Chimps Have a Sense of Fairness

Humans aren't the only ones who cry "no fair." In a classic test of fairness called the ultimatum game, apes will dole out an equitable share of their bananas — and when they don't, their partners will complain, a new study shows.

The findings, published today (Jan. 14) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that humans and chimpanzees may share an evolved sense of fairness common to many cooperative species, said lead study author Darby Proctor, a primatologist at Emory University.

"If you're involved in some cooperative act you need to be sure you're engaging in something that's beneficial to you," Proctor told LiveScience. "Comparing your rewards with others' seems like it would be really, really important."

Fair and square

In a classic economic trial called the ultimatum game, people are given $100 and can give some fraction of it to an anonymous partner they'll never see again. The recipients can reject the offer if they don't like it, in which case both people get nothing.

Rationally, the "smart" response would be to take any offer, no matter how low, but participants routinely reject offers lower than $10 or $20, said Manfred Milinski, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, who was not involved in the study. Most people offer around $40 to their partners and in some countries, people offer more than half of the money to partners, Milinski told LiveScience.

Selfish apes

But past studies of the ultimatum game in chimpanzees (with raisins) had suggested our closest living relatives were "rational maximizers" who would accept even the stingiest offering without getting ruffled. They even accepted zero-raisin offers without even a squawk. That suggested their main goal — getting more tasty raisins — overrode any meager sense of fairness they may have had.

Those studies, however, instantly started a new round of the game if the apes accepted, but made them wait a full minute after rejecting the offer, raising the possibility that the apes realized it was more fruitful to accept quickly to get more raisins, rather than rejecting low-ball offers.

Chimps and children

In the new study, the team trained the primates to dole out tokens that stood for bananas, with one token symbolizing an equal split, while the other was an unfair deal that benefitted the first chimp.

No chimp recipients rejected unfair offers, but they did occasionally hiss, spit or shout at unequal distributions. One recipient even spit a mouthful of water at its partner, Proctor said.

At first the chimps were stingy, but very quickly, they switched to offering equitable splits in the ultimatum game.

To test the method, the researchers had 3- to 5-year-old children participate in a similar experiment using stickers instead of bananas. The little ones started out greedy but quickly offered the tokens for fairer distributions of stickers. And those who got a raw deal complained.

Read more at Discovery News

Do Scientists Fear the Paranormal?

The question has been asked for decades: why haven’t psychic powers been proven yet? Psychics have been studied for decades, both in and out of the laboratory, yet the scientific community (and the public at large) remains unconvinced.

In a recent book, “Science & Psychic Phenomena: The Fall of the House of Skeptics,” author Chris Carter insists that the reason that psychic powers have not been proven is because scientists are unaware of the research or refuse to take it seriously because “Clearly many scientists find the claims of parapsychology disturbing.”

This is a common charge leveled against skeptics and scientists: that they refuse to acknowledge the existence of paranormal phenomenon (psychic abilities, ghosts, etc.) because it would somehow challenge or “disturb” their worldview.

Skeptics and scientists, they say, are deeply personally and professional invested in defending the scientific status quo and cannot psychologically tolerate the idea that they could be wrong. This results in a closed-minded refusal to accept, or even seriously examine, the evidence.

But is this really true? Do scientists ignore and dismiss claims and evidence that challenge dominant scientific ideas? Let’s examine some recent examples.

Psychic Powers

A study published in 2011 in a scientific journal claimed to have found strong evidence for the existence of psychic powers such as ESP. The paper, written by Cornell professor Daryl J. Bem, was published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and quickly made headlines around the world for its implication: that psychic powers had been scientifically proven.

Bem’s claim of evidence for ESP wasn’t ridiculed or ignored; instead it was taken seriously and tested by scientific researchers.

Replication is of course the hallmark of valid scientific research — if the findings are true and accurate, they should be able to be replicated by others. Otherwise the results may simply be due to normal and expected statistical variations and errors. If other experimenters cannot get the same result using the same techniques, it’s usually a sign that the original study was flawed in one or more ways.

A team of researchers collaborated to accurately replicate Bem’s final experiment, and found no evidence for any psychic powers. Their results were published in the journal PLoS ONE. Bem — explicitly contradicting Carter’s suggestion that skeptics set out to discredit his work or refused to look at it — acknowledged that the findings did not support his claims and wrote that the researchers had “made a competent, good-faith effort to replicate the results of one of my experiments on precognition.”

