The silent invasion

My office window looks out over our raised-bed gardens and into our front yard.  It's still chilly early spring here in upstate New York -- things won't really start greening up for another couple of weeks -- but we're seeing signs of the coming explosion of growth that tell us warm weather will soon be here.  We actually got out and did some yard work this past weekend, despite clouds and a high of 45 F.  Mostly clean-up that never got done last fall, but we did plant the early peas and lettuce, transplanted some clumps of chives that were taking over one corner of the vegetable garden, and moved a yucca plant that was getting a little too enthusiastic.

From where I sit right now, I can see our bit of grassy lawn, but also the bare branches of a purple lilac, a couple of still-leafless roses, the gnarled branches of a sawtooth oak, the reddish buds of peonies just starting to unfurl, the bright green spikes of daylily leaves, the stubble of the ornamental Miscanthus grass that by midsummer will be taller than I am.  Clumps of brilliant daffodils, crocus, scilla, and chionodoxa already in full flower.

All cool stuff, promising lots of beauty to come.  But you know what all of the plants I've mentioned have in common?

Not one is native to the United States.

Not even the grass.  Just about all the lawn grasses grown in North America are European natives.  Chances are, unless you have deliberately set out to do natives-only landscaping, the vast majority of the plants in your yard are imports as well.  Of everything I can see from my window, only one is native to upstate New York -- a hedge of ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius).  Two others are eastern natives but originally from a good deal farther south, the Carolina silverbell (Halesia carolina) and black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia).

Thing is, like everything, the situation with exotics is complex.  Not all exotics are a problem.  The charming little bright-blue scilla (Scilla siberica) that pop up everywhere in the very early spring, including all over my lawn, are pretty harmless.  (Contrary to the name, they're not native to Siberia, but to southwestern Russia, the Caucasus, and northern Turkey.)  Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), on the other hand, is an unmitigated thug -- since its introduction in the 1800s, it has spread like wildfire, each plant producing hundreds of seeds, and in many areas has crowded out native plant species.  It's also toxic to a lot of native herbivores, including several species of butterflies.  We've tried for years to rid our yard of this nuisance, without much success.

And don't get me started about multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora).  The Wikipedia page says it's native to Asia, but I'm convinced it was imported directly from hell.  It has pretty white flowers, but more than makes up for that by razor-sharp thorns borne on long, tough, wiry stems that seem to have a deliberate vicious streak.  In general I love roses, but this one is an absolute hazard.

Of course, here in New York, we still have a great many native species that are doing well.  Consider the situation in Hawaii, though -- where on the more populated islands, there are barely any native species left.

Oh, it looks good.  On O'ahu, there are lush forests -- guava, plumeria, cinnamon, peppertree, Kahili ginger, several species of acacia and eucalyptus, banyan, satinleaf -- and flocks of showy birds like the red-billed leiothrix, red-whiskered bulbul, zebra dove, common mynah, and red-crested cardinal.  But not one is native.  The Hawaiian lowland ecosystems were completely destroyed for agriculture and settlement; accidental introduction of the southern house mosquito (Culex quinquefasciatus), and the avian malaria it carried, wiped out nearly all of the birds living below five hundred meters of elevation.  If you want to see native Hawaiian species -- what's left of them -- you have to go up into the mountains, and even there, they're struggling to hang on.

Aarhus University ecologist Jens-Christian Svenning, who has been studying Hawaii's ecology for almost a decade, calls the current situation a "freakosystem."  What's interesting, Svenning says, is that the situation has re-established a healthy, interactive community of species -- just not the ones that were there only two hundred years ago.

"These are wild but changed ecosystems," Svenning said.  "They have passed some critical threshold which means they are unlikely to ever go back to how they were before.  If you removed all people from the planet, Hawaii would be on a different evolutionary ecological trajectory going forward."

Hawaii's iconic plumeria trees, whose flowers are used to make leis, were introduced from the Caribbean in the 1800s  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Varun Pabrai, Plumeria rubra-4, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Hawaii, however, is just the canary in the coal mine.  A study by Svenning and his colleagues indicates that between thirty and forty percent of all terrestrial ecosystems have "transformed into novel states;" that percentage is projected to rise to fifty by 2100.

It's not, of course, that these kinds of changes can't happen through natural processes.  Three years ago I wrote a piece about the effect that continental collisions can have on the species that live there; and, after all, even less dramatic events than that can lead to extinction.  What strikes me here is the speed with which it's happening.  We've tampered with ordinary ecological succession with no forethought, and as a result, triggered what (to judge by the rates) will rank up there with the "Big Five" mass extinctions -- the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Late Triassic, and Cretaceous.

So maybe it's time to start thinking about this.

It's too late to undo the silent invasion of exotic species; here in upstate New York, I'm afraid lawn grass is here to stay, as are garlic mustard and multiflora rose, and lilacs, peonies, and daffodils.  At least the last three are pretty and don't seem to be especially harmful.  But we'd better wise up about what we're doing, and fast.  Because remember that as prideful as we get sometimes, to the biosphere we're just another animal species.  We're no more guaranteed survival than anything else.

Let's hope we learn that lesson before it's too late.

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Dire situation

It's estimated that of the five billion species of organisms that have ever existed on Earth, something like 99.99% of them are extinct.  This is with allowances for the fact that -- as I pointed out in a post a couple of years ago -- the word species is one of the mushiest terms in all of science, one of those words that you think you can define rigorously until you realize that every definition you come up with has dozens of exceptions or qualifications.

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that extinction has been the fate of virtually all of the twigs on the Great Tree of Life, from charismatic megafauna like Apatosaurus and the saber-toothed cat all the way down to single-celled organisms that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago and left no fossil record whatsoever.

Some of the more recent extinctions, though, always strike nature-loving types like myself as a tragedy.  The Dodo usually comes up, and the Thylacine (or "Tasmanian wolf," although it wasn't a wolf and wasn't limited to Tasmania), and the maybe-it-still-exists, maybe-it-doesn't Ivory-billed Woodpecker.  The Passenger Pigeon, which before 1850 was the most abundant bird in eastern North America, comprising flocks of tens of thousands of individuals, was hunted to extinction in only fifty years -- the last wild Passenger Pigeon was shot in Ohio in 1900.

