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Image right: Gymnosperm pollen attached to the abdomen and wing of a thysanopteran from the Alava amber (Credit: Enrique Peñalver, IGME).

The international team of scientists comprises: Enrique Peñalver and Eduardo Barrón from the Instituto Geológico y Minero de España in Madrid; Xavier Delclòs from the University of Barcelona; Andre and Patricia Nel from the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris; Conrad Labandeira from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.; and Carmen Soriano and Paul Tafforeau from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. The amber samples were from the collection of the Museo de Ciencias Naturales de Álava in Spain.

Today, more than 80 percent of plant species rely on insects to transport pollen from male to female flower parts. Pollination is best known in flowering plants but also exists in so-called gymnosperms, seed-producing plants like conifers. Although the most popular group of pollinator insects are bees and butterflies, a myriad of lesser-known species of flies, beetles or thrips have co-evolved with plants, transporting pollen and in return for this effort being rewarded with food.

Image left: An artist’s conception of of Gymnospollisthrips with pollen attached to the body over an ovulate organ of a gingko (Credit: Enrique Peñalver, IGME).

During the last 20 years, amber from the Lower Cretaceous found in the Basque country in Northern Spain has revealed many new plant and animal species, mainly insects. Here, the amber featured inclusions of thysanopterans, so-called thrips, a group of minute insects of less than 2 millimeters long that feed on pollen and other plant tissues. They are efficient pollinators for several species of flowering plants.

Two amber pieces revealed six fossilized specimens of female thrips with hundreds of pollen grains attached to their bodies. These insects exhibit highly specialized hairs with a ringed structure to increase their ability to collect pollen grains, very similar to the ones of well known pollinators like domestic bees. The scientists describe these six specimens in a new genus (Gymnopollisthrips) comprising two new species, G. minor and G. major.

The most representative specimen was also studied with synchrotron X-ray tomography at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility to reveal the pollen grain distribution over the insect’s body in 3D and at very high resolution. The pollen grains are very small and exhibit the adherent features needed so that insects can transport them. The scientists conclude that this pollen is from a kind of cycad or ginkgo tree, a kind of living fossil of which only a few species are known to science. Ginkgos are either male or female, and male trees produce small pollen cones whereas female trees bear ovules at the end of stalks which develop into seeds after pollination.

Image right: Synchrotron tomography image of Gymnospollisthrips minor showing pollen. (Credit: ESRF).

Why did these tiny insects collect and transport gingko pollen 100 million years ago? Their ringed hairs cannot have grown due to an evolutionary selection benefiting the trees. The benefit for the thrips can only be explained by the possibility their larvae ate pollen. This suggests that this species formed colonies with larvae living in the ovules of some kind of gingko for shelter and protection, and female insects transporting pollen from the male gingko cones to the female ovules to feed the larvae and at the same time pollinate the trees.

More than one hundred million years ago, flowering plants started to diversify enormously, eventually replacing conifers as the dominant species. “This is the oldest direct evidence for pollination, and the only one from the age of the dinosaurs,” says Carmen Soriano, who led the investigation of the amber pieces with X-ray tomography at the ESRF. “The co-evolution of flowering plants and insects, thanks to pollination, is a great evolutionary success story. It began about 100 million years ago, when this piece of amber fossil was produced by resin dropping from a tree, which today is the oldest fossil record of pollinating insects. Thrips might indeed turn out to be one of the first pollinator groups in geological history, long before evolution turned some of them into flower pollinators.” –Source: European Synchrotron Radiation Facility

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“We were shocked. Basically what we are looking at is a technology that was learned from one person to another, from father to son or from uncle to nephew,” explains Stanford, co-author of a recent paper on the discovery in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Image right: Clovis stone points from the Drake Cache of Colorado. Click to enlarge. (Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian)

The researchers believe encounters between Clovis knappers, or stone point makers, from different groups at stone quarry sites or in settlements certainly “facilitated the sharing of technological information by allowing knappers to observe tools and techniques used by other artisans,” explains co-author Sabrina Sholts of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California in Berkeley. “The tools selected by the knappers, as well as how they were handled and applied, certainly were part of the Clovis technology,” that was shared between families and tribes.

