The flora of prehistory

I grew up around plants.  Well, everyone does, more or less, but my parents were dedicated gardeners and naturalists.  My dad grew show-quality tea roses and taught me how to recognize the trees of my native Louisiana from the shapes of the leaves and texture of the bark when I was still in elementary school.  My mom's flower gardens more than once had people pulling over to take photographs.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia are well aware of my fascination with prehistoric animals -- like many kids I grew up with books on dinosaurs (and posters of dinosaurs and models of dinosaurs...).  So it shouldn't have been a surprise that I was thrilled when I found out that just like the animals of prehistory, the plants of prehistory were different than the ones we have today.  But I recall that my interest was mixed with shock -- if I went back to the Cretaceous Period, not only would there be T. rexes and triceratopses stomping about, but the plants through which they'd have been stomping wouldn't have been the familiar oaks and ashes and hollies and camellias that were so familiar, but an entirely different flora in which I doubt there'd have been a single species I could have identified.

Well, maybe a couple, if not to species, at least to family.  Some of the earliest flowering plants were magnolias, and from the fossilized flowers, they look pretty much like... magnolias.  Ferns have been around for a long, long time (far predating the dinosaurs, in fact), and conifers like the common pines, cedars, and cypresses I saw every day were plentiful all the way back in the Triassic Period, 240-odd million years ago.  

But that's about it.  And although some of the groups were there, the species themselves would have been different ones than what we see around us today.  Imagine it: forests of plants with huge and wonderful biodiversity, in which you wouldn't recognize a single one that's familiar.

The reason I'm thinking about all this floral prehistory is a link to some cool research that showed up last week in Geology that a friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia sent me, about a discovery of a phenomenally well-preserved flower in hundred-million-year-old amber from Myanmar.  

Valviloculus pleristaminis, flower in lateral view.  Image credit: Poinar, Jr. et al., doi: 10.17348/jbrit.v14.i2.1014.

Dubbed Valviloculus pleristaminis (the genus name comes from the Latin valva -- "a folding door" -- and loculus -- "compartment;" the species name means "lots of stamens"), the little flower is only distantly related to any extant species.  Botanists think that Valviloculus might be allied to one of two rather obscure families of plants native to the Southern Hemisphere -- Monamiaceae and Atherospermataceae -- but that's only a preliminary analysis.

Atherosperma moschatum, an Australian species that may be one of the closest living cousins to Valviloculus [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Peter Woodard]

"This isn't quite a Christmas flower but it is a beauty, especially considering it was part of a forest that existed 100 million years ago," said emeritus professor George Poinar, Jr., of Oregon State University, who led the research into the newly-discovered species.  "The male flower is tiny, about two millimeters across, but it has some fifty stamens arranged like a spiral, with anthers pointing toward the sky.  Despite being so small, the detail still remaining is amazing.  Our specimen was probably part of a cluster on the plant that contained many similar flowers, some possibly female."

What's even more mind-blowing is something I've pointed out before; given how difficult it is to form a good fossil and then have it survive intact for millions of years, the species we know about (both animal and plant) probably represent about 1% of what was actually alive back then.  The vast majority of species came and went, leaving no traces.  So if we were to travel back to the mid-Cretaceous, when Valviloculus was living and flowering in the prehistoric forests, not only would we see it, but literally hundreds of other long-gone species as varied, attractive, weird, and fascinating as the ones we have today.

Imagine the colors, shapes, and scents, plants from tiny sprigs all the way to towering trees, and none of which we still have with us now.  Truly, in Darwin's words, evolution produced -- and continues to produce -- "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A bird in amber

Last week I mentioned the fact that since fossilization requires such precise (and uncommon) conditions, for every one prehistoric species we know about, there are thousands of others we don't.  The biodiversity of the ancient world was orders of magnitude beyond what we glean from the fossil record.

So it's always exciting when we get to add a new character to the menagerie.  Even though it's still going to be (very) far from complete, each new species found gives us a new window into a lost world.

The contribution that appeared in Nature this week is an odd one, even by comparison to some of the other weird critters we've discovered.  Called Oculudentavis khaungraae -- the genus name meaning "toothed eye-bird" and the species name in honor of Khaung Ra, the Burmese collector who donated the fossil for study -- it lived around 99 million years ago in an island arc that is now part of the country of Myanmar.  As the name would suggest, it is a bird, and in fact is closer in relationship to modern birds than the famous Archaeopteryx.

But it was a mighty peculiar bird.

First, it was tiny, about the size of the smallest known modern bird, the Bee Hummingbird, which weighs in at a whopping two grams and has an average length of six centimeters.  But Oculudentavis had teeth.  Lots of them.  From the jaw structure and tooth orientation, it seems to have been a predator, just a really tiny one -- small enough that this particular specimen died after getting tangled in tree sap, leaving its skull preserved in a drop of amber.

The paper, by a team led by Lida Xing of the Chinese Academy of Geosciences, is titled "Hummingbird-Sized Dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period of Myanmar," and provides a thorough analysis of the fossil.  The morphology of the skull is an odd amalgam of birdlike and lizard-like features, especially the bones around the eyes; modern birds have a "scleral ring," a ring of bones that support the eye, while in Oculudentavis the bones are spoon-shaped, like many lizards.

