Such is the case with Brontosaurus.  Long the icon of the dinosaur world, this genus of herbivorous sauropods whose name means “thunder lizard” was a mistake.  An Apatosaurus that had an inaccurate reconstruction of its head added to the original display (because the specimen being used was missing its head when it was discovered), it now exists in science only as a casebook example of phylogenetic inference run amok.  It is also a casebook example both of how we sometimes let our prejudices guide our decisions and how scientific competition is not always a good thing.

The original specimen, still in the great hall of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut (USA), went on display in 1905, some six years after Marsh’s death.  It remains in its original pose, based on the early twentieth belief that the animal walked with its head drooping and its tail dragging the ground behind it.  It has, however, had its head replaced with the correct one for the species.  By contrast, the specimen in the American Museum of Natural History shows what is referred to as the “modern posture”, with  its head sticking forward just higher than its body and its tail raised to body level, to demonstrate how scientists currently believe the animal actually looked in life.

The original conception of how Brontosaurus excelsus, now Apatosaurus excelsus looked, with its head drooping and its tail being dragged behind.
Image Credit: Image is from Wikipedia Commons and is in the public domain.

So, how did all of this happen?  The story goes something like this… From the late 1860s onward, two American paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were engaged in an open feud over the discovery of dinosaur fossils in the American West.  The feud began “back east” as they use to say in the West, when Cope accused Marsh of paying quarrymen in New Jersey to divert to himself fossils that had been paid for by and promised to Cope.  Soon, the two men were engaged snipping at each other’s fossil finds, feuding over fossil hunting rights in the western territories, and in general name calling and accusations.  They tried to out-do each other by finding and naming the largest number of fossils and the biggest specimens they could find.

In the midst of this feud, in 1879, Marsh discovered a very large specimen of a sauropod dinosaur at Como Bluff, in southeastern Wyoming (USA).  It was larger and much more complete than anything that had been found up to then, but it had one little problem.  It was missing its head.  Marsh was convinced that it was an entirely new genus and species, which he named Brontosaurus excelsus. The species name (excelsus) means “highest or sublime” and is intended to refer to the fact that it had the greatest number of sacral vertebrae of any sauropod known at the time.

Scientists started preparing the specimen for display.  Missing bones were replaced using known examples from close relatives of Brontosaurus.  The specimen was missing its feet, so sauropod feet that had been found at the same quarry were used.  But, the head was still a problem.  What to do?  What would the head of such a beast look like?  Marsh, being a thorough nineteenth century man, dismissed many of the proposal as being too effete for such a large animal.  Surely its head would be robust, virile (one at the time might have been tempted to say manly).  So, Marsh had a head constructed from bones of similar species that looked the way Marsh thought Brontosaurus‘ head should look.  This composite skull (which we now know to be mostly made of Brachiosaur bones) was duly created and fitted to the mounted skeleton.  Thus, it was not the (relatively) delicate skull of Apatosaurus excelsus, that would eventually be deemed to be the true appearance of the creature.

Othniel Charles (O.C.) Marsh, who found and named Brontosaurus.
Image Credits: Image is from Wikipedia Commons and is in the public domain.

Marsh, who died in 1899, never lived to see his specimen on display.  Cope had already died in 1897, and their great feud, now known as the Bone War, had died with them.

When it went on display, Brontosaurus was the first sauropod to be seen by the public, and it created a sensation.  It captured the public’s imagination and became a cultural icon of the science of paleontology.  And there it remained through most of the twentieth century, captured in a million images ranging from hollywood renditions in movies to corporate images for oil companies, to a thousand and one cartoon creations and magazine images.

But, even before Brontosaurus went on display, its name and identity were being challenged.  In 1903, paleontologist Elmer Riggs took another look at the fossils.  He agreed with Marsh that B. excelsus was likely its own species, but decided that it had too much in common with Apatosaurus to be a distinct genus.  Riggs reclassified the specimen as Apatosaurus excelsus, where it has remained to this day.  Most scientists over the years have agreed with him.  Yet, in the eyes of the public, it was always Brontosaurus.

