more about the Great Grey Owl on The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's awesome All About Birds website.

Now that's a big baby!

My friend Eric, who lives in Portland, showed me this video of the Oregon Zoo's gorgeous and very playful eight-month-old and 1,005 pound baby elephant, Samudra. The young Asian elephant, who is the first third-generation elephant to be born in the United States, weighed a whopping 286 pounds at birth. He could weigh anywhere between 6,000 and 14,000 pounds when he's a fully grown adult. Asian elephants reach their maximum size when they are 25 years old. Their average lifespan is 45 years. 

Learn some more interesting facts about Asian elephants here and read the updates about Samudra's life story here. 

Happy Earth Day 2009

Big cats hunt for Easter eggs!

Earth Hour!

Transparent fish caught on tape!

Curious octopus floods aquarium

Story by Bob Poole of the Los Angeles Times

It's not surprising that with eight arms and inquisitive nature, the two-spotted octopus is pretty handy around its tank at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium.

Still, those reporting for work Thursday at the popular beachfront attraction were caught by surprise when they were greeted by water lapping around the kelp forest display, the shark and ray tank and the rocky reef exhibit.

 

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  Octopus tinkers in its tank

The guest of honor in the aquarium's Kids' Corner octopus tank had swum to the top of the enclosure and disassembled the recycling system's valve, flooding the place with some 200 gallons of seawater.

"It had grabbed the tube that pulls out the water and caused it to spray outside the tank," said aquarium education specialist Nick Fash. Judging by the size of the flood, Fash estimated that the water flowed for about 10 hours before the first staff member, Aaron Kind, showed up for work.

Kind issued an all-hands-on-deck call to summon co-workers to the pier with mops, water vacuums and fans. Even though the aquarium is built over the beach, it has no floor drain.

The tiny octopus, which is about the size of a human forearm when its appendages are extended, floated lazily in the water that remained in its tank. 

It watched intently through glass walls and portholes as workers struggled to dry the place out in time for the day's first busload of schoolchildren to arrive on a 9:30 a.m. field trip.

Randi Parent, the aquarium's community outreach coordinator, said the only significant damage was to newly installed ecologically sensitive flooring in several offices. It consists of linseed-and-cork tiles that soaked up the seawater and squished beneath workers' feet the rest of the day.

The incident was reminiscent of a 1994 incident at San Pedro's Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in which an octopus named Octavia pulled a plastic pipe loose. 

That giant Pacific octopus died when all of the water in her tank drained out.

Since octopuses are considered by many to be the most intelligent invertebrate -- and to have good memories -- Fash said he jury-rigged his octopus tank piping with clamps and tape in hopes of thwarting any further mischief by its occupant. "She would need tools," he said of his octopus, which until now had no name.

"Some people are suggesting we call her 'Flo,' " he said.

Devastation in Australia

Hope is that thing  with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.

--Emily Dickinson

The world should thank the rescue and rehabilitation crews who have worked so hard to help save all the people and animals they could during Australia's devastating bush fires.  The fires wiped out over 40,000 hectares (or nearly 100,000 acres) of land.

 Australia's creatures are often unique to that continent--koalas, wombats, wallabies, echidnas, dingoes, Tasmanian Devils and kangaroos to name a few--and their populations have suffered devastating losses.  A great number of the surviving animals have lost their habitats.  They will need plenty of help moving into new homes.  

Many animals who survived the deadly fires have been badly burned.  Animal rescuers even found a turtle--still alive--whose shell had melted and fused to her body from the fire's intense heat.  

"We've got a wallaby joey at the moment that has crispy fried ears because he stuck his head out of his mum's pouch and lost all his whiskers and cooked up his nose," Wildlife Victoria President Jon Rowdon told the Associated Press news agency in a February 11th article.  

Now, zoos and animal shelters in Australia are overwhelmed with injured and recovering animals.  Many volunteers are working around the clock to help save them. The video below shows one of  many firefighters, who had been out in the brush, performing a famous koala rescue.  Koalas are dangerous wild animals who normally do not let humans get near them, but this little gal was so thirsty that she put aside her fear and let the kind fireman give her some water.  Rescuers named her "Sam," and she became a symbol of optimism for her entire nation. We wish Sam and all the animals and people of Australia a safe and speedy recovery from this terrible disaster.

