The British Museum will open a major exhibition presenting a history of Indigenous Australia, supported by BP. This exhibition will be the first in the UK devoted to the history and culture of Indigenous Australians: both Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders. Drawing on objects from the British Museum’s collection, accompanied by important loans from British and Australian collections, the show will present Indigenous Australia as a living culture, with a continuous history dating back over 60,000 years.

The objects in the exhibition will range from a shield believed to have been collected at Botany Bay in 1770 by Captain Cook or one of his men, a protest placard from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy established in 1972, contemporary paintings and specially commissioned artworks from leading Indigenous artists. Many of the objects in the exhibition have never been on public display before.

The objects displayed in this exhibition are immensely important. The British Museum’s collection contains some of the earliest objects collected from Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders through early naval voyages, colonists, and missionaries dating as far back as 1770. Many were collected at a time before museums were established in Australia and they represent tangible evidence of some of the earliest moments of contact between Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islanders and the British. Many of these encounters occurred in or near places that are now major Australian cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. As a result of collecting made in the early 1800s, many objects originate from coastal locations rather than the arid inland areas that are often associated with Indigenous Australia in the popular imagination.

The exhibition will not only present Indigenous ways of understanding the land and sea but also the significant challenges faced by Indigenous Australians from the colonial period until to the present day. In 1770 Captain Cook landed on the east coast of Australia, a continent larger than Europe. In this land there were hundreds of different Aboriginal groups, each inhabiting a particular area, and each having its own languages, laws and traditions. This land became a part of the British Empire and remained so until the various colonies joined together in 1901 to become the nation of Australia we know today. In this respect, the social history of 19th century Australia and the place of Indigenous people within this is very much a British story. This history continues into the twenty first century. With changing policies towards Indigenous Australians and their struggle for recognition of civil rights, this exhibition shows why issues about Indigenous Australians are still often so highly debated in Australia today.

The exhibition brings together loans of special works from institutions in the United Kingdom, including the British Library, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. A number of works from the collection of the National Museum of Australia will be shown, including the masterpiece ‘Yumari’ by Uta Uta Tjangala. Tjangala was one of the artists who initiated the translation of traditions of sand sculptures and body painting onto canvas in 1971 at Papunya, a government settlement 240km northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Tjangala was also an inspirational leader who developed a plan for the Pintupi community to return to their homelands after decades of living at Papunya. A design from ‘Yumari’ forms a watermark on current Australian passports.

This exhibition has been developed in consultation with many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals, Indigenous art and cultural centres across Australia, and has been organised with the National Museum of Australia. The broader project is a collaboration with the National Museum of Australia. It draws on a joint research project, funded by the Australian Research Council, undertaken by the British Museum, the National Museum of Australia and the Australian National University. Titled ‘Engaging Objects: Indigenous communities, museum collections and the representation of Indigenous histories’, the research project began in 2011 and involved staff from the National Museum of Australia and the British Museum visiting communities to discuss objects from the British Museum’s collections. The research undertaken revealed information about the circumstances of collecting and significance of the objects, many of which previously lacked good documentation. The project also brought contemporary Indigenous artists to London to view and respond to the Australian collections at the British Museum.

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum said, “The history of Australia and its people is an incredible, continuous story that spans over 60,000 years. This story is also an important part of more recent British history and so it is of great significance that audiences in London will see these unique and powerful objects exploring this narrative. Temporary exhibitions of this nature are only possible thanks to external support so I am hugely grateful to BP for their longstanding and on-going commitment to the British Museum. I would also like to express my gratitude to our logistics partner IAG Cargo and the Australian High Commission who are supporting the exhibition’s public programme.”

Source: The British Museum [April 23, 2015]

A relationship that has lasted for 100 million years is at serious risk of ending, due to the effects of environmental and climate change. A species of spiny crayfish native to Australia and the tiny flatworms that depend on them are both at risk of extinction, according to researchers from the UK and Australia.

Look closely into one of the cool, freshwater streams of eastern Australia and you might find a colourful mountain spiny crayfish, from the genus Euastacus. Look even closer and you could see small tentacled flatworms, called temnocephalans, each only a few millimetres long. Temnocephalans live as specialised symbionts on the surface of the crayfish, where they catch tiny food items, or inside the crayfish's gill chamber where they can remove parasites. This is an ancient partnership, but the temnocephalans are now at risk of coextinction with their endangered hosts. Coextinction is the loss of one species, when another that it depends upon goes extinct.

In a new study, researchers from the UK and Australia reconstructed the evolutionary and ecological history of the mountain spiny crayfish and their temnocephalan symbionts to assess their coextinction risk. This study was based on DNA sequences from crayfish and temnocephalans across eastern Australia, sampled by researchers at James Cook University, sequenced at the Natural History Museum, London and Queensland Museum, and analysed at the University of Sydney and the University of Cambridge. The results are published in the >Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"We've now got a picture of how these two species have evolved together through time," said Dr Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, the paper's lead author. "The extinction risk to the crayfish has been measured, but this is the first time we've quantified the risk to the temnocephalans as well -- and it looks like this ancient partnership could end with the extinction of both species."

Mountain spiny crayfish species diversified across eastern Australia over at least 80 million years, with 37 living species included in this study. Reconstructing the ages of the temnocephalans using a 'molecular clock' analysis showed that the tiny worms are as ancient as their crayfish hosts and have evolved alongside them since the Cretaceous Period.

>A symbiotic relationship that has existed since the time of the dinosaurs is at risk of ending,> as habitat loss and environmental change mean that a species of Australian crayfish >and the tiny worms that depend on them are both at serious risk of extinction >[Credit: David Blair/James Cook University]
Today, many species of mountain spiny crayfish have small geographic ranges. This is especially true in Queensland, where mountain spiny crayfish are restricted to cool, high-altitude streams in small pockets of rainforest. This habitat was reduced and fragmented by long-term climate warming and drying, as the continent of Australia drifted northwards over the last 165 million years. As a consequence, mountain spiny crayfish are severely threatened by ongoing climate change and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed 75% of these species as endangered or critically endangered.

"In Australia, freshwater crayfish are large, diverse and active 'managers', recycling all sorts of organic material and working the sediments," said Professor David Blair of James Cook University in Australia, the paper's senior author. "The temnocephalan worms associated only with these crayfish are also diverse, reflecting a long, shared history and offering a unique window on ancient symbioses. We now risk extinction of many of these partnerships, which will lead to degradation of their previous habitats and leave science the poorer."

The crayfish tend to have the smallest ranges in the north of Australia, where the climate is the hottest and all of the northern species are endangered or critically endangered. By studying the phylogenies (evolutionary trees) of the species, the researchers found that northern crayfish also tended to be the most evolutionarily distinctive. This also applies to the temnocephalans of genus Temnosewellia, which are symbionts of spiny mountain crayfish across their geographic range. "This means that the most evolutionarily distinctive lineages are also those most at risk of extinction," said Hoyal Cuthill.

The researchers then used computer simulations to predict the extent of coextinction. This showed that if all the mountain spiny crayfish that are currently endangered were to go extinct, 60% of their temnocephalan symbionts would also be lost to coextinction. The temnocephalan lineages that were predicted to be at the greatest risk of coextinction also tended to be the most evolutionarily distinctive. These lineages represent a long history of symbiosis and coevolution of up to 100 million years. However they are the most likely to suffer coextinction if these species and their habitats are not protected from ongoing environmental and climate change.

"The intimate relationship between hosts and their symbionts and parasites is often unique and long lived, not just during the lifespan of the individual organisms themselves but during the evolutionary history of the species involved in the association," said study co-author Dr Tim Littlewood of the Natural History Museum. "This study exemplifies how understanding and untangling such an intimate relationship across space and time can yield deep insights into past climates and environments, as well as highlighting current threats to biodiversity."

Source: University of Cambridge [May 24, 2016]

The Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum today announced the naming of Savannasaurus elliottorum, a new genus and species of dinosaur from western Queensland, Australia. The bones come from the Winton Formation, a geological deposit approximately 95 million years old.

Savannasaurus was discovered by David Elliott, co-founder of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, while mustering sheep in early 2005. As Elliott recalled yesterday, "I was nearly home with the mob -- only about a kilometre from the yards -- when I spotted a small pile of fossil bone fragments on the ground. I was particularly excited at the time as there were two pieces of a relatively small limb bone and I was hoping it might be a meat-eating theropod dinosaur." Mr Elliott returned to the site later that day to collect the bone fragments with his wife Judy, who 'clicked' two pieces together to reveal a complete toe bone from a plant-eating sauropod. The Elliotts marked the site and made arrangements to hold a dig later that year.

