US man in critical care after SAfrica chimp attack

US man in critical care after SAfrica chimp attack — In the six years he's managed a sanctuary for abused and orphaned chimpanzees, South African conservationist Eugene Cussons is from time to time called on to comment when an ape elsewhere in the world attacks a human. Cussons says he could always pinpoint a moment of taunting or perceived aggression that could have set off the quick and powerful animals.

In this photo taken Feb. 1, 2011, chimpanzees sit in an enclosure at the Chimp Eden rehabilitation center, near Nelspruit, South Africa. A paramedic official says chimpanzees at a sanctuary for the animals in eastern South Africa bit and dragged a man at the reserve, badly injuring him. In a statement, Jeffrey Wicks of the Netcare911 medical emergency services company said the man he described as a ranger was leading a tour group at the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden Thursday June 28, 2012 when two chimpanzees grabbed his feet and pulled him under a fence into their enclosure. The international institute founded by primatologist Jane Goodall opened the sanctuary in 2005. It is a home to chimpanzees rescued from further north in Africa, where they are hunted for their meat of held captive as pets. (AP Photo/Erin Conway-Smith)

This time, though, the attack was at his own Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden in eastern South Africa. And Cussons, host of the Animal Planet show "Escape to Chimp Eden," is without an explanation.

In telephone interview Saturday, Cussons said he would have to wait until the severely injured victim, a University of Texas at San Antonio anthropology graduate student who was inspired by famed primatologist Jane Goodall to study chimps, was well enough to provide details on what sparked Thursday's attack.

It was the first such attack since Cussons, working with Goodall's renowned international institute, converted part of his family's game farm into the sanctuary in 2006.

"You can train for it, you can do your best to prepare," Cussons said. "But when it actually happens, it's shocking and traumatic for everyone."

Cussons's team quickly evacuated the dozen tourists to whom Andrew F. Oberle had been giving a lecture and tried to separate the chimps from Oberle. In the end, Cussons, who was himself attacked by a chimp as he tried to pull it off Oberle, took the extreme step of firing into the air, scaring the animals away.

Oberle was bitten repeatedly and dragged for nearly a kilometer (half mile). Cussons said one of the chimps was injured in the scuffle, and he was awaiting a veterinarian's report to determine the nature and extent of the injury. No one else was hurt.

Male chimps can stand up to 1.7 meters (5 feet, 7 inches) tall and weigh about 70 kilograms (154 pounds), according to the Jane Goodall institute. The two chimps that attacked Oberle were male, though the sanctuary's website did not say how large those animals were.

Cussons said it was the first time he had asked Oberle to speak to visitors. The student had arrived last month for a follow-up study visit after an extended stay to observe the chimps a year or so ago, Cussons said. As a researcher, Cussons said Oberle had been trained to ensure he understood how the animals might behave and knew to keep a safe distance. Cussons said Oberle was given additional training before addressing the tour group.

Cussons said Oberle broke the rules by going through the first of two fences that separate humans from the chimps. The chimps then grabbed him and pulled him under the second fence, which is electrified. Cussons said it was unclear why Oberle had moved so dangerously close.

Only after Oberle is well enough to talk will investigators "be able to find out why he crossed the safety fence to go on to the main fence," Cussons said.

Mediclinic Nelspruit hospital said Saturday that the 26-year-old Oberle remained in critical condition in intensive care. Oberle underwent surgery at the hospital Thursday.

Cussons said Saturday that Oberle's mother was on her way to South Africa. Oberle's mother, Mary Flint of St. Louis, said Friday that chimpanzees have been her son's passion since seventh grade, when he watched a film about Goodall.

Goodall, a Cambridge University-trained ethnologist, began studying chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe National Park in 1960. Since 1994, her institute has been involved in conservation programs across Africa. The institute says its Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center in Congo is the largest chimpanzee sanctuary in Africa.

Flint said Oberle knew the risks of working with chimps and would not want them blamed for the attack.

"He adored them," she said. "Since he was a little boy he just loved them, and I just have faith that ... when all is said and done, he's going to go right back into it."

The sanctuary has been closed to tourists since the attack, while government and police officials investigate. The Jane Goodall Institute South Africa is conducting its own investigation.

"Everyone at Chimp Eden is hurting," Cussons said, saying the thoughts of staff members were with Oberle and his family.

Cussons said the two chimps that attacked Oberle, Amadeus and Nikki, had been isolated in their night pens since the attack. He said they were calm and exhibiting remorse, which he said chimps show by behaving submissively.

Human-animal contact is kept to a minimum at the sanctuary, designed as a haven for chimpanzees, which are not native to South Africa, that have been rescued from elsewhere in Africa. Some lost their parents to poachers in countries where they are hunted for their meat or to be sold as pets, and others were held in captivity in cruel conditions.

"They come here and we rehabilitate them by giving them space ... and contact with their own kind," Cussons said. According to the sanctuary's website, one of the chimps involved in the attack, Amadeus, was orphaned in Angola and brought to South Africa in 1996, where he was kept at the Johannesburg Zoo until the sanctuary opened. The other, Nikki, came from Liberia in 1996 and also was held at the zoo until becoming among the first chimps at the sanctuary. Before arriving in South Africa, Nikki, whose parents were killed for their meat, had been treated like a son by his owners, who dressed him in clothes, shaved his body and taught him to eat at a table using cutlery, the website said.

In the United States, a Connecticut woman, Charla Nash, was attacked in 2009 by a friend's chimpanzee that ripped off her nose, lips, eyelids and hands before being killed by police. The woman was blinded and has had a face transplant. Lawyers for Nash filed papers this week accusing state officials of failing to seize the animal before the mauling despite a warning that it was dangerous. ( Associated Press )

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In Birds’ Pursuit of Love, New Plant Life Blooms

In Birds’ Pursuit of Love, New Plant Life Blooms - Male bowerbirds cultivate plants, a new study reports, though their gardening work appears to be unintentional.

The birds, found in Australia and Papua New Guinea, are named for the extravagant structures they build to woo females. As part of their courting strategy, they decorate these bowers with fruits, and the seeds of these fruits germinate. This results in new plants of the species Solanum ellipticum, also known as the potato bush.

“On average you find about 40 plants where bowers are,” eight times as many as at random sites, said Joah R. Madden, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter in England.

The findings appear in the journal Current Biology.

The researchers found that the birds were not picking areas with high plant concentrations to build their bowers, since the plants began to appear after their arrival.

“These plants are arriving after the bowerbirds,” Dr. Madden said. “In a sense the male is cultivating them.”

