The first ancestors of giant pandas probably lived in Europe

27 October 2017

By Jasmin Fox-Skelly

A bear very similar to a panda lived in what’s now Hungary 10 million years ago. The creature ate a similar diet to modern giant pandas, suggesting their unusual bamboo-chewing lifestyle has survived through evolutionary time. The finding also adds to the evidence that pandas originated in Europe, not Asia.

The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) is only found in forested mountain ranges in central China. It famously eats little but indigestible bamboo, despite having the digestive system of a carnivore, and is one of the world’s most iconic vulnerable species. This black-and-white bear is the only surviving member of the Ailuropodinae subfamily, part of the larger Ursidae family.

Nobody really knows how the giant panda evolved. Few fossils of its relatives have been found, so its lineage is almost as hotly debated as that of humans.

Now palaeoanthropologist David Begun at the University of Toronto in Canada has found a set of fossil teeth in the town of Rudabánya, Hungary. The site previously yielded the remains of an ancient great ape called Rudapithecus, a possible ancestor of African great apes and humans.

Begun was looking for ancient hominid bones when he spotted the teeth trapped beneath a rhino’s shoulder blade. The teeth are 10 million years old, placing them in the late Miocene.

Suspecting they belonged to a panda, based on their shape, Begun enlisted the help of Louis de Bonis at the University of Poitiers in France and Juan Abella at the State University Santa Elena Peninsula in Ecuador.

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Americans tend to think about wildlife like their ancestors did

October 15, 2015 by Rob Novak

Researchers from Colorado State University and The Ohio State University have found evidence that we think about wildlife like our ancestors did.

More specifically, the strength of Americans' "domination" wildlife values, or the belief that nature should be conquered and the natural environment used for the benefit of humans, can be traced to the country from which their ancestors migrated.

Values are shifting

At the same time, researchers demonstrated that, overall, Americans' values toward wildlife are shifting from a domination view to the view that wildlife deserves treatment equal to humans. Researchers call this line of thought about wildlife "mutualism."

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Ancient Elephants Grazed Before They Had Teeth for It

Ancient elephants switched from eating primarily leaves and shrubs to feeding on grass several million years before their teeth were fully adapted for grazing, according to a new study.

The findings indicate that as the ancestors to modern elephants evolved, anatomical changes significantly lagged behind habitat and behavioral adaptations, said Adrian Lister, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, England.

"It only makes sense that behavior is a powerful driver of evolution, and that by taking the behavioral step to eat grass, it imposes the selection pressure for the right kind of teeth," Lister told LiveScience. "The idea has been around for around 100 years, but there have been few demonstrated examples. This is the first example from the fossil record."

Continued

The lost cousins of Homo sapiens in Asia and the South Pacific

By Paige Minteer

The evolution of humans is the result of a number of speciation events that have built upon one another to create the modern-day human species: Homo sapiens. Humans are believed to have evolved from a line of ancestors dating millions of years ago and originating in Africa. The subsequent Homo sapien ancestors dispersed across Europe and Asia. Of particular note are the “Homo denisova“, of which fragments were found in Siberia, and Homo floresiensis, of which fragments have been found in Flores, Indonesia. Both of these species are of particular relevance to the Southeast Asian and Pacific Island areas because of their continued presence in the DNA of modern humans living there.

“Homo denisova” is considered to be a bridge species between the Neanderthal ancestors and the Homo sapiens species. They are said to have bred with modern humans, and potentially Neanderthals, producing hybrid people. “Homo denisova” are assumed to have had dark skin, brown eyes and brown hair. The teeth are larger than that of which Neanderthals and modern humans have, but more evidence is needed to further extrapolate the size and looks of this species (Hawks 2013). The only remnants of the “Homo denisova” species that have been found are a small toe bone fragment and two molars. This has been enough, however, to create a basic genomic sequence of the species. From this, genome researchers have traced gene markers to help determine the migration patterns of the species. By analyzing the gene flow of various generations of people in various areas in Eastern Europe, Asia and the South Pacific, researchers have been able to decipher the movement of the “Homo denisova”. The origin of this species, however, is debated. While original estimates of the age of the bones make the species too old to be a shoot-off of the H. heidelbergensis species, some argue that it could be a very early speciation from this original species. Others believe “H. denisova” could bring to light a non-erectus evolutionary line. This differentiated evolutionary line would be a large branch-off compared to the branching depicted in current theories of human evolution.