 

Titanoboa!

Texas state dino gets a name change

By Paul J. Weber

From Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO - Pleurocoelus has served ably as the official dinosaur of Texas. Sure, it was a plant-noshing herbivore in a fiercely barbecue-proud state, but the sauropod dwarfed most other dinos and lumbered with a 20-ton swagger.

Then he was exposed as an East Coaster.

The discovery in 2007 led a lawmaker in the southern state to file a resolution in the Legislature this month that seeks to send Pleurocoelus packing and transfer the state dinosaur title to a very similar but more uniquely Texas species, newly dubbed Paluxysaurus jonesi.

That's paluxysaurus as in the Paluxy River in Central Texas, where a graduate student found the dinosaur crowned by state lawmakers in 1997 was really a 112-million-year-old impostor.

"It's important to get things right," said Aaron Pan, curator of science for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. "If it's not the same thing, you can't really call it that."

Official state flowers, songs, and birds are more common in the United States, but Texas is among a handful of states that also have chosen official dinosaurs.

Passage of the measure is a virtual guarantee, while the legislature struggles with the recession, shortfalls in tax revenue and paying for hurricane damage.

The resolution repairs what is largely a case of mistaken identity. Pleurocoelus and Paluxysaurus were both giraffe-necked and enormous four-footed herbivores, with a close resemblance to the more widely known brachiosaurus.

Peter Rose was studying at Southern Methodist University when he began scrutinizing fossils — thought to belong to Pleurocoelus — that littered a Hood County ranch. The prevalence of the remains helped sell the sauropod as state's official dinosaur in the first place.

Paleontologists had long accepted the fossils belonged to Pleurocoelus, whose bones were first dug up in Maryland. But Rose found the juvenile pleurocoelus specimens in Maryland didn't match the adult bones found in Texas.

Rose determined he had a whole new dinosaur on his hands. After tinkering with the name, he settled on incorporating Paluxy and stamped the species as jonesi, in a tribute to the Jones Ranch and its rich collection of fossils.

He then published a paper in 2007 explaining how Texas had been duped.

"I was more intimidated by throwing that out to my peers and the dinosaur community," said Rose, now at the University of Minnesota.

Rose said he's unaware of any challenges to his paper.

Texas boasted its share of dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus rex is thought to have prowled around Big Bend while the meat-eater Acrocanthus, named from an Oklahoma specimen, skulked near the Paluxysaurus. Tracks even suggest the Texas sauropod and Oklahoma's Acrocanthus tangled in the early Cretaceous.

Louis Jacobs, an SMU professor and paleontologist, has a hunch of which prevailed.

"It's hard to knock a big thing down," said Jacobs, who was also Rose's mentor at SMU. "If those tracks are telling the correct story, the sauropod kept on walking on."

Image from the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History

Polar Bear friend gone

This summer, a month after I visited the Seneca Park Zoo and took this photo of him there, Yukon the polar bear died. 

He came to the Seneca Park Zoo about 16 years ago from Cincinnati.  He had fathered five cubs since then.  

You can see from this photo that he was very playful and outgoing, and the camera loved him. 

So did we.

Rest in peace, Yukon.   ♥

 

Dog days of summer

It's toasty outside now that I'm back in south Texas, so I'm thinking cool thoughts about this handsome fellow I met up at the Seneca Park Zoo in New York State a few days ago.  He's an arctic grey wolf, Canus lupus arctos, the largest species of all wolves. Adult male arctic wolves  can weigh over 100 pounds.

Even New York is too hot for this guy, though. He normally lives between the edge of North America and the North Pole, hunting for rabbits, caribou and musk ox.  

