The power of ritual

I was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic home, but after spending my teenage years feeling question after question bubbling up inside me, I left Catholicism, never to return.  In my twenties I tried more than once to find a faith community that seemed right -- that made sense of the universe for me -- attending first a Quaker meeting, then a Unitarian church, and finally a Methodist church, and each time I ended up faced with the same questions I'd had, questions that no one seemed to be able to answer.

The prime question was "How do you know all this is true?"  In other realms, that question was usually easy to answer.  Science, of course, was cut-and-dried; factual truth in science is measurable, quantifiable, observable.  But even with situations that aren't exactly rational, there's usually a way to approach the question.  How do I know that my family and friends love me?  Because they demonstrate it in a tangible way, every day.

But the claims of religion seemed to me to be outside even of that, and I never was able to get answers that satisfied.  Most of them boiled down to "I've had a personal experience of God" or "the existence of God gives meaning to my day-to-day experience," neither of which was particularly convincing for me.  I have never had anything like a transcendent, spiritual experience of an omnipresent deity.  And something imbuing meaning into your life doesn't make it true.  I'd read plenty of meaningful fiction, after all.  And as far as my wanting it to be true, if there was one thing I'd learned by that point, it was that the universe is under no compulsion to behave in a way that makes me comfortable.

So ultimately, I left religion behind entirely.  I have no quarrels with anyone who has found a spiritual home that works for them, as long as they're not forcing it on anyone else; in fact, I've sometimes envied people who can find reason to believe, wholeheartedly, in a greater power.  I just never seemed to be able to manage it myself.

That's not to say I'm unhappy as an atheist.  Perhaps I can't access the reassurance and comfort that someone has who is deeply religious, but there are a lot of the petty rules and pointless, often harmful, restrictions that I wish I'd abandoned many years earlier.  (The chief of which is my years of shame over my bisexuality.  The damage done to the queer community by the largely religiously-motivated bigotry of our society is staggering, and heartbreaking.)

But there's something about being part of a religion that I do miss, and it isn't just the sense of community.  You can find community in a book group or weekly sewing night or runners' club, after all.  What I find I miss most, strangely enough, is the ritual.

There's something compelling about the ritual of religion.  The Roman Catholicism of my youth is one of the most thoroughly ritualistic religions I know of; the idea is that any believer should be able to walk into any Catholic church in the world on Sunday morning and know what to do and what to say.  (Giving rise to the old joke, "How do you recognize a Catholic Star Wars fan?"  "If you say to them, 'May the Force be with you,' they respond, 'And also with you.'")  The vestments of the priests, the statuary and stained glass windows, the incense and candles and hymns and organ music -- it all comes together into something that, to the believer, is balm to the soul, leaving them connected to other believers around the world and back, literally millennia, in time.

Window in the Church of St. Oswald, Durham, England [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tom Parnell, Church of St Oswald - stained glass window, CC BY-SA 4.0]

What got me thinking about this topic was a fascinating look in Science News at the effect that COVID-19 has had on rituals, and how that's affected individuals and society as a whole.  Not just religious rituals, of course; the pandemic has also put the kibosh on rituals like graduations, baby showers, weddings, funerals, secular holiday celebrations, sporting events, even personal ones like birthday parties and anniversaries.  All this has left a lot of us feeling unmoored.  What's taken their place -- Skyping, virtual get-togethers, Zoom meetings -- hasn't proven to be a replacement emotionally, even for non-religious people like myself.

Why humans are so attracted to rituals is an interesting question in and of itself, and one which the article looks at in some depth.  What interests me is not the obvious answer -- creating an in-group, a way to recognize our tribe.  There's a lot more to it than that.  It seems like humans are so wired into ritualistic behavior that it doesn't even matter what the context is.  One experiment the article cites took volunteers and separated them into two groups.  Each group was given a list of one-syllable words to read.  Members of the first group took turns, each participant reading aloud one column of words, then another participant moving on to the next, and so on.  The second group, though, did something different -- they recited the words together to the beat of a metronome.

The researchers gave the volunteers a standard "cooperation game" to play afterward.  The way it works is that you have two choices, X or Y.  If you choose X, you get seven dollars.  If you choose Y, you get ten dollars -- but if and only if every other member of the group also chooses Y.  If anyone chooses X, the ones who chose Y get nothing.

In the group who had recited the words in sequence, only 21% took the risk of cooperation and chose Y.  In the group who had chanted the words together, almost three times as many -- 62% of participants -- chose Y.

We bond to each other through rituals, even if it's something as silly as chanting a list of random words together.

Given that the pandemic is showing no signs of waning -- here in the United States, at least, where for some people wearing a mask to protect yourself and others is considered a fundamental infringement on your liberties -- my guess is that our rituals won't be returning to normalcy for a long time.  What's certain is that our desire for those rituals is very deeply wired into our brains, and their loss has hit a lot of people hard.  It remains to be seen whether we'll find alternate ways to exercise this drive, at least until there's an effective vaccine for COVID-19.

What long-term effect this will have on society -- on cohesion, connection, cooperation, even rates of depression and anxiety -- is unknown.

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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!]

Tuning in and tuning out

Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) are remarkable animals.  They live in staggeringly huge colonies.  The largest known, in Bracken Cave in Comal County north of San Antonio, Texas, has twenty million bats.  I got to see a smaller (but still impressive) colony, in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, when I was a kid, and I'll never forget the sight of the thousands and thousands of bats streaming out of the cave mouth at dusk.

Free-tailed bats echolocate, which you probably already knew; they navigate in the dark by vocalizing and then listening for the echoes, creating a "sonic landscape" of their surroundings accurate enough to snag an insect out of the air in pitch darkness.  But this engenders two problems, which I honestly never though of until they were brought up by the professor of my Vertebrate Zoology course when I was in graduate school:

1. If these bats live in groups of millions of individuals, how do they tune in to the echoes of their own voices, distinguishing them from the cacophony of their friends and family all vocalizing at the same time?
2. In order to echolocate, they must have exquisitely sensitive hearing.  They're picking up the faint echoes of their own calls with an accuracy that allows them to detect the contours and motion (if any) of the object they're sensing.  To create an audible echo, they have to vocalize really loudly.  So how does the original vocalization not deafen those sensitive ears?

The answer to the first was discovered by some research at the University of Tübingen back in 2009.  Using recordings, scientists found that bats are sensitive not only to the echoes themselves, but can pick out from those echoes enough information about the sonic waveform that they can recognize their own voices.  Each bat's voice has a distinct, if not unique, sonic "fingerprint" -- much like human voices.

The answer to the second is, if anything, even more astonishing.  Just as humans do, bats have three tiny sound-conducting bones in their middle ear -- the malleus, incus, and stapes (commonly known as the hammer, anvil, and stirrup) -- that transmit sound from the eardrum into the cochlea (the organ of hearing).  Bats have a tiny muscle attached to the malleus, and when they open their mouths to vocalize, the muscle contracts, pulling the malleus away from the incus.  Result: dramatically decreased sound transmission.  But even more amazing, as soon as they stop vocalizing, the muscle relaxes -- fast enough to bring the malleus back in contact with the incus in time to pick up the echo.

Bats, it turns out, aren't the only animals to experience these sorts of problems.  The reason this whole topic comes up is because of some research that was published last week in The Journal of Neuroscience.  In a paper called "Signal Diversification is Associated with Corollary Discharge Evolution in Weakly Electric Fish," by Matasaburo Fukutomi and Bruce Carlson of Washington University, we learn about a group of fish called mormyrids (elephant fish) that have, in effect, the opposite problem from bats; they have to find a way to tune out their own communication so they can sense that of their neighbors.

