Where in the world do you think the first people managed to tame and keep horses? It wasn’t in Europe or America. We’ll have to travel to the Central Asian steppe to find out more about the history of domesticated horses. Recent research published in the journal Science found three different pieces of evidence pointing to the same conclusion: Horses were tamed about 5,500 years ago by the Botai culture in Kazakhstan, a large country bordering China and Russia. That’s 2,000 years before domestic horses appeared in Europe!

Horses are still central to Kazakh culture. People ride horses, eat horse meat, and drink horse milk in a special fizzy, fermented beverage called koumiss. It turns out all of these traditions may be a thousand years older than archaeologists thought. “The domestication of horses is known to have had immense social and economic significance, advancing communications, transport, food production and warfare,” says the paper’s lead author, Alan Outram of the University of Exeter in England.

Outram and his colleagues looked at excavated horse bones, skulls, and Botai pottery to find their evidence. The bone structures of the ancient horses’ feet resembled later (Bronze Age) domestic horse bones more than wild horse bones from the same time and region. This suggests that the Botai were already keeping and breeding horses. The skulls showed that the Botai rode their horses, too. Five out of 15 skulls showed scarring in the lower jaw where a simple leather bridle was probably looped. Finally, the researchers managed to develop new methods to find traces of fats from horse milk on Botai pottery. “Seventy percent of the sherds we looked at had appreciable fat residues in them,” said Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol in England in a Planet Earth podcast. The tricky part was figuring out what kind of animal the fat came from, and whether it was milk, or meat, fat. It turns out that most of the fat on the pottery was from horsemeat, but about 10 percent of the sherds once held horse milk. Want a taste? Visit Kazakhstan today to try a 5,500-year-old milk drink recipe!

Does your family feed the birds? You could be changing the future -- the evolutionary future, that is. The Blackcap Warbler, a species of small migratory bird that nests in southern Germany, is splitting into two species. One group migrates southwest to Spain for the winter and the other goes northwest to England. You might be thinking: Wait, they go north for the winter? Isn’t that crazy?

“This is reproductive isolation, the first step of speciation,” says evolutionary biologist Martin Schaefer of the University of Freiburg. Reproductive isolation occurs when two groups of the same species of birds tend to mate only within their separate groups because of an outside influence that keeps them apart from each other. When Darwin studied finches on the Galápagos Islands, the separation was an ocean. In the case of Blackcap Warblers, people with bird feeders cause the separation! If this separation continues for long enough, the groups may eventually evolve into two distinct species of bird that never mate with each other. It could take 100,000 years to complete the change, though, and Schaefer doubts that people will keep feeding the birds for that long.

However, some changes are already taking place. The north-migrating birds have rounder wings, which make quick turns easier but long-distance flights more difficult. They also have longer, narrower beaks that are better for eating seeds from bird feeders. The south-migrating group has short, fat beaks for eating fruits and olives in Spain.

Your turn! What do you think the Blackcap Warbler will look like after 100,000 years of evolution? Send your drawing to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or write to: BIRD OF THE FUTURE, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Speciation -- Evolutionary formation of a new species

Friendship isn’t just for humans, and the benefits go beyond feeling accepted and having someone to chat with about your problems. For female horses, friendship can mean a greater number of healthy babies and less trouble from male horses. Zoologist Elissa Cameron of the University of Pretoria in South Africa studied 55 wild, unrelated mares (female horses) in New Zealand for four years. Cameron and her team collected data on the mares’ social habits, including grooming and hanging out close together. They also kept notes on any aggressive harassment by stallions (male horses). After a whopping 2,000 total hours of observation, the researchers calculated a “social-integration” score for each mare -- which means that they figured out how popular and friendly she was. Surprisingly, this score correlated directly with the horses’ reproductive success rates. The least social mares had only about half as many healthy babies as the most social ones. Also, those pesky stallions tended not to pick on the mares that had lots of friends.

It’s very difficult to prove that friendship directly causes healthier, happier mares and foals (young offspring), because a correlation like this can work both ways: Perhaps the mares with the healthiest babies make more friends. Either way, you can text your BFFs that friendship evolved for a reason: even horses know it!

Think that itty bitty egg at the bottom of the ocean is mindlessly sitting there, waiting to hatch? Actually, it’s watching you! Cuttlefish eggs are encased in black ink when they are first laid, but eventually the translucent eggs swell to the point where the not yet hatched embryo can peer out and watch the surrounding world. And what it sees from inside the egg may determine its favorite food after hatching!

This is the first time science has found evidence of visual learning before birth. Ludovic Dickel and his colleagues at the University of Caen Basse in Normandy, France, chose cuttlefish (which are actually mollusks, not fish) based on previous experiments proving their learning skills as hatchlings, and because of their excellent eyesight, which develops fully before birth.

In the experiment, Dickel harvested wild cuttlefish eggs from the ocean and placed them in several laboratory tanks. One group got a clear view of crabs in a separate tank -- because of the glass walls, there was no way for the embryos to smell or taste their future prey.

As soon as the eggs hatched, researchers moved the baby cuttlefish to a tank out of view of the crabs. After seven days, all the newly hatched hunters were introduced to both crabs and shrimp. In the wild, cuttlefish tend to prefer shrimp. But the cuttlefish that had seen crabs from inside their eggs went straight for the crabs as their favorite food! And the clearer the view of crabs an embryo had, the more it liked to eat them. Baby cuttlefish that hadn’t seen any other creatures while in their eggs liked the shrimp best.

