Happy Halloween!

Enjoy this viral video (CAUTION – LANGUAGE) about some men encountering a wolf spider in the house, particularly their surprise at the hitchhikers on her back. I will post my costume photo tomorrow.

 

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Plans to poach

It has recently been revealed that the National History Museum (NHM) in London had designs on the Loch Ness monster, appealing to bounty hunters to capture it (or pieces of it) to trump the Scots. An unnamed official wrote in 1934, a year after the first sighting, "Should you ever come within range of the ‘Monster’ I hope you will not be deterred 
by humanitarian considerations from shooting him on the 
spot and sending the carcase to us in cold storage, carriage forward. Short of this, a flipper, a jaw or a tooth would be very welcome.” By 1959 – long after the monster had become a symbol of Scottish national identity, NHM had given up its pursuit.

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Crabfest

As the author of The Corpse: A History, I have a long known that crabs are among the first scavengers to feed on a dead body underwater. So I was not surprised to learn that that is what researchers found when they dropped and observed pig carcasses in the sea. The decay of corpses above and under the ground is well-documented thanks to the Body Farm, so scientists at Canada's Simon Fraser University decided to add to the forensic knowledge about the breakdown of bodies submerged 330' (100 m) in salt water. Sure enough, they provided a tasty treat for shrimp, Dungeness crabs, and squat lobsters (VIDEO HERE). Concludes forensic entomologist Gail Anderson, "Pigs are the best models for humans. They're roughly the right size for a human body; they have the same kind of gut bacteria, and they're relatively hairless ...Now we have a very good idea of how bodies break down underwater."

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Evolving

"The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve," said Pope Francis yesterday, addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican.

 

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Terrible hands

In 1965, paleontologists excavating a 70-million-year-old sandstone formation in the Gobi desert found the arms of a new species of dinosaur. Beause they each measured 8' (2.4 m) long and ended in 8" (20 cm) claws, they named the beast Deinocheirus mirificus (Greek for “terrible hand, which is unusual”). After 50 years, a team of paleontologists led by Yuong-Nam Lee of the Korea Institute of Geoscience & Mineral Resources has made discoveries that allow them to piece together this creature – and have found it to be as strange as its arms are long. Its broad and lengthy duck-like snout and cavernous lower jaw housed a huge tongue. Inside the gullet were more than 1,400 gizzard stones, which it had swallowed to grind up its food like a bird. It was the size of a tyrannosaur, but couldn't move quickly and had no teeth. The ligaments growing from the spine worked like the cables of a suspension bridge to support the animal's huge abdomen and legs. And fused bones at the end of the tail indicate that it supported feathers (RENDERINGS HERE). Paleontologist Stephen Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh observes, "This alien creature was a monstrous omnivore, a garbage-disposal type of dinosaur that fed on fish, small vertebrates, plants, and probably about anything it could get its hands on.” Its terrible hands...

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Hummingbird and human

Retiree João Silvestrini of Barretos, Brazil, recently joined Facebook. But he already has a very special connection with a wild juvenile swallow-tailed hummingbird (WATCH VIDEO HERE). "Hi! Come here! Let’s make a video here, come here, here! Come close to talk here, ok? Come, let’s talk a little bit, sit here. Want a little drink? Let’s get close to the machine again, shall we? Look there! We’re filming. That’s it, perch on my finger, that’s it! Here," he says in Portuguese during their one-sided conversation over breakfast.

 

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Python parthenogenesis

Thelma (IMAGE ABOVE) shares an enclosure with Louise at the zoo in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. Despite being a male-free zone, this 11-year-old reticulated python produced 6 offspring in June 2012. The female babies – dwarfed by their 200 lb. (91 kg), 20 ' (6 m) long mother – are all half-clones, with 3 retaining her intricate reticulated pattern, and the rest displaying a pattern of bright yellow with black stripes. The number of species capable of parthenogenesis or virgin births – snakes, birds, sharks, and other animals – continues to grow. Biologist Warren Booth of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma observes, "It's something we used to consider an evolutionary novelty that's much more common than we thought."

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Parlor props

"The hairs went up on the back of my neck when I walked into the drawing room. It stood out like a sore thumb," says Mark Stacey of Reeman Dansie auctioneers of the 3,000-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus he came across during a valuation of the contents of a home in Essex, U.K. While the mummy that it contained may have been "unrolled" in the 19th c. and subsequently disposed of, the sarcophagus is believed to have been acquired some 60 years ago and originally purchased from a museum that closed down. The find can be considered exceedingly rare except that it follows on the heels of a similar discovery by an auctioneer – also in Essex – of a 2,300-year-old Egyptian coffin that then sold (despite objections from Cairo) for £12,000 ($19,000) last month.

