ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2011) - Scientists studying genetic evidence have discovered a new species of wolf living in Africa. The researchers have proved that the mysterious animal, known as the 'Egyptian jackal' and often confused with the golden jackal, is not a sub-species of jackal but a gray wolf - (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oxford)
ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2011) -Sharks are unable to distinguish colors, even though their close relatives rays and chimaeras have some color vision, according to new research by scientists in Australia. Their study shows that although the eyes of sharks function over a wide range of light levels, they only have a single long-wave - New research suggests that although the eyes of sharks function over a wide range of light levels, they only have a single long-wavelength-sensitive cone type in the retina and therefore are potentially totally color blind. (Image Credit: iStockphoto/Ian Scott)
ScienceDaily (Nov. 15, 2010) - A new species of squid has been discovered by scientists analyzing 7,000 samples gathered during a seamounts cruise in the southern Indian Ocean last year. Credit: Photo by Rainer von Brandis)
A green sea slug appears to be part animal, part plant. It's the first critter discovered to produce the plant pigment chlorophyll.The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they've eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out photosynthesis - the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy.
Tricky measurements of flow reveal air moves through animal in one direction. Alligators have a one-way path for breathing that is similar to birds', new research shows. The findings could explain how dinosaurs' ancestors rose to prominence. "It's absolutely transformational," comments Adam Summers of the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories. "It really makes us think hard about our interpretations of anatomy". Unlike a mammal's breath, which exits the lungs from the same dead-end chambers it enters, a bird's breath takes a loopy one-way street through its lungs.
Squashed fossils of the first boneless vertebrates suggest basal creatures, but real-time decay patterns hint they might have been less primitive than we thought. Five hundred million years ago, spineless chordates slunk through Earth's Cambrian oceans. These unassuming creatures would eventually give rise to more complex vertebrates such as fish, dinosaurs and even us, so they are crucial evidence for scientists trying to trace animal evolution's early steps.
Flaring the gills that give the species its name, a frilled shark swims at Japan's Awashima Marine Park. Sightings of living frilled sharks are rare, because the fish generally remain thousands of feet beneath the water's surface. With a mouthful of three-pointed teeth, the frilled shark may be a fearsome hunter, but it's considered harmless to humans. Those needle-like choppers are better suited to fleshier forms found in the deep sea, such as squid and other sharks.
The rarest of the nine giraffe subspecies, the West African giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis peralta), almost didn't make it to the 21st century. After years of being poached and losing habitat to development, only 50 of these animals were left in Niger in 1996, and the subspecies's future seemed bleak. But today, just 13 years later, there are more than 200 West African giraffes, a 400 percent increase, and the subspecies looks like it will not only survive, but thrive.
The evolutionary history of New Zealand's many extinct flightless moa has been re-written in the first comprehensive study of more than 260 sub-fossil specimens to combine all known genetic, anatomical, geological and ecological information about the unique bird lineage.
Spanish researchers have confirmed that the largest bat in Europe, Nyctalus lasiopterus, was present in north-eastern Spain during the Late Pleistocene (between 120,000 and 10,000 years ago). The Greater Noctule fossils found in the excavation site at Abríc Romaní (Barcelona) prove that this bat had a greater geographical presence more than 10,000 years ago than it does today, having declined due to the reduction in vegetation cover.
A new study of Antarctica's past climate reveals that temperatures during the warm periods between ice ages (interglacials) may have been higher than previously thought. The latest analysis of ice core records suggests that Antarctic temperatures may have been up to 6°C warmer than the present day.
A newfound creature nicknamed "Dumbo" (pictured) may look like it's all ears--but the protrusions are actually fins that help propel the animal through the darkness 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) under the sea. Netted during a recent Census of Marine Life (CoML) expedition to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, this Dumbo is among the thousands of deep-sea creatures the census has documented so far that live without ever knowing sunlight. Reaching six feet (two meters) in length and weighing 13 pounds (6 kilograms), the jumbo Dumbo is the largest of the octopus-like animals ever found.
