Abraham Lincoln's Compassion for Animals

February 18, 2008

Today we celebrate February birthday boys George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but the sixteenth U.S. president, Lincoln, merits special Born Animal honors. What you might not have read in your history books is that he loved animals and extended tremendous compassion towards them throughout his lifetime. When first lady Mary Tood Lincoln was asked if her husband had a hobby, she replied, "Cats." In fact, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior, as the Civil War was drawing to a close, President Lincoln stumbled upon three orphaned kittens in a telegraph hut. He placed them on his lap and inquired about their mother. When told she had died, he helped to find the kittens a good home.

Lincoln loved dogs too. The National Park Service says that the Lincoln family pooch, a mixed, floppy-eared canine with a yellow coat named Fido, freaked out during the noise and hubbub following Lincoln's 1860 presidential victory. Worried about his welfare, the newly elected president gave the dog to two boys—John and Frank Roll—with personal instructions that they should let Fido inside whenever he scratched at the front door, never scold him for having muddy paws and feed him should Fido come to the dinner table.

President Lincoln had pet goats and rabbits as well. His son, Tad, even took a shine to a turkey named "Tom" that the family was supposed to eat for Thanksgiving. Lincoln interrupted a cabinet meeting to spare Tom's life, beginning an American presidential tradition still observed today for Thanksgiving.

It's fitting that Lincoln's beloved horse, "Old Bob," took center stage in the funeral procession following the president's tragic assassination. A pair of boots, placed backwards in the stirrups, represented the now rider-less horse that marched along the procession route.

Rabbits Mysteriously Vanish from Yellowstone

February 15, 2008

The Wildlife Conservation Society has just announced that jack rabbits have mysteriously disappeared from Yellowstone Park, specifically the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. No one knows why.

I can only wonder how the loss has affected the coyotes, juvenile elk and pronghorns from the region that used to depend on the rabbits for food. Rabbits in their natural habitat also eat weeds, helping to keep the plant ecosystem in order, as well as seeds, which promotes later plant growth. It's frightening to think that this animal so symbolic of spring and bounty has simply vanished from what used to be such a vibrant ecosystem.

SuperCroc and His Flesh-Eating Dinosaur Neighbors

If one of your early human ancestors wandered into what is now the Saharan Desert 110 million years ago, he might have encountered Sarcosuchus, better known as SuperCroc. At 40 feet long and weighing 80 tons, SuperCroc would have been hard to ignore.

This week we learned that SuperCroc lived alongside two ferocious, meat-loving dinosaurs. First, there was short-snouted Kryptops palaios, or “Old Hidden Face," so named for a horny covering that appeared all over its face. The University of Bristol's Stephen Brusatte affectionately compared it to “a fast two-legged hyena gnawing and pulling apart a carcass." With armored jaws and loads of sharp little teeth, it gobbled guts and gnawed on carcasses. (Dino images by Todd Marshall, courtesy of Project Exploration.)

A contemporary of these two was Eocarcharia dinops, or “Fierce-eyed Dawn Shark,” with blade-shaped teeth and a prominent bony eyebrow. Unlike Kryptops, it could disable live prey and sever body parts. Its swollen bony brow gave it a menacing glare at all times.

SuperCroc, Old Hidden Face and Fierce-Eyed Dawn Hawk were pretty evenly matched, so it's likely they just barely tolerated each other as they passed in Gondwana. But what often happened to gigantic plant-eaters like Nigersaurus, which also shared space with these rather unfriendly-looking neighbors? Here's the answer...

Feel the Love with Elephant Seals

February 14, 2008

Love is in the air this Valentine's Day along the Northern California coast. As I type to you, the raging hormones of elephant seals are resulting in pairings galore. Acting as cupid, nature is driving the passion. For a month now, females have been nursing their pups on the beach, so the females need to return to the Pacific Ocean to feed. Like a war torn couple, the male is driven to mate just one last time before the separation.

Another kind of love, that between mother and child, is also evident. Not all of the pups have been weaned. Females with youngsters that still need motherly care are staying put.

The below footage, shot mere hours ago by Jane Ellen Stevens, principal investigator and editorial director of Tagging of Pacific Predators, shows the whole love spectrum.

World's First Known Bat Found

February 13, 2008

It's a day for firsts, what with the gorilla photo in the earlier post, and now the news that Nancy Simmons and her colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History have discovered the world's most primitive bat. It had fully developed wings and was capable of powered flight, but did not possess echolocation, as today's bats do. Echolocation, therefore, must be an evolved skill that emerged much later.