Wouldn't it be cool, many of us have thought, to bring back some of these lost organisms?  The Jurassic Park scenario is a pipe dream; amber notwithstanding, no intact DNA has ever been found from that long ago.  But what about more recently-extinct species?

Well, no need to wonder any more.  It's been done.

A company called Colossal Biosciences, run by Ben Lamm and George Church, claim to have produced three Dire Wolf pups (Aenocyon dirus) using DNA extracted from a tooth and a skull from Idaho and Ohio, respectively -- genetically altering the fertilized eggs of a gray wolf, and gestating the embryos in ordinary female dogs.  Here's one of the results:

[Image credit: Colossal Biosciences]

You're looking at a photograph of an animal that hasn't lived for ten thousand years.

My initial "good lord this is cool" reaction very quickly faded, though, but not because of some sort of "We're playing God!" pearl-clutching.  Lamm, who apparently has huge ambitions and an ego to match, sees no problem with any of it, and has plans to bring back the Dodo and the Woolly Mammoth, and others as well.  All, of course, big flashy animals, because that's what attracts investors; no one is going to put millions of dollars into bringing back the Ouachita pebblesnail.

But even that isn't the actual problem, here.  Lamm himself gave a glancing touch on the real issue in his interview with The New Yorker (linked above), when someone inevitably brought up Jurassic Park.  "That was an exaggerated zoo," Lamm said.  "This is letting the animals live in their natural habitats."

No.  No, it's not.

Because these species' natural habitats don't exist anymore.

Even the Dodo, which went extinct in 1662, couldn't be reintroduced to Mauritius Island today; the feral cats, rats, dogs, and pigs that helped drive it to extinction in the first place still live in abundance on the island.  What would the de-extinction team do?  Create a fenced, guarded reserve for it?

How is that not an "exaggerated zoo?"

And the Dire Wolf is an even more extreme example.  It originally lived throughout much of the continental United States and down into mountainous regions of Central America.  Adults could weigh up to seventy kilograms, so they could take down good-sized prey.  If you could create a breeding population of Dire Wolves, where would you put them that they wouldn't come into contact with livestock, pets... and humans?

The truth is sad but inevitable; the world the Dire Wolf lived in is gone forever.  Whether what we have now is better or worse is a value judgment I'm not equipped to make.  What I do know is that recreating these animals only to have them lead restricted lives in reserves for rich people to come gawk at is morally indefensible.  Ultimately, they can never live in the wild again; so a fenced-in reserve -- or the only other option, to let them go extinct a second time.

As huge as the coolness factor is, we shouldn't be doing this.  How about putting our time, money, and effort into not further fucking up what we still have?  There are plenty of wildlife refuges worldwide that could benefit enormously from the money being sunk into this project.  Or, maybe, working toward fighting Donald Trump's "cut down all the trees and strip mine the world" approach to the environment.

So after the first flush of "Wow," all Lamm and Church's accomplishment did was leave me feeling a little sick.  There seems to be no end to human hubris, and it's sad that these beautiful animals have to be its showpiece.

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The Lazarus flower

The way things are, sometimes it's nice to find a bit of good news to focus on.  Today's good news comes to us by way of my dear writer friend Vivienne Tuffnell, whose books are brilliant and whose lovely blog Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking should be on your "subscribe" list.

The article Vivienne posted was about an amazing accomplishment -- the "de-extinction" of a plant, the York groundsel (Senecio eboracensis).

[Photograph credit: Andrew Shaw/The Rare British Plants Nursery]

The plant has an interesting history.  It's an example of a curious phenomenon where a new species has resulted from hybridization -- in this case, between the exotic Sicilian ragwort (Senecio squalidus) and the native common groundsel (Senecio vulgaris).  Some time in the last three hundred years -- when Sicilian ragwort was unintentionally introduced to England -- the two cross-pollinated.  Such hybrids are usually infertile because of having sets of non-homologous (unpaired) chromosomes, but the hybrid then backcrossed to S. vulgaris, resulting in an allopolyploid, a plant that had a combination of chromosomes from two different parent species but was self-fertile.  It was also genetically distinct enough from both parent species that it couldn't backcross again, and thus was reproductively isolated -- i.e., a new species.

(Interestingly, another example of allopolyploidy is wheat, a hybrid of two grass species that have actually been identified in the wild.)

The problem was, the new species was only found in the city of York, and an extensive cleanup campaign in 1991 involved the overzealous application of weedkiller.  The only colonies of York groundsel known were destroyed.  Researchers had three small pots of the plant on a windowsill in the University of York, but the plant is an annual or short-lived perennial, and they didn't last long.  Fortunately, before dying, they produced a pinch of tiny seeds -- which were sent to the Millennium Seed Bank at the fabulous Kew Gardens.

Andrew Shaw, of The Rare British Plants Nursery, wanted to see if the York groundsel could be brought back.  There was a small amount of seeds in private ownership, but those germinated poorly.  So he approached Kew to see if the remaining seeds might be used to try to save the species from extinction.

It worked.  Of the hundred seeds planted by Shaw, all but two of them germinated.  Over the next two years, Shaw oversaw the production of over a thousand seedlings, which were planted out in specially-chosen plots of land in the city.  The reintroduced plants are now flowering in the wild for the first time in over thirty years.

"It’s a smiley, happy-looking yellow daisy and it’s a species that we’ve got international responsibility for," said Alex Prendergast, senior vascular plant specialist at Natural England, who worked on the project.  "It only lives in York, and it only ever lived in York.  It’s a good tool to talk to people about the importance of urban biodiversity and I hope it will capture people’s imagination.  It’s also got an important value as a pollinator and nectar plant in the area because it flowers almost every month of the year."

So there's your cheerful news of the day.  While humans do their fair share of damage, it's nice to know that sometimes, people who care will actually work toward fixing something.  In this case, bringing back a rare plant from the brink of extinction -- and introducing a bit of color into the landscape of a city.

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The Lazarus flower

The adage goes, "Extinction is forever."