The site was excavated in September 2005 by a joint Australian Age of Dinosaurs (AAOD) Museum and Queensland Museum team and 17 pallets of bones encased in rock were recovered. After almost ten years of painstaking work by staff and volunteers at the AAOD Museum, the hard siltstone concretion around the bones was finally removed to reveal one of the most complete sauropod dinosaur skeletons ever found in Australia. More excitingly, it belonged to a completely new type of dinosaur.

The new discovery was nicknamed Wade in honour of prominent Australian palaeontologist Dr Mary Wade. "Mary was a very close friend of ours and she passed away while we were digging at the site," said Mr Elliott. "We couldn't think of a better way to honour her than to name the new dinosaur after her."

"Before today we have only been able to refer to this dinosaur by its nickname," said Dr Stephen Poropat, Research Associate at the AAOD Museum and lead author of the study. "Now that our study is published we can refer to Wade by its formal name, Savannasaurus elliottorum," Dr Poropat said. "The name references the savannah country of western Queensland in which it was found, and honours the Elliott family for their ongoing commitment to Australian palaeontology."

In the same publication, Dr Poropat and colleagues announced the first sauropod skull ever found in Australia. This skull, and the partial skeleton with which it was associated, has been assigned to Diamantinasaurus matildae -- a sauropod dinosaur named in 2009 on the basis of its nickname Matilda. "This new Diamantinasaurus specimen has helped to fill several gaps in our knowledge of this dinosaur's skeletal anatomy," said Poropat. "The braincase in particular has allowed us to refine Diamantinasaurus' position on the sauropod family tree."

Dr Poropat collaborated with British sauropod experts Dr Philip Mannion (Imperial College, London) and Professor Paul Upchurch (University College, London), among others, to work out the position of Savannasaurus (and refine that of Diamantinasaurus) on the sauropod family tree. "Both Savannasaurus and Diamantinasaurus belong to a group of sauropods called titanosaurs. This group of sauropods includes the largest land-living animals of all time," said Dr Mannion. "Savannasaurus and the new Diamantinasaurus specimen have helped us to demonstrate that titanosaurs were living worldwide by 100 million years ago."

Poropat and his colleagues suggest that the arrangement of the continents, and the global climate during the middle part of the Cretaceous Period, enabled titanosaurs to spread worldwide.

"Australia and South America were connected to Antarctica throughout much of the Cretaceous," said Professor Upchurch. "Ninety-five million years ago, at the time that Savannasaurus was alive, global average temperatures were warmer than they are today. However, it was quite cool at the poles at certain times, which seems to have restricted the movement of sauropods at polar latitudes. We suspect that the ancestor of Savannasaurus was from South America, but that it could not and did not enter Australia until approximately 105 million years ago. At this time global average temperatures increased allowing sauropods to traverse landmasses at polar latitudes."

Savannasaurus was a medium-sized titanosaur, approximately half the length of a basketball court, with a long neck and a relatively short tail. "With hips at least one metre wide and a huge barrel-like ribcage, Savannasaurus is the most rotund sauropod we have found so far -- even more so than the somewhat hippopotamus-like Diamantinasaurus," said Dr Poropat. "It lived alongside at least two other types of sauropod (Diamantinasaurus and Wintonotitan), as well as other dinosaurs including ornithopods, armoured ankylosaurs, and the carnivorous theropod Australovenator."

Mr Elliott is relieved that Wade can now join "Matilda" and the other new dinosaur species on display in the Museum's Holotype Room. "That this dinosaur specimen can now be displayed for our visitors is a testament to the efforts of numerous volunteers who have worked at the Museum on the fossils over the past decade," he said. Mr Elliott and Dr Poropat agree that the naming of Savannasaurus, the fourth new species published by the AAOD Museum, is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to the potential for new dinosaur species in western Queensland.

"The Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum has a massive collection of dinosaur fossils awaiting preparation and the number of specimens collected is easily outpacing the number being prepared by volunteers and staff in our Laboratory," Mr Elliott said. "The Museum already has the world's largest collection of bones from Australia's biggest dinosaurs and there is enough new material to keep us working for several decades."

The paper naming the new dinosaur was published in >Scientific Reports.

Source: Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History [October 20, 2016]

A long-running smuggling scandal involving temple looters in India and a high-profile New York art dealer has widened after an independent review found that the National Gallery of Australia may have been among the prestigious art galleries duped by false documentation.

The Canberra-based gallery, which is Australia's leading cultural institution, said in mid-February that it had identified 22 objects with suspect origins in its Asian art collection, including 14 works bought from former New York-based dealer Subhash Kapoor for $11 million.

Kapoor is in custody in Chennai, India, awaiting trial on art theft charges following his arrest in Germany in October 2011 and extradition to India in mid-2012.

The Canberra gallery said an independent review of its Asian art provenance project by a former High Court judge, Susan Crennan, found the 22 objects had "insufficient or questionable" documentation of their provenance.

One of the objects, a 900-year-old Chola-era bronze statue entitled "Shiva as Lord of the Dance (Nataraja)" has already been returned to India. Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott handed it over to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September 2014, along with a stone statue of Ardhanariswara (Shiva in half-female form), dating from around 1100. That statue was in the collection of another leading Australian gallery, the Sydney-based Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Both of these Hindu art treasures allegedly were stolen from temples in Tamil Nadu in southern India and shipped to Kapoor.

The Canberral gallery bought the Shiva Nataraja from Kapoor's Art of the Past gallery on Madison Avenue in New York in 2008 for $5.1 million, while the New South Wales gallery paid Kapoor 300,000 Australian dollars ($220,800) in 2004 for the Ardhanariswara. The provenance documents he provided now appear to be fraudulent, according to Crennan's report. "There is evidence that the object (the Shiva Nataraja) was stolen from an identified temple in Tamil Nadu ... and that it left India in late 2006 and was given a false ownership history," she wrote. Kapoor is alleged to have masterminded the theft of 28 bronzes from two temples in Tamil Nadu in 2006 and 2008, and their illegal export to the U.S., according to the Economic Offences Wing of the Tamil Nadu police. U.S. authorities have seized $100 million worth of antiquities from Kapoor's gallery and an associated business, Nimbus Import Export, and Kapoor may face U.S. charges after his Chennai trial. Delhi-born Kapoor, 66, moved to the U.S. in 1974 and is a U.S. citizen.

The two Australian galleries are not the only major institutions to have made purchases from Kapoor; galleries in Singapore, Germany, the U.S. and Canada have returned art objects to India over the past year.

A private New York collector surrendered a $1 million bronze to U.S. authorities in mid-2015 after it was identified as stolen. It has also become clear that many major U.S. institutions dealt with Kapoor, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington DC.

Crennan's independent report on the Canberra gallery's Asian Art Provenance project, published on Feb. 17, covers 36 objects acquired between 1968 and 2013, including the 14 bought from Kapoor between 2002 and 2011.

Crennan found that only 12 of the 36 had satisfactory provenance, while two others needed further research and the remaining 22 had insufficient or questionable provenance documentation. The gallery aims eventually to publish the provenance of all 5,000 objects in its Asian art collection.

Aside from the Kapoor purchases, the 36 objects whose documentation was reviewed by Crennan included a red sandstone sculpture, the "Seated Buddha," which the gallery bought from Nancy Wiener Galleries in New York for $1,080,000 in 2007. Last year, after discussions about how the Kushan-period sculpture -- created between 200 BC and 400 AD -- was exported from India, Wiener agreed to refund the purchase price to the Canberra gallery and undertook to return the sculpture to India in 2016.

"Exemplary collaboration"

India's High Commissioner in Australia, Navdeep Suri, praised the Canberra gallery's actions, saying its collaboration with the Archaeological Survey of India to determine the provenance of the "Seated Buddha" was "truly exemplary." He said the Australian gallery had set an example for other countries and institutions to follow in the restitution of stolen artworks to their countries of origin.

The Canberra gallery bought the "Seated Buddha" with assistance from gallery benefactor Roslyn Packer, widow of the late media tycoon Kerry Packer. Roslyn Packer also helped the gallery to buy an 800-year-old sculpture, the "Sacred Bull Nandi, Vehicle of Shiva," for A$655,000 from another New York art dealer, Carlton Rochell, in 2009. This sculpture's provenance is also under a cloud; Crennan's report described it as "problematic" and needing further research.

In a September 2014 statement to mark Abbott's return of the two statues to India, the Canberra gallery said it "would never knowingly purchase a stolen or looted item." It said the gallery had undertaken lengthy, comprehensive and independent research before it bought the Shiva Nataraja from Kapoor in 2008. "Despite these efforts, court proceedings may yet confirm that the gallery has been a victim of a most audacious fraud," said the then director of the gallery, Ron Radford. Radford retired the same month, after 10 years as director.

