After a decade’s worth of effort, an international team of researchers has for the first time been able to track the swarms of migratory insects that soar above the skies of southern England each year, according to a new study published online Friday by the journal Science.

What they found was that approximately 3.5 trillion bugs and butterflies migrate annual above the region, and that together they comprise 3,200 tons of biomass – seven times greater than the mass of songbirds that travel from the UK to Africa each year, and equal to some 20,000 flying reindeer, scientists from the University of Exeter and Rothamsted Research reported.

According to BBC News, the researchers counted the swarms of insects using a combination of vertical radar and balloon-mounted insect nets. They calculated the numbers of insects that flew at altitudes of 150 and 1,200 meters, both during the day and at night, for a total of 10 years.

“Insect bodies are rich in nutrients and the importance of these movements is underappreciated,” co-author Dr. Jason Chapman from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall-based Penryn Campus explained in a statement. “If the densities observed over southern UK are extrapolated to the airspace above all continental landmasses, high-altitude insect migration represents the most important annual animal movement in ecosystems on land.”

Findings reveal the ‘complex’ mechanisms used by bugs and butterflies

The majority of the creatures were small bugs such as cereal crop aphids, flies and midges, but the scientists also tracked larger insects like hoverflies, ladybugs, moths and butterflies, the UK news outlet added. While their path of travel was not fully monitored, the scientists believe that many of the insects had been travelling across the English Channel and the North Sea.

Using radar sites in southern England to monitor the insects’ movements, the researchers found large seasonal differences in the migratory patterns of the creatures, with large numbers heading northward during the spring and towards the south during the autumn. They also found seasonal variations from year-to-year, but noted that the overall net northward spring movements of larger insects was almost exactly the same as the net southward movements during the fall.

The new study is the first to examine daytime insect migration, the researchers said, and one of its more surprising discoveries was that even though smaller insects took off regardless of wind direction, medium-sized and larger ones appeared to carefully measure the wind direction before deciding whether or not to begin their voyage on a particular day or night.

The discovery “signifies that the insects have a compass mechanism in order to know which is north and south” and “the capability to then fly up… assess the direction of the wind and relate it to the compass direction and make a decision on whether to fly or not,” Dr. Campbell told BBC News. “That’s a quite complex set of things and many, many species are doing this.”

“Animal migration, especially in insects, is a very complex behaviour which takes millions of year to evolve and is very sensitive to climatic condition,” added co-author Dr. Ka S Lim, of the Radar Entomology Unit of Rothamsted Research’s AgroEcology Department. “Global climatic change could cause decline of many species, but equally other highly adaptable species thrive and become agricultural crop pests.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

While scientists have drawn a strong evolutionary bridge between dinosaurs and birds, they have been at a loss as to why the former had teeth but the latter does not – however, a newly-published study could shed some light on how, when and why beaks originally began to develop.

The paper, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, details the discovery of a species of dinosaur called Limusaurus inextricabilis that lived in northwestern China approximately 150 million years ago and which appears to have been born with teeth that it lost as it grew older.

According to Reuters and BBC News reports, scientists from the Capital Normal University in Beijing and their colleagues discovered 19 individual specimens of  Limusaurus, ranging in age from less than one year to 10 years old, at a site in Xinjiang Province. It appears as though they became trapped in a mud pit and were unable to free themselves before it was too late.

The discovery provided a rare opportunity for the researchers to examine fossils from the same species of dinosaur across various stages of maturation, and revealed that these tiny, two-legged creatures apparently had small, sharp teeth as juveniles but lost them upon entering adulthood.

“At first we thought they were different dinosaurs – one with teeth and one without – and we started to study them separately,” study co-author Wang Shuo, an evolutionary biologist at the Beijing university, told CNN. “But they were largely identical and we found solid evidence that teeth were lost. There were empty tooth sockets in their jaw bones.”

Dinosaur development ‘more complex’ than previously thought

In light of the evidence of this transition, Shuo and his colleagues believe that Limusaurus likely went from being omnivores that would eat meat (primarily insects) to exclusively eating plants. The phenomenon is common in some species of fish and amphibians, but according to CNN, this marks the first time such changes have been found in a reptile.

This type of tooth-loss is known as ontogenetic edentulism, Reuters explained, and in addition to the empty tooth sockets, the authors also found gastroliths (stones swallowed by some herbivores to help grind up plant material) in the stomachs of some of the adult Limusaurus. However, none of the juvenile stomachs contained any gastroliths, providing additional evidence of tooth loss and dietary changes in members of the species as they grew older.

Limusaurus is a member of the theropod group from which birds evolved, and James Clark, a paleontologist at George Washington University and a co-author on the study, told Reuters that the findings indicate that “species close to the origin of birds may have gone through a similar development, and tooth loss may have been gradual during the evolutionary origin of birds.”

It also shows that “growth and development in dinosaurs was more complex than previously suspected, and it provides a model for a stage that birds may have gone through in evolving their beak,” Clark added. He also told CNN that the study “suggests a mechanism that arrests the development of teeth – an immediate pathway for the origin of beaks.”

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Image credit: Yu Chen

A shocking increase in temperatures observed in the Arctic over the past two months has some scientists concerned that the increasing heat could result in record-low amounts of ice coverage by the summer of 2017, the New York Times and Daily Mail reported this week.

In fact, some parts of the Arctic were more than 35 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than observed averages in mid-November, and the North Pole was 23 degrees hotter than usual, according to the Times. While temperatures cooled off again afterwards, the heat was expected to return on Thursday, with forecasts calling for temperatures as much as 27 degrees above normal.

Furthermore, a new study released Wednesday revealed that the North Pole and the surrounding areas were experiencing both record-high temperatures and record-low ice extent for the months of November and December. While fall typically is a time of sea ice growth in the area, that has not been the case this year, the authors said: last month actually saw a short-lived decline.

That has climate scientists, including Jeremy Mathis, director of the Arctic Research Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), concerned that the warmth may result in record-low ice coverage starting next spring. Furthermore, the absence of ice (which can reflect the sun’s rays) and the increased amount of darker ocean water (which absorbs them) may in turn lead to even warmer temperatures during the year ahead.

“We’re going to be watching the summer of 2017 very closely,” Mathis told the Times.

Impact of climate change on the area will be felt globally

According to a Washington Post story published earlier this week, some computer models are showing 40 to 50 degree hotter-than-usual temperatures at the North Pole just before the holiday weekend, which would bring it dangerously close to the 32 degree melting point.