The following year a second group of scientists also tried to replicate Bem’s ESP experiments, and once again found no evidence for psychic power. The article, “Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi,” was published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and is available on the web page of the Social Science Research Network.

Einstein’s Mistake?

In September 2011, news shot around the world that Italian physicists had measured particles traveling faster than light. The neutrino in the experiment only exceeded the speed of light by a little tiny bit — 60 nanoseconds — but if validated would violate the fundamental laws of physics.

Questions swirled: Would the findings hold up under repeated experiments? Could this team have proven Einstein wrong about the speed of light?

What was the reaction from the scientific community to the news of this fundamentals-of-physics-challenging finding? They didn’t ignore the results, hoping the inconvenient truth would go away; they didn’t brand the scientists liars or hoaxers; they didn’t shout, “Burn the witch, this is heresy and cannot be true!”

Instead, they did what all scientists do when confronted with such anomalous evidence: they took a closer look at the experiment to make sure the results were valid, and tried to replicate the research. It later turned out that the anomaly was caused by at least two measurement errors, possibly including a loose cable: the experiment was flawed.

The scientists were not skeptical because accepting that Einstein was wrong about something would lead to a nervous breakdown, or that their whole worldview would crumble beneath them, or that they would have to accept that science doesn’t know everything.

The reason scientists were skeptical is because the new study contradicted all previous experiments. That’s what good science does: When you do a study or experiment — especially one whose results conflict with earlier conclusions, you study it closely and question it before accepting the results.

In science, those who disprove dominant theories are rewarded, not punished. Disproving one of Einstein’s best-known predictions (or proving the existence of psychic powers) would earn the dissenting scientists a place in the history books, if not a Nobel Prize.

The same pattern exists in other areas of the unexplained. For example many scientists have worked on analyzing alleged hair from mysterious animals such as Bigfoot and the Chupacabra. Researchers from Oxford University spent part of last year collecting samples of alleged Bigfoot hair for possible genetic identification; geneticist Bryan Sykes conducted DNA analysis and plans to publish his results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal soon.

Read more at Discovery News

'Death Star' Superweapon Idea Not New

More than 34,000 people signed an online petition calling on the Obama administration to build the “Star Wars” super-weapon to spur job growth and bolster national defense. With tongue firmly embedded in cheek, the White House reported last Friday that a Death Star would cost too much to build and that the President, “does not support blowing up planets.”

As silly as this sounds, the idea of mega-weapons in space is nothing new.

As the U.S. scrambled to catch up with the Soviets at the launch of the Space Race in the late 1950s, the Air Force considered dropping an atomic bomb on the moon to display U.S. superiority. At the same time, the U.S. Army looked into the feasibility of building a $8 billion lunar outpost to “protect potential United States interests on the moon,” and do surveillance of Earth.

The military also considered placing nuclear missiles on the moon as a sort of doomsday weapon. It would allow for a second strike on the USSR should the U.S. be decimated by a Soviet ICBM surprise first strike.

The 1968 the film classic 2001: A Space Odyssey showed orbiting nuclear bombs (seen at top) in establishing scenes (though they were not explicitly identified as space weapons). In one version of the Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick screenplay the alien reincarnated “Star Child” defiantly explodes the space arsenal. Kubrick dropped this from the film ending because it was too similar to the ending of his 1964 dark comedy classic, Dr. Strangelove, which imagines a “doomsday machine” nuking all of Earth.

Ironically, a year earlier nearly 100 countries signed the Outer Space Treaty that bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction beyond Earth. (In 1958 the U.S. detonated a couple low-yield tactical atomic bombs at high altitude over South Africa.) The treaty also prohibits the militarization of celestial bodies — so long Starship Troopers. This could become problematic if we ever considered launching a super-nuke to deflect an earthbound asteroid.

In the early 1980s President Ronald Regan envisioned a multi-layered defensive shield called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) that was almost like the imaginary force field in sci-fi stories. The weapons envisioned were straight out of the film Star Wars. Among the proposed arsenal were particle beam weapons and orbiting gamma-ray lasers that would shoot soviet ICBMs out of the sky as effectively as the arcade game Missile Command. The laser would be powered by detonating a nuclear bomb in Earth orbit.