The search for the Hindu statues stolen from two temples in Tamil Nadu in 2006 and 2008 was aided by photographic evidence from the archives of the French Institute of Pondicherry. The institute, established in what was once the French colony of Pondicherry, about 200km south of Chennai, had a collection of photographs of items in various temples in the region. These were matched against catalogue pictures of items being offered for sale by Kapoor in New York. Kapoor's Art of the Past gallery manager Aaron Freedman pleaded guilty in the U.S. in December 2013 to one count of criminal conspiracy and five counts of possession of stolen property. He is now helping U.S. federal authorities with their inquiries. Another New York associate, Selina Mohamed, was charged in December 2013 with possession of stolen property. She subsequently pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of conspiracy and in March 2015 was given a one year conditional release.

The arrests were part of Operation Hidden Idol, run by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Homeland Security Investigations' cultural property unit, which focused on Kapoor's activities.

The Kapoor case evokes parallels with an art looting saga from the 1970s involving a temple north-east of Cambodia's famed Angkor complex. Between 2013 and 2015, six 10th century sandstone statues that were stolen from the Koh Ker temple during the Cambodian civil war were returned to Cambodia from the U.S. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two of these statues in 2013 after it said new information had come to light that was not available when the statues were donated to the museum between 1987 and 1992.

In 2014, three items portraying characters from the Mahabharata, an epic Sanskrit poem of ancient India, were returned by the U.S., including a statue of Duryodhana that was first auctioned in London in 1975. The statue was due to be auctioned by Sotheby's in New York in March 2011 before action by Unesco, the United Nations cultural organization, stopped the sale on Cambodia's behalf.

Another statue, of the character Bhima, was returned by California's Norton Simon museum and a third, representing the character Pandava, was returned by Christie's auction house in 2014. Last year, the Cleveland Museum of Art said it would return a statue of Hanuman, a Hindu god, that it acquired in 1982.

Author: Geoff Hiscock | Source: Nikkei Asian Review [March 04, 2016]

The hidden secrets of Egyptian mummies up to 3,000 years old have been virtually unwrapped and reconstructed for the first time using cutting-edge scanning technology in a joint British-Australian exhibition.

Three-dimensional images of six mummies aged between 900BC and 140-180AD from ancient Egypt, which have been held at the British Museum but never physically unwrapped, give an insight into what it was like to live along the Nile river thousands of years ago.

"We are revealing details of all their physical remains as well as the embalming material used by the embalmers like never before," the British Museum's physical anthropology curator Daniel Antoine told AFP at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Thursday. "What we are showing to the public is brand-new discoveries of their insides."

Two of the travelling mummies were previously exhibited at the British Museum in 2014, with the other four being revealed to the world for the first time in the Sydney show that opens on Saturday.

A dual-energy computed tomography (CT) scanner at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London—of which only a handful are in operation around the world—was used to obtain thousands of slices of images of the mummies, with volumetric software then harnessed to create 3D models, Antoine said.

It effectively allows visitors to virtually peel back the layers of history through interactive 3D visualisations of the CT scans.

"I've been able to image the arteries of the mummies, the ones that have been left, and I'm able to look at whether they are suffering from diseases which many people are suffering from today, (such as) cardiovascular diseases," Antoine added.

He believes the mummies can be rescanned in a decade's time using the latest technology to find out more about their state of health, what diseases they were suffering from and the nature of their deaths.

"We hope in the future to image the soft tissues at the cellular level to look at whether there's any changes or to find evidence, for example, of cardiovascular diseases but also things like cancer."

The scans found that one of mummies, Tamut, a priest's daughter from about 900BC, had plaque in her arteries. Three-dimensional printing was also used to recreate amulets found during scans of her mummified remains.

The earliest evidence of mummification in Egypt suggests that the practice of wrapping bodies to preserve them after death dates back as far as 4500BC.

The mummies are due to travel to Asia next year.

Source: AFP [December 08, 2016]

Medical scanners and the same software used to assess building strength after the Canterbury earthquakes, have revealed new information about the diet and dining preferences of New Zealand's extinct moa.

Researchers from Canterbury Museum, the University of Auckland, Finders University and the Universities of New England (Australia) and New South Wales have discovered that the nine species of moa were able to co-exist because differences in the structure and strength of each species' skull and bills were influenced by, or dictated by, diet.

The findings are published today in the journal >Proceedings of the Royal Society, in London.

Co-author, Dr Peter Johnston from the University of Auckland's Anatomy and Medical Imaging department, made MRI scans of the mummified moa remains to allow accurate models to be made for the research.

The moa, which roamed New Zealand until the 15th century, were herbivores and some of the largest birds to have ever existed. The largest species, the South Island Giant moa, weighed up to 240 kg whilst the smallest (the upland moa) was the size of a sheep.

Until now scientists had thought that the huge difference in size between the species determined their foraging behaviour as well as what, when and where they ate (ie their ecological niche).

Co-author Professor Paul Scofield from Canterbury Museum says that the team took the most complete skulls of each species of moa from the collections of Canterbury Museum and Te Papa Tongarewa and scanned those using medical CT (Computed Tomography) scanners.

"We then produced highly accurate 3D models of each. This wasn't a simple job as we didn't have a single skull that was perfect so we used sophisticated digital cloning techniques to digitally reconstruct accurate osteological models for each species," Professor Scofield said.

Using the medical MRI scans of the mummified remains, Dr Johnston digitally reconstructed the muscles of each species.

"Each moa species has a characteristic bill shape and the reasons for this have not previously been defined," says Dr Johnston. "Charles Darwin had an easier time investigating a similar situation in Galapagos finches, as the differences are more extreme and the diets are obvious in that group of birds."

Software used by civil engineers after the Canterbury Earthquakes to identify weak or unsound buildings, was used to test the strength and structure of each moa species' bill.

These were compared to each other and to two living relatives, the emu and cassowary. The models simulated the response of the skull to different biting and feeding behaviours including clipping twigs and pulling, twisting or bowing head motions to remove foliage.

The skull mechanics of moa were found to be surprisingly diverse. The little bush moa had a relatively short, sharp-edged bill and was superior among moa at cutting twigs and branches, supporting the proposition that they primarily fed on fibrous material from trees and shrubs.

At the opposite extreme, the coastal moa had a relatively weak skull compared to all other species which may have forced them to travel further than other moa in search of suitable food, such as soft fruit and leaves.

Dr Trevor Worthy (a New Zealander working at Flinders University in Australia) says "until now we have been limited in assessing anatomical function to examining the external aspect of bones. This new technology allows us to bring new life to old bones and to get one step closer to understanding the birds they came from."

"Little has been known about how New Zealand's ecosystem evolved, largely because we know so little about how moa lived and co-existed," says Associate Professor Stephen Wroe, leader of the Function, Evolution and Anatomy Research (FEAR) laboratory at the University of New England (Australia).

"This new research advances our understanding about the feeding behaviours of the moa species and their impact on New Zealand's unique and distinctive flora."

Source: University of Auckland [January 14, 2016]

Trekking across the high Canadian Arctic almost 20 years ago, Howie Scher had an unexpected encounter that helped fix the course of his career.

An undergraduate on a research expedition over summer break, Scher was part of a scientific group traveling deep into the Arctic Circle to collect basalt cores for paleomagnetic analysis. But as focused as the team was on finding rocks with magnetic minerals that can help establish where on Earth they had formed, it was stony deposits that had once been very much alive that really caught the team's collective eye.

"We stumbled across a fossil bone bed there," Scher says. "We were pulling out vertebrate fossils--crocodilians, turtles, bony fish--and when we got home we showed them to a paleontologist who told us it was a warm water assemblage. That was a great experience as a freshman in college, and it got me very interested in climate--just seeing how it had been so different in the past than what my experience was near the North Pole, trudging through the snow."

Now an associate professor at the University of South Carolina, Scher has made a career of climate science. He is part of an international team that recently published a report pinpointing the genesis of one of the cornerstones of the Earth's current climate system, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

A constant eastward flow of ocean water in the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is akin to the Gulf Stream, the current that moves water through the Atlantic Ocean from the tip of Florida, along the east coast of North America, and, by extension into the North Atlantic Current, to the shores of western and northern Europe. The Gulf Stream's transport of warm southern waters northward is why many European countries have more temperate climates than would be expected purely from their latitudes (relatively mild London, for example, lies more than 500 miles further north than Toronto).

But if the Atlantic Circumpolar Current is something like the Gulf Stream, there's a notable difference: it's even bigger.