It appears to be an excellent symbiotic relationship, he said. When the birds build their bowers, they clear the area around them, creating ideal growing conditions for the plants.

“When we look around bowers, only 30 percent is covered with grass, shrubs, compared to random sites, where’s there about 50 percent,” Dr. Madden said.

And male bowerbirds surrounded by more plants had more success with mating.

Curiously, males seem to cultivate a duller, grayer version of the fruit; fruits grown farther from bowers were a more yellowish green.

Dr. Madden isn’t sure why. “Presumably because that’s what the female wants,” he said. ( nytimes.com )

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Study Sheds Light on How Birds Navigate by Magnetic Field

Study Sheds Light on How Birds Navigate by Magnetic Field - Birds are famously good navigators. Some migrate thousands of miles, flying day and night, even when the stars are obscured. And for decades, scientists have known that one navigational skill they employ is an ability to detect variations in the earth’s magnetic field.

How this magnetic sense works, however, has been frustratingly difficult to figure out.

Now, two researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Le-Qing Wu and David Dickman, have solved a central part of that puzzle, identifying cells in a pigeon’s brain that record detailed information on the earth’s magnetic field, a kind of biological compass.

Two researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have identified cells in pigeons’ brains that serve as a kind of biological compass.

“It’s a stunning piece of work,” David Keays of the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna wrote in an e-mail. “Wu and Dickman have found cells in the pigeon brain that are tuned to specific directions of the magnetic field.”

Their report appeared online in Science Express on Thursday. Kenneth Lohmann at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who also studies magnetic sensing, said in an e-mail that the study was “very exciting and important.”

Navigating by magnetism includes several steps. Birds have to have a way to detect a magnetic field, and some part of the brain has to register that information; it seems likely that another part of the brain then compares the incoming information to a stored map.

The Baylor researchers have offered a solution to the middle step. They identified a group of cells in the brainstem of pigeons that record both the direction and the strength of the magnetic field. And they have good, but not conclusive, evidence to suggest that the information these cells are recording is coming from the bird’s inner ear. Dr. Dickman said this research “is still something we want to pursue.”

They did not work on the third step, but Dr. Dickman said a good candidate for the location of that map was the hippocampus, the brain region involved in memory of locations in both birds and humans.

A well-known and often-mentioned study of London taxi drivers showed that experienced drivers with a mental map of London had a hippocampus larger in one area than people without their experience. In some birds that hide seeds and return later to their caches with astonishing accuracy, the hippocampus grows and shrinks seasonally, presumably as they map their hiding spots.

Efforts to understand the magnetic sense in birds have gone in several directions. Some researchers have offered evidence for chemical reactions in the eyes sensitive to magnetic signals, while others have looked at neurons in the beak that they thought contained minute amounts of magnetite, a mineral that is affected by magnetic fields.

Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Keays and colleagues reported in the journal Nature that the idea of neurons in the beak was a nonstarter.

The Baylor researchers did a kind of step-by-step tracking of what areas in pigeons’ brains were responding to variations in an artificial magnetic field that they created. They focused on activity in the brainstem, one of the most primitive parts of the brain, partly because in earlier work they had shown that this area of the brain received signals from a part of the inner ear.

By looking at specific neurons in this part of the brain, the researchers found that the bird’s orientation determined which neurons were active. Each neuron was tuned to respond to signals from one direction. The neurons also registered the strength of the magnetic field.

Other brain regions are also active in response to magnetic stimulation and may be involved in the magnetic sense, Dr. Dickman said. And although he does not provide an answer to how birds detect magnetism, the research clearly falls on one side of a debate over whether magnetite is involved, or whether chemical reactions in the eye may be the key.

Dr. Keays said the research gave strong support to the magnetite idea and the hypothesis that “a population of undiscovered magnetoreceptive cells reside in the pigeon’s ear.”

As Dr. Lohmann said, the discovery “will no doubt inspire much additional work in the future.” ( nytimes.com )

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Fungus behind bat die-off came from Europe

Fungus behind bat die-off came from Europe — The mysterious deaths of millions of bats in the United States and Canada over the past several years were caused by a fungus that hitchhiked from Europe, scientists reported Monday.

Experts had suspected that an invasive species was to blame for the die-off from "white nose syndrome." Now there's direct evidence the culprit was not native to North America.

The fungal illness has not caused widespread deaths among European bats unlike in the U.S. and Canada. In North America more than 5.7 million bats have died since 2006 when white nose syndrome was first detected in a cave in upstate New York. The disease does not pose a threat to humans, but people can carry fungal spores.

FILE - This Oct. 2008, file photo, provided by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation shows a brown bat with white nose fungus in New York. Federal officials are granting $1.4 million to scientists investigating deadly white-nose syndrome in bats. The fungal infection has killed more than 5.5 million bats in eastern North America since it was first detected in upstate New York in 2006. (AP Photo/New York Department of Environmental Conservation, Ryan von Linden, File)

It's unclear exactly how the fungus crossed the Atlantic, but one possibility is that it was accidentally introduced by tourists. Spores are known to stick to people's clothes, boots and caving gear.

White nose syndrome has killed bats in four Canadian provinces and 19 U.S. states, mostly in the Northeast and South. Last week, the illness marched west of the Mississippi River, infecting bats in Missouri.

Now that scientists have pinpointed the apparent origin of the epidemic, what can be done to protect bats? They play a crucial role in the ecological food chain by devouring insects.

"There is still not much we can do beyond making absolutely sure we don't make things worse by accidentally spreading the fungus," said biologist Craig Willis of the University of Winnipeg in Canada.

Willis and a team of U.S.-Canadian scientists set out to determine whether the fungus behind white nose syndrome was native to this continent or invaded from abroad. To do this, they collected 54 little brown bats from an uninfected cave in Manitoba.

The bats were divided into three groups: One group was infected with spores collected from Europe; another group was sickened with spores from North America. A third group was not infected. Researchers used infrared cameras to monitor the bats' behavior and disease progression over several months.

Both infected groups developed symptoms, including the telltale trace of white powder on the nose that gives the disease its name and scarring on the wings. Compared with uninfected bats, infected bats were roused more often from hibernation. This depletes their fat reserves and ultimately leads to death.

The findings were reported online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since the infected groups showed similarly severe symptoms, scientists concluded the fungus originated in Europe. Had the pathogen been native to North America but with a mutation that made it more deadly, scientists would have expected to see milder symptoms in the group infected with the European fungus.

The team planned to repeat the experiment next year with European bats and compare results.

