TIL thread

[Infinity Blade]

Although I knew for a while now that the sandhill crane uses its second digit toe as a weapon, TIL that it actually keeps the digit II claw sharp and protected from wear by rotating the claw on its long axis, such that the claw lies on its side when the foot makes contact with the ground.

You can see this in Figure 8 in the paper down below.

www.gmnh.pref.gunma.jp/wp-content/uploads/bulletin13_1.pdf

I also learned that various birds have what are called pectinate claws, which means that they have this serrated comb-like structure along the length of the claw. Although it's often assumed to be an adaptation for grooming, there seem to be arguments against this hypothesis.

curioussengi.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/looking-good-part-i-pectinate-claws-avian-edition/

If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that theropods did/do a lot of weird and interesting shit with their feet.

[theropod]

TIL that not only are woodlice edible, but they actually do taste like their marine relatives, shrimp:
eattheplanet.org/land-shrimp-a-small-relative-of-our-favorite-seafood/
"Not only are they edible but from my experience some of them do in fact taste similar to shrimp. Any bug should be cooked before eaten, but some people eat them raw. They make a great sauce, or they can be added to soup. There are a lot of other ways to cook them including, mixed with, dough, egg, or rice."

Sounds tasty.

[Infinity Blade]

TIL about this forged "dinosaur skull". It was named "Randy", and it was supposed to be a Majungasaurus. A (now burned down) small museum at the Herkimer Diamond Mines actually bought it from "paleontologists" in Madagascar, both figuratively and literally.


Image source->

Here's someone's joke life reconstruction out of it.

© @ Olivia Carr->

EDIT: it's similar to another forgery that's also from Madagascar. Frustratingly, this one was partly made from genuine dinosaur fossils.

wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/13823/2010.v.45.ZIPFEL_ET_AL_Fossil_forgery_from_Madagascar.pdf?sequence=1

[Supercommunist]

"Not only are they edible but from my experience some of them do in fact taste similar to shrimp. Any bug should be cooked before eaten, but some people eat them raw. They make a great sauce, or they can be added to soup. There are a lot of other ways to cook them including, mixed with, dough, egg, or rice."

Sounds tasty.

In China, I ate what I think was silkworm pupae and if cooked in a certain way tasted exactly like chicken. I am a big fan of insect eating, its a shame its unlikely to ever catch on.

[Infinity Blade]

TIL how deadly sandhill cranes can apparently be.

Here are a few things I've seen during my travels along bike paths and parks:

An osprey, perched on the high branches of a dead tree, happily ripping the guts out of a fish the bird already rendered headless.

Two sand hill cranes pecking a third sand hill crane to death. The two aggressors, for reasons I could not fathom, took turns striking the doomed crane on the head with their beaks. It was a gory sight, with blood streaming from the victim bird.

www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/fl-jvcol-oped0612--20150611-column.html



Unfortunately, though, I'm unable to read further details on the latter account, because Birds of the World requires a paid subscription to let you look at this kind of info. Just creating an account there won't give you access to these webpages (I just tried, so that was a nigh worthless move).

EDIT: found something else.

D. Bill-stab (Masatomi and Kitagawa, 1975; upright-peck; Nesbitt and Archibald, 1981; Bill Sparring). A rapid thrust of the bill (closed or slightly open) is used to injure the target. Predators (e.g. dog (Canis familiaris) and human) have been killed by a stab of a crane’s bill (Bent, 1926:227).

www.globalraptors.org/grin/researchers/uploads/476/sociogram_for_cranes.pdf

[Supercommunist]

^Cranes killing coyotes sounds like an outlier, while a stork/crane could put up a spirtied defense against a mammalian meso predator they usually get taken out when the predator is determined enough

[yotutube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX7ay8vfJ4U[/youtube]



^this stork managed to fend off the jackal but was clearly taken the most damage, though to be fair it was injured from the start.



Those articles are intresting though and remind me of these accounts I've read about the surprisingly hardcore streamer ducks.

