Moa - The Last Big Bird

No animal has had more speculation heaped upon it than the Moa.These birds evolved around 85 million years ago on the southern Super-continent called Gondwanaland. They belonged to a group known as Ratites; the family includes Ostriches, Emus and the extinct Elephant Bird of Madagascar. Once New Zealand separated from Gondwanaland and became isolated it enabled the Moa to survive in a relatively predator free environment, filled with avian fauna, the only mammals present were three species of small bats.Recently discovered fossil evidence further seems to indicate there was a species of both Python and Crocodile which may have included Moa on the menu.This isolation enabled these birds to obtain a wide variety of sizes, from small Turkey sized species such as Euryapteryx curtus to the gigantic Dinoris giganteus which stood 4 meters tall and weighed in at 250 kilograms. All Moa species were herbivorous browsers. They ranged in habitat from the alpine regions to the coastal areas.

The main mysteries surrounding this bird is when did it become extinct, or if it is infact extinct. It has been implied the Moa was already on the decline before the human colonization commenced; evidence from Maori butchering and cooking sites show there must have been an abundance of birds, judging by the wasteful practices engaged in the butchering process. Meat from the thighs were primarily used, the remainder of the carcass was left to perish.This is rather surprising, Maori of old were very conservation conscious to ensure resources were not overtaxed. This was accomplished by oral traditionand folklore; seasons set out for hunting different species guaranteed a recovery period.Even the name Moa is somewhat of a conundrum, it does not appear among theoral traditional legends of the Maori, the term used to widely make reference to this bird was Tarepo.It seems generally accepted that the large species were supposed to have been extinct by the early 1800's, and if not already extinct by then, they had become extremely scarce. However if is plausible that some of the smaller species, neglected as a food source because of their bigger relatives may have persisted longer.The mid to late 1800's produced many reports of large birds witnessed inisolated areas of bush; this was an era of exploration, regions were being opened up for settlement. Many reports focused on the South Island, as gold prospectors and surveyors pushed into the isolated interior areas.One of the most curious reports of this period includes a confrontation between a sheep dog and a Moa, the Moa turned on the dog after being harassed, once the dog backed off, the Moa was witnessed to bob its headup and down in the direction of the dog in what seemed to be a possible threat posture.

1931 and 1960 saw further reports of large birds in the bush of the South Island, in 1989 a pair of birds were observed by trampers, once more in the South Island.All accounts seemed to involve the large species of Moa.In 1990 there were several sightings of large Birds, in the Arthur's Pass district, and tracks were found on two occasions.The most recent sighting caught World Media attention.On January 20th 1993 three companions were tramping the Craigieburn Rangearea, Paddy Freaney, Sam Waby and Rochelle Rafferty. Mr. Waby paused at a secluded stream for a drink; Paddy Freaney's attention was drawn to a large bird which was nearby watching them. Freaney drew the attention of his associates to the bird, which then panicked and fled. Freaney chased the bird, with camera in hand, and at an approximated 35 meters got the now famous photo of the bird; he further discovered and photographed, after loosing sight of it, wet bird footprints on a rock.These pictures were shown to a Department of Conservation Officer who expressed the opinion that the bird seemed very much like Megapteryxdidinus, a sub-alpine species of moa known to have populated the South Island.

Computer analysis was performed on the photo by Canterbury University,specialists at the University expressed the view that the photograph was of a genuine large bird and not some prop stage to look like one. Deer and other four footed animals were further ruled out. To add to the weight of evidence in support of the photograph being genuine,in the following year, 1994, a physician was tramping in exactly the same area the snapshot was taken; he came across browsing damage that was consistent with what is known of Moa feeding habits. In light of the corroborating evidence the Department of Conservation made no attempt to follow up on what certainly would have been the find of thecentury.Is the Moa extinct? Perhaps in some of New Zealand's remote areas, and there are still a few,the species may still hold a tenuous grasp on existence.The sad fact is if it were to be discovered how simple it would be to conclude what was started in those Maori middens hundreds of years ago.

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Megalania

In this day and age, Australia is thought of as desert filled with eucalyptus trees and cotton plantations. The animals usually associated with this continent are koalas, kangaroo, wombats, and crocodiles, some of the largest to be found. There used to be other animals, commonly referred to as megafauna, that roamed this continent before being wiped out by plague or man. These were nightmarish versions of the creatures that we have today. Australia once held 10-foot tall kangaroos that fed on flesh rather than vegetation, and at one time had monitor lizards that dwarfed the Komodo dragon. This was megalania prisca, a reptile reaching 30 feet in length and weighing at least 1,000 pounds or more. The Komodo dragon is roughly the size of a lion, but megalania was bigger than an average dairy cow. Extinct megalania is listed with the many casualties of the Ice Age. Or is it extinct? The creature has been sighted many times in the last century, and some sightings suggest that it lives also in New Guinea.