He has a brilliant white coat that distinguishes him from his close cousin, the North American gray wolf, who was just removed from the federal list of threatened and endangered species this past March.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the arctic wolf is the only subspecies of wolf that has not yet been threatened, due to its isolation from humans in its native environment. As mines and oil pipelines encroach upon their territory and interrupt their food supply though, we may see arctic wolf numbers begin to decline.

You can read some interesting facts about Nikko, the Seneca Park Zoo arctic wolf, here.

A sad seal story

When Columbus came to the New World, legend is the first animal he discovered was a Caribbean monk seal on the coast of Santa Domingo. In fact, Columbus and his men hunted the small but plentiful seals, who once populated the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, for food. The docile creatures were easy prey for the explorers and for the multitude of European settlers who followed in their footsteps.  

The seals were hunted so much for food and for their oil that by the 1880's, they were already rare.  But up until the 1950's, visitors to the Florida Keys could still see monk seals swimming in the area's warm waters.

There hasn't been an official sighting of a Caribbean monk seal in more than fifty years.

Now, just this past week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has officially declared the Monachus tropicalis species extinct--the first extinction to be officially blamed on humans.

Scientists warn that Hawaiian and Mediterranean monk seals could be the next pinnipeds to vanish from the planet.  They say there are about 1,200 Hawaiian and 500 Mediterranean seals remaining.

"We hope we've learned from the extinction of Caribbean monk seals, and can provide stronger protection for their Hawaiian and Mediterranean relatives," says Kyle Barker,  an NOAA Fisheries Service biologist.

U.S. National Museum illustration

Sea turtle gets another chance

Allison is a three-year-old green sea turtle who was found one day back in 2005 by some tourists on South Padre Island.  She was brought to Sea Turtle, Inc., a hospital for the endangered animals,  because she only had one fin. Allison's other three fins had been bitten off, probably by a shark.  The prospects for her survival looked pretty grim, but the staff at Sea Turtle, Inc. nursed her back to health by giving her antibiotics and feeding her a diet of squid.  

Now, Allison's doctors are working with the University of Texas Dental branch to create a prosthetic fin for her out of silicone.  A mold of the stump that's left from her injury will be used to fashion her new flipper, which will be the first of its kind.  The flipper will be attached to her body with straps, and may have to be replaced every five or ten years as she grows. She currently weighs only about eight pounds,  but adult green sea turtles can grow to be about 450 pounds and live to  be nearly 100!

Once she gets her new flipper, Allison will stay at Sea Turtle, Inc. since she would be too vulnerable to predators.  If she had three flippers, though, she could be returned to the wild.  That is why the work being done to help Allison will be important in helping to save other green sea turtles with injuries in the future. Green sea turtles nest at night in the Gulf of Mexico--but only every three or four years.  The rare sea turtle babies need all the help they can get in their difficult quest for survival.  

"Allison is near and dear to everyone's heart here at Sea Turtle, Inc.," says Jeff George, a curator there.  "She will make a great ambassador here since she is an endangered animal."

Learn more about green sea turtles here.

(Photo from Sea Turtle, Inc.)

Harvesting the sun

Can you say Solana? Sounds like the name of a space ship, but it's actually Spanish for "sunny place." It's also the name of what will be one of the world's largest solar energy farms, to be built near not-so-shady Phoenix, Arizona by the year 2011.

The plant will cover about 1,900 acres of land (about three square miles) with what are called parabolic trough reflectors, which look a lot like giant square-shaped satellite dishes.

The thick glass mirrors in the troughs will collect sunlight and reflect it like huge magnifying glasses into a receiver, where it heats a synthetic type of energy-carrying oil. The sunlight heats the oil to a blazing temperature of about 725 degrees Fahrenheit. The oil then travels through pipes to heat exchangers which convert the energy first to high-pressure steam, which powers a turbine that creates electricity.

When operating at full power, Solana will be able to provide clean electrical power to about 70,000 homes.

Now that's hot!

_____________________________________

(Solana farm illustration from APS)

Happy Earth Day!

Let's keep it clean.

Remember to reuse, recycle, reduce--turn off the lights when you leave a room (and the video games when you're done playing), shut off the water while you're brushing your teeth, don't waste paper, plant a tree, don't litter--and spread the word about conservation to all your friends!

