Usually, your close relatives resemble you. Or at least they have the same number of limbs.
Not true, however, for Brachymeles lukbani, a species recently discovered by Cameron Siler, one of the museum's graduate students in herpetology. This critter (which has lost its limbs through evolution) looks like a snake but is actually a skink — a type of lizard. The genus Brachymeles has a diverse membership.
"They have the full suite from limbed to limbless, from working limbs with five fingers to no limbs at all," says Siler.
But this makes the lizards an excellent group for studying how and why limb loss occurs. Brachymeles lukbani "swims" through rotten logs and undergrowth, looking for food. In that situation, possessing limbs might not be very useful, or even counter-productive.
Siler's research has increased the museum's holdings of skinks, making it a leader in skink research
While a recent discovery may change textbooks and the way that many scientists think about bird and dinosaur evolution, it comes as no surprise us.
This week, Xing Xu, H. You, K. Du and F. Han published in the journal Nature a reanalysis of early bird evolution. The analysis knocks Archaeopteryx off its perch as a grandfather to later birds.
KU has been the central hub for the discovery of the fossil bird beds in the Early Cretaceous of China with the description of the primitive bird, Confuciusornis, and has continued to be involved with all the new discoveries coming out of this region in part through an alumnus of the KU vertebrate paleontology program.
The alumnus, Zhonghe Zhou, presently leads Chinese studies in that region and was recently elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Zhou and one of the paper’s authors, Xing Xu, had already precipitated a revolution in our understanding of bird evolution with the discovery of the four-winged gliding bird/dinosaur, Microraptor. With Microraptor, they showed that bird flight began with gliding.
Zhou has a long-term collaboration with KU vertebrate paleontology researchers at the Biodiversity Institute. Preparator David Burnham, collection manager Desui Miao and I regularly visit China to work on early birds. Our research also has suggested that Archaeopteryx along with other archaic birds represents a side branch that split off much earlier than the new bird, Xiaotingia, and its sister Anchiornis, another four-winged gliding animal.
While the recent paper in Nature calls these animals “feathered dinosaurs,” we think that they and their common ancestor with modern birds can be best considered true birds. Rather than removing Archaeopteryx from Aves because its avian features were shared with birdlike dinosaurs, we place a stronger emphasis on these features thereby pulling the dinosaur-like birds into Aves. This limits these flying, feathered animals to the Class Aves and pushes the origin of birds into the Early Jurassic or Late Triassic at about the same time as the dinosaurs themselves.
Curious children often observe scientists such as my collaborator, Mauricio Garcia, whenever we're collecting insects
Mauricio, Jesus and I scouted a few new field sites today in the Serrania de Perija- the mountainous border region that forms the western boarder with Colombia. Just a few hours from the relatively affluent oil city that is Maracaibo, the roads gradually narrow into small dirt paths winding around large rural haciendas (ranches) and indigenous communities. Cars give way to burrows and horses as the primary (and functional) means of transport.
The last few days have been full of logistical gymnastics in preparing for the main expedition that will start on 8 January. After celebrating New Years in Maracaibo, Jesus, Mauricio and I spent 10 hours on the second of January driving to Caracas to pick up another collaborator, Kelly Miller, at the airport the next morning. Kelly is curator of arthropods at the University of New Mexico and a specialist in several water beetle groups. From Caracas, we headed to the city of Maracay (about 2 hours west) where the primary entomological museum in Venezuela (MIZA) is located on the agricultural campus of the Universidad Central de Venezuela. We spent the afternoon catching up with our colleagues and working out some trip details. Today, the group (with Kelly, now four in number) spent the day collecting in Henri Pittier National Park, which encompasses the middle swath of Venezuela’s coastal mountains. These mountains are kind of the last northern throws of the Andes. Running east-west and reaching more than 2500 meters in height, they form a huge wall between the Caribbean and this part of Venezuela.
We collected at a few rivers on the northern slopes that had been severely scoured by heavy rains two months ago. Some of them look as if a few bulldozers had plowed down the valleys in which they flow. It will be interesting to compare the insects we find here with what we find in other non-impacted streams in the area as well as track the recolonization and recovery of these streams over the next few years.
I arrived in Moorea on a Saturday morning and quickly settled into the lab and accommodations. On my first afternoon I went out collecting with Dr. Arthur Anker and Ms. Sarah McPherson (both of the Florida Museum of Natural History) to search for sea anemones at Papetoai. At low tide, we waded in water about 0.5 m deep on a sandy/muddy substrate, flipping over dead coral boulders and rocks looking for sea anemones hidden from plain view.
Specimen of sea anemone specimens Triactis producta attached to a dead coral boulder
Sure enough, hidden under boulders we found specimens of the sea anemone species Triactis producta. This is one of the species I am researching for my Ph.D. and I have already collected specimens from the Red Sea, Zanzibar, Maldives, and Australia! The photo below shows one of the specimens attached to a rock – if you look closely, you can see transparent tentacles at the top of the animal, and a skirt of dark brown tissue about mid-way down the column. This extra tissue of the anemone is full of zooxanthellae. Zooxanthellae are intracellular symbionts (organisms in a symbiotic relationship) that photosynthesize and produce sugars the anemone can use. The specimen in the photo was about 7 mm tall, so you can imagine that it takes a well-trained eye to spot them in the field!
After I collected these specimens, I took them back to laboratory at the Gump Research Station to look at them under the microscope and make more detailed observations. Once I am finished photographing and observing them, some specimens are preserved in 95% ethanol and the rest in 10% formalin. The ethanol specimens will be used for molecular studies while the formalin specimens will be used to study the morphology of the anemones. I can’t wait to get back into the field to collect more sea anemones!
Today was our first couple of hikes on the trails at CICRA. Going into this experience, I really had no idea what to expect. I had a cartoon illustration with monkeys swinging on vines and colorful beetles surrounding us, but I was not far off. We walked through a rainforest full of life: everything was alive! The birds and the monkeys could be seen jumping around on the trees, filling the jungle with their calls. It didn’t take long to train my eyes to see smaller details. Uncovering a plant to reveal miniature ecosystems. Life depending on life.
As we uncovered different plants and logs, I started to wonder about the chemistry behind the insects and their ecosystems. What was attracting these particular bugs to these particular plants? As a microbiologist, I wondered about the biochemistry of the nectar of the plants and what kind of microbes they attract. I began to discover how many research topics the rain forest had to offer. For example, the diversity of microbes in gold-mined rivers versus non gold-mined river near CICRA. All of these questions have yet to be answered and leave plenty of scientific opportunities for Amazon microbiology and ecology.