Birds down under

I've been an avid birdwatcher for many years, and have been fortunate enough to travel to some amazingly cool places in search of avifauna.  Besides exploring my own country, I've been to Canada (several times), Belize (twice), Ecuador (twice), Iceland (twice), England (twice), Scotland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Malaysia.

One place I've never been, though, is Australia, which is a shame because it's got some incredible animals.  And despite a pretty well-deserved reputation for having far more than their fair share of wildlife that's actively trying to kill you, most tourists come back from trips to Australia alive and with all their limbs still attached in the right places.

The main reason for Australia's unique ecosystems is that it's been isolated for a very long time.  During the breakup of Pangaea, the northern part (Laurasia, made up of what is now Europe, North America, and most of Asia) separated from the southern part (Gondwanaland, made up of what is now Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, and India), something on the order of 180 million years ago.  The other pieces gradually pulled apart as rifting occured, but Australia remained attached to Antarctica until around thirty million years ago.  At that point, the whole thing had a fairly temperate climate, but when the Tasman Gateway opened up during the Oligocene Period, it allowed the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, isolating and cooling Antarctica and resulting in the extinction of nearly all of its native species.  Australia, now separate, began to drift northward, gradually warming as it went, and carrying with it a completely unique suite of animals and plants.

The reason all this comes up is a sharp-eyed Australian loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link to a news story about a recent discovery by a dedicated amateur fossil hunter and birdwatcher, Melissa Lowery, who was looking for fossils on the Bass Coast of Victoria and stumbled upon something extraordinary -- some 125 million year old bird footprints.

Lowery's bird footprints [Image by photographer Rob French, Museums Victoria]

At that point, the separation of Australia and Antarctica was some 65 million years in the future, the sauropod dinosaurs were still the dominant animal group, and Victoria itself was somewhere near the South Pole.  Lowery's find led to a full-scale scientific investigation of the area, and uncovered a great many more bird tracks, including some with ten-centimeter-long toes.  Also in the area were the footprints of dozens of kinds of non-avian dinosaurs.

"Most of the bird tracks and body fossils dating back to the Early Cretaceous are from the Northern Hemisphere, particularly from Asia," said Anthony Martin, of Emory University, who led the study.  "Our discovery shows that there were many birds, and a variety of them, near the South Pole about 125 million years ago."

Of course, being a birdwatcher, I'm intensely curious as to what these birds looked like, but there's only so much you can tell from a footprint, or even fossilized bones.  It's simultaneously intriguing and frustrating to think about the fact that these animals -- and all the other animals and plants that lived alongside them -- had every bit of the diversity, all the curious and wonderful and beautiful adaptations and behaviors, that our modern wildlife does.

Imagine what it would be like to transport yourself back to Australia in the early Cretaceous, and witness all of that with your own eyes and ears.  (With, of course, a guarantee of coming back alive and with all your limbs still attached in the right places.  Back then, Australia was a rougher place than it is now.)

So thanks to the reader who sent me the link -- it's renewed my desire to visit Australia.  If I can't see the amazing birds they had 125 million years ago, at least I can have a look through my binoculars at some of the ones they have today.

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The depths of time

An article this week in Smithsonian got me to thinking about the scale of history and prehistory.

The topic of the article is fascinating enough on its own.  Archaeologists working in the Nefed Desert of northern Saudi Arabia have discovered tracks of what was pretty close to an anatomically-modern human, fossilized in a dried-up lake bed.  What's remarkable about these tracks is that the best estimate the researchers have for their age is 120,000 years.

This is a surprise for a couple of reasons.  The conventional wisdom is that humans didn't leave Africa until 50,000 years ago, so this would mean our cross-continental walkabout started over twice as long ago as we thought it did.  Also, it points to the Arabian Peninsula as having had a dramatically different climate back then -- along with the human footprints were the prints of elephants, camels, buffalo, and horses, suggesting something more similar to the central African savanna than the current barren desert.

But what this brought to my mind is the vastness of time.  When we think of "old stuff" we tend to lump it all together.  If asked to name something old that humans did, a lot of people would come up with the Egyptian Pyramids -- but these footprints are 24 times older than the Great Pyramid.

So when the person who created these prints was walking across this mudflat, it would be another 115,000 years before the builders of the Great Pyramid were born.

