Primordial soup dwellers

A paper in Nature last week blew my mind from several different perspectives.

Entitled, "Evidence for Early Life in Earth's Oldest Hydrothermal Vent Precipitates," it sounds at first like something that could only possibly interest paleontology and/or geology geeks.  But as soon as you start looking closely, you find that what this paper describes is groundbreaking.

*rimshot*

The group, led by Matthew Dodd of University College London, thin-sliced rock excavated from a piece of the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt in Québec, one of the oldest intact rock formations on Earth.  And I do mean thin; the rock slices were, on average, 100 microns thick, or about the thickness of a sheet of printer paper.  And "old" is no exaggeration, either.  The rock is estimated at four billion years old, only three hundred million or so years after the crust solidified from molten magma.

The rock is an iron-rich sedimentary rock that formed at a hydrothermal vent -- a fissure on the deep ocean floor that is spitting out geothermally-heated, mineral-rich water.  We still have these around, mostly in places where the tectonic plates are moving apart, like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and even today they host a biome that is unlike any other on Earth.  There are species of shrimp, tube worm, sponges, and bacteria found nowhere else.  Not only that, they are one of only a handful of communities that is disconnected, energetically, from the Sun.  Everything else -- so, almost all life on Earth -- can trace the energy that makes it go back down the food chain and ultimately to a photosynthesizer (usually plants or phytoplankton), which are powered by sunlight.  The hydrothermal vent organisms, on the other hand, are powered by chemical reactions between the seawater and the hot stone of the upper mantle.

And when the scientists looked at the thin slices of the four-billion-year-old rock from Québec, they found...

... fossils.

The formation where the fossil-bearing rock was found [Photograph by Dominic Papineau]

The fossil traces are almost certainly from thermophilic bacteria, but form a colonial structure nearly a centimeter long.  It includes tubes, branching filaments, and spheres that are (the researchers claim) too complex to be explainable by inorganic chemical reactions.  This pushes the earliest life forms back by almost a third of a billion years earlier than the previous estimate, so we're not talking about a small shift, here.

"Using many different lines of evidence, our study strongly suggests a number of different types of bacteria existed on Earth between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years ago," said study co-author Dominic Papineau, in an interview with GeologyIn.  "This means life could have begun as little as 300 million years after Earth formed.  In geological terms, this is quick – about one spin of the Sun around the galaxy."

What this immediately brought to my mind is that it is increasingly looking as if the development of life is much faster and easier than anyone thought, and this bodes well for finding it elsewhere.  Probably lots of elsewheres, considering the billions of extrasolar planets there undoubtedly are in the Milky Way.  Perhaps, too, we might look closer to home; there may even be life in tectonically-active moons in our own Solar System such as Titan and Europa.

I'm not the only one who had this reaction.  "These findings have implications for the possibility of extraterrestrial life," Papineau added.  "If life is relatively quick to emerge, given the right conditions, this increases the chance that life exists on other planets."

Now, bear in mind that still is talking about microscopic life.  Even if the start of life turns out to be common on any sufficiently hospitable planet, that still leaves us with four variables in the Drake equation that are relatively poorly understood -- the fraction of life in the universe that becomes multicellular, the fraction of multicellular life that becomes intelligent/sentient, the fraction of intelligent life that advances in technology enough to send signals into space, and the average length of time such high-tech civilizations last.  So while the current study is encouraging to exobiology aficionados like myself, it may not have a lot of impact on our search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

But no matter how you slice it (*rimshot* again), the Nature paper is amazingly cool.  It's hard to believe that such a short time after the Earth's crust solidified, there were already tiny living things building homes in the oceans.  And it boggles the imagination to think about where else similar life forms might exist -- on some other planet, perhaps, circling one of the stars we see in the night sky.

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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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Sending pucks to Bolivia

Over the last few days I've been reading physicist Sean Carroll's wonderful book Something Deeply Hidden, which is about quantum physics, and although a lot of it (so far) is at least familiar to me in passing, he has a way of explaining things that is both direct and simultaneously completely mind-blowing.

I'm thinking especially of the bit I read last night, about the fact that even the physicists are unsure what quantum mechanics is really describing.  It's not that it doesn't work; the model has been tested every different way you can think of (and probably ones neither one of us would have thought of), and it's passed every test, often to levels of precision other realms of physics can only dream of.  The equations work; there's no doubt about that.  But what is it, exactly, that they're describing?

