Laelaps

Photo of the Day #869: Teddy

Category: Cats • Photography

Posted by Brian Switek at 5:31 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Finding a home for jaguars

Category: Cats • Ecology • Mammals

One year ago this week Macho B was euthanized. He had been captured in mid-February of 2009, the only known jaguar living inside the United States, but after he was caught and fitted with a radio collar his health quickly deteriorated. When he nearly stopped moving he was recaptured, taken to the Phoenix zoo, and put to sleep when it was discovered that he was suffering from irreparable kidney failure.

At first it seemed as if his capture was a lucky accident, but a later investigation by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that the snare had been intentionally laid (without proper notification) in an area Macho B was known to have frequented. This may have hastened his death. At the time of his capture Macho B was at least 14, pretty old for jaguar, and it is possible that the stress of his capture is what triggered his decline. Since the necropsy on his body was incomplete, however, we can never know for sure.

But Macho B was probably not the last jaguar to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. At the same time that the report on Macho B's death was making the news it was discovered that another jaguar had been spotted just 30 miles to the south of the US border. There may no longer be any resident jaguars inside the United States, but big cats along the borderlands continue to cross the nation's southern boundary. As two recent studies illustrate, however, this northern population is only part of a network of jaguars conservationists are trying to hold together.

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Posted by Brian Switek at 10:37 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

A Yellowstone fox catches dinner

Category: Mammals • Television

Yellowstone National Park is an amazing place. I stayed there for three days longer than I had originally planned and I still was not ready to leave it. Even if I had spent another week there I still would not have seen all the natural wonders of the park, but fortunately the BBC recently sent film crews to Yellowstone to capture its natural history in every season. These vignettes were expertly strung together in the miniseries Yellowstone: Battle for Life, and embedded below is one of the scenes in which a fox tries to catch dinner in the middle of winter:

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Posted by Brian Switek at 3:38 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Photo of the Day #868: Flowers

Category: Photography • Plants

Posted by Brian Switek at 11:00 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

New Study Confirms That "Ida" is Not Our Great-Great-Great-Great-Etc. Grandmother

Category: Evolution • Mammals • Paleontology • Primates

Almost ten months ago an international team of researchers introduced the world to an exquisitely-preserved primate from the 47 million year old oil shales of Messel, Germany. Dubbed Darwinius masillae, and nicknamed "Ida" and "The Link", the fossil was touted as one of our earliest primate ancestors in a massive media campaign worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. Yet the trouble was that there was no solid evidence that Darwinius was one of our ancestors. Despite the marketing blitz promoting the fossil the team of scientists who described it did not provide sufficient evidence that the lemur-like primate was anywhere close to our ancestry, and it would take the description of a related fossil primate several months later to put "Ida" in her place. Darwinius was not one of our ancient progenitors, as had been proclaimed, but instead belonged to an extinct branch of early primates which were more closely related to living lemurs and lorises.

Now another team of early primate experts has published a new analysis of the famous fossil. Writing in the Journal of Human Evolution paleontologists Blythe Williams, Richard Kay, Christopher Kirk, and Callum Ross have independently confirmed that the original description of Darwinius which appeared in the journal PLoS One was deeply flawed. Understanding why, however, requires a bit of background.

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Posted by Brian Switek at 8:16 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Photo of the Day #867: Japanese macaque

Category: Mammals • Photography • Primates

Posted by Brian Switek at 2:30 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Another sneak-peek at Life: Ethiopian wolves

Category: Mammals • Television

Here's another sneak-peek at Life (this time with David Attenborough's narration) featuring one of my most favorite canids, the Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis). Enjoy!

Posted by Brian Switek at 11:54 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Photo of the Day #866: Dwarf mongoose

Category: Mammals • Photography

Posted by Brian Switek at 5:51 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Uncovering the "Chimpanzee Stone Age"

Category: Anthropology • Mammals • Paleontology • Primates

Before 1859 the idea that humans lived alongside the mammoths, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats of the not-too-distant past was almost heretical. Not only was there no irrefutable evidence that our species stretched so far back in time, but the very notion that we could have survived alongside such imposing Pleistocene mammals strained credulity. Contrary to what might be immediately expected, however, it was not Darwin's famous abstract On the Origin of Species that changed appraisals of human prehistory. Instead it was a collection of stone tools found mingled among the bones of extinct mammals found in deposits on either side of the English Channel.

The discovery of stone tools from places like Brixham Cave in England and France's Somme Valley confirmed that industry was a very old human enterprise, and so some scholars naturally felt quite comfortable in giving out species the honorary title of "Man the Toolmaker." The ability of our species to make and use tools clearly separated us from all other organisms, at least until it was discovered that chimpanzees, too, made and used tools. More than that, studies since the 1960's have confirmed that different populations of chimpanzees have distinctive tool cultures affected by the contingencies of their surroundings, and a recent study published two years ago in PNAS illustrates that these cultures of tool use among non-human primates stretch back at least 4,300 years.

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Posted by Brian Switek at 11:42 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks