(from Strugnell, JM, Rogers AD, Prodo PA, Collins MA, Allcock AL (2008) The thermohaline expressway: the Southern Ocean as a centre of
origin for deep-sea octopuses. Cladistics 24:1-8)
Now this is an interesting beast. It’s a 220 million year old fossil from China of an animal that is distinctly turtle-like. Here’s a look at its dorsal side:
Notice in the skull: it’s got teeth, not just a beak like modern turtles. The back is also odd, for a turtle. The ribs are flattened and broadened, but…no shell! It’s a turtle without a shell!
(Today’s entry is reader-submitted, from Scott Milton)
Once upon a time, way back when I entered graduate school, the first big project I was involved in was essentially a morphological mapping of the circuitry of the larval zebrafish. We did lots of backfills of neurons with horseradish peroxidase, and later the fluorescent dye DiI, and then with injected lineage tracers like rhodamine dextran. I guess technology has greatly advanced, because we never got anything as pretty as this set of fluorescently labeled neurons in the brain and spinal cord of a larval zebrafish.
This image was made using brainbow fluorescent microscopy. Transgenic fish carry an assortment of fluorescent protein genes that are randomly flipped on in the cells to produce these multicolored views of a subset of the neurons. It’s like the good old Golgi silver stain, only in technicolor.
This is a spectacular video of the development of Clypeaster subdepressus, also called a sand dollar or sea biscuit. These are stunningly beautiful creatures (as are we all, of course), and it is so cool to see them changing here. The video starts with a little echinoderm porn — these animals are profligate with their gametes — and then we see early divisions, gastrulation, the formation of the pluteus larva, metamorphosis into Aristotle’s lantern (one of the more charming names for a developmental stage), and into an ungainly spiky juvenile.
This is why some of us are developmental biologists: it’s all about the exotic weirdness and delicate loveliness of transformation.
Christine Huffard sent me a note alerting me to the publication of her latest paper, and she thought I might be interested because I “seem to like cephalopods”. Hah. Well. I’ve noticed that Dr Huffard seems to have some small affection for the tentacled beasties herself.
The paper follows on an old tradition and an old problem. While people have no problem distinguishing human individuals, we have a tough time telling one individual animal from another. This perceptual difficulty complicates problems of studying variations in behavior or physiology, or monitoring numbers and behavior, in natural populations. One solution is tagging or marking the animals in some way, but that always has the risk of changing or harming the disturbed animals — non-invasive procedures are much preferred. This is an especially difficult problem with small animals, like zebrafish or small octopus; I’ve struggled myself with trying to track individual fish in experiments.
I came up with one solution, and Huffard et al. have come up with something similar: humans can be trained to recognize distinctive individual variations, and learn to identify single animals. In this paper, they describe a pattern of white pigmented regions that are consistent within single animals of the species Wunderpus photogenicus…and as you might guess, that is a great excuse to put together a collection of photographs of these aptly named animals.
The Mesozoic was inhabited by some strange-looking critters, and here’s another example: a Jurassic dinosaur called Epidexipteryx, which has spiky teeth, big claws, fluffy feathers all over its body, and four long decorative feathers coming off a stumpy tail. It resembles a particularly ugly bird with a nasty bite, but it couldn’t fly — none of the feathers covering its forelimbs are pennaceous, but are more like an insulating fur. Or, alternatively, its feathers were all about display, a possibility suggested by the odd long feathers of the tail. Here are the bones; as you can see, the integument is remarkably well preserved, with a scruffy ruff of short, non-shafted feathers over the body and limbs, and a surprising spray of just four very long feathers coming off the tail.
And here’s what it would have looked like in life (only the colors are imaginary). It would have been about the size of a pigeon — I think a pack of these scurrying about New York’s Times Square would be both scenic and would quickly clean up the pigeon problem there.
For all the details, read the write-up on Tetrapod Zoology.
Zhang F, Zhou Z, Xu X, Wang X, Sullivan C (2008) A bizarre Jurassic maniraptoran from China with elongate ribbon-like feathers. Nature 455:1105-1108.