Here's the analogy he uses.  Suppose there was some physicist who was able to program a computer with all of Newton's laws of motion and the other equations of macroscopic physics that have been developed since Newton's time.  So if you wanted to know anything about the position, velocity, momentum, or energy of an object, all you have to do is input the starting conditions, and the computer will spit out the final state after any given amount of time elapsed.

A simple example: a cannon fires a cannonball with an initial velocity of 150 m/s at an incline of 45 degrees.  The (constant) acceleration due to gravity is -9.8 m/s^2 (the negative sign is because the acceleration vector points downward).  Ignoring air resistance, what is the highest point in its trajectory?

And the computer spits out 574.4 meters.

Now, anyone who took high school physics could figure this out with a few calculations.  But the point Carroll makes is this: could someone input numbers like that into the software, and get an output number, without having any clue what the model is actually doing?

The answer, of course, is yes.  You might even know what the different variables mean, and know that your answer is "maximum height of the cannonball," and that when you check, the answer is right.  But as far as knowing why it works, or even what's happening in the system that makes it work, you wouldn't have any idea.

That's the situation we're in with quantum physics.

And of course, quantum physics is a hell of a lot less intuitive than Newtonian mechanics.  I think the piece if it that always boggles me the most is the probabilistic nature of matter and energy on the submicroscopic level.  

Let me give you an example, analogous to the cannonball problem.  Given a certain set of conditions, what is the position of an electron?

The answer -- which, to reiterate, has been confirmed experimentally countless times -- is that prior to observation, the electron kind of isn't anywhere in particular.  Or it's kind everywhere at once, which amounts to the same thing.  Electrons -- and all other forms of matter and energy -- are actually fields of probabilities.  You can calculate those probabilities to as many decimal places as you like, and it gives phenomenally accurate predictions.  (In fact, the equations describing those probabilities have a load of real-world applications, including semiconductors, microchips, and lasers.)  But even so, there's no doubt that it's weird.  Let's say you repeatedly measure electron positions hundreds or thousands of times, and plot those points on a graph.  The results conform perfectly to Schrödinger's wave equation, the founding principle of quantum physics.  But each individual measurement is completely uncertain.  Prior to measurement, the electron really is just a smeared-out field of probabilities; after measurement, it's localized to one specific place.

Now, let me point out something that this isn't saying.  Quantum physics is not claiming that the electron actually is in a specific location, and we simply don't have enough information to know where.  This is not an issue of ignorance.  This was shown without any question by the famous double-slit experiment, where photons are shot through a pair of closely-spaced slits, and what you see at the detector on the other side is an interference pattern, as if the photons are acting like waves -- basically, going through both slits at the same time.  You can even shoot one photon at a time through the slits, and the detector (once again after many photons are launched through), still shows an interference pattern.  Now, change one thing: add another detector at each slit, so you know for sure which slit each photon went through.  When you do that, the interference pattern disappears.  The photons, apparently, aren't little packets of energy; they're spread-out fields of probabilities, and when they're moving they take all possible paths to get from point A to point B simultaneously.  If you don't observe its path, what you measure is the sum of all the possible paths the photon could have taken; only if you observe which slit it went through do you force it to take a single path.

It's as if when Wayne Gretzky winds up for a slap shot, the puck travels from his stick to the net taking every possible path, including getting there via Bolivia, unless you're following it with a high-speed camera -- if you do that, the puck only takes a single path.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alexandre Gondran, 100 trajectories guided by the wave function, CC BY-SA 4.0]

If you're saying, "what the hell?" -- well, so do we all.  The most common interpretation of this -- called the Copenhagen interpretation, after the place it was dreamed up -- is that observing the electron "collapses the wave function," meaning that it forces the electron to condense into a single place described by a single path.  But this opens up all sorts of troublesome questions.  Why does observation have that effect?  What counts as an observer?  Does it have to be a sentient being?  If a photon lands on the retina of a cat, does its wave function collapse?  What if the photon is absorbed by a rock?  Most importantly -- what is actually happening that makes the wave function collapse in the first place?

To add to the mystery, there's also the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that for certain pairs of variables -- most famously, position and velocity -- you can't know both of them to high precision at the same time.  The more you know about a particle's position, the less you can know even theoretically about its velocity.  Or, more accurately, if you pinpoint a particle's position, its velocity can only be described as a wide field of probabilities.  And vice versa.

