New species of mosasaur named for Norse sea serpent

Scientists have discovered a new species of mosasaur, large, carnivorous aquatic lizards that lived during the late Cretaceous. With "transitional" traits that place it between two well-known mosasaurs, the new species is named after a sea serpent in Norse mythology, Jormungandr, and the small North Dakota city Walhalla near to where the fossil was found. Details describing Jormungandr walhallaensis are published today in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

"If you put flippers on a Komodo dragon and made it really big, that's basically what it would have looked like," said the study's lead author Amelia Zietlow, a Ph.D. student in comparative biology at the American Museum of Natural History's Richard Gilder Graduate School.

The first mosasaur was discovered more than 200 years ago, and the word "mosasaur" predates the word "dinosaur." But many questions about these animals remain, including how many times they evolved flippers and became fully aquatic -- researchers think it was at least three times, and maybe four or more -- and whether they are more closely related to monitor lizards or snakes. Researchers are still trying to determine how the different groups of mosasaurs are related to each other, and the new study adds a new piece to that puzzle.

The fossil on which the study is based was discovered in 2015, when researchers excavating in the northeastern part of North Dakota found an impressive specimen: a nearly complete skull, jaws, and cervical spine, as well as a number of vertebrae.

After extensive analysis and surface scanning of the fossil material, Zietlow and her collaborators found that this animal is a new species with a mosaic of features seen in two iconic mosasaurs: Clidastes, a smaller and more primitive form of mosasaur; and Mosasaurus, a larger form that grew to be nearly 50 feet long and lived alongside Tyrannosaurus rex. The specimen is estimated to be about 24 feet long, and in addition to flippers and a shark-like tail, it would have had "angry eyebrows" caused by a bony ridge on the skull, and a slightly stumpy tail that would have been shorter than its body.

"As these animals evolved into these giant sea monsters, they were constantly making changes," Zietlow said. "This work gets us one step closer to understanding how all these different forms are related to one another."

The work suggests that Jormungandr was a precursor to Mosasaurus and that it would have lived about 80 million years ago.

"This fossil is coming from a geologic time in the United States that we don't really understand," said co-author Clint Boyd, from the North Dakota Geological Survey. "The more we can fill in the geographic and temporal timeline, the better we can understand these creatures."

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Oldest bat skeletons ever found described from Wyoming fossils

Scientists have described a new species of bat based on the oldest bat skeletons ever recovered. The study on the extinct bat, which lived in Wyoming about 52 million years ago, supports the idea that bats diversified rapidly on multiple continents during this time. Led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History and Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, the study is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

There are more than 1,460 living species of bats found in nearly every part of the world, with the exception of the polar regions and a few remote islands. In the Green River Formation of Wyoming -- a remarkable fossil deposit from the early Eocene -- scientists have uncovered over 30 bat fossils in the last 60 years, but until now they were all thought represent the same two species.

"Eocene bats have been known from the Green River Formation since the 1960s. But interestingly, most specimens that have come out of that formation were identified as representing a single species, Icaronycteris index, up until about 20 years ago, when a second bat species belonging to another genus was discovered," said study co-author Nancy Simmons, curator-in-charge of the Museum's Department of Mammalogy, who helped describe that second species in 2008. "I always suspected that there must be even more species there."

In recent years, scientists from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center started looking closely at Icaronycteris index by collecting measurements and other data from museum specimens.

"Paleontologists have collected so many bats that have been identified as Icaronycteris index, and we wondered if there were actually multiple species among these specimens," said Tim Rietbergen, an evolutionary biologist at Naturalis. "Then we learned about a new skeleton that diverted our attention."

The exceptionally well-preserved skeleton was collected by a private collector in 2017 and purchased by the Museum. When researchers compared the fossil to Rietbergen's expansive dataset, it clearly stood out as a new species. A second fossil skeleton discovered in the same quarry in 1994 and in the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum was also identified as this new species. The researchers gave these fossils the species name Icaronycteris gunnelli in honor of Gregg Gunnell, a Duke University paleontologist who died in 2017 and made extensive contributions to the understanding of fossil bats and evolution.

Although there are fossil bat teeth from Asia that are slightly older, the two I. gunnelli fossils represent the oldest bat skeletons ever found.

"The Fossil Lake deposits of the Green River Formation are simply amazing because the conditions that created the paper-thin limestone layers also preserved nearly everything that settled to the lake's bottom," said Arvid Aase, park manager and curator at the Fossil Butte National Monument, in Wyoming. "One of these bat specimens was found lower in the section than all other bats, making this species older than any of the other bat species recovered from this deposit."

While the I. gunnelli skeletons are the oldest bat fossils from this site, they are not the most primitive, supporting the idea that Green River bats evolved separately from other Eocene bats around the world.

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Ethereal color variant of mysterious plant is actually a new species

Green leaves and photosynthesis were once considered essential characteristics of plants. However, some plants have stopped performing photosynthesis and take the nutrients they need from other organisms instead. One such mycoheterotrophic plant is ghostly-looking Monotropastrum humile that is widely found across East and Southeast Asia. It often grows in woodlands where there is little sunlight, obtaining the nutrients it needs by feeding off the hyphae of fungi. Despite its wide distribution, it was previously believed that only one species of this plant existed in the world. However, Professor SUETSUGU Kenji and colleagues have discovered that a variant found in Japan is actually a new species, shaking up our understanding of this unusual-looking genus of plants.

It has rosy pink petals and stems resembling milk glass, giving it a beautiful, otherworldly appearance. As it was first found around Kirishima in Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan, the new species has been named Monotropastrum kirishimense.

Originally, this new species was tentatively treated as a color variant of M. humile, known as M. humile f. roseum. Thus began an extensive and multifaceted 20-year study to determine how exactly these plants differed. Specimens were collected from throughout Japan and Taiwan, as well as Vietnam.

Results of various analyses revealed morphological differences, including the following; M. kirishimense flowers and ovaries are more rounded than those of M. humile, and its rootball is more obscured by the surrounding soil (in contrast to M. humile's protruding root tips). M. kirishimense individuals are shorter above ground (under 5cm) and longer below ground (over 10cm). The flowering season is different too; M. humile flowers bloom approximately 40 days earlier than M. kirishimense. As the two plant species have the same primary pollinator (the bumblebee Bombus diversus), this difference in flowering times can reduce heterospecific pollen deposition, helping to ensure conspecific mating, and thereby preventing them from producing hybrids.

There are several other possible reasons why M. kirishimense and M. humile may have evolved into separate species. One possibility is that they have become specialized in feeding on different fungi, which has led to reproductive isolation, or the inability to produce offspring together. This process is known as resource partitioning and is one of the major ways that species can evolve from a common ancestor. Genetic analysis of mycobionts revealed that M. kirishimense has a consistent, specialized association with a particular lineage of fungi, whereas M. humile is associated with different lineages. Therefore, this study suggests that M. kirishimense may have evolved into a new species by relying on a specific type of fungus. In fact, the phylogenetic tree (a 'family tree' of the evolutionary history of a group of organisms) of the plants themselves shows that the genetic characteristics of M. kirishimense and M. humile can be separated into two clades. Based on the researchers' analysis of various characteristics, it has been revealed that M. kirishimense is distinct from M. humile in terms of its appearance, flowering patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological relationships. Therefore, the researchers concluded that it should be recognized as an independent species.

