Chinese cheese

Researchers led by Changsui Wang from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences have analyzed yellowish organic material buried with mummies including the "Beauty of Xiaohe" (PHOTO ABOVE WITH ARROWS AND CLOSE-UP) and found it to be the world's oldest cheese. The 3,600-year-old cheese remained intact because of the dry, salty conditions in the desert and the Bronze Age people who buried their dead under boat-like wooden structures wrapped in cowhide, creating conditions that "vacuum-packed" both the bodies and the cheese. The cheese was made in such a way that it could have been eaten by the lactose-intolerant Asians. And it is assumed that the ancient mummies were meant to nibble on it, like the meat mummies with which Egyptians equipped their dead for the afterlife.

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California gold rush

The discovery of buried treasure in California, U.S., has just been announced. A couple publicly identified only as "John" and "Mary" were walking their dog on their property (location undisclosed) when they noticed a partially buried can jutting out of the ground. They dislodged it with a stick, carried it back to the house, and pried the lid open to find – mixed with dirt and stones – numerous $20 gold pieces. Returning to the site repeatedly and using the help of a metal detector, they uncovered a total of 8 rusty cans filled with over 1,400 rare U.S. gold coins (IMAGES HERE)! The coins have been cleaned and authenticated by Kagin’s, Inc., the numismatic firm representing the couple. Company president Donald Kagin found them to be in pristine condition, some finer than anything seen to date. The coins in the “Saddle Ridge Hoard,” as it has been named, will be sold by Kagan and on Amazon and are expected to fetch more than $10 million. John and Mary will use the money to pay off their bills, hold onto their home, and donate to local charities. The coins, which date from 1847 to 1894 and have a face value of $28,000, would have been a windfall during the California Gold Rush. Says John about the discovery, “I thought any second an old miner with a mule was going to appear.”

 

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Cat corridor

On Sunday, a leopard was seen in a populated area of Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, in Northwest India. Situations like these are bound to arise as humans encroach on the endangered cat's territory, and often result in death for both parties. Authorities urged that schools and markets be closed, but that did not stop crowds from gathering to taunt, tease, and harass the big cat. Hundreds turned out by the time the cat sought refuge inside a nearby hospital, panicking patients and staff. It was confined within an empty ward and tranquilized with a dart, but managed to escape through a wall (IMAGE ABOVE, MORE PHOTOS HERE). By that time, hundreds of onlookers had turned to thousands, creating a massive traffic jam. The leopard then snuck into a cinema and an apartment block before officials lost track of it. At the same time their territory is diminished, the animals are often prevented from getting back to it by the curious crowds. This one may be lucky. Conservationist Deepankar Ghosh of World Wildlife Fund-India explains, "Leopards are large territorial mammals. They need space to move around. Some of their corridors are getting blocked so there is bound to be an interface. We can't put all the leopards into cages. We can't remove all the people living near forested areas. We have to manage the situation the best way we can."

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Luckless duck

"You're sitting there waiting for a bird to come in. Never did see him. All of the sudden the window just explodes. I don't know if he was diving or what happened when I got him," describes Ron Weber about piloting his single-engine plane into Fort Myers, Florida, U.S., on Saturday. He was about 1,000' (305 m) off the ground, traveling at 170 mph (274 km/h), when a bird hit the windshield. A camera on board caught the incident (VIDEO HERE), after which Weber had the presence of mind to bring the plane down safely at Page Field Airport. The cockpit was full of shattered glass, which had cut his forehead, but there was no dead bird to be found. Its species could be known, however, with the analysis of the snarge it left behind…

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Florida fuzzy

"He was very lethargic, listless, and non-responsive," said Carli Segelson of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission of the U.S. about the discovery by biologists in the woods of the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge last month. The kitten (SLIDESHOW HERE, VIDEO HERE) weighed only 1 lb and appeared to have been abandoned by its mother. He was taken to the Animal Specialty Hospital of Naples for emergency treatment, then transferred to the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa for longer-term rehabilitation. With his healthy appetite for the milk replacement supplement he drinks, the kitten has gained 3 lbs. In a few weeks, he will be weaned and started on a meat-based diet. Although he will not be returned to the wild since he never learned to hunt, and will live out his life at the Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park, the panther kitten will then truly be a carnivore.

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM (and thanks for not abandoning me)!