Why, you might ask, didn’t Riggs reclassify Apatosaurus into Brontosaurus, since the latter was clearly the better known and more popular name?  The reason for that is the rules surrounding the naming and renaming of animals in biology.  This is governed by rules set down by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN).  According to those rules, if two genera are determined to be the same, then the one that was named first has priority and the animal(s) in the one named later are reclassified into the older one.  It should be noted here that the same rule applies at all levels of scientific nomenclature (family, genera, species, etc.).  Since Apatosaurus had been named in 1877 (ironically by Marsh himself), Apatosaurus won, and Brontosaurus became what is known as a “junior synonym” and was discarded from formal use.

It might have remained that way, with the general public knowing Brontosaurus and scientists knowing Apatosaurus, but for the U.S. Postal Service.  In 1989, they issues a series of four dinosaur stamps, one of which was of Brontosaurus.  A number of paleontologists went ballistic, accusing the post office of promoting inaccurate science.  From that hoopla, the general public first became aware of the whole Brontosaurus fiasco and the fact that their “beloved” Brontosaurus was actually something else.  In the eyes of some in the public, it called into question the reputation that paleontologists had worked so hard to established.  It seemed that the Bone War had done more harm to paleontology, nearly a century after it had ended.

Others point out that it has shown paleontology as a science that learns from its mistakes and is honest and strong enough to make the necessary changes and go on.

In any case, it certainly shows that men of science can have their own issues.  Aside from the rivalry between Cope and Marsh, it shows how we are slaves to our times.  Marsh could not see that his fossil’s head was smaller and more delicate than the burly version he envisioned, largely because his society said it was supposed to be that way.

It also demonstrates the nineteenth century European fascination with naming and categorizing things, often to the exclusion of anything else, especially if that something else disagreed with the way they thought things should be.

Alas, we have our own prejudices.  Will we be able to stand the scrutiny of our successors a hundred years from now?  Only time will tell, but in any event, Brontosaurus was the dinosaur that never was, except in our own imaginations.

The study conducted by a team of Canadian researchers indicated that, at least in hoverfly populations, predators impose less selection if the mimic is smaller.  Thus, small mimic species need to have less fidelity with the species they are mimicking than do larger ones.  The team concludes that the most likely reason for this is that the mimics are less profitable prey species and are not apt to be pursued as strongly as are larger species.  So, less fidelity will do.

The team was also able to show little or no correlation of mimicry to several other theories that had been posited over the years as explanations for the imperfections.  Among these, they were able to show that human ratings of mimetic fidelity are positively correlated with both morphometric measures and avian rankings of the mimicry, indicating that variation in mimetic fidelity is not just an illusion based on human perception.

See here for the complete paper.

Reporting in an article published on March 19, in the online journal PLoS One (Public Library of Science One), a team of scientists from the United States has traced the origins and evolution of these kinases.  Based on their study, the team concludes that GPCRs are very old, having appeared before the rise of Metazoa and expanded rapidly among true metazoans.  They hypothesize that this rapid expansion was the result of the need for quick signalling adjustments in fast-moving animals.  They note that this “lifestyle requires the ability to reset and re-engage the environmental sensors frequently, which calls for [a] rapid shut-off mechanism.  A dedicated system for quick deactivation of GPCR may have been one of the factors profoundly determining the metazoan lifestyle.”  For the full paper, see here.

Crystal structure of G protein coupled receptor kinase 1 (GRK1) bound to ATP (Credit: Image is from Wikipedia Commons and is by the Jmol development team. It is used under a GNU Free License.)

The humble house mouse (Mus musculus), traveling the globe with man. Image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.

An international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of York in the United Kingdom have used mitochondrial DNA to show that the timeline of house mice migration across the upper north Atlantic through Scotland and the Scottish Islands, to Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland closely matches that of the Viking invasion.

The Vikings, who fought, raided, and explored their way across the north Atlantic from the late eighth to the mid-tenth centuries were the scourge of most of Europe at that time, raiding, killing, and pillaging large swaths of the continent, not just the areas above, but also parts of England, Wales, the Isle of Man, and Ireland.  They established the first cities in Ireland.  They founded the duchy of Normandy, in France, and they even established a kingdom in Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea.

It seems that where they went, their house mice (scientific name Mus musculus) went with them, at least on the northern part of their journey.

According to a press release (see here) the research team, made up of members from the UK, US, Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden, used techniques designed to characterize genetic similarity, and thereby infer the relatedness of one population, or one individual, with another, in order to determine a mouse colonisation timeline.