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Amazon deforestation threatens newly discovered fish species in Brazil

Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History researcher Murilo Pastana and his colleagues have discovered and described two new species of Amazonian fish -- one with striking red-orange fins and the other so small it is technically considered a miniature fish species -- in a paper published today, May 16, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Both species inhabit waters located at the bleeding edge of human encroachment into the Amazon rainforest roughly 25 miles north of the Brazilian city of Apuí. Pastana and his co-authors, Willian Ohara with the Federal University of Rondônia and Priscila Camelier with the Federal University of Bahia, said that ongoing deforestation in the region places these roughly inch-long fish, part of a group known colloquially as the South American darters, in imminent danger of extinction. In particular, the more colorful of the two species, Poecilocharax callipterus, is at risk because its known range is limited to a single stream comprising roughly 1.5 square miles of habitat.

"It was exciting to find new species," Pastana said. "But in the field, we saw the forest on fire, logging trucks carrying out huge trees, and cleared patches turned into cattle pasture. This made us feel a lot of urgency to document these species and publish this paper as quickly as possible."

As a Brazilian-born scientist, Pastana is passionate about preserving the country's biological heritage, and his hope is that naming and describing these species might motivate the Brazilian government to protect and conserve these newly discovered, endangered fishes.

The small subfamily to which these previously unknown fish species belong is also highly desirable in the aquarium hobbyist market. Pastana, whose work is supported by the Smithsonian's Sara E. and Bruce B. Collette Postdoctoral Fellowship in Systematic Ichthyology, said that the exotic aquarium fish trade could pose yet another threat to these two new species even as scientists are first formally identifying them and learning of their existence.

The expeditions that uncovered these new freshwater species took place between 2015 and 2016. Pastana said the broad goal of these forays into the Brazilian Amazon was to search out the still unknown biological treasures of the many waterways in the Madeira River Basin, the richest river basin in the world in terms of fish biodiversity according to a 2019 estimate.

"We went to sample places that have never been visited by scientists," Pastana said. "This area is really important because this is one of the frontiers where deforestation is moving north -- the border between new cities and native forest."

The Apuí region where these scientific surveys took place sits at number two on a recent list of Brazilian municipalities with the highest deforestation rates. Ironically, the same roads that facilitate the region's accelerating loss of habitat also facilitated access to formerly unreachable streams, ponds and tributaries for Pastana and his colleagues.

So, in 2015 and 2016 Pastana and others camped along a road called AM-174 and collected fish using nets, traps and other methods. All the specimens were photographed, cataloged and preserved for further study back at the Museum of Zoology, University of São Paulo.

One of these specimens has vivid red-orange fins and a distinctive dark spot just in front of its tail. This fish stood out immediately as a new species, Pastana said. The fish, which has now been named P. callipterus, inhabits the margins of what scientists call a black water stream, so named because its waters are stained the color of coffee by tannins leached from fallen leaves. Males of the species have even more intense coloration and sport dorsal fins that can exceed half their body length, which averages just over an inch. Despite targeted efforts to seek out this species in the surrounding area on the 2016 return trip, Pastana and his colleagues were only able to find P. callipterus in the stream in which it was first discovered.

Researchers encountered the second new species documented on these field expeditions among tangles of tree roots protruding from the banks of muddy watered streams -- distinct from the relatively translucent, if darkly stained, black water streams. Given the scientific name P. rhizophilus for its love (phil) of roots (rhiz), this species is an amber yellow with males possessing dark streaks in their dorsal and anal fins. But perhaps the most distinctive quality of this new species is that it is so small that scientists consider it to be miniature, a designation given to any fish that is less than about an inch long when mature, Pastana said. He added that lab study revealed that in these three-quarter-inch-long fish, parts of the skeleton that are typically bone are instead made of cartilage.

Genetic investigations confirmed the evolutionary relationship of these two new closely related species and their relatives, bringing the total number of species in their small sub-family (Crenuchinae) to five. This is the first addition of a new species to the group in 57 years.

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Researchers discover new species of salamander from Gulf Coastal plains hotspot

There are approximately 750 species of salamander known to science, a third of which reside in North America. Now, a team of researchers led by R. Alexander Pyron, the Robert F. Griggs Associate Professor of Biology at the George Washington University, has discovered a new species of swamp-dwelling dusky salamander from the Gulf Coastal Plain of southeastern Mississippi and southwestern Alabama.

The discovery increases knowledge of the biodiversity in the southeastern United States Coastal Plain, a candidate region meeting the global criteria for a biodiversity hotspot. According to the researchers, the region has been studied intensively for hundreds of years, but nonetheless still contains abundant undescribed diversity.

"This discovery shows us how much more there is to learn even in our own backyards," Pyron said. "The famed naturalist E.O. Wilson called this region 'America's Amazon,' where ivory-billed woodpeckers and red wolves once lived. We are losing biodiversity at a dramatic rate, while still discovering how much was originally there. Salamanders are among the most imperiled animals globally, and we've yet to understand their true biodiversity."

The researchers determined that the new species of salamander, known as Desmognathus pascagoula, is similar to another recently discovered species known as Desmognathus valentinei. However, certain morphological, genetic and geographic aspects of the new species differ. The researchers sequenced the genomes from D. valentinei and D. pascagoula specimens, revealing genetic variations in 881 different genes. They also compared the body structure of D. pascagoula with D. valentinei and Desmognathus conanti, another species that occurs in the area, using collections from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. They found subtle but significant differences: D. pascagoula has a longer, more slender body and a narrower head and nostrils.

"Many of these dusky salamanders are cryptic, meaning they can't easily be told apart with the naked eye, which is one reason they went undiscovered for so long," Pyron said. "Only with genome sequencing can we see how different they really are. Then, precise measurements of preserved specimens reveal tiny differences in things like the width of the head, which are otherwise imperceptible."

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Dynamic rivers contributed to Amazon's rich bird diversity

 One of the most contentious questions in evolutionary biology is, how did the Amazon become so rich in species? A new study focused on birds examines how the movements of rivers in the Amazon have contributed to that area's exceptional biological diversity. The research team, led by the American Museum of Natural History, found that as small river systems change over time, they spur the evolution of new species. The findings also reveal previously unknown bird species in the Amazon that are only found in small areas next to these dynamic river systems, putting them at high risk of imminent extinction. The study is detailed today in the journal Science Advances.

The lowland rainforests of the Amazon River basin harbor more diversity than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. It is also a globally important biome containing about 18 percent of all trees on Earth and carrying more fresh water than the next seven largest river basins combined. Researchers have long wondered and hotly debate how the Amazon's rich biodiversity arose and accumulated.

"Early evolutionary biologists like Alfred Russel Wallace noticed that many species of primates and birds differ across opposite riverbanks in the Amazon, and ornithologists now know that rivers are associated -- in one way or another -- with the origin of many avian species," said the study's lead author Lukas Musher, a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University and a recent comparative biology Ph.D. graduate of the American Museum of Natural History's Richard Gilder Graduate School. "Moreover, accumulating geological evidence has suggested that these rivers are highly dynamic, moving around the South American landscape over relatively short time periods, on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of years."

To investigate how the movement of rivers across the landscape has influenced the accumulation of bird species in the Amazon, the researchers sequenced the genomes of six species of Amazonian birds.