 

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Wise old bird

Wisdom is a Laysan albatross who makes her home in the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge on the Midway Atoll in the North Pacific between Hawaii and Japan. She has been followed since 1956 and now – sporting the 6th band on her leg – is declared by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be the oldest bird they have recorded in the wild. Wisdom has been around the block and is estimated to have traveled at least 2 to 3 million miles in her lifetime. She has "been around" in other ways, too, and hatched another chick – possibly her 35th – earlier this month (IMAGE ABOVE)!

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Animals hoarding

Usually, when we hear about animal hoarding, it's a story like this one from 2012 in which authorities seized 150 dead birds and more than 350 live parakeets, conures, finches, canaries, cockatoos, and other species (IMAGE ABOVE) from a man's home. But sometimes it's the birds themselves that do the hoarding. Psychologist Christopher E. Overtree of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is a specialist in treating hoarding disorder in humans and explains that it is triggered by a biological reflex present in all animals. Its roots lie in resource scarcity and squirrels, for instance, gather 75% more nuts than they will need. A pivotal moment in Overtree's research was when an eagle's nest on the Minnesota property of a friend fell from a tree. Surprisingly, the nest contained 23 dog and cat collars. “The eagle ate the animals but saved the collars.”

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Vodka visage

These days, facial reconstruction can be done digitally. But forensic artist Nigel Cockerton used the tried-and-true method of applying clay to a skull to achieve the representation above (SEE SERIES OF PHOTOS HERE). In this case, the skull was not that of a long-dead historical figure whose remains had been unearthed, but the sculpted bottle of Crystal Head Vodka. The result of this exercise? A drunken fool, of course.

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Imperfection

"For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it," wrote 1st c. B.C.E. Roman architect Vitruvius. When Leonardo da Vinci put this idea to paper during the Renaissance, his now famous image of the perfect proportionality of the human body (ABOVE) became known as Vitruvian Man. Symbolically, Vitruvian Man was intended to represent a microcosm of the universe, depicting the human form as the bridge between the terrestrial and the celestial. But it turns out that this "perfect" person is not so perfect after all. Based on the bulge just above the left side of his groin, Hutan Ashrafian, a lecturer of surgery at Imperial College London, has diagnosed Vitruvian Man with an inguinal hernia. Two American doctors concur: Jeffrey Young, director at the University of Virginia’s Trauma Center, and Michael Rosen, director of the Comprehensive Hernia Center at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Ohio, who comments, “If it isn’t a hernia then I really have no idea what it would be.”

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Pottery protest

I looked up sharply at the TV yesterday to see the video of a man who deliberately broke a million-dollar vase at a museum in Miami over the weekend. Then I researched the story to find that it was not just an act of vandalism – it's much more complicated than that. The Perez Art Museum is showing the work of contemporary Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei through mid-March. Among the pieces on display are more than a dozen vases painted in bright colors, so 51-year-old local artist Maximo Caminero picked up a large one from the floor and dropped it, smashing it to bits. Caminero claims that his act – a protest against the museum for its failure to exhibit the work of local artists – was inspired by the art of Ai Weiwei himself. The photographs behind the smaller vases (IMAGE ABOVE) document Ai's most famous performance piece, "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn," in which he destroyed a 2,000-year-old piece of Chinese pottery. Thinking he had smashed a common clay pot like you would find at the Home Depot, Caminero had in fact destroyed an urn of equal age. Underneath the gaudy paint applied by Ai were more antiques from the Han dynasty. When reached for comment, Ai said of Caminero– rather ironically in my opinion, since cultural property belongs to us all even when it is in private hands, “The argument does not support the act. It doesn’t sound right. His argument doesn’t make much sense. If he really had a point, he should choose another way, because this will bring him trouble to destroy property that does not belong to him.”

Continue reading the main story

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Bosch's butt

At the turn the 16th c., Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch painted a cautionary triptych (IMAGE ABOVE), the title of which was lost to time. Now referred to as "The Garden of Earthly Delights," the work hangs in the Prado in Madrid and depicts the Garden of Eden on the left, the delights of earth in the center, and the horrors of eternal damnation on the right. Earlier this month, a student at Oklahoma Christian University was perusing a reproduction of the painting with a friend. Amelia – who also blogs and describes herself as a hard-of-hearing music and information systems double major – writes, "Luke and I…discovered, much to our amusement, music written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting which is intended to represent Hell. I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era." Surprised at all the attention her discovery has received, she is working with the college music department on a more precise transcription, but until then we have the "600-year-old butt song from hell," a.k.a. the "torture victim's backside hymnal" (LISTEN HERE).

