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Tag Archives: Weirdo
Alien shopping-bag ocean weirdo has glowing Cheetos for guts
Resembling an alien shopping bag with guts made of glowing Cheetos, a bizarre creature took center stage in new footage captured by a remotely operated vehicle deep in the Pacific Ocean.
Gliding through the sea at a depth of some 7,221 feet (2,201 meters), the ocean weirdo — actually an unknown species of sea cucumber — had its innards on display in the new clip, taken in March by an ROV exploring part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument southeast of Honolulu. The ROV was gliding over an unexplored seamount at the Kingman Reef and Palmyra Atoll when operators spotted the creature, said Megan Cook, the director of education and outreach at The Ocean Exploration Trust’s Nautilus Live.
“These are always so exciting and spectacular to see because — just, what an incredible animal,” Cook told Live Science.
Sea cucumbers, or holothurians, are a diverse group, with many species distributed across the Central Pacific, Cook said. The one spotted by the ROV linked to the research vessel E/V Nautilus crew belongs to a family called Elpidiidae, she said. These deep-sea cucumbers are scavengers that feed on marine snow, a shower of skin cells, poop and bits of dead animals that filters down to the ocean floor.
Related: 10 weird creatures found in the deep sea in 2021
Many species in the Elpidiidae family have appendages that look like fins or sails that let them swim for short distances. This is a useful adaptation that allows the sea cucumbers to cover more ground and search for new grazing spots, Cook said.
To eat, the animal oozes across the seafloor, using its sticky tentacles — the leaf- or star-shaped red fringe around its mouth — to pick up a mix of sand and organic material, which it then brings to its mouth. The bright orange intestine — the glowing “Cheetos” — seen inside the transparent creature then digests the organic material, excreting the non-edible sand.
This turns out to be an important storage system for carbon. The ocean floor is the largest carbon sequestration system on Earth, with carbon-rich organic material getting scooped up by bottom-dwellers like sea cucumbers and remaining deep in the ocean for long periods of time.
“They are this great scavenger/recycler on the seafloor,” Cook said of the deep-sea sea cucumbers.
Some sea cucumber species can eject their digestive systems through their anuses when startled, a method that often lets them escape hungry predators. (The organs soon grow back.) However, it’s unknown if the species in the new video has that trick up its sleeve (or its anus), Cook said.
The EV Nautilus livestreams its ROV dives, and the current season runs through late October. The team will continue to explore the Central Pacific, including many unexplored spots in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument and its surroundings. Viewers can follow along on Twitter @EVNautilus, on Instagram at @NautilusLive, on TikTok @NautilusLive, on Facebook @NautilusLive or on YouTube at /EVNautilus.
“Our next ROV dives will be to Johnston Atoll, which is one of the most remote atolls in the whole planet,” Cook said.
Originally published on Live Science.
What has no eyes, walked on stilts and died in ‘Paleo Pompeii’? This ancient weirdo.
Paleontologists recently announced the discovery of an “exceptionally well preserved” ancient animal near the eastern shore of Lake Simcoe in southern Ontario, Canada, in a stone quarry that is such a hotbed for marine fossils that scientists have dubbed the area “Paleo Pompeii.”
Named Tomlinsonus dimitrii, the species represented by the specimen is part of an extinct group of arthropods known as marrellomorphs that lived approximately 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, the research team reported in a new study. Other echinoderm fossils that are abundant in the area typically contain mineralized body parts that are more likely to be preserved over time, but this species is entirely soft-bodied, making the discovery all the more startling.
“We didn’t expect to find a soft-bodied species at this site,” said lead study author Joseph Moysiuk, a doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto and a researcher at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). “When we think of fossils, we typically think of things like dinosaur bones and shells. However, soft-tissue preservation is very rare, and there are only a few sites around the world where soft-bodied organisms have been found,” Moysiuk told Live Science.
Measuring 2 inches (6 centimeters) — just shy of an index finger’s length and able to fit in the palm of a hand — the specimen features an ornate head shield that contains two curved horns covered in feather-like spines. The animal’s segmented body resembles that of other arthropods, such as insects and spiders, and contains multiple sets of segmented limbs — including one very unusual pair.
