Found at last: Bizarre, egg-laying mammal finally rediscovered after 60 years

More than sixty years after it was last recorded, an expedition team has rediscovered an iconic, egg-laying mammal in one of the most unexplored regions of the world. Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, named after famed broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, was captured for the first time in photos and video footage using remote trail cameras set up in the Cyclops Mountains of Indonesia's Papua Province.

Alongside the echidna's rediscovery, the expedition -- a partnership between the University of Oxford, Indonesian NGO Yayasan Pelayanan Papua Nenda (YAPPENDA), Cenderawasih University (UNCEN), Papua BBKSDA, and the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia (BRIN), Re:Wild -- made many other remarkable finds. These included Mayr's honeyeater, a bird lost to science since 2008; an entirely new genus of tree-dwelling shrimp; countless new species of insects; and a previously unknown cave system. This was despite the difficulties posed by extremely inhospitable terrain, including venomous animals, blood-sucking leeches, malaria, earthquakes, and exhausting heat.

One of the world's most unusual mammals finally caught on film

Recorded by science only once in 1961, Attenborough's long-beaked echidna is a monotreme: an evolutionarily distinct group of egg-laying mammals that includes the platypus. This echidna species is so special because it is one of only five remaining species of monotremes, the sole guardians of this remarkable branch of the tree of life. Echidnas are notoriously difficult to find since they are nocturnal, live in burrows, and tend to be very shy. Attenborough's long-beaked echidna has never been recorded anywhere outside the Cyclops Mountains, and is currently classified as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species

To give themselves the best chance of finding one, the team deployed over 80 trail cameras, making multiple ascents of the mountains, and climbing more than 11,000 meters (more than the height of Everest) in the process. For almost the entire four weeks that the team spent in the forest, the cameras recorded no sign of the echidna. On the last day, with the last images on the final memory card, the team obtained their shots of the elusive mammal -- the first ever photographs of Attenborough's echidna. The identification of the species was later confirmed by Professor Kristofer Helgen, mammalogist and chief scientist and director of the Australian Museum Research Institute (AMRI).

Dr James Kempton, a biologist from the University of Oxford who conceived of and led the expedition, said: 'Attenborough's long-beaked echidna has the spines of a hedgehog, the snout of an anteater, and the feet of a mole. Because of its hybrid appearance, it shares its name with a creature of Greek mythology that is half human, half serpent. The reason it appears so unlike other mammals is because it is a member of the monotremes -- an egg-laying group that separated from the rest of the mammal tree-of-life about 200 million years ago.'

'The discovery is the result of a lot of hard work and over three and a half years of planning,' he added. 'A key reason why we succeeded is because, with the help of YAPPENDA, we have spent years building a relationship with the community of Yongsu Sapari, a village on the north coast of the Cyclops Mountains. The trust between us was the bedrock of our success because they shared with us the knowledge to navigate these treacherous mountains, and even allowed us to research on lands that have never before felt the tread of human feet.'

A treasure trove of discoveries

Alongside searching for the echidna, the expedition carried out the first comprehensive assessment of invertebrate, reptile, amphibian, and mammal life in the Cyclops Mountains. With the support of local guides in the expedition team, the scientists were able to create makeshift labs in the heart of the jungle with benches and desks made from forest branches and vines.

By combining scientific techniques with the Papuan team members' experience and knowledge of the forest, the team made a wealth of new discoveries. These included several dozens of insect species completely new to science and the rediscovery of Mayr's honeyeater (Ptiloprora mayri), a bird lost to science since 2008 and named after famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr.

An extraordinary finding was an entirely new genus of ground and tree-dwelling shrimp. 'We were quite shocked to discover this shrimp in the heart of the forest, because it is a remarkable departure from the typical seaside habitat for these animals,' said Dr Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou (a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History), lead entomologist for the expedition. 'We believe that the high level of rainfall in the Cyclops Mountains means the humidity is great enough for these creatures to live entirely on land.'

The team also revealed a treasure trove of underground species, including blind spiders, blind harvestman, and a whip scorpion, all new to science, in a previously unexplored cave system. This astonishing discovery was made on one of the sacred peaks above Yongsu Sapari where the team had been given special permission to do research. People rarely tread here, and the striking cave system was chanced upon when one team member fell through a moss-covered entrance.