This video was created by Sabrina Sholts of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California in Berkeley using 3D digital scans of a Clovis stone projectile point from the collections of the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

In fact, the researchers say, through a strong communication network  Clovis spear point technology spread across North America in as little as 200 years. Radiocarbon dating of the stone points backs this theory. Many Clovis points “have been recovered from kill sites, in association with the remains of animals such as mammoths and bison,” Sholts says. This “suggests that they were effective for hunting large prey.”

The scientists used high-tech 3D scanning to create detailed images of the Clovis points from the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The researchers focused particularly on the contours of the scars on the front and back of each bi-face spear point where individual stone flakes were carefully and systematically removed centuries ago by striking with an implement made of antler, bone, ivory or even perhaps hardwood. Each 3D scan records millions of minute measurements, revealing “subtle differences in the various steps of reduction [flaking off tiny pieces of stone] and nuances that you can’t see with your eyes,” Stanford explains.

Right: Images of 3D models and overlaid front and back flake scar contours from projectile points from the Colby Cache, Wyoming (left), Drake Cache, Colorado (center left), and two modern replicas (center right and right). The Colby and Drake points have markedly different bases, but this difference is much less prominent in the flake scar contours. For the two modern replicas, their flake scar contours are generally more uneven, and also display larger differences between the overlaid contours.

“One nice thing about the study is its relative objectivity,” Sholts points out. With the 3D imaging, “it is really very automated. What we are doing is essentially data analysis, capturing the contours and curvature of the surface of each biface in a standard way. The results were surprising to me.”

This 3D study has laid to rest the theory that Clovis technology spread region by region from knappers who copied lost or discarded stone points they had found, Stanford says. In fact, the paper reveals, part of the research included projectile points made by an expert modern-day knapper who closely studied and copied Clovis points in the Smithsonian collection. Computer analysis revealed these modern creations do not share the same symmetry as do the authentic Clovis points—further proof that the real Clovis points were a learned technology.

“We are now working on a new study with Clovis points from California that we are putting into that same computer matrix,” Stanford says.–John Barrat

Article link:  “Flake scar patterns of Clovis points analyzed with a new digital morphometrics approach: evidence for direct transmission of technological knowledge across early North America,” authored by Sabrina Sholts, Dennis Stanford, Louise Flores and Sebastian Wärmländer, will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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The existing dinosaur hall will remain open until spring 2014, when it will be closed to the public to allow construction to begin; selected dinosaur specimens will remain on view in other public areas of the museum.

Image right and below: The Dinosaur Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

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CTFS-SIGEO is a global network of forest research plots committed to the study of tropical and temperate forest function and diversity. The multi-institutional network includes plots across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, with a strong focus on tropical regions. Ecologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute established the first forest dynamics plot on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal in 1980.

Image left: Daniel Johnson, a biology graduate student at Indiana University, measures the diameter of a white ash tree in the University’s Lilly-Dickey Woods. The 550-acre woods were recently added to CTFS-SIGEO’s global network of forest research plots. (Photo by F. Collin Hobbs)

Stuart J. Davies, CTFS-SIGEO director and senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, will make the move along with David Kenfack, CTFS-SIGEO Africa Program coordinator. Davies sees the need for increased presence at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. as the network continues to build partnerships within different Smithsonian units.

The scale and intensity of the CTFS-SIGEO research program remains unprecedented in forest science. Scientists monitor the growth and survival of about 4.5 million trees of approximately 8,500 species in 21 different countries. The work aims to increase the scientific understanding of forest ecosystems, guide sustainable forest management and natural-resource policy, monitor the impacts of climate change, and build capacity in forest science. Most recently CTFS-SIGEO added the Lilly-Dickey Woods–a 550-acre forest in Brown County Indiana that is a research and teaching preserve for Indiana University–to its network of forest research plots.

Because of its extensive biological monitoring, unique databases, and the expertise of its partners, CTFS-SIGEO enhances society’s ability to evaluate and respond to the impacts of global climate change. Monitoring so many forest plots at once is providing a comprehensive, yet locally detailed perspective on how the world’s forests are being transformed by global change.  Research on tropical forest dynamics continues, but is joined by new initiatives studying carbon fluxes, temperate forests, ecosystem services, and biodiversity. CTFS-SIGEO and its many institutional partners are leveraging huge intellectual horsepower to transform our understanding of forest-ecosystem structure and function. The network has been so successful that the Smithsonian is now planning to extend its system of earth observatories to the near shore marine realm. –Source: The Plant Press, newsletter of the Department of Botany, National Museum of Natural History.

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Collections will continue to be owned by the National Park Service but will be in the permanent custodial care of the Smithsonian Institution. The agreement formalizing the relationship was signed today by National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis and the Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for Science Eva J. Pell at the National Museum of Natural History.

Photo right: Jon Jarvis, Director of the National Park Service, and Eva Pell, Under Secretary for Science at the Smithsonian sign an MOU between the two organizations. The partnership gives broader access to National Park Service collections through the Smithsonian’s care and management of them. (Johnny Gibbons photo)

“This agreement benefits science, the American people, and the long-standing and historic relationship between our two organizations,” said Jarvis. “Together we are building a collection that will become an extraordinary tool for the scientific community to study biodiversity, evolution, and the distinctive character of national park ecosystems.”

The Smithsonian echoed the significance of the new agreement. “Two venerable institutions long known for protecting the nation’s heritage, are now working together to enhance care and access to specimens that document the natural environment of our national parks,” said Eva Pell, under secretary for science at the Smithsonian.

Examples of National Park Service collections that the Smithsonian could curate under the new agreement are:

• 138 holotypes – a specimen described in scientific literature to establish a new species – that researchers in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina have discovered and described over the past 14 years.

• From George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia, 3,000 vascular plant specimens representing 1,326 species, as well as a wide range of specimens from the Potomac River Gorge, including holotypes of shoreflies, caddisflies, and copepods (small crustaceans).

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Both snakes (newly named Ramphotyphlops hatmaliyeb and Ramphotyphlops adocetus) are believed to be indigenous to islands that only formed in the last 2,000-years. These islands are surrounded by water and have never had any connection to land.

“The question is,” Wynn says, “how did they get there?” The only other terrestrial snake found in the Caroline Islands east of Palau is a third blind snake species known to have been introduced by humans years ago.

“These new species extend the known range of blind snakes some 2,000 kilometers out into the Pacific Ocean, into areas where we didn’t know they occurred or could ever occur. We just didn’t expect to find blind snakes out there in the middle of the ocean,” Wynn says.

Image right: The new blind snake species “Ramphotyphlops hatmaliyeb.” (Photo courtesy Marjorie Falanruw)

Blind snakes live underground, are typically four or five inches long and easily mistaken for large worms. “They eat termites and small ants, and there are about 240 or so known species in the world,” Wynn says. “They spend their lives burrowing so their head is blunt and pointed to push their way through the soil. Their rudimentary eyes can only differentiate between light and dark and exist as pigment spots underneath scales on their head.”

When we first received a single specimen from the island of Ant Atoll, in the Carolines, Wynn explains, “we initially thought it must be a waif, brought by humans aboard a ship, because it was so unexpected.” As the scientists received additional specimens they were faced with the fact that the snakes are a species indigenous to the Caroline Islands. One hypothesis to their presence is that they are a relic population that somehow survived on temporary cays, reefs, platforms and other oceanic structures for thousands of years until the islands on which they now live were formed.

Image right: Top and side photographs of the head of the newly named blind snake species “R. adocetus” with accompanying illustration showing the unique scale pattern that scientists use to identify them as to species.

Because different species of blind snakes look so similar in appearance, an expert is normally required to tell species apart. Physical characteristics used to distinguish them are counts of the number of scales found along the back of the animal or scale rows around the animal’s body, shape and position of scales on the head, and color pattern.

Article link: “The unexpected discovery of blind snakes (Serpentes: Typhlopidae) in Micronesia: two new species of Ramphotyphlops from the Caroline Islands,” by Addison Wynn, Robert Reynolds, Donald Buden, Marjorie Falanruw and Brian Lynch appeared in the journal Zootaxa.