Our minds boggle at big numbers.  The 120,000 year old footprints are still, geologically speaking, recent, still in the middle of the Pleistocene Ice Ages.  Ten times further back -- 1.2 million years ago -- you're still in the Pleistocene.  To reach the next age back -- the Pliocene -- you have to go over twenty times deeper into the past, on the order of 2.6 million years ago.

And still, things would be more or less like they are now.  Sure, there were some odd animals lurching about -- the enormous short-faced bear and tank-like armadillo relatives called glyptodonts come to mind -- but a map of the continents wouldn't be too very different from today's.

Ten times further back than that, 26 million years ago (and 25.88 million years prior to the "extremely old" Saudi Arabian footprints), and you're in the Oligocene Epoch, the time of some of the largest land mammals ever, and finally things are looking pretty different.  The aptly-named titanotheres hit their peak size with the Baluchatherium, which was five meters tall at the shoulder.  This is also when the weird little multituberculates bit the dust for reasons unknown, after being one of the dominant mammal groups since the Jurassic Period.

To get back to the last of the non-avian dinosaurs, we have to go a bit over twice as far back as that -- 66 million years, or 550 times older than the Arabian footprints we started with.  T. rex bought the farm during the Cretaceous Extinction, but what's kind of mindblowing is that another of the popular dinosaurs, Stegosaurus, went extinct over twice as far back as that, toward the end of the Jurassic, around 150 million years ago.

Put a different way, in terms of time, you're fifteen million years closer to the Tyrannosaurus rex than he is to the Stegosaurus.

It's why I always get a bit of a laugh when I hear people say the dinosaurs were a colossal evolutionary failure.  The earliest true dinosaurs appeared in the early Triassic Period, something like 240 million years ago, and the last of them (again, other than birds) died at the K-T Boundary, 66 million years ago.  So they were the dominant life forms for 174 million years, roughly seven hundred times longer than humans have been around.

Back another twelve million years before the first dinosaurs was the horrific Permian-Triassic Extinction, caused by a serious Series of Unfortunate Events -- the lockup of Pangaea changing the climate, sea level, and ocean current flow, along with a volcanic event for which superlatives fail me.  It covered virtually all of what is now Siberia, burning through live vegetation and Carboniferous-era coal deposits, spiking the carbon dioxide content of the air, simultaneously boosting the temperature by fifteen or more degrees and turning the oceans into an acidic, anoxic sewer.  By some estimates, 96% of life on Earth died, pretty much because a natural event did accidentally to the world's sequestered carbon reserves what humans are now doing deliberately.

Cautionary tale, that should be, but for some reason it isn't.

Over twice as far back as that -- something like 541 million years ago, or 4,500 times older than the Arabian footprints -- we reach the Cambrian Explosion, the rapid diversification that produced just about every basic animal body plan that exists today.

And that's where we'll stop, although be aware that in a trip back to the formation of the Earth, you would still only be one-twelfth of the way there.

I don't know how anyone can not be impressed by the vast depths of time, and how honestly insignificant and ephemeral we are.  You are the end product of a lineage that stretches back all the way to the beginning, each generation of which lived long enough to reproduce.  As my evolutionary biology professor put it, "Your ancestors all the way back had to be good at two things: surviving and fucking."  (Accurate if a bit crass.) 

What it all makes me think of is where it's all going.  What, if we could look forward, would we see?  120,000 years, 5 million, 50 million, 500 million years from now?  Highly unlikely that humans (or their descendants) will last so long; extinction and replacement are the rule, not the exception.  I expect that whatever we'd see would be as weird to our eyes as the glyptodonts and pterodactyls and stegosaurs are.

But considering what the Earth's ecosystems have gone through in the past, I'm pretty sure there'll still be life of some kind, even in those far reaches of the future.  And I find that a comforting, if humbling, thought.

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Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

Footprints, skulls, real estate, and musical theater

My prognostication earlier this year that Melba Ketchum's failure to demonstrate that she had a sample of Bigfoot DNA would be an end to squatchery was apparently wildly wrong.

Ketchum's embarrassment of a scholarly paper, and her subsequent meltdown, evidently discouraged no one in the cryptozoological world, although it did generate a number of highly witty comments (my two favorites were "I guess she didn't Ketchum" and "Melba is toast").  But judging by four stories this week, the folks who believe that our hairy cousins populate the remote areas of the world are still undaunted.