Let’s imagine for a moment that an Evil Empire-type super-civilization wanted to essentially sterilize a planet. They might want to colonize the planet but not deal with its indigenous life forms, which could be a Jurassic Park of pretty vicious predators. The planet could be wiped clean for colonization without building a megabucks death-ray space battle station. The aliens could simply tap a lot of kinetic energy by retargeting an asteroid to smash into the planet obliterate the surface biosphere. After waiting a few years for the dust to settle the conquering civilization would move in with their own genetically engineered Noah’s Ark life forms.

Ironically, the secret U. S. Vela satellites launched in the 1960s to monitor any gamma rays from rogue above ground atomic bomb tests (banned under the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty by the Soviet Union), picked up, on a daily basis, intense bursts from universe’s natural death stars. Years later it was determined that explosions — hypernovae (an imploding star that unleashes much more energy than a supernova) — focused devastating beams of gamma rays seen by Vela as gamma-ray bursts.

Read more at Discovery News

Incoming ISON to be Dazzling Daytime Comet?

Later this year, the world could be in for a once-in-a-century astronomical treat: Comet ISON may become as bright as a full moon and be a daytime comet. Yes, on a clear day, you should be able to go outside and see ISON hanging in a blue abyss (just as Comet McNaught did in 2007, pictured above).

The comet, designated C/2012 S1, was discovered last year by the Russian International Scientific Optical Network (ISON — hence the comet’s name) and it quickly became apparent that it could be the “Comet of the Century.” If it lives up to the hype, we’ll be in for a very exciting nighttime and daytime show this November. However, astronomers urge caution: comets don’t always behave as expected.

It appears that ISON is a pristine comet freshly ejected from the Oort Cloud (a hypothetical population of comets that surround the solar system around one light-year from the sun), so it could be a pretty robust object packed with primordial ice and dust that was created during the solar system’s formative years. If this is the case, it could survive its death-defying journey past the sun, creating a wonderful tail of ice, gas and dust as it does so.

As pointed out by NASA’s Tony Philips at Spaceweather.com:

“Comet ISON is a sungrazer. On Nov. 28, 2013, it will fly through the sun’s outer atmosphere only 1.2 million km from the stellar surface below. If the comet survives the encounter, it could emerge glowing as brightly as the Moon, visible near the sun in the blue daylight sky. The comet’s dusty tail stretching into the night would create a worldwide sensation.”

Or, it might be a dud. But it’s good to be prepared for something awesome.

Read more at Discovery News

Building Electronics from the Ground Up

There's hardly a moment in modern life that doesn't involve electronic devices, whether they're guiding you to a destination by GPS or deciding which incoming messages merit a beep, ring or vibration. But our expectation that the next shopping season will inevitably offer an upgrade to more-powerful gadgets largely depends on size -- namely, the ability of the industry to shrink transistors so that more can fit on ever-tinier chip surfaces.

Engineers have been up to the task of electronics miniaturization for decades now, and the principle that the computer industry will be able to do it on a regular schedule -- as codified in Moore's Law -- won't come into doubt any time soon, thanks to researchers like the University of South Carolina's Chuanbing Tang.

Tang is a leader in constructing miniscule structures from the bottom up, rather than the top down. Currently, modern electronics are primarily fabricated by the latter method: the smooth surface of a starting material -- say, a wafer of silicon -- is etched through micro- or nanolithography to establish a pattern on it. The top-down method might involve a prefabricated template, such as a photomask, to establish the pattern. But the approach is becoming more and more challenging, because reducing the size of the features on the requisite templates is getting extremely expensive as engineers work their way further down the nanoscale. "Going from 500 to sub-30 nanometers is cost prohibitive for large-scale production," said Tang, an assistant professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry in USC's College of Arts and Sciences.

As a chemist, Tang uses a bottom-up approach: he works with the individual molecules that go onto a surface, coaxing them to self-arrange into the patterns needed. One established method of doing this involves block copolymers, in which a polymer chain is made up of two or more sections of different polymerized monomers.