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“Nothing makes sense,” explains Martin Nweeia, a practicing New England dentist and member of the Smithsonian’s Department of Vertebrate Zoology and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. For one, narwhals have no teeth. “They eat large fish, yet swallow them whole. If you look in its mouth there’s nothing.  There are absolutely no teeth.”

Image right: The mouth of a narwhal has no teeth. (Photo by Martin Nweeia)

Incredibly, the narwhal’s only visible tooth is outside of its mouth. Its tusk, in fact, is a giant canine tooth—that can grow as long as 9 feet—with a distinct left-hand spiral, covered in a tissue called cementum, normally only found around the base of a tooth lodged in bone.

Nweeia and a team of dentists and zoologists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Harvard and other research organizations recently took a very close look at the dentition of the narwhal’s mouth. They studied more than 130 skulls in museum collections and 21 skulls of narwhals killed by native hunters in Canada. In a new paper published in The Anatomical Record, the team determined:

• The long spiral tusk of the male narwhal is one of a pair of canine teeth positioned horizontally in the animal’s skull. They determined it was a canine and not an incisor because the tusk originates in the narwhal’s maxillary bone, where canine teeth in mammals originate. This is the first study to confirm the tusk as a canine tooth. In most mammals, canines are vertical in the mouth and are used for holding food or as weapons.

• It is the left tooth of the pair that grows into a long tusk that erupts through the narwhal’s upper lip. The right canine tooth is also a tusk but it remains embedded in the narwhal’s skull unerrupted. Only occasionally do both tusks erupt. Female narwhals have two embedded tusks that erupt only very rarely.

Image left: A rare double-tusked narwhal in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History is examined by Martin Nweeia, left, and Charles Potter, collections manager, Smithsonian Marine Mammal Program. (Photo by Joseph Meehan)

• A second pair of tiny teeth is located in open tooth sockets in the narwhal’s snout alongside the tusks. These teeth are vestigial, meaning they have no function. Close inspection across many specimens reveal extreme variation in location, morphology and histology (tissue structure) of these teeth, all indications they “are following a pattern consistent with evolutionary obsolescence,” the scientists write.

“It is striking when you think that this animal decided to take all of its tooth-producing energy and put it into one thing [a tusk] that sticks out nine feet into the ocean. With the amount of energy that it takes to produce that one tusk it could easily have 30 to 40 teeth in its mouth doing other things,” Nweeia explains. “Evolutionary-wise something is saying don’t do this, instead it is better to grow this extraordinary tusk.” A pretty compelling reason must be behind such a decision.”

Image right: An array of vestigial teeth collected from narwhals. (Photo by Joseph Meehan)

Did the narwhal once have teeth oriented vertically in its mouth as do other mammals? “One might assume this animal once had more teeth positioned vertically in the mouth, but there is no evolutionary evidence to say that would be true,” Nweeia explains. “With whales the evolutionary pieces of the puzzle are scant and I prefer to leave speculation out of the equation.”

There are many kinds of curious expressions of teeth in whales, narwhals being the most extraordinary, Nweeia says. “The strap-toothed whale, for example, has two teeth that wrap over its upper jaw preventing the animal from opening its mouth.”

Image left: The dissection team at the Osteo-Prep Lab of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History begins dissection on a male narwhal specimen. From left, James Mead, curator emeritus, Museum of Natural History; Ted Cranford, San Diego State University; and Martin Nweeia. (Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution)

“The whole thing that is great about the teeth of the narwhal is that nothing makes sense,” Nweeia adds. “The tusks are an extreme example of dental asymmetry. They exhibit uncharacteristic dimorphic or sexual expressions since females do not exhibit erupted tusks as commonly as males. Also, the tusk has a straight axis and a spiraled morphology.  Conventional mechanisms of evolution do not help explain these expressions of teeth.”–John Barrat

Article link: “Vestigial Tooth Anatomy and Tusk Nomenclature for Monodon monoceros,” The Anatomical Record, April 2012. Authored by Martin T. Nweeia, Frederick C. Eichmiller, Peter V. Hauschka, Ethan Tyler, James G. Mead, Charles W. Potter, David P. Angnatsiak, Pierre R. Richard, Jack R. Orr, and Sandie R. Black.

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