"Even though birds can fly, our study confirmed that current rivers across the Southern Amazon rainforest, even relatively small ones, are highly effective at isolating populations of these six species, which leads to genomic divergence and ultimately speciation," said the study's senior author Joel Cracraft, Lamont Curator and curator-in-charge in the Museum's Department of Ornithology.

However, because these rivers move around the landscape at different time scales, their movements can have varying outcomes for bird species: when river rearrangements occur quickly, populations of birds on each side can merge before they've had time to differentiate; when river changes happen slowly, species have a longer time to diverge from one another; and when rivers change at intermediate rates, bird populations diverge and then join back together and co-occur when a river moves.

The scientists also identified distinct populations of birds that should be described as separate species but have been considered a single species until now.

"Though we know Amazonian biodiversity is unmatched by any other terrestrial ecosystem, we demonstrated that its species richness may be greatly underestimated even in well-studied groups such as birds," Musher said. "Our results corroborate those of other studies that have reported fine-scale patterns of diversity across the southern Amazon basin -- a region threatened by rapid and ongoing deforestation -- yet this diversity is generally unrecognized. Many of the distinct populations are relatively young and endemic to a small Amazonian region, meaning that a large portion of the Amazon's birds may be threatened with loss to imminent extinction."

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New species of stegosaur is oldest discovered in Asia, and possibly the world

Relatively small, but fearsome-looking stegosaur measured about 2.8 metres (9 feet) from nose to tail -- but scientists can't tell whether the remains are those of an adult or juvenile.

A new species of one of the most recognisable types of dinosaur is the oldest stegosaur ever found in Asia, and one of the earliest unearthed anywhere in the world, according to research published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Remains of the stegosaur, which included bones from the back, shoulder, thigh, feet, and ribs, as well as several armour plates, date to the Bajocian stage of the Middle Jurassic period -- much earlier than most known stegosaurs.

A team from the Chongqing Bureau of Geological and Mineral Resource Exploration and Development in China and London's Natural History Museum named it Bashanosaurus primitivus - "Bashan" in reference to the ancient name for the area of Chongqing in China where the dinosaur was found, and the Latin for 'first' -- primitivus.

The new dinosaur, which roamed the planet 168 million years ago, plays a part in uncovering how the stegosaurs evolved -- of which, to this day, little is known.

It has a smaller and less developed should blade, narrower and thicker bases to its armour plates and other features that are different from all other Middle Jurassic stegosaurs discovered so far. However, it does have similarities with some of the first armoured dinosaurs, which are over 20 million years older.

"All these features are clues to the stegosaurs' place on the dinosaur family tree," says Dr Dai Hui from Chongqing Bureau of Geological and Mineral Resource Exploration and Development who led the research. "Bashanosaurus can be distinguished fromother Middle Jurassic stegosaurs, and clearly represents a new species.

"What's more, our analysis of the family tree indicates that it is one of the earliest-diverging stegosaurs along with the Chongqing Lizard (Chungkingosaurus) and Huayangosaurus. These were all unearthed from the Middle to Late Jurassic Shaximiao Formation in China, suggesting that stegosaurs might have originated in Asia," adds Hui.

Instantly recognisable by the huge back plates, long tail spikes and tiny head, stegosaurs were four-legged, plant-eating dinosaurs that lived during the Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods. Stegosaur fossils have been found on all continents except for Antarctica and Australia, and 14 species of stegosaur have been identified so far.

Well-known members of Stegosauria include Huayangosaurus (one of the most primitive stegosaurs), Gigantspinosaurus, notable for its enormous shoulder spines, and Miragaia for its extremely long neck. However, the fragmentary fossil material has hindered attempts to understand how the stegosaurs evolved and how they relate to one another.

With the discovery of this new species the mystery has started to clear up. Bashanosaurus primitivus has several primitive features that are similar to the earliest stegosaurs like Huayangosaurus and Gigantspinosaurus and early-branching thyreophorans (armoured dinosaurs). These include longer tail vertebrae, a shoulder blade that is narrower and flares out, and features of the back vertebrae that are similar to the early armoured dinosaur Scelidosaurus, which lived during the Early Jurassic.

The fossilised remains of Bashanosaurus also reveal a host of features that make it unique from other known stegosaurs. For example, the bony point at the end of the shoulder blade is small and less well developed than in other stegosaurs; a bony projection of the thighbone (fourth trochanter) is positioned below the middle of the shaft; and the bases of the armour plates curve outwards and are thicker than the plates on the backs of its later relatives.

"The discovery of this stegosaur from the Middle Jurassic of China adds to an increasing body of evidence that the group evolved in the early Middle Jurassic, or perhaps even in the Early Jurassic, and as such represent some of the earliest known bird-hipped dinosaurs," says Dr Susannah Maidment, co-author and palaeontologist at London's Natural History Museum.

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Discovery of new tiny fish, lizard species

Two tiny new species that inhabited part of what is now the American south some 100 million years ago have been discovered by a team of researchers that includes a University of Wisconsin Oshkosh paleontologist.

Joseph Frederickson, a vertebrate paleontologist and director of the Weis Earth Science Museum on the Fox Cities campus, is among the authors on a recent paper published in PeerJ, highlighting these new discoveries in southwest Arkansas. The species are a small lizard researchers named Sciroseps pawhuskai and a fish named Anomoeodus caddoi.

The paper is titled A new vertebrate fauna from the Lower Cretaceous Holly Creek Formation of the Trinity Group, southwest Arkansas, USA. Celina Suarez, associate professor of geosciences at the University of Arkansas, served as primary author on the article, which pulls together decades of research in the area known as the Holly Creek Formation. Frederickson is the second author.

"The Holly Creek Formation is interesting because few fossils have been described in publications, even though it has produced dinosaur fossils in the past," Frederickson said. "Formations like these help us better understand how the continent was connected and the diversity of animals alive during the Early Cretaceous Period."

The discoveries serve both to underscore the variety of fossils found at this site, including dinosaurs, mammals, fish, amphibians and reptiles, and to reinforce the overall lack of variety of fossils found throughout North America from the period.

"The fish and lizard represent material, though small and fragmentary, that preserves enough detail to call them new species," he said. "The lizard jaw is specifically interesting because normally fossils are limited to small and broken bits, while the specimen we describe in this paper is most of a complete lower jaw."

Frederickson began work with the project in 2017. The previous year he started work with Suarez on a fossil-bearing site in Montana.

His part of the Arkansas project included investigating the micro-fossils, or small material that required microscopes to see in detail. This included the fish, amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs teeth. He compared these fossils with those from similarly aged rocks in Oklahoma, Montana and Maryland to determine which species were present and then photographed the material using a scanning electron microscope.

This latest publish work comes a year after Frederickson made headlines for another published paper. In 2020, he presented evidence that Velociraptors likely did not hunt in large, coordinated packs as famously depicted in the Jurassic Park films. This latest research, of course, focuses in on creatures far less glamorous than the immortalized-by-Hollywood raptor.

"I think this paper is a good reminder that the fossil record preserves many different animals, not just dinosaurs," he said. "This paper focuses heavily on the tiny organisms crawling or swimming at the feet of giant dinosaurs, which too often go undocumented because they can be difficult to study. However, often it's these small animals that tell us the most about the environment in which they lived."

The study resulted from long-term investigations that began in Arkansas in the 1970s. That area is where thousands of sauropod and theropod tracks have been discovered, beginning in the 1980s.

Dinosaurs previously preserved from the site include at least one long-necked sauropod (likely Sauroposeidon), large theropods (a juvenile Acrocanthosaurus), an ankylosaur (armored dinosaur), and the small kickboxing raptor, Deinonychus.

A variety of very small fossils also was uncovered, including remains of sharks, bony fish, frogs, lizards, turtles, crocodilians and mammals. Although unspectacular, these tiny bones and teeth document the presence of numerous species critical to understanding the ecosystem that lived in Arkansas millions of years ago.

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Dust from a giant asteroid crash caused an ancient ice age

About 466 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth froze. The seas began to ice over at the Earth's poles, and the new range of temperatures around the planet set the stage for a boom of new species evolving. The cause of this ice age was a mystery, until now: a new study in Science Advances argues that the ice age was caused by global cooling, triggered by extra dust in the atmosphere from a giant asteroid collision in outer space.

There's always a lot of dust from outer space floating down to Earth, little bits of asteroids and comets, but this dust is normally only a tiny fraction of the other dust in our atmosphere such as volcanic ash, dust from deserts and sea salt. But when a 93-mile-wide asteroid between Mars and Jupiter broke apart 466 million years ago, it created way more dust than usual. "Normally, Earth gains about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material every year," says Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum, associate professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the paper's authors. "Imagine multiplying that by a factor of a thousand or ten thousand." To contextualize that, in a typical year, one thousand semi trucks' worth of interplanetary dust fall to Earth. In the couple million years following the collision, it'd be more like ten million semis.

"Our hypothesis is that the large amounts of extraterrestrial dust over a timeframe of at least two million years played an important role in changing the climate on Earth, contributing to cooling," says Heck.

"Our results show for the first time that such dust, at times, has cooled Earth dramatically," says Birger Schmitz of Sweden's Lund University, the study's lead author and a research associate at the Field Museum. "Our studies can give a more detailed, empirical-based understanding of how this works, and this in turn can be used to evaluate if model simulations are realistic."

To figure it out, researchers looked for traces of space dust in 466-million-year-old rocks, and compared it to tiny micrometeorites from Antarctica as a reference. "We studied extraterrestrial matter, meteorites and micrometeorites, in the sedimentary record of Earth, meaning rocks that were once sea floor," says Heck. "And then we extracted the extraterrestrial matter to discover what it was and where it came from."

Extracting the extraterrestrial matter -- the tiny meteorites and bits of dust from outer space -- involves taking the ancient rock and treating it with acid that eats away the stone and leaves the space stuff. The team then analyzed the chemical makeup of the remaining dust. The team also analyzed rocks from the ancient seafloor and looked for elements that rarely appear in Earth rocks and for isotopes -- different forms of atoms -- that show hallmarks of coming from outer space. For instance, helium atoms normally have two protons, two neutrons, and two electrons, but some that are shot out of the Sun and into space are missing a neutron. The presence of these special helium isotopes, along with rare metals often found in asteroids, proves that the dust originated from space.

Other scientists had already established that our planet was undergoing an ice age around this time. The amount of water in the Earth's oceans influences the way that rocks on the seabed form, and the rocks from this time period show signs of shallower oceans -- a hint that some of the Earth's water was trapped in glaciers and sea ice. Schmitz and his colleagues are the first to show that this ice age syncs up with the extra dust in the atmosphere. "The timing appears to be perfect," he says. The extra dust in the atmosphere helps explain the ice age -- by filtering out sunlight, the dust would have caused global cooling.

Since the dust floated down to Earth over at least two million years, the cooling was gradual enough for life to adapt and even benefit from the changes. An explosion of new species evolved as creatures adapted for survival in regions with different temperatures.

Heck notes that while this period of global cooling proved beneficial to life on Earth, fast-paced climate change can be catastrophic. "In the global cooling we studied, we're talking about timescales of millions of years. It's very different from the climate change caused by the meteorite 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs, and it's different from the global warming today -- this global cooling was a gentle nudge. There was less stress."

It's tempting to think that today's global warming could be solved by replicating the dust shower that triggered global cooling 466 million years ago. But Heck says he would be cautious: "Geoengineering proposals should be evaluated very critically and very carefully, because if something goes wrong, things could become worse than before."

While Heck isn't convinced that we've found the solution to climate change, he says it's a good idea for us to be thinking along these lines.

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New whale species discovered along the coast of Hokkaido

A new beaked whale species Berardius minimus, which has been long postulated by local whalers in Hokkaido, Japan, has been confirmed.

In a collaboration between the National Museum of Nature and Science, Hokkaido University, Iwate University, and the United States National Museum of Natural History, a beaked whale species which has long been called Kurotsuchikujira (black Baird's beaked whale) by local Hokkaido whalers has been confirmed as the new cetacean species Berardius minimus (B. minimus).

Beaked whales prefer deep ocean waters and have a long diving capacity, making them hard to see and inadequately understood. The Stranding Network Hokkaido, a research group founded and managed by Professor Takashi F. Matsuishi of Hokkaido University, collected six stranded un-identified beaked whales along the coasts of the Okhotsk Sea.

The whales shared characteristics of B. bairdii (Baird's beaked whale) and were classified as belonging to the same genus Berardius. However, a number of distinguishable external characteristics, such as body proportions and color, led the researchers to investigate whether these beaked whales belong to a currently unclassified species.

"Just by looking at them, we could tell that they have a remarkably smaller body size, more spindle-shaped body, a shorter beak, and darker color compared to known Berardius species," explained Curator Emeritus Tadasu K. Yamada of the National Museum of Nature and Science from the research team.

In the current study, the specimens of this unknown species were studied in terms of their morphology, osteology, and molecular phylogeny. The results, published in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that the body length of physically mature individuals is distinctively smaller than B. bairdii (6.2-6.9m versus 10.0m). Detailed cranial measurements and DNA analyses further emphasized the significant difference from the other two known species in the genus Berardius. Due to it having the smallest body size in the genus, the researchers named the new species B. minimus.

"There are still many things we don't know about B. minimus," said Takashi F. Matsuishi. "We still don't know what adult females look like, and there are still many questions related to species distribution, for example. We hope to continue expanding what we know about B. minimus."

Local Hokkaido whalers also refer to some whales in the region as Karasu (crow). It is still unclear whether B. minimus (or Kurotsuchikujira) and Karasu are the same species or not, and the research team speculate that it is possible Karasu could be yet another different species.

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New species of pocket shark identified

A team of researchers, including two from Tulane University, has identified a new species of pocket shark, following careful study of a pocket shark that made international headlines in 2015 after it was brought to the Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection at the Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute.

The 5½-inch male kitefin shark has been identified as the American Pocket Shark, or Mollisquama mississippiensis, based on five features not seen in the only other known specimen of this kind. That specimen was captured in the Eastern Pacific Ocean in 1979 and is now housed at the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The details of the new species, which was caught in the Gulf of Mexico in February 2010, are described in an article published in the animal taxonomy journal Zootaxa. The authors include Mark Grace of the NMFS Mississippi Laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Henry Bart and Michael Doosey of the Tulane University Biodiversity Research. Other researchers involved in the study are John S. Denton and Gavin Taylor of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida, and John Maisey of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

"In the history of fisheries science, only two pocket sharks have ever been captured or reported," Grace said. "Both are separate species, each from separate oceans. Both are exceedingly rare."