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Unmasked

Researcher Marleen De Meyer of the University of Leuven in Belgium was excavating Old Kingdom cave graves in Dayr al-Barsha, Egypt, when she turned over what she thought was a potsherd on the way to the storage tent. What she held in her hands was a rare 4,000-year-old death mask. Similar masks have long believed to have been modeled after the deceased, but the texturesof textile strips (IMAGE ABOVE, MORE HERE) suggested that the plaster had been applied to the face. But no traces of the face on the inside were visible, just clay. The archaeologists reasoned that the plaster mask was made and removed, then the body was mummified and clay applied to the face, after which the mask was pressed into that clay. They performed experimental archaeology, with a member of the team volunteering to be the corpse, and determined just that. They are now awaiting permission to carry out a CT scan of the artifact which will show the exact form of the ancient Egyptian's face sandwiched between the plaster and the clay.

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Sphinx found

An Egyptian-style sphinx has been excavated… from the sands of Guadalupe, California, U.S. It is one of 21 that flanked the set of Cecil B DeMille's 1923 silent film "The Ten Commandments" (not the 1956 remake with Charlton Heston as Moses). After 90 years beneath the dunes, the sphinx needed special handling, which was good practice for the archaeology volunteers. To keep the paper-thin plaster of Paris from cracking, they wrapped it in cheesecloth soaked in a preservative chemical; funneled the sand out of the hollow statue and replaced it with expanding insulation foam; and allowed it to dry and shrink to its normal size (IMAGES HERE). That normal size of 15' (4.6 m) tall was dwarfed by the 12-story set. Executive director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center Doug Jenzen, who oversaw the excavation, explains that in the era before special effects, the movie required constructing one of the largest sets ever made: "...anything that they wanted to look large, they had to build large."

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6

"Consequently the species now stands at the brink of complete extinction, a sorry testament to the greed of the human race," says a spokesman for Ol Pejeta Conservancy on the natural death of one of two remaining breeding male northern white rhinoceros (ABOVE RIGHT). The species numbered 2,000 in the 1960s, but was decimated by poaching in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving today only six of these rhinos remaining in the world.

 

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Blue goo

Earlier this month, residents of the Burin Peninsula on the south coast of Newfoundland, Canada, woke to find a strange blue substance on Mooring Cove Beach. A longtime resident described it as having a "quivering, lifelike quality." At first feared to be a chemical spill of some kind, the blob was subsequently identified by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as plankton (ctenophores mixed with pelagic tunicate salp). So it was all natural after all, although unusual for its high concentrations (VIDEO HERE).

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Whether weather worshipped

A massive 3,300-year-old cult complex has been uncovered at the Tel Burna site in Israel. The courtyard alone measures 52' x 52' (16 x 16 m). Inside, researchers have discovered – among other things – a cylinder-shaped seal, goblets and chalices, broken figurines that look part-human and part-animal, and the noses of masks which were worn. The complex held huge jars likely imported from Cyprus and an Egyptian scarab (IMAGES HERE), with the possibility that they were used in the worship of the Canaanite storm god Baal. Says Israeli archaeologist Itzhaq Shai of Ariel University, "From the finds within the building, we can reconstruct the occurrence of feasts, indicated by several goblets and a large amount of animal bones. Some of these animal bones are burnt, probably indicating their use in some sacrificial activity. The presence of the pithoi [large jars] may indicate the collection of tithes, or at a minimum, the storage of foods for later use in cultic activities. Finally, the masks may suggest ceremonial processions that arrived or left from the complex, possibly before or after the conducting of feasts."

NOTE: I have been unable to upload photographs, so please follow the links to see the images.

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Norski

A receding glacier in Norway has revealed an almost complete ancient wooden ski. It measures 68" (172 cm) in length and 5.7" (14.5 cm) in width and has leather straps for securing the foot. The ski is estimated to be 1,300 years old, but the history of skiing dates much further back. Another ski found in Norway dates to 3200 B.C.E. and a ski found in Sweden dates to 3300 B.C.E. But even those are trumped by a ski found in Russia which may be 8,300 years old!

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Indonesian images

For decades, archaeologists have known about cave paintings (IMAGES HERE) on the island of Sulawesi east of Borneo. They were believed to have been created either by the region's first farmers a few thousand years ago or by hunter-gatherers around 8,000 years ago. But recent testing proves that they rival the images in Spain and France as the oldest cave art. Archaeologist and geochemist Maxime Aubert of Australia's Griffith University explains, "It was previously thought that Western Europe was the centerpiece of a 'symbolic explosion' in early human artistic activity, such as cave painting and other forms of image making, including figurative art, around 40,000 years ago. However, our findings show that cave art was made at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world at about the same time, suggesting these practices have deeper origins — perhaps in Africa before our species left this continent and spread across the globe."

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Back to back

When 27-year-old Dominic Smee saw images of the crooked skeleton of Richard III, discovered in 2012, he felt as if he were looking at x-rays of his own back. Smee had been diagnosed at the age of 11 with the same condition – idiopathic adolescent onset scoliosis– from which the king suffered. When he contacted the research team at Leicester University, he was recruited to participate in a documentary which has just aired on British TV. With Smee as a stand -in (IMAGES HERE), they confirmed that Richard III would have been able to accurately wield a sword and lance while riding a medieval warhorse and wearing a 66 lb. (30kg) suit of armor. Smee was given the customized suit of armor afterward, which has elevated his status when he participates in his hobby. Appropriately, he takes part in reenacting historic battles and gloats, "The guys who do the reenactments are very envious."

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Camel cam

Google has enlisted the help of a 10-year-old dromedary camel to capture video and still images of the Liwa Desert in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, as part of their worldwide mapping mission. Wearing one of the company’s Trekker cameras like a Crittercam, "Raffia" is being led through the sand (VIDEO HERE). Joyce Baz, Google’s spokesperson in the Middle East and North Africa, points out, "With every environment and every location, we try to customize the capture and how we do it for that part of the environment. In the case of Liwa we fashioned it [in such a way that the camera] goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way.”

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Eiffel eyeful

As part of a campaign by SOS: Save Our Species, a camera was strapped to the back of an endangered white-tailed eagle, which flew over Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower to a fan- filled stadium (VIDEO HERE).

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Grrrr

I have been experiencing technical difficulties with the upload of my blog for two days.

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Creativity nativity

The sculpture above, known as Der Löwenmensch (The Lion Man), was discovered in a German cave in 1939. It was carved out of mammoth ivory 40,000 years ago and marks a turning point in human evolution. When ancient artists made cave paintings and sculpted figurines, they were depicting things that already existed. In contrast, the Lion Man has the head of a lion but the body of a human – a creature which does not exist. The artist took 2 pieces of knowledge and combined them in his or her imagination, creating something unique which no human or other animal had ever seen. The figurine could then you have been used to describe the concept of a human-lion hybrid to others. Nick Skillicorn of Improvides Consulting Ltd. explains, "At it’s most fundamental level, this is human creativity in action. And this is the first example of it happening (until older examples may one day be unearthed."

 

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Scorching sculpture

This publicly-funded sculpture was given a place of honor in front of a Calgary recreation center, but has since been removed. A visitor had stepped inside the hollow hemispheres and thumbed a text message to the artwork, as encouraged. But as the artwork was translating the texted characters into a unique light and sound display, it was also focusing a beam of light on the visitor's jacket and began to burn a hole in it. Canadian taxpayers may or may not be out the $559,000 they paid for the piece and rec center president Carol Steiner is not happy about that or the fact that no one foresaw the potential problem. She is a former high school physics teacher and complains, "You put a spherical surface out there in the sun — what did you expect? And what really gets me is they said, ‘We had no idea.’ Really. They should have had an idea. I mean, an elementary physics student, year one, could figure that out, find the focal point of that mirror.”

 

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Spider sinker

Studies have shown how strong spider silk is. But the image above also demonstrates the engineering savvy of the spider mind. When this one strung a web in the shallow area between two rafters in a garage, it used a stone to weight it down. Images were posted by Imgur user Reverseloop (FOLLOW LINK FOR MORE PHOTOS), who remarks, "This clever spider grabbed a rock, dragged it up to the web, and suspended it from the bottom."

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Cub curbside

Earlier this week, Florence Slatkin's Chihuahua Paco discovered a dead bear cub in the bushes of New York's Central Park at 69th Street and West Drive. The female black bear, less than a year old, was removed to the State Department of Environmental Conservation’s wildlife pathology unit. A necropsy determined that the cub died from blunt force trauma consistent with being hit by a car. This raises questions of where the collision occurred and why the animal was hidden in the park. Whoever did so faces charges for illegal possession, transport, and disposal of an untagged bear. Associate director Patrick R. Thomas of the Bronx Zoo, confirms that the bear was not an escapee and that they have not been native to the island for centuries. “There’s a record of one being shot in Manhattan in 1630."

