Volaticotherium antiquus

This sad jumble of bones is all that remains of Volaticotherium antiquus, a small rat-sized mammal that was recently dug up in China. There are two particularly outstanding things about this creature.

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One is that browner layer in the rock: that isn’t an artifact, it’s a bit of soft tissue that was preserved, called a patagium. A patagium is a thin membrane stretched between the limbs, and is used for…flying! This animal probably lived much like a modern flying squirrel (although it is definitely not a squirrel), gliding from tree to tree.

The second surprise is the age. This is a Mesozoic mammal, from Chinese beds that are roughly dated to somewhere around the mid Jurassic to early Cretaceous—it was a contemporary of the dinosaurs. I’m tickled to imagine a diplodocid stretching up its long neck to strip the foliage from a tree branch, and this little guy squeaking angrily and leaping off to fly to the next tree.

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Now one more thing we need, but are extremely unlikely to find, is a Mesozoic moose.

Mang J, Hu Y, Wang Y, Wang X, Li C (2006) A Mesozoic gliding mammal from northeastern China. Nature 444:889-893.

That’s some tongue

Behold the spectacularly long-tongued glossophagine nectar bat, Anoura fistulata:

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Anoura fistulata feeding from a test tube filled with sugared water; its tongue (pink) can extend to 150% of body length.

This length of tongue is unusual for the genus, and there is an explanation for how it can fit all of that into its mouth: it doesn’t. The base of the tongue has been carried back deep into the chest in a pocket of epithelium, and is actually rooted in the animal’s chest.

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Ventral view of A. fistulata, showing tongue (pink), glossal tube and tongue retractor muscle (blue), and skeletal elements (white).

Across the glossophagine nectar bats, maximum tongue extension is tightly correlated with the length of their rostral components, such as the palate and mandible. Although the correlation holds for A. caudifer and A. geoffroyi, A. fistulata falls far outside the 95% confidence interval. Close examination of tongue morphology reveals the basis for this pattern. In other nectar bats, the base of the tongue coincides with the base of the oral cavity (the typical condition for mammals), but in A. fistulata the tongue passes back through the neck and into the thoracic cavity. This portion is surrounded by a sleeve of tissue, or glossal tube, which follows the ventral surface of the trachea back and positions the base of the tongue between the heart and the sternum.

Unsurprisingly, this adaptation co-evolved with the lengthening corolla of a tropical flower, Centropogon nigricans—observations suggest that this bat is the only pollinator of this particular flower.

I’m sure Gene Simmons would be jealous.

Muchhala N (2006) Nectar bat stows huge tongue in its rib cage. Nature 444:701-702.

Awww

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That’s a baby gorilla holding hands with a worker at the Lefini Faunal Reserve. It’s a touching picture (and there’s a much larger version available if you click on the image), but there’s an ugly story behind it. The gorilla is a “bush-meat orphan”.

“Bush-meat orphan.” That’s a phrase of understated unpleasantness.