This is the second straight year that the region has experienced abnormally high temperatures in late December, and the second time in as many months, the newspaper added. The cause of these conditions, researchers explain, is a powerful storm east of Greenland with an estimated pressure of about 945 millibars, which the Post said is “comparable to many category 3 hurricanes.”

“A warm episode like the one we are currently observing is still a rare event in today’s climate,” Friederike E.L. Otto, a senior scientist at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the aforementioned study, said to the Times. “But it would have been an extremely unlikely event without anthropogenic climate change.”

Should climate change continue at its current rate, Otto added, events such as this could become commonplace in the Arctic region, possibly occurring up to once every two years. She added that “it’s quite impressive how much the risk of these kinds of events is changing” and that the North Pole and its surrounding area is “one region where we see the impacts of climate change very strongly.”

“We’ve seen a year in 2016 in the Arctic like we’ve never seen before,” Dr. Mathis told the Times, adding that this year has been the warmest in the region’s history. That, he explained, should concern people all over the world. “We need people to know and understand that the Arctic is going to have an impact on their lives no matter where they live.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

A supervolcano that formed during the largest eruption in European history is showing signs that it is about to wake up and erupt again, according to a new study led by scientists from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in Rome, Italy.

The caldera in question is known as Campi Flegrei, and according to The Guardian, it originally formed 39,000 years ago in a massive explosion that sent hundreds of cubic kilometers of debris into the air. The volcano, which is located near the city of Naples, hasn’t erupted since 1538 but is now showing signs of activity, the researchers reported on Tuesday.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, INGV volcanologist Giovanni Chiodini and his colleagues explained that the 7.5-mile-wide caldera is close to reaching a critical point at which decreased pressure on rising magma results in outgassing (the unchecked release of gas that had been frozen, trapped or absorbed by other materials) and, potentially, an eruption.

Were that to happen, Chiodini told the Washington Post, it could be catastrophic for the 500,000 people living in Naples and elsewhere around the volcano. However, he noted, “volcanology is not a precise science” and that “many uncertainties” remain about the caldera’s behavior. “Long-term provisions are at the moment not possible,” he said. “The process that we describe could evolve in both directions: toward pre-eruptive conditions or to the finish of the volcanic unrest.”

Caldera’s behavior similar to other volcanos prior to eruptions

Chiodini’s team developed physical and volatile saturation models, then used the results of those models to demonstrate that magmatic volatiles which are released by decompressing magma at a critical degassing pressure (CDP) could drive what they call “volcanic unrest.”

At the CDP, they reported, the abrupt release of gasses could heat hydrothermal fluids and rocks. This heating, in turn, could be the catalyst for an accelerating deformation that ultimately results in rock failure and an eruption at the caldera, the study authors said.

Based on their observations, they believe that magma at Campi Flegrei could be nearing the CDP point. Furthermore, as the Washington Post noted, the increases in ground deformation and low-level seismic activity observed at the caldera are comparable to activity witnessed at other craters (Rabaul in Papua New Guinea and Sierra Negra in the Galapagos) prior to eruptions.

Both of those volcanoes, Chiodini told The Guardian, had demonstrated “acceleration in ground deformation before eruption with a pattern similar to that observed at Campi Flegrei.” While the INGV volcanologist could not specify when the Italian supervolcano might erupt, he emphasized that it would be “very dangerous” for those living nearby if and when it does.

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Image credit: Donar Reiskoffer/Wikimedia

A type of octopod spotted for the first time last spring could already be at risk due to deep sea mining, as the creatures lay their eggs on top of highly-sought after minerals used in consumer electronics, according to a newly-published Current Biology study.

The octopod, which was named “Casper” in honor of its ghost-like appearance, was discovered swimming at depths of more than 4,000 meters (2.5 miles) around Necker Island in Hawaii back in February, BBC News and Popular Science reported on Monday. Researchers believe that the creature is a member of a species that was previously unknown to science.

Unfortunately, as a team of German and American scientists reported in the new study, this new creature tends to lay and raise their eggs on a particular type of sponge that only grows on top of manganese deposits. Since commercial companies and tech firms are also interested in extracting these minerals, the octopods could be at risk from mining-related activities.

“These sponges only grow in some areas on small, hard nodules or rocky crusts of interest to mining companies because of the metal they contain,” lead author Autun Purser from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany told BBC News. “The removal of these nodules may put the lifecycle of these octopods at risk.”

Disturbing manganese deposits may have ‘serious consequences’

Casper, an octopod that lacks fins and crawls on the seafloor, was first spotted by the camera on an NOAA-operated submersible vehicle near Hawaii, reports indicate. They lay their eggs on top of dead sponge stalks attached to crusted rocks filled with manganese and other valuable metals.

The mothers protect their eggs while they grow – a task that, based on the observations of other deep-sea octopuses, could take as much as four years and could leave the creature vulnerable to the effects of deep-sea mining operations. Furthermore, the authors of the new study found that even octopuses that aren’t even caring for eggs tend to seek out these manganese nodules.

Complicating matters, Purser told Popular Science, is that “many of the metals contained [within manganese nodules] are ‘high-tech’ metals, useful in producing mobile phones and other modern computing equipment, and most of the land sources of these metals have already been found and are becoming more expensive to buy.”

Manganese nodules also grow rather slowly, developing one layer at a time similar how pearls form inside oysters, the publication added. Thus, disturbing them may have a long lasting impact on Casper’s population. In fact, the researchers said, an experiment from the late 1980s in which a team of scientists removed similar nodules found that even a quarter of a century later, not all of the local fauna had fully recovered.

“Our new observations show that we have to know about the behavior of deep-sea animals and the specific way in which they adapt to their habitat in order to draw up sustainable protective and usage concepts,” AWI researcher Antje Boetius said in a statement. Capser and its relatives, she added, are “particularly endangered” as studies have shown that they lay few eggs and have long reproductive cycles. Disturbances to their habitat, she and her colleagues noted, could have “serious consequences for the octopus offspring.”

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Image credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Hohonu Moana 2016

Astronomers have just released the largest digital survey of the visible universe – the results of an international project which features data from more than three billion different stars, galaxies, and other space objects collected over the past four years, according to a press release.

