Gall wasps and oak trees: 30 million years of stability

Gall wasps are so named because they inject chemicals into trees that create abnormal growth patterns (galls) that shelter the wasps' own developing larvae. In this cool recent study, paleontologists looked at the fossil record (over 2,900 fossil leaves from the western U.S., with the oldest about 45 million years old) in order to see how stable the relationship is between gall wasps and their preferred host trees.  This is possible because the galls are sometimes preserved in the fossil record. It turns out that galls associated with Cynipini wasps only occur on the leaves of just two types of oak trees, and that the association remains stable over about 30 million years: An interesting case of stability in an ecological relationship! This raises some interesting evolutionary questions about why parasites do (or in this case, don't) shift their hosts.

E.H. Leckey and D. H. Smith, "Host fidelity over geologic time: restricted use of oaks by oak gall wasps," Journal of Paleontology, vol. 89, no. 2. (March 2015), 236-244. 

Ancient Megafauna Found at OSU

Construction workers expanding Oregon State University's football stadium in Corvallis, Oregon have dug up what appear to be mammoth, bison, and camel fossils dating to the early Holocene. What a boon for OSU's archaeology students! Read about it here.

Dick Levins Dies...

Richard "Dick" Levins, a scientist who had a profound and encouraging impact on the philosophy of biology, passed away on the 19th of January. There is a nice reflection on him, focusing on his anti-deterministic and dialectical focus, here
.

Evidence of violence around 10,000 years ago

New evidence from Kenya suggests that people were killing each other around 10,000 years ago. Whether this should be described as war is contested. See the article published in Nature here. The New York Times reports the story here.

Applying Phylogenetic Analyses to Fairytales?

Paleontologists and 'neontologists' (those rather boring biologists who study living animals) often use phylogenetic methods to trace the ancestry of the critters they study. These same methods can also be applied to languages and - it turns out - fairytales. We at Extinct have no idea about the trustworthiness or otherwise of the methods for this application, but the results are pretty fascinating (suggesting at least one piece of folk-lore has survived from the bronze-age!).

Here's the original study,

And here's a nice summary.

Enjoy Ranking Dinosaurs? Here's the survey for you...

Here at Extinct we very much approve of favorite-dinosaur-ranking, and it looks like over at A Dinosaur a Day they're taking this to a new level. Here's the survey: http://a-dinosaur-a-day.com/post/137382419960/a-very-long-but-very-important-survey

Looking forwards to the results!

That's not a crocodile, THIS is a crocodile...

To file away under 'really big extinct things', they've just published findings on a 10 meter long cretaceous crocodile. Interestingly, the article also involves a bit of speculation about the nature of the extinction event separating the Jurassic and the Cretaceous...

Here's a nice article in the Washington Post

And here's the paper...

Fresh out of Alberta: New Research on Dinosaur Babies

Back in 2010, the remarkably complete remains of a juvenile Chasmosaurus was found in Dinosaur Park in Alberta, and a paper has just come out describing it, complete with a new reconstruction made by the authors and Michael Skrepnick (the paleoartist who lent us his wonderful Diplodocus for our cover art!).

What makes the find exciting is the amount of detail we can now have about a ceratopsid while it grows. There's been a recent trend in dinosaur paleobiology to emphasize the amount of anatomical (and thus perhaps physiological, behavioral and ecological) changes that happen during the animal's life - and so getting a good look at dinosaurs during growth is imperative. Also, baby dinosaurs!

See here for the news item (and reconstruction!)

Here's the journal article

Wherein 5 (FIVE!) Papers About Historical Reconstruction are Published Simultaneously!

Our own Adrian Currie has edited a special section of Studies in HPS, "Scientific Knowledge of the Deep Past", featuring Maureen O'Malley, Lindell Bromham, and our own Derek Turner, here. What's more, for the next 50 days you can download each paper FOR FREE, here are the papers in the collection and links to your free copy!

Adrian & Derek's Introduction: Scientific Knowledge of the Deep Past

Derek Turner's A Second Look at the Color of Dinosaurs

Lindell Bromham's Testing Hypotheses in Macroevolution

Maureen O'Malley's Histories of Molecules: Reconciling the Past

Adrian Currie's Ethnographic Analogy, the Comparative Method, and Archaeological Special Pleading

 

 

 

Dirty dancing

A research team led by Martin Lockley and Karen Houck of the University of Colorado Denver have found new evidence for courtship behavior in theropod dinosaurs. According to Lockley et al, "scraping" traces associated with theropod footprints are morphologically similar to those left by modern ground-nesting birds in leks. If the behavior was indeed similar, then we can add courtship displays to the ever-growing list of similarities between avian and non-avian dinosaurs.

The relevant paper can be found here.

Patient(s) Zero of the K-Pg Event?

A paleontologist in New Jersey is looking close to home for evidence of the K-Pg event. Kenneth Lacovara of Rowan University hopes to find an assemblage that can be directly associated with the proximate cause of the non-avian dinosaurs' extinction. More at the New York Times.