Let’s welcome the world’s newest sub-species of monkey -- Mura’s saddleback tamarin (saguinus fuscicollis mura). The little primate is nine inches tall with a 12-inch long tail, and weighs less than a pound. It managed to remain hidden from the eyes of science in the Amazon River basin until a 2007 expedition. “This newly described monkey shows that even today there are still major wildlife discoveries to be made,” says Fabio Röhe of the Wildlife Conservation Society, lead author of a June 2009 study introducing and describing the new species.

The Amazon River basin is chock full of a surprising number of species -- known and unknown. But local plans for development in the area, including a major highway currently under construction, do not bode well for the newly discovered monkey’s future. “This discovery should serve as a wake-up call that there is still so much to learn from the world’s wild places, yet humans continue to threaten these areas with destruction,” says Röhe.

Tough luck, mummy, your hair isn’t the oldest of all anymore!

Until now, a 9,000-year-old South American mummy held the world record for the oldest human hair. But thanks to a recent discovery of fossilized hairy remains in ancient hyena poop, that honor now belongs to an unknown hominin who died between 195,000 and 257,000 years ago in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. No, hyenas didn’t necessarily eat this early human. Most likely, one of the dog-like creatures found and scavenged a dead body, then took a bathroom break in its usual spot -- inside a cave. Today, thousands of years after this ancient hyena dined and pooped, brown hyenas in Africa still use specific spots in caves as toilets.

A team of researchers led by Lucinda Backwell of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa discovered the ancient hyena midden, or toilet, inside a cave and used tweezers to extract forty fossilized hairs that looked like glass needles from one coprolite, the archaeological word for “turd.” Using electron microscopes, the team compared the scales on the hairs to those of many different species, and humans were the closest to a match. Modern humans were just emerging during the time when the coprolites were fresh, so the old hairs may have come from a close relative such as Homo heidelbergensis.

“The oldest known hairs (for all mammals) are found in carnivore feces, permafrost, and amber,” Backwell told Discovery News. She explained that calcium dripping from the cave roof and the additional high calcium content of the hyena poop helped fossilize the hairs and keep them intact for so many years. Now that’s a hairy tale!

Your turn! Have you ever discovered unknown animal hairs in an owl pellet, nest, or elsewhere outside? Did you try to figure out what the hair belonged to? Email your “hairy tale” to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or write to: HAIRY TALES ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Cradle of Humankind -- An area of about 200 square miles just north of Johannesburg in South Africa with an incredible density of hominin remains. It has been the site for some of the most exciting fossil discoveries since the 1940s.

Forty-seven million years ago, a small, monkey-like creature spent her days swinging through the trees of the Messel rainforest in Germany, until she met an untimely death at the edge of a volcanic lake. Her fossilized body was so well preserved that “you can see the fur, the ears, all of the gut contents [leaves and a fruit], all the fingertips and toes,” Holly Smith of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor told Science News.

Smith is one of a team of international scientists who analyzed Ida’s skeleton and determined that the fossil represents a whole new genus of primates! There’s a bizarre story behind this exciting discovery: Ida was actually unearthed from the Messel pit in 1983, but private collectors split the fossil into two parts. One part wound up in a Wyoming museum, and the more complete part spent 25 years in a private collection before being purchased by Dr. Jørn Hurum for the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo in Norway. In secret, Hurum brought together a team of international scientists, including Dr. Jens Franzen of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany who had previously studied Ida’s Wyoming half. The team realized that the two parts belonged to the same fossil, and began their research of the newly discovered piece. Hurum named the fossil “Ida” after his 6-year-old daughter, and the scientific name Darwinius masillae was given in honor of Darwin’s 200th birthday on February 12, 2009.

Ida lived during a span of time when the “dry nose” haplorhines (an evolutionary branch of primates eventually leading to monkeys, apes, and humans) began to split from the “wet nose” strepsirrhine branch (leading to lemurs, aye-ayes, and bush babies). Although she resembles a primitive lemur, Ida can’t be one because she doesn’t have a toothcomb or toilet claw. She also has finger and toe nails instead of claws, opposable thumbs, and a special foot bone called a talus bone -- all features shared with humans!

While it’s tempting to call Ida the missing link in human evolution, she’s really only one of many, many links between us and our long-lost, tree-swinging ancestors.

If you want to meet a striped rabbit, a poisonous dragon millipede, or a frog with green blood and turquoise bones, travel on over to the Greater Mekong region in southeast Asia. This corner of the world -- including Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and some of China -- is packed with fascinating critters. According to a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 1,068 new species have been found there in just ten years! Here’s the run down: 519 plants, 279 fish, 88 frogs, 88 spiders, 46 lizards, 22 snakes, 15 mammals, four birds, four turtles, two salamanders and a toad. “Who knows what else is out there waiting to be discovered, but what’s clear is that there is plenty more where this came from,” says Stuart Chapman, head of the WWF network’s Greater Mekong Program.

The Greater Mekong is also home to river dolphins, Asian elephants, tigers, Javan rhinos, and the largest freshwater fish in the world: the Mekong giant catfish measuring nearly nine feet long and weighing over 600 pounds. But this biodiversity hot spot is in danger. As the human population grows, factories and farmland threaten local wildlife. The WWF plans to work with local governments and businesses to protect the environment while still helping the economy.

WWF’s report, First Contact in the Greater Mekong illustrates just how rich this region is in newly discovered life. Colorful caterpillars and freaky frogs are only the beginning! Scientists browsing a food market in Laos discovered a species of rock rat everybody thought had been extinct for 11 million years, and officially identified the “new” species in 2005. The world’s largest huntsman spider (Heteropoda maxima), which has up to a foot-long leg span, was also discovered in Laos and named in 2001. A black and white striped krait from Vietnam, Bungarus slowinskii joined the black mamba and spitting cobra in a growing family of super-deadly snakes in 2005. And in 2000, scientists discovered a new mammal -- a truly rare occurrence these days! The furry, black and brown Annamite striped rabbit (Nesolagus timminsi) lives in Vietnam and Laos. And then there’s that dragon millipede (Desmoxytes purpurosea) from Thailand added to the list of new species in 2007. This hot pink, spiny, creepy-crawly protects itself with the deadly poison cyanide! Are you still sure you want to travel to the Greater Mekong?

