First Proof: Ancient Birds Had Iridescent Feathers

John Roach
for National Geographic News

Just like modern-day starlings, some ancient birds had glossy black feathers with a metallic, glimmering sheen, scientists report in a new study.

The discovery is based on 40-million-year-old fossils of an unidentified bird species that were stored at the Senckenburg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany for up to 30 years. The fossils represent the first evidence of ancient iridescence in feathers.

Iridescence is caused by an interaction of light with the material that the light hits. The color changes depending on the angle of observation, like the rainbow sheen on an oil slick.

The research moves scientists a step closer to determining the true colors of extinct creatures, said study co-author Richard Prum, an ornithologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

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Just like modern-day starlings, some 40-million-year-old birds had glossy black feathers, according to the first evidence of iridescence ever seen in a fossilized feather (pictured).

The August 2009 research also moves scientists a step closer to determining the true colors of extinct creatures, the study authors say.

Photograph courtesy Jakob Vinther/Yale University

Ten New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Communities: Deep Ties, Deeper Pain

 Photograph by Meggan Haller, Keyhole Photo/Corbis

A man takes a break from refurbishing a boat in Bayou La Batre, Alabama—one of the fishing communities deeply affected by the Gulf spill.

Although community attachment is generally seen as a positive that aids in resilience, researchers from Louisiana State University found the negative mental health impacts of the spill were greatest for longtime residents with complex social networks of relatives, friends, and acquaintances. This sense of connectedness, and the accompanying pain, was underscored as people also depended on local resources for their livelihood.

The study is one of the first to systematically collect and analyze public health data on coastal populations affected by the spill. In a late June 2010 telephone survey of 935 households living in the coastal portions of Plaquemines, La Fourche, and Terrebonne parishes, the study found individuals with stronger community attachment exhibited higher self-reported levels of anxiety, worry, nervousness and fear.

Under normal circumstances, community attachment promotes better physical and mental health, but in times of crisis it can be problematic as people's way of life is threatened, the researchers noted.

"In crisis conditions, among those whose resources are threatened, we find that community attachment is associated with higher levels of negative affect," said the study, published in October 2011 in the journal American Behavioral Scientist.

This held true even for people who were not directly employed by the fishing and oil industries, suggesting that community attachment is strong in this area, and that people felt concerned about others whose livelihoods were directly affected.

But attachment may aid in recovery in the long run. Study lead author Matthew Lee, associate vice chancellor in the Office of Research and Economic Development at LSU, said that follow-up surveys have demonstrated that residents who had high community attachment and increased distress early on, "over time, they also recovered more quickly than those who were not highly attached to their communities." He said the findings are consistent with survey results of people recovering from Hurricane Katrina.
—Stacey Schultz

Dinosaur True Colors Revealed by Feather Find

Fossil Feather Melanosomes 

photograph courtesy University of Bristol

An international team of researchers reported finding fossilized rod-shaped eumelanosomes, shown here in a scanning electron micrograph, and spherical phaeomelanosomes in 125-million-year-old fossil birds and dinosaurs from China.

Eumelanosomes and phaeomelanosomes are two types of sub-cellular structures called melanosomes that are packed with the dark pigment melanin. A close packing of eumelanosomes from the extinct bird Confuciusornis suggests black was part of its color pattern, the new Nature study says.

Melanosomes are found in abundance within the feathers of living birds, and they have been reported before in fossil feathers.

This is the first time, though, that melanosomes have been found in the fossilized feathers of non-avian dinosaurs—such as Sinosauropteryx and Sinornithosaurus—and in the exquisitely preserved fossil birds from Liaoning Province, China.
 
Finding melanosomes in dinosaurs shows that the controversial hairlike structures seen in many feathered dinosaur fossils are indeed related to feathers. Analysis of fossilized melanosomes in creatures that lived and died millions of years ago promises to open up exciting new avenues of research and provide a glimpse into the previously unknown world of prehistoric color.

Ten New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Dead Zone: Mixed Views

 

 Photograph by NASA-GSFC, Science Faction/Corbis

 

Each September, a giant low-oxygen "dead zone" forms in the Gulf of Mexico as nutrients from agricultural runoff into the Mississippi River support the growth of oxygen-hungry algae, which can choke out other sea life. It can be seen here as the teal blue area along the Louisiana coastline.

A major question was whether this hypoxic area would be worsened by the assault of crude oil from the BP spill.