Why European bats have not died off en masse is unknown. It's possible they developed immunity to the fungus or learned to avoid places that favor the spread of the disease. North American bats have shown little protection against white nose syndrome and there's active research into whether populations can rebound.

"We are still working to understand if it is possible for bats to develop resilience or resistance to the fungus," said Jeremy Coleman of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who had no role in the latest work. ( Associated Press )

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Monster titanoboa snake invades New York

Monster titanoboa snake invades New York - New York commuters arriving at Grand Central Station will soon be greeted by a monstrous sight: a 48-foot-long, 2,500-pound titanoboa snake.

The good news: It's not alive. Anymore. But the full-scale replica of the reptile -- which will make its first appearance at the commuter hub on March 22 -- is intended, as Smithsonian spokesperson Randall Kremer happily admitted, to "scare the daylights out of people" -- actually has a higher calling: to "communicate science to a lot of people." The scientifically scary-accurate model will go a long way toward that: If this snake slithered by you, it would be waist-high and measure the length of a school bus. Think of it as the T-rex of snakes.

This newly discovered species, known as titanoboa (yes, the words "titan" and "boa" are in there), which lived 65 million years ago, is about to have its close-up. The New York City appearance is promoting an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History in D.C. opening on March 30, which ties in to a TV special on the Smithsonian Channel called, what else, "Titanoboa: Monster Snake." The two-hour program airs April 1.

Remains of the titanoboa were first discovered in a Colombian coal mine in 2005. One of the researchers specializing in the Paleocene era, the time after the death of the dinosaurs, was Jonathan Bloch. A vertebrate paleontologist from University of Florida's Museum of Natural History, the scientist led multiple expeditions, along with Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The team collected remains from the mine, which resulted in the find. Together with ancient-snake expert Jason Head of the University of Nebraska, they named the world's largest snake Titanoboa.

Speaking on the phone to Yahoo! News, Bloch admitted that when the team was first collecting the skeletons of Titanoboa, he didn't immediately understand what he had found until he returned to the lab. With the help of his students, he was able to identify the fossils as snakes, just much, much bigger than the ones of today. He described the enormous vertebrae as "sort of like if you saw a mouse skull the size of rhino skull."

The predator, which is related to a boa constrictor but actually behaved like an anaconda, lived in water and fed on fish, other titanoboas, and crocodiles (very, very large crocodiles).

If this sounds like Hollywood's next blockbuster, Bloch noted that this time around, truth is actually bigger than fiction: The predator from the movie "Anaconda," for one, is not as big as titanoboa. "This is really an example where reality and the past have exceeded the imaginations of Hollywood." ( The Upshot )

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Why there are no more woolly mammoths

Why there are no more woolly mammoths - Last week, a video allegedly showing a live woolly mammoth stirred frenzied speculation over its authenticity. Even though it was quickly debunked, it captured the popular imagination. What is it about these shaggy elephants that enchants us, and why did they disappear from the earth?

Last week, a very low-quality video of a 'woolly mammoth' crossing a river in Russia went viral, only to be debunked as a hoax within a few days.

STEVEN STRAIT as D’Leh is being chased by a mammoth in a scene from Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ epic adventure “10,000 B.C.” COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURE

According to the Sun newspaper, a British tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the video was taken by a government engineer. It showed a hazy image of a brownish bear-sized four-legged creature ambling through the water.

A few days later, the truth emerged. Ludovic Petho, a writer and videographer who was hiking in Siberia's Sayan Mountains revealed his footage of the Kitoy River. Although much less blurry, it was the same footage that appeared in the Sun, but with one big difference: no mammoth.

Outside of a handful of hard-core cryptozoophiles, Petho's revelation surprised nobody. Woolly mammoths are widely believed to have gone extinct on the Russian mainland thousands of years ago.

But still, the video captured the popular imagination, lingering on the top of news aggregators for several days, even after having been debunked. What exactly were these huge, hairy elephantine beasts that roamed Europe, Asia, and North America, co-existing with modern humans for most of our history. And why, exactly, did they go extinct?

The woolly mammoth belongs to the Elephantidae family, a taxonomic rank that includes the two species of modern-day elephants, and it lived during the Pleistocene period from about 5 million years ago, into the Holocene period, some 4,500 years ago. Unlike the American mastodon, the woolly mammoth evolved into multiple species. Its precise taxonomy is still subject to debate, but the earliest accounts of its presence are found about 4 million years ago in Africa, before woolly mammoths started crossing into Europe.

The word mammoth comes from the Russian mamont, a word used by the currently endangered Mansi tribe, which lives in the Russian oil-producing region of Tyumen Oblast.

The discovery of numerous carcasses, body parts and cave paintings has given us a clear picture of what these animals looked like. Unlike most other pre-historic vertebrates, woolly mammoth fossils are easy to find, thanks to their enormous size and the cold climates in which they dwelled.

Wooly mammoths are closely related to present-day Asian and African elephants. They had a towering physical presence, standing at nine to eleven feet. It is estimated that they weighted between four and six tons.

The gigantic beast had a total of 24 teeth for both its upper and lower jaws and had extremely curved tusks, sometimes longer than 13 feet.

Although it is believed that the last woolly mammoths vanished from Europe and Siberia about 12,000 years ago, some new discoveries reveal that a small group survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska until 3,750 B.C. Frozen, mummified mammoths were unearthed at the remote Russian Wrangel Island, where they existed until 1,650 B.C.

Why they disappeared is a matter of contention. Research published in Nature, an international weekly science journal, concluded that “a combination of climatic and anthropogenic [that is, human-caused] resulted to the mammoths’ mass extinction."

That's probably true, as far as it goes, but it doesn't say exactly what ultimately did the beasts in. One theory holds that humans hunted them to extinction. According to Paul Martin’s 1967 “Blitzkreig” theory, the retreat of the continental glaciers allowed humans to travel farther north and wipe out the mammoths. Proponents of this theory point to the numerous unearthed mass kill sites and the signs of “spear points among the bones of mammoths,” according to Drexel’s University Academy of Natural Sciences.

But a study of woolly mammoth DNA has found that the animals still existed for thousands of years after humans moved into their territory. A 2009 report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that hunting did have an impact but “did not deliver the deathblow” to the species.

Other scientists look to the sky for an explanation. Pointing to fragments of glassy carbon, microscopic diamonds, and enriched iridium at several sites in the United States and Canada, all buried beneath a layer of soot, decayed plants, and other debris, they speculate that, about 13,000 years ago, a comet exploded over Canada, unleashing a shock wave with a force equivalent to millions of nuclear weapons.