I think the passage in Carroll's book that made me the most astonished was the following summation of all this:

Classical [Newtonian] mechanics offers a clear and unambiguous relationship between what we see and what the theory describes.  Quantum mechanics, for all its successes, offers no such thing.  The enigma at the heart of quantum reality can be summed up in a simple motto: what we see when we look at the world seems to be fundamentally different from what actually is.

So.  Yeah.  You can see why I was kind of wide-eyed, and I'm not even a quarter of the way through the book yet.  

Anyhow, maybe we should lighten things up by ending with my favorite joke.

Schrödinger and Heisenberg are out for a drive, with Heisenberg at the wheel.  After a while, they get pulled over by a cop.

The cop says to Heisenberg, "Do you have any idea how fast you were going?"

Heisenberg replies, "No, but I know exactly where I am."

The cop says, "You were going 85 miles an hour!"

Heisenberg throws his hands up and the air and says, "Great!  Now I'm lost!"

The cop by this time is getting pissed off, and says, "Fine, if you're going to be a smartass, I'm gonna search your car."  So he opens the trunk, and in the trunk is a dead cat.

The cop says, "Did you know there's a dead cat in your trunk?"

Schrödinger says, "Well, there is now."

Thanks.  You've been a great audience.  I'll be here all week.

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Snake in the grass

Okay, now I've heard everything.

If you ever run across a more ridiculous claim, I do not want to know about it.  This one already lowered my opinion of the average intelligence of the human species by ten IQ points.

You've probably heard the conspiracy theories about COVID-19 -- that it was deliberately started by the Chinese, that the vaccine contains microchips so The Bad Guys ™ can keep track of us, and so on.  But none of them can hold a candle to what one Bryan Ardis is saying.  Ardis is allegedly a "chiropractor, acupuncturist, and medical researcher," but after you hear his claim, you will probably come to the conclusion that his medical degree came from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.

Ready?

Ardis says the Catholic church created the COVID-19 virus from cobra venom, and is using it to turn us all into Satan worshipers.

So far, it's just a wacko guy who came up with a wacko idea.  Nothing special, because after all, that's what wacko guys do.  What sets him apart is that radio broadcaster Stew Peters took him seriously enough that he made a documentary about Ardis and his idea -- a documentary called "Watch the Waters" which has already gotten 640,000 views and is trending on Twitter.

I'd like to hope a significant chunk of the views are by people who are saying, "Whoa, listen up to what this nutcake is saying," but chances are, there are enough people who believe him that it's troubling.  Here's what Ardis says, which I feel obliged to state is verbatim:

The Latin definition historically for virus—originally and historically, virus meant, and means, "venom."  So, I started to wonder, "Well, what about the name ‘corona’? Does it have a Latin definition or a definition at all?"  So I actually looked up what’s the definition and on Dictionary.com, it brings up thirteen definitions: ‘Corona, religiously, ecclesiastically, means gold ribbon at the base of a miter.  So, this actually could read, "The Pope’s Venom Pandemic."  In Latin terms, corona means crown.  Visually, we see kings represented with a crown symbol.  So put that together for me: king cobra venom.  It actually could read, "King Cobra Venom Pandemic."

I actually believe this is more of a religious war on the entire world.  If I was going to do something incredibly evil, how ironic would it be that the Catholic Church, or whoever, would use the one symbol of an animal that represents evil in all religion? …  You take that snake or that serpent, and you figure out how to isolate genes from that serpent and get those genes of that serpent to insert itself into your God-given created DNA.  I think this was the plan all along; to get the serpent’s—the Evil One’s—DNA into your God-created DNA.  And they figured out how to do this with this mRNA [vaccine] technology.  They’re using mRNA—which is mRNA extracted from I believe the king cobra venom—and I think they want to get to that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.

 Probably needless to say, I read this whole thing with this expression on my face:

It does leave me with a few responses, however:

• Satan has DNA?
• Linguistics is not a cross between free association and a game of Telephone.  
• When mRNA is injected into you (e.g. the COVID vaccine), it degrades in only a couple of days.  By that time, if the vaccine worked, you've begun to make antibodies to the protein the mRNA coded for (in this case, the spike protein).  It doesn't get into your DNA, nor affect your DNA in any way.  So if the COVID vaccine was engineered to turn us into demons, we'd all turn back into ordinary humans a couple of days later, which now that I think of it could be kind of fun.
• Injecting king cobra venom into you would kill you within minutes, given that this is basically what happens when you get bitten by a king cobra.
• "Corona" is Latin for "crown," that bit is correct.  But coronaviruses are a big family of viruses that has been known to scientists since Leland Bushnell and Carl Brandly first isolated them in 1933, and were named not for the pope's miter but because the rings of spike proteins on the surface look a little like a crown.
• Is Bryan Ardis stark raving loony?  Or what?