Researchers from Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium concluded in a study published in February in Marine Pollution Bulletin that the net effect of the spill on the dead zone's size appeared to be "negligible."  The hypoxic area was 20,000 square kilometers in 2010, close to the size predicted in a new model the researchers developed. (The dead zone has ranged between 40 square kilometers and 22,000 square kilometers from 1985 through 2010, and has averaged 13,600 square kilometers, or 5,200 square miles.)

But the Louisiana researchers cautioned that Tropical Storm Bonnie, which crossed the Gulf during July 2010, may have had a great enough impact to disguise the impact of the crude oil on the Gulf dead zone.

When oil spilled into the Gulf from the Macondo well, that zone expanded, leading scientists to study the situation and offer a number of explanations.

Other scientists have noted impact from the BP spill on Gulf  oxygen levels. A study from the University of California, Santa Barbara, which appeared in the January 2012 issue of the journal Science indicated that abnormally large blooms of methane-consuming bacteria had reduced the Gulf of Mexico's methane and oxygen levels.

Barbara Mulligan

Dinosaur True Colors Revealed by Feather Find

Dinosaur-Feather Doppelganger? 

 

 

Photographs courtesy University of Bristol

The feather of an extinct Confuciusornis bird may have had colors similar to those in this modern feather from a zebra finch, according to the new study.

Feather color in Confuciusornis—an early beaked bird found in 120- to 130-million-year-old fossil beds in Liaoning Province, China—was inferred from microscopic melanosomes preserved in a fossil specimen.

Two types of melanosomes were found. Eumelanosomes (such as the finch eumelanosomes inset at left) are rodlike and associated with the colors black and grey in living birds. Phaeomelanosomes (inset right) are spherical and produce colors ranging from reddish brown to yellow. A lack of melanosomes makes white.

Using a scanning electron microscope, the researchers found that a fossil Confuciusornis feather contained both types of melanosomes and was likely multicolored in life.

Ten New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Northern Gannet: Delayed Impact 

Photograph by Brian Skerry, National Geographic

A northern gannet coasts on the water. Among the 102 species of birds harmed in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, this long-distance migrating bird, known by the scientific name Morus bassanus, suffered the highest levels of oil damage. New research indicates much greater impact on immature birds than traditional counting methods would suggest, with long-term effects that remain to be seen.

"Seabirds are among the most obvious and immediate indicators of wildlife and environmental damage during marine pollution events," said William Montevecchi  of Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. He led a study published in Biology Letters, a journal of the Royal Society, that took advantage of advances in tracking technology to focus on the northern gannet, the largest seabird that breeds in the North Atlantic, and the only species of solely Canadian origin to be significantly affected by the spill. Using bird-borne global location sensors (GLS) and satellite tags to assess migration patterns, the researchers concluded the gannet population saw a much higher level of "oiling" than traditional assessment methods—bird "banding" or body counts—would suggest.

The Memorial University scientists extrapolated from GLS and satellite tags that the number of gannets of all age classes that winter in the Gulf of Mexico was 118,633 birds, more than double the number (54,905) estimated by traditional banding techniques.

In addition, the study authors stated that researchers traditionally assess seabird mortality by counting dead and dying animals along coasts, so they see only a fraction of those affected.

Most mature gannets had already returned to their breeding colonies in Canada before the Gulf spill in April, but the study concluded more than 50,000 immature gannets were in the Gulf during the spill and suffered oil-related mortality. The long-term effects of those gannet deaths will not show up until those birds would have reached sexual maturity—at about five or six years of age.

—Barbara Mulligan

Dinosaur True Colors Revealed by Feather Find

Showing Its Stripes

Photograph courtesy Institute of Fossil Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing

The feathers of Sinosauropteryx have been the subject of controversy ever since they were first described.

To the naked eye, the fossilized feathers are fine hairlike filaments that give the impression of being soft and downlike. Some researchers proposed that these structures were not feathers at all, however, but the remains of collagen from inside the tail.

The new study shows that these structures—visible in this fossil Sinosauropteryx as dark patches along the back and tail—are packed with melanosomes, pigment-carrying, sub-cellular structures found in the feathers of living birds but not in collagen.

This strengthens the argument that the fossil hairlike structures are protofeathers, an early stage in feather evolution before feathers had central shafts with vanes out to each side, as seen in modern birds.

How do fossil fuel emissions affect our health?