"On 11 November, Storer found two fresh carcasses of female Red Shovelers on the southern shore of Laguna de la Nevada; both were exceedingly fat and showed no obvious outward cause for mortality. One bird was in full wing molt. Then, on 25 November, at a nearby lake named Laguna Blanchillo, Nuechterlein observed a male steamer-duck catch and kill a molting adult shoveler. In this attack, which lasted over 3.5 min, the steamer-duck grabbed the shoveler by the neck and pounded its body with his wing knobs. As in intraspecific fights, the steamer-duck was nearly stationary and upright in the water, with wings spread (Fig. 3a). Several meters away, a female steamer-duck displayed excitedly, calling and Stretching (Fig. la) repeatedly. At intervals, the male steamer-duck pulled the shoveler beneath the surface, then raised it up again and renewed the wing-beating. After approximately 2 min, the male steamer-duck was distracted by the female and displayed with her. Within 30 s, he returned to the shoveler, grabbed it by the neck, and again beat it another 15-20 times with its wings. He then released the limp body of the shoveler, pecked at it, and released it again. Turning to the female, he joined her in calling repeatedly while she Stretched. A full minute later, after the steamer-ducks had left, the shoveler raised its head and began struggling toward shore. As the shoveler moved, the steamer-duck pair again approached within 2 m, the female in the lead, but then swam off. The crippled shoveler eventually reached shore, where it died 15 min later. Examination of the specimen disclosed several broken bones, hemorrhages in the lower neck region, and massive internal bleeding at the base of the right leg. The skin was not broken, but there was obvious subcutaneous evidence of bites on the head, back, tail and left hip. The bird was fat, weighed 675 g, and was in full wing molt.

sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/condor/v087n01/p0087-p0091.pdf

[kekistani]

Jun 20, 2020 21:10:17 GMT 5 Infinity Blade said:

TIL about this forged "dinosaur skull". It was named "Randy", and it was supposed to be a Majungasaurus. A (now burned down) small museum at the Herkimer Diamond Mines actually bought it from "paleontologists" in Madagascar, both figuratively and literally.


Image source->

Here's someone's joke life reconstruction out of it.

© @ Olivia Carr->

EDIT: it's similar to another forgery that's also from Madagascar. Frustratingly, this one was partly made from genuine dinosaur fossils.

wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/13823/2010.v.45.ZIPFEL_ET_AL_Fossil_forgery_from_Madagascar.pdf?sequence=1

...did they actually think it was real?!?

[Infinity Blade]

Jun 23, 2020 9:27:00 GMT 5 kekistani said:

...did they actually think it was real?!?

Yes, the people who ran this museum were actually fooled by it. They even had it on exhibit until the museum burned down in 2017.

This is a picture of it being displayed, unironically being touted as a real dinosaur skull.

Image source->

[kekistani]

Jun 23, 2020 9:34:14 GMT 5 Infinity Blade said:

Jun 23, 2020 9:27:00 GMT 5 kekistani said:

...did they actually think it was real?!?

Yes, the people who ran this museum were actually fooled by it. They even had it on exhibit until the museum burned down in 2017.

This is a picture of it being displayed, unironically being touted as a real dinosaur skull.

Image source->

JESUS.

[DonaldCengXiongAzuma]

Today I learn

[Infinity Blade]

TIL that, unlike Smilodon, ALL of Homotherium's teeth were serrated. That means upper canines, lower canines, incisors, and carnassial teeth. Jesus Christ.

Actually, now that I've looked into it a bit, Smilodon doesn't even seem to have true denticles on its canines like I thought it did. I knew for a while now that it's not a true ziphodont animal (since the carina is composed of enamel only), but it is straight up claimed that it lacks denticles and that its teeth were unserrated. There are irregular bumps that kind of look like denticles, but it looks like they're not considered true serrations (now that I think about it, I think they're more comparable to the imperfections you'd see on the edge of a blade with heavy magnification).


Microanatomy of ziphodont teeth lacking deep interdental folds. (A) Carcharodon megalodon (ROM 30530). (B) Smilodon sp. (ROM 3288) carina, lacking denticles (not a true ziphodont animal as the carina is composed of enamel only). (C) Varanus komodoensis (ROM R7565), distal carina, with unevenly sized denticles. (D) Hadrosaurid (ROM 58205) labial denticles. (E) Sagittal thin section through the distal carina of a maxillary tooth of Dimetrodon grandis (ROM 6039), showing inconsistently-sized denticles. Thin section (top), SEM (bottom). (F) Troodon formosus (ROM 05089), mesial carina. Thin section (top), SEM (bottom).

link->

Although all saber-tooth predators share cranial traits related to the necessity imposed by their enlarged upper canines to exert larger gapes, there were (at least) two ecological types or “ecomorphs” of saber-tooths (see Van Valkenburgh, 2007, for review): the scimitar-toothed forms (e.g., Homotherium) had shorter, serrated canines, and lacked a pronounced mandibular flange; the dirk-toothed forms (e,g., Smilodon) had longer, unserrated canines that were also narrower and more recurved, and had more pronounced cranial modifications. Scimitar-toothed saber-tooths had more cursorially-adapted postcranial skeletons than most conical-toothed felids, while dirk-toothed forms had postcrania indicative of their being powerfully built highly-specialized ambush predators (Kurtén, 1968; Martin, 1980; Meachen-Samuels, 2012; Figueirido et al., 2018; but see Martin et al., 2000). Dirk-toothed forms were the more extremely adapted forms, including the iconic S. fatalis of the La Brea tar pits (one of the few dirk-toothed taxa lacking a mandibular flange) and T. atrox.