“This event was large enough to directly kill most everything instantly. Those that survived would have found their food sources devastated, their water polluted, all kinds of things that would have made it difficult to go on much longer,” Richard B. Firestone, a nuclear chemist at the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory, told the Washington Post. This event is thought to have contributed to the extinction of the saber-toothed cat, the American camel, and the giant ground sloth.

Is it possible that the woolly mammoth could someday roam the earth again? Evolutionary geneticists could someday clone the woolly mammoth by inserting the nuclei of the long-dead beast into the egg of an Asian elephant. Ethicists may debate the morality of resurrecting extinct species, but nobody would deny that it would make for a very interesting trip to the zoo. ( csmonitor )

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Woolly mammoth may have interbred with elephants

Woolly mammoth may have interbred with elephants - Woolly mammoth roamed the planet for more than a million years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America. Nearly all of these giants vanished from Siberia by about 10,000 years ago.

The woolly mammoth may surprisingly have regularly interbred with a completely different and much larger elephant species, researchers now find.

A model of a wooly mammoth stands at the exhibition 'Ice Age Giants' in Garding, Germany, on May 31. Newscom

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) roamed the planet for more than a million years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America. Nearly all of these giants vanished from Siberia by about 10,000 years ago, although dwarf mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until 3,700 years ago.

Although woolly mammoths lived in the cold of the tundra, the Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) preferred the more temperate regions of southern and central North America. The Columbians were much larger than woollies, with Columbian males reaching one-and-a-half to two times that of woolly males.

"We are talking about two very physically different species here," said researcher Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. "You have roughly 1 million years of separation between the two, with the Columbian mammoth likely derived from an early migration into North America approximately 1.5 million years ago, and their woolly counterparts emigrating to North America some 400,000 years ago."

Poinar and his colleagues investigated the evolution of Columbian mammoths by analyzing DNA retrieved from the tusks, bone and teeth of two approximately 11,000-year-old fossil specimens, one found in the Huntington Reservoir in Utah and the other found near Rawlins, Wyo. The researchers concentrated on the genomes of the mitochondria, the "powerhouses" of the cells, which have their own unique DNA and are inherited from the mother.

Surprisingly, they discovered the mitochondrial genome of the Columbian mammoth was nearly indiscernible from that of its northern woolly counterparts.

"At first I thought, 'Oh crap, there's contamination of some sort,'" Poinar said.

However, any minor contamination they found could not explain the extensive genetic evidence they uncovered, and they replicated their results in an independent lab. "I think we were very lucky," Poinar told LiveScience.

"We think we may be looking at a genetic hybrid," said researcher Jacob Enk, a graduate student in the McMaster Ancient DNA Center.

When glacial times got nasty, woollies likely moved to more pleasant conditions southward, where they came into contact with the Columbian mammoths.

"Living African elephant species hybridize where their ranges overlap, with the bigger species out-competing the smaller for mates," Enk added. The offspring are perfectly fertile, Poinar added.

Since woollies and Columbians overlapped in time and space, it is not unlikely that they interbred in much the same manner.

"It reminds me a bit of high-school days — the larger males are more successful at meeting women across the dance floor than the rest of us," Poinar said.

These findings could explain why some mammoth fossils had features intermediate between woollies and Columbians, although the genomes of both species should be sequenced to tell for sure. The researchers also want to look at Columbian mammoth specimens from farther south where no woollies ever ventured, to get an idea of what nonhybrid samples might look like.

The scientists detailed their findings online May 31 in the journal Genome Biology. ( csmonitor.com )

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Elephants in Arabia? Scientists find prehistoric footprints

Elephants in Arabia? Scientists find prehistoric footprints - The fossilized gigantic footprints detected in the Arabian dessert belong to a herd of elephants, scientists say. The seven-million-year-old discovery marks the world’s oldest evidence on how these ancient mammals lived.

The world's oldest elephant tracks have now been revealed, 7-million-year-old footprints in the Arabian Desert, researchers say.

Nature Reserve, Africa - An African Bush Elephant - Newscom

These prehistoric footsteps, likely the work of some 13 four-tusked elephant ancestors, are the earliest direct evidence of how the ancestors of modern elephants interacted socially, and the oldest evidence of an elephant herd.

"Basically, this is fossilized behavior," said researcher Faysal Bibi, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Museum for Natural History in Berlin. "This is an absolutely unique site, a really rare opportunity in the fossil record that lets you see animal behavior in a way you couldn't otherwise do with bones or teeth."

The site, known as Mleisa 1, is in the United Arab Emirates. The region then was home to a great diversity of animals, including elephants, hippopotamuses, antelopes, giraffes, pigs, monkeys, rodents, small and large carnivores, ostriches, turtles, crocodiles and fish. These were sustained by a very large river flowing slowly through the area, along which flourished vegetation, including large trees. The animals resembled those from Africa during the same time, though there are also similarities with Asian and European species of that period.

Fossil trackways in the region have been long known to locals, and were taken to be the prints of dinosaurs or giants of ancient myth. It was not until January 2011, when researchers mapped the area from the air for the first time, "that we realized what we had and how we could go about studying it," Bibi said.

"Once we saw it aerially, it became a much different and clearer story," said researcher Brian Kraatz at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, Calif. "Seeing the whole site in one shot meant we could finally understand what was happening."

The footprints cover an area of 12.3 acres (5 hectares). This is about equal to nine U.S. football fields, seven soccer fields, or the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

"The trackways are visually stunning," said researcher Andrew Hill at the University of Poitiers in France. "It is quite obvious to anyone, without any technical knowledge, that these are the footprints of very large animals, and to learn that they are over 6 million years old presents a visitor with the sensation of walking back in time."

The researchers noted that while these prehistoric titans were proboscideans like modern elephants, they likely looked quite different. Of the three kinds of fossil proboscidean species in the area at that time, the one that most likely made the trackways was Stegotetrabelodon syrticus, the earliest known member of the elephant family, "which carried tusks in both its upper and lower jaws," Bibi told LiveScience.

The trackways stretch up to about 850 feet (260 meters) long, making them "the most extensive ever recorded for mammals, and to view them is to be transported 7 million years back in time when herds of four-tusked primitive elephants and other related behemoths roamed a wetter and more vegetated Arabian Peninsula," said paleontologist William Sanders at the University of Michigan, who did not take part in the study.

Actually mapping these footsteps proved challenging, since the individual tracks are each only about 15 inches (40 centimeters) wide, too small to show up in satellite imagery. To do so, researchers mounted a pocket digital camera onto a kite, stitching the hundreds of pictures it took into a single large mosaic image that gave a broad overview of the site.