It's a sobering thought.  There's been talk of "de-extinction" -- using intact DNA from well-preserved fossils to resurrect, Jurassic-Park-style, extinct animals -- but so far, the research in that vein has been tentative and not particularly promising.  Plus, there are the inevitable ethical questions about bringing back woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons, and dodos into a world where their environment has changed into something they couldn't survive in anyway.  It seems like recreating a few individuals of an extinct species, then having them live out their lives in zoos, is nothing more than generating a handful of entertaining curiosities at a very great cost.

There are, however, a few species that have been declared extinct which have turned out not to be.  The most famous of these is the coelacanth, a weird-looking fish that's one of the lobe-finned fish, the fish group with the closest relationship to amphibians.  It was thought that all the lobe-fins had become extinct along with the non-avian dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Extinction 66 million years ago, but then someone caught one in the Indian Ocean.  There are, in fact, two living species of coelacanth -- the West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) and the Indonesian coelacanth (Latimeria menadoensis).  This long-term survival of a species that was thought to be long gone has resulted in the coelacanth being labeled a "living fossil" or a "Lazarus taxon."

There are also the ones that have been declared extinct, but that a handful of true believers -- and sometimes some scientists, as well -- are convinced are still alive.  The last thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus), which is neither a wolf nor restricted to Tasmania, died in a zoo in 1936 -- except there continue to be sightings of purported thylacines, both in Tasmania and adjacent South Australia.  In fact, there's a Facebook group devoted to alleged thylacine sightings, which so far, have either been anecdotal, or accompanied by photos of Bigfoot-level blurriness.

Then there's the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campophilus principalis), an enormous woodpecker species that used to live in swampy regions of the North American southeast.  The last confirmed sighting was in Louisiana in 1944, but there have been sporadic reports ever since -- most, probably, of the related (but smaller) pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus).  But a friend of mine, an employee of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, was part of the team sent to investigate a cluster of alleged sightings, and she was one of the people who say they actually saw one.  Now, let me add that my friend is an accomplished and knowledgeable birder, and knew what she was looking for; she, and the other members of the team, would not mistake a pileated woodpecker for this bird.  Unfortunately, the only video they got was short and of poor quality, and although she and the rest of the team have serious credibility, it still amounts to a single anecdotal report, and a lot of folks are not convinced.

All of this is just by way of introducing a discovery that should give some hope to the thylacine and ivory-billed woodpecker aficionados.  Just last week, a paper in the journal PhytoKeys described the (re)discovery of a plant in the family Gesneriaceae, a tropical group most familiar to collectors of rare houseplants -- the best-known members are the African violet (Saintpaulia spp.),  Cape primrose (Streptocarpus spp.), and gloxinia (Gloxinia spp.).

The recent discovery was in the Centinela region of southern Ecuador, in the foothills of the Andes Mountains.  Centinela has been devastated by deforestation -- by some estimates, 97% of the original old-growth rain forest has been cleared or extensively damaged -- so it's to be expected that any species endemic to the region are gone.  That's what the botanists thought about a glossy-leaved, orange-flowered plant that grew in the humid understory; it was last seen in the 1980s.  By the time it was discovered and catalogued, it was gone.

That's why they named it Gasteranthus extinctus.

And then, a couple of months ago, some botanists studying what's left of Centinela found that it wasn't extinct after all.  Here's the plant:

[Photograph by Riley Fortier]

They took lots of photographs but were careful not to disturb the few remaining plants -- nor are they telling exactly where they found them.  This same strategy was adopted by the folks from Cornell looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker; the last thing they needed was a bunch of overenthusiastic amateurs stomping about the place (and you know they would).  But it is a hopeful thought, that some of the species we thought were gone forever might still be out there somewhere.  (For what it's worth, they're keeping the name Gasteranthus extinctus, and hoping that it doesn't one day become accurate in fact.)

"Rediscovering this flower shows that it’s not too late to turn around even the worst-case biodiversity scenarios, and it shows that there’s value in conserving even the smallest, most degraded areas," said Dawson White, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago, who was the paper's lead author.  "New species are still being found, and we can still save many things that are on the brink of extinction."

So that's today's optimistic news.  Me, I'm still hoping for the thylacine.  Those things were cool.  While thus far the evidence thus far has been less than convincing, it's certainly still a possibility that it -- and some of the other species most folks have given up on -- are still alive after all.

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Out of sight, out of mind

Humans have amazingly short memories.

I suppose that there's at least some benefit to this.  Unpleasant events in our lives would be far, far worse if the distress we experienced over them was as fresh every single day as it was the moment it happened.  That's the horror of PTSD; the trauma gets locked in, triggered by anything that is even remotely similar, and is re-experienced over and over again.

So it's probably better that negative emotions lose their punch over time, that we simply don't remember a lot of what happens to us.  But even so, I kind of wish people would keep important stuff more in mind, so we don't repeat the same idiotic mistakes.  Santayana's quote has almost become a cliché -- "Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it" -- but part of the saying's sticking power is its tragic accuracy.

The reason this comes up is because of some research out of Oxford University that appeared in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution this week.  A team led by Ivan Jarić looked at the phenomenon of extinction -- but framed it a bit differently than you may have seen it, and in doing so, turned the spotlight on our own unfortunate capacity for forgetting.

There are various kinds of extinction.  Extirpation is when a species is lost from a region, but still exists elsewhere; mountain lions, for example, used to live here in the northeastern United States, but were eradicated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (the last confirmed sighting was in Maine in 1938).  They're still holding their own in western North America, however.  Functional extinction is when the population is reduced so much that it either no longer has much impact on the ecosystem, or else would not survive in the wild without signification conservation measures, or both.  Sadly, the northern white rhinoceros, the northern right whale, and the south China tiger are all considered functionally extinct.  

Extinct in the wild is exactly what it sounds like; relict populations may exist in captivity, but it's gone from its original range.  Examples include the beautiful scimitar oryx, the Hawaiian crow, and the franklinia tree (collected in the Altamaha River basin in Georgia in 1803 and never seen in the wild since).  Such species may be reintroduced from captive breeding, but it tends to be difficult, expensive, and is often unsuccessful.