Also believed to inhabit various parts of New Guinea, Megalania has been spotted many times throughout the years, but an equal number of skeptics maintain that the huge reptilian creature has long been extinct. Sightings have been reported as recently as the late Seventies, in which desert travelers discovered footprints in the sand, leading to apparent plaster casts of the creature's weighty impressions. Is that enough proof? We all know what thousands of plaster casts did to prove the existence of Bigfoot, don't we? Still, despite a lack of conclusive evidence, Bigfoot makes for good television. But when you're dealing with a giant lizard, that's must-see TV.

During the middle of the day, a surveyor returned to his truck. Tired, he wanted nothing more than to go home. He spied what he thought was a fallen tree near his car. Blaming his fatigue for his lack of details he climbed in his car and slammed the door. The "log" suddenly bolted away! It ended up being a lizard of 15 feet in length. Australian cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy is convinced these creatures are still alive and it is only a matter of time before one is captured or killed and brought in.

As recently as the late '70s there have been megalania sightings. In July 1979, Rex Gilroy was informed of footprints of the creature found in a recently plowed field. Across the field were 30 or so tracks from what looked like an enormous lizard. Rain had ruined most of the tracks but Gilroy was able to make a plaster cast of one that had been preserved. The footprint looked surprisingly like something that might have been made by a Megalania.

Also in 1979 a sighting of megalania arose, this time by the best possible witness. Herpetologist Frank Gordon, after conducting some field work in the Wattagan Mountains in New South Wales, returned to his vehicle. After starting his engine he saw, what he at first thought was a log, scampering off. It ended up being a lizard of some 30 feet or more in length.

Another incident includes a farmer who observed a gigantic lizard walking along one of his fields. It walked along a wire fence, so the farmer used a set of fence posts as a guide. His estimate of the beast was a length of twenty to twenty-five feet. The size corresponds with megalania.

Megalania might not be constrained only to Australia--some sightings suggest it may live in New Guinea. A French priest in the 1960's was traveling up river with a native guide in order to reach his mission. During the trip he spotted a large lizard lying on a fallen tree in the sun. He told the native to stop, but being badly frightened, the native continued the journey. The priest returned to the spot the following morning and measured the tree. It was 40 feet long, yet the lizard almost matched it.

As mentioned, the creature is not simply contained to Australia, as further sightings have tracked it to New Guinea where in the Sixties, a French priest witnessed Megalania resting on a downed tree. It was later discovered that the creature's momentary wooded bed was over 40 feet in length, further adding to the mystery that such a gargantuan lizard does indeed exist. What about the hard evidence?

Hard evidence has never stopped the imagination from seeing what we want to, nor has it disproved some of the world's great mysteries. If it did, we'd be able to reconstruct the Great Pyramids by hand. Without conclusive verification like the body of a deceased reptilian behemoth, Megalania will continue to remain the topic of strange Australian folklore. Although Megalania has been spotted many times by farmers and weary travelers, Megalania Prisca is indeed accounted for in the scientific community under the classification of extinct prehistoric species. Until one wanders out of the Australian Outback and into the bustling downtown core of Sydney in search of prey, we may never know what Megalania is truly capable of.

Whether or not megalania is still alive today is uncertain, but until a dead body, or perhaps a living one, is brought in we will forever find it in textbooks as an extinct animal of prehistoric times.

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Hobbits from Indonesian island of Flores

Six years after their discovery, the extinct little people nicknamed hobbits who once occupied the Indonesian island of Flores remain mystifying anomalies in human evolution, out of place in time and geography, their ancestry unknown. Recent research has only widened their challenge to conventional thinking about the origins, transformations and migrations of the early human family.

Indeed, the more scientists study the specimens and their implications, the more they are drawn to heretical speculation.

¶Were these primitive survivors of even earlier hominid migrations out of Africa, before Homo erectus migrated about 1.8 million years ago? Could some of the earliest African toolmakers, around 2.5 million years ago, have made their way across Asia?

¶Did some of these migrants evolve into new species in Asia, which moved back to Africa? Two-way traffic is not unheard of in other mammals.

¶Or could the hobbits be an example of reverse evolution? That would seem even more bizarre; there are no known cases in primate evolution of a wholesale reversion to some ancestor in its lineage.

The possibilities get curiouser and curiouser, said William L. Jungers of Stony Brook University, making hobbits “the black swan of paleontology — totally unpredicted and inexplicable.”