If the different block sections are properly designed, the blocks will self-aggregate when placed on a surface, and the aggregation can be harnessed to create desirable patterns on the nanoscale without the need for any templates. Di-block copolymers of poly(ethylene oxide) and polystyrene, for example, have been used to construct highly ordered arrays of perpendicular cylinders of nanoscale materials. Solvent evaporation, or annealing, of these polymers on surfaces exerts an external directional field that can enhance the patterning process and create nearly defect-free arrays.

Tang's laboratory just published a paper for the special "Emerging Investigators 2013" issue of the journal Chemical Communications that takes this method to a new level. Working together with graduate student Christopher Hardy, Tang led a team that fabricated nanoparticles of pure, crystalline iron oxide with controlled size and spacing on silicon wafers by covalently incorporating a ferrocene moiety into a tri-block copolymer.

Incorporating metals into nanoscale designs is crucial for fabricating electronic devices, and Tang's method is a step forward for the field. Because ferrocene is covalently bonded to the block copolymer, there is no need for a complexation step to add a metal-containing compound to the surface -- a burdensome requirement of most previous methods. Moreover, their technique is a step beyond related polymer systems that contain covalent ferrocenylsilane linkages, in which removal of the organic components leaves behind silicon oxide as an impurity in the metal oxide.

The technique is a promising addition to the available tools for addressing the chronic need to decrease the size of electronic components. "The industry won't replace top-down methods," Tang said, "but they plan to use bottom-up together with the existing top-down methods soon."

Read more at Science Daily

New Implant Replaces Impaired Middle Ear

Functionally deaf patients can gain normal hearing with a new implant that replaces the middle ear. The unique invention from the Chalmers University of Technology has been approved for a clinical study. The first operation was performed on a patient in December 2012.

With the new hearing implant, developed at Chalmers in collaboration with Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, the patient has an operation to insert an implant slightly less than six centimetres long just behind the ear, under the skin and attached to the skull bone itself. The new technique uses the skull bone to transmit sound vibrations to the inner ear, so-called bone conduction.

"You hear 50 percent of your own voice through bone conduction, so you perceive this sound as quite natural," says Professor Bo Håkansson, of the Department of Signals and Systems, Chalmers.

The new implant, BCI (Bone Conduction Implant), was developed by Bo Håkansson and his team of researchers. Unlike the type of bone-conduction device used today, the new hearing implant does not need to be anchored in the skull bone using a titanium screw through the skin. The patient has no need to fear losing the screw and there is no risk of skin infections arising around the fixing.

The first operation was performed on 5 December 2012 by Måns Eeg-Olofsson, Senior Physician at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg, and went entirely according to plan.

"Once the implant was in place, we tested its function and everything seems to be working as intended so far. Now, the wound needs to heal for six weeks before we can turn the hearing sound processor on," says Måns Eeg-Olofsson, who has been in charge of the medical aspects of the project for the past two years.

The technique has been designed to treat mechanical hearing loss in individuals who have been affected by chronic inflammation of the outer or middle ear, or bone disease, or who have congenital malformations of the outer ear, auditory canal or middle ear. Such people often have major problems with their hearing. Normal hearing aids, which compensate for neurological problems in the inner ear, rarely work for them. On the other hand, bone-anchored devices often provide a dramatic improvement.

In addition, the new device may also help people with impaired inner ear.

"Patients can probably have a neural impairment of down to 30-40 dB even in the cochlea. We are going to try to establish how much of an impairment can be tolerated through this clinical study," says Bo Håkansson.

If the technique works, patients have even more to gain. Earlier tests indicate that the volume may be around 5 decibels higher and the quality of sound at high frequencies will be better with BCI than with previous bone-anchored techniques.

Now it's soon time to activate the first patient's implant, and adapt it to the patient's hearing and wishes. Then hearing tests and checks will be performed roughly every three months until a year after the operation.

"At that point, we will end the process with a final X-ray examination and final hearing tests. If we get good early indications we will continue operating other patients during this spring already," says Måns Eeg-Olofsson.

Read more at Science Daily

Alternative Medicine Use High Among Children With Chronic Conditions

Children who regularly see specialists for chronic medical conditions are also using complementary medicine at a high rate, demonstrates recently published research from the University of Alberta and the University of Ottawa.

