Earliest Ancestor of Biggest Bird Ever ID'd

The first in a line of birds that would culminate with the world’s biggest bird ever has been discovered in Australia.

Researchers from Flinders University and the University of New South Wales have just published a study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology detailing their findings on the flightless, 551-pound Dromornis murrayi, now the earliest known species in the genus Dromornis -- prehistoric birds that stood up to 10 feet tall and could weigh more than half a ton.

Believe it or not, even at that weight D. murrayi was the baby of the Dromornis line.

“Originally, it was the smallest, at a pretty hefty 250 kilograms [551 pounds],” said the study’s lead author Trevor Worthy. “But by eight million years ago it had evolved into D. stirtoni, which averaged a whopping 450 kilograms [992 pounds], with some individuals reaching 650 kilograms [1,433 pounds] — the largest birds the world has known.”

The new bird D. murrayi lived during the late Oligocene to early Miocene. Its Dromornis genus belonged to the Dromornithidae family of huge birds also known as "Mihirungs."

“Mihirungs were giant flightless birds only found in Australia and are known only from fossils,” explained Worthy. “The largest stood two meters [6.6 feet] high at its back and reached well over three meters [9.8 feet] at the head."

“They survived until the Pleistocene period when Genyornis newtoni, the last species, died out, probably about 50,000 years ago,” he added.

“The very large and distinctive bones of this new ‘Big Bird’ are quite common in the Riversleigh [northwest Queensland, Australia] fossil deposits, and are easily spotted by scientists and visitors to the site,” said study co-author Suzanne Hand, of the University of New South Wales.

The researchers realized the new bird was an ancestor of the hulking D. stirtoni after poring over skull, sternum, and breast bones as well as bones from the leg and foot of the giant bird.

“We even had some tiny bones of the wing, which showed this gigantic bird had already, by 26 million years ago, essentially lost its wings,” said Worthy.

From Discovery News

Volkswagen-Size Armored Mammal Is Armadillo Ancestor

A new genetic analysis of the glyptodont, an ancient armored creature the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, reveals that it’s closely related to the modern-day armadillo.

Glyptodonts roamed the Earth for millions of years until they went extinct during the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. The animal’s clublike armored tail, enormous size and remarkable bony shell have captivated many since Charles Darwin collected the first known specimens in the early 1830s. Though the glyptodont looked like a giant armadillo, scientists weren’t sure how it fit into the armadillo family tree until now, the researchers said.

“The data sheds light on the familial relations of an enigmatic creature that has fascinated many but was always shrouded in mystery,” study researcher Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist and physical anthropologist, said in a statement. “Was the glyptodont a gigantic armadillo or weird offshoot with a fused bony exoskeleton?”

Glyptodonts are part of the mammal group Xenarthra, which includes anteaters, tree sloths, extinct ground sloths, extinct pampatheres (a small armadillolike creature) and armadillos, but its relationship to these animals had eluded scientists.

Now, a genetic analysis shows that the glyptodont is nestled deeply within the armadillo family and should be treated like a close relative, the researchers said.

“Glyptodonts, in fact, represent an extinct lineage that likely originated about 35 million years ago within the armadillo ,” said Poinar, who is director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Center at McMaster University in Canada.

Poinar worked with an international team of scientists to collect glyptodont specimens; they used ancient DNA-extraction techniques on one specimen — an approximately 12,000-year-old bony shell of a Doedicurus, one of the largest glyptodonts on record.

An analysis of the specimen, found in Argentina, allowed them to extract and sequence the mitochondrial DNA (genetic data passed down through the maternal line). Then, they compared it with the mitochondrial DNA of other living mammals in the Xenarthra group.

“Ancient DNA has the potential to solve a number of questions such as phylogenetic position — or the evolutionary relationship — of extinct mammals, but it is often extremely difficult to obtain usable DNA from fossil specimens,” Poinar said. “In this particular case, we used a technical trick to fish out DNA fragments and reconstruct the mitochondrial genome.”

Read more at Discovery News

Seas Are Rising at Fastest Pace in 2,800 Years

The world’s oceans are rising at a faster rate than any time in the past 2,800 years, and might even have fallen without the influence of human-driven climate change, researchers say.

Sea levels rose globally by about 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) from 1900 to 2000, said the study led by Rutgers University, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the absence of global warming, the change in sea level would have been far less — ranging between a 1.2 inch (3 centimeters) drop in the last century, to a rise of about 2.8 inches (7 centimeters).

“The 20th century rise was extraordinary in the context of the last three millennia — and the rise over the last two decades has been even faster,” said lead author Robert Kopp, an associate professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

The study also predicted that global sea level will rise by 1.7 to 4.3 feet (50 to 130 centimeters) in the 21st century if the world continues to rely heavily upon fossil fuels.