"It's the weirdest fossil I've ever been lucky enough to study," said study coauthor Jingmai O'Connor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an interview with BBC News.  "I just love how natural selection ends up producing such bizarre forms.  We are also super lucky this fossil survived to be discovered 99 million years later."

Without further ado, here's an artist's reconstruction of what Oculudentavis may have looked like, courtesy of Han Zhixin:

And a close-up of the face:

So it might have been little, but its expression says very clearly, "Do not fuck with me."

"It's lucky this tiny creature was preserved in amber, as such small, fragile animals aren't common in the fossil record," said study coauthor Luis Chiappe, of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  "This finding is exciting because it gives us a picture of the small animals that lived in a tropical forest during the age of dinosaurs."

So once again, a fortuitous discovery has given us a lens into the time of the dinosaurs, and added another branch to the evolutionary tree.  But it once again brings home how little we actually know about the distant past -- and makes me wonder what kind of surprises we'd be in for if we somehow invent a time machine and go back there.  I think what we'd find would beggar belief, and make even Charles Darwin's grand words about "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" seem an insufficient description.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The Buddhist jihad

I probably come across as hostile to religion, sometimes, and at the risk of being accused of he-doth-protest-too-much, it really isn't true.  In matters of belief, I am a strong advocate for following wherever your heart and mind leads, and far be it from me to try to push anyone in a direction they don't want to go -- provided they accord me the same right.

Still, I'm an atheist for a reason, and I must state for the record that mostly what I feel toward a lot of religious ideologies is incomprehension.  When I read about various gods and angels and demons and spirits and so on, mostly what my reaction is can be summed up as, "Why on earth do you think that's true?"  But again, if it floats your boat, and you don't feel the need to have congress pass laws mandating that everyone treat it as scientific fact, you certainly are free to believe what you like.  (I might, however, write a sardonic post about it, every so often.  Tolerance and ecumenism only gets you so far.)

In fact, I find it unendingly interesting what sorts of beliefs people gravitate towards.  With the exception of people whose beliefs are what they are simply because they were raised that way and have never considered anything else, I have noticed a general pattern; nice people tend to envision nice deities, and mean, narrow-minded people envision harsh, judgmental ones.  We tend to populate the spiritual world with beings that match our temperaments, all the way from Borne Up On the Wings of Angels to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

All of which is a rather verbose way to introduce today's news story, which comes all the way from Myanmar.

Meet the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu.  You probably already have a picture in your mind, just from my identification of him as a "Buddhist monk" -- and likely that picture involves someone whose foremost characteristics are a love of peace, love, understanding, and detachment from the world.  Given that most of us have people like the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh as our models, it's no wonder that we have this as our mental image of what the term means.

This image, however, is very far from the truth.  Wirathu is currently traveling around Myanmar, trying to stir up violent ethnic cleansing against the country's Muslim minority.  [Source]

"Muslims are like the African carp," Wirathu said, in an interview with reporters from Global Post.  "They breed quickly and they are very violent and they eat their own kind.  Even though they are minorities here, we are suffering under the burden they bring us...  Because the Burmese people and the Buddhists are devoured every day, the national religion needs to be protected."

His rhetoric may sound familiar, especially if you have read any of the speeches of Adolf Hitler.

He refers to Muslims as "mad dogs" and "cannibals," and advocates driving out of the country those Muslims who will not convert to Buddhism.  He has been a strong advocate of a "National Identity Law," which would mandate Buddhism as the official state religion for all citizens of Myanmar.  He has started a campaign called "969" (after the number of virtues of the Buddha) that encourages Buddhists only to do business with other Buddhists.

Now, let me say first that I am no apologist for Islam.  Muslims in the Middle East, Africa, and (increasingly) in Europe and North America have a lot to answer for, given the silence of their leaders in the face of terrorism, intolerance, and subjugation of women, minorities, and those who dissent.  But in Myanmar, Muslims only make up 4% of the population [Source] -- so this has much more of a flavor of oppressing a vilified minority than it does striking out against a group that has created legitimate problems.

Be that as it may, Wirathu's fire-and-brimstone speeches have stirred up the populace in a way that is all too familiar to students of history.  Recent riots have, according to estimates in Global Post, caused the deaths of 200 Muslim citizens of Myanmar, and displaced from their homes 150,000 others.

The irony of what amounts to a jihad against Muslims leaves me shaking my head in dismay.

It is appalling that Wirathu has corrupted the message of Buddhism in this way -- Buddhism has, for the most part, been the most tolerant and peace-loving of the world's major religions.  But it is, perhaps, unsurprising.  The fact that kind people spin religion in a kind fashion, and violent ones in a violent fashion, is universal -- and further evidence (in my opinion) that all of religion is a human invention.  We live in the world we create, and Wirathu and his followers are determined to create a world out of hatred, intolerance, violence, and demonization of people who are different.

As author Ken Keyes put it: "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."