"It's the largest ocean current today, and it's the only one that connects all the ocean basins," Scher says. "The Atlantic, Pacific and the Indian are huge oceans, but they're all bounded by continents; they have firm boundaries. The Southern Ocean, around Antarctica, is the only band of latitude where there's an ocean that goes continuously around the globe. Because of that, the winds that blow over the Southern Ocean are unimpeded by continental barriers.

"So the distance that the wind can blow over the ocean, which as oceanographers we call the 'fetch,' is infinite. And fetch is one of the things that determines how high the waves are, how much mixing goes on in the oceans, and ultimately what drives surface ocean currents. With infinite fetch, you can have a very strong ocean current, and because this particular band of ocean connects all of the world's oceans, it transports heat and salt and nutrients all around the world."

In a paper recently published in the journal Nature, Scher and his team make the case for just when this massive ocean current first started flowing. One straightforward obstacle in the distant past was the arrangement of continental masses. Antarctica and Australia were part of a single super-continent, Gondwana, and began to separate about 83 million years ago, so the Pacific and Indian Oceans couldn't have been in contact near the South Pole before then.

It was much later than the initial separation of Australia and Antarctica that deep ocean currents could flow between the two continents, though. Paleoceanographers have identified a transition, the opening of the Tasmanian gateway, a deep-water channel between Tasmania and Antarctica, as being a necessary part of any large-scale, sustained flow on the order of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

Using novel information about the separation of Antarctica and Australia, Scher and his team developed a tectonic model that showed that the Tasmanian gateway first developed at least 500 meters of depth some time between 35 and 32 million years ago.

From geochemical analyses of sediment core, however, they concluded that the channel opening to that depth wasn't enough to get the Antarctic Circumpolar Current flowing. The Pacific Ocean is in contact with much younger rock than the Indian Ocean, Scher says, which leads to a distinguishing concentration in each ocean of one isotope of neodymium that has a half-life longer than that of the solar system.

By measuring neodymium isotope compositions incorporated into fish teeth fossils in core samples, the team was able to establish that eastward current flow between the Pacific and Indian Oceans didn't begin until about 30 million years ago, some 2 to 5 million years after the Tasmanian gateway opened.

Taking both geophysical and geochemical data into account, they conclude that although the Tasmanian gateway was wide enough to accommodate a deep current, the gateway was located too far south to be in contact with the mid-latitude trade winds, which are the driving force for today's eastward-flowing Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

Instead, when the gateway first opened, water initially flowed westward, the opposite of that today, in keeping with the prevailing polar winds located at the more southern latitudes.

Only as both continents, and the gateway between the two, drifted northward on their tectonic plates over the next several million years did alignment with the trade winds come about. That reversed the current flow, to the east, and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current was born.

"It's the global mix-master of the oceans--that's a quote from Wally Broecker [of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory], and that's what it's been called by oceanographers for 50 years now," Scher says. "The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the world's largest current today, it influences heat exchange and carbon exchange, and we really didn't know for how long it's been operating, which I call a major gap in our command of Earth history. It was a cool outcome."

Author: Steven Powell  | Source: University of South Carolina [August 25, 2015]

Industrialized nations that view wildfire as the enemy have much to learn from people in some parts of the world who have learned to live compatibly with wildfire, says a team of fire research scientists.

The interdisciplinary team say there is much to be learned from these "fire-adaptive communities" and they are calling on policy makers to tap that knowledge, particularly in the wake of global warming.

Such a move is critical as climate change makes some landscapes where fire isn't the norm even more prone to fire, say the scientists in a new report published in a special issue of the >Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

"We tend to treat modern fire problems as unique, and new to our planet," said fire anthropologist Christopher Roos, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, lead author of the report. "As a result, we have missed the opportunity to recognize the successful properties of communities that have a high capacity to adapt to living in flammable landscapes—in some cases for centuries or millennia."

One such society is the ethnically Basque communities in the French Western Pyrenees, who practice fire management to maintain seasonally flammable grassland, shrub and woodland patches for forage and grazing animals. But the practice is slowly being lost as young people leave farming.

Additionally, Aboriginal people in the grasslands of Western Australia use fire as part of their traditional hunting practices. Children begin burning at a very young age, and the everyday practice is passed down. These fires improve hunting successes but also reduce the impact of drought on the size and ecological severity of lightning fires.

Social institutions support individual benefits, preserve common good

Fire-adaptive communities have social institutions in place that support individual benefits from fire-maintained landscapes while preserving the common good, said Roos, whose fire research includes long-term archaeological and ecological partnerships with the Pueblo of Jemez in New Mexico.

"These institutions have been shaped by long-histories with wildfire, appropriate fire-use, and the development of social mechanisms to adjudicate conflicts of interest," said Roos, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology. "There is a wealth of tried and tested information that should be considered in designing local fire management."

The authors note that globally, a large number of people use fire as a tool to sustain livelihoods in ways that have been handed down across many generations. These include indigenous Australians and North Americans, South Asian forest dwellers, European farmers, and also hunters, farmers and herders in tropical savannahs.

Global Warming will likely bring new fire problems, more flammable landscapes

Global Warming will likely bring new fire problems, such as making some landscapes more flammable, Roos said. More effort will be required to balance conflicting fire management practices between adjacent cultures. Currently most fire-related research tends to be undertaken by physical or biological scientists from Europe, the United States and Australia. Often the research treats fire challenges as exclusively contemporary phenomena for which history is either absent or irrelevant.

"We need national policy that recognizes these dynamic challenges and that will support local solutions and traditional fire knowledge, while providing ways to disseminate scientific information about fire," Roos said.

The authors point out that one of the greatest policy challenges of fire on a warming planet are the international consequences of smoke plumes and potential positive feedbacks on climate through carbon emissions. Most infamously, wildfire smoke plumes have had extraordinary health impacts during Southeast Asian "haze" events, which result in increased hospitalization and mortality in the region.

Not all fire is a disaster; we must learn to live with and manage fire

Carbon emissions from wildfires can be as much as 40 percent of fossil fuel emissions in any given year over the last decade. Although only deforestation fires and land conversion are a net carbon source to the atmosphere, the contribution of wildfires to global carbon emissions is non-trivial and should be a formal component of international climate dialogs.

"It is important to emphasize that not all fire is a disaster and we must learn how to both live with as well as manage fire," said co-author Andrew Scott, earth sciences professor at Royal Holloway University of London.

The report, "Living on a flammable planet: interdisciplinary, cross-scalar and varied cultural lessons, prospects and challenges," was published May 23, 2016 by The Royal Society, the U.K.'s independent scientific academy.

Authors call for holistic study of fire on Earth

The authors are from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Spain. The synthesis emerged from four days of international meetings sponsored by the Royal Society - the first of its kind for fire sciences.

The authors advocate for greater collaboration among researchers studying all aspects of fire.

Pyrogeography—the holistic study of fire on Earth, "may be one way to provide unity to the varied fire research programs across the globe," the authors write.

"Fire researchers across disciplines from engineering, the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities need to develop a common language to create a holistic wildfire science," said Roos. "The magnitude of the wildfire challenges we face on a warming planet will demand greater collaboration and integration across disciplines, but our job won't be done unless we are also able to translate our research for policymakers, land managers, and the general public."

Source: Southern Methodist University [June 01, 2016]

Using the oldest fossil micrometeorites -- space dust -- ever found, Monash University-led research has made a surprising discovery about the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago.

The findings of a new study >published in the journal Nature -- led by Dr Andrew Tomkins and a team from the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment at Monash, along with scientists from the Australian Synchrotron and Imperial College, London -- challenge the accepted view that Earth's ancient atmosphere was oxygen-poor. The findings indicate instead that the ancient Earth's upper atmosphere contained about the same amount of oxygen as today, and that a methane haze layer separated this oxygen-rich upper layer from the oxygen-starved lower atmosphere.

Dr Tomkins explained how the team extracted micrometeorites from samples of ancient limestone collected in the Pilbara region in Western Australia and examined them at the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy (MCEM) and the Australian Synchrotron.

"Using cutting-edge microscopes we found that most of the micrometeorites had once been particles of metallic iron -- common in meteorites -- that had been turned into iron oxide minerals in the upper atmosphere, indicating higher concentrations of oxygen than expected," Dr Tomkins said.

"This was an exciting result because it is the first time anyone has found a way to sample the chemistry of the ancient Earth's upper atmosphere," Dr Tomkins said.

Imperial College researcher Dr Matthew Genge -- an expert in modern cosmic dust -- performed calculations that showed oxygen concentrations in the upper atmosphere would need to be close to modern day levels to explain the observations.

"This was a surprise because it has been firmly established that the Earth's lower atmosphere was very poor in oxygen 2.7 billion years ago; how the upper atmosphere could contain so much oxygen before the appearance of photosynthetic organisms was a real puzzle," Dr Genge said.

