Planet Earth

Climate change would be altering deer to give birth early

Credit: Elsemargriet / Pixabay

Usually, we think of evolution as a slow process that takes place over millions of years. However, a team of scientists has now documented how deer on a Scottish island seem to be evolving over the course of decades, possibly in response to climate change, which makes them give birth earlier, at the beginning of the year.

According to a study published in the open access journal PLOS Biology, these deer, who live on the island of Rum, near the west coast of Scotland, have undergone genetic changes that have contributed to the animals having children almost two weeks earlier over the past four decades.

Previous studies by other groups of scientists have shown that deer on this island have been giving birth before, partly as a result of warmer temperatures that have altered their behavior and the functioning of their bodies.

Genetic changes in deer

However, the latest study sheds light on the important role of adaptive genetic changes in this process. The researchers say that this work represents some of the first evidence that evolutionary changes are affecting the time of year when wild animals give birth.

Timothée Bonnet, lead author of the study of the Australian National University said in a statement:

This is one of the few cases in which we have documented the evolution in action, which shows that it can help populations adapt to climate warming. ”

For their research, Bonnet and his colleagues examined the field records and genetic data that scientists collected from the deer population living on the island between 1972 and 2016.

Red deer on the Isle of Rum, Scotland. Credit: J. Pemberton

Bonnet told the website Newsweek:

That population of red deer has been monitored intensely since the 1970s, and even before in less detail. That is why researchers have been able to notice changes in birth dates over the years. That is the fundamental motivation for our study: try to understand that change. ”

Impact of climate change on deer

The team’s analysis revealed that red deer hinds, known as hinds, with genetic adaptations that made them give birth at the beginning of the year, they tended to have more offspring throughout their lives. Therefore, responsible genes offer an evolutionary advantage and as a result they have become increasingly common in this deer population in recent decades.

Bonnet said:

We discovered that the genetic makeup of the population had changed to determine the dates of birth before spring. We discovered that genetic change is probably a response to natural selection, but we do not know what causes selection: it could be climate change, change in population density or any unknown factor that has changed in recent decades.
It is very difficult to say when climate change causes genetic change, but genetic change occurs at a rate similar to direct (non-genetic) responses to climate warming and fast enough to matter in the ecological dynamics related to climate change. ” .

Climate change would be changing deer to give birth early — Credit: smarko / Pixabay

Sally Thomas, from Scottish Natural Heritage, who also did not participate in the study, said in a statement:

These findings are a fascinating example of the impact that climate change can have on wildlife. More and more research shows that climate change is influencing species throughout the United Kingdom and the world. ”

Climate change is affecting life on our planet Earth in several ways and scientists say that for species to survive they must adapt by experiencing genetic changes or migrating to more suitable habitats, for example.

But a recent research published in the magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that genetic adaptation along with dispersion in new ranges could put species in conflict with each other.

This finding could mean that scientists have been underestimating how the global climate change will affect biodiversity and the amount of extinctions that will occur.

Some scientists have argued that the Earth is currently experiencing its sixth mass extinction, with species that disappear significantly faster than historical reference rates.

In fact, a historical report by the UN recently warned that 1 million species around the world run the risk of disappearing due to human pressures and climate change.

The scientific study has been published in PLOS Biology.

Source: Newsweek

Planet Earth

A previously unknown species of winged dinosaur very similar to a dragon discovered in China

Artistic representation of how the Wulong bohaiensis could have been. Credit: Erick Toussaint / San Diego Natural History Museum

A new species of dinosaur, a relative of Velociraptor, has shown scientists a little more about the origins of similarities and differences between the feathers of dinosaurs and birds.

The fossil belongs to a fierce dinosaur from the Cretaceous period called the “dancing dragon” who lived 120 million years ago in what is now China.

‘Dancing dragon’

Wulong bohaiensis fossil — Fossil of the Wulong bohaiensis. Credit: Erick Toussaint / San Diego Natural History Museum

Called Wulong Bohaiensis, It was a two-legged carnivore, a little bigger than a raven, that resided in an environment next to lakes. He had a scaly face, a mouth full of pointed teeth, a particularly dangerous toenail, and probably hunted small mammals, lizards, birds and fish.

He was gound in the Chinese province of Rehe, in northeastern China and his name translates as ‘dancing dragon’, as it refers to the articulated position in which his skeleton is.

Conserved in its entirety, the skeleton included soft tissues such as feathers, which appear together on its arms and legs, very similar to those of birds now. In addition to its four long limbs and two long feathers at the end of the tail, his body was covered by spongy filaments.

At the end of its long bone tail, fused in a rigid rod, there were 2 very long feathers.

«The Wulong specimen is a magnificent fossil. With the feathers and claws, I think it would have been beautiful and a little scary. I would love to see one alive, ”said leading research paleontologist Ashley Poust of the San Diego Natural History Museum.

Plumage differences between birds and feathered dinosaurs

A thorough examination of the bones showed that this Wulong individual was approximately one year old, that is, he was a young male still growing.

A new species of feathered dinosaur in China

This characteristic puzzled the experts, since usually the feathers appear in the adult stage. “Either the young dinosaurs needed these tail feathers for some function we don’t know, or they were cultivating their feathers very differently than most current birds”, Poust explained

Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs approximately 150 million years ago. But there were many feathered dinosaurs that didn’t fly, like Wulong.