Long-nosed elephant fish (Gnathonemus petersii)  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons spinola, Elefantenrüsselfisch, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Mormyrids communicate by electrical signals; the long "trunk" is actually an exquisitely-sensitive electrical sensor.  They not only use it to pick up electrical signals given off the nerves and muscles of the insect larva prey they feed on, they use it to pick up those sent by other members of their own species.  In effect, they talk using voltage.

Here, though, they have to be able to ignore the voltage shifts in the water around them given off by their own bodies.  It's as if you were in a conversation with a friend, and instead of doing what most civilized friends do -- taking turns talking -- you both babble continuously, and your brain simply stops paying attention to your own voice.

They do this using a corollary discharge, an inhibitory signal that blocks the higher parts of the brain from responding to the signal.  The researchers found that corollary discharges only occurred in response to voltage changes from the individual itself, and not to those from other individuals.

In other words, just like the bats, mormyrid fish can recognize their own communications.  "Despite the complexity of sensory and motor systems working together to deal with the problem of separating self-generated from external signals, it seems like the principle is very simple," said study co-author Bruce Carlson, in an interview with Science Daily.  "The systems talk to each other.  Somehow, they adjust to even widespread, dramatic changes in signals over short periods of evolutionary time."

So there you have it.  Another natural phenomenon to be impressed by.  It reminds me of the wonderful TED talk by David Eagleman called, "Can We Develop New Senses for Humans?" that talks about an animal's umwelt -- in essence, how it perceives the world.  What must the world seem like to a fish that gathers most of its information from electrical signals?

Staggers the imagination, doesn't it?

***************************

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!]

Wings over North Carolina

Rounding out Paleontology Week is a story courtesy of my friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, the brilliant novelist Tyler Tork (whose new book The Deep End is a must-read for anyone who likes speculative fiction and magical realism).  And, I might add, it is completely on-brand for 2020.

So today we have: pterodactyl sightings are on the increase in the United States.

Pteranodon by Heinrich Harder (1916)  {Image is in the Public Domain]

Myself, I would have thought that one pterodactyl sighting would be an increase given that the number of currently-living pterodactyls is zero, but apparently I'm incorrect.  Evidently North Carolina is a hotspot of pterodactyl activity, where people are seeing big flying things with crests and a diamond-shaped rudder on the tail.  This sounds to me like my favorite pterodactyloid, Rhamphorhynchus:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Now, I hasten to add that I don't really believe there are pterodactyls flying around Charlotte.  To me, there's the same problem with this as with all the Bigfoot claims; lots of anecdotal stories of sightings, and not a single unequivocal piece of hard evidence.  You'd think if these things were still around, someone would have run across a body or a skull or something.  Or even a fossil of one that isn't older than 66 million years.

But that doesn't stop the true believers.  Over at the sight LivePterosaurs.com (of course there's a website called "LivePterosaurs.com") you can read dozens of eyewitness accounts.  And much to my surprise, my home state of New York is not far behind North Carolina, according to this map:

So I think I better keep my eyes open.  Although even with my fairly lousy eyesight, it's hard to imagine how I could miss something that (according to one witness) "had an enormous pointed beak, and a pointed top of its head...  The wingspan was probably about 5-6 feet wide with bony wing structure ending in points (almost like sails) and what looked like small claws on the middle of wing."

Anyhow, after reading this article I made the mistake of looking at the "comments" section.  (This is, in fact, always a mistake.)  The comments seemed to be half "of course pterodactyls are still alive, I've seen one" and half "whatever you've been smoking, can I have some?"  But my favorite comment was from the woman who wrote (spelling and grammar are as written): "Wit all the ice melting.  Who knows what was frozen.  Or.  Wilderness caves where anything could hide."

So here we have yet another downside of global climate change; thawing out all the pterodactyls who have been encased in ice in the frozen wasteland of North Carolina for 66 million years.