Continued:  http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/2013/06/14/homo-denisova-and-homo-floresiensis-in-asia-and-the-south-pacific/

How Whales' Ancestors Left Land Behind

Wynne Parry, LiveScience Contributor

Date: 20 March 2013 Time: 06:26 PM ET

NEW YORK — By moving into the water full-time, the ancestors of whales paved the way for their descendants to become behemoths, largely free from gravity's constraints. Today, the blue whale is the largest animal ever to live.

But even before the move, this lineage was setting size records. One ancient cousin to modern whales and hippos, called Andrewsarchus mongoliensis, ranks as the largest mammal known to have stalked the land as a predator. A skull from this creature — the only fossil found so far from this beast — greets visitors on their way into a new exhibit on whales here at the American Museum of Natural History.

"It's odd to have a big predator in this hoofed plant-eating mammal group," said John Flynn, co-curator of the exhibit, referring to the group to which whales and the now-extinctAndrewsarchus belonged. "But if you think about it, some of the other relatives like pigs and peccaries are pretty ferocious and will eat just about anything."

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/28075-how-whales-ancestors-left-land.html

Distant Human Ancestor Had Shark Head

Peer far enough back in the human family lineage, and you'll find a fishy ancestor that looked surprisingly like a shark.

In fact, this now-extinct fish was among the first to split from sharks, whose bones are made of cartilage, to evolve into a line of tough-boned species that includes everything from bony fish to human beings. A new analysis finds that this controversial class of animals was more shark-like than expected.

"The common ancestors of all jawed vertebrates today organized their heads in a way that resembled sharks," study researcher John Finarelli, a vertebrate biologist at University College, Dublin, said in a statement. "Given what we now know about the interrelatedness of early fishes, these results tell us that while sharks retained these features, bony fishes moved away from such conditions."

Finarelli and his colleagues examined a fish called Acanthodes bronni, part of the acanthodian group of fish, which included the earliest vertebrate animals with jaws. A. bronni lived about 290 million years ago, during the Paleozoic period. The shark family and the bony fish families split about 460 million years ago. 


A. bronni left few traces besides its fossil scales and fin spines. But a few fossilized, fragmented skulls survived millions of years in the ground and now reside in museum collections. The researchers made silicone rubber casts of these fossils in order to reconstruct the anatomy of the fish's heads.


Read on:  http://www.livescience.com/20937-fishy-human-ancestor-shark.html

Today's Environment Influences Behavior Generations Later: Chemical Exposure Raises Descendants' Sensitivity to Stress

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2012) — Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Washington State University have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound generations earlier.

The findings, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, put a new twist on the notions of nature and nurture, with broad implications for how certain behavioral tendencies might be inherited.

The researchers -- David Crews at Texas , Michael Skinner at Washington State and colleagues -- exposed gestating female rats to vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable fungicide known to disrupt hormones and have effects across generations of animals. The researchers then put the rats' third generation of offspring through a variety of behavioral tests and found they were more anxious, more sensitive to stress, and had greater activity in stress-related regions of the brain than descendants of unexposed rats.

"We are now in the third human generation since the start of the chemical revolution, since humans have been exposed to these kinds of toxins," says Crews. "This is the animal model of that."

"The ancestral exposure of your great grandmother alters your brain development to then respond to stress differently," says Skinner. "We did not know a stress response could be programmed by your ancestors' environmental exposures."

Continued: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120521163853.htm

Ancient virus DNA thrives in us

By David ShukmanScience editor, BBC News

Traces of ancient viruses which infected our ancestors millions of years ago are more widespread in us than previously thought.

A study shows how extensively viruses from as far back as the dinosaur era still thrive in our genetic material.

It sheds light on the origins of a big proportion of our genetic material, much of which is still not understood.

The scientists investigated the genomes of 38 mammals including humans, mice, rats, elephants and dolphins.

The research was carried out at Oxford University, the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Centre in New York and the Rega Institute in Belgium.

It is reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of the viruses was found to have invaded the genome of a common ancestor around 100 million years ago with its remnants discovered in almost every mammal in the study.

Another infected an early primate with the result that it was found in apes, humans and other primates as well.

The work established that many of these viruses lost the ability to transfer from one cell to another.

Instead they evolved to stay within their host cell where they have profilerated very effectively - spending their entire life cycle within the cell.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17809503