Analysis of the footsteps suggests they belonged to a herd of at least 13 elephants of different sizes and ages that walked through mud, leaving behind tracks that hardened, were buried, and then re-exposed by erosion.

The researchers also discovered tracks from a solitary male traveling in a different direction from the herd. These suggest the extinct giants divided into solitary and social groups, just as elephants do today. Also, these ancient pachyderms might have structured themselves along lines of sex just as their modern relatives do, with the males leaving the herd to live alone.

"Like the human handprints in Paleolithic caves, animal trackways crystallize in time [the] identity and behavior of the organisms that made them, and yield rare insights about these organisms, which fossil bones alone cannot provide," Sanders said. ( csmonitor.com )

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Why There Are So Few Fish in the Sea

Why There Are So Few Fish in the Sea - Most saltwater fish may have evolved from a freshwater ancestor, according to a new study that traces the family tree of both marine and freshwater fish.

The finding may seem topsy-turvy given that life originated in the oceans, but the results could help explain why the sea is relatively low in diversity compared with the land. The ocean takes up 70 percent of the Earth's surface, but contains only 15 percent to 25 percent of the Earth's total estimated species.

"It's a striking pattern that we haven't really explained yet," said study researcher John Wiens, a professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University in New York.

The new results may provide a clue, Wiens told LiveScience. Freshwater fish could have diversified from saltwater ancestors, only to see those ancestors wiped out in ocean extinctions. Such extinctions would free up space for some freshwater fish to evolve, once again, to thrive in the ocean.

Diversity mystery

To investigate the relative dearth of fish in the sea, Wiens and his colleagues turned to the largest group of marine vertebrates on Earth, the ray-finned fishes. This group contains 96 percent of fish species, meaning they're "pretty much every fish you've ever eaten or kept in a fish tank or seen in a coral reef, with the exception of sharks and rays," Wiens told LiveScience.

Studying ray-finned fish was a "good place to start," Wiens said, not only because the group is so large but because it allowed for direct comparison between land and sea. Fish aren't land animals, of course, but they do live in a distinct non-marine environment: freshwater.

"Looking at a group in which all these species are aquatic … helps us to isolate what's special specifically about the ocean," Wiens said.

He and his co-authors pulled information on all living fish species from a comprehensive database called FishBase. Next, they combined that information with a family tree of ray-finned fish that shows relationships between groups and clades (groupings of organisms consisting of an individual species and all its descendents). The researchers also put together a tree for known fossil fishes.

Fish family tree

A first glance at the data confirmed that there is indeed more diversity in freshwater than saltwater, especially given the relative volume of freshwater to saltwater on Earth. Of all living ray-finned fish, the researchers found 15,149 species live in freshwater and 14,736 live in saltwater. (A small minority of ray-finned fish, about 4 percent, can live in both fresh and saltwater. To prevent double-counting these species, the researchers classified them as freshwater.)

The fish family tree also revealed that fish diversity only exploded in the last 100 million years or so. But the strangest finding was what sat at the base of the tree.

"The really weird thing that we found that is most surprising, and may end up being the most controversial, is that all the marine ray-finned fish that we see today appear to be derived from a freshwater ancestor," Weins said.

This ancestor would have lived about 300 million years ago, Weins and his colleagues report today (Feb. 7) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. About 180 million years ago, the first unambiguously marine fish in the lineage start showing up. It’s not until about 110 million years ago that a group of fish called percomorpha, which now includes 40 percent of all species of bony fish, started diversifying in saltwater. In freshwater, another group called ostariophysi evolved into many species, which now comprise almost 70 percent of freshwater fish.

"That's the big driver of fish diversity that we see today," Wiens said of these two groups.

Other fish in the sea

The implication of the findings is that the sea today represents the long-term effects of earlier extinctions, said David Reznick, a biologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the study.

"The unexpectedly small number of marine species may reflect past mass extinctions that were more severe in marine than freshwater environments," Reznick told LiveScience, adding that he was reading the paper as a "spectator, rather than as a practitioner" of the type of research Wiens carries out.

The phenomenon of organisms evolving "back" to the sea is not unheard of. Whales, for example, evolved from a terrestrial ancestor that resumed an aquatic life and adapted over many generations to deep-sea living.

Wiens said that the geography of the sea could also contribute to low biodiversity. In freshwater, fish can get isolated by continents rifting apart, rivers changing course or other geographical barriers. Once isolated, individual populations may lose the ability to breed with one another, splitting into separate species.

In the ocean, Wiens said, fish can "wander anywhere," to mate, or at least farther afield than a freshwater fish can usually swim.

Wiens and his colleagues hope to extend the research to find out why percomorpha and ostariophysi suddenly started diversifying like mad 100 million years ago after a long history of fairly low fish diversity. Wiens warned that future fish fossil evidence could alter the fish family tree, and the conclusions about the freshwater fish ancestry could be overturned, though the current evidence supports the fish-from-freshwater theory.

But if the low diversity we see in the seas today is the result of ancient ocean extinctions, it puts today's problems with overfishing and species loss into context, Wiens said. The ocean can certainly bounce back, he said, but humans may not live to see that day.

"If we wipe out and eat all the fish in the ocean and modify the environment in the ocean so that it's inhospitable, what these analyses that we've done show is it may be 100 million years to recover from that," Wiens said. "And that's a fast recovery." ( LiveScience.com )

READ MORE - Why There Are So Few Fish in the Sea

The Chimpanzee that can remember numbers faster than you: Primate can solve puzzle in the blink of an eye

The Chimpanzee that can remember numbers faster than you: Primate can solve puzzle in the blink of an eye - A chimp raised in captivity in Japan has been trained to perform feats of memory most humans would find impossible.

Ayumu has been called the world's greatest animal mind, and can easily out-perform humans in a series of memory tests.

Ayumu is the son of Ai, a chimpanzee whose intelligence has been studied for over 30 years by Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa.

Ayumu the chimp can remember the location and order of a set of numbers in less time than it takes the average human to blink

The 11-year-old chimp was born at the Kyoto University in 2000, and he has studied at the Primate Research Institute there ever since as part of the Ai Project, which aims to better understand the chimpanzee mind.

His particular skill is remembering where a series of numbers are placed on a screen, and then recalling them perfectly after only the briefest periods of time to memorise them.

At age five Ayumu had already out-smarted the professors who had set him his intelligence tasks.

Now age 11 he is performing feats of memory the vast majority of humans could not even attempt to complete.