They obtained modern samples of house mic DNA and compared them to ancient samples dating mostly from the 10th to 12th centuries.  Samples were collected from nine sites in Iceland, Narsaq in Greenland, and four sites near the Viking archaeological site, L’Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland.  Ancient samples came from the Eastern and Western settlements in Greenland and four archaeological sites in Iceland.

When analyzed, the samples showed that house mice traveled with the Vikings to Iceland in the early 10th century , either from Norway or the northern part of the British Isles.  From Iceland the mice continued their journey on Viking ships to settlements in Greenland.  However, while descendants of these stowaways can still be found in Iceland, the early colonizers in Greenland have become extinct and their role has been filled by Danish house mice (same species) brought much later by a second wave of European human immigrants.

Of significance is the fact that no evidence of house mice was found in the Viking settlement in Newfoundland, nor was there any evidence of ancestral Viking house mice DNA in modern house mice there.  So, it seems that if the mice made if as far as Newfoundland, they became extinct before they could contribute to the modern house mice lineage on the island.

Replica of a Viking long ship. Photograph by archiwum własne wikingów, Jarmeryk, from Wikimedia Commons.

The study, led by Alessandro Achilli, of the Dipartimento di Biologia Cellulare e Ambientale, at the Università di Perugia, in Perugia, Italy, determined that the common ancestral mare to all living horses trotted the earth between 130,000 and 160,000 years ago, with a date of approximately 140,000 years being most likely.  More importantly, the study also identified 18 major clusters of genes called haplogroups, that were involved in the domestication of horses.

Torroni and his colleagues examined 83 modern horse genomes from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.  While the generalities of horse domestication are broadly understood, the specifics of time and location are not.  This study sheds significant light on these aspects of the horse’s natural history.

The study indicates that horses were domesticated over a broad area of Eurasia with multiple incidents of domestication occurring at different times.  This differs from many other domestic animals, such as cattle and sheep, which were domesticated from a handful of animals at very specific locations and then spread through trade and capture.  At least one of these domestication events took place in Europe, with Iberia being a possible location for it.

Horses have an extended and close relationship with humans.  They have played a major role in human history.  Horses were widely used in warfare until the end of World War I, and were still used to some extent even in World War II.  In civilian use, millions of horses were engaged for transportation and to haul goods until the 1920s, when they were largely replaced by trucks and automobiles.  They were still a common sight on many American roads until the 1940s.

In addition to its general scientific interest, the paper points out that the results of the study can also be used to classify fossil horse remains, identifying where they belong on the horse family tree; better define and understand modern horse breeds and their ancestry; and evaluate the role of maternal ancestry in racehorse performance.

A 30,000 year old rock painting from Bhimbetka in north central India, showing a man riding a horse. This image comes from Wiki Commons and is used under the GNU Free Documentation License

The team, consisting of scientists from the University of British Columbia in Canada and the University of South Bohemia, in the Czech Republic, published their findings in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), an American publication.

Chromera is a symbiont found inside corals. While it has a compartment (called a plastid) used to perform photosynthesis like the dinoflalgellate algae that causes red tide (as well as photosynthesis in plants), Chromera is closely related to apicomplexan parasites, which include malaria.  This discovery, first published in the journal Nature in 2008, gave researchers the idea that the algae and the parasites might be related and that the Chromera was the connection.

The scientists sequenced the genome of Chromera and were able to show for the first time, how the two are connected evolutionarily.

In recent interviews, the scientists said that they hope the knowledge gained by their research will not only advance basic scientific knowledge, but will also open the way for treatments for diseases such as malaria.

The original PNAS article is available here.

Working with funding by the UK Highways Agency, as part of a study commissioned by Oxford Archaeology, the University of Southampton’s Dr Francis Wenban-Smith discovered two ancient flints at the juncture of the M25 and A2 roads near Dartford, in Kent.  The flints were waste flakes from the manufacture of unknown tools, which would almost certainly have been used to cut up dead animals.  Tests on the sediments in which the flints were buried showed that they date from around 100,000 years ago, proving Neanderthals were living in Britain at the time, even though the country had been assumed by scientists to be uninhabited during that period.

The island was occupied by early pre-Neanderthals, who were there before the last ice age, but were forced south by glaciation sometime around 200,000 year ago.  When the climate warmed up again, between 130,000 and 110,000 years ago, they couldn’t return because, similar to the present day, the sea-level in the English Channel was raised, blocking their path, or so scientists believed.  This discovery shows that they somehow returned earlier than the 60,000 years ago, that previous evidence suggested.