'A beautiful but dangerous land'

Extremely challenging and, at times, life-threatening conditions were at the background of these discoveries. During one of the trips to the cave system, a sudden earthquake forced the team to evacuate. Dr Davranoglou broke his arm in two places, one member contracted malaria, and another had a leech attached to his eye for a day and a half before it was finally removed at a hospital. Throughout the expedition, members were beset by biting mosquitoes and ticks, and faced constant danger from venomous snakes and spiders. Making any progress through the jungle was a slow and exhausting process, with the team sometimes having to cut paths where no humans had ever been before.

'Though some might describe the Cyclops as a "Green Hell," I think the landscape is magical, at once enchanting and dangerous, like something out of a Tolkien book' said Dr Kempton. 'In this environment, the camaraderie between the expedition members was fantastic, with everyone helping to keep up morale. In the evening, we exchanged stories around the fire, all the while surrounded by the hoots and peeps of frogs.'

An enduring legacy

Rediscovering the echidna is only the beginning of the expedition's mission. Attenborough's long-beaked echidna is the flagship animal of the Cyclops Mountains and a symbol of its extraordinary biodiversity. The team hope that its rediscovery will help bring attention to the conservation needs of the Cyclops, and Indonesian New Guinea more generally, and they are committed to supporting long-term monitoring of the echidna. Key to this work is NGO YAPPENDA, whose mission is to protect the natural environment of Indonesian New Guinea through empowerment of Indigenous Papuans. As part of the expedition team, members of YAPPENDA helped train six students from UNCEN in biodiversity surveys and camera trapping during the expedition.

Dr Davranoglou said: 'Tropical rainforests are among the most important and most threatened terrestrial ecosystems. It is our duty to support our colleagues on the frontline through exchanging knowledge, skills, and equipment.'

With the team having only sorted a fraction of the material collected on the expedition, they expect that the coming months will yield even more new species. The intention is to name many of these after the Papuan members of the expedition.

Besides animal specimens, the team also collected over 75 kg of rock samples for geological analysis, which was led by the expedition's chief geologist, Max Webb, from Royal Holloway University, London. These could help answer many questions about how and when the Cyclops Mountains originally formed. The mountains are believed to have formed when an island arc in the Pacific Ocean collided with the New Guinea mainland about 10 million years ago. Combined with the biological findings, this geological work will help the team understand how the extraordinary biodiversity of the Cyclops came to be.

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Fossils reveal the long-term relationship between feathered dinosaurs and feather-feeding beetles

New fossils in amber have revealed that beetles fed on the feathers of dinosaurs about 105 million years ago, showing a symbiotic relationship of one-sided or mutual benefit, according to an article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today.

The main amber fragments studied, from the Spanish locality of San Just (Teruel), contain larval moults of small beetle larvae tightly surrounded by portions of downy feathers. The feathers belonged to an unknown theropod dinosaur, either avian (a term referring to "birds" in wide sense) or non-avian, as both types of theropods lived during the Early Cretaceous and shared often indistinguishable feather types. However, the studied feathers did not belong to modern birds since the group appeared about 30 million years later in the fossil record, during the Late Cretaceous.

When looking at modern ecosystems, we see how ticks infest cattle, frogs capture insects with acrobatic tongues, or some barnacles grow on the skin of whales. These are just a few of the diverse and complex ecological relationships between vertebrates and arthropods, which have coexisted for more than 500 million years. The way that these two groups have interacted throughout deep time is thought to have critically shaped their evolutionary history, leading to coevolution. Nevertheless, evidence of arthropod-vertebrate relationships is extremely rare in the fossil record.

The larval moults preserved in the amber were identified as related to modern skin beetles, or dermestids. Dermestid beetles are infamous pests of stored products or dried museum collections, feeding on organic materials that are hard for other organisms to decay such as natural fibres. However, dermestids also play a key role in the recycling of organic matter in the natural environment, commonly inhabiting nests of birds and mammals, where feathers, hair, or skin accumulate.

"In our samples, some of the feather portions and other remains -- including minute fossil faeces, or coprolites -- are in intimate contact with the moults attributed to dermestid beetles and show occasional damage and/or signs of decay. This is hard evidence that the fossil beetles almost certainly fed on the feathers and that these were detached from its host," explains Dr Enrique Peñalver, from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain of the Spanish National Research Council (CN IGME-CSIC) and lead author of the study.

