Request for a Citation

Recently I obtained a pile of duplicate reprints from the museum library, and I've since been entering them into my Endnote. Unfortunately, one of the reprints doesn't have the journal volume number and pagination, and I haven't been able to find them online. Does anyone out there have the details for:

Ride, W. D. L., & A. J. Cain. 1961. On the transfer of the name Anas punctata Burchell from the Hottentot teal to the Maccoa duck by the S.A.O.S. List Committee. Ostrich.

In the meantime, enjoy this sweet little video courtesy of The Other 95%:



Update (13/12/2007): A massive thank you to Darren Naish who finally supplied me with the answer:

Ride, W. D. L., & A. J. Cain. 1961. On the transfer of the name Anas punctata Burchell from the Hottentot teal to the Maccoa duck by the S.A.O.S. list committee. The Ostrich 32: 91-92.

He even gave me the reference for a follow-up paper:

Winterbottom, J. M. 1961. Transfer of the name Anas punctata Burchell from the Hottentot teal to the Maccoa duck. The Ostrich 32: 134-135.

Now I am content.

Is it a sponge, or is it a plant?

Welcome to the first (but hopefully not the last) conjointly envisioned post on Catalogue of Organisms. Today's post is on the problematic fossil Receptaculites, and Kevin Z is providing a musical background (or foreground if you prefer) to accompany it.

The fossil order Receptaculitida occurs from the Ordovician to the Carboniferous, possibly to the Permian (Nitecki et al., 2004 - image above comes from Wikimedia). They are quite spectacular fossils, with a striking geometric arrangement of plates on a globose body. Complete fossils are rare, but we have a reasonably good idea of overall structure.



One end of the fossil (shown above in an image from Gould & Katz, 1975) provided the centre that the plates radiated from (the nucleus), and is the most often preserved section. The other end (the lacuna) appears to have been open at the tip (Nitecki et al., 1999). The plates radiated off a central axis to which they were attached by lateral branches known as meroms.


The relationships of receptaculitids have been debated ever since they were discovered. Various authors have regarded them as giant foraminifera, sponges or algae. Part of the problem is that, as with Stylophora, receptaculitids are a group of fossil taxa different enough from anything still living that authors have disagreed on which end was up and which down. Those who would see the receptaculitids as algae have argued for an orientation with the closed nucleus upwards, while an uncalcified stalk would have attached the organism to the substrate through the lacuna. On the contrary, if receptaculitids are to be sponges, the orientation is reversed - the nucleus becomes the lower, while the open lacuna corresponds to the osculum of other sponges, the ejection point of filtered water. Also, like a palaeontological version of the famous two faces vs. vase optical effect, some authors have seen the meroms as solid branches supporting the plates, while others would see them as hollow canals. Authors have also disagreed about whether the nucleus or the lacuna represented the growing end of the receptaculitid, but the existence of specimens with secondarily fused plates at the nucleus, in contrast with the less calcified plates at the lacunar end, strongly implies that the lacuna is the growing end.



A word of caution at this point - the term "alga" is often a difficult one in palaeontology. It is well-known that the various groups of living algae (green, red, brown, etc.) are a polyphyletic group, with multicellularity arising multiple times from unicellular ancestors. Unfortunately, the characters distinguishing the various groups are usually fine scale features, often at the cellular level. At the macroscopic level, the simple organisation of many algae means that members of different groups may be superficially quite similar in appearance, and may be indistinguishable as fossils. As a result, referring to fossils of completely extinct groups as "algae" often implies a certain degree of agnosticism about their actual relationships. At worst, the term "fossil alga" sometimes seems to be a shorthand for "sessile organism that we haven't a clue where else to put it". In the case of receptaculitids, fortunately, an actual modern algal analogue has been suggested in the form of the Dasycladales, an order of calcified green algae that also possess a radial arrangement of side-branches around a central stem (image above of Acetabularia from here). However, there are problems in attributing receptaculitids directly to Dasycladales, as that would effectively require the nucleus to be the growing end.