Then there's global extinction.  Gone forever.  There has been some talk about trying to resuscitate species for which we have remains that have intact DNA, Jurassic Park-style, but the hurdles to overcome before that could be a reality are enormous -- and there's an ongoing debate about the ethics of bringing back an extinct species into a changed modern world.

The new research, however, considers yet another form of extinction: societal extinction.  This occurs when a population is reduced to the point that people basically forget it ever existed.  It's amazing both how fast, and how completely, this can happen.  Consider two bird species from North America -- the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) and the Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) -- both of which were common in the wild, and both of which went completely extinct, in 1914 and 1918 respectively.

Illustration of the passenger pigeon by naturalist Mark Catesby (1731) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Actually, "common" is a significant understatement.  Up until the mid-nineteenth century, passenger pigeons were the most common bird in North America, with an estimated population of five billion individuals.  Flocks were so huge that a single migratory group could take hours to pass overhead.  Carolina parakeets, though not quite that common, were abundant enough to earn the ire of fruit-growers because of their taste for ripe fruit of various kinds.  Both species were hunted to extinction, something that only fifty years earlier would have been considered inconceivable -- as absurd-sounding as if someone told you that fifty years from now, gray squirrels, robins, house sparrows, and white-tailed deer were going to be gone completely.

What is even more astounding, though, is how quickly those ubiquitous species were almost entirely forgotten.  In my biology classes, a few (very few) students had heard of passenger pigeons; just about no one knew that only 150 years ago, there was a species of parrot that lived from the Gulf of Mexico north to southern New England, and west into the eastern part of Colorado.  As a species, we're amazingly good at living the "out of sight, out of mind" principle.

The scariest part of this collective amnesia is that it makes us unaware of how much things have changed -- and are continuing to change.  Efforts to conserve the biodiversity we still have sometimes don't even get off the ground if when the species is named, the average layperson just shrugs and says, "What's that?"  Consider the snail darter (Percina tanasi), a drab little fish found in freshwater streams in the eastern United States, that became the center of a firestorm of controversy when ecologists found that its survival was jeopardized by the Tellico Dam Hydroelectric Project.  No one but the zoologists seemed to be able to work up much sympathy for it -- the fact that it wasn't wiped out is due only to the fact that a population of the fish was moved to neighboring streams that weren't at risk from the dam, and survived.  (It's currently considered "threatened but stable.")

"It is important to note that the majority of species actually cannot become societally extinct, simply because they never had a societal presence to begin with," said study lead author Ivan Jarić, in an interview with Science Daily.  "This is common in uncharismatic, small, cryptic, or inaccessible species, especially among invertebrates, plants, fungi and microorganisms -- many of which are not yet formally described by scientists or known by humankind.  Their declines and extinctions remain silent and unseen by the people and societies."

Which is honestly kind of terrifying.  It's bad enough to lose species that are, as it were, right in front of our eyes; how many more are we losing that are familiar names only to biologists, or aren't even yet known to science?  And keep in mind that little-known doesn't mean unimportant.  There are plenty of "uncharismatic, small, cryptic, or inaccessible species" that are pretty damn critical.  One that springs to mind immediately are mycorrhizae, a group of underground fungi that form a symbiotic relationship with plant roots.  The relationship is mutually beneficial; the plant has its capacity to absorb minerals and water greatly increased, and the fungus gets a home and a source of food.  By some estimates, 95% of plant species have a mycorrhizal partner, and some -- notably orchids -- are completely dependent on it, and die if they are separated from their fungal symbiont.  Even plants that aren't entirely reliant on them benefit from the relationship; there is increasing evidence that adding mycorrhizal spores to an ordinary vegetable garden can decrease dependence on chemical fertilizers, improve drought resistance, and increase crop yield (some experiments have seen it as much as double).

Incredibly cool.  But not what most of us would consider "charismatic."  I doubt, for example, that micrographs of mycorrhizae will ever usurp the wolves and eagles and elephants on the pages of the calendars we hang on our walls.  I mean, I would buy one, but I suspect I'm in the minority.

What this highlights to me is that we need to fight this tendency to overlook or forget about the organisms in our world that aren't obvious -- the rare, the small, the hidden.  The fact that their plight is not as obvious as the whales and the elephants and the tigers doesn't mean they're unimportant.  We need to become conscious of what's around us, and committed to protecting it.  Another comparison that's become almost a cliché is comparing biodiversity to a tapestry, but the symbolism is apt.

Pull out enough threads, and the entire thing comes to pieces.

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The kites fly again

The iconic movie Jurassic Park has provided us with quite a number of quotable lines:

"I hate it when I'm always right."

"Clever girl."

"That is one big pile of shit."

"See?  Nobody cares."

"Hold onto your butts."

But as someone who has studied (and taught) evolution for decades, none of them has stuck in my mind like Ian Malcolm's pronouncement, "Life... uh... finds a way."

This short sentence sums up something really profound; however the Earth's ecosystems are damaged, they always bounce back.  Even after the catastrophic Permian-Triassic Extinction -- which by some estimates wiped out 90% of the existing taxa on Earth -- there was a recovery and rediversification.

Note that I'm not saying that means it was a good thing.  The end Permian extinction event was, it is believed, caused by an unimaginably huge series of volcanic eruptions, followed by a major spike in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere -- leading to a jump in the global temperature and catastrophic oceanic anoxia.

So yeah.  "Life survived" doesn't mean it'd have been a fun event to live through.  But it should give us hope that the damage humans can do to the Earth as a whole is, in the grand scheme of things, short-lived.

As an encouraging example of this, take a recent study out of the University of Florida on snail kites.  These birds, related to hawks and falcons, are serious food specialists; they eat only one species of snail, found in salt marshes like the Everglades (and also parts of Central America; I first saw snail kites in Belize).  When things are stable, being a specialist is a good thing -- you pretty much corner the market on a particular resource, like the South American hummingbird species whose bills are shaped to fit one and only one species of flower.  The snail kite's food finickiness is this same sort of thing, and as long as the Everglades was undamaged and had an abundant supplies of snails, all was well.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, Snail Kite (Rosthramus sociabilis) Poconé, Mato Grosso, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But when the environment is rapidly changing, either through human effects or because of natural events, being a specialist is seriously precarious.  When a new species of snail -- the island apple snail -- was introduced to the Everglades, its larger size and voracious appetite outcompeted the native snails, and the snail kites were in trouble because their bills weren't large and heavy enough to tackle the bigger prey.

Snail kites were already on the Endangered Species List, given that the Everglades has been massively damaged by human activity.  This, it seemed, might be the death blow to the Florida population of this striking bird.

But... life, uh, finds a way.

The snail kite, in a near-perfect reenactment of the bill diversification in Darwin's finches in the Galapagos, had a variety of bill sizes.  Genetic diversity, despite their extreme specialization.  Before the introduction of the island apple snail, bill size probably didn't make much difference, positive or negative, to the individual birds.  But now, large bills were a serious advantage.  The birds with the biggest bills could tackle the larger snail species -- meaning they had a copious food source that their smaller-billed cousins couldn't utilize.

And in the thirteen years since the introduction of the island apple snail, the average bill size has gone up dramatically -- and the overall population is rebounding.

"Beak size had been increasing every year since the invasion of the snail from about 2007,” said Robert Fletcher, who co-authored the study.  "At first, we thought the birds were learning how to handle snails better or perhaps learning to forage on the smaller, younger individual snails...  We found that beak size had a large amount of genetic variance and that more variance happened post-invasion of the island apple snail.  This indicates that genetic variations may spur rapid evolution under environmental change."

As I said earlier, this is not meant to give the anti-environmental types another reason to say, "Meh, we don't have to change what we're doing, things'll be okay regardless."  Most species aren't as fortunate as the snail kites, already having the genetic diversity to cope with a sudden change.  Much more likely, if we keep doing what we're doing, the specialist species in the world will simply be wiped out.

Whether we'll be able to survive in such a changed world remains to be seen.

But one thing is nearly certain; even if we catastrophically damage the global ecosystem, it will rebound eventually.  Which is hopeful, as far as it goes.  Even after Homo sapiens is another fossilized footnote in the Earth's geological history, life will persist -- once more generating, in Darwin's immortal words, "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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 Many of us were riveted to the screen last week watching the successful landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance, and it brought to mind the potential for sending a human team to investigate the Red Planet.  The obstacles to overcome are huge; the four-odd-year voyage there and back, requiring a means for producing food, and purifying air and water, that has to be damn near failsafe.

Consider what befell the unfortunate astronaut Mark Watney in the book and movie The Martian, and you'll get an idea of what the crew could face.

Physicist and writer Kate Greene was among a group of people who agreed to participate in a simulation of the experience, not of getting to Mars but of being there.  In a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, Greene and her crewmates stayed for four months in isolation -- dealing with all the problems Martian visitors would run into, not only the aforementioned problems with food, water, and air, but the isolation.  (Let's just say that over that time she got to know the other people in the simulation really well.)

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, Greene recounts her experience in the simulation, and tells us what the first manned mission to Mars might really be like.  It makes for wonderful reading -- especially for people like me, who are just fine staying here in comfort on Earth, but are really curious about the experience of living on another world.

If you're an astronomy buff, or just like a great book about someone's real and extraordinary experiences, pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.  You won't regret it.

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

Sighting a survivor

I think if I had to choose one extinct species to bring back, it would be the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus).  Second place would be a harder choice; I've always wished we could resurrect some of the dozens of extinct endemic Hawaiian birds, including the three species of 'o'o and the various Hawaiian honeycreepers -- all of which were wiped out in the past 150 years from a combination of habitat destruction, hunting for decorative feathers, and the introduction of mosquitoes and avian malaria.

But there's something about the thylacine that has always fascinated me.  Also called the "Tasmanian wolf" -- a complete misnomer, as its range was not restricted to Tasmania, and it's not a wolf but a marsupial -- the last wild thylacine was shot by a farmer in 1931, and the last captive individual of the species died in a zoo in Hobart in 1936.  They certainly look canine, but it's a case of convergent evolution.  Adults were on the size of a large German shepherd, something on the order of a meter and a half tip-to-tail and sixty centimeters at the shoulder, with a distinctive pattern of stripes on the back (giving them their other misnomer of "Tasmanian tiger").  Their jaws were odd -- long and narrow and capable of almost a ninety-degree gape, giving it a powerful "scissor bite" that allowed them to take down prey far larger than themselves.

This, in fact, was largely their undoing.  They often went after domestic animals, especially sheep, earning them the enmity of farmers and other residents.  They were hunted as nuisances, and in the early twentieth century the Tasmanian government offered a £1 a head bounty on thylacines, something that was taken advantage of over two thousand times.  The scheme worked.  Within two decades the thylacine was functionally extinct, and a few years after that, extinct in reality.

Captive thylacines, ca. 1903 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Since its official extinction in the 1930s, however, there have been regular sightings of thylacines.  At least alleged sightings, because none of them have resulted in anything a scientist would accept as hard evidence -- a photograph, a clump of hair, a bone, even a footprint.  But the claims that the thylacine still exists refuse to die down as they have with other animals.  (No one, for example, claims to have seen a dodo recently on Mauritius Island.)

The problem, besides the lack of evidence, is that there are a lot of ways to misidentify this animal, similar to how an untrained observer might mistake the probably-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker for the relatively common Pileated Woodpecker.  A quick glance could well make someone identify an Australian wild dog (or dingo) for a thylacine -- or even a large feral domestic dog.  Plus, most of the sightings have been in poor light or from a distance.  (To be fair, even if some of these have been actual sightings, that wouldn't be unusual; thylacines were notoriously shy of contact with humans.)

The reason this comes up is because just a few days ago, there was an alleged thylacine sighting, not in Tasmania but in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia.  Once again, there was no photograph or other hard evidence, but this sighting does have some features that make me hopeful it could be the real deal.

According to the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia, a gentleman who lives in the Adelaide Hills -- a relatively wild forested area, where you can easily picture an animal living and going unnoticed -- was up at six AM and saw what he unequivocally thinks was a mother thylacine with several pups.  What sets his account apart is that he claims he heard the animal vocalizing, and what he describes is very similar to how the howling of thylacines was described in accounts from the nineteenth century.