“Underneath the head, there is this amazing pair of limbs that are extremely long and have foot-like projections at the terminal ends, which we think it most likely used to stilt its way across the seafloor,” Moysiuk said. “It also appears to be blind, since it doesn’t have any eyes at all.”
Related: Photos: Trove of marine fossils discovered in Morocco
Researchers discovered the bizarre arthropod last summer during a formal excavation of an active quarry owned by the Tomlinson Group, an infrastructure service company based in eastern Canada. (Paleontologists named the species Tomlinsonus dimitrii as a nod to the Tomlinson Group for letting them excavate the site.)
Prior to this dig, which was led by George Kampouris, the paper’s co-author and an independent paleontological technician who has been investigating the quarry’s fossil beds since 2014, marrellomorphs were predominately found at older fossil sites, like the Cambrian Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia. According to paleontologists, the newly described specimen resembles another species of extinct soft-bodied arthropod called Marrella splendens, found at the Burgess Shale.
Similar to the Burgess Shale, the Lake Simcoe quarry was once submerged in water and was part of a shallow tropical marine sea that covered much of what is now modern-day Canada. Over millions of years, the seafloor became blanketed in sediment caused by storms.
“What we’re seeing is the rapid burial of these organisms that were living on this flat, shallow ocean bottom and were repeatedly smothered by large undersea mudflows coming from storm events,” Moysiuk said. “You can imagine hurricanes hitting this shallow shelf area and burying the whole community of organisms, which is why we nicknamed the site “Paleo Pompeii.” These organisms were entombed exactly where they were living, and what we’re seeing is them frozen in time.”
Moysiuk and his fellow researchers hope that this discovery will help “close the gap” in the fossil record for this group of arthropods, they wrote in the study.
The Tomlinsonus dimitrii specimen is now in ROM’s collection and is currently on display in the Willner Madge Gallery as a part of the museum’s “Dawn of Life” exhibit.
The findings were published March 24 in the Journal of Paleontology.
Originally published on Live Science.
No, this dinosaur isn’t vaping. It just breathed like a weirdo.
A new illustration of a dinosaur exhaling a puffy cloud might look like the animal is vaping. But in reality, the artwork is simply depicting a dinosaur breathing on a chilly morning. And it turns out this dino breathed in a way unlike any seen in this group of dinosaurs before.
Scientists found unusual rib and sternum bones in an exceptionally well-preserved fossil skeleton of Heterodontosaurus tucki, a turkey-size, plant-eating ornithischian, or bird-hipped dinosaur — the group that includes duck-billed dinosaurs, frilled dinosaurs like Triceratops and armored dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus.
X-rays of the fossil, which was discovered in South Africa’s Eastern Cape in 2009, enabled researchers to digitally reconstruct the skeleton in 3D. Their models revealed skeletal features that were previously unknown in ornithischians, showing rib and hip bones that were connected by muscles to help the animal breathe in a way that was novel for dinosaurs: through expansion of its chest and belly.
Related: 7 surprising dinosaur facts
H. tucki measured about 3 feet (1 meter) from nose to tail and roamed what is now South Africa about 200 million years ago during the early Jurassic period (200 million to 145 million years ago), according to the Natural History Museum in London. It’s one of the earliest species to be included in the ornithischian group, which means that H. tucki can provide clues about the evolution of features that are common among ornithischians but differ from other dinosaurs, researchers reported July 6 in the journal eLife.
Because the H. tucki skeleton was nearly complete, paleontologists discovered a group of tiny, slender abdominal rib bones called gastralia. These rib bones are found in crocodiles and other modern reptiles and play a part in respiration, but were previously unknown in ornithischian dinosaurs, said lead study author Viktor Radermacher, a doctoral student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
“Gastralia were thought to be absent from all ornithischians, but we show that they retained them for a very brief period of their early evolution,” Radermacher told Live Science in an email. H. tucki also had paddle-shaped ribs and elongated breastbone plates, which could move with ribs that were attached to the sternum to facilitate breathing. Such features “are lost in later ornithischians,” Radermacher said. This tells us that early members of this group “were doing something very different with their bodies,” he added.