About 71 per cent of pediatric patients attending various specialty clinics at the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton used alternative medicine, while the rate of use at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa was 42 per cent. Nearly 20 per cent of the families who took part in the study said they never told their physician or pharmacist about concurrently using prescription and alternative medicine.

Sunita Vohra, a researcher with the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the U of A, was the lead investigator on the study, which was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics. Her co-investigator was W. James King from the University of Ottawa.

"The children in this study are often given prescription medicines," says Vohra, a pediatrician who works in the Department of Pediatrics and the School of Public Health at the U of A.

"And many of these children used complementary therapies at the same time or instead of taking prescription medicine. We asked families if they would like to talk about the use of alternative medicine, more than 80 per cent of them said, 'yes, please.'

"Right now, these families are getting information about alternative medicine from friends, family and the Internet, but a key place they should be getting this information from is their doctor or another member of their health-care team, who would know about possible drug interactions with prescription medicines." Vohra said the study "identified a gap in communications" in dealing with pediatric patients and their families.

"It's important to get these conversations going with every patient, especially when you consider it's not widely recognized how common it is for children with chronic illnesses to use alternative medicine," says the Alberta Innovates-Health Solutions scholar.

"We need to make sure these families are comfortable telling their specialists they are taking other therapies," she said. Right now, Vohra and her colleagues at the U of A have developed curricula for undergraduate medical students about the use of alternative medicine by pediatric patients, which is considered innovative and novel. Ensuring medical students receive information about alternative medicine is key because it arms them with more knowledge about potential interactions with prescription medicine, says Vohra.

Read more at Science Daily

Secret of Dingo's Down-Under Origin Revealed

Indians migrating to Australia more than 4,000 years ago may have introduced dingoes to the island continent, along with novel stone tools and new ways to remove toxins from edible plants, researchers say.

Australia was thought to have remained largely isolated from the rest of the world between its initial colonization about 40,000 years ago by the ancestors of aboriginal Australians and the arrival of Europeans in the late 1800s.

"Outside Africa, aboriginal Australians are the oldest continuous population in the world," said researcher Irina Pugach, a molecular anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Still,researchers had not really explored the genetic history of Australians in great enough detail to address this question.

Isolated continent?

"The extent of isolation of aboriginal Australia has been debated for a long time," Pugach told LiveScience. "The Australian archaeological record documents some changes that occur in Australia around 4,000 years ago, which could have been potentially, but not necessarily, brought in from the outside."

To find out more, the researchers analyzed DNA from 344 people, including aboriginal Australians, highlanders of Papua New Guinea, Southeast Asian islanders, Indians, Nigerians, individuals of European descent living in Utah and Han Chinese from Beijing.

The scientists found a common origin for populations from Australia, New Guinea and the Mamanwa, a group from the Philippines. The researchers estimate these groups split from one another about 36,000 years ago. This supports ideas that the groups descended from an ancient southwards migration out of Africa.

The researchers also detected substantial gene flow from Indian populations into Australia about 4,230 years ago. Scientists estimate this Indian genetic influence appears in about 10 percent of the aboriginal Australian populations they analyzed.

At about the same time, the dingo first appears in the Australian fossil record, an animal that most closely resembles Indian dogs.

In addition, at about that time, "archaeologists describe a sudden shift in stone tool technologies, with new implements known as the Small Tool Tradition appearing for the first time" in Australia, Pugach said. These represented stone tools that were smaller and more finely worked than before, she explained.

Moreover, at about that time, new techniques for altering dangerous plants to make them edible also appeared in Australia. For instance, while plants known as cycads can be toxic, soaking or fermenting their kernels can remove the poisons.

"Aboriginal Australians use the fruits of these plants as an important food source despite them being highly toxic," Pugach said.

The researchers caution the migration "may not have actually been from India, but from some population somewhere else that subsequently no longer exists, but whose closest living relative — at least, among populations we examined — are Dravidian-speakers from southern India," Pugach said.

The researchers also emphasized they are not claiming some Indian group members are the ancestors of aboriginal Australians. "The migration happened about 4,000 years ago. By that time, people lived in Australia for more than 40,000 years," Pugach said.