In any case, if you had "pterodactyls" on your 2020 Apocalypse Bingo Card, you can check that box off.  And frankly, I'd take pterodactyls over murder hornets.  Have you ever seen a photograph of one of those things?  They are huge, and have a stinger like a fucking harpoon.  So I say: bring on the pterodactyls.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is by the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist Frans de Waal, whose work with capuchin monkeys and chimps has elucidated not only their behavior, but the origins of a lot of our own.  (For a taste of his work, watch the brilliant TED talk he did called "Moral Behavior in Animals.")

In his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, de Waal looks at this topic in more detail, telling riveting stories about the emotions animals experience, and showing that their inner world is more like ours than we usually realize.  Our feelings of love, hate, jealousy, empathy, disgust, fear, and joy are not unique to humans, but have their roots in our distant ancestry -- and are shared by many, if not most, mammalian species.

If you're interested in animal behavior, Mama's Last Hug is a must-read.  In it, you'll find out that non-human animals have a rich emotional life, and one that resembles our own to a startling degree.  In looking at other animals, we are holding up a mirror to ourselves.

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

The English dinosaurs

Continuing with the paleontological bent we've been on all week, today we have: bones of a previously-unknown tyrannosaur on a beach in England.

As unlikely as it sounds, beaches in southern England are great places to find dinosaur bones.  One of the founders of the science of paleontology, Mary Anning, did most of her work in the Lyme Regis region of the Dorsetshire coast during the first half of the nineteenth century, and her discovery of complete skeletons of Jurassic-era ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs on walks with her faithful dog has become the stuff of legends.  (Sadly, her dog was killed in a landslide when a cliffside collapsed -- Anning missed sharing his fate because she was only a couple of feet ahead of him.)

The new find comes from Cretaceous sedimentary rocks on the coast of the Isle of Wight, where paleontologists from the University of Southampton have identified some fossilized bones as belonging to a new species that has been christened Vectaerovenator inopinatus (the name translates roughly to "unexpected air-filled hunter").  It got its name from the presence of air sacs in and around the bones.  This adaptation is also found in modern birds, re-emphasizing the relationship between predatory theropods and chickadees.

Vectaerovenator was a big guy -- an estimated four meters long -- but was astonishingly light-built.  "We were struck by just how hollow this animal was - it's riddled with air spaces," said Christopher Barker, who was lead author of the study.  "Parts of its skeleton must have been rather delicate.  The record of theropod dinosaurs from the 'mid' Cretaceous Period in Europe isn't that great, so it's been really exciting to be able to increase our understanding of the diversity of dinosaur species from this time...  You don't usually find dinosaurs in the deposits at Shanklin as they were laid down in a marine habitat.  You're much more likely to find fossil oysters or driftwood, so this is a rare find indeed."

The fossils were found in marine sedimentary rocks, and surmise is that the dinosaur they belonged to fell into a river (whether before or after it died is, of course, impossible to tell) and its body washed out into the shallow sea, where it was covered up and preserved.

Artist Trudie Wilson's impression of the final moments of the Shanklin Ventaerovenator inopinatus  [Image courtesy of the University of Southampton]

The bones were found by three amateur fossil-hunters.  Robin Ward of Stratford-upon-Avon, was walking on the beach with his family and found the first ones.  "The joy of finding the bones we discovered was absolutely fantastic," Ward said.  "I thought they were special and so took them along when we visited Dinosaur Isle Museum.  They immediately knew these were something rare and asked if we could donate them to the museum to be fully researched."

"It looked different from marine reptile vertebrae I have come across in the past," said James Lockyer, of Spalding, Lincolnshire, who found additional pieces of the skeleton.  "I was searching a spot at Shanklin and had been told and read that I wouldn't find much there.  However, I always make sure I search the areas others do not, and on this occasion it paid off."

Paul Farrell, an Isle of Wight native, contributed further pieces to the discovery.  "I was walking along the beach, kicking stones and came across what looked like a bone from a dinosaur," Farrell said.  "I was really shocked to find out it could be a new species."