Even if fossil fuels were phased out, the seas would likely mount between 0.8 and two feet by century’s end, it said.

Average global temperature today is about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (one degree Celsius) higher than it was in the late 19th century.

The Rutgers-led study — with co-authors from Harvard University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany — was based on a database that included records from 24 locations around the world, and 66 tide-gauge records from the last 300 years.

Scientists say the planet is incredibly sensitive to small changes in temperature, with today’s average climate about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (one degree Celsius) warmer than it was in the 19th century.

“During the past millennia sea-level has never risen nearly as fast as during the last century,” said co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, co-Chair of the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research’s (PIK) research domain Earth System Analysis.

Read more at Discovery News

Pluto Moon Charon 'Bursting' With Frozen Ocean?

Charon, to begin bursting at the seams, much like Marvel's green superhero the Hulk.

A newly released image of Charon from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft suggests that some of the fractures on that moon's surface may be the result of a once-liquid ocean beneath the surface freezing over time. That may have resulted in the signs of expansion on Charon's surface that NASA scientists compared to "Bruce Banner tearing his shirt as he becomes the Incredible Hulk."

The largest of Pluto's five moons, Charon is about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) in diameter, about half as wide as Pluto. Because the center of mass of the Pluto-Charon system lies beyond Pluto's surface, the two are frequently regarded as a twin planet system.

When New Horizons passed by Charon in July 2015, the probe discovered a network of tectonic faults on the moon in the form of ridges, scarps and valleys. The extensive system of chasms is one of the longest in the solar system, stretching at least 1,100 miles (1,800 km) long and 4.5 miles (7.5 km) deep. By comparison, Arizona's Grand Canyon is only 277 miles (446 km) long and just over a mile (1.6 km) deep.

The new image shows a color-coded topography of Serenity Chasma captured by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons. Measurements of the feature's shapes reveals that Charon's water-ice layer was once at least partially liquid before freezing solid.

Scientists have said that Charon may have housed a layer of liquid water, the same material that makes up Charon's surface. The decay of radioactive elements, combined with the internal heat produced by Charon's formation, could have caused the deeper water-ice to melt. As the moon cooled over time, the ocean would have frozen and expanded. Like with an overly full plastic cup of water left in the freezer, the surface was pushed outward, with tearing resulting in the detailed system of chasms, scientists said.

It's also thought that Pluto once hosted a liquid ocean, though the younger surface of the dwarf planet suggests that this ocean took longer to freeze than Charon's.

From Discovery News

Giant Dinosaur Had 2 Tumors on Its Tailbone

It’s fairly common to discover dinosaur remains scratched with ancient claw or bite marks, but finding fossils with signs of tumors is rare.

And now scientists have found not one but two different types of tumor on the same bone — the vertebra of a titanosaur, a gigantic long-necked, long-tailed paleo beast, a new study finds.

“Finding any disease in fossils is rare,” said the study’s lead researcher, Fernando Barbosa, a doctoral student of geology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. “Cancer still is most rare because the majority of them do not leave signals in bones.”

The finding is the first known case of a tumor in a dinosaur that isn’t a duck-billed dinosaur, or hadrosaur, the researchers said.

The 7-inch-long (17 centimeters) fossilized vertebra, discovered in 2012 in Brazil’s southern São Paulo state, belongs to a species in the Titanosauridae family, “the most abundant Cretaceous dinosaur family of South America,” the researchers wrote in the study.

However, the 90-million-year-old bone had an unusual appearance — a “small bony button-shaped protuberance,” the researchers wrote in the study. Curious, Barbosa and his colleagues decided to investigate the weird bump, which measured just 0.3 by 0.3 inches (8.6 by 7.5 millimeters).

They found evidence of two tumors, both benign, Barbosa said. One is an osteoma, a bone overgrowth, which the researchers confirmed with a computer tomography (CT) scan and an examination of the fossil’s structure.

The other, a hemangioma, is a harmless vascular tumor.

“We were very lucky finding this because we didn’t have any evidence of the hemangioma,” Barbosa told Live Science in an email. “It was diagnosed by [the CT scan], which was only possible because we were investigating the radiological appearance of the osteoma.”

The tumors, though examples of abnormal cell growth, should not be called cancer, he said. Usually, only harmful tumors are called cancer, and these tumors were benign, Barbosa said. Furthermore, because of the tumors’ location and likely small sizes, the dinosaur probably didn’t notice them, the researchers said.

It’s not the first ancient animal to have an osteoma, the researchers said. The oldest known case of osteoma dates to the early Carboniferous (a period spanning 359.2 million to 299 million years ago) in the North American fish Phanerosteon mirabile. The mosasaur Platecarpus, a marine reptile, also had an osteoma, as did a crocodile, Leidyosuchus formidabilis, which lived during the Paleocene, a period spanning between 65 million and 56 million years ago.