Dr Tomkins explained that the new results suggest the Earth at this time may have had a layered atmosphere with little vertical mixing, and higher levels of oxygen in the upper atmosphere produced by the breakdown of CO 2 by ultraviolet light.

"A possible explanation for this layered atmosphere might have involved a methane haze layer at middle levels of the atmosphere. The methane in such a layer would absorb UV light, releasing heat and creating a warm zone in the atmosphere that would inhibit vertical mixing," Dr Tomkins said.

"It is incredible to think that by studying fossilised particles of space dust the width of a human hair, we can gain new insights into the chemical makeup of Earth's upper atmosphere, billions of years ago." Dr Tomkins said.

Dr Tomkins outlined next steps in the research.

"The next stage of our research will be to extract micrometeorites from a series of rocks covering over a billion years of Earth's history in order to learn more about changes in atmospheric chemistry and structure across geological time. We will focus particularly on the great oxidation event, which happened 2.4 billion years ago when there was a sudden jump in oxygen concentration in the lower atmosphere."

Source: Monash University [May 12, 2016]

Various specimens of Africa’s earliest coelacanth have been found in a 360 million year-old fossil estuary near Grahamstown, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

More than 30 complete specimens of the new fossil species, Serenichthys kowiensis, were collected from the famous Late Devonian aged Waterloo Farm locality, by palaeontologist Dr Robert Gess and described by him in collaboration with Professor Michael Coates of the University of Chicago.

Gess did the research whilst he was completing his PhD at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. An article describing the new species will be published in the in the prestigious Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London on Monday, 21 August.

“Remarkably, all of the delicate whole fish impressions represent juveniles. This suggests that Serenichthys was using a shallow, waterweed-filled embayment of the estuary as a nursery, as many fish do today,” says Gess.

The fossils come from black shales originally disturbed by road works at Waterloo Farm. These shales are the petrified compacted remains of mud, which was deposited in the quiet reaches of an estuary not unlike some of those along the Eastern Cape coast today.

“This earliest known record of a coelacanth nursery foreshadows a much younger counterpart, known from the 300 million year old Mazon Creek beds of Illinois in the United States,” says Gess.

“This glimpse into the early life history of ancient coelacanths raises further questions about the life history of the modern coelacanth, Latimeria, which is known to bear live young, but whether they, too, are clustered in nurseries remains unknown,” explains Coates.

360 million years ago, Africa was part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, made up of Africa, India, Australia, Antarctica and South America. At that time, the rocks of Waterloo Farm were forming along the shores of the semi-enclosed Agulhas Sea, not far from the South Pole.

Gess originally identified coelacanth remains from the locality whilst carrying out excavations at Waterloo Farm in the mid-1990s under the supervision of Dr Norton Hiller, of the Rhodes University Geology Department. These fossils were not, however, well enough preserved to be reconstructed and described. His painstaking excavation of tons of shale salvaged during subsequent roadworks has now shed light on dozens more specimens, a few of which are preserved in exquisite detail.

These were prepared under a microscope and have allowed the species to be reconstructed in minute detail. They prove to be a new genus and species.

Coelacanths are believed to have arisen during the Devonian Period (about 419.2 ± 3.2 million years ago), however only five species of reconstructable Devonian coelacanths have previously been described, in addition to a number of very fragmentary remains. None of these came from Africa, but rather from North America, Europe, China and Australia. The new species gives important additional information on the early evolution of coelacanths.

“According to our evolutionary analysis (conducted by Gess and Coates), it is the Devonian species that most closely resembles the line leading to modern coelacanths,” says Gess.

The new species was discovered a mere 100km from the mouth of the Chalumna River, off which the type specimen of Latimeria chalumnae (the first discovered modern coelacanth) was caught in 1938.

Furthermore, the Geology Department at Rhodes, where Gess was based when he found his first fossil coelacanth, is on the site of the former Chemistry Department where Latimeria was first described. In keeping with the naming of its living relative (after an Eastern Cape river), the species name of the new fossil form, kowiensis, is after the Kowie River which rises among the hills where it was found, and the genus name, Serenichthys, honours Serena Gess, who provided land for the storage of more than 70 tons of black shale rescued from roadworks for ongoing research – in which all the new material was found.

All specimens have been deposited in the palaeontological collection of the Albany Natural History Museum, in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.

Source: University of the Witwatersrand [September 21, 2015]

Researchers from CSIRO and Imperial College London have assessed how widespread the threat of plastic is for the world's seabirds, including albatrosses, shearwaters and penguins, and found the majority of seabird species have plastic in their gut.

The study, led by Dr Chris Wilcox with co-authors Dr Denise Hardesty and Dr Erik van Sebille and published today in the journal PNAS, found that nearly 60 per cent of all seabird species have plastic in their gut.

Based on analysis of published studies since the early 1960s, the researchers found that plastic is increasingly common in seabird's stomachs.

In 1960, plastic was found in the stomach of less than 5 per cent of individual seabirds, rising to 80 per cent by 2010.

The researchers predict that plastic ingestion will affect 99 per cent of the world's seabird species by 2050, based on current trends.

The scientists estimate that 90 per cent of all seabirds alive today have eaten plastic of some kind.

This includes bags, bottle caps, and plastic fibres from synthetic clothes, which have washed out into the ocean from urban rivers, sewers and waste deposits.

Birds mistake the brightly coloured items for food, or swallow them by accident, and this causes gut impaction, weight loss and sometimes even death.

"For the first time, we have a global prediction of how wide-reaching plastic impacts may be on marine species -- and the results are striking," senior research scientist at CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Dr Wilcox said.

"We predict, using historical observations, that 90 per cent of individual seabirds have eaten plastic. This is a huge amount and really points to the ubiquity of plastic pollution."

Dr Denise Hardesty from CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere said seabirds were excellent indicators of ecosystem health.

"Finding such widespread estimates of plastic in seabirds is borne out by some of the fieldwork we've carried out where I've found nearly 200 pieces of plastic in a single seabird," Dr Hardesty said.

The researchers found plastics will have the greatest impact on wildlife where they gather in the Southern Ocean, in a band around the southern edges of Australia, South Africa and South America.

Dr van Sebille, from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said the plastics had the most devastating impact in the areas where there was the greatest diversity of species.

"We are very concerned about species such as penguins and giant albatrosses, which live in these areas," Erik van Sebille said.

"While the infamous garbage patches in the middle of the oceans have strikingly high densities of plastic, very few animals live here."

Dr Hardesty said there was still the opportunity to change the impact plastic had on seabirds.

"Improving waste management can reduce the threat plastic is posing to marine wildlife," she said.

"Even simple measures can make a difference. Efforts to reduce plastics losses into the environment in Europe resulted in measureable changes in plastic in seabird stomachs with less than a decade, which suggests that improvements in basic waste management can reduce plastic in the environment in a really short time."

Chief Scientist at the US-based Ocean Conservancy Dr George H. Leonard said the study was highly important and demonstrated how pervasive plastics were in oceans.

"Hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world come face-to-face with this problem during annual Coastal Cleanup events," Dr Leonard said.

"Scientists, the private sector and global citizens working together against the growing onslaught of plastic pollution can reduce plastic inputs to help protect marine biodiversity."

Source: CSIRO Australia [September 01, 2015]

The wreck of a former slave ship lying just off the coast of Perth is being scoured by maritime archaeologists using new technology to revisit earlier excavations and help learn more about Australia's underwater past.

The site of the James Matthews is being photographed to create a detailed three-dimensional model of the shipwreck.

It is hoped the work will eventually help determine new ways of protecting it and other shipwrecks as well as ways to test new techniques and methods.

"The colours and details are really accurate," the WA Maritime Museum's Madeline McAllister said.

"Whereas in the past we would have taken some photos to create a 2D site plan and then also done the measurements ourselves with tapes, so [it was] not quite as accurate as what we're getting with these 3D models."

The James Matthews was first discovered in 1973 lying largely buried in sand in shallow waters two-to-three-metres-deep, less than 200 metres off Woodman Point, just south of Fremantle.

It had sunk there after slipping its anchor during a storm and hitting rocks in July 1841.

At the time, the snow brig was a merchant vessel, and had travelled from London laden with farm equipment and construction material for the newly established Swan River colony.

But archaeologists, who first excavated the ship in the 1970s led by former director of the WA Maritime Museum Graeme Henderson, soon discovered its link to the horrific trans-Atlantic slave trade.

It had previously been called the Don Francisco and was owned by a notorious and powerful Brazilian-born slave trader called Francisco Felix de Souza, who operated out of West Africa and was involved in power plays with leaders of the Kingdom of Dahomey, in present day Benin.