The survey was compiled as part of the international Pan-STARRS initiative, an effort that used a 1.8-meter telescope operated by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy and based at the summit of a volcano in Maui. The survey, which used visible and near infrared light, was the first to observe the entire visible sky in multiple colors of light, the researchers said.

Using the observatory, the participating scientists collected a total of two petabytes worth of data while repeatedly imaging roughly three-fourths of the sky – data equivalent to a billion selfies or 100 times the content of Wikipedia. The telescope was used to scan the sky 60 times in all, or 12 times with each of five different filters, with the goal of finding moving objects such as asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth.

“The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys allow anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogs containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies,” Pan-STARRS observatories director Dr. Ken Chambers from the University of Hawaii said in a statement.

Data expands census of known objects to 300 light years

Launched in May 2010, Pan-STARRS (officially known as the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System) was designed to rapidly observe the visible sky repeatedly, looking for moving, variable or transient objects. The project involved 10 research institutions from around the world and was supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

“Pan-STARRS has made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects in the Solar System to lonely planets between the stars; it has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early universe,” said Dr. Chambers.

“With this release we anticipate that scientists – as well as students and even casual users – around the world will make many new discoveries about the universe from the wealth of data collected by Pan-STARRS,” he noted. NSF astronomical sciences division director Nigel Sharp added that it was “great” to see the data released “to the general astronomical community.”

The newly released data, the “Static Sky,” provides an average value for the position, color and brightness of the objects captured in the sky at various points in time. Additional data based on individual images will be released in 2017, the researchers said. Once it is released, the data will all be accessible online at the Pan-STARRS1 data archive home page.

Thanks to Pan-STARRS, “researchers are able to measure distances, motions and special characteristics such as the multiplicity fraction of all nearby stars, brown dwarfs, and of stellar remnants like, for example white dwarfs,” Thomas Henning of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy’s Planet and Star Formation Department (PSF), told Engadget. “This will expand the census of almost all objects in the solar neighborhood to distances of about 300 light-years.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Antimatter has been notoriously difficult to produce, capture, and maintain, but scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have reportedly developed a new way to observe and analyze these elusive materials – a project two decades in the making.

As BBC News explains, most scientists believe that the Big Bang produced equal amounts of both matter and antimatter, but for reasons not completely understood, the universe currently is made up almost exclusively of matter. Existing theories have been unable to explain why, but a team of CERN researchers has apparently come one step closer to finding the answer.

In research published Monday in the journal Nature, members of CERN’s ALPHA collaboration reported the first ever measurement of an antimatter atom on the optical spectrum – a feat which they accomplished by trapping the antimatter atoms, then shining a laser on them to see whether or not they behaved any differently than regular atoms.

“Using a laser to observe a transition in antihydrogen and comparing it to hydrogen to see if they obey the same laws of physics has always been a key goal of antimatter research,” ALPHA team spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst said in a statement. This breakthrough, he and his colleagues added, could result in the dawning of “a completely new era in high-precision antimatter research.”

So far, so good for the Standard Model, researchers say

One of the primary reasons that antimatter has been so difficult to work with, BBC News said, is that it get annihilated if it comes into contact with ordinary matter. However, by using a specially designed magnetic trap, the ALPHA collaboration was able to capture an antihydrogen atom.

The goal, Hangst told the British media outlet, was to see if antimatter obeyed the same laws of physics as ordinary matter – specifically, the Standard Model that explains each of the subatomic particles and the interactions between them. By recording measurements of the optical spectrum of the captured antihydrogen atom, the CERN researchers have confirmed that such particles do indeed behave in a manner consistent with the Standard Model, said Yahoo! News.

“Within experimental limits, the result shows no difference compared to the equivalent spectral line in hydrogen. This is consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that best describes particles and the forces at work between them, which predicts that hydrogen and antihydrogen should have identical spectroscopic characteristics,” CERN explained.

As Nature noted, the findings are good news for scientists who have spent decades working to find a way to study how antimatter absorbs and emits light. The hope, the journal added, is that this could be the first step towards a test of charge-parity-time or CPT symmetry, one of the key symmetries of the known laws of physics. Based on CPT symmetry predictions, antimatter and matter should have the same energy levels, as was the case in the ALPHA team’s experiments.

“We’ve tried to shine the same ‘color’ of light, if you will, on an antihydrogen atom that we would use for hydrogen, to see if it responds in the same way. The answer so far is yes,” Hangst told BBC News. “What really matters here and for the future is how precisely you do that measurement. Right now, we have a precision of a few parts in 10 billion. We hope to get much, much better than that – the precision with hydrogen is a few parts in a thousand trillion.”

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Image credit: CERN

Video footage of a 2009 encounter with an incredibly rare creature known as a ghost shark was recently released by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and revealed this aquatic oddity covers much more ground than researchers previously believed.

This marks the first time that the ghost shark, officially known as the pointy-nosed blue ratfish or Hydrolagus trolli, had been seen in the wild, according to the Daily Mail. Previously the creature had been captured in the waters around Australia and New Zealand, the British newspaper added, but the latest specimen was sighted in the waters near Hawaii and California.

As study author Lonny Lundsten and colleagues reported earlier this year in the journal Marine Biodiversity Records, they saw the ghost shark swimming at depths of 1,640 meters (about 5,381 feet) in the central and eastern North Pacific Ocean, extending the creature’s known geographic range by approximately 6,000 kilometers (more than 3,700 miles).

In a statement, the MBARI team said that this marked the first time that Hydrolagus trolli had been officially identified anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. The video footage was captured by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) during one of several dives off the coast of California and the Hawaiian islands, according to Washington Post reports published over the weekend.

Footage could result in the identification of a new species

First identified in 2002, the pointy-nosed blue ratfish (also known as a chimera) has a skeleton made of cartilage instead of bone and gets its name from its jaw, which is fused to its skull and gives its face an appearance similar to that of a rodent. The creature also has a retractable penis on its forehead, but scientists are not entirely certain how this unusual organ is used.

In their recently-published study, Lundsten’s team presented evidence suggesting that the ghost sharks spotted by their ROV were the same that had been previously identified as living only in the Southwestern Pacific. However, while they believe the physical characteristics of both types of creatures are similar, they cannot definitely confirm this without actually collecting one of the fish featured in the video and bringing it back to the surface for additional analysis.