Who do you blame when an aquarium tank floods? That’s right, the octopus. When the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium staff showed up for work on February 26, 2009, they were greeted with over 200 gallons of spilled saltwater. They didn’t need to call in detectives to figure out whodunit. The culprit was watching the mess from inside her tank, perhaps waving all eight of her suction cup arms in delight!

Octopuses are well known for being intelligent, curious, and strong. This foot-long female California two-spotted octopus had found a valve near the top of her tank and tugged on it, releasing a steady stream of water onto the floor. Thankfully, the staff discovered the disaster before any other creatures in the tank were harmed. “It’s actually quite comical,” said Tara Crow, the Aquarium’s Public Programs Manager. “I think the whole staff is still laughing about the ordeal.” The only bad part, Crow explained, is that the aquarium had just installed brand new, environmentally friendly floors. “Even after two hours of cleaning up we still have salt water seeping up between the tiles every step we take,” she said. Now the curious octopus has lots of extra clamps and tape covering the top of her tank. Next time she’ll have to enlist the help of some razor clams to help her break free so she can do some more mischief!

Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! The rats are laughing again! These lucky rats are part of Dr. Jaak Panksepp’s research on tickling and laughter that he hopes will lead to discovering the source of human joy.

What can we learn from rat laughter? “Lots,” says Dr. Panksepp. “If one has an animal model of an emotional process, one can work out the brain mechanisms.” Tickling and laughter are controlled by the ancient brain systems that humans share with other animals. In fact, rough and tumble play, like tickling and chasing, has been observed in humans, chimpanzees, squirrel monkeys, dogs, and rats.

Play in humans, Dr. Panksepp explains, “probably helps program higher regions of the brain, making us more socially sophisticated and allowing us to learn about our world more effectively.” Tickling rats could lead to a better understanding of how play helps construct parts of the brain.

Ultimately, he would like to track down the gene for joy.

Tickling -- it’s good for so much more than just a laugh!

To see Dr. Panksepp tickling rats, check out “Laughing Rats” on YouTube.com (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-admRGFVNM).

Dolphins may be famous for playing all day, but some of these intelligent sea creatures really know how to get the job done when it comes to finding fish hiding beneath the sandy sea floor. Out of the several thousand dolphins living in Australia’s Shark Bay, 41 mostly female bottlenose dolphins spend up to 17 percent of their time using sea sponges like shovels to sweep yummy fish out of the sand.

“It turns out the brainiacs of the marine world can also be tool-using workaholics, spending more time hunting with tools than any nonhuman animal,” says Janet Mann of Georgetown University in Washington D.C. “This is the first and only clear case of tool-use in a wild dolphin or whale.” Mann has been studying the Shark Bay dolphins and collecting data on their behavior for over 20 years. Although “sponging” was discovered in the 1980s, no one really knew at first why some dolphins carried sponges around in their beaks. Now Mann has not only observed dolphin tool-use first hand, she has documented that mothers pass the behavior on to their daughters.

In every case where Mann observed female “spongers” with their calves, the daughters started sponging within a few years of birth. Sons, however, rarely took up sponging, or if they did, they didn’t start until after weaning. It’s unclear why so many more female dolphins use sponges than males, but it might have something to do with the fact that “spongers” tend to spend more time alone, hunting in deep crevices. It’s important for a female to have strong foraging skills in order to support herself and her calf during the three to eight years of nursing, and this antisocial behavior doesn’t seem to affect a female’s chance for having babies. But having strong social bonds with other males is extremely important to a boy dolphin’s future, so he might ignore his mom’s odd behavior in favor of making new friends!

Imagine a shark gigantic enough to snack on whales, with a bite that could crush a small car. This ancient ancestor of the Great White, Carcharodon megalodon, or megalodon for short, actually swam the seas over a million years ago. At over 50 feet long, and weighing around 50 tons this dude had to be one of the scariest predators ever!

Megalodon means “large tooth” but “large bite” would be just as accurate. Recent research by Dr. Stephen Wroe and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Australia used data collected from great whites and computer modeling to show that megalodon had the most powerful bite of any creature ever to live. For comparison, try biting down on an apple as hard as possible. That’s only about 150 pounds of force. An African lion bites with about 1,235 pounds, a T. rex could chomp with 6,834 pounds. . .and the super-shark? Those giant jaws generated 24,000 to 40,000 pounds of crazy bite power! That’s over 100 times more powerful than our favorite great white shark, the star of Jaws.

“I reckon [megalodon] could have crushed a small car,” Wroe told National Geographic News. “Of course it would probably have broken most of its teeth in the exercise.” Those teeth are the real killing tools for the extinct giant fish. Throughout its life, old dull teeth fell out and were constantly replaced by rows and rows of fresh teeth. You could say that its bite was the ultimate in overkill. Megalodon could easily have sliced open a whale with a fraction of all that biting power.

What do sharks and golf balls have in common? Not much unless you zoom in on the golf balls’ dimples and compare them to a sharks’ skin. Despite Jaws’s smooth and sleek look, a shark’s skin is actually studded with millions of tiny scales, called dentricles, which look like little teeth pointing toward the shark’s tail. If you’re brave enough to pet a shark, rub from head to tail! The other direction feels like enlarged sandpaper.

