Christmas Miracles!

"And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of Chester a Saviour, which is Draco the lizard. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the egg wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in an incubator."
"And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward dragons."

It has been recently reported that two female komodo dragons at seperate european zoos have reproduced asexually (parthenogenisis). When I first heard that dragons had laid eggs without a male's input, I immediately thought that it could have been a case of sperm storage, whereby a female can lay fertile eggs using sperm from a male mated with even years ago. Genetic testing though has shown that this is not the case. In fact, one of the dragons had never even been kept in an encloser with a male in her life. The process of asexual reproduction is a bit more common than the average person might expect, occuring in several lizards, fish, and a bird. In fact, the whiptail lizard (Cnemidophorus sp.) reproduces exclusively through parthenogenisis. So far, the komodo dragon is the largest animal to undergo parthenogenisis.

link to a good article on the subject

Paleo News

I haven't updated in a while, so I thouht that I would do the public service of providing links to recent news articles related to paleontology.

The miocene fossil remains of a small land mammal have been found on the south island of New Zealand. This disproves the view that the landmass has been without indiginous mammals since it split from the rest of Gondwanaland during the Cretaceous. This means that there was either a lineage that survived on the island from the original split, or that there was some sort of contact (maybe a land bridge) with other land masses that allowed the imigration of the mammals to the island at some point in the intervening period. The article implies that discovery means that New Zealand's flightless birds such as the kiwi and the kakapo (possibly too cute to live) would have lost their ability to fly in the presence of indiginous mammals. I think that it is possible that the kiwi lost flight in the presence of mammals, but that is because it is part of the paleornithine clade (including ostriches, emus, rheas, moas) that are almost all flightless (tinamous aren't). I suspect that the relative defenselessness of New Zealand birds would have been a novelty that arose in the pleistocene or late pliocene. link

The Joggins fossil cliffs, a deposit that has revealed some of the earliest and most primitive amniote fossils in the world, is going to get a gift shop. The province of Nova Scotia and the Canadian government are puting up $7 million for an interpretive center at the site in hopes of getting it classified as a world heritage site (something that I assumed it already was). I don't really see this as the blessing that others might. On the one hand, it will bring attention to the site and hopefully a means of generating funding for further research on fossils from it. However, it has been my experience that the best way to preserve a site is to keep the general public as far away from it as possible. It isn't as though scientists won't think to explore the cliffs for fossils if it doesn't get advertising or a place on a tourist map. Among people who know vertebrate paleontology, it's already one of the most famous sites in the world. Bringing in the public is just an invitation to loose fossils to day trippers and amature collectors. I'll grant that other fossil based world heritage sites have interpritive centers (the burgess shale comes to mind) but they are usually hard to get to, and as far as I know, haven't really generated new research. link

An insectivorous mammal has been recovered from the lower Cretaceous of Mongolia with a preserved gliding membrane between it's limbs. The discovery, reportedly a member of a newly designated order, represents the earliest airborn mammals, greatly surpassing the earliest bats from the eocene. Several articles also mistakenly report that this mammal predates the birds in it's aerial exploits. Archaeopteryx, from the Kimmeridgian stage of the Jurassic, predates the new mammal by about 30 million years. Furthermore, fossil birds from Lioaoning are about the same age as the gliding mammal. link

In more news from Mongolia, more Tarbosaurus remains have been found in an international effort (including University of Alberta proffessor Phil Currie), thereby bulsturing my claim made nearly a year ago to a fossil dealer in Tucson that for $100,000 I could find my own Tarbosaur. link

Botanize!

While searching for nurseries that cary primitive plants, I came across an excellent gallery of x-radiographs of various plants. The artist is Judith McMillan. This isn't particularly palaeontological in nature, but at least it has a magnolia (around since the Cretaceous).

I doubt that anything new would be contributed to science by examining flowers via x-ray, but I'd still classify this as a melding of art and science rather than pure art.