“This is much easier said than done, because these fish are generally too large, fast, and agile to be caught by MBARI’s ROVs,” the Institute explained. “If and when the researchers can get their hands on one of these fish, they will be able to make detailed measurements of its fins and other body parts and perform DNA analysis on its tissue,” thus either confirming that it is part of the same species, or allowing them to assign it to a new species altogether, they added.

“If these animals turn out to be the same species as the ghost sharks recently identified off California,” MBARI officials concluded, “it will be further evidence that, like many deep-sea animals, the pointy-nosed blue chimera can really get around.”

 

Hoping to discover why the unusual creatures are upright swimmers instead of horizontal ones, and why the male members experience pregnancy rather than the females, a group of researchers has successfully sequenced the genome of a seahorse species for the very first time.

In addition to these anatomical oddities, seahorses also lack tails, teeth, and pelvic fins, and their entire bodies are covered by bony plates – not to mention horse-like heads and a tail that they use to grasp onto corals and seagrasses to avoid being swept away by a current, said Reuters.

To better understand these unique creatures, scientists at Germany’s University of Konstanz  and colleagues from China and Singapore sequenced and analyzed the genome of a species called the tiger tail seahorse. Their findings were published online Thursday in the journal Nature.

“As a seahorse biologist, it is terrifically exciting,” Tony Wilson, an associate biology professor at Brooklyn College in New York who did not take part in the study, told the Los Angeles Times. He went on to explain that the genome sequence could help scientists better understand how the unique traits of seahorses developed, and how they are expressed on the genetic level.

Findings may help explain lack of pelvic fins, male pregnancy

Seahorses originally diverged from other bony fishes during the Cretaceous period, roughly 100 million years ago, and researchers have long been puzzled by their unusual morphology and odd reproductive patterns, the Times said. While the authors caution that their analysis of the seahorse genome is in its early stages, they have already made some interesting discoveries.

For instance, they have learned that the seahorse genome lacks the genes required for the coding of enamel, which would explain why they lack teeth. In addition, the creatures appear to lack the genes that regulate the growth of pelvic fins. To test if this is why seahorses lack pelvic fins, they removed these same genes from a zebrafish, and found that this was indeed the case.

The research team also found gene duplications during the evolution of the seahorse, which may explain male pregnancy among these creatures. As they explained in a statement, when a copy of a gene is created, it can fulfill a new function, and in this case, the duplicate DNA might regulate the pregnancy by coordinating the hatching of embryos’ with the male’s brood pouch. Once their embryos hatch, genes activate to allow the newborn fish to exit the brood pouch.

The study also uncovered evidence that seahorse DNA and proteins evolved much more quickly than their closest relatives, such as sea dragons and pipe fish. They currently have no explanation for why this is the case, the Times said, but the authors said that their work will help scientists to better understand the genetic underpinnings of the evolution of these unusual organisms.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

What was initially believed to have been a tiny, ancient Greek village has actually turned out to be a large metropolis that somehow went largely unexplored for 200 years, even though experts knew of its existence, researchers from Sweden’s University of Gothenburg have revealed.

The reason, according to LiveScience, is that so many archaeologists had dismissed the remains at Vlochós, located five hours north of Athens, as something of a “backwater” site. However, the new study has confirmed that it was a larger, more important city than previously believed.

As lead investigator Robin Rönnlund, a PhD student in classical archaeology and ancient history, explained in a statement, “What used to be considered remains of some irrelevant settlement on a hill can now be upgraded to remains of a city of higher significance than previously thought.”

Rönnlund, who is working with colleagues from Greece, Sweden and the UK on the project, said that the team first found the site “in connection with another project last year, and we realized the great potential right away. The fact that nobody has never explored the hill before is a mystery.”

Findings date back to between fifth and third century BC

The remains are scattered on and around the Strongilovoúni hill portion of the great Thessalian plains, the researchers noted, and have been dated to several different historical periods. Among the objects they found were towers, walls and city gates on both the summit and the slopes.

“We found a town square and a street grid that indicate that we are dealing with quite a large city. The area inside the city wall measures over 40 hectares,” Rönnlund said. “We also found ancient pottery and coins that can help to date the city. Our oldest finds are from around 500 BC, but the city seems to have flourished mainly from the fourth to the third century BC before it was abandoned for some reason, maybe in connection with the Roman conquest of the area.”

Little is visible on the surface of the ground, they added, and rather than attempting to excavate the site, they hope to use non-invasive techniques such as ground-penetrating radar to examine what lies beneath the surface. The goal is to leave the site in the same condition it was when they first arrive and conducted their first round of field work in early September.

The study, known officially as the Vlochós Archaeological Project or VLAP, is a collaboration between the Ephorate of Antiquities of Karditsa and the Swedish Institute at Athens and involved archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg and the UK’s University of Bournemouth. The research team plans to return to the site in 2017 for further study, LiveScience noted.

“Very little is known about ancient cities in the region, and many researchers have previously believed that western Thessaly was somewhat of a backwater during Antiquity,” Rönnlund said. “Our project therefore fills an important gap in the knowledge about the area and shows that a lot remains to be discovered in the Greek soil.”

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Image credit: SIA/EFAK/YPPOA

Doing little to calm pre-election concerns over his viewpoint on the subject, US President-Elect Donald Trump on Sunday said that “nobody really knows” whether or not climate change was a real thing, adding that he was “studying” the Paris accord on greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump’s comments were made during an interview with “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace this weekend, and as the Washington Post noted, come just days after he appointed a well-known climate skeptic, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, as the new head of the EPA.

Contrary to the President-Elect’s position on the climate change issue, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body created to deliver an objective, scientific view of climate change and its global impacts, called it “extremely likely” that human activity was the “dominant cause” of the Earth’s current warming trend.

Furthermore, data indicates that the 10 hottest years ever recorded have all happened since 1998, and NASA scientists have determined that 2016 will almost certainly be the hottest year ever, or at least since formal records were first kept in 1880, the Washington Post said. The space agency added that 97% of actively-publishing climate scientists were in agreement on the matter.

Nonetheless, Trump, during his Sunday morning interview with Wallace, said, “I’m still open-minded. Nobody really knows. Look, I’m somebody that gets it, and nobody really knows. It’s not something that’s so hard and fast. I do know this: Other countries are eating our lunch.”