Although much is known about the behavior of white sharks in coastal regions, very little is known about their vertical movements offshore in the eastern Pacific where they spend up to five months. Recovered pop-up satellite tags from Guadalupe Island white sharks advance our understanding of the vertical habitat use of white sharks while offshore. While oxygen may limit the extent of sharks' vertical movements, it will also impact prey distribution. Consequently, the shallow oxygen minimum zone in the SOFA may act to concentrate prey, thus enhancing foraging opportunities in these oligotrophic waters.
For more than 400 years, scientists have studied the amazing regenerative power of salamanders, trying to understand how these creatures routinely repair injuries that would usually leave humans and other mammals paralyzed or worse. Now, fueled by a highly competitive National Institutes of Health Grand Opportunity grant of $2.4 million, a multi-institutional team of researchers associated with the University of Florida McKnight Brain Institute's Regeneration Project has begun creating genomic tools necessary to compare the extraordinary regenerative capacity of the Mexican axolotl salamander with established mouse models of human disease and injury.
Only two kinds of egg-laying mammals are left on the planet today-the duck-billed platypus and the echidna, or spiny anteater. These odd "monotremes" once dominated Australia, until their pouch-bearing cousins, the marsupials, invaded the land down under 71 million to 54 million years ago and swept them away. New research suggests these two kinds of creatures managed to survive because their ancestors took to the water.
Wild Malus orientalis, species of wild apples that could be an ancestor of today's domesticated apples, are native to the Middle East and Central Asia. A new study comparing the diversity of recently acquired M. orientalis varieties from Georgia and Armenia with previously collected varieties originating in Russia and Turkey narrows the large population and establishes a core collection that will make M. orientalis more accessible to the breeding and research communities.
Ever since the Falklands wolf was described by Darwin himself, the origin of this now-extinct canid found only on the Falkland Islands far off the east coast of Argentina has remained a mystery. Now, researchers who have compared DNA from four of the world's dozen or so known Falklands wolf museum specimens to that of living canids offer new insight into the evolutionary ancestry of these enigmatic carnivores.
Biological species are often defined on the basis of reproductive isolation. Ever since Darwin pointed out his difficulty in explaining why crosses between two species often yield sterile or inviable progeny (for instance, mules emerging from a cross between a horse and a donkey), biologists have struggled with this question. New research into this field by basic scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, published online Oct. 22 in Science Express, suggests that the solution to this problem lies within the "dark matter of the genome": heterochromatin, a tightly packed, gene-poor compartment of DNA found within the genomes of all nucleated cells.
Emory University researchers have identified the first fish known to have switched from ultraviolet vision to violet vision, or the ability to see blue light. The discovery is also the first example of an animal deleting a molecule to change its visual spectrum. The common vertebrate ancestor possessed UV vision. However, many species, including humans, have switched from UV to violet vision, or the ability to sense the blue color spectrum.
The world's largest living lizard species, the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), is vulnerable to extinction and yet little is known about its natural history. New research by a team of palaeontologists and archaeologists from Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia, who studied fossil evidence from Australia, Timor, Flores, Java and India, shows that Komodo Dragons most likely evolved in Australia and dispersed westward to Indonesia.
Iron containing short nerve branches in the upper beak of birds may serve as a magnetometer to measure the vector of the Earth magnetic field (intensity and inclination) and not only as a magnetic compass, which shows the direction of the magnetic field lines. Several years ago, the Frankfurt neurobiologists Dr. Gerta Fleissner and her husband Prof. Dr. Günther Fleissner discovered these structures in homing pigeons and have, in close cooperation with the experimental physicist Dr. Gerald Falkenberg (DESY Hamburg), characterized the essential iron oxides.
New species are not just discovered in exotic locales-even places as urban as California still yield discoveries of new plants and animals. Academy scientists recently named a new species of chimaera, an ancient and bizarre group of fishes distantly related to sharks, from the coast of Southern California and Baja California, Mexico. The new species, the Eastern Pacific black ghostshark (Hydrolagus melanophasma), was described in the September issue of the international journal Zootaxa by a research team including Academy Research Associates David Ebert and Douglas J. Long.