The bat, Onychonycteris finneyi, was an agile climber that could hang from trees with ease. Unlike today's species, it had claws on all of its digits and its limbs were like those of sloths and gibbons. This is just a guess, but I bet the mammal started off leaping from tree to tree for food before evolving its short wings. Better flight skills emerged in bats as the years went on.

The find answers the longstanding question among bat experts, "Which came first in bats, flight or echolocation?" Now they know the answer and you do too.

It isn't everyday we get to see the remains of a 52-million-year-old bat. Have a look at the very well preserved fossil.

Gorilla Romance Captured in Photo

The first known photograph of gorillas wooing each other face to face has just been released by scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Previously it was thought that western gorillas did not mate in such a manner. The back of the female, nicknamed Leah, discretely hides the mating goings on in the image.

You might know Leah, as she gained gorilla fame in 2005 when researchers spotted her using a stick to test water depth. Tool use of this nature previously hadn't been reported among western gorillas. So here is a female that probably works all day and deserves a little affectionate attention when the time is right.

Habitat loss, illegal hunting and disease, such as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, have reduced western gorilla populations by 60 percent in recent years. The image, therefore, is bittersweet. In future, such moments may rarely, if ever, be witnessed in the wild again. Credit for the photo goes to Thomas Breuer.

Hang Out with Elephant Seals at Dawn

February 12, 2008

TOPP, which stands for Tagging of Pacific Predators, has had its scientists and staff busily removing satellite tags from elephant seals beached in Northern California. As principal investigator and editorial director Jane Ellen Stevens said in a recent TOPP blog, "to (the seals) we might as well be furniture—they don't care about us at all." By that she means the blubbery marine mammals paid little attention to the human interlopers.

Look how close Jane and the other researchers got, and imagine what it would be like to lounge on the beach, just hanging out with elephant seals. You might need earplugs...

Mini Pterodactyl Comes to Life in Images

One of the smallest pterodactyls ever known was recently unearthed by paleontologists working in China. Please read our full report here.

Usually images of excavated fossils show just a jumble of bones that only might mean something to a trained eye. In this case, however, the toothless pterodactyl tyke comes through with remarkable clarity.

The yellow matter, which looks sort of orange in the above, might even be decomposed tissue or the remains of the flying reptile's last meal. Alexander Kellner, one of the paleontologists, told me that he hopes it's the pterosaur's last meal, as that would tell a whole ecological food chain story in one slab of rock.

Check out this reconstruction of the new species, Nemicolopterus crypticus. Credit goes to Michael Skrepnickaption.

And here's another spectacular recreation, by Chuang Zhao. It ran with the Discovery News story. Thanks to Xiaolin Wang, one of the paleontologists who worked on the project, for sending it.

See A Water Shrew Hunt In Slow and Split Second Motion

February 10, 2008

Water shrews live in overdrive, according to a recent Vanderbilt University story. They have such high metabolisms that they must eat more than their total body weight daily. If they don't, they could starve to death in just a half day's time. Food for them primarily consists of small fish and aquatic insects, which they grab with their toothy little mouths. Most hunting occurs at night.

Since they catch prey and eat it in split second time underwater in the dark, scientists had to put the water shrews in a special aquarium and film them using a high speed infrared video camera. In the below you'll see how the minuscule mammals use their whiskers to detect the shapes of prey, sniff potential edibles by exhaling water bubbles that they inhale again and how they pay attention to water movements caused by nearby swimmers. You'll see two experiments in both slow motion and in real time. Don't blink, or else you'll miss the real time footage.

Captive Great White Feeds

February 08, 2008

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has revolutionized the way that great white sharks are kept in captivity. Previously, few other aquariums were able to do this with much success. Since the fearsome fish needs its space, and will actually eat its aquarium mates, the MBA only houses individual great whites for a certain period of time before releasing them back into the wild. The latest release occurred just a few days ago and was chronicled here.

Staffers must keep their distance when feeding great whites, which like to consume sushi-grade fish. The sharks might develop a taste for human arm, however, should they ever tire of seafood. Here's how scientists and staff manage to keep their toothy charges satiated.

Once returned to the wild, great white sharks display their unbelievable skills as ocean predators, as the below demonstrates.