Science Tuesday - Living Fossil, Rare Virus, and Prehistoric man

Diving Deep for a Living Fossil
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, The New York Times, August 25, 2009

For 33 years, Peter A. Rona has pursued an ancient, elusive animal, repeatedly plunging down more than two miles to the muddy seabed of the North Atlantic to search out, and if possible, pry loose his quarry.

Like Ahab, he has failed time and again. Despite access to the world’s best equipment for deep exploration, he has always come back empty-handed, the creature eluding his grip.

The animal is no white whale. And Dr. Rona is no unhinged Captain Ahab, but rather a distinguished oceanographer at Rutgers University. And he has now succeeded in making an intellectual splash with a new research report, written with a team of a dozen colleagues.

They have gathered enough evidence to prove that his scientific prey — an organism a bit larger than a poker chip — represents one of the world’s oldest living fossils, perhaps the oldest. The ancestors of the creature, Paleodictyon nodosum, go back to the dawn of complex life. And the creature itself, known from fossils, was once thought to have gone extinct some 50 million years ago.

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Global Update: Viruses: Veterinarian in Australia Is Sickened After Being Exposed to a Rare Virus
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, August 25, 2009

A veterinarian in Australia has been hospitalized in critical condition after exposure to the rare Hendra virus, according to local reports, which said he fell ill after treating two dying horses on a Queensland stud farm.

The virus was found in 1994 and has never been seen outside Australia since its discovery in Hendra, a Brisbane suburb. There have been only a dozen outbreaks, but the virus has proved lethal to horses and to humans caring for them. About 70 percent of the horses infected have died, and so have three of the six people known to have caught it from them — a veterinarian, a farmer and a prominent horse trainer, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, August 21, 2009

The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.

In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.

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