The Don Francisco was seized in 1837 off the island of Domenica as it headed towards Cuba by the British, who had passed an act abolishing the slave trade three decades earlier.

The British sailors found 433 slaves crammed inside the 24.5-metre hull.

The ship should have been destroyed under the law of the time, but was instead repaired and renamed the James Matthews, a London-registered merchant vessel — paving the way for its eventual demise.

When it was wrecked off Woodman Point, the ship fell on its side and buried much of its cargo and rigging in the sand.

That helped preserve the artefacts.

"In the case of the James Matthews, it went into sand and the sand buried it with the shifting currents and so forth, and so basically most of the ship was still there. Wonderful," Dr Henderson said.

"The sand gives them an anaerobic environment, which means no oxygen, which means not much in the way of deterioration had taken place.

A leather shoe, a parasol with much of the lace preserved, an ivory chess set, and pulleys with rope still largely intact, were some of the surprisingly well-conserved artefacts discovered.

Intriguingly, the part-owner of the ship at the time, Henry de Burgh, later wrote 200 gold sovereigns were also lost to the sea, supposedly never recovered.

Former WA Maritime Museum director Graeme Henderson, who has officially retired but still spends his days hunting shipwrecks, said the 3D modelling would help gain a better understanding of the site over time.

"The idea is we will come back very few years and take another set of photographs and be able to overlay the models," he said.

"And you'll see growth in seaweed and sponges on the site and you'll also be able to see the deterioration if that's happened."

WA Museum maritime archaeology curator Ross Anderson said a lot of underwater cultural heritage sites, including shipwrecks like the James Matthews and prehistoric sites, were "out of sight and out of mind".

"If people don't see them, they don't see the importance, so these kinds of visualisations and interpretations convey to people what's under there, what's under the water, what's under the sand, [and that it's] actually really important and worth preserving," Dr Anderson said.

Author: Nicolas Perpitch | Source: ABC News Website [December 11, 2016]

Many people in the UK feel a strong sense of regional identity, and it now appears that there may be a scientific basis to this feeling, according to a landmark new study into the genetic makeup of the British Isles.

An international team, led by researchers from the University of Oxford, UCL (University College London) and the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Australia, used DNA samples collected from more than 2,000 people to create the first fine-scale genetic map of any country in the world.

Their findings, published in Nature, show that prior to the mass migrations of the 20th century there was a striking pattern of rich but subtle genetic variation across the UK, with distinct groups of genetically similar individuals clustered together geographically.

By comparing this information with DNA samples from over 6,000 Europeans, the team was also able to identify clear traces of the population movements into the UK over the past 10,000 years. Their work confirmed, and in many cases shed further light on, known historical migration patterns.

Key findings

• There was not a single "Celtic" genetic group. In fact the Celtic parts of the UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Cornwall) are among the most different from each other genetically. For example, the Cornish are much more similar genetically to other English groups than they are to the Welsh or the Scots.

• There are separate genetic groups in Cornwall and Devon, with a division almost exactly along the modern county boundary.

• The majority of eastern, central and southern England is made up of a single, relatively homogeneous, genetic group with a significant DNA contribution from Anglo-Saxon migrations (10-40% of total ancestry). This settles a historical controversy in showing that the Anglo-Saxons intermarried with, rather than replaced, the existing populations.

• The population in Orkney emerged as the most genetically distinct, with 25% of DNA coming from Norwegian ancestors. This shows clearly that the Norse Viking invasion (9th century) did not simply replace the indigenous Orkney population.

• The Welsh appear more similar to the earliest settlers of Britain after the last ice age than do other people in the UK.

• There is no obvious genetic signature of the Danish Vikings, who controlled large parts of England ("The Danelaw") from the 9th century.

• There is genetic evidence of the effect of the Landsker line -- the boundary between English-speaking people in south-west Pembrokeshire (sometimes known as "Little England beyond Wales") and the Welsh speakers in the rest of Wales, which persisted for almost a millennium.

• The analyses suggest there was a substantial migration across the channel after the original post-ice-age settlers, but before Roman times. DNA from these migrants spread across England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, but had little impact in Wales.

• Many of the genetic clusters show similar locations to the tribal groupings and kingdoms around end of the 6th century, after the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons, suggesting these tribes and kingdoms may have maintained a regional identity for many centuries.

To uncover the extremely subtle genetic differences among these individuals the researchers used cutting-edge statistical techniques, developed by four of the team members. They applied these methods, called fineSTRUCTURE and GLOBETROTTER, to analyse DNA differences at over 500,000 positions within the genome. They then separated the samples into genetically similar individuals, without knowing where in the UK the samples came from. By plotting each person onto a map of the British Isles, using the centre point of their grandparents' birth places, they were able to see how this distribution correlated with their genetic groupings.

The researchers were then able to "zoom in" to examine the genetic patterns in the UK at levels of increasing resolution. At the broadest scale, the population in Orkney (islands to the north of Scotland) emerged as the most genetically distinct. At the next level, Wales forms a distinct genetic group, followed by a further division between north and south Wales. Then the north of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland collectively separate from southern England, before Cornwall forms a separate cluster. Scotland and Northern Ireland then separate from northern England. The study eventually focused at the level where the UK was divided into 17 genetically distinct clusters of people.

Dr Michael Dunn, Head of Genetics & Molecular Sciences at the Wellcome Trust, said: "These researchers have been able to use modern genetic techniques to provide answers to the centuries' old question -- where we come from. Beyond the fascinating insights into our history, this information could prove very useful from a health perspective, as building a picture of population genetics at this scale may in future help us to design better genetic studies to investigate disease."

Source: Wellcome Trust [March 18, 2015]

Gaps in our information about biodiversity means we are at risk of focussing our conservation efforts in the wrong places.

New research from Newcastle University, UK, University College London (UCL) and the University of Queensland, Australia, highlights the uncertainty around our global biodiversity data because of the way we record species sightings.

The study explains how a lack of information about a species in a particular location doesn't necessarily mean it's not there and that recording when we don't see something is as important as recording when we do.

Changing the way we record data

Publishing their findings in the journal Biology Letters, the team say we need to change the way we record sightings -- or a lack of them -- so we can better prioritise our conservation efforts in light of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Dr Phil McGowan, one of the study's authors and a Senior Lecturer in Biodiversity and Conservation at Newcastle University, said: "Where there is no recent biodiversity data from an area then we might assume a species is no longer found there, but there could be a number of other possible reasons for this lack of data. It could be that its habitat is inaccessible -- either geographically or due to human activity such as ongoing conflict -- or perhaps it's simply a case that no-one has been looking for it. Unless we know where people have looked for a particular species and not found it then we can't be confident that it's not there."

Galliformes and man

To test the research, the team used the rigorously compiled database of European and Asian Galliformes -- a group of birds which includes the pheasant, grouse and quail.

"Our long-standing love of the Galliformes goes back hundreds of years which means we have records that are likely to be much better than for other groups of animals or plants," explains Dr McGowan.

"Not only have these birds been hunted for food, but their spectacular colours made them valuable as trophies and to stock the private aviaries of the wealthy. In the late 1800s and the turn of the last century, the Galliformes were prized specimens in museum and private collections and today they are still a favourite with bird watchers."

Data absent from 40% of the study area

Analysing 153,150 records dating from 1727 to 2008 and covering an area from the UK to Siberia and down to Indonesia, the team found that after 1980, there was no available data at 40% of the locations where Galliformes had previously been present.

The study suggests two possible scenarios.

Dr Elizabeth Boakes, the study's lead author and a teaching fellow at University College London, said: "We have no evidence of populations existing past 1980 in 40% of our locations. However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. One scenario is that populations have been lost from these areas, probably due to hunting or habitat loss. The other scenario is that the species are still locally present but that nobody has been to look for them. Our study shows that which scenario you choose to believe makes a huge difference to measures used in conservation priority-setting such as species richness and geographic range. It's important that we make the right call and that means a big shake up in the way we currently monitor biodiversity. We need to record what we don't see as well as what we do see and we need to be recording across much wider areas."

Meeting international targets

Involving 192 countries and the EU, the Convention on Biological Diversity is dedicated to promoting sustainable development.

The goals include the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity which says we must at least halve and, where feasible, bring close to zero the rate of loss of natural habitats, including forests, and halt extinction of those species we know to be under threat.

"In order to start meeting these goals we must first understand exactly which organisms are close to extinction and need prioritising in order to meet this target," explains Dr McGowan, who is Co-chair of IUCN Species Survival Commission's Policy Subcommittee and a member of its Strategic Conservation Planning Subcommittee.

