Great Slave Lake fish may be new species

Monday, July 27, 2009 6:23 PM CT

A fish biologist in the Northwest Territories says he may have found an entirely new species of cisco in Great Slave Lake.

Paul Vecsei of Golder Associates said he and some federal government researchers were at the Sub Islands near Yellowknife in October, pulling up nets, when they hauled up the unusual-looking cisco with large fins, enormous eyes high up on its head and an upturned mouth.

The male fish, 27.8 centimetres in length, has been named Coregonus googelii, or the "googly-eyed cisco."

"It had enormous eyes for the size of the individual. It had eyes that were unlike other cisco or fish in general," Vecsei, whose company is based in Yellowknife, told CBC News in an interview that aired Monday.

"The eyes are positioned very high, so when you look at it from a dorsal view, the eyes are almost joining at the top and you have just a narrow separation."

Vecsei said researchers are trying to determine if the fish is a relic of a very old species, a newly-evolved species, or just a variation of cisco that's specific to the Sub Islands.

"At the time, I frankly didn't even consider that maybe we discovered something," he said of the find.

"Rather, I thought it's just some of the lesser-known species that exist elsewhere, and we thought it just may look a little different here."

New and different species?

Already common in Great Slave Lake, ciscos can range from tiny fish that live in fast-flowing rivers, to fish as large as whitefish that live in deep lakes.

After checking with other fish experts across Canada, Vecsei realized what he had found was new and different.

But whether it's a separate species is up for debate, said Jim Reist, head of Arctic fish ecology with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Winnipeg.

"What one individual may conclude and defend and say, 'This is the way the world is,' another individual working in the same area and on the same material may come up with a differing opinion," he said.

Reist said the definition of what constitutes a new species can change on a case-by-case basis.

He added that the line between cisco species is blurry and especially difficult to establish in Canada's North, where plants and animals have only been around since the last Ice Age and continue to evolve today.

The decision on whether Coregonus googelii should be a new species will come down to a professional judgment call, Reist said. Even after that call is made, he said the matter could remain up for debate.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2009/07/27/nwt-cisco.html

Fishing 12-year-old nets Ice Age bone in Embarras River

Monday, July 27, 2009 6:34 AM CDT

By TONY REID - H&R Staff Writer

GREENUP - Josh Brandenburg went angling for a mammoth catfish and came back with a big bit of mammoth instead.

The platter-size circular bone he fished out of the Embarras River is now setting off some elephantine ripples in the scientific community. Experts from the Illinois State Museum in Springfield say the size of the bone means it belonged to one of the biggest mammoths on record from Ice Age Illinois.

The bone also has some "chatter marks" on it, which suggest it was gnawed on by a big meat-eater or maybe even hungry prehistoric humans who had just nailed the mother of all pot roasts.

Either way, Josh's find is something special. The bone is anywhere from 13,000 to 24,000 years old and came from, most likely, a woolly mammoth or another mammoth type, the mammuthus Jeffersonii, which is named for Thomas Jefferson, a major prehistoric critter fan.

But whether woolly or Jeffersonii, it was big: The expert guess is it stood anywhere from 11 to 13 feet at the shoulder, and maybe even bigger, with a weight that could tip the scales at 4 tons.

The bone is actually an "atlas vertebra," which attached the animal's massive head to its neck. "And this remains one of the largest atlas vertebrae we've seen," said Chris Widga, Ph.D., assistant curator of geology at the Illinois State Museum Research and Collections Center.

"We thought it was just a cow's pelvis or something," said Josh, 12, who was fishing in a boat with his dad, David, and brothers Zack, 13, and Alex, 16. Instead of throwing it back, though, they took it home and began trampling all over the Internet trying to find out what it was. They eventually hit on sites that identified it as an atlas bone from a mammoth, which wasn't a bad result for four hours point-and-click work with a mouse.

Josh plans to head back to the now top-secret catfishing spot, cast his rods aside and become a fisher of mammoths. "I kind of like big animals," he said. "We're going to look for more bones."

His dad and his mom, Tricia, were surprised to discover that mammoth bones can command prices into the hundreds and even many hundreds of dollars. But Josh and the family decided the right thing to do was hand their atlas over to the Illinois State Museum and bask in the glory of a grateful science along with official recognition that the find is what they thought it was.

"I didn't want my boy accused of being nuts because he claims to have found this cool mammoth bone, but nobody believed him," said Dad, who works in highway maintenance for the state of Illinois. "Now this find has got all my kids thinking and researching and using their brains instead of just spending the summer hanging out of a tree or something. You got kids? You know what I mean. Finding this bone has been pretty neat for us."

Jeffrey Saunders, Ph.D., who also works in the Illinois State Museum's Research and Collections Center and has a mammoth job description - quaternary vertebrate paleontology curator and chairman, geology section - said Josh Brandenburg's name will live forever.

"He has received a certificate of appreciation from the Illinois State Museum, suitable for framing, and we do everything we can to praise him," Saunders said. "His name will be forever associated with that bone as the finder."

Saunders, who has Beanie Baby mammoths sitting on his computer monitor and whose English family name features three elephants in its coat of arms, has a soft spot for mammoths. He suspects they were like modern-day elephants in their behavior: intelligent and moving around in matriarchal family units and willing to risk it all to protect each other.

He says baby mammoth mummies dug out of the permafrost of Siberia have given even scientists aw-shucks moments. "Three feet tall, three feet long, with a long little trunk and cute little ears," he said. "You see just how cute and compelling these mammoths were."