"The beetle larvae lived -- feeding, defecating, moulting -- in accumulated feathers on or close to a resin-producing tree, probably in a nest setting. A flow of resin serendipitously captured that association and preserved it for millions of years."

"Three additional amber pieces each containing an isolated beetle moult of a different maturity stage but assigned to the same species were also studied, allowing a better understanding of these minute insects than what is usually possible in palaeontology," says Dr David Peris, from the Botanical Institute of Barcelona (CSIC-Barcelona City Council) and co-author of the study. The most impressive, complete specimen was found in the amber deposit of Rábago/El Soplao in the northern Spain, roughly of the same age as San Just.

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Beetle in the coconut: Fossil find sheds new light on Neotropical rainforests

Tiny beetles that feed on fruit from the palm family may have developed their taste for coconuts long ago, according to a Penn State-led team of scientists studying suspected insect damage in a 60-million-year-old fossil.

"We found this remarkable fossil coconut that has clear signs of insect tunneling," said L. Alejandro Giraldo, a graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. "After studying the damage in detail, we were able to pinpoint the insect culprit: a group of beetles commonly referred to as palm bruchines that today still eat lots of palm fruit -- coconuts included."

The findings represent the earliest fossil evidence of seed beetles feeding on palm fruit and shed new light on the Neotropical rainforests that emerged in modern day South America following the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs and reshaped life on Earth, the scientists said.

"These were the first Neotropical forests as we know them today," said Giraldo, whose adviser is Peter Wilf, professor of geosciences at Penn State. "We know these forests had similar plants compared to today, and the next step is knowing what was happening to these forests -- for example how insects were interacting with the plants."

Previous studies have focused on insect damage to fossil leaves, the most abundant plant parts found in the fossil record, the scientists said. Examples of insect damage to fruit and seeds are less common, but scientists found six suspected insect holes on a coconut fossil from a site in modern day Colombia.

The fossil contained damage to the outer and inner layers of the fruit, revealing a three-dimensional path that suggests the holes had a biological origin -- like from larvae eating their way through the coconut, the scientists said.

The team analyzed the number, position and size of the holes and the scar tissue left behind and compared that with damaged caused by modern insects, especially those that feed on plants from the palm family. The damage was consistent with a sub-group of modern beetles called palm bruchines, the scientists reported in the journal Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology.

"There are thousands of different insect species that can feed on seeds, but not many of them feed on palm seeds, so that was the way to start," Giraldo said. "After that it was doing a lot of detective work, really digging into the literature and studying different morphological features in terms of how this damage occurs. And it paid off."

This kind of relationship between specific plants and insects -- called specialized interactions -- plays an important role in creating and maintaining plant diversity in modern Neotropical rainforests. By eating and destroying seeds, these highly specialized insects help prevent any one group of plants from dominating the landscape.

The findings suggest that palm bruchines have consistently eaten palm fruits for at least 60 million years and that the specialized interactions that define modern-day Neotropical rainforests have occurred through geological time, the scientists said.

"This is something that we see 60 million years ago, and it's something that is still occurring today," Giraldo said. "Our contribution is that we pinpoint this specific group of insects as the culprit, and that group is still living today and attacks the same coconuts and same palms as it did in the past."

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An easy relationship between a beetle and its yeast symbiont

Japanese lizard beetle larvae feed on yeast injected from their mothers' abdomens into the bamboo stems they are growing in. Now, scientists at Nagoya University have made a surprising discovery: the yeast can digest some complex sugars in the bamboo woody tissue, but it doesn't. Instead, it consumes much simpler and more available sugar sources.

"This was a real surprise," says Nagoya University bioagricultural researcher Wataru Toki. "While yeast can indeed decompose those indigestible components, our analysis shows the yeast actually grows on small molecule monosaccharides." The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Female Japanese lizard beetles carry the yeast Wickerhamomyces anomalus in a specialised pocket-like organ. In spring, they dig holes in bamboo and insert their eggs and the yeast. W. anomalus grows into a sort of fungal garden that the very hungry beetle larvae munch on as soon as they hatch.

In other symbiotic relationships, fungi typically break down complex sugars into more digestible chunks that their host insects can feed on. Toki and his colleague, Dan Aoki, wanted to know whether this was also the case in the relationship between the Japanese lizard beetle and W. anomalus.

Their research suggests not. The scientists used a technique called ion exchange chromatography to analyse and compare the sugar content of fresh bamboo pith, and pith colonized by yeast alone or by yeast and beetle larvae. The comparison revealed that the yeast mostly ate the simple free sugars glucose and fructose.