Nevertheless, an algal interpretation (whatever that might mean) of Receptaculitida does seem more likely than a sponge. The solid outer casing of receptaculitids doesn't compare that well to the more porous structure of sponges. The question of the life-orientation of receptaculitids is even harder to comment on - while an open lacuna-upward position does seem more appealing if the lacuna is the growing tip, an attached lacuna-downwards position is still not impossible, though receptaculitids would then be perhaps the only group other than grasses to have evolved a basal meristem.

In 1972, Zhuravleva and Myagkova assigned receptaculitids to an association with other Palaeozoic sessile problematica such as Archaeocyatha in a new extinct kingdom Archaeata unrelated to both plants and animals (Rowland, 2001). Archaeocyaths were cup-shaped Cambrian organisms that are now almost universally agreed to be sponges of some form. The concept of Archaeata never gained much recognition outside Russia, though it must be admitted that at least part of this may have been due to the inaccessibility of Russian publications in the West.



The Cyclocrinales are another group of Palaeozoic "algae" found from the Middle Cambrian to the Lower Devonian (Nitecki et al., 2004). Cyclocrinales are superficially similar to receptaculitids, with a similar basic body plan (image of Cyclocrinites from Dry Dredgers. They differ in having a less organised nucleus, generally lacking a lacuna, and branching laterals that come off the axis in certain areas rather than over the entire length as in receptaculitids. Cyclocrinales are more easily accepted as related to Dasycladales, and most authors appear to have done just that.

REFERENCES

Gould, S. J., & M. Katz. 1975. Disruption of ideal geometry in the growth of receptaculitids: a natural experiment in theoretical morphology. Paleobiology 1: 1-20.

Nitecki, M. H., H. Mutvei & D. V. Nitecki. 1999. Receptaculitids: A phylogenetic debate on a problematic fossil taxon. Springer.

Nitecki, M. H., B. D. Webby, N. Spjeldnaes & Zhen Y.-Y. 2004. Receptaculitids and algae. In The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (B. D. Webby, F. Paris, M. L. Droser & I. G. Percival, eds.) Columbia University Press.

Rowland, S. M. 2001. Archaeocyaths - a history of phylogenetic interpretation. Journal of Paleontology 75 (6): 1065-1078.

Interesting Animals Viral Chain Letter... I mean, Meme

I've had this one passed on to me by Julia.

An interesting animal I've had

My misfortune with cats has become something of a running black joke in the family - I've had two hit by cars and two disappear (one of them only a few months after I'd spent $1400 getting her brought back to life after being hit by a car). My most recent cat did technically outlive me - when I left New Zealand, I sent him to live at my parent's. Unfortunately, that rather elderly cat (I had inherited him from someone else who had gone overseas) took to peeing around the house, and after my mother injured her back slipping on one of the puddles, my father took the cat outside and shot him. At the moment my partner and I are catless, but we do have a year old retriever/bull terrier cross dog by the name of Sammy, also known as Master of Destruction, He of the Inescapable Tongue, and Digger-up and Devourer of Unspeakable Things. Sammy has been known to eat wood.

An Interesting Animal I Ate

There is very little that I won't try at least once, but outside of crustaceans and molluscs, there are surprisingly few tasty invertebrates. The only thing that I've found almost completely inedible were silkworms (they taste exactly like mushrooms picked after they've become too old and gone to spore), which were sold in copious amounts from street-stands in Korea. I have tried witchetty grubs, which have a very rich taste something like butter and something like snot. Jack says they used to catch locusts in the season in Thailand and eat them fried, but I've not yet had the pleasure.

One thing I haven't yet tried - a number of years ago the Department of Conservation tent at the local Field Days was selling pies made from possum, but they were all gone by the time my sister and I got there.