The substances that come out of a car's tailpipe, such as carbon monoxide, sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide, hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide, are harmful to our health and to the environment. Carbon monoxide affects the blood supply and can cause heart disease; sulfur dioxide causes acid rain; nitrogen oxide causes the haze over populated cities; carbon dioxide gases produce the greenhouse effect; and hydrocarbons cause cancer. The federal government set up regulations to limit car emissions, ensuring a safer, healthier environment.

Notable Feathered Dinosaurs: Nomingia

Historical Period: Late Cretaceous (70-65 million years ago)

Size and Weight: About 6 feet long and 25 pounds

Diet: Probably omnivorous

Distinguishing Characteristics :Long legs; clawed hands; fan on end of tail

About Nomingia:

In most cases, the similarity between small theropod dinosaurs and birds is limited to their size, posture, and feather coats. Nomingia took its birdlike attributes one step further: this is the first dinosaur ever discovered to have sported a pygostyle, that is, a fused structure on the end of its tail that supported a fan of feathers. (All birds have pygostyles, though some species' displays are more garish than others, as witness the famous peacock.)

Despite its avian features, Nomingia was clearly more on the dinosaur than on the bird end of the evolutionary spectrum. It's likely that this dino-bird used its pygostyle-supported fan as a way of attracting mates--the same way a male peacock flashes its tail feathers to reel in available females.

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Check out Bob's Dinosaur Blog !

Bob Strauss is a freelance writer and book author; one of his specialties is explaining scientific concepts and discoveries to both a lay and professional audience.

Bob Strauss is the author of two best-selling question-and-answer books that range across the expanse of science, biology, history and culture: The Big Book of What, How and Why (Main Street, 2005) and Who Knew? Hundreds & Hundreds of Questions & Answers for Curious Minds (Sterling Innovation, 2007).

Ten New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Dolphins: Signs of Serious Illness

Photograph courtesy Reuters

In the depths of the ocean and on shore, science is only beginning to measure the long-term impact of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

On the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, a slew of new studies paint a complex picture of how the Gulf of Mexico's ecosystems absorbed the insult of 4.9 million barrels of crude oil.

The catastrophic failure of BP's Macondo well off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010, triggered a blast and fire that took the lives of 11 rig workers and sent oil spewing from the deep sea bed for 87 days. Unprecedented steps were taken to minimize the amount of oil that reached shore, including the application of some 800,000 gallons (3,028,000 liters) of dispersants directly at the wellhead nearly a mile (1,500 meters) below the surface. Still, the oil left its mark, scientists now say, on marine mammals, salt marshes, corals, tiny organisms and coastal communities. The new studies track both lingering harm and recovery.

Bottlenose dolphins in oil-contaminated Barataria Bay off the coast of Louisiana are showing signs of serious illness, including extremely low weight, anemia, low blood sugar, and some symptoms of liver and lung disease, according to a health assessment conducted by U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists and their partners.

The scientists, who performed comprehensive physicals last summer on 32 dolphins from the bay, also found that half of the tested dolphins showed abnormally low levels of hormones that regulate stress response, metabolism, and immune function, indicating adrenal insufficiency. One of the dolphins in the survey was found dead on Grand Isle in January.

Lori Schwacke of NOAA, the project's lead investigator, said the findings were preliminary and could not be conclusively linked to the oil spill. But she added that control groups of dolphins living along the Atlantic coast and in other areas that were not affected by the 2010 spill did not manifest those symptoms.

"The findings that we have are consistent with other studies that have looked at the effects of oil exposure in other mammals," she said.

The study is a part of an ongoing examination of the U.S. government-led Natural Resource Damage Assessment process and the Gulf of Mexico Dolphin Unusual Mortality Event. Since February 2010, more than 675 dolphins have stranded in the northern Gulf of Mexico—a much higher rate than the usual average of 74 dolphins per year.

BP's Houston office did not respond to requests for comment on this research or the other scientific studies related to the Gulf Oil Spill.



—Barbara Mulligan

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Phytoplankton: Oil Sensitivity 

Photograph by Bill Curtsinger, National Geographic

Phytoplankton, whose name literally means "plant drifter," are a presence just beneath the surface of the Gulf, detectable only by the green gloss they lend to the water due to the chlorophyll in their cells. as seen above. But they provide an important base in the aquatic food chain. And following the Gulf spill, researchers from the University of South Carolina (USC) found that even small exposures to oil can have large impacts on these microscopic algae.