TAGOA explains the sighting as follows:

Last night, however, when we spoke and I interviewed them both, it was clear he now has 100% belief in what his wife had witnessed as he too has now seen the unbelievable.  A podcast of our discussion will be released soon on our YouTube channel, as well as Mark Taylor's report when he heads out there in the next day or so to set up trail cameras and get a handle on the area….more to come soon...

The witnesses both claim that they have heard weird noises of a screaming nature several times and just fobbed it off.  The beauty of this sighting is that the husband saw the mother (animal) make the weird screechy noise…that part is rare as rocking horse shit.

Which is a wonderful simile that I will be sure to incorporate in my conversations from now on.

Okay, I know, claims like this are a dime a dozen, and I've been unhesitating in dismissing that sort of thing vis-à-vis bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.  But at least this claim has going for it that we know thylacines did exist at some point in the past, which is more than I can say for most other cryptids.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if the claim was borne out?  It would mean there was a breeding population of thylacines not just in Tasmania but in mainland Australia that has persisted since the last wild sighting occurred in 1931.  And hell, the coelacanth was supposedly extinct for sixty-odd-million years until someone caught one off the coast of Madagascar, so stranger things have happened.

Anyhow, keep your eye on Australia.  It'll be interesting to see how the ongoing search progresses.  How encouraging would it be to find out that at least one of us humans' attempts to wipe out an entire species actually failed?

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Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

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

Dinosaur redux

For me, one of the coolest things about science is that even once you think you've got something pretty well figured out, you can always find new interesting pieces of the puzzle.

For example, take dinosaurs, which we've known a good bit about for a long while, starting with Mary Anning's discoveries along the "Jurassic Coast" of Dorset, England in the early nineteenth century.  Even the kids' books when I was growing up back in the 1960s and 1970s had a lot of pretty decent information.  Although some of the reconstructions of skeletons, and (especially) our knowledge of the soft tissue that covered it, has changed since that time, it wasn't like I had to completely relearn the science when I studied it more seriously.

That said, we're still learning new stuff and adding to the picture.  Just this week we had two new papers that have sharpened the focus on our understanding of dinosaur evolution -- the first about the mid-Jurassic peak in dinosaur diversity and size, and the second about the event that wiped the entire lineage out, with the exception of the ones we now call birds.

The first paper is from Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and is titled "Extinction of Herbivorous Dinosaurs Linked to Early Jurassic Global Warming Event."  The paper was written by a team led by Diego Pol, paleontologist at the Paleontological Museum Egidio Feruglio in Trelew, Argentina, and looked at a hitherto-unexplained overturning of Jurassic fauna that made way for the rise of the sauropods -- the largest land animals that have ever lived.

Skeleton of Apatosaurus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tadek Kurpaski from London, Poland, Louisae, CC BY 2.0]

The early Jurassic had a high dinosaur diversity, but then toward the middle of the period something happened, and a good many of the early Jurassic dinosaurs vanished.  They were replaced by behemoths like the familiar Brachiosaurus and the less-well-known but hilariously-named Supersaurus, which measured an almost unimaginable 33 meters from tip to tail.  (Even better, though, is the name Dreadnoughtus, which was shorter than Supersaurus -- "only" 26 or so meters long -- but is thought to be the heaviest land animal ever, on the order of thirty metric tonnes.)

So what caused the replacement of the earlier species by the giants?  Pol and his team found what they think is the smoking gun, a series of massive volcanic eruptions in southern Gondwanaland (what is now South America and Africa), which spiked the carbon dioxide content of the air, boosting the average temperature and dropping the pH of ocean water.  

The perturbation of the climate affected the plants first.  Earlier groups, like seed ferns and other smaller herbaceous plants, were replaced by conifers, which have tough, lignified stems, small needles or scales instead of leaves, and thick waxy cuticles to prevent water loss.  The problem is -- if you're an early Jurassic herbivorous dinosaur -- having evolved to eat seed ferns, you're not going to do so well trying to munch pine needles.

So as it always does, the change to the base of the food web percolated its way up to the top.  The early dinosaurs were replaced by big sauropods, who had grinding teeth (so tough plant material could be thoroughly pulverized before swallowing) and large stomachs (where food could sit and digest for a long time, extracting all the nutritive value possible).  The result was the arrival on the scene of monsters like Supersaurus and Dreadnoughtus and their cousins, which were the dominant land herbivores for a good hundred million years thereafter.

Sometimes new evidence results in our having to revise our previous models, overturning what we thought we knew.  Take, for example, the research that appeared this week in Royal Society Open Science that conclusively put to rest a commonly-held idea -- that by the time the Chicxulub Meteorite hit the Earth 66 million years ago, dinosaurs were already in a steep decline, so they would have disappeared anyhow, even without the massive impact that was the final death blow.

In "Dinosaur Diversification Rates Were Not in Decline Prior to the K-Pg Boundary," by a team led by Joseph Bonsor of the London Natural History Museum and the University of Bath, we find out that the dinosaurs were actually doing okay before the meteorite hit.  Far from being in decline, they would have been very likely to retain their position as the dominant animals on Earth well into the Cenozoic Era -- with effects on mammalian evolution that can only be imagined.

Bonsor, as befits a good scientist, is cautious about overconcluding.  "The main point of what we are saying is that we don't really have enough data to know either way what would have happened to the dinosaurs," Bonsor said in a press release from the Natural History Museum.  "Generally in the fossil record there is a bias towards a lack of data, and to interpret those gaps in the fossil record as an artificial decline in diversification rates isn't what we should be doing.  Instead we've shown that there is no strong evidence for them dying out, and that the only way to know for sure is to fill in the gaps in the fossil record."

But in the absence of positive evidence for a decline, we're thrown back to the null hypothesis; that they weren't in imminent danger of extinction.  So the whole idea of the dinosaurs as some kind of "failed experiment" in evolution is clearly wrong.  Not only did they kind of run things for a good two hundred million years -- which, by comparison, is something like a thousand times longer than we've been around -- they would probably have persisted for a good long while had a giant rock not interfered.