Read more at Discovery News

30-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Flowers May Be Toxic

Delicate, though possibly deadly, flowers trapped in amber for some 30 million years have been discovered, scientists report.

The fossilized plants are asterids, which make up about one-third of the world’s flowering plants. About 80,000 species fall under this taxonomic clade, including coffee trees, tomato plants, mint, basil and tobacco. Despite the ubiquity of asterids today, no fossilized examples of the plants have been found until now, the researchers say.

The two flower specimens, which have been named Strychnos electri, belong to the same genus as poisonous plants that have been used to make lethal, paralyzing substances like strychnine and curare.

“Species of the genus Strychnos are almost all toxic in some way,” George Poinar Jr., an amber expert at Oregon State University, said in a statement. “Each plant has its own alkaloids with varying effects. Some are more toxic than others, and it may be that they were successful because their poisons offered some defense against herbivores.”

Scientists have identified about 200 species of Strychnosplants. One of the most famous representatives of this genus might be Strychnos nux-vomica, from which strychnine is derived. Strychnine has been used in rat poison, but it has also cropped up as a weapon in Agatha Christie novels, and Norman Bates used the poison to kill his mother in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Strychnine poisoning was even proposed as a possible cause of Alexander the Great’s death.

Curare —which contains the toxin tubocurarine, extracted from the plant Strychnos toxifera — has a storied history as well. Hunters in South America used the poison to make paralyzing blow darts (witnessed as early as the 16th century by the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh). More recently, safe doses of the poison have been used in medicine as a muscle relaxer.

Read more at Discovery News

Apollo 10 Astronauts Heard Odd 'Music' on Far Side of Moon

The astronauts who flew the dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing reported hearing mysterious “outer space-type music” while flying behind the moon in May 1969.

The case of the odd, unexplained whistling noise is uncovered during an upcoming episode of the Science Channel series, “NASA’s Unexplained Files.” The episode focuses on a strange event experienced by the crew members of Apollo 10, a mission which flew to the moon, entered lunar orbit and got within 5,000 feet of the moon’s surface in preparation for Apollo 11’s historic flight two months later.

The Apollo 10 astronauts – Tom Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan – can be heard on recordings from the flight talking about the strange sound, and whether to tell NASA about it.

“It sounds like, you know, outer space-type music,” one of the astronauts says.

“Shall we tell about it?” an astronaut asks.

“I don’t know,” another replies. “We ought to think about it.”

There’s no record of the astronauts discussing the noise with NASA or with the public. It’s unclear if the astronauts ever heard the noise on subsequent passes on the far side of the moon or if other astronauts on subsequent missions heard the sound. Young eventually flew back to the moon and walked on it as the commander of Apollo 16. Cernan commanded the Apollo 17 mission and was the last man to walk on the moon. Stafford flew in space again, but never journeyed back to the moon.

The May 1969 tapes were recorded while Stafford, Young and Cernan were on the far side of the moon, out of radio communication with Earth. The whistling sound lasted nearly the entire hour the astronauts were out of touch. Later, the recordings were sent back to Mission Control where they were transcribed, archived and classified, per protocol.

The conversation was eventually unearthed in 2008.

Some technicians have speculated the sound may have originated from interference from VHF radios on the command module and lunar module interacting with each other, according to researcher and author Andrew Chaikin.

Read more at Discovery News

Mars 2030: Explore Your Own Virtual Red Planet

Catching a flight to Mars won’t be possible for most of us until human trips to the Red Planet become affordable, routine and heck, even possible. NASA is currently hoping to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s, although some experts recently warned Congress that the agency’s budget may not be able to support that goal.

In any case, NASA is sticking to the 2030s timeline for now, and one way it is promoting it is by letting you stroll on the Red Planet in virtual reality. Through a partnership with VR developer Fusion (whose parent companies are Disney-ABC and Univision) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a new game called “Mars 2030″ will premiere at South By Southwest in March and be available to the public later this year.

“NASA has provided us information to achieve the highest level of regard for scientific accuracy through direct contact with various teams working on the many facets of such a complex mission,” said Julian Reyes, Fusion virtual reality producer and designer, in an e-mail to Discovery News.

“We’ve visited JSC (Johnson Space Center) and Langley Research Center on multiple occasions and had several interviews with scientists dedicated to studying the planet. Our goal is to stay within the bounds of scientific accuracy while still driven by a compelling story that engages the players.”