All three agreed to donate their finds to the Dinosaur Isle Museum at Sandown.

What this highlights to me is the degree to which interested amateurs can contribute to science.  In fact, Mary Anning herself had no training in paleontology, or in fact, in any kind of science; to call opportunities for women in science in the early nineteenth century "limited" is a vast understatement.  Anning's descriptions of her extraordinary discoveries were turned down for publication by the Magazine of Natural History, and she was denied entry to the Geological Society of London purely because of her gender.

So it's a double-edged sword, isn't it?  Talented amateurs can make incredible contributions, but only if the often hidebound powers-that-be will allow them.  Sometimes it's an uphill struggle just to gain a small amount of credibility, and in Anning's case, even that never happened.  Shortly before her death from breast cancer at the age of 47, she wrote, "The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone."

Fortunately, that isn't the case here, and the amateurs and the scientists are happily collaborating.  With luck and persistence, we will continue to learn about the prehistoric landscape of England as it was 115 million years ago, when dinosaurs like Ventaerovenator were prowling the shores.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is by the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist Frans de Waal, whose work with capuchin monkeys and chimps has elucidated not only their behavior, but the origins of a lot of our own.  (For a taste of his work, watch the brilliant TED talk he did called "Moral Behavior in Animals.")

In his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, de Waal looks at this topic in more detail, telling riveting stories about the emotions animals experience, and showing that their inner world is more like ours than we usually realize.  Our feelings of love, hate, jealousy, empathy, disgust, fear, and joy are not unique to humans, but have their roots in our distant ancestry -- and are shared by many, if not most, mammalian species.

If you're interested in animal behavior, Mama's Last Hug is a must-read.  In it, you'll find out that non-human animals have a rich emotional life, and one that resembles our own to a startling degree.  In looking at other animals, we are holding up a mirror to ourselves.

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

Taking flight

One of the many things I find fascinating about the evolutionary model is how different lineages can happen on the same "solution" to the problems of surviving and reproducing, leading to similarities cropping up that don't result from common ancestry.  This is a phenomenon called convergent evolution, and explains why the North American flying squirrel and Australian sugar glider look a lot alike, even though they are only distantly related.  (The flying squirrel is a rodent, and the sugar glider a marsupial more closely related to kangaroos.)

I put the word "solution" in quotes and use it with caution, because this makes it sound like evolution is forward-looking, which it is not.  As Richard Dawkins explains brilliantly in his book The Blind Watchmaker, to trigger evolution, all you have to have is an imperfect replicator (in this case, DNA) and a selecting agent.  To phrase it more like Darwin would have put it: variation coupled with differences in survival rate.

I recall how surprised I was to learn that the eye had actually evolved multiple times.  Starting with light-sensitive spots, such as you still find today in many microorganisms, variations on different lineages came up with a variety of different "solutions" -- the pinhole-camera eye of a chambered nautilus, the cup-shaped eye of a flatworm, the compound eye of a fly, and our own eye with a transparent lens like that of a refracting telescope.  All these adaptations work just fine for the animal that has them.  (Eye formation in a number of species is controlled by the paired-box 6 [PAX6] gene, without which eyes won't form at all.  It's such a critical gene that it is conserved across thousands of species -- in fact, your PAX6 gene and a mouse's are identical, base-pair-for-base-pair.)

The reason this subject comes up is because of some research published in the journal Current Biology last week that showed another trait -- flight -- not only evolved separately in groups like insects and birds, but even in the dinosaurian ancestors of today's birds, it evolved more than once.