Young Wulong seemed to have the plumage of an adult.

«It has long and isolated feathers that extend from its long tail. This is quite different from live birds and tells us that these decorative feathers preceded adulthood in dinosaurs. Of course, they may be using these feathers in a very different way from live birds too, ”said the expert.

Paleontologists are eager to understand many more plumage differences between birds and these feathered dinosaurs.

The finding was described in the scientific journal. The Anatomical Record.

Planet Earth

Australia Firefighters Save the Only Wild Prehistoric Wollemi Pines on Earth

Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Waking Times

It looks as if firefighters in Australia have succeeded in saving a secret grove of prehistoric trees belonging to a species that dates back to the time of the dinosaurs.

The Wollemi pines once grew widely across Australia from more than 100 to 60 million years ago, The Washington Post reported. But now less than 200 remain in the wild, in a national park 125 miles northwest of Sydney.

“It’s something like the Opera House of the natural world,” Richard Kingsford, director of the Center for Ecosystem Science at the University of New South Wales (NSW), told The Sydney Morning Herald. “Losing it would have added to the catastrophe we have seen elsewhere.”

The Wollemi Pines outlasted the dinosaurs and thanks to the mammoth efforts of NPWS they look like they will survive these bushfires https://t.co/LKOHLeOOkk
— Matt Kean MP (@Matt_KeanMP) January 15, 2020

Historic wildfires in Australia this spring and summer have killed at least 28 people and more than a billion animals. Heavy rainfall in the last 24 hours has brought some relief to the the hard-hit states of NSW and Victoria, CNN reported.

But during the worst of the crisis, the NSW government knew it had to protect the ancient trees growing in a ravine in Wollemi National Park, so the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) firefighters and the NSW Rural Fire Service worked together to carry out an “unprecedented environmental protection mission,” NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean said in a statement Wednesday.

“Wollemi National Park is the only place in the world where these trees are found in the wild and, with less than 200 left, we knew we needed to do everything we could to save them,” he said.

Fire retardant was first dropped over the area from air tankers, and firefighters were lowered from helicopters into the ravine to set up an irrigation system.

Firefighters returned when the flames approached the grove to operate the irrigation system. Helicopters also dropped water on the edges of the fire to protect the trees, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

Much of Wollemi National Park was destroyed by the Gospers Mountain fire, and, for four days towards the end of 2019, officials feared the trees might have been destroyed too.

“We just waited with bated breath,” Kean told The Sydney Morning Herald.

But when smoke cleared, it became clear that most of the trees had survived.

Wollemi pines aren’t actually pines, The Washington Post explained. They are in fact a type of conifer that has bubbly-looking bark and can grow to be 130 feet.

They were thought to be extinct until 1994, when David Noble, an officer with the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, discovered an unfamiliar tree species when rappelling in the park, NPR reported.

Noble did not know what he’d found, and the samples he brought back stumped biologists and botanists. It was only when he returned with scientists a month later that the mystery was solved.

“When the pines were discovered in 1994, you might as well have found a living dinosaur,” Kean told The Sydney Morning Herald.

Their exact location has been kept a secret since then to protect them from contamination, and the firefighters’ efforts to save them were kept similarly secret to protect their location.

Kean expressed hope that what Australian firefighters had done for the trees, Australia as a whole could do for the planet.

“We’ll always have bush fires in this country. There’s no doubt about that. But there’s no doubt also that the severity of this year’s bush fires is not like anything we’ve ever seen. And that’s due to climate change,” Kean told NPR. “There’s a huge opportunity for us to lead the way in terms of tackling climate change and help the rest of the world decarbonize. There’s no better country on the planet better placed to do that than Australia.”

Planet Earth

“Huge anomalies” at the edge of the earth’s core

At the edge of the Earth’s core lie two gigantic blobs of ultrahot rock — and that’s about the extent to which geologists agree about them.

NASA PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY. DISTRIBUTED ACTIVE ARCHIVE CENTER

The mysterious blobs are on opposite sides of the planet, one hidden beneath Africa, the other in the middle of the Pacific Ocean – the Quanta Magazine compared the ‘massive anomalies’ to Princess Leia’s iconic hairstyle (Star Wars).

Scientists discovered the blobs decades ago by mapping the interior of the planet, but have not learned much since.

Some ideas

There are two main schools of thought regarding the blobs, according to Quanta. The first camp holds that they’re merely massive clusters of hot plumes.

The other argues that the blobs — so big that they would drown the planet’s surface in a lava ocean over 60 miles deep — are their own distinct entity and not just a particularly warm region of the core.

Recent evidence supports the second camp: Quanta reports that scientists found traces of unique, ancient rocks and isotopes in magma that’s flowed upward from the blobs — materials nearly as old as the Earth itself and not found elsewhere on the planet.

Persistent Mystery

Still, great mystery still surrounds the deeply-buried hotspots. One theory is that they could be fragments of a Mars-sized object that crashed into the Earth.

University of Maryland seismologist Vedran Lekić told Quanta

It would be like having an object in the sky, and asking, ‘Is that the moon?’ And people are like, no. ‘Is that the sun?’ No. ‘What is it?’ We don’t know.