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It is what it is

Meteorologists were puzzled by the butterfly shape on radar above St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., on September 19th until the National Weather Service determined that it was caused by hundreds of monarch butterflies flying between 5,000' and 6,000' (1525 m to 1825 m) on their way to Mexico. Just as scientists are figuring out why the insects are so well-equipped for their long migrations, the numbers of monarchs are declining sharply, due in large part to the use of pesticides. Wendy Caldwell of the nonprofit organizationd Monarch Joint Venture explains, "The primary threat to monarchs in the U.S. is the loss of breeding and migrating habitat throughout their range. Monarch caterpillars rely on milkweed as their only food source, and changing land use and land management practices have eliminated much of the milkweed from the agricultural landscape." To help save the monarchs – and to enjoy their beauty in your backyard – plant milkweed!

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Dinosaur dance floors

There is an amazing sight (site) in Sucre, Bolivia, which features hundreds of distinct dinosaur tracks from at least 8 different species – a total of 5,055 individual prints. The "dinosaur dance floor," as it is called, stands 328' (100 m) high and stretches .9 miles (1.5 km). Ian Belcher of The Guardian explains how the limestone wall (IMAGES HERE) was formed: “It was unique climate fluctuations that made the region a palaeontological honey pot. The creatures’ feet sank into the soft shoreline in warm damp weather, leaving marks that were solidified by later periods of drought. Wet weather then returned, sealing the prints below mud and sediment. The wet-dry pattern was repeated seven times, preserving multiple layers of prints. The cherry on the cake was added when tectonic activity pushed the flat ground up to a brilliant viewing angle – as if nature was aware of its tourism potential.” Meanwhile, the name of another "dinosaur dance floor" in northern Arizona, U.S., which has been discredited by geologists at the University of Utah as only a dense collection of unusual potholes eroded in the sandstone, must now be understood metaphorically.

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Leopard seal changes its spots

"More frightening than the canines was the deep jackhammer sound she let loose that rattled through my chest," described photographer Paul Nicklen. He was on assignment for National Geographic in 2006 when he captured this image of a mature female leopard seal protecting her kill from another seal behind him. The solitary animals are apex predators in the waters of the Antarctic, where 28-year-old British marine biologist Kirsty Brown was killed by one just last week. Possibly mistaken for another seal, the scientist was dragged underwater and drowned in what is believed to be the first fatal attack by a seal since the Scott Expedition of 1912. When American biologist Lisa Kelly encountered one recently on a National Geographic expedition, she was understandably nervous. But instead of threatening her, the leopard seal playfully panned for the camera (VIDEO HERE).

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Fertility first

From a very different kind of wandering womb, a baby has emerged. More than 35 years since the birth of the first "test tube baby," a child has been carried by his biological mother in a transplanted uterus. The baby was delivered by cesarean section in the 31st week of pregnancy when the mother developed preeclampsia. If the parents, a Swedish couple, decide to increase their family, the womb will be left in place. Otherwise, it will be removed so that the anti-rejection medicine – which carries an increased risk of cancer – can be halted. The proud father comments, "He’s no different from any other child, but he will have a good story to tell. One day he can look at the newspaper articles about how he was born and know that he was the first in the world to be born this way."

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Kiwi waka

A major storm in New Zealand in 2012 revealed something buried in a sand dune on South Island near the Anaweka estuary. That something was a 19.95' (6 m) long section of the hull of a native canoe known as a waka that would have been at least 45.9' (14 m) long and carved from a single timber. Polynesian seafarers used such vessels to colonize islands as far away as Samoa and Hawaii, centuries before Captain Cook explored the South Pacific. Radiocarbon dating revealed that the canoe was last caulked about A.D. 1400. And carved on the hull (IMAGE ABOVE) was a sea turtle, a symbol rarely found in New Zealand's native Maori culture, but which was used widely throughout Polynesia. See turtles were respected for their ability to navigate the open ocean on long voyages and the boat on which this one is emblazoned will provide archaeologists with evidence of how early Polynesians did the same. Lead author Dilys Amanda Johns of the University of Auckland describes, “It was one of those situations where it sort of took your breath away. I’d never seen anything like it.”

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