"Exposure to very small concentrations of crude oil can result in major shifts in phytoplankton community composition as well as a reduction in total phytoplankton biomass," said James Pinckney, associate professor at USC and a co-author of a study published in January in the journal Estuaries and Coasts.

The researchers attempted to simulate oil spill conditions to examine short-term, two-day changes in phytoplankton community composition and total biomass. In Nalgene polycarbonate bottles, they combined water from Clambake Landing in North Inlet near Georgetown, South Carolina, a National Estuarine Research Reserve, with two separate oil samples, one obtained from the Deepwater Horizon spill and the other a mixture of Texas crude oils. They analyzed a control and six replicated experimental treatments of crude oil at various concentrations.

"Crude oil spills may impact many marsh organisms," the researchers wrote. "But phytoplankton represent a major food source for many larval, juvenile, and adult fish and shellfish species."

There is concern that the changes the researchers observed could lead to a decrease in overall marsh productivity. Continued research is needed on the longer-term impacts of crude oil exposure to phytoplankton and whether the community composition will return to pre-exposure composition after the crude oil is removed, Pinckney says.

—Stacey Schultz

New and Frozen Frontier Awaits Offshore Oil Drilling

By JOHN M. BRODER and CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Jim Wilson/New York Times 

Edward Itta, the former mayor of North Slope Borough and an Inupiat Eskimo, campaigned against offshore drilling.

 

WASHINGTON — Shortly before Thanksgiving in 2010, the leaders of the commission President Obama had appointed to investigate the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico sat down in the Oval Office to brief him.

After listening to their findings about the BP accident and the safety of deepwater drilling, the president abruptly changed the subject.

“Where are you coming out on the offshore Arctic?” he asked.

William K. Reilly, a former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and a commission co-chairman, was startled, as was Carol M. Browner, the president’s top adviser at the time on energy and climate change. Although a proposal by Shell to drill in the Arctic had been a source of dissension, it was not a major focus of the panel’s work.

“It’s not deep water, right?” the president said, noting that Shell’s proposal involved low-pressure wells in 150 feet of water, nothing like BP’s 5,000-foot high-pressure well that blew out in the gulf.

“What that told me,” Mr. Reilly later recounted, “was that the president had already gotten deeply into this issue and was prepared to go forward.”

The president’s preoccupation with the Arctic proposal, even as the nation was still reeling from the BP spill, was the first hint that Shell’s audacious plan to drill in waters previously considered untouchable had gone from improbable to inevitable.

Barring a successful last-minute legal challenge by environmental groups, Shell will begin drilling test wells off the coast of northern Alaska in July, opening a new frontier in domestic oil exploration and accelerating a global rush to tap the untold resources beneath the frozen ocean.

It is a moment of major promise and considerable danger.

Industry experts and national security officials view the Alaskan Arctic as the last great domestic oil prospect, one that over time could bring the country a giant step closer to cutting its dependence on foreign oil.

But many Alaska Natives and environmental advocates say drilling threatens wildlife and pristine shorelines, and perpetuates the nation’s reliance on dirty fossil fuels.

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Gulf Spill New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Microorganisms: Life Cycles Disrupted 

Photograph by David Snyder, ZUMApress. com/Alamy

Fishermen inspect damaged cane grass soon after the Gulf spill, knowing that the oil has killed the small organisms upon which fish and crabs of the wetlands depend for food. By now, everyone knows of the oil-eating microorganisms that helped Gulf recovery. But as is clear in this marsh grass and elsewhere, some of the Gulf's tiniest denizens did not fare well.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill inhibited  microorganisms' nitrogen cycle, which is critical to ecosystem development and decomposition, according to research by Florida Gulf Coast University.


While some bacteria served as "glorious brave fighters" to help clean up the spill by breaking down the oil, other groups of microorganisms such as archaea were victims, Hidetoshi Urakawa, the lead researcher and assistant professor of the university's department of marine and ecological sciences, said by email.
"The important finding of our study was that oil spills not only damage marine animals and entire food webs, but also the nitrogen cycle, which is one of the major bloodstreams of our planet," Urakawa said.
The data, published in February in the journal Environmental Pollution, found that one common archae bacterium called Nitrosopumilus maritimus showed a particularly high sensitivity to crude oil.
That susceptibility may have an ecological significance, even leading to a shift to bacterial dominance in the aftermath of a major oil spill, the researchers said. But they also cautioned that the variation in petroleum toxicity might be explained in part by the different sizes of microorganisms.