So there you have it.  We are now in the Pope's King Cobra Venom Pandemic.  Despite these dire warnings, my wife and I have both been vaccinated three times, and we haven't turned into hybrids of Satan.  But we have, so far, avoided getting COVID, which is kind of the point.

But I will end with reiterating my plea: if you find a crazier claim, please don't tell me about it.  Reading about this one made countless cells in my cerebral cortex that I can ill afford to lose die screaming in agony.  From now on in Skeptophilia, I think I'll focus on happy bunnies and rainbows.  We'll see how long that lasts.

Hopefully a while, at least.  The last thing we need is my brain cell loss contributing to a further drop in the average human IQ.

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Mysterious planet

You never hear people talking about the planet Neptune much.

The other planets are all famous for something or another.  Mercury is the closest to the Sun; Venus is ridiculously hot; Mars has been the subject of repeated visits; Jupiter's the biggest; Saturn has rings; and Uranus is best known for being a name you can't say without all the immature people giggling. 

To be fair, the unfortunately-named Uranus has some fascinating features, the most obvious of which is its axial tilt.  Its rotational axis is tipped at a bit over ninety degrees -- so it, in effect, rolls around its orbit on its side.  This means that at its summer solstice, its northern hemisphere is almost entirely illuminated all day long, and the entire southern hemisphere is in the dark; the opposite is true on the winter solstice.  (And given that its orbital period is 84 Earth years long, its winters are even longer than the ones we have here in upstate New York.)

But Neptune?  Other than the fact that it's a gas giant, and very far out in the Solar System, most people don't know much about it.

That's a shame, because it's a pretty interesting place.  Being about 1.5 times farther away from the Sun than Uranus, it's got a much longer year, at 164.8 Earth years.  It's really cold, with an average temperature somewhere around 70 K (-200 C, give or take).  Also, it's an interesting color -- a really deep, rich blue, something we didn't know until the first good images came back from the Voyager 2 flyby almost a little over thirty years ago.  Some of the color apparently comes from crystals of methane, but according to NASA, it's way deeper blue to be accounted for solely from that.  Their page on the planet says, "Uranus' blue-green color is also the result of atmospheric methane, but Neptune is a more vivid, brighter blue, so there must be an unknown component that causes the more intense color that we see.  The cause of Neptune's bluish tinge remains a mystery."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

What brings this up is a study out of the University of Leicester showing that we haven't come close to exploring all of Neptune's oddities.  Currently the planet is in the southern hemisphere's summer; Neptune's axial tilt is a little over 28 degrees, so more than the Earth's (at 23.5) but nowhere near as tilted as Uranus (at 97.7).  So as with the Earth, when the southern hemisphere is pointed toward the Sun, it should be slowly warming up.

It's not.  It's cooling down.  The average temperature of the upper atmosphere in the southern hemisphere has dropped by 8 C.  (Remember that being a gas giant, Neptune has no well-defined surface.)  Even odder, there one place that's warming -- the planet's south pole, where the average temperature has gone up by 11 C.

These are not small changes, especially given how big Neptune is (seventeen times the mass of the Earth).  And the astronomers have no idea what's causing it.  It sounds like something that could be driven by convection -- atmospheric turnover, where warmer gases from lower down in the atmosphere rise, displacing colder, denser gases as they do so -- but that's a hell of a big convection cell if it's affecting the entire southern hemisphere of the planet.

Of course, when it comes to moving stuff around, Neptune is pretty good at it.  It has the fastest winds ever clocked in the Solar System (at a little over 1,900 km/hr).  An enormous storm called the "Great Dark Spot" was spotted by Voyager 2 in 1989 -- but by 1994, it had completely disappeared.

"I think Neptune is itself very intriguing to many of us because we still know so little about it," said astronomer Michael Roman, who was lead author on the paper, which appeared this week in The Planetary Science Journal.  "This all points towards a more complicated picture of Neptune’s atmosphere and how it changes with time."

So the most distant planet from the Sun is still largely a mystery, and this week's paper just added to its peculiarities.  Amazing that since its discovery by German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle in 1846, we are still largely in the dark about what makes it tick.

And I, for one, find that absolutely fascinating.