Ayumu memorises the numbers and their locations in less than half a second, which is faster than the blink of an eye.

For those who are sceptical, if Ayumu was to just make a lucky stab at the numbers, the likelihood of him getting it right by mere guesswork are one in 362,000.

Ayumu the chimp can solve the puzzle in 60 milliseconds, at Kyoto University, Japan

His latest feats have been highlighted in a BBC and Discovery Channel co-production called Super Smart Animals.

Ayumu is no stranger to British TV screens however and was also featured in a Channel Five programme called Extraordinary Animals in 2008.

In that show the male chimp, then aged seven, took on British memory champion Ben Pridmore in a series of contests, and beat him easily.

He did three times as well as Mr Pridmore at remembering the position of numbers on a screen.

And that's no mean feat considering the accountant from Derby was capable of memorising the order of a shuffled pack of cards in under 30 seconds. ( dailymail.co.uk )

READ MORE - The Chimpanzee that can remember numbers faster than you: Primate can solve puzzle in the blink of an eye

Japanese and Russian Scientists May Be Able to Clone Mammoth

An artist's reconstruction of columbi sergiodlarosa -- a Columbian Mammoth

Japanese and Russian Scientists May Be Able to Clone Mammoth – Japanese and Russian scientists might be able to clone a mammoth after confirming the presence of well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thighbone found in Siberian permafrost, Kyodo News reported.

The scientists from the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Kinki University's graduate school will begin research next year to regenerate the huge mammal, which became extinct about 10,000 years ago.

They will transplant nuclei from the bone marrow cells into elephant egg cells whose nuclei were removed through a type of cloning. The process can create an embryo that can be planted into an elephant womb for birth.

For scientists involved in the research since the late 1990s, finding nuclei with undamaged mammoth genes has been a challenge, AFP reported.

But the discovery in August of the well-preserved thighbone in Siberia increased the chances of a successful cloning. ( foxnews.com )

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ABC News Blogs ‘World’s Loneliest Seal’ Thrives in New Home

‘World’s Loneliest Seal’ Thrives in New Home - The seal in her new home at the Akvatoria dolphinarium.

After being shunned by a seal colony in the wild, the "world's loneliest seal" is being given a second chance after being taken in by a Russian aquarium.

The seal now dubbed Nafanya, after a popular Soviet-era cartoon, initially gained fans after being spotted by nature photographer Anatoly Strakhov. The photographer noticed the unusually colored fur seal hiding under a pile of logs, far from the other seals that had congregated near the water.

‘World’s Loneliest Seal’ Thrives in New Home (ABC News)

"I was pleased to be able to capture such an unusual animal, but the poor seal is almost blind and so was unlikely to survive in the wild," Strakhov, 61, told the UK's Daily Mail.

However, Nafanya is now thriving after she was flown nearly 8,000 miles to the Akvatoria dolphinarium in Adler, Russia, according to the Daily Mail. Yulia Frolova, who heads the dolphinarium, says that Nafanya is not as blind as initially thought and is able to play with and chase her fish at feeding time.

"She has a good appetite, and always seems in a happy mood. She is such an unusual seal with very beautiful bright blue eyes," Frolova told the Daily Mail.

Fur seals are typically a dark chocolate brown, and appear almost black when wet - a sharp contrast from this young seal's pink flippers and light-colored eyes.

"It's a much lighter color than you would normally see in a fur seal," said Dudley Wigdahl, curator for mammals and birds at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif. Wigdahl, told ABCNews.com he has never seen a seal with this coloring before.

Albino features often create problems for animals in the wild because they are more easily spotted by predators. Sometimes these animals also suffer from poor eyesight. However, in the protective setting of an aquarium, Nafanya's albino features should not be a disadvantage.

"[She] may live a relatively healthy life," Wigdahl said.

While Nafanya is currently in quarantine, the pup will not be considered the "loneliest" seal for much longer. Along with her devoted caretakers, Nafanya is gaining international followers due to a web cam installed in her tank. ( ABC News )

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What Happens After a Python Gorges May Help Human Hearts ( 2 )

What Happens After a Python Gorges May Help Human Hearts ( 2 ) - Several pieces of evidence pointed to fatty acids, which are important in the body’s energy production and metabolism. In additional experiments, Dr. Riquelme and other members of the Colorado team found that only the specific combination of three fatty acids from a sated python produced the same hypertrophy when injected into a fasting one. The three fatty acids that enlarge the python’s cells (myristic, palmitic and palmitoleic) occur in proportionately higher amounts in pythons than in humans. Injections of one fatty acid, or a combination of two, did not produce hypertrophy.

Another mystery was what protected the python heart from the toxic effects of huge amounts of the lipids. Further research determined that the protective substance was an enzyme, SOD (for superoxide dismutase), an antioxidant that defends cells exposed to oxygen.

By March 2010, Dr. Riquelme’s husband, Hugo Olguin, had joined the faculty of Catholic University in Santiago, Chile. They had two young children and wanted to return to Chile. So Dr. Riquelme left Boulder, expecting to write a scientific paper about the python research and to get an academic position in Chile. But a giant earthquake struck there just before their departure, delaying her plans for months.

A giant python swallows an alligator in Everglades National Park, Fla.

Dr. Riquelme had done the pioneering experiments in Boulder and had to leave it to her colleagues in Colorado to carry out additional ones. In one, blood plasma from bloated pythons was injected into live mice. Again, surprisingly, mouse heart cells enlarged as they would in a well-conditioned athlete.

Along the way, the Colorado team asked Dr. Secor, who had moved from the University of California, Los Angeles, to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, to join in the research. He is an author of the new paper in Science.

The findings leave a number of mysteries still open to research. What causes the organs to shrink to their fasting size? How would such findings apply to the death of human cells in processes called atrophy or apoptosis? And will repeated injections of the fatty acid combination safely lead to sustained increase in organ size?

Dr. Leinwand said she carried out the python research with support from federal and Colorado taxpayers and the American Heart Association. But the federal National Institutes of Health rejected her requests for direct financing, calling the relationship between reptiles and human heart disease too remote. In 2007, Dr. Leinwand became a founder of the Hiberna Corporation of Boulder to develop drugs derived from the study of exaggerated variations in animal metabolism. The company helped pay for some of the research. ( nytimes.com )

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What Happens After a Python Gorges May Help Human Hearts ( 1 )

What Happens After a Python Gorges May Help Human Hearts ( 1 ) — Pythons are known for their enormous appetites. In a single meal they can devour animals at least as big as they are — deer, alligators pigs and house pets, for example.