A team led by paleontologist Rui Pei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed bone and feather structure of various dinosaur groups to see if they flew, glided, or were using their feathers for a different purpose (such as keeping warm).  To their surprise, it was found that multiple lineages were capable of flying or nearly so.  The authors write:

We [used] an ancestral state reconstruction analysis calculating maximum and minimum estimates of two proxies of powered flight potential—wing loading and specific lift.  These results confirm powered flight potential in early birds but its rarity among the ancestors of the closest avialan relatives (select unenlagiine and microraptorine dromaeosaurids).  For the first time, we find a broad range of these ancestors neared the wing loading and specific lift thresholds indicative of powered flight potential.  This suggests there was greater experimentation with wing-assisted locomotion before theropod flight evolved than previously appreciated.  This study adds invaluable support for multiple origins of powered flight potential in theropods (≥3 times), which we now know was from ancestors already nearing associated thresholds, and provides a framework for its further study.

Here are their results, in graphical form:

As you can see, actual birds -- labeled "Later-diverging avialans" near the bottom of the tree -- were far from the only ones to have flight capability.  Rahonavis, Microraptor, and several of the anchiornithines were probably fliers, and only the last mentioned is on the same clade as today's birds.

Flying is pretty useful, so it's no wonder that when feathers evolved from scales -- probably, as I mentioned earlier, in the context of warmth and insulation -- it was only a small step remaining toward lengthening those feathers to the point that their owners could catch a breeze and glide.  After that, the same kind of refinement took over that happened with the eye, and eventually, you have true flight.

So that's yet another cool bit of research about prehistory.  Wouldn't you like to know what those prehistoric fliers looked like?  I'd love to see them.  From a distance, because a lot of them were predators.  For example, Microraptor is Greek for "tiny hunter," and were a little like miniature velociraptors with wings.

If you wanted an image to haunt your dreams.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is by the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist Frans de Waal, whose work with capuchin monkeys and chimps has elucidated not only their behavior, but the origins of a lot of our own.  (For a taste of his work, watch the brilliant TED talk he did called "Moral Behavior in Animals.")

In his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, de Waal looks at this topic in more detail, telling riveting stories about the emotions animals experience, and showing that their inner world is more like ours than we usually realize.  Our feelings of love, hate, jealousy, empathy, disgust, fear, and joy are not unique to humans, but have their roots in our distant ancestry -- and are shared by many, if not most, mammalian species.

If you're interested in animal behavior, Mama's Last Hug is a must-read.  In it, you'll find out that non-human animals have a rich emotional life, and one that resembles our own to a startling degree.  In looking at other animals, we are holding up a mirror to ourselves.

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

After 'while, crocodile

Because I have an endless fascination for things that are big and powerful and can kill you, today's topic is: Deinosuchus.

If you know a little Greek, the name itself should put you on notice.  It comes from the words δεινός (terror) and σοῦχος (crocodile).  Because crocodiles aren't terrifying enough on their own, apparently.  The largest extant crocodilian is the Australian saltwater crocodile, which can get to be about six meters in length and can weigh twelve hundred kilograms.  It regularly attacks humans, often stupid ones who don't know enough to stay away from the shallow water habitats it prefers, and as the Wikipedia article puts it, "As a result of its power, intimidating size and speed, survival of a direct predatory attack is unlikely if the crocodile is able to make direct contact."

Deinosuchus was just shy of twice as long.  Considering that the usual rule that the mass of an animal varies as the cube of its length, this would put the biggest ones at eight times heavier than a saltie -- something on the order of nine thousand kilograms.

That's equivalent to the mass of a school bus.  Just for reference.

If that's not bad enough, it had teeth up to a foot long.  Lots of them.  The largest species, Deinosuchus riograndensis, which lived (unsurprisingly) in what is now the western United States and northern Mexico, apparently fed on dinosaurs.

A reconstructed Deinosuchus hatcheri skeleton in the Natural History Museum of Utah.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

According to research published last week in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology -- which is why this whole horrifying topic comes up -- a combination of new fossil finds and re-analysis of old fossils, Deinosuchus was probably an ambush predator, like its much smaller modern Australian cousin.  It could, paleontologists believe, have taken down just about any of the dinosaurs alive at the time, up to the biggest ones.