Everything about them seems incredible. They were very small, not much more than three feet tall, yet do not resemble any modern pygmies. They walked upright on short legs, but might have had a peculiar gait obviating long-distance running. The single skull that has been found is no bigger than a grapefruit, suggesting a brain less than one-third the size of a human’s, yet they made stone tools similar to those produced by other hominids with larger brains. They appeared to live isolated on an island as recently as 17,000 years ago, well after humans had made it to Australia.

Although the immediate ancestor of modern humans, Homo erectus, lived in Asia and the islands for hundreds of thousands of years, the hobbits were not simply scaled-down erectus. In fact, erectus and Homo sapiens appear to be more closely related to each other than either is to the hobbit, scientists have determined.

It is no wonder, then, that the announcement describing the skull and the several skeletons as remains of a previously unknown hominid species, Homo floresiensis, prompted heated debate. Critics contended that these were merely modern human dwarfs afflicted with genetic or pathological disorders.

Scientists who reviewed hobbit research at a symposium here last week said that a consensus had emerged among experts in support of the initial interpretation that H. floresiensis is a distinct hominid species much more primitive than H. sapiens. On display for the first time at the meeting was a cast of the skull and bones of a H. floresiensis, probably an adult female.

Several researchers showed images of hobbit brain casts in comparison with those of deformed human brains. They said this refuted what they called the “sick hobbit hypothesis.” They also reported telling shoulder and wrist differences between humans and the island inhabitants.

Even so, skeptics have not capitulated. They note that most of the participants at the symposium had worked closely with the Australian and Indonesian scientists who made the discovery in 2003 and complain that their objections have been largely ignored by the news media and organizations financing research on the hobbits.

Some prominent paleoanthropologists are reserving judgment, among them Richard Leakey, the noted hominid fossil hunter who is chairman of the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University. Like other undecided scientists, he cited the need to find more skeletons at other sites, especially a few more skulls.

Mr. Leakey conceded, however, that the recent research “greatly strengthened the possibility” that the Flores specimens represented a new species.

At the symposium, Michael J. Morwood, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia who was one of the discoverers, said that further investigations of stone tools had determined that hominids arrived at Flores as early as 880,000 years ago and “it is reasonable to assume that those were ancestors of the hobbits.” But none of their bones have been uncovered, so they remain unidentified, and no modern human remains have been found there earlier than 11,000 years ago.

Excavations are continuing at Liang Bua, a wide-mouth cave in a hillside where the hobbit bones were found in deep sediments, but no more skulls or skeletons have turned up. Dr. Morwood said the search would be extended to other Flores sites and nearby islands.

Peter Brown, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, said that his examination of the premolars and lower jaws of the specimens made it almost immediately “very, very clear that this was a hominid in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The first premolars in particular, he said, were larger than a human’s and had a crown and roots unlike those of H. sapiens or H. erectus.

Dr. Brown, a co-author of the original discovery report, said that no known disease or abnormality in humans could have “replicated this condition.”

At first, Dr. Brown and colleagues hypothesized that the hobbits were descendants of H. erectus that populated the region and had evolved their small stature because they lived in isolation on an island. Island dwarfing is a recognized phenomenon in which larger species diminish in size over time in response to limited resources.

The scientists soon backed off from that hypothesis. For one thing, dwarfing reduces stature, but not brain size. Moreover, researchers said, the hobbit bore little resemblance to an erectus.

In an analysis of the hobbit’s wrist bones, Matthew W. Tocheri of the Smithsonian Institution found that certain bones were wedge-shaped, similar to those in apes, and not squared-off, as in humans and Neanderthals. This suggested that its species diverged from the human lineage at least one million to two million years ago.

So if several lines of evidence now encourage agreement that H. floresiensis was a distinct and primitive hominid, the hobbit riddle can be compressed into a single question of far-reaching importance: where did these little people come from?

“Once you establish that this is a unique species,” said Frederick E. Grine, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook, “then these primitive features that it has suddenly take on a profound evolutionary significance.”

Scientists said in reports and interviews that they had only recently begun contemplating possible ancestries.

As a starting point, scientists rule out island dwarfing as a primary explanation. Dwarfs and pygmies are simply diminutive humans; they do not become more apelike, as the hobbits appear to be in some aspects. Besides, normal dwarfing would suggest that the hobbits presumably evolved from H. erectus, the only previous hominids identified in this part of Asia or anywhere outside Africa; the first one was discovered in Java in the late 19th century. But research has found few similarities between the hobbit skeleton and Asian H. erectus.