Equally remarkable is what happens inside the python as it digests its prey. Within a day, its heart and other organs can double in size. The metabolic rate and production of insulin and lipids soar.

Then, like an accordion, the python’s organs return to normal size in just a few days. Metabolism slows. Then the snake can fast for months, even a year, without losing muscle mass or showing any ill effects, ready to ambush new prey.

How this process happens so rapidly is a biological mystery with important implications for human health, particularly when it comes to heart failure. Now scientists at the University of Colorado here are reporting that they have partly solved it.

In a paper in the current issue of Science , they report that a gorging python expands its heart by enlarging existing cells — a process called hypertrophy — and not by creating new ones. (It is not known whether snakes get heart disease.)

A giant python swallows an alligator in Everglades National Park, Fla.

A second finding is that a specific combination of three fatty acids produces enlargement of a python’s heart, intestines, liver and kidneys. (The brain does not expand, presumably because it is confined by the skull.) Injections of the combination produce similar growth in the heart of a mouse.

Understanding such exaggerated variations, the researchers say, could help them develop novel ways to delay, prevent, treat or even reverse various hereditary and acquired human diseases.

Pharmaceutical companies have scientifically manipulated substances from other reptiles to develop marketed drugs. For example, Byetta, a diabetes drug, is derived from a hormone found in Gila monster saliva.

And the day may come when doctors literally prescribe snake oil for heart disease. “Heart failure is the goal” of the python research, said Leslie A. Leinwand, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor at the University of Colorado and a senior member of the research team. She added that the findings might also lead to treatments to prevent sudden death in young athletes, as well as ailments like diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.

A gorging python produces an opaque milky plasma composed of fatty acids and other lipids in amounts so huge they would damage a human heart, Dr. Leinwand said. Trigylcerides, the main components of natural fats and oils, zoomed to 50 times the fasting rate.Dr. Leinwand had been fascinated by a journal article by Stephen M. Secor and Jared Diamond urging other scientists to explore extremes of lifestyles among wild animals. The python research in Boulder began in 2005, when Cecilia A. Riquelme, who had earned a Ph.D. in cell biology in her native Chile, sought a fellowship in Dr. Leinwand’s laboratory.

An expert in the molecular workings of the heart, Dr. Leinwand knew little such research had been done on pythons. There are structural differences — a python heart has three chambers, a human heart four. Yet she thought experiments in comparative biology might advance human heart research.

Adult pythons can grow as long as 25 feet and as thick as telephone poles, far too large for her laboratory. So she bought a supply of five-footers and asked Dr. Riquelme, “How would you feel about working with pythons?”

Dr. Riquelme was not crazy about the idea; pythons are not venomous, but she feared being bitten. Still, the challenge was too tempting to pass up, and after a harmless bite she overcame her fear, though she and her colleagues always handled the slithering snakes with healthy respect.

She started by observing how the python’s organs grew while the intact prey was in the stomach. Then the organs regressed in size over a period of about two weeks.

There was nowhere she could buy the biological materials she needed to conduct experiments involving python tissues, so she had to make her own.

An early effort was to develop chemical stains to measure cell size and the number of nuclei seen under a microscope. The observations showed that the python heart expansion was from hypertrophy, not formation of new cells.

Hypertrophy of the human heart occurs in two types. One, from ailments like high blood pressure and heart attacks, is a leading predictor of death. The second type is beneficial and occurs from exercise in well-conditioned athletes.

The Colorado scientists found that the enlargement of a python’s heart is analogous to the growth seen in the heart of a human athlete. Among their goals is to better understand how plasma components instruct individual cells to develop into the beneficial ones among athletes or bad ones in disease.

After a year, Dr. Riquelme determined that she could enlarge the heart of a starved python by injecting blood from a feasting one. She then proposed adding the blood’s straw-colored plasma to rat heart cells to determine whether it had the same effect.

Dr. Leinwand doubted that the experiment would work. But it did, and Dr. Leinwand “jumped up and down,” Dr. Riquelme said, adding that she believed her own findings only after repeating the experiment several times.

Dr. Leinwand called it “the critical finding that motivated us to translate the python biology into mammals.”

Still, a major mystery remained: What component of the python plasma caused the cells to enlarge?

Dr. Riquelme used gas chromatography and additional techniques to analyze the proteins, lipids and other components of python plasma in fed and starving pythons. ( nytimes.com )

READ MORE - What Happens After a Python Gorges May Help Human Hearts ( 1 )

Pythons' big hearts hold clues for human health

Pythons' big hearts hold clues for human health — You don't think of pythons as big-hearted toward their fellow creatures. They're better known for the bulge in their bodies after swallowing one of those critters whole.

But the snakes' hearts balloon in size, too, as they're digesting — and now scientists are studying them for clues about human heart health.

The expanded python heart appears remarkably similar to the larger-than-normal hearts of Olympic-caliber athletes. Colorado researchers report they've figured out how the snakes make it happen.

"It's this amazing biology," said Leslie Leinwand, a molecular biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose team reports the findings in Friday's edition of the journal Science. "They're not swelling up. They're building (heart) muscle."

This undated handout photo provided by the journal Science shows an adult Burmese python. You don't think of pythons as big-hearted toward their fellow creatures. They're better known for the bulge in their bodies after swallowing one of those critters whole. But the snakes' hearts balloon in size, too, as they're digesting _ and now scientists are studying them for clues about human heart health. (AP Photo/Stephen M. Secor, Science)

Reptile biologists have long studied the weird digestion of these snakes, especially the huge Burmese pythons that can go nearly a year between meals with no apparent ill effects. When they swallow that next rat or bird — or in some cases deer — something extraordinary happens. Their metabolism ratchets up more than 40-fold, and their organs immediately start growing in size to get the digesting done. The heart alone grows a startling 40 percent or more within three days.

Leinwand, who studies human heart disease, stumbled across that description and saw implications for people. An enlarged human heart usually is caused by chronic high blood pressure or other ailments that leave it flabby and unable to pump well. But months and years of vigorous exercise give some well-conditioned athletes larger, muscular hearts, similar to how python hearts are during digestion.

So Leinwand's team — led by a graduate student who initially was frightened of snakes — ordered a box of pythons and began testing what happens to their hearts.

The first surprise: A digesting python's blood gets so full of fat it looks milky. A type of fat called triglycerides increased 50-fold within a day. In people, high triglyceride levels are very dangerous. But the python heart was burning those fats so rapidly for fuel that they didn't have time to clog anything up, Leinwand said.