"The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is a good starting point but as our research shows, it's only as accurate as the data that's been collected. Going forward, we need to make sure we are recording when we've not seen something just as much as when we do and that's where keen and informed members of the public -- such as bird watching groups -- could really help us."

Source: Newcastle University [March 08, 2016]

I Love Surfing!

Few people outside of the surfing world realise a debate has been raging for 42-years over which country is responsible for the shortboard revolution. A new surfing documentary from two-time Academy Award nominee David Bradbury seeks to settle the issue once and for all.

Going Vertical opens with some great vintage footage of surfers taking on huge waves on traditional longboards, complete with entertaining wipeouts. The film follows on with a who's who of the surfing universe explaining the significance of the shift from longboard to shortboard surfing. Now known as the shortboard revolution, it is the only time in surfing history that has a name. At the heart of the story are lifelong rivals and surfing royalty American Dick Brewer and Australian Bob McTavish, both now in their sixties (pictured above, promoting the film at the Currumbin surf museum). Filmed in Australia, Hawaii and California, and featuring extraordinary archive footage, the men each have a chance to explain why they were responsible for the shortboard revolution and how the other is, well, a phoney.

Sure, it may sound like two old-timers bickering but their stories are so extraordinary, so hilarious and so entertaining, you soon forget what these two were arguing over in the first place. Interviews with Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning, Layne Beachley, Laird Hamilton and Stephanie Gilmore add some colour as they weigh in on the debate and talk about the effect shortboards have had on the sport. Bradbury knows what he is doing and it shows in this sharp, memorable piece of filmmaking that chops from nostalgic recollections to cutting edge surfing footage like one of the film's stars on a wave.

The only criticism is Australian actor Simon Baker's narration, which sounds flat and lazy compared to the excited and vibrant voices of the surfers. Yet overall Going Vertical is slicker than your average surfing documentary, largely because of the juicy story behind it and the colourful array of characters on screen.This is a must-see for all surfing enthusiasts and lovers of quality documentaries. It is screening in limited release throughout Australian from Thursday, March 25 to Sunday, March 28.

The National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) will join in the most powerful, comprehensive, and intensive scientific search ever for signs of intelligent life in the Universe. The international endeavor, known as the Breakthrough Listen, will scan the nearest million stars in our own Galaxy and stars in 100 other galaxies for the telltale radio signature of an advanced civilization.

In a contract signed with the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, significant funding -- approximately $2 million per year for 10 years -- will go to the GBT to participate in this exhilarating journey of discovery.

"Beginning early next year, approximately 20 percent of the annual observing time on the GBT will be dedicated to searching a staggering number of stars and galaxies for signs of intelligent life via radio signals," said Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which operates the GBT and other world-class radio astronomy facilities. "We are delighted to play such a vital role in hopefully answering one of the most compelling questions in all of science and philosophy: are we alone in the Universe?"

In addition to the GBT, the Parkes Telescope in Australia will also be involved in this endeavor.

Breakthrough Listen will be the biggest scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. It will be 50 times more sensitive and cover 10 times more of the sky than previous searches. In tandem with this radio search, the Automated Planet Finder Telescope at Lick Observatory in California will undertake the world's deepest and broadest search for optical laser transmissions, a tantalizing complementary approach to searching the cosmos for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The $100 million Breakthrough Listen initiative was announced today at the Royal Society in London.

The program will include a survey of the one million closest stars to Earth. It will scan the center of our Galaxy and the entire galactic plane. Beyond the Milky Way, it will search for messages from the 100 closest galaxies. If a civilization based around one of the 1,000 nearest stars transmits to us with the power of common aircraft radar, the GBT and the Parkes Telescope could detect it.

The program will generate vast amounts of data; all of which will be open to the public. This will likely constitute the largest amount of scientific data ever made publicly available. The Breakthrough Listen team will use and develop the most powerful software for sifting and searching this flood of data. All software will be open source. Both the software and the hardware used in the Breakthrough Listen project will be compatible with other telescopes around the world, so that they could join the search for intelligent life. As well as using the Breakthrough Listen software, scientists and members of the public will be able to add to it, developing their own applications to analyze the data.

Breakthrough Listen will also be joining and supporting SETI@home, the University of California, Berkeley ground-breaking distributed computing platform, with 9 million volunteers around the world donating their spare computing power to search astronomical data for signs of life. Collectively, they constitute one of the largest supercomputers in the world.

The 100-meter Green Bank Telescope is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope. Its location in the National Radio Quiet Zone and the West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zone protects the incredibly sensitive telescope from unwanted radio interference, enabling it to perform unique observations.

Source: National Radio Astronomy Observatory [July 20, 2015]

Researchers have identified the first known example of fossilised brain tissue in a dinosaur from Sussex. The tissues resemble those seen in modern crocodiles and birds.

An unassuming brown pebble, found more than a decade ago by a fossil hunter in Sussex, has been confirmed as the first example of fossilised brain tissue from a dinosaur.

The fossil, most likely from a species closely related to Iguanodon, displays distinct similarities to the brains of modern-day crocodiles and birds. Meninges -- the tough tissues surrounding the actual brain -- as well as tiny capillaries and portions of adjacent cortical tissues have been preserved as mineralised 'ghosts'.

The results are reported in a >Special Publication of the Geological Society of London, published in tribute to Professor Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford, who died in 2014. Brasier and Dr David Norman from the University of Cambridge co-ordinated the research into this particular fossil during the years prior to Brasier's untimely death in a road traffic accident.

The fossilised brain, found by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks near Bexhill in Sussex in 2004, is most likely from a species similar to Iguanodon: a large herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous Period, about 133 million years ago.

Finding fossilised soft tissue, especially brain tissue, is very rare, which makes understanding the evolutionary history of such tissue difficult. "The chances of preserving brain tissue are incredibly small, so the discovery of this specimen is astonishing," said co-author Dr Alex Liu of Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, who was one of Brasier's PhD students in Oxford at the time that studies of the fossil began.

According to the researchers, the reason this particular piece of brain tissue has been so well-preserved is that the dinosaur's brain was essentially 'pickled' in a highly acidic and low-oxygen body of water -- similar to a bog or swamp -- shortly after its death. This allowed the soft tissues to become mineralised before they decayed away completely, so that they could be preserved.

"What we think happened is that this particular dinosaur died in or near a body of water, and its head ended up partially buried in the sediment at the bottom," said Norman. "Since the water had little oxygen and was very acidic, the soft tissues of the brain were likely preserved and cast before the rest of its body was buried in the sediment."

Working with colleagues from the University of Western Australia, the researchers used scanning electron microscope (SEM) techniques in order to identify the tough membranes, or meninges, that surrounded the brain itself, as well as strands of collagen and blood vessels. Structures that could represent tissues from the brain cortex (its outer layer of neural tissue), interwoven with delicate capillaries, also appear to be present. The structure of the fossilised brain, and in particular that of the meninges, shows similarities with the brains of modern-day descendants of dinosaurs, namely birds and crocodiles.

In typical reptiles, the brain has the shape of a sausage, surrounded by a dense region of blood vessels and thin-walled vascular chambers (sinuses) that serve as a blood drainage system. The brain itself only takes up about half of the space within the cranial cavity.

In contrast, the tissue in the fossilised brain appears to have been pressed directly against the skull, raising the possibility that some dinosaurs had large brains which filled much more of the cranial cavity. However, the researchers caution against drawing any conclusions about the intelligence of dinosaurs from this particular fossil, and say that it is most likely that during death and burial the head of this dinosaur became overturned, so that as the brain decayed, gravity caused it to collapse and become pressed against the bony roof of the cavity.

"As we can't see the lobes of the brain itself, we can't say for sure how big this dinosaur's brain was," said Norman. "Of course, it's entirely possible that dinosaurs had bigger brains than we give them credit for, but we can't tell from this specimen alone. What's truly remarkable is that conditions were just right in order to allow preservation of the brain tissue -- hopefully this is the first of many such discoveries."

"I have always believed I had something special. I noticed there was something odd about the preservation, and soft tissue preservation did go through my mind. Martin realised its potential significance right at the beginning, but it wasn't until years later that its true significance came to be realised," said paper co-author Jamie Hiscocks, the man who discovered the specimen. "In his initial email to me, Martin asked if I'd ever heard of dinosaur brain cells being preserved in the fossil record. I knew exactly what he was getting at. I was amazed to hear this coming from a world renowned expert like him."

Source: University of Cambridge [October 27, 2016]

An international team of astronomers led by Dr. Andrea Kunder of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in Germany has discovered that the central 2000 light years within the Milky Way Galaxy hosts an ancient population of stars. These stars are more than 10 billion years old and their orbits in space preserve the early history of the formation of the Milky Way.