President-Elect promises to balance environmental laws, business interests

During his campaign, Trump had previously called climate change a “hoax” that was invented by China, although after meeting with the New York Times editorial board last month, the New York business magnate seemed to soften his stance, saying (as he did on Sunday) that he had an “open mind” on the issue and would “look at it very carefully,” according to CBS News.

Last week, a memorandum obtained by Bloomberg News revealed that the Trump team wanted to identify Energy Department officials who had taken part in international climate negotiations over the past five years, as well as those who worked to shape the climate policies of the Obama administration. It is uncertain if the intent is to identify and then replace those individuals.

When asked about his reason for choosing Pruitt to head the EPA, Trump said that it would be a way to “speed up the process” for permit approvals and related agency business. Furthermore, he told Wallace that he did not intend to – in Wallace’s words – “take a wrecking ball to the Obama legacy” on climate change, and that he only wanted to do “what’s right” for the country.

He elaborated that any environmental regulation needed to be weighed against the restrictions they would place on domestic manufacturers and businesses, adding that companies in China and other parts of the country are free to work without the limits placed on US firms. “We can’t let all of these permits that take forever to get stop our jobs,” the President-Elect noted.

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Image credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

We used to think monkeys couldn’t speak because of their vocal chords– but a new study shows that the limitation comes from their brain, the authors of a new Science Advances study have revealed.

According to the New York Times, research conducted by Philip H. Lieberman, who is currently a professor emeritus of Brown University, in the 1960s concluded that the vocal tract anatomy of monkeys was not developed enough to produce the range of vowel sounds made by humans.

In fact, Lieberman called a gradual anatomical change to the vocal tract that included a human’s tongue moving back into the throat a critical part of the development of speech, and that that the first fossils of fully modern people with such vocal tracts only first appeared 75,000 years ago.

However, a group of scientists led by one of Lieberman’s former students, University of Vienna cognitive scientist W. Tecumseh Fitch, has come to a radically different conclusion: they looked at videos tracking the mouth and throats of macaques and found that, anatomically speaking, the creatures are perfectly equipped for speech – they just lack the brainpower to do so.

Specifically, they found a monkey’s brain organization is what keeps the creatures from being able to carry on a conversation, according to NPR. Fitch’s team was able to use computer models to synthesize simulations of monkey speech, including a marriage proposal that reportedly could be clearly understood by nearby listeners. Listen to it here:

With simulated human speech to compare:

Lack of brain connections to blame for their lack of speech

During their research, the study authors filmed three rhesus macaque monkeys using a portable X-ray scanner, recording them as they produced a wide variety of different sounds and gestures, including lip-smacking, chewing, yawning, grunting and cooing, according to NPR.

From this footage, they captured nearly 100 still images for detailed analysis. They mapped the outline of the vocal tract in each picture, the Times said, and then used this data to generate a 3D rendering of the vocal tract anatomy. Finally, they used this 3D rendering to create the computer simulations used to model the different sounds a monkey was capable of producing.

Fitch and his colleagues were able to identify five separate, distinguishable vowels during their analysis – the amount found most commonly in various world languages, NPR said. The vowels were identified as “‘bit,’ ‘bet,’ ‘bat,’ ‘but’ and ‘bought,’” Dr. Fitch told the Times, and they show that, under perfect conditions, a monkey would be able to form “hundreds” or even “thousands” of perfectly intelligible words.

So what’s stopping them? The way their brains are organized, according to the study authors. The monkeys’ brains lack direct connections down to the neurons which control the tongue and the larynx, and they also lack connections between the brain’s auditory cortex and motor cortex they would need to imitate what they hear the way that people do, the researchers noted.

“This new result tells us that there’s still a big mystery concerning where human speech came from,” Yale University psychology professor Laurie Santos, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement. “If a species as old as a macaque has a vocal tract capable of speech, then we really need to find the reason that this didn’t translate for later primates into the kind of speech sounds that humans produce. I think that means we’re in for some exciting new answers soon.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

If there was any lingering doubt about whether or not dinosaurs possessed bird-like feathers, the unprecedented discovery of a well-preserved, feathered dinosaur tail entombed in an almost 100 million-year-old piece of amber should put an end to the debate once and for all.

The fossilized tail, discovered by Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences in 2015 in a Myanmar amber market in 2015, marked “the first time skeletal material from a dinosaur has been found in amber,” the paleontologist said in an interview with the New York Times.

Xing’s team, who reported the findings Thursday in the journal Current Biology, said that soft tissue and eight complete vertebrae were encased in the gold-colored stone and that based on an analysis of the tail bones, they can definitively conclude that it belonged to a dinosaur, not a bird. The specimen dates back to the mid-Cretaceous period and is around 99 million-years-old.

According to Quartz, the tail is believed to have belonged to a juvenile coelurosaur, a flightless dinosaur about the same size as a sparrow. The tail formed a tiny curl, was 3.67 centimeters long and found alongside approximately 2 centimeters of bone. It had soft, not rigid, plumage that was chestnut brown-colored on top and white underneath.

Discovery sheds new light on the evolution of plumage

Dinosaur-era feathers were first discovered encased in amber five years ago, but as Quartz noted, earlier discoveries involved isolated plumage that scientists could not definitively say came from dinosaurs and not birds. With the new discovery, CT scans and microscopic analysis have shown that the specimen indeed belong to a dinosaur, proving that at least some had feathers.

Ryan McKellar, a paleontologist with the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada and co-author of the new study, told CNN that he was amazed when he first saw the amber, calling it “a once in a lifetime find” that “really underlines the importance of amber as an anchor for future study.”

“We’re picking up features we couldn’t see in compressed sedimentary fossils,” including the hue of the feathers, McKellar added. In an interview with Quartz, he said that based on the number of specimens researchers have studied thus far, it is likely that “most theropod dinosaurs” possessed feathers or plumage “at some point in their life,” though not necessarily into adulthood.

McKellar went on to tell the Times that while the color was fascinating, that the most interesting part of the research was analyzing the structure of the feathers using a high-powered microscope. Unlike modern bird feathers, the coelurosaur plumage lacked a central shaft (known as a rachis). Instead, it just had barbs and barbules that were “more fuzzy than sleek,” the paleontologist said, providing “a rare glimpse” at how dinosaur feathers differed from those of modern birds.

According to the researchers, this appears to indicate that the barbs and barbules evolved before the rachis, which they noted appears to aid in flight. This would appear to suggest that dinosaurs used feathers not for flight, but to regulate their body temperature, for camouflage, and/or as a way to deliver visual signals to other members of their species.