This piece was derived from an article by the University of Southampton (2010, June 1). “Neanderthals walked into frozen Britain 40,000 years earlier than first thought, evidence shows.” ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 1, 2010, from the following URL:
http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2010/06/100601124124.htm.

A reconstruction of Jeyawati rugoculus a basal Hadrosaur that lived 80 to 65 million years ago (Image Credit: Lukas Panzarin)

A team of scientists have identified bones unearthed in 1996, as a new species of Hadrosaur that lived between 80 and 65 million years ago.  Publishing their findings in the May edition of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, they have named their find Jeyawati rugoculus.  The name derives from two Zuni Indian words that mean grinding-mouth wrinkle-eye.

According to the researchers, J. rugoculus appears to be basal to the line of hadrosaurs.  Scientists believe that the animal walked mostly on all four legs, but that it could rear up on two legs when the need arose.

The bones are now located at the Arizona Museum of Natural History, where specimens of other dinosaurs uncovered in this region are also located.

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) the father of modern genetics

One of the most important manuscripts in modern science, long thought lost, has resurfaced in the middle of an ownership dispute.

The original manuscript of Gregor Mendel’s pea-breeding experiments, that allowed him to deduce the laws of heredity, thereby laying the foundations of modern genetics, has turned up in Germany after being missing for more than 50 years.

At the time it was published, Mendel was an Augustinian monk in the Abbey of St. Thomas, in the Austro-Hungarian city of Brünn, now Brno in the Czech Republic.

The importance of Mendel’s work was unrecognized by the international scientific community until 1900 (16 years after Mendel’s death).  The was due mostly to the fact that it was published in the rather obscure Journal of the Brünn Natural History Society.

Once discovered, however, it quickly became one of the most important articles in modern science.  This was because it was the first publised article to describe in detail how genetics operated, even though Mendel (and the rest of the world for that matter) knew nothing about DNA or other elements of genetics.  Indeed, it was Mendel’s paper that set the world on the road to discovering the whole of genetic theory.  In addition, Mendel’s experiment is often cited as one of the most elegant scientific experiments in history.

In an article published on Monday (June 31) in The New York Times, writer Nicholas Wade describes what happened to the orignal manuscript after it was published 1865.  According to Wade, the manuscript, the title of which translates into English as Experiments on Plant Hybridization, has been through a lot in the last 145 years.  It languished in the Brünn Natural History Society’s library until 1911, when it was discarded.  Saved from the trash by a local high school teacher, it was returned to the society’s files.  During World War II, a German botany professor (apparently part of the occupying force, who was in chage of the library) keep it in his briefcase.  Afterward, when Soviet forces occupied the area, it disappeared and was presumed destroyed.  Only in 1988 did it resurace, in the hands of a descendent of Mendel’s, who is also an Augustinian monk.  Since then, there have been competing claims to its ownership, with the monk’s order threatening to throw him out and even the German government getting involved.

For the complete story and the details of  the ownership controversy, please see the NY Times article, here.

The discovery was made by two Canadian scientists, Anthony Russell (a biologist for the University of Calgary), and Michael Ryan (an adjunct professor at Carleton University, as well as the head of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History).  The new dinosaur is scheduled to be described in the book New Perspectives on Horned Dinosaurs:  The Royal Tyrrell Museum Ceratopsian Symposium, edited by Michael J. Ryan, Brenda J. Chinnery-Allgeier, and David A. Eberth.  The book is being published by Indiana University Press, and is scheduled for release on June 17, 2010.

The new dinosaur was named for the Medusa of Greek myth, because of the snake-like horns that protrude from its massive bone crest.  It’s species name comes from Loki, the Norse god of mischief, because it was such a tricky dinosaur to identify.  According to Ryan, speaking in the Canada.com interview, it required years of study to finally identify the remains as that of a new species.  This was, in part, because the remains were part of a bone bed, a collection of disarticulated bones grouped together by the force of water or other natural activities.

 According to Ryan, his team at first thought they had found an Albertaceratops, a very similar and closely related genus of ceratopsian.  It did not help, according to Ryan, that he had earlier found one nearby.

Due to copyright concerns, I have not included an image of Medusaceratops lokii.  To see one, follow the link to the Canada.com article.