Science Tuesday - Old Stuff
Mar. 6th, 2012 12:02 pm
Lactose Intolerant, Before Milk Was on Menu
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, March 5, 2012
Since it was discovered in 1991, preserved in 5,300 years’ worth of ice and snow in the Italian Alps, the body of the so-called Tyrolean Iceman has yielded a great deal of information. Scientists have learned his age (about 46), that he had knee problems, and how he died (by the shot of an arrow).
Now, researchers have sequenced the complete genome of the iceman, nicknamed Ötzi, and discovered even more intriguing details. They report in the journal Nature Communications that he had brown eyes and brown hair, was lactose intolerant and had Type O blood.
The lactose intolerance makes sense, said Albert Zink, an anthropologist at the European Academy of Research in Bolzano, Italy, who was one of the study’s authors.
“In early times, there was no need to digest milk as an adult because there were no domesticated animals,” Dr. Zink said. “This genetic change took hundreds of years to occur.”
But the scientists were surprised to find that Ötzi had a strong predisposition to heart disease. “If he wasn’t shot with an arrow, it would have been possible that he might have had a heart attack soon after,” Dr. Zink said.

Giant Jurassic Fleas Packed a Mean Mouth
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, March 2, 2012
Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest fleas to date — bloodsuckers that lived among (and possibly on) dinosaurs.
Fossils found in northeastern China belong to two ancient species of fleas, the researchers report in the current issue of the journal Nature: one dating to the Middle Jurassic, about 165 million years ago, and the other to the Early Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago.
Females ranged from one-eighth to half an inch long, males from one-sixth to a third of an inch.
That makes them giants. Today’s fleas are only about one-tenth the size.

No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of This Fossil
By SARAH FECHT, The New York Times, March 5, 2012
The famous feathered dinosaur archaeopteryx seems to have had a penchant for fossilizing in painful positions, with its head cranked backward at a severe angle. The contorted posture is so common in dinosaur fossils that it has its own name: opisthotonus, from the Greek “tonos,” meaning tightening, and “opistho,” behind.
Since the 1920s, paleontologists have debated how these dinosaurs came to have such grotesque final resting positions. Some theorized that water currents moved the bones into formation, or that the muscle contractions of rigor mortis pulled the head backward. Others thought the animals must have died in pain.
New research proposes a simpler explanation.
In a paper published last month in the journal Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments, Achim G. Reisdorf of the University of Basel in Switzerland writes that the trouble with the death-throe hypothesis is that carcasses are flexible. To fossilize in the traumatic death position, a carcass would have to be quickly buried in the exact spot where it died, without any transportation.
But that is unlikely, Mr. Reisdorf wrote. Many of the dinosaurs found in opisthotonic posture are land animals that fell into sediment at the bottom of bodies of water, and probably had to settle before reaching their final resting place.
Mr. Reisdorf thought water might be the key. So he and a colleague, Dr. Michael Wuttke, decided to try some kitchen science. They bought fresh chicken necks from a butcher and plunged them into water buckets.