It's so easy being green!

Hark! Who goes there?

We took another little road trip to West Texas recently where we came across this field in the Davis Mountains full of deer and wild turkey. There must have been at least 200 deer there, and they looked like they were gathering for some kind of huge family reunion. I'm surprised they weren't wearing little t-shirts telling them which banquet hall they belonged in. I know they were related because they all had those big funny ears.

In fact, those big ears gave the Mule Deer their family name. Their large, gray and white ears look like (guess what?) mule's ears. Mule Deer are pretty common in West Texas and the western half of the country. They look a bit different from the White-Tailed Deer I'm used to seeing back in the East!

Mule Deer like to eat grass, and lots of it, so these guys were all having fun at their picnic.

I wonder if those big ears help them hear better?

I like how that one fellow in the picture is not interrupting his meal for whatever is making the others stand up and listen!

Did you know...that deer appeared in the fossil record about 35 million years ago, in the Oligocene Epoch?

Earth lights at night

NASA photo

Click on the image to see a bigger version!

A beautiful baby makes her debut

Photo by Gareth Fuller of the Associated Press

This very rare 14-week-old Amur leopard baby just came out of hiding on February 28 for the first time. Her mother, Ascha, is a resident of the Marwell Zoological Park in Winchester, England. She has been caring for her little girl quietly in her den since the baby cat was born.

The cub doesn't have a name yet--but if you visit the Marwell Zoo's website before March 19, you can vote on one for her! (I chose "Kiska," a Russian name that means "pure.")

The Amur leopard, Panthera pardus orientalis, is a Far Eastern subspecies of leopard. The cats inhabit regions of eastern Russia and northern China, and are known for their distinctively large spots, on coats that grow from about 2 centimeters long in the summer to about 7 centimeters long during the harsh winters of their homelands.

The Amur leopard, unfortunately, is also considered the most endangered big cat in the world. There are, by most counts, less than thirty-five of them left in the wild. Efforts to save the cats have now reached a crisis point.

That is why zoos have become so important in the conservation of this incredible species. There are more than 200 of these rare and beautiful creatures now being cared for in zoos around the world. Since their numbers have dwindled in their native habitats, the cats have not been successfully giving birth in the wild. Male cats left in the wild also outnumber the females almost four to one. When a new Amur leopard baby is born in a zoo, her life expectancy is quite a bit longer than it would have been otherwise. She won't be in danger there from habitat loss, deforestation, or poaching.

A new leopard baby typically stays with her mother for about two years before she becomes independent. Most female leopards have only one or two cubs per litter.

Learn more about the Amur leopard here.

Get folding

You can share the following story with your teachers when you get caught designing future unmanned spacecraft during math class.

Download a template to make your own F-117 "Nighthawk" (shown in the picture) at Amazing Paper Airplanes.com.

Story by Yoko Kubota

From Reuters

KASHIWA CITY, Japan - A spacecraft made of folded paper zooming through the skies may sound far-fetched, but Japanese scientists plan to launch paper planes from the International Space Station to see if they make it back to Earth.

On February 6th, the University of Tokyo researchers tested small, origami planes made of special paper for 30 seconds in 482 degrees Fahrenheit heat and wind at seven times the speed of sound. The planes survived the wind tunnel test intact.

The theory is that paper craft, being much lighter than space shuttles, may escape the worst of the friction and heat that much heavier space shuttles face on re-entry to the atmosphere.

"Paper planes are extremely light so they slow down when the air is thin and can gradually descend," said Shinji Suzuki, a professor of aerospace engineering.

Suzuki said the technology might one day be used for unmanned spacecraft.

The team has asked a Japanese astronaut to release the 8-inch planes, made from paper chemically treated to resist heat and water, from the space station.

It will take several months for the craft to reach Earth, and there is no way to predict their landing spot if they make it, Suzuki said.

"It's going to be the space version of a message in a bottle. It will be great if someone picks one up," he said. "We are thinking of writing messages on the planes saying 'if found, please contact us' in a couple of languages."