An Interesting Animal in a Museum

I already mentioned the Auckland Museum moa earlier this week, which despite its vast inaccuracies is an old familiar. For a great many years, visitors coming into the foyer of Auckland Museum were greeted by "Rajah". Rajah had been resident in Auckland Zoo in the 1930s, but increasingly erratic behaviour (in a time when zoo elephants were expected to be available to be ridden by visitors) lead to his being regarded as a danger to public safety and put down, after which he was mounted and put on display at the museum. By the time the museum was refurbished about ten years ago, long years of display had taken their toll on Rajah, who was beginning to look decidedly tattered and moth-eaten, and the decision was made to take him off display (it may have also been a factor that Rajah had a decidedly colonial air, and was associated with an outdated mindset that the museum was trying to escape the taint of). He was moved into storage, but the size of the mount was such that the movers ended up sawing of his legs in order to fit him onto the truck (seven months to prepare the mount, a matter of minutes to destroy it). I was an occassional volunteer in the museum at the time, and there was a story circulating that the sight of an elephant travelling down the road on the back of a truck had severely disconcerted a passing drunk in Newmarket.

Rajah has since been somewhat restored, and has been returned to the Auckland Museum as part of a display on the history of children's icons in the country. If you look closely at the photo on the museum's website, you can still see the scars of past indignities in the seams were his legs had to be sewn back on.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

I have been thrown by a bull once in my life. When my parents first moved from dairy to beef, the first time I helped in taking the bulls into the stockyards I was not yet used to working with these animals that were so much bigger than the cows I was used to. When one of them turned and tried to head back in the direction he'd come from, my nervousness rather compromised my attempts to shoo him in the direction he was supposed to go. The bull made a dash for it with me standing in the gateway, picked me up with the dish of his head and tossed me onto the fence. I rolled off the fence and came away completely unharmed. For the record, I am now more aware that it is spectacularly easy you get a bull to do what you want - you just need to shout louder than they do.

An Interesting Animal in its Natural Habitat

Pretty much all of them, I'd say. I have rather fond memories of the first time I found a scorpion, though.

I suppose I should pass this on. Okay, Kevin, Aydin, Bug Girl, she's all yours.

Larry Moran on What Evolution Is

This was written some months ago, but I just found it and I think it's worth highlighting. Larry Moran of Sandwalk posted an essay in January on the definition of evolution. The importance of definitions in science almost can't be overstated - far too much ink has been wasted on arguments between people who didn't realise that they were using a different definition.

Linking past the language barrier

I just found through eXTReMe Tracking that I've been linked to by Avtor Franc at MIKROB(io)LOG, and I'd just like to say thank you for the link. Unfortunately, I can't comment on Avtor's blog because I'm afraid I can't read the language it's written in. I think it's an Eastern European language - if anyone out there can identify what it is, I'd appreciate the help.

Which brings me to comment on another thing - this is a non-English blog that has no apparent qualms about linking to sites in English. Many if not most non-English speakers seem to have no issues with the idea of at least attempting other languages, and I sometimes just get embarressed by the arrogance of English speakers in automatically writing off material in other languages. In the name of my race, I bow down to those who are more willing to leave their comfort zone.

Taxon of the Week: Leg or Breast?

This week's highlight taxon is one that is very familiar to me as a New Zealander, except it's not really. I've heard of these creatures since I was a little lad, and representations of them have been almost everywhere I've gone. I've never actually seen one. I don't know anyone who's every seen one. Probably no-one has seen one for hundreds of years, in fact. The Dinornithiformes are but a memory these days, long since converted into quarter-pack meals for Polynesian settlers. Ka ngaro i te ngaro a te moa - lost as the moa is lost.

The taxonomy of moa is complicated, but at present there are eleven species recognised as valid*. The order was unique to New Zealand - the "Australian" Dinornis queenslandiae De Vis, 1884, was based on a partial femur in the Queensland Museum, but this bone is now believed to have come from New Zealand and is assigned to Pachyornis elephantopus. In the past, Dinornithiformes has been divided into two families - the lightly built, more cursorial genus Dinornis in its own family and the other smaller and/or more heavily built genera in the Emeidae, but phylogenetic analysis has shown that Dinornis is nested within the Emeidae (Worthy & Holdaway, 2002).

*Eleven species were recognised in Worthy & Holdaway (2002), the most recent major review of Dinornithiformes. Bunce et al. (2003) reduced the number of species of Dinornis from three to two (see below), but Baker et al. (2005) increased the number of species of Megalapteryx from one to two.