Bart added, "The fact that only one pocket shark has ever been reported from the Gulf of Mexico, and that it is a new species, underscores how little we know about the Gulf -- especially its deeper waters -- and how many additional new species from these waters await discovery."

Researchers said there were notable differences between the original Pacific Ocean specimen and the newer specimen from the Gulf of Mexico. Those differences include fewer vertebrae and numerous light-producing photophores that cover much of the body. The two species both have two small pockets that produce luminous fluid (one on each side near the gills).

The pocket shark was collected in February 2010 in the eastern Gulf of Mexico by the NOAA ship Pisces, during a mission to study sperm whale feeding. Much to his surprise, Grace discovered the shark in 2013 while examining specimens that were collected during the NOAA survey. Grace asked Tulane to archive the specimen in its Fish Collection. Soon after, Grace and Tulane postdoctoral researcher Doosey undertook a study to determine what species it was.

Identifying the shark involved examining and photographing external features of the specimen with a dissecting microscope, studying radiographic (x-ray) images and high resolution CT scans. The most sophisticated images of internal features of the shark were produced at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, which uses the most intense source of synchrotron-generated light in the world to produce x-rays 100 billion times brighter than the x-rays used in hospitals.

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New species of early human found in the Philippines

Professor Philip Piper from the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology inspects the cast of a hominin third metatarsal discovered in 2007. The bone is from a new species of hominin.

An international team of researchers have uncovered the remains of a new species of human in the Philippines, proving the region played a key role in hominin evolutionary history. The new species, Homo luzonensis is named after Luzon Island, where the more than 50,000 year old fossils were found during excavations at Callao Cave.

Co-author and a lead member of the team, Professor Philip Piper from The Australian National University (ANU) says the findings represent a major breakthrough in our understanding of human evolution across Southeast Asia.

The researchers uncovered the remains of at least two adults and one juvenile within the same archaeological deposits.

"The fossil remains included adult finger and toe bones, as well as teeth. We also recovered a child's femur. There are some really interesting features -- for example, the teeth are really small," Professor Piper said.

"The size of the teeth generally, though not always, reflect the overall body-size of a mammal, so we think Homo luzonensis was probably relatively small. Exactly how small we don't know yet. We would need to find some skeletal elements from which we could measure body-size more precisely" Professor Piper said.

"It's quite incredible, the extremities, that is the hand and feet bones are remarkably Australopithecine-like. The Australopithecines last walked the earth in Africa about 2 million years ago and are considered to be the ancestors of the Homo group, which includes modern humans.

"So, the question is whether some of these features evolved as adaptations to island life, or whether they are anatomical traits passed down to Homo luzonensis from their ancestors over the preceding 2 million years."

While there are still plenty of questions around the origins of Homo luzonensis, and their longevity on the island of Luzon, recent excavations near Callao Cave produced evidence of a butchered rhinoceros and stone tools dating to around 700,000 years ago.

"No hominin fossils were recovered, but this does provide a timeframe for a hominin presence on Luzon. Whether it was Homo luzonensis butchering and eating the rhinoceros remains to be seen," Professor Piper said.

"It makes the whole region really significant. The Philippines is made up of a group of large islands that have been separated long enough to have potentially facilitated archipelago speciation. There is no reason why archaeological research in the Philippines couldn't discover several species of hominin. It's probably just a matter of time."

Homo luzonensis shares some unique skeletal features with the famous Homo floresiensis or 'the hobbit', discovered on the island of Flores to the south east of the Philippine archipelago.

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Five new frog species from Madagascar

An adult male Mini scule resting on a fingertip.

Scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology have named five new species of frogs found across the island of Madagascar. The largest could sit on your thumbnail, the smallest is hardly longer than a grain of rice.

Madagascar, an island a little larger than mainland France, has more than 350 frog species. This number of recognized species is constantly rising, and many of the newly named species are very small.

Mark D. Scherz, a PhD candidate at LMU Munich, and Dr. Frank Glaw, Head of the Herpetology Section at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich, together with colleagues at the Technical University of Braunschweig and the University of Antananarivo have named five new species of tiny frogs found across the island. Their study appears in the online journal PLOS ONE.

The five new species belong to a group of frogs commonly referred to as 'narrow-mouthed' frogs, a highly diverse family found on every continent except Antarctica and Europe. Although most narrow-mouthed frogs are small to moderately large, many are tiny. In fact, the group includes the smallest frog in the world -- Paedophryne amauensis from Papua New Guinea, mature specimens of which reach a length of only 7.7 mm. What's remarkable is that, in the smallest frogs, "miniaturization" has evolved independently -- often several times within a single region, as highlighted in this new study. Three of the new species belong to a group that is wholly new to science, which the authors have formally dubbed Mini. The other two new species, Rhombophryne proportionalis and Anodonthyla eximia, are also just 11-12 mm long, and are much smaller than their closest relatives.

"When frogs evolve small body size, they start to look remarkably similar, so it is easy to underestimate how diverse they really are," says Mark D. Scherz, lead author on the new study. "Our new genus name, Mini, says it all. Adults of the two smallest species Mini mum and Mini scule are 8-11 mm long, and even the largest member of the genus, Miniature, at 15 mm, could sit on your thumbnail with room to spare."

Finding tiny frogs in the leaf litter is hard work. "Calling males often sit one or two leaves deep and stop calling at the slightest disturbance," says Frank Glaw. "It can take a lot of patience to find the frog you are looking for."

From Science Daily

Meet India's starry dwarf frog, lone member of newly discovered ancient lineage

The starry dwarf frog is an expert hider. Plunging into leaf litter at the slightest disturbance, it has successfully evaded attention for millions of years -- until now.

The thumbnail-sized species was discovered in India's Western Ghats, one of the world's "hottest" biodiversity hotspots. Scientists have named the frog Astrobatrachus kurichiyana for its constellation-like markings and the indigenous people of Kurichiyarmala, the hill range where it was found.

But A. kurichiyana is not only a new species to science. It's the sole member of an ancient lineage, a long branch on the frog tree of life that researchers have classified as a new subfamily, Astrobatrachinae.

"This is an oddball frog -- it has no close sister species for maybe tens of millions of years," said David Blackburn, the associate curator of herpetology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. "With frogs, there are still ancient lineages out there awaiting discovery. This gives us one more puzzle piece to think about deep time."

Dark brown with a bright orange underbelly and speckled with pale blue dots, the frog camouflages well in wet leaf litter, and only a few individuals have been found.

"The coloration was the first thing that stood out to me, these starry patterns with a blue tinge," said Seenapuram Palaniswamy Vijayakumar, lead author of the species description and now a postdoctoral fellow at George Washington University. "We hadn't seen anything like this before."

But the starry dwarf frog nearly got overlooked in the crush of new species that Vijayakumar and his then-doctoral supervisor Kartik Shanker were finding on a series of expeditions to the Western Ghats, a 1,000-mile-long mountain range along India's southwestern coast.

Vijayakumar and Shanker, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science, had designed a meticulous study, covering multiple elevations, habitats and hill ranges to record and map the region's frogs, lizards and snakes.

"When we started sampling, we realized we were digging up a huge treasure," Vijayakumar said. "This was one among 30 species we captured one night, and while I took photos of it, none of us paid much attention to it."