"Deinosuchus was a giant that must have terrorized dinosaurs that came to the water's edge to drink," Adam Cossette, of the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University.  "Until now, the complete animal was unknown.  These new specimens we've examined reveal a bizarre, monstrous predator with teeth the size of bananas."

During the time it was around -- the late Cretaceous Period, between 75 and 82 million years ago -- it lived in similar habitats to the Australian saltwater crocodile.  At that time, North America was split in two by a shallow sea that extended from the Arctic Ocean to what is now the Gulf of Mexico, and which covered most of what is now the Midwest and Southeast.  The Western Interior Seaway, as it was called, separated the small continent of Laramidia (now the Southwest, California, and the Pacific Northwest) from Appalachia (the mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and eastern Canada).  (If you're curious, the surreal, brightly-colored rock formations in what is now Bryce Canyon National Park, in Utah, were deposited at this time.  Hard to imagine that what is now high desert was once a shallow tropical sea, but it was.)

So Deinosuchus would have lived on both sides of that narrow sea, laying in wait for any prey to come along.  Also found in these same rocks are fossils of Pteranodon, the familiar crested pterodactyloid, along with hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs) and monstrous turtles like Archelon, which is estimated at five meters in length and weighing about two thousand kilograms.

Hard to picture that tableau as having occurred in what is now Kansas.

One of the weirder things about Deinosuchus is that it didn't make it to the Cretaceous Extinction.  It died out about 75 million years ago, missing getting fried by the Chicxulub Meteorite strike by a good nine million years.  What wiped it out is unknown, but there's a general pattern that if the environment changes, apex predators get hit the hardest -- they're usually slow-reproducing, and their survival depends on the entire biotic web being intact.  (Consider that most of the modern large mammalian predators are on the Endangered Species List.)

There comes a point where superlatives fail me, and I think I've hit it.  I'll leave the rest to your imagination.  Suffice it to say that while it was around, it was the unchallenged ruler of the Western Interior Seaway.  And honestly, cool as it undoubtedly was, I'm just as glad those aren't lurking around any more.  Australian saltwater crocodiles are terrifying enough.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is by the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist Frans de Waal, whose work with capuchin monkeys and chimps has elucidated not only their behavior, but the origins of a lot of our own.  (For a taste of his work, watch the brilliant TED talk he did called "Moral Behavior in Animals.")

In his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, de Waal looks at this topic in more detail, telling riveting stories about the emotions animals experience, and showing that their inner world is more like ours than we usually realize.  Our feelings of love, hate, jealousy, empathy, disgust, fear, and joy are not unique to humans, but have their roots in our distant ancestry -- and are shared by many, if not most, mammalian species.

If you're interested in animal behavior, Mama's Last Hug is a must-read.  In it, you'll find out that non-human animals have a rich emotional life, and one that resembles our own to a startling degree.  In looking at other animals, we are holding up a mirror to ourselves.

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

Fishy business

My evolutionary biology professor told our class, many years ago, "The only reason we came up with the word species is because humans have no near relatives."

It's a comment that has stuck with me.  We perceive species as being these little cubbyholes with impenetrable sides, and once you've filed something there, it stays put.  Of course a polar bear and a grizzly bear are different species.  How could they be otherwise?

But when you start pushing at the definition a little, you find that it gives way almost immediately.  Ask some non-scientist how they know polar bears and grizzly bears are different species, and you'll likely get an answer like, "Because they look completely different."  And, to be fair, that's more or less how the father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, did it.

Problems creep in almost immediately, though.  The "of course different species" polar and grizzly bears look far more alike than do, say, a chihuahua and a St. Bernard.  (Imagine trying to convince an alien biologist that those two are members of the same species.)  So very quickly, scientists were forced into refining the definition so as to capture the separateness of two different species in such a way that the term could be applied consistently.