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Image credit: CreditRyan McKellar/Royal Saskatchewan Museum

A quiet but significant decrease in giraffe populations during the past three decades makes the world’s tallest land mammal vulnerable to extinction, according to new statistics released by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on Wednesday.

Speaking at a biodiversity conference in Mexico, IUCN officials increased the threat levels for the giraffe and 34 other species on its international Red List of threatened species while reducing the at-risk classification for seven others, BBC News and the Associated Press reported.

Based on the organization’s figures, the global number of giraffes has fallen from approximately 155,000 in 1985 to just 97,000 in 2015 – a decrease of nearly 40% in just 30 years. The creatures were considered to be of “least concern” in previous Red Lists, but their numbers are falling due to habitat loss, poaching, and civil unrest throughout Africa, IUCN officials have revealed.

“Everyone assumes giraffes are everywhere,” said Julian Fennessy, co-director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and one of the biologists responsible for putting the creatures on the Red List. However, the fact is that while elephants attract more attention from conservationists, there are four times fewer giraffes on Earth than pachyderms, he told USA Today.

“If you go on a safari, giraffes are everywhere,” he said to BBC News. “While there has been great concern about elephants and rhinos, giraffes have gone under the radar,” Fennessy noted, adding that he and his colleagues were “a little shocked” that the giraffe population “declined by so much in so little time.” The creatures, he said, are experiencing a “silent extinction.”

Civil unrest has caused some to turn to giraffes for food

The rapid expansion of farming and cultural development linked to the increase in people living near giraffe habitats is one of the reasons for their declining numbers, the ICUN noted. In addition, conflict in northern Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia near the South Sudan have caused many to turn to the giraffe as a source of food, the biologist told BBC News.

Of the nine subspecies of giraffe officially recognized by the Red List, five have been found to have experienced population declines. A sixth has remained stable, while the others are growing. In fact, Fennessy reported that the subspecies living in southern Africa have increased by two to three times their previous numbers. Nubian giraffes living in East Africa, on the other hand, have seen their populations drop by as much as 95% in some areas, he added.

Experts like Chris Ransom of the Zoological Society of London are confident that the trends can be reversed, and point to the success in southern Africa as a blueprint for how to save the species in other parts of the continent. In southern Africa, Ransom explained to BBC News, “there is a lot of moving of animals between different conservation areas, it is a very different scenario than in most of the rest of Africa.”

“With the right conservation efforts, and we can ensure that the animals do live in the wild,” he added. While the IUCN said that a total of 860 plant and animal species are extinct, and another 68 have been declared extinct in the wild, Ransom emphasized that there are also “a lot of cases of success in conservation. The giraffes could be one.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Archaeologists excavating on the island of Anglesey off the coast of North Wales, UK, have uncovered two partial human remains and thousands of artifacts at a vast Neolithic site, in what has been dubbed an ‘unprecedented’ discovery.
The company CR Archaeology has uncovered over 6000 artifacts at the dig in Llanfaethlu, including a broad array of pottery designs dating from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, in what appears to the largest find of its kind in North Wales.
More significantly, the discovery of human remains may transform historians’ understanding of the beginnings of agriculture in the region according to the archaeology firm, who have been working alongside Wynne Construction, Gwynedd Archeological Planning Services and Anglesey Council.

“Human remains are incredibly rare outside of megalithic tombs in this area as bone seldom survives in North Wales. Several teeth have been recovered which will enable scientists to discover more about Anglesey’s first farmers,” said archeologist Catherine Rees.
The teeth found in human remains hold the key to understanding the individual’s diet and the location of where they were raised.
Through additional examination, a picture will begin to emerge of the kind of things the people in this area ate 6000 years ago and whether they grew up in the region or had migrated from more distant shores.
Rees commented: “It is no understatement to say Llanfaethlu is one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the last 50 years and it is clearly of international significance.
“It provides the potential to examine Welsh history over millennia, examining the changing culture and land use.
“This site will place Wales and Anglesey at the forefront of the current archeological discourse and Llanfaethlu will undoubtedly become a ‘type site’ in the study of Prehistory.”

Changing our knowledge of early farming communities

Professor Alasdair Whittle, Archeology Professor and expert in the Neolithic period at Cardiff University, added that “This exciting find is undoubtedly of international importance. It speaks to an important, ongoing debate in the international archeological research community about the way of life of early farming communities.”

Early digs around the site had unearthed houses over 6000 years, with two of them being double the size of previously discovered equivalents from the area. In addition, tools such as leaf-shaped arrowheads, serrated blades, and stone axes have been found.
It is understood that these artifacts were often not made from stone found in the region, but had come from as far afield as Ireland and the Peak District, more than 100 miles away.
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Image credit: CR Archeology

In order to predict what will happen to the Greenland ice sheet as a result of climate change in the years ahead, two teams of researchers have used new techniques to peer into its past farther than was previously possible – but their studies produced contrasting results.

Four times larger than the state of California, the Greenland ice sheet holds so much water that, were it to melt, the global sea level would rise by more than 20 feet, the researchers explained in a statement. Such an event could be catastrophic for those living in coastal areas, so experts have been working to determine if such melting could occur in the near future.

Now, two separate groups of scientists have attempted to look into how the ice sheet behaved in the distant past – several million years ago, in fact, when global temperatures were three or more degrees hotter than they currently are. However, each of these groundbreaking studies painted a much different picture of how the ice sheet responded to past climate change.

Both teams used “a powerful new tool for Earth scientists,” explained Imperial College London scientist Dylan Rood, co-author of one of the newly-published papers. Using isotopes contained within grains of quartz produced during a time when Earth’s bedrock was being bombarded by a steady stream of cosmic rays. By determining the ratio of two elements made by cosmic rays, they could determine how long the quartz was exposed and how long it was covered by ice.

Findings appear to be contradictory… but are they?

Specifically, the researchers looked at the ratio of aluminum-26 and beryllium-10 (two elements produced by cosmic rays) using an accelerator mass spectrometer – a method that has long been used to study land-based erosion, but which had not previously been used to investigate samples collected from the ocean. Both studies have been published in the journal Nature.