The next morning, on a chilly, wet stroll over the grasslands -- watching the ground for leeches -- Vijayakumar spotted another of the unusually patterned frogs.

"I picked it up and said, 'Hey, this is the same guy I photographed in the night,'" he said. "As a greedy researcher, I kept it, but at that point in time, it wasn't too exciting for me. I didn't realize it would become so interesting."

Years passed before Vijayakumar and Shanker could turn their attention to the unknown frog species and assemble a research team to describe it. Alex Pyron, the Robert F. Griggs associate professor of biology at George Washington University and now Vijayakumar's adviser, analyzed the frog's genetics, and Florida Museum associate scientist Edward Stanley CT scanned the frog, revealing its skeleton and other internal features.

Thanks to CT technology, the starry dwarf frog could traverse more than 8,700 miles from Pune, India, to Blackburn's computer monitor in Gainesville, Florida, in a matter of minutes.

"I've never physically seen this species we've put all this effort into describing," Blackburn said. "Once specimens are digitized, it really doesn't matter where they are. The strengths that Ed and I could contribute to the team -- comparative anatomy -- were things we were able to do digitally."

Blackburn and Stanley could instantly compare the starry dwarf frog's bone structure to other frog species from the Western Ghats that have been imaged as part of the openVertebrate project, known as oVert, an initiative to scan 20,000 vertebrates from museum collections.

"We have this deep bench of CT data that makes collections amassed over hundreds of years instantaneously available, not just to researchers, but to anyone with a computer," Stanley said.

The team found that A. kurichiyana's closest relatives are the family Nyctibatrachidae, a group of nearly 30 species native to India and Sri Lanka. But their last common ancestor could date back tens of millions of years.

"These frogs are relics. They persisted so long. This lineage could have been knocked off at any point in time," Vijayakumar said. "Irrespective of who we are, we should be celebrating the very fact that these things exist."

Scientists have found many ancient lineages of frogs in the Western Ghats, whose biodiversity stems from its history and distinct geography. India, once part of Africa, split from Madagascar about 89 million years ago and drifted northeast, eventually colliding with the Asian mainland and giving rise to the Himalayas. But its long isolation as an island provided fertile ground for the evolution of new life forms and may have sheltered species that disappeared elsewhere. This is especially true of the Western Ghats, which is much like a network of islands, Vijayakumar said. The elevated region has been cross-sectioned into separate hill ranges by millions of years of erosion and climatic changes.

"It's a perfect scenario for cooking up new species," he said.

One question he and Blackburn are interested in exploring further is whether peninsular India's frogs are the descendants of African ancestors or whether they first originated in Asia and then moved south.

Finding ancient lineages like Astrobatrachinae can help fill in in the region's distant biological past, but the starry dwarf frog maintains many mysteries of its own. Researchers still do not know its life cycle, the sound of its call or whether the species is threatened or endangered.

Read more at Science Daily

How new species arise in the sea

A barred Hamlet (Hypoplectrus puella) off the coast of Panama.

For a new species to evolve, two things are essential: a characteristic -- such as a colour -- unique to one species and a mating preference for this characteristic. For example, individuals from a blue fish species prefer blue mates and individuals from a red fish species prefer red mates. If the two species interbreed, the process of sexual recombination is expected to destroy the coupling between colour and mate preferences and form red individuals with a preference for blue mates and vice versa. This will prevent the two species from diverging, and this is one of the reasons why it has been thought for a long time that new species can only evolve in absolute isolation, without interbreeding.

However, the dynamics of this process depend on the exact number and location of genes underlying species characteristics and mate preferences, the strength of natural selection acting on these genes, and the amount of interbreeding between species. In a new study, Professor Oscar Puebla from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany together with colleagues from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have found that natural selection can couple the evolution of genes for colour pattern and mate preferences when species still interbreed. The study has been published today in the international journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

"To address this question, the first challenge was to identify an animal group in which species are still young and interbreed, with clear species characteristics, and in which the bases of reproductive isolation are well understood," Oscar Puebla explains. The hamlets, a group of closely related reef fishes from the wider Caribbean, constitute exactly such a group. The hamlets are extremely close genetically, differ essentially in terms of colour pattern, and are reproductively isolated through strong visually-based mate preferences.

A second difficulty consists in identifying the genes that underlie species differences and mate preferences. The authors of the new study have assembled a reference genome for the hamlets and sequenced the whole genomes of 110 individuals from three species in Panama, Belize and Honduras. "This powerful dataset allowed us to identify four narrow regions of the genome that are highly and consistently differentiated among species in a backdrop of almost no genetic differentiation in the rest of the genome," co-author Kosmas Hench from GEOMAR says. In line with the ecology and reproductive biology of the hamlets, these four intervals include genes involved in vision and colour pattern.

The data also show that vision and colour pattern genes remain coupled despite the fact that they are located on three different chromosomes and that species still interbreed. Such a coupling had been previously reported when the two sets of genes are very close to each other on chromosomes, in which case they are protected from sexual recombination, but not when they are on different chromosomes. By capturing the very earliest stages of speciation in hamlets, the team shows how selection can contribute to the creation of new species.

Read more at Science Daily

Howler monkey study examines mechanisms of new species formation

A new University of Michigan study of interbreeding between two species of howler monkeys in Mexico is yielding insights into the forces that drive the evolution of new species.

How do new species emerge in nature? One common but overly simplified version of the story goes like this: A population of animals or plants becomes geographically isolated -- by a river that changes course or a mountain range that rises up, for example -- and the two separated groups accumulate genetic differences over time as they adapt to their environments in isolation.

Eventually, the DNA of the two groups is so different that the two populations are considered distinct species. Voilà, speciation has occurred.

In reality, the process is much more complex than that. While geographic isolation can start the speciation process, evolutionary biologists believe that other forces -- including various forms of natural selection -- can help to complete it.

The new U-M study provides rare empirical evidence that multiple forms of natural selection, including a contentious one called reinforcement, are helping to complete the speciation process in a natural howler monkey "hybrid zone," a place where the two species coexist and occasionally interbreed in a process called hybridization.

The study is scheduled for online publication Dec. 22 in the journal Molecular Ecology. In the paper, the researchers use the primate hybrid zone to identify parts of the genome that are likely to contain genes underlying speciation and to test for signals of the selection forces that shaped them.

"We observed patterns in the genetic data suggesting that hybridization is playing a direct role in completing the speciation process by enhancing genetic differences between species," said U-M doctoral candidate Marcella Baiz, the study's first author. The other authors are Liliana Cortés-Ortiz and Priscilla Tucker of the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

"We found a signal for multiple forms of natural selection driving species differences, including reinforcement, a process that has been highly debated," Baiz said. "This result is particularly notable because empirical evidence for reinforcement is extremely rare, especially genetic evidence."

The two species at the center of the study, mantled howler monkeys and black howler monkeys, diverged about 3 million years ago and lived apart until relatively recently when they came into contact again -- perhaps within the last 10,000 years -- in a roughly 12-mile-wide hybrid zone in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco.

A species was once defined as a group of actually or potentially interbreeding individuals that are reproductively isolated from other such groups. The concept of reproductive isolation is key to that definition and means that despite any hybridization, true species maintain their uniqueness.

However, the modern view of what a species is does not require full reproductive isolation, and hybridization has been discovered to be quite common in nature.