Those little scales may be the secret to sharks’ ability to swim at super speed. The shark speed record belongs to the shortfin mako, which has been clocked swimming at 31 miles per hour. There are estimates that it can actually achieve bursts of up to 45 miles per hour or more, but it’s hard to get a wild shark to volunteer and show off its speed!

Like the dimples on a golf ball, the denticles help reduce drag, as the shark zips through water. Drag is the force of water (or air) resisting a moving object. Amy Lang and her team at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa decided to research how, exactly, the scales on a shark’s skin affect the water around the shark to reduce drag and help it swim faster.

Based on evidence that some shark species bristle their scales, or make them stand on end, in order to swim faster, Lang placed a sharkskin-like material with bristled scales in a water tunnel. Thanks to lasers and special materials in the water, the team could see tiny vortices, or swirls, of water form behind the scales. Those swirls act like tiny wheels rolling the shark through the ocean. Imagine rolling a heavy box along on wheels versus pulling it across the floor. Just like the box you drag, a perfectly smooth golf ball or shark would actually have a tougher time speeding along!

Eventually, sharkskin-like material could be used to help save energy on airplanes, ships, or submarine vehicles. So if you want to pet a submarine, better do it now while they’re still smooth!

Warmer winters mean less fluffy snow, and less fluffy snow means hard times for the lemmings of Norway. These little rodents are famous for their huge population bursts and the (untrue) myth that when there are too many lemmings, some will commit suicide by walking off cliffs. Lemming booms used to occur every 3–5 years, but due to global warming, there hasn’t been a population peak since 1994.

Lemmings need light, fluffy snow because the guinea-pig-sized rodents can scamper around in melted spaces beneath the drifts to search for food, mostly mosses and grasses, without predators noticing. Warm winters mean wetter snow and ground often covered in ice, so there’s no place to hide. Predators like the arctic fox and snowy owl used to depend on lemmings’ population booms. Now, they have to search for different prey. Nils Christian Stenseth and colleagues at the University of Oslo in Norway published a study in the November 6, 2008, issue of Nature linking the lemming population decline and climate change.

The study points out that lemmings are still far from endangered, and people in Norway remember what it was like when the population boomed. One commentary on the study pointed out that the numbers were so high in 1970 that people in North Norway used snowplows to clear all the squashed lemmings from the roads!

Last year, scientists predicted there might be only about 50,000 western lowland gorillas left in the whole world by 2011. But it turns out our critically endangered primate cousins have a secret city all to themselves -- in the swamp forests of the Republic of Congo in Africa.

A Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) survey team spent two years tromping through muck and wilderness in those swamp forests, and counted 125,000 gorillas! That’s more than twice the number expected.

Since gorillas don’t exactly line up for role call, the team counted nests -- beds of sticks and leaves that gorillas make every night. Then they used a mathematical model to estimate how many gorillas lived in the area. In the most hidden gorilla city, discovered because of a tip from local hunters, the team found evidence of 6,000 gorillas living close together in a swamp so remote it is impossible for people to reach for over half of the year. The WCS team had to hike through mud for three days to get there!

These high numbers don’t mean we can erase gorillas off the endangered species list. Nest counting isn’t a perfect method for determining creature numbers and there are still lots of threats facing gorillas, including illegal hunting and Ebola (a viral disease that is deadly for both gorillas and humans). Half the surveyed area was already part of national parks or reserves, and the WCS is working with the government of the Republic of Congo to create new protected areas.

“Conservation in the Republic of Congo is working,” says Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, President and CEO of WCS. “This discovery should be a rallying cry for the world that we can protect other vulnerable and endangered species, whether they be gorillas in Africa, tigers in India, or lemurs in Madagascar.”

Three cheers for the gorillas! Now, let’s hope we can leave them alone to enjoy their swamp forest city in peace.

Have you ever seen a bat swooping silently, using echolocation to find its prey at night?

Scientists knew bats were loud, but in the lab, bats don’t make quite as much noise as in their natural habitat. In order to measure wild bats, Surlykke and Kalko set up an array of microphones and cameras to record the flying predators. The researchers used their data to reconstruct the bats’ flight paths, then estimated the sound intensity of each cry based on the bat’s distance from the microphone. Most of the sounds ranged between 122 and 134 decibels (db). But the bulldog bat (Noctilio leporinushit) 140 db, a new loudness record for an animal in air! Your home fire alarm screeches at about 108 db, and a rock concert blasts out between 115 and 120 db. Even brief exposure to a sound as loud as 140 db would cause permanent damage to your ears.

Bats need to use high frequencies in order to track tiny insects. But these frequencies fade very quickly in the air, so the louder the sound, the farther away bats can detect prey before the sound fades out. The loudest species of bat also uses the highest frequencies, and can detect a large moth at a range of about 30 feet. I wonder if all that noise drives the other bats batty?

We know that whales sing and dolphins play, but are they smarter than humans? The sperm whale wins the prize for the biggest brain on Earth, and dolphins are second only to humans (and tree shrews, which just happen to have very tiny bodies) for the largest brains relative to body size. But neuroscience has shown that the complexity of folds in a brain is more significant than size. One measure of this folding is called the gyrification index. Humans have an index of 1.75, dolphins 2.7, and killer whales score even higher! Dr. Lori Marino of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, concluded in a study published in the Public Library of Science journal PloS Biology that cetaceans (marine mammals) show evidence of “complex behavior, learning, sociality, and culture."