In one of the studies, a team led by University of Vermont geologist Paul Bierman investigated deep cores of ocean-bottom mud containing bedrock that eroded Greenland’s eastern site. They found that the ice sheet in this region had not completely melted for an extended period of time at any point in the past 7.5 million years, and that it has actively been covered by glacial ice for the majority of that span – a discovery said to be consistent with current computer models.

Furthermore, their research found that during cooler periods in the past, the ice sheet expanded into areas that were previously ice-free, demonstrating that the ice sheet “responds to and tracks global climate change,” according to Bierman. “The melting we are seeing today may be out of the bounds of how the Greenland ice sheet has behaved for many millions of years.”

While that study found that eastern Greenland has been pretty much consistently covered by an ice sheet for the past seven million years, the other study took a look at the middle of the current ice sheet and found that the ice sheet was nearly ice-free for at least 280,000 years in the middle Pleistocene era (about 1.1 million years ago), in contrast to most existing computer models.

While the studies appear to blatantly contradict one another, Bierman emphasizes that this is not necessarily the case. He explained that both of the studies have “some blurriness” regarding what they were able to determine about short-term changes to the ice sheet’s size, since the studies use data from different locations. “It’s quite possible that both of these records are right for different places,” the geologist concluded. “Both of these studies apply a similar innovative technique and let us look much farther into the past than we have been able to before.”

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Image credit: Joshua Brown/UVM

Fossils of what could possibly be the earliest four-legged vertebrates to walk on land were recently found in Scotland, according to a new report in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The team behind the discovery said the lizard-like animals that left behind these fossils lived approximately 355 million years ago when the precursors of modern reptiles, birds, and mammals appeared out of swamps.

Discovery Fills a Huge Fossil Record Gap

The discovery fills in a 15 million-year gap in the fossil record and included five completely intact fossils, with many more pieces of bones yet to be categorized.

The researchers said some fossil fragments look like lizards or newts, and some are bigger, with crocodile-like dimensions.

“We’re lifting the lid on a key part of the evolutionary story of life on land,” team member Jennifer Clack, of the University of Cambridge, told BBC News. “What happened then affects everything that happens subsequently – so it affects the fact that we are here and which other animals live with us today.”

About 360 years ago, several kinds of life, including early on fish, were wiped out a global extinction event. For roughly the next 15 million years, a major time in the progression of four-legged vertebrates, there is a hole in the fossil record.

To put it another way– we know very little around how fish-like animals developed the limbs that could help them on land.

Nick Fraser, of National Museums Scotland, said modern-day Scotland just might have been where the first land animals emerged from the water.

“If you want to draw the analogy to Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon,” he said, “it was one small step for man but a giant leap for mankind, well, this in some ways is a small step out of the water for these animals but it’s a giant leap forward for the future evolution of life on land.”

Just a few locations on the planet have produced similar fossils from this time period. One site is in Scotland, west of Glasgow, where only a single fossil has been discovered. Fossils bits have also been discovered in the US and Canada.

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Image credit: Mark Witton/National Museums Scotland

Industrial pollution may feel like a modern development, however, an international team of scientists uncovered what might be the world’s oldest contaminated river, polluted about 7,000 years ago.

Within a now-dry riverbed in southern Jordan, researchers found proof of early contaminants from copper smelting. Neolithic humans here could have been in the early stages of developing metallurgy.

The Earliest Pollution Ever Found

According to the study team’s findings, published in Science of the Total Environment, the discovery points to a time when humans started transitioning from making tools out of stones to forging tools out of metal. This period, referred to as the Copper Age, is a transitional period of time between the late Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age.

“These populations were experimenting with fire, experimenting with pottery and experimenting with copper ores, and all three of these components are part of the early production of copper metals from ores,” study author Russell Adams, an anthropologist at the University of Waterloo, said in a news release. “The technological innovation and the spread of the adoption and use of metals in society mark the beginning of the modern world.”

People produced copper at this point in our history by incorporating charcoal and the blue-green copper ore commonly discovered in this region in pottery vessels and cooking the amalgamation over a fire. The method took a long time and was labor-intensive. Because of this, it took millennia before copper was a central component of human culture.

This team tried to recreate the process as accurately as they could:

A lot of the items produced in the very first phase of copper generation were mainly symbolic and satisfied a social function within society. Obtaining uncommon and unusual items was a way involving individuals attained or represented status.

Over time, communities in the area grew and copper generation expanded. People constructed mines, then large smelting heaters and factories by around 2600 BC.

“This region is home to the world’s first industrial revolution,” Adams said. “This really was the center of innovative technology.”

However, metal creation took a toll on surrounding life. Slag is a major waste product of smelting and it is comprised of metals like copper, lead, arsenic and mercury. Plants soaked up these metals, people and livestock ate them and so the pollutants accumulated in the ecosystem.

Adams said the contaminants from copper mining and generation likely caused widespread health difficulties, including infertility and premature death. Scientists have discovered high amounts of copper and lead in human bones going back to the times of the Roman Empire

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Image credit: Barqa Landscape Project/University of Waterloo.

The House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology is under fire from scientists after retweeting a controversial article which challenges the validity of climate change and mocks “alarmists” who cite corroborated, peer-reviewed data regarding the matter.

The committee, which is comprised of 38 members, oversees energy, environmental, aviation and space-travel research in development in the lower house of Congress and is chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican. Among the agencies it oversees are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, and NASA.

The article in question was published on Breitbart News and written by James Delingpole, who is an UK-based columnist and novelist who, according to NBC News , “does not have a science degree and is not a scientist.” His article, which the website called “unscientific  and “steeped in opinion,” declares that the science behind global climate change is “in its final death rattle.”

.@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists https://t.co/uLUPW4o93V

— Sci,Space,&Tech Cmte (@HouseScience) December 1, 2016

Furthermore, Delingpole’s article uses “cherry-picked data” to make it appear as though global temperatures are on the decline, according to Live Science. Previous research has shown that this year is on pace to be the hottest in recorded history, with NASA data showing that all but one of the 12 months from Oct. 2015 through Sept. 2016 had seen record-breaking heat.

Based on their analysis of global temperatures, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) determined that 2016 would almost certainly go down as the hottest since at least 1880. In a statement released in October, GISS director Gavin Schmidt emphasized that although “monthly rankings are newsworthy, they are not nearly as important as long-term trends.”