But just like their dinosaur predecessors, Mother Nature finally drew a line under them, and all that remains of their extinct species are the remains they left to a puzzled posterity. "Just what did happen to them?" Saunders asks. "That is the $64,000 question."

http://www.herald-review.com/articles/2009/07/28/news/local/1042725.txt

Bird fossils found in Kalaeloa, Hawaii

By David Waite
Advertiser Staff Writer

Workers restoring wildlife habitat areas on land that was part of the former Barbers Point Naval Air Station have uncovered a number of fossilized bird bones, including those of several extinct species, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The unexpected discovery will allow scientists to learn more about the ancient creatures that once were found throughout the Pearl Harbor Wildlife Refuge-Kalaeloa Unit, officials said.

The fossilized bird bones were found while scientists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were restoring several small tidal pools, known as anchialine pools. Over the past century, the pools had been filled in with rubble, rocks and debris by agricultural, military, residential and commercial activities. The discovery of the fossils provides a more complete picture of the natural bird diversity of a coastal dryland forest on O'ahu.

"These fossils of extinct birds give us a glimpse of an earlier time on O'ahu when the lowlands teemed with native birds, insects, and plants," said Helen James, research zoologist and curator of birds for the Smithsonian Institution.

"To me, it is excellent news that important fossil sites can still be discovered on an island that has experienced so much economic development," James said in a news release about the fossil find. "Lamentably the birds cannot be brought back to life, but by studying their bones we at least gain an appreciation of O'ahu's rich natural heritage."

The fossilized bones discovered so far are those of an extinct hawk, long-legged owl, Hawaiian sea eagle, petrel, two species of crow, Hawaiian finches, Hawaiian honeyeaters, and the moa nalo (a turkey-sized, flightless gooselike duck that was the largest of the native Hawaiian birds). Further work is needed to confirm the identification of each species.

The ages of the fossilized bones are unknown at this time and require further testing using radiocarbon analysis. Avian bones found at similar sites on the 'Ewa Plain date back from 1,000 to 8,000 years ago, the scientists said.

"The discovery of these ancient bird bones, including several species now extinct and maybe even new species not known before, is a great reminder of the truly unique history and wonderful diversity of Hawai'i's birds and the need to protect what is still left," David Ellis, refuge manager for the O'ahu National Wildlife Refuge Complex, said in the news release.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with the Smithsonian Institution and Bishop Museum to properly clean, store, and preserve the bones. The Smithsonian is also providing technical assistance to Bishop Museum and the Fish and Wildlife Service to properly identify and catalog the recently discovered fossils. Interest is high among all involved to continue with a more in-depth paleontological study of the area but further work is dependent on the availability of funding.

The Kalaeloa Unit was added to the National Wild- life Refuge System in 2001 to protect native plants, including two endangered species: the 'akoko and the 'Ewa hina hina. Kalaeloa is an area of ancient raised limestone coral reef and has the last remaining coastal dryland plant communities that were once widespread throughout the 'Ewa Plain.

In January 2008, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began restoring 12 anchialine pools on the Kalaeloa Unit. While removing the debris, Fish and Wildlife Service personnel began to encounter the fossilized bones — some never before seen.

http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090728/NEWS01/907280321/Bird+fossils+found+in+Kalaeloa

Extinct rodent species discovered

Right: Lower incisor

28 July 2009 Plataforma SINC

An international team of scientists has discovered an extinct rodent species, based on fossil tooth remains found in Alborache, Valencia. Eomyops noeliae, from the Eomyidae family, represents the oldest find within this genus in the world

The small number of fossils found has prevented the scientists from the University of Valencia (UV), who have led this research study, from being able to gain a full picture of this "new" rodent. However, they have been able to prove - on the basis of just the teeth, the only fossil remains discovered - that Eomyops noeliae was morphologically and biometrically different from other rodents of the Eomyops genus. The new species provides valuable evolutionary, biostratigraphic and paleoenvironmental information related to this rodent, which was of average size within the group.

"Until now, the Eomyops genus was made up of a group of small species and one large one, but no intermediately- sized kinds such as Eomyops noeliae had been found", Francisco Javier Ruiz-Sánchez, lead author of the study published in the French journal Comptes Rendus Palevol and a researcher in the UV's Department of Geology, tells SINC.

The palaeontologists have also confirmed the age of the find. "The fossils found in the Morteral 20A deposit in Valencia show that this is the oldest species within the genus known in the world with absolute certainty", points out Ruiz-Sánchez. According to this data, Eomyops noeliae would have lived during the Aragonese period "perhaps between the Lower and Middle Miocene (around 16 million years ago)", underscores the researcher.

The rodent's wet environment

The varied fauna of micro-mammals and the new species found in the Valencian deposit provide information about the environmental conditions in which these animals would have lived at the time. "The rodent taxa found show evidence that the environment was very wet", says Ruiz-Sánchez, even though the full study on all the fossil rodent remains, begun with this new eomyid, has still not been completed.

According to the study, the environment was "relatively thickly wooded, and the climate was wet", although other factors such as temperature have not yet been defined.

The biogeographical data also show that Eomyops noeliae lived throughout the east of the Iberian Peninsula during the Lower-Middle Miocene. This has been confirmed from the Eomyops species remains excavated from the "most recent" Morteral 22 deposit, which is very close to Morteral 20A.

Ruiz-Sánchez says the finds of this species' teeth in deposit strata separated by just a few metres show that "how this species survived in the east of the peninsula over a specific time period that is currently hard to define, but which must have gone on for several tens of thousands of years".

http://plataformasinc.es/index.php/esl/Noticias/Descubren-una-especie-extinta-de-roedor

* Full bibliographic information
Ruiz-Sánchez, Francisco Javier; Lázaro Calatayud, Belén; Freudenthal, Matthijs. "Eomyops noeliae sp nov., a new Eomyidae (Mammalia, Rodentia) from the Aragonian of Spain" Comptes Rendus Palevol 8(4): 375-384 mayo-junio de 2009.

http://www.physorg.com/news167992052.html