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Aztec canines

The Aztecs had a high regard for dogs, believing that they could guide human souls after death and guard pyramids when buried beneath them. Yet at the height of the Aztec empire, between 1350 and 1520 A.D., they buried 12 dogs together in a small pit in what is now the Aztacapozalco borough of Mexico City. The dogs have been dated stratigraphically and are medium-sized with full sets of teeth. It is the first time a group of dogs has been found interred together in a cemetery-like setting. Archaeologist Rocio Morales Sanchez with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History points out, "This is definitely a special finding because of the number of dogs and because we have found no connection to a building or with the deceased."

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Framing and farming

Another VIDEO has caught my eye, this one taken about 80' (24 m) below the surface of Bluefish Cove in Carmel, California, U.S. Diving partners David Malvestuto and Warren Murray encountered a large octopus that grabbed the camera until the flash scared it away. Above is one of the resulting stills. Back in September of last year, I was surprised to learn that researchers are trying to raise octopus in farms, which would allow for better studies and ease overfishing of the animal for food. They should be good candidates because they only take a year or two to reach full maturity, the females lay thousands upon thousands of eggs, and they are incredibly efficient at turning calories consumed into body mass. The problem was that the juveniles would only eat live food! Marine scientists from the Autonomous National University of Mexico finally hit upon the right species, but there remains an issue: "One other potential obstacle to octopus farming, however, is that unlike many other animals that are currently reared together in large numbers, octopuses cannot be vaccinated against common infections."

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Paleo parturition

Study the fossil above for a moment to make sense of it. The complete animal on the lower right is an embryonic 248-million-year-old ichthyosaur. But you will notice a vertebral column above it and a pelvis to the left, which indicates that it is emerging from the mother's womb (SEE COLOR-CODED DIAGRAM HERE). The find came out of recent excavations in south Majiashan, Anhui, China, led by paleontologist Guan-bao Chen of Anhui Geological Museum. The dig yielded more than 80 skeletons of the lizard-like Chaohusaurus, the oldest of Mesozoic marine reptiles but, at 6' (1.8 m) in length, one of the smallest ichthyosaurs. This particular specimen is even more momentous than mites procreating when they were covered by sap 40 million years ago or turtles caught in the act when they were overcome by volcanic gases 47 million years ago. Lead author of the newly published paper in the journal PLoS ONE Ryosuke Motani from the University of California, Davis, explains, “The study reports the oldest vertebrate fossil to capture the ‘moment’ of live-birth, with a baby emerging from the pelvis of its mother. The 248-million-year old fossil of an ichthyosaur suggests that live-bearing evolved on land and not in the sea.”

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PigPro

Questionable videos and legitimate scientific photographs have gone viral touting the durability of the GoPro camera. So whether this one is authentic or a set-up, it is still fun to watch. The clip was posted on February 9th by Mia Munselle, who has a presence – but no biographical information – on YouTube and Twitter. “Camera falls from a skydiving aeroplane and lands on my property in my pig pen. I found the camera eight months later and viewed this video,” Munselle writes. The location of the farm is not indicated and no skydiver has come forward to claim the camera, so the story remains unconfirmed. But the video (WATCH IT TO THE END) is hilarious!

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Crocodiles climb

This morning, the rather offputting news that crocodilians can climb trees! The scientific literature dating back to 1972 cites only 3 references, but anecdotal reports describe both crocodiles and alligators as high as 30' (9 m) up in trees in Mexico, the United States (IMAGE ABOVE TAKEN IN MISSISSIPPI), Columbia, and along the Nile. So an international team of researchers decided to do their own survey. They spotted crocodiles in trees, day and night, around the world and suggest the behavior exists as a means for the animals to regulate their body temperature and survey their environment. In Africa, crocodiles were seen in trees as frequently as some birds. Russian born zoologist Vladimir Dinets and his colleagues write, "Juvenile crocodilians can...climb on relatively thin, vertical branches that have to be gripped from the sides, or even across multiple branches using them as a ladder and lifting the body vertically." But this, by no means, rules out the adults. In the Florida Everglades and Central America, they saw crocodiles basking on branches that could only have been reached by climbing the vertical trunks of the mangrove trees. They saw one crocodile in Australia attempting to scale a chain-link fence. Another was observed on a log 13' (almost 4 m) above the water and 16' (almost 5 m) from the riverbank: “To reach this site the crocodile would have had to scale a completely vertical bank and then walk amongst the branches to reach the end of the tree." The observers report that the crocodiles are skittish and most fell off their logs or dove into the water as they approached. But the idea of these carnivores above our heads is a bit more sinister than the bizarre but benign image of arboreal goats.