Urakawa said it also might be possible to take the most sensitive archaea and develop a bioassay to measure and monitor petroleum toxicity in the seawater and "help map a future spill."
To conduct their study, the researchers collected tar balls that had drifted ashore in nearby Panama City, Florida, and tested the toxicity responses of bacteria and archaea to oil contamination.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill provided an opportunity to "think about some of the unseen damages of nature" in the deep ocean, Urakawa said. Jose Barreto, professor of Florida Gulf Coast University's department of chemistry and mathematics, collaborated on the project.

—Jeff Smith

The Demise of a Wooden Dinosaur

The microstructure of Smets' "dinosaur" revealed the fossils to be petrified wood. From Hovelacque, 1890. 

Naming a new dinosaur is a tricky thing. More often than not, previously unknown dinosaurs first appear as bits and pieces, and more than a few dinosaurs have been established on little more than isolated teeth. Thanks to the uncertainties often inherent in describing new dinosaurs, sometimes what seem to be novel species turn out to be parts of previously known animals. That’s just how science works—ideas are constantly being investigated and tested. But I’m sure that was little consolation to a 19th century scientist who mistakenly named a new dinosaur from petrified plants.

In 1887, naturalist Abbe G. Smets announced the discovery of Aachenosaurus multidens. Not much of the organism survived in the fossil record—just two dark-colored fragments—but Smets was so confident in his ability to restore the whole animal that he issued a full-scale restoration of a Hadrosaurus-like dinosaur.

Other naturalists were not impressed. Paleontologist Louis Dollo and botanist Maurice Hovelacque didn’t see a dinosaur in the fossil pieces. The fragments, Dollo and Hovelacque concluded, were actually bits of fossil wood!

Smets was outraged. How dare Dollo and Hovelacque deride his discovery? Smets viciously attacked his peers in print, but this only undermined his case. The microstructure of the fossils clearly revealed them to be wood, not bone, and Smets’ anger could not change that fact. As naturalists G.A. Boulenger and Richard Lydekker wrote in a 1889 Geological Magazine article about the controversy, Smets appeared to:

… have followed the Old Bailey maxim, that when you have no case, the only thing left is to abuse the plaintiff and all connected to him.

Indeed, Boulenger and Lydekker were especially aggravated to find that Smets had attempted to use their research to discredit Dollo and Hovelacque. Both men were well-respected naturalists and no amount of name-calling by Smets was going to change that. Smets was only making a fool of himself by trying to turn other naturalists upon each other, and his wooden dinosaur rotted away.

A Little Independent Energy Experiment on the Prairie

If you can fight your way through the dirt storms of Madelia, Minnesota, you may be able to find the future of renewable energy

• By Maggie Koerth-Baker
• Smithsonian.com

Madelia, Minnesota is a small town with a big plan to produce fuel made from local materials for local markets. Maggie Koerth-Baker


In the middle of the Minnesota prairie sits Madelia, a town of a little more than 2300 people that is surrounded on all sides by miles upon miles of brown soil, tilled into neat rows. If you flew there in an airplane, Madelia would look like a button, sewn into the middle of a patchwork quilt—each farm divided into fields shaped like squares and circles, bordered by pale yellow gravel roads and by the narrow strips of bright green grass that grow alongside creeks and drainage ditches.

When the residents of a town such as Madelia think about the future of energy, the solutions they come up with are unsurprisingly centered on the land and what it can grow. In Madelia, however, those solutions look a little different from what you might expect. When Madelians imagine the future of energy, they don’t see prairie dotted with big ethanol refineries, where corn grown by hundreds of farmers is processed into fuel that will be sold all around the United States. Instead, they’re thinking about something much more local. Madelia is a small town with a big plan to produce fuel made from local materials for local markets. From the native grasses that easily grow in prairie soil to leftover beaks and pieces from a nearby chicken canning factory, anything that can grow within a 25-mile radius of town is fair game.

Why would a generally conservative town, populated by a lot of generally risk-averse farm families, want to stake a decent amount of time and money on the cutting edge of alternative energy? When I traveled to Madelia, I ran headlong into the reason before I’d even reached the town itself. My moment of enlightenment happened a few miles outside the city limits, on the narrow blacktop of Highway 60, when I came very close to driving my car into a ditch.


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