If the hobbit is a throwback to much earlier hominids, scientists said, reverse evolution would be the most far-fetched explanation. Dr. Jungers, a paleoanthropologist who organized the symposium, said there were no known examples of mammals becoming significantly reduced in size and anatomy as a consequence of reverting to an ancestral form.

“Is it possible?” he asked rhetorically. “If that is the case, it is unprecedented and a tremendous discovery.”

Several scientists think the answer to hobbit ancestry lies deeper in the hominid past. If this species is unlike H. erectus, it presumably descended from even earlier small-bodied migrants out of Africa that preceded erectus into Asia. Just the thought questions conventional wisdom.

Possible candidates include Homo habilis, the first and least known species of the Homo genus. The short, small-brained habilis might have emerged as early as 2.3 million years ago and lived to co-exist with the brainier, long-limbed H. erectus. At present, erectus fossils, found in the republic of Georgia and dated at 1.8 million to 1.7 million years ago, are the earliest well-established evidence for hominids outside Africa.

If hobbits resemble habilis in some respects, scientists said, it indicates that habilis or something like it possibly left Africa earlier and became the likely hobbit ancestor.

Another possible ancestor might even have been a pre-Homo species of the Australopithecus genus. The first evidence for stone toolmaking in Africa, at least 2.5 million years ago, is associated with australopithecines. Several scientists called attention to skeletal similarities between hobbits and A. afarensis, the species famously represented by the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy skeleton from Ethiopia.

The suggestion that the H. floresiensis ancestor might have reached Asia a million years before H. erectus left Africa was raised earlier this month at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

And then there is the idea, raised again at the symposium, of hominid migrations out of Africa and back. Dr. Jungers advised abandoning the old image of the long-limbed H. erectus striding out of Africa in the first wave of hominids making their way in the world.

“Why think they couldn’t have done it many times, even before erectus?” he said. “Other mammals have migrated in and out of Africa.”

The idea revived speculation that erectus itself might have evolved in Asia from an earlier migrant from Africa, and then found its way back to the land of its ancestors. Similarly, other hominids arriving in distant parts of Asia might have churned out new species, among them the hobbits.

Robert B. Eckhardt of Penn State University, an ardent hobbit skeptic, is unyielding in his opposition to the interpretation that the Flores skull belongs to a previously unrecognized species. He insists that it will prove to be from a modern human stricken with microcephaly or a similar developmental disorder that shrinks the head and brain.

“Convincing others is much more difficult than I thought it would be at the outset,” Dr. Eckhardt acknowledged in an e-mail message, “but increasingly it is becoming evident that what is at stake is not just some sample of specimens, but instead the central paradigm of an entire subfield.”

Susan G. Larson, an anatomist at the Stony Brook School of Medicine who analyzed the non-human properties of the hobbit shoulders, said in an interview that the investigations had entered “a period of wait and see.”

“Someday,” Dr. Larson said, “people may be saying, why was everyone so puzzled back then — it’s plain to see where the little people of Flores came from.”

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The search for the Yeti in Russia

The search for the Yeti or Bigfoot of Shoria Mountain in Russia is set to continue as the snows melt and the weather warms in Siberia. The expedition will commence in June 2009 and will be headed by Valery Kimiev and Professor Nikolai Skalon, the head of the department of Zoology at the Kemerovo State University. Local’s are still alleging they have seen the bigfoot type creature in the area surrounding the Azass Caves on many occasions. One local will be joining the expedition, Hunter Michael Kiskarov who claims to have seen a Yeti more than once.

The local head of government Vladimir Tashtagol has received 14 written reports by residents of remote villages around the area of the Azass caves and the nearby Mrassu river claiming to have seen these creatures in recent years. The Cryptids are described as being two meters tall, with reddish black hair that resembles that of a brown bear. The Azass cave is several kilometres deep and it is believed the Yeti or Yeti’s dwell deep in its interior. Some believe that the creature is a lone neanderthal survivor or the sightings have been of one of a number the species, part of a small colony that represents the world’s last Neanderthals.

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First dino blood extracted from ancient bone

A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.

Proteins such as collagen are far more durable than DNA, but they had not been expected to last the 65 million years since the dinosaurs died out. So palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University attracted wide attention when she reported finding first soft tissue and later collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone that was intact until it was broken during excavation.

Yet critics said the extraordinary claim required extraordinary evidence, and asked for protein sequences, better handling of samples to prevent contamination, and confirmation analyses from other laboratories.

So Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80 million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample, sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.

Now they report recovering not just collagen – which conveys little evolutionary information because it is the same in almost all animals – but also haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells. The proteins should reveal more about dinosaur evolution because they vary much more between species.

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