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Double-nosed dog

Unlike the storied but unconfirmed Andean double-nosed tiger hound, this dog is very real and was until just recently in need of a forever home."Snuffles" was available for adoption from the Dogs Trust Rehoming Centre, a no-kill shelter in Glasgow, Scotland. People are put off by his odd looks (PHOTOS HERE), but the 5-month-old Belgian Shepherd is happy and healthy. Although cleft palates are not uncommon in cattle and dogs, veterinarian Angela McAllister says, “Instead of his nostrils being fused together, he’s got some sort of split there. It’s a defect in his palate which gives him the appearance of having two noses as his nostrils can move independently of each other. I’ve never seen the condition in my 20-year career.” After the publicity, the Centre received offers from as far away as South Africa, but chose a family in East Lothian.

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The zoo's point of view

Last week, a healthy 2-year-old giraffe unofficially named "Marius" was euthanized at the Copenhagen Zoo. Members of an outraged public staged a protest, signed a petition, and one individual even offered to buy the giraffe for $680,000 (€500,000). The zoo is a member of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA), which has a mission of conserving global biodiversity and recommended the animal be put down because there were a lot of giraffes with similar genes in their breeding program. Two zoos had offered to take Marius, but one already held his brother and the other does not belong to the EAZA. Zoo spokesman Tobias Stenbaek Bro explained that a tenet of membership is that they are custodians of the animals, not owners, and can't sell them to anyone outside the organization who doesn't follow EAZA principles, which would rule out the individual who made the financial offer. The Copenhagen Zoo, by the way, doesn't castrate the giraffes or give them contraceptives because that could have unwanted side effects and because they value parental care. Instead, they went ahead with euthanizing the animal, using a bolt pistol instead of lethal injection so as not to contaminate the meat. With visitors of all ages present (IMAGE ABOVE), the giraffe was then butchered and fed to the lions, tigers, and leopards. Copenhagen Zoo's scientific director Bengt Holst pointed out, "I know the giraffe is a nice looking animal, but I don't think there would have been such an outrage if it had been an antelope, and I don't think anyone would have lifted an eyebrow if it was a pig."

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Backward birds

The image above shows a young bird with claws on its wings like the extinct archaeopteryx, long believed to be evidence of the evolutionary transition of dinosaurs to birds. Except that the bird in the drawing is alive today – the only bird known to have this trait. The Amazonian hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin) has a number of interesting characteristics, a striking appearance, some interesting nicknames, and some new conclusions about its origins. But the idea that it is a vestige of a bird which lived 150 million years ago is misleading. As Gerald Mayr, curator of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, points out, "Many Archaeopteryx reconstructions were inspired by hoatzins." Meanwhile, scientists attached prosthetic tails to chickens to test theories about the way bipedal dinosaurs moved. Researchers led by Bruno Grossi of the Universidad de Chile write, "These results indicate a shift from the standard bird, knee-driven bipedal locomotion to a more hip-driven locomotion, typical of crocodilians (the only other extant archosaur group), mammals, and hypothetically, bipedal non-avian dinosaurs." Watch the mesmerizing video HERE.

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Skeptical about skulls

Make of this what you will. The Paracas skulls are a group of more than 300 elongated skulls discovered by Peruvian archaeologist Julio Tello in 1928 in the Pisco Province on the southern coast of the country. Their strange shape gave rise to the idea that the members of this culture, which died out some 3,000 years ago, had interbred with space aliens. Subsequent theories assumed that the shaping of the skull was the deliberate result of cranial deformation, through head flattening, or head binding. However, this doesn't account for the fact that the cranial volume is up to 25% larger and their weight up to 60% heavier than conventional human skulls and that they contain only one parietal plate, rather than two. Independent researcher Brien Foerster (PICTURED ABOVE WITH ONE OF THE SKULLS), who has studied, written about, and offered tours to see the skulls for years, has taken the next step in their analysis. Museum director Juan Navarro of the Paracas History Museum, which houses a collection of 35 of the Paracas skulls, allowed Foerster to take samples of skin, hair with roots, a tooth, and bone for DNA testing by an as-yet-unnamed geneticist. After the initial sequencing of mitochondrial DNA, the scientist revealed that it had mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal yet on record. If the Paracas people were so biologically different, they would not have been able to breed with other ancient humans such as Neanderthals or Denisovans. In his report to Foerster, the anonymous geneticist wrote, “I am not sure it will even fit into the known evolutionary tree."