First, we have a report from Malaysia that a set of 200 footprints belonging to a Southeast Asian Sasquatch were reported from the village of Kampung Kepis Baru.

Now, my first thought was: I was just in Malaysia last August, and the Bigfoot waits until now to show up?  There I was, chasing birds, and I could have been chasing proto-hominins.  Best of all, it would have been chasing proto-hominins in the tropics, which is definitely preferable to freezing my ass off in the Himalayas.  But sometimes you don't get this kind of break, however richly you deserve it.

Be that as it may, the guy who discovered the footprints, a rubber plantation owner named Adnis Pungut, took the following photograph:

So, my next thought was: really?  That's your evidence?  Couple that with the following quote from the article:

The footprints were all the same size and according to reports from Pungut based on the prints it could be assumed the creature who made them had two legs and weighed more then [sic] 100kg or about 220lbs.

220 pounds?  Wow, that is one impressive creature.  I can't think of anything that could be an upright, bipedal creature that weighs 220 pounds except for a Malaysian Bigfoot.  Unless, possibly, it could be an overweight American tourist wearing flip-flops.


Next, we have a real estate company called Estately, Inc., which has compiled a list of the best and worst states for Sasquatch to live.  Unsurprising that Washington comes first, especially given that Olympia Beer Company is offering a million-dollar reward for anyone who captures a Bigfoot alive.  This is followed by Oregon and California, but the fourth state is kind of mystifying.

Ohio?

Apparently, according to the article, Bigfoot has been sighted in Ohio 234 times, making it rank fourth.  Who knew?

If you're interested, Florida came in dead last, probably because of the general "if it moves, shoot it" attitude of a significant percentage of Floridians.

But I do have a question about all of this.  What earthly purpose can a real estate company have for compiling such a list?  Is it trying to attract cryptozoologists?  It seems like kind of a small target audience.  Selling real estate to Sasquatch himself also seems to me to be a losing proposition.  So however you cut it, it's kind of bizarre.


But not nearly as bizarre as our third story, which comes out of Ogden, Utah, where a retired private detective named Todd May claims to have found a fossilized Bigfoot skull.  May apparently has had Bigfoot sightings while hiking many times, according to the article:

May says he found the item about six weeks ago near the mouth of Ogden Canyon while he was on a dig looking for fossils. He said he was sort of drawn to something he could see sticking out of the ground and it seemed like just a rock but he went ahead and began to dig it out. He said at first he couldn’t tell exactly what it was because it was face down but once he got it completely dug out he could see the face perfectly. May believes this 70 lb object that he has recovered is a fossilized Bigfoot skull and says he has also had Bigfoot sightings in the same area on multiple occasions.

So, without further ado, here's a picture of May with his prize:

Um, Mr. May?  I hate to break it to you, but that is not a Bigfoot skull.  That is a rock.  I have to admit that it looks like a very sad rock, but it is a rock nonetheless.  You can now join Melba Ketchum in the "Sorry, I Don't Think So" department.


Our last story, though, is an encouraging one.  Just because the evidence for Bigfoot is pretty much nonexistent doesn't mean that he can't have his very own musical.

Yes, folks, Sasquatched: The Musical opens on July 9 at the New York Musical Theater Festival.  Billed as a heartwarming story about "about a Sasquatch named Arthur who gets lost in Columbia National Park and befriends a young boy named Sam," the play tells the tale of how they "encounter oddball locals, dodge a TV crew on the hunt for Bigfoot, and bust out into songs to help move the story along."

The songs include "Shake the Camera and Run" and "Eight Feet Tall and He Smelled Like a Skunk." And, for the record, I didn't make either of these titles up.   Arthur the Sasquatch does have some solos, but according to playwright Phil Darg, they are "dignified" and "not really show tunes."

I know I'm relieved about that.  This sounds like it's all about dignity.

So, anyway, that's the news from the world of cryptozoology.  And I thought squatching was a dying pastime.  Little I knew.  Apparently there are plenty of Sasquatch enthusiasts out there, still misinterpreting evidence, hyping Bigfoot for publicity, and writing musicals.  And I guess if it keeps you entertained, there's nothing wrong with it, as long as you don't have a Melba-style freakout if people laugh at you.