Janis et al., 2020

[Infinity Blade]

TIL that meridiungulates were declining long before the Great American Biotic Interchange. This is similar to what I've researched about South America's native metatherian predators. Looks like we can discount competitive displacement (by invading North American herbivores) as the cause of this long and severe decline.

link->

[theropod]

TIL that it is currently warmer on earth than at any time in the Holocene (Marcott et al. 2013, NOAA 2020) and, by extension, since the Eemian interglacial 130-115 ka, which was about 1.5° warmer than 1961-1990 average, ~1.9° above pre-industrial (Turney & Jones 2010), and by extension around 1.6° warmer than the average for the 20th century according to NOAA data.



Furthermore, based on current trends we are likely to exceed Eemian global temperatures within just a few decades:

This is a simple exponential model fitted to the temperature data since 1980, which predicts we will hit Eemian global temperature by 2049.
As you see it slightly underestimates the most recent datapoints, but let’s hope that’s just noise. By 2100, this model would predict about 3.9 or 4° (depending on your exact reference level) above pre-industrial levels, which is a bit higher than the median estimate by Raftery et al. (2017) at 3.2° based on current policies, but well within their 2-4.9° "likely range", and likely good enough to get an idea over the next few decades for which divergence between different models is low anyway. Also, as a side note, their estimates only base on anthropogenic emissions scenarios and not the natural tipping points that will likely be exceeded under them (at >2° of warming).

Alternatively a model fitted to the data from 1880 would suggest exceeding Eeemian temperatures by 2091, however that one vastly underestimates recent temperature increases (basically everything since 1990) as well as projections based on emissions scenarios, so I don’t think this is accurate.

Now the Eemian is pretty much as warm as it gets in the Pleistocene, and by extension since the middle Pliocene:

In other words, I learned that it is warmer now than in over 115 ka, and we can expect to see temperatures higher than anything in the last 3 ma within a few decades based on current developments.

Oh also, CO2-clock keeps ticking, only 40t left per person now.

(creature386 of course correct me if I am mistaken)

Marcott, S.A., Shakun, J.D., Clark, P.U. and Mix, A.C. 2013. A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years. Science 339 (6124): 1198–1201.
NOAA. 2020. Global Surface Temperature Anomalies | Monitoring References | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Downloaded from www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/faq/anomalies.php on 17 July 2020.
Raftery, A.E., Zimmer, A., Frierson, D.M.W., Startz, R. and Liu, P. 2017. Less than 2 °C warming by 2100 unlikely. Nature Climate Change 7 (9): 637–641.
Turney, C.S. and Jones, R.T. 2010. Does the Agulhas Current amplify global temperatures during super-interglacials? Journal of Quaternary Science 25 (6): 839–843.

[Infinity Blade]

Wow, so even the Medieval Warm Period was much colder than it is today (let alone the Little Ice Age that followed afterwards)? Shit.

[theropod]

Yes. I’m always surprised how widespread this myth ("it was warmer than today in the middle ages/during the roman empire!") is, but there are actually some fairly straightforward reasons:

I think part of it has to do with old data; the time around the years 0 and 1000 were both almost as warm as the 1961-1990 reference periods, slightly warmer than the 20th-century average, so for someone living in the 60s maybe those times could have seemed "just as warm as today".


This is Marcott et al.’s temperature dataset for the Holocene

Part of it may have to do with unwillingness to compare them. Current warming is so fast that a conclusion drawn in the last decade can already be deprecated. E.g. Marcott et al. 2013, while they do conclude "current" (i.e. 2000-2009) temperatures were higher than most of the holocene, stated they were not yet warmer than the highest holocene temperatures around 6000 BCE. That has changed since then. So if a paper from the early 2000s made a claim as to what period was "warmer than today", that’s not necessarily true any more, you need to look at the numerical data to check.

Then there’s the thing with data resolution. Of course the resolution is lower for periods further back, so the curve will get smoothed over.

And of course there is a huge problem with people confusing local and global temperature records. Maybe medieval or roman times really were warmer than today, in some parts of the world. That doesn’t make the global climate warmer though (at least some authors don’t support the idea of a global "medival warm period" at all, e.g. link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF01092410.pdf though others do e.g. doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447-29.1.51).

So this is of course fertile soil for people who want a cheap but relatively convincing-looking argument to push their agenda.