The evidence out there is overwhelming. Dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors (see “A Good Look in the Mirror,” ODYSSEY October 2007), learn quickly, imitate humans, and may even give each other names. Killer whales in the eastern North Pacific belong to distinct social groups, and many produce beautiful sounds that are almost definitely a form of language, and perhaps even art. In 2002, the Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) identified a sound that had baffled the U.S. Navy for years. Submarine crews had nicknamed the pulsing sound a “boing” when it was first heard in the 1950s off the coast of Hawaii and San Diego, California. Thanks to the SWFSC, we now know that minke whales make this sound, but we still don’t know why. The illustration is a mathematical "wavelet" image by scientist and sound artist Mark Fischer that reveals features of the “boing” invisible to our human ears (see picture, above right).

Another possible measure of smartness based on brain biology is the number of neurons, especially in the neocortex, the area of the brain most responsible for intelligence. Neuroscientists Nina Eriksen and Bente Pakkenberg of the University of Copenhagen counted neurons, and discovered that minke whales have about 12.8 billion, only two thirds of the human neuron count. But there are also 98.2 billion cells called “glia” in the minke whale’s giant neocortex! (Humans have only a small number more glia than neurons.) Recent research suggests that glia may help with information processing. Based on this evidence, researcher R. Douglas Fields, in an article for Scientific American, asks: “Is the whale brain intellectually weaker than the human brain, or just different?” Maybe glia process information in a different way than neurons do, and maybe all those extra glia make whales as smart, or smarter, than humans.

What do you think? Are there whale scientists out there right now discussing their theories on human intelligence? Maybe whales don’t care for science, and create beautiful sound artworks, instead. Or is all this just speculation by us humans, who are desperate for company on the evolutionary ladder? Email your response to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or write to: WHALE BRAINS, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Sharks don’t smell blood, they sense it in their snot! This process is known as electroreception, and is made possible by a mass of gel in sharks’ heads. “The gel contains various proteins and salts, so it’s similar to mucus, only with a Jello-like consistency,” researcher R. Douglas Fields told the television news program Discovery News.

Don’t try to follow bloody trails with your own boogers, though. Shark gel is part of a sensory organ system called the ampullae of Lorenzini, in honor of the scientist who first wondered if the gel was more than mere snot. According to Fields’s research, the gel carries electrical current signals from the water to the shark’s brain.

Lots of things give off electrical current, including swimming fish, humans, and blood. “Bloody salts produce a strong electrical field,” Fields explains. In fact, gushing blood produces such a strong signal that it can overwhelm sharks’ eyesight and smell. If you’re swimming and some one gets attacked by a shark, it may be safe to go to the rescue. Chances are, the shark will ignore you in favor of the already bleeding victim. Or you might want to wait until scientists have invented a shark repellent that can fool the ampullae of Lorenzini and keep sharks away from swimmers.

This newly-classified mammal is about the size of a house cat, with a nose like an anteater, a gray face, red fur, a black rump, and spindly, antelope-like legs. Its scientific name is Rhynochocyon udzungwensis, but if you can’t quite figure out how to pronounce that mouthful, it’s also known as a giant elephant shrew or gray-faced sengi.

Galen Rathbun of the California Academy of Sciences is a sengi expert. In 2005, he saw some intriguing photographs taken by a set of camera traps hidden in the Udzungwa Mountains in Tanzania. He told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news that his first thoughts were: “Boy, these look strange.” He was sure he was looking at a totally new mammal, and set out with an international team in March 2006 to trek through the mountains of Africa in search of specimens.

Sengis are only found in Africa, and the gray-faced sengi only lives 3,000 feet up in the Udzungwa Mountains. It rained almost every day, and the regular traps were too small to capture the new species. In spite of these difficulties, the team managed to catch four of the rare mammals with traditional snares.

We want to know what you would name this new mammal! Rhynochocyon udzungwensis is a mouthful and “gray-faced sengi” is descriptive but rather boring. We bet you can come up with some brilliant alternatives! Email your idea to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or write to: NAME THE SENGI, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Plants of all shapes and sizes beware! Gryposaurus monumentensis had a duck-like bill and a huge jaw with 800 teeth that could tear through much more vegetation than your lawn mower. “With its robust jaws, no plant stood a chance against G. monumentensis,” said Terry Gates of the Utah Museum of Natural History.

This “monumental” herbivore also could squash your lawn mower! Gryposaurus is more than thirty feet long. But there were no machines cutting grass 75 million years ago in the late Cretaceous Period when this giant lived. Gryposaurus means “hook-beaked lizard,” and “monumentensis” actually doesn’t describe the dinosaur’s size, but the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, where the new species’ skull was found back in 2004. It took three years of analysis and research before paleontologists at the Utah Museum of Natural History were ready to name the new creature and publish their work.

Another recently named dinosaur makes Gryposaurus look puny. Futalognkosaurus dukei was 105 feet long. Think three school buses parked end to end! Half of that length was the plant eater’s gigantic neck. The first Futalognkosaurus bones were discovered in Argentina seven years ago, and paleontologists still aren’t finished digging up the skeleton.

Let’s pretend you took a bath with skunk-scented soap. What would your friends at school do? They’d probably all stand far away and say, “Peeeww! What happened?” Well, now imagine you’re a fish, and you take a swim through water where someone has dumped old laundry detergent boxes. When you encounter your fishy school mates, they take one whiff and swim away from you, leaving you alone and defenseless.

But detergent is just soap, you might argue. Well, soap smells sweet to us, but many detergents and other cleaners contain 4-nonylphenol (4-NP), a pollutant that stinks to some kinds of fish as badly as a skunk does to us.

Suzanne Currie and her colleagues at Mount Allison University in Sackville, Canada, tested how a low level of 4-NP pollution affects schools of banded killifish. “Fish don’t like to associate with other fish that smell like nonylphenol,” Currie told the Web site nature.com. So what if smelly fish get rejected? A school of fish swimming together, or shoaling, offers extra protection from predators. A fish alone is an easy meal.