At the howler monkey hybrid zone in Mexico where U-M's Cortés-Ortiz and her colleagues have worked for about two decades, analysis of DNA samples has confirmed that black and mantled howler monkeys interbreed and produce hybrid offspring. The fact that hybridization is occurring between the two groups means that reproductive isolation is incomplete.

Evolutionary biologists believe that various natural selection pressures can help complete the process by strengthening barriers to gene flow between two groups, pushing them toward full reproductive isolation.

And because natural selection favors organisms that successfully reproduce over those that don't, it is biased against hybrids, which sometimes die before reproducing or are simply incapable of reproducing.

Natural selection tries to block the formation of these "unfit" hybrids. One way to do that is to gradually increase the genetic differences between two groups of organisms -- in this case black and mantled howler monkeys -- so that it's more difficult for them to mate and to produce hybrid offspring.

While working to thwart the formation of hybrids in this way, natural selection strengthens reproductive isolation by increasing genetic differences. This process is called reinforcement; while the idea has been around for more than a century, empirical evidence to support it is scarce.

To test for the presence of reinforcement, Baiz and her colleagues compared the DNA of black and mantled howler monkeys living the Tabasco hybrid zone to the DNA of black and mantled howler monkeys living far from the hybrid zone.

If reinforcement is working to thwart hybridization and to strengthen reproductive isolation, then the genetic differences between the two species in the hybrid zone should be greater than the genetic differences between monkeys of these two species living on either side of the hybrid zone.

And that's exactly what Baiz and her colleagues found when they compared genetic markers that are at or near genes likely associated with reproductive isolation.

Read more at Science Daily

New species of ‘missing link’ between dinosaurs and birds identified

Dr. John Nudds with Archaeopteryx fossil specimen at the European Synchrotron in Grenoble.

Known as the 'Icon of Evolution' and 'the missing link' between dinosaurs and birds, Archaeopteryx has become one of the most famous fossil discoveries in Palaeontology.

Now, as part of an international team of scientists, researchers at The University of Manchester have identified a new species of Archaeopteryx that is closer to modern birds in evolutionary terms.

Dr John Nudds, from the University's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and the team have been re-examining one of the only 12 known specimens by carrying out the first ever synchrotron examination, a form of 3D X-ray analysis, of an Archaeopteryx.

Thanks to this new insight, the team says that this individual Archaeopteryx fossil, known as 'specimen number eight', is physically much closer to a modern bird than it is to a reptile. Therefore, it is evolutionary distinctive and different enough to be described as a new species -- Archaeopteryx albersdoerferi.

The research, which is being published in journal Historical Biology, says that some of the differing skeletal characteristics of Archaeopteryx albersdoerferi include the fusion of cranial bones, different pectoral girdle (chest) and wing elements, and a reinforced configuration of carpals and metacarpals (hand) bones.

These characteristics are seen more in modern flying birds and are not found in the older Archaeopteryx lithographica species, which more resembles reptiles and dinosaurs.

Specimen number eight is the youngest of all the 12 known specimens by approximately half a million years. This age difference in comparison to the other specimens is a key factor in describing it as a new species.

Dr Nudds explains: "By digitally dissecting the fossil we found that this specimen differed from all of the others. It possessed skeletal adaptations which would have resulted in much more efficient flight. In a nutshell we have discovered what Archaeopteryx lithographica evolved into -- i.e. a more advanced bird, better adapted to flying -- and we have described this as a new species of Archaeopteryx."

Archaeopteryx was first described as the 'missing link' between reptiles and birds in 1861 -- and is now regarded as the link between dinosaurs and birds. Only 12 specimens have ever been found and all are from the late Jurassic of Bavaria, now Germany, dating back approximately 150 million years.

Lead author, Dr Martin Kundrát, from the University of Pavol Jozef Šafárik, Slovakia, said: "This is the first time that numerous bones and teeth of Archaeopteryx were viewed from all aspects including exposure of their inner structure. The use of synchrotron microtomography was the only way to study the specimen as it is heavily compressed with many fragmented bones partly or completely hidden in limestone."

Read more at Science Daily

New species of dazzling, neon-colored fish

Tosanoides aphrodite inhabits rocky crevices of twilight zone reefs.

On a recent expedition to the remote Brazilian archipelago of St. Paul's Rocks, a new species of reef fish -- striped a vivid pink and yellow -- enchanted its diving discoverers from the California Academy of Sciences. First spotted at a depth of 400 feet beneath the ocean's surface, this cryptic fish inhabits rocky crevices of twilight zone reefs and is found nowhere else in the world. Upon discovery, the deep-diving team was so captivated by their finned find that they didn't notice a massive sixgill shark hovering above them in an exciting moment captured on camera. The new fish description published today in Zookeys.

"This is one of the most beautiful fishes I've ever seen," says Dr. Luiz Rocha, the Academy's Curator of Fishes and co-leader of the Hope for Reefs initiative. "It was so enchanting it made us ignore everything around it."

The sixgill shark stretched nearly ten feet long and cruised overhead as Rocha and post-doctoral fellow Dr. Hudson Pinheiro delicately collected the fish for further study back at the Academy. Behind the camera, the team's diving officer Mauritius Bell enthusiastically announced the behemoth visitor to the duo, but to no avail. Aptly named, Tosanoides aphrodite enchanted its discoverers much like Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and beauty, enchanted the ancient Greek gods.

"Fishes from the twilight zone tend to be pink or reddish in color," says Pinheiro. "Red light doesn't penetrate to these dark depths, rendering the fishes invisible unless illuminated by a light like the one we carry while diving."

Back at the Academy, laboratory and collections manager Claudia Rocha helped the diving duo describe the new species: Males are outfitted with alternating pink and yellow stripes while females sport a solid, blood-orange color. Using a microscope, the team counted fins and measured spine length; DNA analysis revealed the new species is the first Atlantic-dwelling member of its genus.

The new denizen of the deep is a remarkable testament to the vast ocean habitats that still remain unexplored. Rocha and Pinheiro are part of a deep-diving research team that ventures to twilight zone reefs -- mysterious coral habitats stretching across a narrow band of ocean 200 -- 500 feet beneath the surface. In these deep reefs, animals live in partial darkness -- beyond recreational diving limits, yet above the deep trenches patrolled by submarines and ROVs. As part of its Hope for Reefs initiative, the Academy team and their collaborators are exploring this unknown frontier with the help of high-tech equipment like closed-circuit rebreathers that allow scientists to extend their research time underwater.

Nearly 600 miles offshore the coast of Brazil, St. Paul's Rocks is so remote that the diving team had to use the research vessel M/V Alucia as their homebase to explore the archipelago. The rocky outcroppings are extensions of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge -- an active, tectonic plate boundary -- puncturing the ocean's surface. Given the region's unique geology and isolated location, many of the species that live there are found nowhere else on Earth. Through their research, the Hope for Reefs team is finding that twilight zone habitats also host many location-specific species.

In a recent landmark paper, the team found that twilight zone reefs are unique ecosystems bursting with life and are just as vulnerable to climate change threats as their shallow counterparts. Their findings upended the long-standing assumption that species might migrate between habitats to avoid human-related stressors. As documented in the footage from this new fish's discovery, a piece of fishing line can be seen streaming behind the sixgill shark -- evidence that human impacts extend to depth too.