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A flower in amber

Today's post comes to us purely from the "Okay, This Is Cool" department.

I've been fascinated with plant taxonomy since long before I knew the word.  I couldn't have been more than about seven years old when a friend of the family gave me a lovely old book by the early twentieth-century botanical illustrator F. Schuyler Mathews called Field Book to American Trees and Shrubs.  Not only did I use it to try to identify every tree in my neighborhood, I found out something about how plants are classified -- not by leaf shape (which at the time seemed to me the most logical characteristic to use) but by flower structure.  That's when I learned that beeches, oaks, and chestnuts are in the same family; so are rhododendrons, heather, blueberries, and cranberries; so are birches, alders, and hazelnuts; so, most surprisingly to me, are willows and poplars.

It was also my first introduction to how difficult the classification of organisms actually is, something I learned a great deal more about when I took evolutionary biology in college.  The standout from Mathews's book in that respect is the genus Crataegus, hawthorns, of which he lists (and illustrates with beautiful woodcuts) over a hundred species, many of which looked (and still look) exactly alike to my untrained eye.  Taxonomists argue vehemently over how particular species are to be placed and who is related to whom, although the advent of genetic analysis and cladistics has now provided a more rigorous standard method for classification.

What I didn't know, even after my umpteenth perusal of the Field Book, was that the strange and magical-sounding scientific names of plant families Mathews mentions are barely scratching the surface.  You go elsewhere in the world, all bets are off; you'll run into plants that are in families with no members at all in the United States.  An odd historical filigree is that one of the reasons the British colonizers felt so at home in northeastern North America was that the plants were familiar; oaks, ashes, beeches, birches, willows, maples, pines, and spruces are found in both places (although the exact species vary).  Go to southeast Asia, South America, or pretty much anywhere in Africa, though, and even someone well-versed in the plants of North America and western Europe might well not recognize a single species.  I found that to be the case in Malaysia -- a (very) little bit of reading about the flora of the places I visited gave me at least a name or two, but I'd say 95% of what I saw I couldn't even have ventured a guess about.

One of the many peculiar plants I saw in the rain forests of Malaysia -- I still don't know what it is, but it sure has a cool-looking leaf.

The reason this comes up is an article sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a fossil from Myanmar that was the subject of a recent paper in The Journal of the Botanical Institute of Texas.  Encased in amber, the flower is almost perfectly preserved -- despite being just this side of one hundred million years old, a point at which the dinosaurs would still be in charge of everything for another thirty-four million years.

If it sounds like figuring out the taxonomy of modern plants is a challenge, it gets way worse when you start looking at plant fossils.  Not only do we not have living plants to analyze genetically, often what we're having to judge by is what's left of a leaf or two.  Fortunately, in this case what the researchers have is a preserved flower -- remember that flowering plants are classified by flower structure -- and that was enough to convince them that they were not only looking at a previously unrecorded species, but a previously unrecorded genus -- and possibly a whole new family.

The flower of the newly-named Micropetasos burmensis [Image by George Poinar of Oregon State University)

Most fascinating of all, the researchers aren't even sure how Micropetasos fits into known plant systematics.  The paper says about all we can say so far is that it seems to belong to the clade Pentapetalae -- which doesn't narrow it down much, as that same clade contains such distantly-related plants as roses, asters, cacti, cucumbers, and cabbage.

Long-time readers might recognize the name of the lead author of the paper -- George Poinar.  This isn't the first time he's pulled off this kind of botanical coup.  About a year and a half ago, I wrote about another of Poinar's discoveries in Burmese amber, a little flower called Valviloculus pleristaminis, which also was of uncertain placement amongst known plant families.  Amazing that in bits of fossilized tree sap we can find remnants that allow us to piece together the flora of the Cretaceous Period.

Of course, what it always brings up is the elegiac thought that however many fossils we find, the vast majority of species that have existed on Earth left no traces whatsoever that have survived to today.  If we were to take a time machine back a hundred million years, Micropetasos and Valviloculus we might perhaps recognize from Poinar's work; but there would be thousands more that are completely unfamiliar.  The lion's share of prehistory is unknown -- and unknowable.

But at least we have one more little piece, a tiny flower in amber.  When it was growing, there were triceratopses and T. rexes stomping around, and our closest ancestors were small, rodent-like critters that still had tens of millions of years of evolution before they'd even become primates.  That we can have any sort of lens into that distant, ancient world is astonishing.