Me, I always want to know "what if?"  I think it comes from being a novelist; I'm always wanting to play around with reality and see what happens.  If the dinosaurs had stuck around for a long time rather than dying out 66 million years ago, it's hard to see how the rise of mammals -- and ultimately, us -- would have occurred.  Mammals had been around for a long while before the Chicxulub Impact, but they were mostly small, presumably kept that way both by the big carnivores and by competition with herbivores much larger than themselves.  So what would the Earth look like today?

Super-intelligent dinosaurs?  Maybe.  Evolution doesn't always point in the direction of "bigger and smarter;" it's the law of whatever works.  So as fun as it is to speculate, to be fair we have to side with Bonsor and say we just don't know.

Anyhow, that's our look back into the distant past for today.  Cool that we're still assembling new views of an old branch of biology.  Further reinforcing my opinion that if you're interested in science, you will never ever be bored.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that has raised a controversy in the scientific world: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madeleine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier.

It tells the story of a stupendous discovery -- twelve-million-year-old hominin fossils, of a new species christened Danuvius guggenmosi.  The astonishing thing about these fossils is where they were found.  Not in Africa, where previous models had confined all early hominins, but in Germany.

The discovery of Danuvius complicated our own ancestry, and raised a deep and difficult-to-answer question; when and how did we become human?  It's clear that the answer isn't as simple as we thought when the first hominin fossils were uncovered in Olduvai Gorge, and it was believed that if you took all of our millennia of migrations all over the globe and ran them backwards, they all converged on the East African Rift Valley.  That neat solution has come into serious question, and the truth seems to be that like most evolutionary lineages, hominins included multiple branches that moved around, interbred for a while, then went their separate ways, either to thrive or to die out.  The real story is considerably more complicated and fascinating than we'd thought at first, and Danuvius has added another layer to that complexity, bringing up as many questions as it answers.

Ancient Bones is a fascinating read for anyone interested in anthropology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology.  It is sure to be the basis of scientific discussion for the foreseeable future, and to spur more searches for our relatives -- including in places where we didn't think they'd gone.

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

A prehistoric hoax

One of the hazards of becoming more aware of how biased and (sometimes) duplicitous popular media can be is that you might finally, de facto, stop believing everything you read and hear.

It's called being a "cynic," and it's just as lazy as being gullible.  However, because the credulous are often derided as silly or ignorant, cynics sometimes feel that they must therefore be highly intelligent, and that disbelieving everything means that you're too smart to be "taken in."

In reality, cynicism is an excuse, a justification for having stopped thinking.  "The media always lies" isn't any closer to the truth than "everything you eat causes cancer" or "all of the science we're being told now could be wrong."  It give you an automatic reason not to read (or not to watch your diet or not to learn science), and in the end, is simply a statement of willful ignorance.

Take, for example, the site Clues Forum, which has as its tagline, "Exposing Media Fakery."  In particular, consider the thread that was started several years ago, but which continues to circulate, lo up unto this very day... entitled "The (Non-religious) Dinosaur Hoax Question."

Muttaburrasaurus skeleton (Queensland Museum)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

And yes, it means what you think it means.  And yes, the "Question" should simply be answered "No."  But let's look a little more deeply at what they're saying... because I think it reveals something rather insidious.

Take a look at how it starts:

Dinosaurs have, in recent years, become a media subject rivaling the space program in popularity and eliciting similar levels of public adoration towards its researchers and scientists.  The science of dinosaurs and other prehistoric life is also directly linked to other controversial scientific topics such as evolution, fuel production, climate and even the space program (i.e., what allegedly killed them).

So right from the outset, we've jumped straight into the Motive Fallacy -- the idea that a particular individual's motive for saying something has any bearing on that statement's truth value.  Those scientists, the author says, have a motive for our believing in dinosaurs.  Supporting controversial ideas for their own nefarious reasons.  Getting us worried about the climate and the potential for cataclysmic asteroid strikes.  Therefore: they must be lying.  We're never told, outright, why the scientists would lie about such things, but the seed is planted, right there in the first paragraph.

Then, we're thrown more reason for doubt our way, when we're told that (*gasp*) scientists make mistakes.  A dinosaur skeleton found in New Jersey, and now on display at the New Jersey State Museum, was reconstructed with a skull based on an iguana, since the actual skull could not be found.  The article, though, uses the word "fake" -- as if the museum owners, and the scientists, were deliberately trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, instead of interpolating the missing pieces -- something that is routinely done by paleontologists.  And those wily characters even gave away the game by admitting what they were up to, right beneath a photograph of the skeleton:

Above is the full-size Hadrosaurus mount currently on display at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton.  The posture is now recognized as incorrect.  At the same time the skeleton is fitted with the wrong skull of another type of duck-bill dinosaur.  Signs at the exhibit acknowledge that both the mounted skeleton as well as nearby illustrated depictions of what the living animal looked like are both wrong.  Both are slated for correction at some unspecified future date.

Because that's what clever conspirators these scientists are.  Covering up the fact that they're giving out erroneous information on dinosaurs by... um... admitting they had some erroneous information about dinosaurs.

But according to Clues Forum, this is yet another hole punched in our confidence, with the revelation that (*horrors*) there are things scientists don't know.  Instead of looking at that as a future line of inquiry, this article gives you the impression that such holes in our knowledge are an indication that everything is suspect.

Last, we're told that it's likely that the paleontologists are creating the fossils themselves, because fossils are just "rock in rock," leaving it a complete guessing game as to where the matrix rock ends and the fossil begins.  So for their own secret, evil reasons, paleontologists spend days and weeks out in the field, living in primitive and inhospitable conditions, grinding rocks into the shape of bones so as to hoodwink us all:

But, in our hoax-filled world of fake science, doesn't this rock-in-rock situation make it rather easy for creative interpretations of what the animal really looked like?  And, once a particular animal is “approved” by the gods of the scientific community, wouldn't all subsequent representations of that same animal have to conform with that standard?

By the time you've read this far, you're so far sunk in the mire of paranoia that you would probably begin to doubt that gravity exists.  Those Evil, Evil Scientists!  They're lying to us about everything!