The photo at the top of the page (from Wikipedia) shows the reconstructed Dinornis in the Auckland Museum. This specimen has been around for some time - it was built in 1913, though when the Natural History section of the museum was rebuilt it lost the tussock-land diorama it had previously inhabited (if I recall correctly) and moved into a glass case. The Auckland Museum moa stands about three metres tall, and modern interpretations would, unfortunately, label this a severely inaccurate reconstruction. It has been mounted in an unnaturally elevated stance, and should have been much more low-slung. A more realistic reconstruction was shown on a recent stamp issue, shown below (from New Zealand Birds):



Such a lowered reconstruction significantly lowers the height, but we're still looking at about two metres for the tallest Dinornis specimens. A moa of this size may have wighed over 150 kg (Worthy & Holdaway, 2002). Other species were smaller - the smallest was Megalapteryx didinus at probably about 40 kg. The super-heavy Pachyornis elephantopus was considerably shorter than large Dinornis, but may have weighed about the same amount. The image below comes from Nature, and shows three moa species against a 1.8 metre tall human. From left to right, the moas are a female Dinornis novaezealandiae, Megalapteryx didinus and Pachyornis elephantopus.



Despite their extinction prior to European settlement in New Zealand, a surprising amount of molecular data has been gleaned from ancient DNA studies of moa. Among other things, said molecular analyses have demonstrated that Dinornis displayed the highest degree of size dimorphism known from any bird (Bunce et al., 2003). Previously Dinornis had been divided into three species on the basis of size. Bunce et al. tested DNA from Dinornis remains for female-specific markers (birds differ from mammals in that it is the female that possesses different sex chromosomes [ZW], while the male has identical sex chromosomes [ZZ]). They found that all specimens that had been assigned to the smaller 'species' Dinornis struthoides were male, while all specimens of the larger 'species' D. novaezealandiae and D. giganteus were female. Molecular phylogenetic analysis also showed that these specimens were intermingled, with the major divide in the genus being not by size but by geography - the North Island and South Island populations (both containing representatives from all three 'species') were distinct, and were recognised as the separate (but morphologically indistinguishable) species Dinornis novaezealandiae (North Island) and D. robustus (South Island). While females showed a great deal of variation in size, the largest females would have been about 280% of the weight and 150% of the height of the largest males.

There is very little reliable information on the life habits of moa. By the time of European settlement, it had been long enough since the extinction of the moa that records of it in Maori oral tradition were seemingly few and far between, and those that were present had become significantly mythologised. Early researchers such as Owen and Haast interpreted moa as birds of open country, comparing them to modern ostriches and emus. However, the extensive New Zealand grasslands and fernlands these authors pointed to hadn't existed prior to human settlement, so moa were undoubtedly forest birds, foragers rather than grazers as also shown by preserved gizzard contents. Dinornis and Pachyornis seem to have had more fibrous diets with gizzards containing twigs and fibrous plants such as Phormium (the New Zealand flax) while Emeus and Euryapteryx with less robust bills had more selective diets of fruit and leaves. Interestingly, a well-preserved specimen of Euryapteryx geranoides showed a massive intrathoracic loop in the trachea, 1.2 metres long. In other birds such loops are associated with the ability to make loud, far-carrying calls, so moa (or at least Euryapteryx) would have been quite vocal birds in life.

REFERENCES

Baker, A. J., L. J. Huynen, O. Haddrath, C. D. Millar & D. M. Lambert. 2005. Reconstructing the tempo and mode of evolution in an extinct clade of birds with ancient DNA: The giant moas of New Zealand. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 102(23): 8257-8262.

Bunce, M., T. H. Worthy, T. Ford, W. Hoppitt, E. Willerslev, A. Drummond & A. Cooper. 2003. Extreme reversed sexual size dimorphism in the extinct New Zealand moa Dinornis. Nature 425: 172-175.

Worthy, T. H., & R. N. Holdaway. 2001. The Lost World of the Moa: Prehistoric life of New Zealand. Indiana University Press: Bloomington (Indiana).

New Pages at Palaeos

Info pages are up at Palaeos.org for Deiphoninae and Gymnospermae. As always, all edits are welcome.