The second surprise: A key enzyme that protects the heart from damage increased in python blood right after it ate, while a heart-damaging compound was repressed.

Then the team found that a specific combination of three fatty acids in the blood helped promote the healthy heart growth. If they injected fasting pythons with that mixture, those snakes' hearts grew the same way that a fed python's does.

But did it only work for snakes? Lead researcher Cecilia Riquelme dropped some plasma from a fed python into a lab dish containing the heart cells of rats — and they grew bigger, too. Sure enough, injecting living mice made their hearts grow in an apparently healthy way as well.

Now the question is whether that kind of growth could be spurred in a mammal with heart disease, something Leinwand's team is starting to test in mice with human-like heart trouble. They also want to know how the python heart quickly shrinks back to its original size when digestion's done.

The experiments are "very, very cool indeed," said James Hicks, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has long studied pythons' extreme metabolism and wants to see more such comparisons.

If the same underlying heart signals work in animals as divergent as snakes and mice, "this may reveal a common universal mechanism that can be used for improving cardiac function in all vertebrates, including humans," Hicks wrote in an email. "Only further studies and time will tell, but this paper is very exciting."

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and a Boulder biotechnology company that Leinwand co-founded, Hiberna Corp., that aims to develop drugs based on extreme animal biology. ( Associated Press )

READ MORE - Pythons' big hearts hold clues for human health

Pilgrims eat Haram’s pigeon feed for cure

Pilgrims eat Haram’s pigeon feed for cure - There has been a growing tendency among pilgrims who lack correct knowledge of Islamic faith to do things against the creed out of belief that this would cure them of diseases or bring blessings.

Arab News has noted that a number of pilgrims go to Hira Cave, where revelation was first made to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) or Jabal Al-Rahmah (Mountain of Mercy) in Arafat believing that this is part of Umrah rites or seeking God’s providence. Some of them even take stones from the mountain back home to bless their family.

Arab News also noted pilgrims who seek medical treatment for themselves and others collecting the seeds and grains thrown to pigeons and other birds near the Grand Mosque. Seeds to feed pigeons are sold by foreigners in small plastic bags for SR1 for pilgrims to buy and feed the pigeons. The grains and wheat are available in the districts of Al-Masfalah, Al-Hafair, Ghazah and others close to the Grand Mosque.

A pilgrim gathers pigeon food at a street in Makkah. (AN photo)

Asked why he was collecting the birds’ food, 60-year-old Pakistani pilgrim Riyasa Ghulam said his wife, who is six years younger than him, was sterile and failed to bear children during the long years of their marriage. “We tried all kinds of treatment everywhere in vain. A friend suggested we perform Umrah and eat the pigeon feed,” he said.

Ghulam said upon their arrival in Makkah, they immediately went to the Al-Misyal area where grains were thrown to the pigeons. “For a week now each one of us is eating seven seeds every day. We are still waiting for the result,” he said.

Ismail, an Egyptian pilgrim, said his wife, who is epileptic, could not be cured and her fits were increasing. He said a friend advised them to travel to Makkah for Umrah and to eat the food thrown to the pigeons to cure her. “The friend said my wife should eat three seeds with each of the three meals for three consecutive days. Two weeks have passed but my wife has not got better,” Ismail said.

He said the friend told them that the seeds should not be broken, and they should be taken together in one gulp. “We have carried the advise of the friend to the letter but nothing has happened so far,” he said.

Commenting on the issue, Muhammad Al-Suhali, director of the Islamic studies center at Umm Al-Qurah University, said only Muslims with weak faith and little knowledge of the religion would do these things. He advised pilgrims not to do things that are completely against the Islamic faith.

He also recalled a Hadith that says items found in Makkah (money, food or others) should not be picked up and used.

Al-Suhali asked the pilgrims to make use of their stay in the Grand Mosque to worship God sincerely and to ask Him for cure and for any other worldly matter. ( arabnews.com )

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Plant, animal extinctions often exaggerated

Plant, animal extinctions often exaggerated – A projected spate of extinctions of animals and plants this century may be less drastic than feared because the most widely used scientific method can exaggerate losses by more than 160 percent, a study said on Wednesday.

"Extinctions caused by habitat loss require greater loss of habitat than previously thought," two experts, based in China and the United States, wrote in the journal Nature.

Despite that good news, the report also endorsed past findings that human activities are wrecking habitats from the tropics to the Arctic, threatening the worst losses of species since the dinosaurs.

"Our results must not lead to complacency about extinction due to habitat loss, which is a real and growing threat," Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell wrote.

The study, based on a survey of birds in the United States and forests, suggested the most commonly used method can exaggerate losses by more than 160 percent.

Waldrapps, critically endangered species - Waldrapps, a critically endangered species, perch inside the breeding aviary cage at the Preservation and Research Center in Yokohama, south of Tokyo October 25, 2010

"The method has to be revised," Hubbell, of the University of California, told a news conference.

Scientists have long struggled to project extinctions as a rising human population shrinks habitats, for instance by felling forests to clear land for farms or cities. Pollution and global warming are also adding to threats.

The scientists stoked controversy by saying there was "reason to question" a U.N.-led Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that projected future extinctions at 1,000 to 10,000 times current rates, and a 2004 study saying that 18 to 35 percent of all species could be set on a path toward extinction by 2050.

Chris Thomas, the lead author of the latter study at the University of York in England, said he had published an update later in 2004 with a less severe extinction projection, broadly using techniques advocated in Wednesday's report.

CLIMATE CHANGE

"It is a pity that the authors did not realize this," he said. "And currently there is no reason for complacency that the extinction risk from climate change will necessarily be lower" than originally projected, he told Reuters.

Wednesday's report did not question findings by the U.N. panel of climate scientists in 2007 -- used by governments to guide climate policies -- that said 20 to 30 percent of species may be "at increased risk of extinction" as temperatures rise.

For scientists, the problem is they can fairly easily count species in an area -- adding one for each new bird, flower or mammal they find. It is far harder to count extinctions since that requires a judgment that the last individual has died.

Some studies in the 1970s, for instance, wrongly projected that half of all species could be lost by 2000.

More recent studies have added the idea of an "extinction debt," that species are doomed to die out once their habitat shrinks beyond a critical point. The study said estimations used by that technique were mathematically flawed.

Still, it said there was "no doubt whatsoever that the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has correctly identified habitat loss as the primary threat to conserving the Earth's biodiversity, and the sixth mass extinction might already be upon us or imminent."

Scientists count five mass extinctions in the fossil record, the most recent 65 million years ago when dinosaurs vanished. ( Reuters )

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