Of course, what we're seeing here is the phenomenon I started with; substituting lazy gullibility with lazy disbelief.  All the writer would have to do is sign up for a paleontology class, or (better yet) go on a fossil dig, to find out how the science is really done.

But I've found that people like this will seldom take any of those steps.  Once you suspect everyone, there's no one to lean on but yourself -- and (by extension) on your own ignorance.  At that point, you're stuck.  

So I should correct a statement I made earlier.  There is a difference between gullibility and cynicism.

Gullibility is far easier to cure.

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Fan of true crime stories?  This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for you.

In The Poisoner's Handbook:Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum, you'll find out about how forensic science got off the ground -- through the efforts of two scientists, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, who took on the corruption-ridden law enforcement offices of Tammany Hall in order to stop people from literally getting away with murder.

In a book that reads more like a crime thriller than it does history, Blum takes us along with Norris and Gettler as they turned crime detection into a true science, resulting in hundreds of people being brought to justice for what would otherwise have been unsolved murders.  In Blum's hands, it's a fast, brilliant read -- if you're a fan of CSI, Forensics Files, and Bones, get a copy of The Poisoner's Handbook, you won't be able to put it down.

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

Of rhinos and puppies

You're not alone if you immediately think "Africa" when you hear the word "rhinoceros."  The two largest and best-known species -- the black (Diceros bicornis) and white (Ceratotherium simum) rhinos -- are both native to the southern parts of Africa.  There are three additional extant species in southern Asia, however; the Indian (Rhinoceros unicornis), Javan (Rhinoceros sondaicus), and Sumatran (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) rhinos.  The latter two are amongst the most endangered mammals in the world, with only about 60 and 245 individuals left, respectively.

Rhinos, though, used to be much more diverse, and much more common.  One of the most remarkable fossils ever discovered is the Blue Lake rhino, a fifteen-million-year-old cast of an extinct rhinoceros species called Diceratherium in what is now eastern Washington state.  The "remarkable" part is that it's fossilized in igneous rock, which isn't supposed to happen -- fossils are supposed to all be in sedimentary rock, right?  But what happened is there was a colossal eruption fifteen million years ago that produced the Columbia River Flood Basalts, releasing an estimated 174,000 cubic kilometers of lava, an amount that's hard to fathom.  Anyhow, this poor rhino was peacefully grazing, minding its own business, and suddenly BAM, it gets hit by a fast-moving, highly liquid lava flow, its body entombed then burned away.  Fast forward to 1935, when a fossil hunter named Haakon Friele discovered a strange cave in a basalt formation, crawled inside with a flashlight, and somehow thought, "Hey, this hole is shaped just like a rhino."  A bit later, a crew of paleontologists from the University of California - Berkeley were called in, and they made a plaster cast of the interior -- and sure enough, it's a cast of a very surprised-looking rhino who was very much in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There were other rhino species more recently, however.  The woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) was an ice-age species that lived pretty much everywhere in what is now Asia and Europe, but started declining in population about forty thousand years ago, dwindling until only a remnant population was left in Siberia.  The last ones died fourteen thousand years ago, give or take.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ДиБгд, Wooly Rhino15, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The blame for the woolly rhino's demise has been attributed to overhunting by early humans, but recent research suggests the cause was actually climate change.  In the paper, "Pre-Extinction Demographic Stability and Genomic Signatures in the Woolly Rhinoceros," by a team led by Edana Lord of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, we read the following:

Ancient DNA has significantly improved our understanding of the evolution and population history of extinct megafauna.  However, few studies have used complete ancient genomes to examine species responses to climate change prior to extinction.  The woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) was a cold-adapted megaherbivore widely distributed across northern Eurasia during the Late Pleistocene and became extinct approximately 14 thousand years before present (ka BP).  While humans and climate change have been proposed as potential causes of extinction, knowledge is limited on how the woolly rhinoceros was impacted by human arrival and climatic fluctuations.  Here, we use one complete nuclear genome and 14 mitogenomes to investigate the demographic history of woolly rhinoceros leading up to its extinction.  Unlike other northern megafauna, the effective population size of woolly rhinoceros likely increased at 29.7 ka BP and subsequently remained stable until close to the species’ extinction.  Analysis of the nuclear genome from a ∼18.5-ka-old specimen did not indicate any increased inbreeding or reduced genetic diversity, suggesting that the population size remained steady for more than 13 ka following the arrival of humans.  The population contraction leading to extinction of the woolly rhinoceros may have thus been sudden and mostly driven by rapid warming in the Bølling-Allerød interstadial.

So at least that's one calamity we're not responsible for.

On the other hand, another recent discovery shows that we might not have doomed the woolly rhino, but our best friends might have had a hand -- um, a paw -- in it.  A friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to an article about a mummified body of a dog found in Siberia that, when analyzed, was found to have bits of meat from a woolly rhino it its stomach.  "This puppy, we know already, has been dated to roughly 14,000 years ago," said researcher Love Dalén, also of the Swedish Museum of Natural History.  "We also know that the woolly rhinoceros goes extinct 14,000 years ago.  So, potentially, this puppy has eaten one of the last remaining woolly rhinos."

Dogs: Eating Stuff They Shouldn't Eat For the Past Fourteen Thousand Years.

So that's today's excursion into weird cul-de-sacs of zoology.  And honestly, I'm just as glad the temperate-area rhino species are gone, cool as they undoubtedly were.  We have enough trouble keeping the groundhogs and rabbits out of the vegetable garden, I can't imagine how we'd deal with rhinos tromping around the place.

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Fan of true crime stories?  This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for you.

In The Poisoner's Handbook:Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum, you'll find out about how forensic science got off the ground -- through the efforts of two scientists, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, who took on the corruption-ridden law enforcement offices of Tammany Hall in order to stop people from literally getting away with murder.

In a book that reads more like a crime thriller than it does history, Blum takes us along with Norris and Gettler as they turned crime detection into a true science, resulting in hundreds of people being brought to justice for what would otherwise have been unsolved murders.  In Blum's hands, it's a fast, brilliant read -- if you're a fan of CSI, Forensics Files, and Bones, get a copy of The Poisoner's Handbook, you won't be able to put it down.

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