Mammals breathe by expanding and contracting their lungs with the help of an organ called a diaphragm, which pushes air in and out. Birds — a modern lineage of theropod dinosaurs — use a different method, in which a network of air sacs distributes oxygen by running it in a loop through the birds’ lungs and bodies. Paleontologists who previously reconstructed extinct dinosaurs’ internal anatomy found evidence of similar air sacs, suggesting that most dinosaurs breathed like modern birds, Live Science reported in 2005.
But H. tucki‘s anatomy suggested that this dinosaur had a different strategy. By flexing muscles connecting the gastralia and the pelvis, and the sternal plates and bony paddles, the dinosaur would have inhaled air by inflating its belly and chest, and then relaxed those muscles to push air out, according to the new study.
This type of breathing resembles the respiration of certain reptiles; crocodiles breathe using their chests, bellies, “and truly weird muscles” in their bodies, while lizards breathe by expanding and contracting their entire bodies “and even the neck sometimes,” Radermacher said. Pterosaurs, which are flying reptile cousins of dinosaurs, have some bony chest features resembling those of H. tucki, hinting that pterosaurs may also have breathed with their chests and bellies, he added. (Pterosaurs, crocodylians and dinosaurs all belong to the archosaur group).
Prior to this discovery, some scientists suspected that ornithischians might have breathed differently from other dinosaurs; this well-preserved H. tucki specimen “was the missing piece of the puzzle” for confirming that hypothesis, Radermacher said.
Originally published on Live Science.
Astronomers Have Spotted a Weirdo ‘Jupiter’ With a Four-Day Year
Nearly 600 light-years from Earth, the exoplanet known as WASP-62b whips around its host star at a breakneck pace. The planet is a hot Jupiter, and despite its gassy constitution, its atmosphere is completely cloudless, according to a study published this month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
WASP-62b was first detected in 2012 in a sweep by the Wide Angle Search for Planets South survey (hence the acronym in its name). The survey detects exoplanets by spotting them as they pass in front of their host stars, causing a dip in the brightness of the star’s shine.
“We can’t actually see these planets directly. It’s like looking at a firefly next to a streetlamp,” Munazza Alam, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the recent paper, said in a phone call. “We’re gleaning all this information about the planet’s atmosphere from what we call combined light observations, meaning we’re looking at the light from both the star and the planet.”
Hot Jupiters are a class of exoplanets, named because they are gas giants (like our local Jupiter) that orbit close to their host stars and thus are quite hot. They stand among super-Earths, mini-Neptunes, and a slew of other classifications that seek to describe exoplanets based on their archetypes in our local solar system. As a result of a hot Jupiter’s proximity to its host star, the exoplanets have extremely short orbital periods. If WASP-62b’s orbit began on a Monday morning for Earth, its year would be over before you clocked out for the weekend.
Within the Milky Way, Alam said, hot Jupiters are rarer than smaller planets, and among exoplanets, it’s more common to find cloudy atmospheres. That makes this hot Jupiter a bit of an oddball.
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The team looked at spectroscopic data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope that focused on quantities of potassium and sodium in the atmosphere. None of the former turned up, but sodium was detected in “whopping” amounts, Alam said, suggesting that the atmosphere of WASP-62b was clear at the pressures detected by Hubble. The results make the planet the first hot Jupiter with a cloud-free atmosphere and only the second exoplanet with such a clear atmosphere after a hot Saturn (WASP-96b) detected in 2018. Both planets have that significant sodium content, which appears in a tent-like peak in the data, that make for a cloud-free gas giant.
Down the line, the team aims to probe different atmospheric layers of the hot Jupiter that are not detectable by Hubble. Future observations of the exoplanet will be done with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which will be able to see in near-infrared.
“Kepler showed us that there are thousands of planets out there, and TESS is doing that as well in different parts of the sky,” Alam said. “We found thousands of smaller planets, which is really changing the demographics of the planet population as we knew it.”