Fusion first got interested in Mars 2030 after reading about a now-famous “Mars One” 2014 feasibility study written by MIT students. Mars One is a privately funded initiative to send humans on a one-way trip to the Red Planet, and is now selecting astronauts for preliminary training while simultaneously trying to raise funds for the journey. While Mars One says the hardware will be capable of keeping humans alive indefinitely, the study cited limitations with their version such as needing frequent resupplies, which will only grow as a colony naturally expands in size.

Fusion contacted lead author Sydney Do (a Ph.D. student at MIT) after the study was publicized. To do the study, Do explained to Discovery News in an e-mail, the students created a simulation of a Mars outpost based on statements and claims by Mars One. Following the activities of four people on Mars, the students then created the systems needed for consumables (gases and water) to keep the crew alive, and the spare parts needed to support these systems. This information then gave them information on what a surface habitat system would need.

“The Mars 2030 experience essentially incorporates insights like these into a more realistic visual environment,” said Do, who describes himself as an occasional gamer. “You could say that our research does the back-end work — it determines how much of what resource or technology is needed based on a crew activity profile designed to meet some mission objective, while the Mars 2030 experience visualizes this information and builds a story around it using the state of the art in game development.”

Do acted as a technical advisor for Fusion, providing information on aspects of Mars such as surface habitats, life support, food, crew activities in the habitat and outside, maintenance and in-situ resource utilization. He even took into account planetary protection protocols to, for example, suggest sterilized robots explore an area before a human went there and threatened any possible microbes.

Read more at Discovery News

3D-Print Your Own Homo Naledi Skull

Ever felt like cranking up your 3D printer and making fossil recreations suitable for living room décor?

Now you can, thanks to a free website under the auspices of Duke University that allows registered users to peruse a library of some 9,000 digital scans of fossils uploaded to the site from scientists at more than 70 institutions.

The site, MorphoSource, was created by Duke assistant professor Doug Boyer, and the university calls it the “largest and most open digital fossil repository of its kind.” Just this month it announced the addition of more than 400 skulls and other bones from 59 species of apes, lemurs, and monkeys.

The site boasts among its digitized goodies a fossil superstar: Homo naledi, the ancient human that made headlines worldwide when it was found in a South African cave in 2015. MorphoSource made available to site visitors more than 80 scans of bones from the famous fossil find. Including, yes, a skull.

While many institutions have made moves to digitize their fossil collections, MorphoSource says it is one of the only ones that has put all of the images under one roof.

“We’re essentially taking bones out of museum catacombs and putting them online,” Boyer said in a press release.

The site offers image files representing bones from more than 500 extinct species. Visitors can rotate the images, zoom in/out on them and run them through a 3D printer.

Among the other scans on the site are Megalodon teeth, vertebrae from the largest snake ever known (Titanoboa), and the bones of a foot-plus-long devil frog.

“Paleoanthropology has been relying on digital data more and more,” Boyer said. “Before we released this dataset, only a dozen labs around the world had digital samples that large at their fingertips. Overnight we leveled the playing field in a significant way.”

From Discovery News

Record 18,300 Apply for NASA Astronaut Training

More than 18,300 people have applied for 14 or fewer spots in NASA's next astronaut class, shattering the 1978 record of 8,000 applicants.

(In 1978, it had been nine years since the previous chance to apply to be an astronaut, and the space shuttle had recently been announced. Plus, it was the first official call for female applicants.)

The prospective astronauts all submitted their applications between Dec.14 and when the application period closed yesterday (Feb. 18) — and the total number is close to triple the applicants for NASA's most recent astronaut class, in 2012. (At the time, the 2012 application pool was the second largest ever at more than 6,300.)

"It's not at all surprising to me that so many Americans from diverse backgrounds want to personally contribute to blazing the trail on our journey to Mars," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "A few exceptionally talented men and women will become the astronauts chosen in this group who will once again launch to space from U.S. soil on American-made spacecraft."

Bolden himself is a former astronaut, selected as one of a class of 19 in 1980.

Over the next 18 months, NASA's astronaut-selection board will narrow the applicants down, and the top applicants will interview at Johnson Space Center in Houston — ultimately, NASA will select a final set of eight to 14 astronaut candidates to begin training.

The training process will take about two years, and will include "training on spacecraft systems, spacewalking skills and teamwork, Russian language and other requisite skills," NASA officials said in the statement.

Ultimately, those who make it through the training will be assigned to either the International Space Station, NASA's Orion spacecraft, the Boeing CST-100 Starliner or the SpaceX Crew Dragon. Orion, currently in development to launch in the early 2020s on the new Space Launch System megarocket, will be able to support a crew of four for up to 21 days — habitat modules will be added for longer journeys, such as visiting Mars or deep space. Both the Starliner and Crew Dragon are in development aided by NASA's commercial crew program to bring four astronauts to the space station at a time.

Read more at Discovery News