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Angels on ice

I guess it's natural enough to ascribe all sorts of bizarre stuff to places we don't know much about.  And top of the list of places we don't know much about is Antarctica.

The first recorded landing on the shores of Antarctica by humans (you'll see why I added "by humans" in a moment) was in 1821, when the American seal-hunting ship Cecilia, under Captain John Davis, anchored in Hughes Bay, between Cape Sterneck and Cape Murray along the west coast of the continent.  There's a possibility that the Māori discovered it first, perhaps as far back as the seventh century C.E., but that's based only on their legends and at this point is pure conjecture.

Since that time, there's been a good bit of exploration of the place, but there's a ton we still don't know.  The reason for this is not only its inaccessibility, but its ridiculously cold temperatures; the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was on July 21, 1983, when in Vostok Station, Antarctica it reached just this side of -90 C.  (For reference, carbon dioxide freezes at -78.5 C, so some of the white stuff on the ground there was dry ice.)

The mystery and inhospitable conditions just invite speculation, not to mention outright invention.  Perhaps the most famous story set in Antarctica is H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," in which a team of explorers finds the remnants of monumental architecture that predates the earliest humans by a good hundred million years -- at which time Antarctica was a tropical rainforest.  (What's most fascinating about this story is that Antarctica was a tropical rainforest at one point, when the continent was a great deal farther north, and that Lovecraft had conjectured this a good forty years before plate tectonics was discovered.)  Of course, being a story by HPL, it wouldn't be complete without monsters, and the unfortunate explorers discover that the place is still inhabited, and by the time it's over most of them have been eaten by Shoggoths.

Interestingly, this leads us right into the story that spawned today's post, because although most people know that Lovecraft's stories and others of their type are fiction, there are some for whom that distinction has never really taken hold.  I found out about this because a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that had popped up on Ranker called "These Fallen Angels Might Have Been Imprisoned in Antarctica," about a fellow named Steven Ben-Nun who claims that according to the Book of Enoch (a Jewish text dated to somewhere between 200 and 100 B.C.E., which is considered apocryphal by most Christian sects) when the angels fell, they didn't go to hell, they went to Antarctica.

Which, I suppose, is hellish enough.

Ben-Nun (and Enoch) give a great many details.  Apparently there were a bunch of angels called the Watchers, who became enamored of humans, and not just of watching, if you get my drift.  They came down to Earth and immediately taught humans "unholy ways" that apparently involved lots and lots of sex.  This resulted in lots and lots of babies, who were half-angel and half-human, and these are the Nephilim, about whom the conspiracy theorists still babble, lo unto this very day.

If this nineteenth-century marble statue of a fallen angel by Belgian sculptor Joseph Geefs is accurate, you can see why humans were tempted.  I wouldn't have said no either.

But new and fun sexual diversions weren't the only thing the angels taught humans.  According to the article:

Azazel, the leader of the Watchers, taught men to make tools for war and women to make themselves more attractive with jewelry and cosmetics.  Shemyaza taught magical spells; Armaros taught the banishment of those spells; the angel Baraqijal taught astrology; Kokabiel gave humans knowledge of astronomy; Chazaqiel taught them about weather; Shamsiel gave humans knowledge of the sun cycles; Sariel taught them the lunar cycles; Penemuel instructed humanity to read and write, and Kashdejan gave humanity the knowledge [of] medicine.

Well, all this was unacceptable to the Old Testament God, who above all seemed to resent it whenever he saw humans learning stuff or enjoying themselves.  So he and the unfallen angels (who presumably were just fine with humans not knowing about astronomy and weather and reading and writing and sex) waged war, and the Watchers were defeated.  At that point, Ben-Nun says, God looked about for the worst place possible to put them, and decided, understandably enough, on Antarctica.

And there they still reside, frozen underneath Wilkes Land.  Why specifically Wilkes Land, you might ask?  Well, it's because that's where the Wilkes Land Gravitational Anomaly is, the conventional explanation for which is that it's the site of an impact crater from a meteorite that hit about 250 million years ago.

But you can see how that explanation leads directly to the conclusion, "... so there must be a hundred fallen angels frozen under here somewhere."

Other than that, the claim doesn't have much going for it, and I don't think the scientists need to worry about waking up a bunch of Watchers.  The Lovecraftian cyclopean architecture is kind of a non-starter, too.  Too bad, because otherwise, most of Antarctica seems like nothing much more than rocks and ice.  It could use a few Shoggoths or hot-looking scantily-clad angels to liven thing up a bit.

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