Climate scientists, researchers weigh in with the facts

Nonetheless, Delingpole wrote that “global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of the year – the biggest and steepest fall on record” and a phenomenon which he said was triggered by “a La Nina event following in the wake of an unusually strong El Nino.” Karen James of the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine called the story “heinously misleading” and said that it “mutilated” the work of climate scientists.

James was far from the only expert weighing in on the matter. Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, told Live Science that the article was guilty of ignoring the “deleterious impact that our profligate burning of fossil fuels is having on the planet.” In light of the GISS data, he said, “For anyone, least of all the House Committee on Science, to… be promoting fake news aimed at fooling the public into thinking otherwise, can only be interpreted as a deliberate effort to distract and fool the public.”

So what are the facts regarding the issue of climate change? According to NASA, at least 97% of papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals confirms that climate warming trends in the last century are real, and are “extremely likely due to human activities.” Likewise, the American Association for the Advancement of Science said in 2006 said that the evidence was “clear” that “global climate change caused by human activities is… a growing threat to society.”

Another issue with the Breitbart story, Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said to Live Science, is that it uses the term “global temperatures” in its headline while the actual article text refers to “land temperatures” only. The classification is important, he noted, because land temperatures fluctuate more than ocean temperatures. However, Trenberth said, combining land and ocean temperatures clearly demonstrates that overall global temperatures are indeed on the rise.

“If the temperature changes from one year to the next year, so what? That’s natural variability, or something else that’s not global warming,” added Tim Barnett, a research marine physicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. As he told Live Science, “People really need to stand back and look at the record from a 20-year period to get a good feel. And when you do that, it’s very clear that there’s an upward trend.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Increasing global temperatures will hamper the ability of soil to store carbon, with at least 55 trillion kg of the greenhouse gas expected to be released into the atmosphere by 2050, according to a new Yale University-led study published this week in the journal Nature.

While scientists had long speculated that climate change would have this kind of impact on the ability of soil to store carbon, studies on the issue have produced mixed results, with some even suggesting that the storage capacity of soil would actually increase, the university explained.

Now, a team led by Thomas Crowther, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology at the time of the study, has demonstrated that increasing temperatures due to human activities will actually cause a greater than anticipated loss of carbon – about 17% more than earlier projections had indicated.

This would be roughly the same as adding a new industrialized country the same size as the US to the planet, the study authors said in a statement, and perhaps most importantly, they found that this loss will be greatest at high latitudes, in the coldest places on Earth – areas which had largely been ignored by previous studies investigating the matter, they noted.

Losses will be greatest in colder, higher-latitude regions

As the Yale-led team explained, the majority of studies exploring carbon loss in the soil looked primarily at temperate regions that were home to smaller carbon stocks. In contrast, colder, high latitude areas have massive carbon stocks that have accumulated over several thousand years and have remained relatively secure thanks to microbial activity – until now, that is.

“Carbon stores are greatest in places like the Arctic and the sub-Arctic, where the soil is cold and often frozen. In those conditions microbes are less active and so carbon has been allowed to build up over many centuries,” Crowther said in a statement. “But as you start to warm, the activities of those microbes increase, and that’s when the losses start to happen.”

“The scary thing is, these cold regions are the places that are expected to warm the most under climate change,” he added. His team’s study was based on analysis of soil carbon data collected from dozens of studies involving more than 40 institutions conducted over the past two decades in several different parts of the world.

The research predicts that approximately 30 petagrams of soil carbon will be released into the atmosphere per degree of warming – twice the amount emitted due to human activity each year, the authors said. However, several factors could speed up or slow down this process, according to the Netherlands Institute, leading them to conclude that the emissions will rise between 12% and 17% by the middle of the century. This would likely cause the planet to warm by about two degrees Celsius by 2050, they added.

“Getting a handle on these kinds of feedbacks is essential if we’re going to make meaningful projections about future climate conditions,” added Crowther, who now is completing a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute. “Only then can we generate realistic greenhouse gas emission targets that are effective at limiting climate change.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Although she was a biped who regularly walked on the ground, the ancient human predecessor known as Lucy was more muscular than modern people and had strong arm bones that suggest she spent a lot of time climbing trees, a newly-published PLOS One study has found.

Led by Christopher Ruff, a professor of functional anatomy and evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the new study is the first to examine the internal bone structures of “the world’s most famous Australopithecus afarensis,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

The analysis of the approximately 3.2 million-year-old specimen revealed that she had hips, legs, and feet that were clearly adapted for bipdealism, but also had extremely strong arm bones which would have allowed her to easily hoist herself up tree branches, the Washington Post added.

Upper limb strength indicative of daily tree climbing

“Most people have agreed for a while that she did some tree climbing, or had done tree climbing in the recent past,” Ruff told the Times, “but there were a lot of questions about whether it was a major part of her lifestyle. We’re saying she probably used trees on a daily basis.”

Ruff and his colleagues reached their conclusion after analyzing micro-CT scans performed on Lucy’s skeleton at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. In particular, they found that cross-sectional scans on one remaining thigh bone and two upper arms bones revealed that her upper limb strength was slightly closer to that of a chimpanzee than a modern human.

This suggests that Lucy used her upper limbs significantly more than we normally do, but not quite as often as chimps, which regularly climb trees, the Times explained. Climbing, Ruff said, is the only logical explanation for the bone tissue distribution he witnessed in Lucy’s upper arm bones – “there is really no other explanation for that kind of overloading.”

Lucy was bipedal, except when acquiring food or sleeping

Furthermore, the micro-CT scans indicated that the 3.5 foot tall Australopithecus afarensis did walk on two legs when she was on the ground, based on the shape of her feet and pelvis, Ruff’s team reported in their study. Their analysis paints a picture of a pre-human which likely walked on the ground most of the time, but climbed trees daily  to obtain food or to sleep.

By examining Lucy’s pelvis, the researchers also found that she likely would have swayed from side-to-side while walking, forcing her to expend more energy than modern-day humans to move across the land, the Times said. Furthermore, they discovered that her overall bone strength was much greater than ours, indicating that she had far stronger muscles than her progeny.

“Hominins had slowly developed adaptations for walking on the ground, but for millions of years we were still using the trees in a significant way. Really, it was only with evolution of Homo the genus that we became fully committed to the ground,” Ruff told the Post. “This is what makes Lucy so fascinating. She had crossed a lot of thresholds on the path to becoming human, but not all of them.”

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Image credit: John Kappelman/University of Texas at Austin