Read more at Discovery News

Fish cannot feel pain say scientists

A study has found that, even when caught on a hook and wriggling, the fish is impervious to pain because it does not have the necessary brain power.

The research, conducted by a team of seven scientists and published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, concluded that the fish’s reaction to being hooked is in fact just an unconscious reaction, rather than a response to pain.

Fish have already been found to have “nociceptors” - sensory receptors that in humans respond to potentially damaging stimuli by sending signals to the brain, allowing them to feel pain.

However, the latest research concluded that the mere presence of the receptors did not mean the animals felt pain, but only triggered a unconscious reaction to the threat.

The latest findings contradict previous research, which suggested that these nociceptors enabled the creatures to feel reflexive and cognitive pain.

In an earlier study done by the University of Edinburgh, rainbow trout were injected in the lips with an acid solution.

Researchers pointed to the fish’s behavioural changes, such as them rubbing their mouths on the gravel, and moving in a rocking motion similar to that seen in stressed mammals, as evidence of pain.

However, the new research, which reviewed a series of studies conducted over the years, discovered that only an extremely small number of “C fibres” - a type of nociceptor responsible for pain - can be found in trout and other fish.

Professor James Rose from the University of Wyoming in the US, who led the study, also found that the fish brain does not contain the highly developed neocortex needed to feel pain, so do not experience it in any meaningful way like humans.

He concluded that fish are able to experience unconscious, basic instinctive responses, but that these did not lead to conscious feelings or pain.

The trout’s reactions in the earlier study were therefore not ones of discomfort, as they lack the capacity to experience it, Prof Rose found.

The new research also referred to a study done on fish which were caught with a hook and then released.

The fish resumed feeding and normal activity immediately or within minutes and went on to show good long-term survival, which indicated they had not experienced pain.

Professor Robert Arlinghaus, one of the team’s researchers, said the presumption that fish feel pain has hindered scientists for decades and has stigmatised anglers.

“I think that fish welfare is very important, but I also think that fishing and science is too,” he said.

“There are many conflicts surrounding the issue of pain and whether fish can feel it, and often anglers are portrayed as cruel sadists. It's an unnecessary social conflict.”

Mark Lloyd, head of the Anglers’ Trust, said: “This debate about fish feeling pain has always been a red herring, so to speak.

“Anglers care passionately about the protection of fish stocks and do more than any other group to protect and improve freshwater and marine environments.

Read more at The Telegraph

First Land Animals Shuffled Like Seals

The world’s first 3D reconstruction of a 4-legged animal backbone reveals that the first animals on land moved like seals.

One of the studied animals was a fierce-looking, toothy beast known as Ichthyostega. It lived 374 – 359 million years ago and was a transitional species between fish and terrestrial animals.

Ichthyostega is thought to have navigated through shallow water in swamps, probably lured by food.

Now we know that it probably moved by dragging itself across flat ground, using its front legs to crutch itself forward, much like that of a mudskipper or seal.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

Lead author Stephanie Pierce, of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, was quoted as saying in a press release, “The results of this study force us to re-write the textbook on backbone evolution in the earliest limbed animals.”

Pierce and her colleagues bombarded 360-million-year-old early fossils for four-legged animals with high-energy synchrotron radiation. The resulting high resolution X-ray images allowed the researchers to reconstruct the backbones of the extinct animals in exceptional detail.

Today, all four-limbed animals (technically known as tetrapods) possess a backbone. It is formed from many bony segments, called vertebrae, all connected in a row from head to tail/rear end. Unlike the backbone of living tetrapods like humans, in which each vertebra is composed of only one bone, early tetrapods had vertebrae made up of multiple parts.

Pierce said, “For more than 100 years, early tetrapods were thought to have vertebrae composed of three sets of bones — one bone in front, one on top, and a pair behind. But, by peering inside the fossils using synchrotron X-rays, we have discovered that this traditional view literally got it back-to-front.”

The team of scientists discovered that what was thought to be the first bone – known as the intercentrum — is actually the last in the series.

“By understanding how each of the bones fit together we can begin to explore the mobility of the spine and test how it may have transferred forces between the limbs during the early stages of land movement,” Pierce said.

Aside from deducing that Ichthyostega and its ilk moved like seals, the researchers also discovered a string of bones that extended down the middle of its chest.

Read more at Discovery News