For the first time the team kinematically disentangled this ancient component from the stellar population that currently dominates the mass of the central Galaxy. The astronomers used the AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo Australian Telescope near Siding Spring, Australia, and focussed on a well-known and ancient class of stars, called RR Lyrae variables. These stars pulsate in brightness roughly once a day, which make them more challenging to study than their static counterparts, but they have the advantage of being "standard candles." RR Lyrae stars allow exact distance estimations and are found only in stellar populations more than 10 billion years old, for example, in ancient halo globular clusters. The velocities of hundreds of stars were simultaneously recorded toward the constellation of Sagittarius over an area of the sky larger than the full moon. The team therefore was able to use the age stamp on the stars to explore the conditions in the central part of our Milky Way when it was formed.

Just as London and Paris are built on more ancient Roman or even older remains, our Milky Way galaxy also has multiple generations of stars that span the time from its formation to the present. Since heavy elements, referred to by astronomers as "metals," are brewed in stars, subsequent stellar generations become more and more metal-rich. Therefore, the most ancient components of our Milky Way are expected to be metal-poor stars. Most of our Galaxy's central regions are dominated by metal-rich stars, meaning that they have approximately the same metal content as our Sun, and are arrayed in a football-shaped structure called the "bar." These stars in the bar were found to orbit in roughly the same direction around the Galactic Centre. Hydrogen gas in the Milky Way also follows this rotation. Hence it was widely believed that all stars in the centre would rotate in this way.

But to the astronomers' astonishment, the RR Lyrae stars do not follow football-shaped orbits, but have large random motions more consistent with their having formed at a great distance from the centre of the Milky Way. "We expected to find that these stars rotate just like the rest of the bar" states lead investigator Kunder. Coauthor Juntai Shen of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory adds, "They account for only one percent of the total mass of the bar, but this even more ancient population of stars appears to have a completely different origin than other stars there, consistent with having been one of the first parts of the Milky Way to form."

The RR Lyrae stars are moving targets -- their pulsations result in changes in their apparent velocity over the course of a day. The team accounted for this, and was able to show that the velocity dispersion or random motion of the RR Lyrae star population was very high relative to the other stars in the Milky Way's center. The next steps will be to measure the exact metal content of the RR Lyrae population, which gives additional clues to the history of the stars, and enhance by three or four times the number of stars studied, that presently stands at almost 1000.

The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Source: Leibniz-Institut fur Astrophysik Potsdam [April 22, 2016]

Current rates of climate change could trigger instability in a major Antarctic glacier, ultimately leading to more than 2m of sea-level rise.

This is the conclusion of a new study looking at the future of Totten Glacier, a significant glacier in Antarctica. Totten Glacier drains one of the world's largest areas of ice, on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS).

By studying the history of Totten's advances and retreats, researchers have discovered that if climate change continues unabated, the glacier could cross a critical threshold within the next century, entering an irreversible period of very rapid retreat.

This would cause it to withdraw up to 300 kilometres inland in the following centuries and release vast quantities of water, contributing up to 2.9 metres to global sea-level rise.

The EAIS is currently thought to be relatively stable in the face of global warming compared with the much smaller ice sheet in West Antarctica, but Totten Glacier is bucking the trend by losing substantial amounts of ice. The new research reveals that Totten Glacier may be even more vulnerable than previously thought.

The study, by scientists from Imperial College London and institutions in Australia, the US, and New Zealand is >published in Nature. Last year, the team discovered that there is currently warm water circulating underneath a floating portion of the glacier that is causing more melting than might have been expected.

Their new research looks at the underlying geology of the glacier and reveals that if it retreats another 100-150 km, its front will be sitting on an unstable bed and this could trigger a period of rapid retreat for the glacier. This would cause it to withdraw nearly 300 km inland from its current front at the coast.

Retreating the full 300 km inland may take several hundred years, according to co-author Professor Martin Siegert, Co-Director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. However, once the glacier crosses the threshold into the unstable region, the melting will be unstoppable -- at least until it has retreated to the point where the geology becomes more stable again.

"The evidence coming together is painting a picture of East Antarctica being much more vulnerable to a warming environment than we thought," he said. "This is something we should worry about. Totten Glacier is losing ice now, and the warm ocean water that is causing this loss has the potential to also push the glacier back to an unstable place."

"Totten Glacier is only one outlet for the ice of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, but it could have a huge impact. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is by far the largest mass of ice on Earth, so any small changes have a big influence globally."

To uncover the history of Totten Glacier's movements, the team looked at the sedimentary rocks below the glacier using airborne geophysical surveys. From the geological record, influenced by the erosion by ice above, they were able to understand the history of the glacier stretching back millions of years.

They found that the glacier has retreated more quickly over certain 'unstable' regions in the past. Based on this evidence, the scientists believe that when the glacier hits these regions again we will see the same pattern of rapid retreat.

Author: Hayley Dunning. | Source: Imperial College London [May 18, 2016]

The British Government is refusing to negotiate with Greece about the return of the so-called Elgin Marbles despite a request to do so from the United Nations, a decision that could prompt Athens to begin legal action for the first time.

British campaigners likened the UK’s stance to “clinging on to stolen booty for dear life” and contrasted it with the “generous act” of returning the sculptures to help a friendly country on the brink of economic collapse. Youth unemployment has hit 50 per cent and suicide rates have soared amid a crisis so severe the Financial Times has warned Greece could turn into a “quasi slave economy”.

In 2013, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) invited the UK to take part in mediation about the marbles, created 2,500 years ago to decorate the Parthenon temple in Athens. Then last year it asked for a response by 31 March.

However a Government source said the UK “won’t be able to make any significant announcement this side of the [May] election”.

A motion calling for the UK to reply to Unesco and move to return the marbles is to be filed in the House of Commons on Monday.

The failure to respond in time could prompt Greece to abandon decades of diplomacy and take legal action, possibly in the European Court of Human Rights. A team of lawyers in London, including leading QC Geoffrey Robertson and Amal Clooney, wife of actor George, is preparing a “book-length” document setting out the options.

A source who has advised successive Greek governments said the main problem was finding a court to take jurisdiction in the case, but once that hurdle was overcome “then the lawyers are saying there is about a 75 to 80 per cent chance of success”.

The marbles are regarded as some of the finest works of art in history and a symbol of the birth of Western civilisation. Some sculptures were taken to Britain by Lord Elgin in controversial circumstances just over 200 years ago when Greece was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.

Dr Elena Korka, director of antiquities at the Greek Culture Ministry, said the central issue was “reunifying these exceptional, outstanding and most important sculptures, which belong as an integral part of a unique symbolic monument for the whole world”.

“This is the essence of it, making something which exists today as whole as it can be… this is what the public wants, every poll shows it. It’s such an important issue. Even if Greece didn’t ask for it, the whole world would,” she said.

She said if the British authorities relented it would be “a day of true joy, not only for the monument itself but I think for the value of the gesture for the sake of co-operation”. “It would definitely help the [public] morale. It would be a huge boost,” she said.

Asked about the prospect of legal action, Dr Korka said Greece was “still so much into the process of mediation that we’re not thinking of the next step”. “We haven’t exhausted the possibilities so let’s not go so fast,” she said.

She added that the UK’s silence since 2013 was “not so polite really”.

David Hill, chairman of the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures in Australia, said there was a “growing appreciation even among people who are timid about the prospect of litigation that we have reached the point of last resort if this UNESCO gambit fails. The diplomatic and political strategies of the last 30 years have not produced any progress at all.”

Polls have consistently showed strong support in Britain for returning the marbles. In November, a survey for The Times found there was a two-to-one majority in favour.

Andrew George, chairman of Marbles Reunited and Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, said: “One of our friends is down on their uppers and we can offer something to them that might make their lives easier and give them a lift, which can only be good for their economy.

“It would be a generous act which would improve Britain’s standing in the world. At the moment we look rather grubby… like we are clinging on to stolen booty for dear life.”

He said he planned to lodge an early day motion in the Commons tomorrow calling for  the Government to “demonstrate that Britain is prepared to... reunite these British-held Parthenon sculptures with those now displayed in the purpose-built Acropolis Museum in the shadow of the monument to which they belong, the Parthenon in Athens”.

The British Museum, which denies Elgin stole the marbles, argues that it “tells the story of cultural achievement throughout the world” and the Parthenon sculptures are “a significant part of that story”. It regards itself as “a unique resource for the world” with visitors able to “re-examine cultural identities and explore the complex network of interconnected human cultures” within its walls.

“The Parthenon Sculptures are a vital element in this interconnected world collection. They are a part of the world’s shared heritage and transcend political boundaries,” it says.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said it would “respond in due course” to UNESCO.

Author: Ian Johnston | Source: Indpendent [March 07, 2015]