Scienceblogtwo

A well-preserved fossilized worm from 518 million years ago has been found by an international team of scientists, including researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Oxford and the Natural History Museum, to resemble the ancestor of three significant groups of living creatures. The fossil worm, known as Wufengella and discovered in China, was a stubby creature with a half-inch long body covered in a dense, regularly overlapping array of plates on its back. It belonged to an extinct class of shelled animals known as tommotiids. A fleshy body with several side-projecting flattened lobes surrounded the asymmetrical armour. Between the lobes and the armor, bundles of bristles protruded from the body. The worm was previously serialized or segmented, like an earthworm, as evidenced by the numerous lobes, bundles of bristles, and array of shells on the back. The results have been published in the journal Current Biology today. Dr. Jakob Vinther, a study co-author from the School of Ea...

Salamanders without lungs produce lungs as embryos despite having lost their lungs as adults over millions of years. The lungs of many vertebrates, including humans, are crucial. However, four extant amphibian clades now mostly breathe through their wet skin rather than their lungs. The developmental causes of lung loss in these clades are poorly understood. When the Plethodontidae, a dominant family of salamanders that are all lungless as adults, were examined, researchers from Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology found that they do develop lungs as embryos. This finding sheds light on the evolution of lung loss over millions of years. The journal Science Advances just published their findings. With about two-thirds of the diversity in the current salamander population, Plethodontidae is the salamander family with the greatest number of species. The skin and mucous membranes of the mouth and throat serve as the pr...

Male bottlenose dolphins have been found by an international team of researchers lead by scientists at the University of Bristol to create the largest known multi-level alliance network outside of humans. These cross-group alliances make it easier for men to get a scarce resource. In order to reconstruct the structure of alliances between 121 adult male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins at Shark Bay in Western Australia, the researchers, along with collaborators from the Universities of Zurich and Massachusetts, examined association and consortship data. Today, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published their findings (PNAS). In Shark Bay, male dolphins group together in first-order alliances of two to three males to cooperate pursue mating relationships with specific females. For access to female dolphins, second-order coalitions of four to fourteen unrelated males fight with one another, while third-order alliances form amongst collaborating second-order alliances. ...

Male bottlenose dolphins have been found by an international team of researchers lead by scientists at the University of Bristol to create the largest known multi-level alliance network outside of humans. These cross-group alliances make it easier for men to get a scarce resource. In order to reconstruct the structure of alliances between 121 adult male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins at Shark Bay in Western Australia, the researchers, along with collaborators from the Universities of Zurich and Massachusetts, examined association and consortship data. Today, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published their findings (PNAS). In Shark Bay, male dolphins group together in first-order alliances of two to three males to cooperate pursue mating relationships with specific females. For access to female dolphins, second-order coalitions of four to fourteen unrelated males fight with one another, while third-order alliances form amongst collaborating second-order alliances. ...

Princeton University geneticist Stephen Gaughran has confirmed that "Fernanda" is connected to a tortoise that was removed from Fernandina Island more than a century ago and that both of them are genetically different from all other Galápagos tortoises. A Galápagos species of tortoise that was previously believed to be extinct has been found to still be alive. The tortoise, named Fernanda after her native Fernandina Island, is the first of its kind to be found in more than a century. The Fernandina Island Galápagos giant tortoise, sometimes known as the "wonderful gigantic tortoise," was only ever found as a single individual. The finding of a female tortoise on Fernandina Island in 2019 provided the opportunity to determine whether the species is still extant. By sequencing the genomes of the living creature and the museum specimen and comparing them to the other 13 species of Galápagos giant tortoises, Stephen Gaughran from Princeton University proved that the two...

Recent genomic studies on wild baboons in southern Kenya show that the majority of them have DNA signs of hybridization. A third of their genetic composition is made up of DNA from another, closely related species as a result of interbreeding. The study was conducted in an area close to Kenya's Amboseli National Park, where yellow baboons and their anubis baboon neighbors that dwell to the northwest occasionally interact. The Amboseli Baboon Research Project, one of the longest-running field studies of wild primates in the world, has tracked these creatures almost daily since 1971, recording when they married with outsiders and how the progeny fared during their lifetimes. The faces and undersides of yellow baboons are white, and their fur is yellow-brown. Male Anubis baboons have shaggy manes wrapped around their heads and have greenish-gray hair. Despite being separate species that split 1.4 million years ago, they are capable of hybridizing in areas where their ranges intersect....