Read more at Science Daily

Three new species of fish discovered in the extreme depths of the Pacific Ocean

Three new species of snailfish were discovered at great depths in the Atacama Trench.

An exploration to one of the deepest places on earth has captured rare footage of what is believed to be three new species of the elusive Snailfish.

Involving a team of 40 scientists from 17 different nations, including Dr Alan Jamieson and Dr Thomas Linley from Newcastle University, UK, the expedition to the Atacama Trench has uncovered a wealth of information about life in one of the deepest places on earth.

Among the new discoveries are what the team believe to be three new species of snailfish.

Temporarily named 'the pink, the blue and the purple Atacama Snailfish', the footage shows the fish feeding and interacting in their secret world 7,500 metres below the surface.

These fish are part of the Liparidae family and do not conform to the preconceived stereotypical image of what a deep-sea fish should look like.

Instead of giant teeth and a menacing frame, the fishes that roam in the deepest parts of the ocean are small, translucent, bereft of scales -- and highly adept at living where few other organisms can. The snailfish will be featured as part of the Challenger Conference 2018 which kicks off at Newcastle University from today and runs until Friday.

Dr Thomas Linley, from Newcastle University, said:

"There is something about the snailfish (fish of the family Liparidae) that allows them to adapt to living very deep. Beyond the reach of other fish they are free of competitors and predators.

"As the footage clearly shows, there are lots of invertebrate prey down there and the snailfish are the top predator, they seem to be quite active and look very well-fed.

"Their gelatinous structure means they are perfectly adapted to living at extreme pressure and in fact the hardest structures in their bodies are the bones in their inner ear which give them balance and their teeth. Without the extreme pressure and cold to support their bodies they are extremely fragile and melt rapidly when brought to the surface."

Amazingly, the team did manage to catch one the new species of snailfish which followed its amphipod prey into one of the traps. The single specimen was in very good condition and, following careful preservation, is currently being described by the Newcastle team with the help of colleagues from the United States and the Natural History Museum, London.

Pioneering technology for exploration of the ultra-deep

The Hadal Trenches are one of the last great frontiers in marine science and the deepest places on Earth.

Mostly located around the Pacific rim in areas where tectonic plate collide and plunge, the seafloor reaches depths close to 11,000 metres (~7 miles) in some areas.

The Atacama Trench, a trench almost 6000 km long and more than 8000 m deep, runs along the west coast of South America.

Newcastle University scientists and engineers have been pioneering technology for the exploration of these ultra-deep environments for the last five years and have to date completed nearly 250 deployments of their novel 'lander' systems.

Using two full-ocean depth (11,000 m) capable landers equipped with HD cameras and traps the Newcastle team assessed the animals found within the trench.

Designed and developed at Newcastle University, the lander is dropped overboard, and free-falls to the ocean floor where it carries out a variety of monitoring and sampling tasks.

It can take four hours for a trap to sink to the bottom and after waiting an additional 12 to 24 hours, the researchers send an acoustic signal to the trap, which releases weights and the lander rises to the surface with the help of floatation.

This allows the team to catch fish specimens and take video footage of life at the bottom of the ocean.

On this latest expedition to the Atacama Trench in the SE Pacific off the coast of Peru and Chile, the team deployed their baited camera system 27 times from 2537 to the deepest point, Richard's Deep, at just over 8000 metres.

More than 100 hours of video and 11,468 photographs were taken at the seabed.

As well as the snailfish, the team also filmed some astonishingly rare footage of long-legged isopods, known as Munnopsids, which are about the size of an adult hand.

These crustaceans have small bodies, extraordinarily long legs and swim backwards and upsides down, propelling themselves with paddles on their ventral side -- their 'tummies' -- before righting themselves on the seafloor and spreading their long walking legs out like a spider.

Read more at Science Daily

Spider eat spider: Scientists discover 18 new spider-hunting pelican spiders in Madagascar

Pelican spiders are beautiful and iconic Madagascan spiders. They have a bizarre appearance, with a long "neck" and chelicerae ("jaws") that are used to prey on other spiders from a distance. This pelican spider (pictured above, top) is dangling its spider prey (bottom) upside-down using its chelicerae after capturing it. These spiders also occur in Australia and South Africa; however, the species with the longest "necks" occur in Madagascar. All of the pelican spiders that Wood described live only in Madagascar, an island whose tremendous biodiversity is currently threatened by widespread deforestation. The new species add to scientists' understanding of that biodiversity, and will help Wood investigate how pelican spiders' unusual traits have evolved and diversified over time. They also highlight the case for conserving what remains of Madagascar's forests and the biodiversity they contain, she says.

In 1854, a curious-looking spider was found preserved in 50 million-year-old amber. With an elongated neck-like structure and long mouthparts that protruded from the "head" like an angled beak, the arachnid bore a striking resemblance to a tiny pelican. A few decades later when living pelican spiders were discovered in Madagascar, arachnologists learned that their behavior is as unusual as their appearance, but because these spiders live in remote parts of the world they remained largely unstudied -- until recently.

At the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, curator of arachnids and myriapods Hannah Wood has examined and analyzed hundreds of pelican spiders both in the field in Madagascar and through study of pelican spiders preserved in museum collections. Her analysis, focused on spiders of the Eriauchenius and Madagascarchaea genera, sorted the spiders she studied into 26 different species -- 18 of which have never before been described. Wood and colleague Nikolaj Scharff of the University of Copenhagen describe all 26 pelican spider species in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal Zookeys.

Wood says pelican spiders are well known among arachnologists not only for their unusual appearance, but also for the way they use their long "necks" and jaw-like mouthparts to prey on other spiders. "These spiders attest to the unique biology that diversified in Madagascar," she said.

Pelican spiders are active hunters, prowling the forest at night and following long silk draglines that lead them to their spider prey. When a pelican spider finds a victim, it swiftly reaches out and impales it on its long, fang-tipped "jaws," or chelicerae. Then it holds the capture away from its body, keeping itself safe from potential counterattacks, until the victim dies.

Today's pelican spiders are "living fossils," Wood says -- remarkably similar to species found preserved in the fossil record from as long as 165 million years ago. Because the living spiders were found after their ancestors had been uncovered in the fossil record and presumed extinct, they can be considered a "Lazarus" taxon. In addition to Madagascar, modern-day pelican spiders have been found in South Africa and Australia -- a distribution pattern that suggests their ancestors were dispersed to these landmasses when the Earth's supercontinent Pangaea began to break up around 175 million years ago.

Madagascar is home to vast numbers of plant and animal species that exist only on the island, but until recently, only a few species of pelican spiders had been documented there. In 2000, the California Academy of Sciences launched a massive arthropod inventory in Madagascar, collecting spiders, insects and other invertebrates from all over the island.

Wood used those collections, along with specimens from other museums and spiders that she collected during her own field work in Madagascar, to conduct her study. Her detailed observations and measurements of hundreds of specimens led to the identification of 18 new species -- but Wood says there are almost certainly more to be discovered. As field workers continue to collect specimens across Madagascar, "I think there's going to be a lot more species that haven't yet been described or documented," she said.

The spiders Wood personally collected, including holotypes (the exemplar specimens) for several of the new species, will join the U.S. National Entomological Collection at the Smithsonian, the second-largest insect collection in the world, where they will be preserved and accessible for further research by scientists across the globe.

Read more at Science Daily