This surprised the scientists because further tests showed that the yeast can actually digest some complex, indigestible sugars if necessary.

"Bamboo is not only a farm for the yeast but also a house for the larvae. So the larvae can live in a strong house safely because the house is not decomposed by the food," explains Toki.

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This beetle can survive getting run over by a car. Engineers are figuring out how

 Getting run over by a car is not a near-death experience for the diabolical ironclad beetle.

How the beetle survives could inspire the development of new materials with the same herculean toughness, engineers show in a paper published Wednesday (Oct. 21) in Nature.

These materials would be stiff but ductile like a paper clip, making machinery such as aircraft gas turbines safer and longer-lasting, the researchers said.

The study, led by engineers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and Purdue University, found that the diabolical ironclad beetle's super-toughness lies in its two armorlike "elytron" that meet at a line, called a suture, running the length of the abdomen.

In flying beetles, the elytra protect wings and facilitate flight. But the diabolical ironclad beetle doesn't have wings. Instead, the elytra and connective suture help to distribute an applied force more evenly throughout its body.

"The suture kind of acts like a jigsaw puzzle. It connects various exoskeletal blades -- puzzle pieces -- in the abdomen under the elytra," said Pablo Zavattieri, Purdue's Jerry M. and Lynda T. Engelhardt Professor of Civil Engineering.

This jigsaw puzzle comes to the rescue in several different ways depending on the amount of force applied, Zavattieri said. A video explaining these findings is available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/NS3AqJB5SfU.

To uncover these strategies, a team led by UCI professor David Kisailus first tested the limits of the beetle's exoskeleton and characterized the various structural components involved by looking at CT scans.

Using compressive steel plates, UCI researchers found that the diabolical ironclad beetle can take on an applied force of about 150 newtons -- a load of at least 39,000 times its body weight -- before the exoskeleton begins to fracture.

That's more impressive than sounds: A car tire would apply a force of about 100 newtons if running over the beetle on a dirt surface, the researchers estimate. Other terrestrial beetles the team tested couldn't handle even half the force that a diabolical ironclad can withstand.

Zavattieri's lab followed up these experiments with extensive computer simulations and 3D-printed models that isolated certain structures to better understand their role in saving the beetle's life.

All of these studies combined revealed that when under a compressive load such as a car tire, the diabolical ironclad beetle's jigsaw-like suture offers two lines of defense.

First, the interconnecting blades lock to prevent themselves from pulling out of the suture like puzzle pieces. Second, the suture and blades delaminate, which leads to a more graceful deformation that mitigates catastrophic failure of the exoskeleton. Each strategy dissipates energy to circumvent a fatal impact at the neck, where the beetle's exoskeleton is most likely to fracture.

Even if a maximum force is applied to the beetle's exoskeleton, delamination allows the interconnecting blades to pull out from the suture more gently. If the blades were to interlock too much or too little, the sudden release of energy would cause the beetle's neck to snap.

It's not yet known if the diabolical ironclad beetle has a way to heal itself after surviving a car "accident." But knowing about these strategies could already solve fatigue problems in various kinds of machinery.

"An active engineering challenge is joining together different materials without limiting their ability to support loads. The diabolical ironclad beetle has strategies to circumvent these limitations," said David Restrepo, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio who worked on this project as a postdoctoral researcher in Zavattieri's group.

In the gas turbines of aircraft, for example, metals and composite materials are joined together with a mechanical fastener. This fastener adds weight and introduces stress that could lead to fractures and corrosion.

"These fasteners ultimately decrease the performance of the system and need to be replaced every so often. But the interfacial sutures of the diabolical ironclad beetle provide a robust and more predictable failure that could help solve these problems," said Maryam Hosseini, who worked on this project as a Ph.D. student and postdoctoral researcher in Zavattieri's group. Hosseini is now an engineering manager at Procter & Gamble Corp.

UCI researchers built a carbon fiber composite fastener mimicking a diabolical ironclad beetle's suture. Purdue researchers found through loading tests that this fastener is just as strong as a standard aerospace fastener, but significantly tougher.

"This work shows that we may be able to shift from using strong, brittle materials to ones that can be both strong and tough by dissipating energy as they break. That's what nature has enabled the diabolical ironclad beetle to do," Zavattieri said.

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