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Family of footprints

Until now, the earliest human footprints in Britain dated to about 7,500 years ago. They have just been eclipsed dramatically by the Happisburgh prints, named after the village in Northfolk, U.K., in which they were found. Nearly 1,000,000 years ago, a group of at least one or two large adult males, at least two or three adult females or teenagers, and at least three or four children – possibly a family – walked upstream across tidal mudflats likely in search of food. About 50 of their preserved footprints were exposed by coastal erosion; discovered by a joint team from the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, and Queen Mary University of London; and promptly destroyed by incoming tides. Luckily, the prints were recorded photogrametrically to produce 3D digitized images of them, especially the 12 that were reasonably complete and the 2 that showed the toes in detail. Says archaeologist Nicholas Ashton of the British Museum, "These footprints are immensely rare - and are the first examples of such great age to have been found outside Africa. They are of huge international significance because they give us a very tangible link to the first humans to inhabit northern Europe, including Britain."

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Beach blanketed

Josie Lim and her family were walking the beach in Hobart, Tasmania, when they came across something strange. It was a 5' (1.5 m) jellyfish stranded belly-up, identified by experts at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) when the Lims sent in a photo (IMAGE ABOVE) of the giant animal. Although not yet classified, it is a new species of the genus Cyanea - known as the Lion's Mane group – which includes the world's largest jellyfish that can grow up to 10' (3 m) wide. According to Lisa-ann Gershwin of CSIRO, the Lion's Manes have a raggedy look to them, "like a dinner plate with a mop hanging underneath."

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Rabbit hole

Less than 200 yards (183 m) from Land's End in Cornwall, England, a treasure trove has been revealed by rabbits. As they dug their burrows, the earth they threw out contained arrow heads, flint tools, and hide scrapers dating back to the Neolithic Age. The scale of the site is not yet known, but there is speculation that it has been used to bury important community members over the last 8,000 years because of its stunning views. The bunnies have been as curious about the archaeologists as the archaeologists have been about what lies beneath the ground. Managing director Dean Paton of Big Heritage will lead a team in excavating the site over the next 2 years and exclaims, "A family of rabbits have just rewritten the history books.”

Please note that I have illustrated this post with a hare rather than a rabbit – a 1502 watercolor by German artist Albrecht Dürer – but you can learn about the differences between the animals here.

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Melancholy marbles

When 83-year-old Toosje Kupers was moving last year, she found some toys she had kept for decades in a cupboard. The book, tea set, and collection of marbles (IMAGE ABOVE) had belonged to her little playmate on the Merwedeplein in Amsterdam and were left in Toosje's care when the girl's family announced they were leaving for Switzerland. She remembers the concern of her childhood friend when she turned them over: "'I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into the wrong hands. Could you keep them for me for a little while?'" The marbles remain safe – it was the girl and her family who fell into the wrong hands, and she was never able to reclaim them. Her fate is well-known and her name is Anne Frank.

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Guy

The most famous resident of the London Zoo was given the name because he was welcomed in 1947 on Guy Fawkes Night. Guy the Gorilla had been born the year before in the French Cameroons and arrived via the Zoo de Vincennes in Paris in exchange for a zebra and a tiger. He became a household name during the three decades he lived at the zoo (PHOTO ABOVE TAKEN BY HENRY GRANT C. 1950, PHOTO HERE TAKEN BY WOLF SUSCHITZKY IN 1958). The British public was heartbroken when he died during a tooth operation in 1978, and outraged that his body was to be mounted and placed on display at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. The museum postponed its plans and instead stored Guy's half-cured skin in the freezer. But as museum press officer Sue Runyard explained to her superiors, the story would not die. “My interest is that I should not have to explain to the press at some time why we allowed his remains to spoil,” she wrote in 1980. At that point, taxidermist Arthur Hayward was brought in, but found that the pelt was not in very good condition. His only option was to set the hairs in a latex replacement skin, which he stretched over a model. The results went on display to mixed results for a few weeks in 1982. The same year, a bronze sculpture by William Timym was unveiled at the London Zoo. In my humble opinion, neither one (IMAGES HERE) does the beloved gorilla justice.

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