What they ultimately landed on was the canonical definition used in just about every biology textbook in the world: "Members of the same species are capable of potentially interbreeding and producing viable and fertile offspring."  (The "fertile" part had to be added because of the famous example of a horse and a donkey being able to produce a viable hybrid -- but that hybrid, the mule, is almost always infertile.)

The problem was, even that wasn't enough to clarify things. Polar bears and grizzly bears, for example, can and do hybridize in the wild, and the offspring (the rather unfortunately-named "pizzly bear") are almost always fertile.  This isn't an aberration.  These kinds of situations are common in the wild.  In fact, in my part of the world, there are two birds that look dramatically different -- the blue-winged warbler and the golden-winged warbler -- but they will happily crossbreed.  When the hybrids were first observed by scientists, they were different enough from both parents that it was thought they were a third separate species, which was called Brewster's warbler.  It was only after long observation that biologists figured out what was going on -- especially given that "Brewster's warblers" are potentially interfertile with either parental species.

In fact, the more you press the definition, the more it falls apart, the more exceptions you find.  Today's taxonomists are usually wary about labeling something a "species" -- or when they do, they're aware that it's potentially an artificial distinction that has no particular technical relevance.  They are much more comfortable talking about genetic overlap and most recent common ancestry, which at least are measurable.

The reason all this comes up is because of a startling discovery brought to my attention by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Researchers in Hungary have produced a hybrid between an American paddlefish and a Russian sturgeon -- two species no one could confuse with each other -- and they appear to be fertile, and normal in every other way.

The more you look at these "sturddlefish," the more shocking they get.  Sturgeon and paddlefish are not only separate species, they're in separate families -- two layers of classification above species.  "I’m still confused," said Prosanta Chakrabarty, ichthyologist at Louisiana State University.  "My jaw is still on the floor.  It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby."

He quickly amended that statement -- giraffes and cows have a recent common ancestor only a few million years ago, whereas paddlefish and sturgeons have been separate lineages for 184 million years.  To get anything comparable, Chakrabarty said, you'd have to have something like a human coming out of a platypus egg.

The scientists believe that the reason this happened is because of the relatively slow rate of evolution of both lineages (especially the sturgeons).  Sturgeons now look pretty similar to sturgeons two hundred million years ago, while almost all of the mammalian biodiversity you see around you -- divergence between, say, a raccoon and a squirrel -- happened since the Cretaceous Extinction, 66 million years ago.  But even so, it's pretty remarkable.  To my eye, paddlefish and sturgeon look way more different than lots of pairs of species that can't interbreed, so once again, we're confronted with the fact that the concept of species isn't what we thought it was -- if it has any biological relevance at all.

Atlantic Sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrhynchus)

American Paddlefish (Polyodon spathula)  [Both this and the above image are in the Public Domain]

This brings us back to the unsettling (but exciting) fact that whenever we think we have everything figured out, nature reaches out and astonishes us.  It's why I'll never tire of biology -- to paraphrase Socrates, the more we know, the more we realize how little we know.

But one thing I know for sure is that the biologists really need to come up with better names than "sturddlefish" and "pizzly bear."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is by the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist Frans de Waal, whose work with capuchin monkeys and chimps has elucidated not only their behavior, but the origins of a lot of our own.  (For a taste of his work, watch the brilliant TED talk he did called "Moral Behavior in Animals.")

In his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, de Waal looks at this topic in more detail, telling riveting stories about the emotions animals experience, and showing that their inner world is more like ours than we usually realize.  Our feelings of love, hate, jealousy, empathy, disgust, fear, and joy are not unique to humans, but have their roots in our distant ancestry -- and are shared by many, if not most, mammalian species.

If you're interested in animal behavior, Mama's Last Hug is a must-read.  In it, you'll find out that non-human animals have a rich emotional life, and one that resembles our own to a startling degree.  In looking at other animals, we are holding up a mirror to ourselves.

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