What do you think? There are limits on the amount of pollution people are allowed to dump in bodies of water. But even very low levels of 4-NP can affect fish behavior. What could be done to solve this problem? Send your ideas to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or write to A FISHY FIX, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Don’t reach for the fly swatter -- this prehistoric bug was big enough to swat you around with just one of its claws!

The giant sea scorpion Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae lived about 400 million years ago, and grew to be up to eight feet long! That’s longer than the tallest professional basketball players.

“We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies,” said Dr. Simon Braddy of the University of Bristol, England. “But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were.” Why were they so big? There are several theories. Maybe there was more oxygen in the air back then. Or maybe there was less competition from vertebrates like us. The explanation I like best, though, is that these sea scorpions liked to fight and even eat one another, so the biggest, baddest bug won all the battles!

vertebrates -- Creatures with a backbone

Most people are smarter than primates, but what about two-and-a-half-year-old people? Are human toddlers bright enough to beat chimpanzees and orangutans in a test of social learning skills? The answer is yes, according to a September 2007 report published in the journal Science.

Most chimps and little kids are equally intelligent when it comes to understanding space, quantities, and cause and effect. But social communication, social learning, and theory-of-mind may be uniquely human skills.

Experimenters showed each group how to pop open a tube to get at a toy or snack inside. Seventy-four percent of toddlers were able to repeat the action, while most (67 %) chimps and orangutans bit at the tubes in desperation.

“The children were much better than the apes in understanding nonverbal communications, imitating another’s solution to a problem, and understanding the intentions of others,” Esther Hermann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told the Web site Science Daily.

Toddlers may win the social skills award, but what about a tree climbing competition?

You surely know that chimpanzees, monkeys, gorillas, and other primates are your closest animal cousins, but who are your second cousins? Tree shrews or flying lemurs? Thanks to new genetic data gathered by a team from Penn State University, you may want to add several species of colugos, or flying lemurs, to your extended family tree. Colugos actually can’t fly and aren’t technically lemurs. But they do have a special skin fold that flaps open like a kite, allowing them to glide from tree to tree.

Primates, flying lemurs, and tree shrews are all members of an evolutionary group called Euarchonta, which arose over 87 million years ago, during the days of the dinosaurs. Tree shrews were the first to separate into their own branch, while the split between primates and colugos came later. The split between chimpanzees and humans was much more recent, perhaps only six million years ago.

Any old fruit tree isn’t good enough for the white-faced saki monkey! Most animals tend to scarf up whatever food they can get, but bands of monkeys and other primates may choose the best place to eat based on memory and what’s best for the whole group. You and your family may drive for half an hour to get the perfect pizza, and a group of white-faced saki monkeys may walk past perfectly good food just to get to the best fruit tree location.

Six saki monkeys living on an island in Venezuela traveled four times farther than researchers expected to get to their food. Traveling long distances uses up precious energy and increases the risk from predators, but maybe filling their bellies isn’t the only thing on the saki monkeys’ minds. They choose trees with lots of fruit, trees near watering holes, or trees they have visited recently. These monkeys are probably using different kinds of memory to find the fruit trees that will feed the whole group without competition.

“The monkeys’ foraging decisions may help to keep the group together,” said researcher Elena Cunningham of the New York University College of Dentistry. She was co-author of the study, which was published in the journal Animal Cognition.

I wonder how far the monkeys would travel if they knew how good pizza tastes!

Everyone loves pandas. They’re cute, fuzzy, and their poop makes some super-duper products! The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Center in Sichuan Province in China is turning tons of panda poo into wrapping paper, photo frames, and souvenirs just in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. “We are not interested in doing this for the profits but to recycle the waste, Liao Jun, a researcher at the Center, told the Associated Press. “It’s environmentally friendly.”

Don’t wrinkle up your nose in disgust just yet! You poop what you eat, and pandas eat only bamboo. So their poop is mostly mashed up fiber, which is exactly what you need to make paper. The recipe is simple. Take a pile of panda poop, sterilize it, smash it up, dissolve it in water, and pour it into forms to dry. Take a whiff, and you won’t smell anything.

Researchers at the Chengdu Center aren’t the first to turn poop into profit. They got the idea from the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, which makes its souvenir paper from, you guessed it, elephant poop. You can also buy paper made from the waste of giraffes and zebras. Or shop for Roo Poo paper if you prefer kangaroos. If those aren’t enough options, two Idaho artists who call themselves “Dung and Dunger” make paper from bison poop, according to Fine Books & Collections magazine.

So, what do you think? Are poop products “green” genius or simply disgusting? Send your response on a sheet of your favorite animal dung stationery (if you have some!) to “Poop Products,” ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458. Or save that paper by emailing it to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com.

Just how does a long, slippery, snake-like moray eel force a struggling fish down into its stomach? Scientists always assumed they used suction like most aquatic predators, until an amazing discovery was published in the September 2007 Journal Nature. Moray eels have a second jaw, that’s lined with teeth.

The second jaw is hidden deep in the eel’s throat. As the main jaw grips the prey, the second jaw shoots forward like a slingshot, grabs on, then drags the food down into the eel’s throat. Eels aren’t the only fish to have two sets of teeth, but they are the only known species that flings its second jaw up into its mouth and uses it to transport prey. The jaw-jump lasts only a fraction of a second. Evolutionary biologist Rita Mehta of the University of California at Davis took a super slow motion video of the action. You can watch it at: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=109985 “It was one of those gee-whiz moments when we were absolutely ecstatic,” Mehta told MercuryNews.com.

No. And that’s why he certainly wasn’t the first person to “discover” America in 1492. You see, researchers have recently unearthed chicken bones on the coast of Chile in South America, which predate Columbus’s arrival to “the New World.”

Anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith and her colleague Alice Storey from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said the bones were found alongside other materials belonging to the indigenous people who lived on the country’s southern coast. But the bones are not of the same species of chicken that lay their eggs there today.

As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Matisoo-Smith and Storey reveal that carbon dating places the chicken bones in a time frame ranging anywhere from 1304 to 1424 A.D. If true, the birds arrived well before any European made landfall in South America. Since the chickens didn’t fly across the ocean to vacation in Chile, someone must have brought them there. But who?

Well, DNA tests show that the birds resemble a species of fowl native to Polynesia in the South Pacific! These numerous islands were populated by great navigators who migrated to the islands from Southeast Asia 3,000 years ago. It’s been known for some time that these seafarers gradually extended their range eastward all the way to Easter Island, about 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile.

Now the new chicken-bone discovery lends credence to a theory that at least one group of fearless Polynesian navigators crossed the vast Pacific all the way to the southern coast of Chile -- a feat that’s not so surprising when you consider that they also journeyed several thousand miles northward to populate the Hawaiian islands. Find that journey in a simple vessel hard to believe? In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian anthropologist, made a voyage from Peru to Polynesia aboard his Kon-Tiki raft to prove the trip was doable.

Purple is a princely color, even for a frog. Meet the purple frog of Suriname, a highland country on the northeast coast of South America. The frog has an elaborate color scheme -- an aubergine (sort of eggplant purple) skin with irregular fluorescent lavender loops. Conservation International’s Leeanne Alonso, who led the expedition that found the frog, says that it was one of 24 new species observed in the remote region.

The actual discovery occurred in 2006 as part of an ecological survey of the country’s Nassau plateau. It was a true field day, as the 13 participating scientists saw an impressive 467 native species, ranging from large cats, like panthers and pumas, to monkeys, reptiles, bats, and insects.

Alonso was surprised by the number of other new species found besides the purple frog, including six fish, 12 dung beetles, and an ant. Today, most new species discovered are usually of interesting insects. The discovery, Alonso told a reporter, is extraordinary and points up the need to survey and protect these regions, especially from illegal mining, which could threaten the life in this fragile environment.

You guessed it! It’s time to play ODYSSEY’s Name Game. What do you think scientists should call the new purple frog? Send your suggestions to “The Purple Prince,” ODYSSEY, 30 Grove St., Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

After three decades of being either endangered or threatened, America’s bald eagle, its symbol of pride, has made a remarkable comeback. In June the U.S. took the the high-flying bird off the Endangered Species Act's "threatened" list. At a ceremony held on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, said, “The eagle has returned."

For a century (1870-1970) bald eagle populations severely declined because of hunting, habitat loss and the use of DDT. In 1963, there were only 417 breeding pairs in the lower 48. By 1970 , people feared it was facing near extinction. Further problems, such as habitat destruction, illegal shooting, and food-contamination raised concerns.

Now, there are 9,789 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states, all of which are protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which prohibits anyone without a permit from shooting, shooting at, poisoning, wounding, killing, capturing, trapping, collecting, molesting and disturbing bald eagles.

While the eagles have made a successful return, there are still 541 animals in the United States listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

Now hear this! Scientists at the biotech firm ViaLactia, in Auckland, New Zealand, have bred cows so that they produce skimmed milk!

Meet Marge, the cow. She’s like an ordinary Friesian cow, and produces a normal level of protein in her milk . But the milk also has substantially less fat, and the fat she does produce has much more unsaturated fat -- so the milk is less prone to cause heart disease. Her milk also contains very high levels of omega3 oils, which according to some sources, can improve brain power. (Hmmm.)

There’s more news! As reported in Chemistry & Industry, a journal of the Society of Chemical Industry, Marge has had calves that carried on her peculiar gene, so they too produce skimmed milk like their mother. Anyway, butter from these cows can be spread like margarine straight from the fridge. The Auckland-based company says the first commercial herds for spreadable butter could be expected by 2011.

Dr Susan Jebb, head of the Medical Research Council’s human nutrition unit, said such a milk could contribute to the nation’s health. The long-term hope, of course, is to establish herds of the new cattle to meet the demands of health-conscious consumers. But, naturally, the Food and Drug administration will have to ensure that the genetic mutations that produced the milk are not harmful in any way.

Bee-ware! There’s a buzz around that honey bee counts throughout the United States are . . .well, excuse the mixed metaphor. . .dropping like flies! According to a February 12, 2007, CNN Science & Story Web report, beekeepers in 22 states have reported losses of up to 80 percent of their colonies!

Jerry Bromenshenk, a professor at the University of Montana at Missoula and chief executive of Bee Alert Technology, a company monitoring the problem, told CNN that the loss is severe and unusual. If the trend continues, it will leave many bee farmers unable to rent their “honeys” to farmers who need the fuzzy little critters to pollinate crops such as almonds, apples, and blueberries -- all stuff that’s good for you!

Seriously, it could become a major problem. Financial loses for farmers could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars! One Pennsylvania beekeeper, for instance, told CNN that he had lost about 2,000 hives, which can each contain around 50,000 bees during the summer months! That kind of loss must sting! What’s most mystifying is that no one can pin down the culprit. In fact, when investigators go to the apparent scene of the crime (the hives), they are often empty, except for the queen and a few bees. That leaves them with a bee in their bonnet -- a feeling of frustration and no relief.

Sigh! Where’s Sherlock Holmes when you need him to solve The Mystery of the Colony Collapse Disorder. Yes, that’s the very scientific-sounding term scientists are calling the bee’s vanishing act. Indeed, not only are the hives empty, but no one knows where the bees have gone or what drove them away. Are they dead? Jeff Pettis, a bee researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, MD, says that parasitic mites and a lack of nectar in pollen may have killed them off. But, of course, that’s just a theory. Other researchers are investigating whether recent bee losses in some European countries, particularly Spain, might have something to do with what’s going on in the United States. A group of pesticides that were banned in some European countries, could somehow be affecting the bees innate ability to find their way back home, according to some researchers. Still others think the bees just might be stressed out.

Well, no need to speculate any further. It’s time for you to tell us what you think has happened to the bees. Send your thoughts to “To Bee, Or Not to Bee,” ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C. Peterborough, NH, 03458.

If the vanished commercial honeybees don’t come back to their hives, there’s hope on the horizon. As reported in the January 2006 issue of Science News, scientists at five bee laboratories, operated by the United States Department of Agriculture, are working with various species of solitary, or loner, bees to replace those in the vanishing swarms.

Beelieve it or not, while honeybees are commonly thought to live in hives, specialized hive dwellers are in the minority among bee species. At least 75 percent of the 4,500 bee species in the United States and Canada live solitary lives. And these independent fliers are happy to live in artificial condos or other manufactured studios fit for a queen. These loners hold great promise as crop pollinators. In fact, they may be called in to help commercial beekeepers, who rent their hives to farmers, who, in turn, use the bees to pollinate some 100 commercial crops in North America.

Alas, the pollination problem goes beyond the bees. Scientists, you see, are recording major declines in other wild pollinators, such as butterflies, moths, and bats. As reported in Science News, biologists have documented dramatic examples of plants nearing extinction after their specialized pollinator died off. Loner bees could be a solution, because they visit wild plants too. In fact, these widespread species can pollinate about 40,000 flowering plants! That’s nearly 17 percent of the known worldwide total! It’s also twice the total number of planet species pollinated by butterflies and moths, and more than 40 times the number serviced by birds! Only beetles do it better!

Can a worm smell drugs? Can insects detect explosives? Well, a $3.5 million (U.S.) cyber-nose project in Australia -- a collaboration between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (Australia’s national science agency), Monash University in Melbourne, and the Australian National University in Canberra -- aims to find out.

Stephen Trowell, who heads the biotechnology research team, believes that if he and his coworkers can artificially copy the way worms and insects process smells, they can build an electronic “cyber-nose” that might one day be able to do a wide range of sniff tests -- from measuring aromas and flavors in soft drinks to checking passengers at train stations and airports for traces of explosives. As reported in Scientific American, Trowell says that right now, doggies’ “wet noses” (can beat out instruments in detecting these subtle aromas. But he also believes that once researchers understand how worms and insects process smells, they will be able to replicate the process in an electronic nose.

Small as they are, worms and insects have simple genetic and nerve structures, which, Trowell says, make it easy for scientists to examine how they use their acute senses of smell. “They move toward something they like,” he says, “and move away from something they don’t like. And you can measure that.”

How soon might you expect to see a cyber-nose machine? Trowell estimates five to seven years. Until then, wet noses rule.

If a monkey sees you eat an ice cream cone, what will it do? Well, according to Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma, the monkey will enjoy eating that cone in its mind. You see, Rizzolatti and his team found a special class of brain cell, which they dubbed mirror neurons, that fire whenever the animal sees or hears an action that it has carried out on its own -- like eating. So if a monkey sees you bringing food to your mouth, mirror cells in the brain fire away, allowing it to anticipate what comes next.

Now it appears that we humans also have these mirror cells, but they are far smarter, more flexible, and more highly evolved than those in monkey brains. Our mirror cells have a specific function: to understand the actions, intentions, and emotions of others. It’s key to our survival, Rizzolatti told The New York Times. “Mirror neurons,” he explained, “allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.”

These neurons fire in response to chains of actions linked to intentions. That’s why if we observe someone picking up an ax in a certain way, with a certain expression, we can, in a sense, predict that person’s intentions, whether he or she is going to use it to chop wood or to. . .well, you get the picture. It’s all about survival.

Mirror neurons can explain many behaviors, such as why we feel itchy when we see a spider crawling up someone’s leg or why we feel someone else’s emotional or physical pain. They also can explain why children watching violent acts on the TV can become aggressive.

Then again, mirror neurons can also help us “see” or “imagine” how to perform a complicated task, like perfecting a putt or spinning on ice skates. All we have to do is observe, and our body feels how to perform the task. When it comes time for us to actually do the task, our minds are ready to help the body. Of course, it’s really practice that makes us perfect.

Watch out! Malaysian researchers are trying to turn a mild-mannered hamster into a man-eater!

It’s true! But don’t worry, because while the hunting hamster is real, it’s only a virtual man-eater. Welcome to Mice Arena, an augmented-reality computer game being developed at the Emerging Art and Architecture Research Group and the Mixed Reality Lab at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.

As reported in New Scientist magazine, Mice Arena could be the first in a new breed of games aimed at both people and their pets. Here’s how it works.

The researchers place a real hamster in a mazelike tank lined with infrared (invisible radiation wavelengths) sensors.

The tank also includes a tasty morsel of food to bait the hamster. As the hamster races for the bait, infrared sensors track its movements. These movements are then mimicked by a virtual monster hamster on a computer screen. On the screen, the bait is portrayed as a virtual human character, whose movements are controlled by a real human player.

As the player moves the bait on the screen (to evade the hungry hamster), actuators -- mechanisms that put something into automatic motion -- move the real bait around the tank’s floor, the shape of which matches the game's on-screen terrain.

The goal, of course, is for the human player to keep the bait away from the real rodent. The game ends when the virtual human has been caught or eaten, or when he or she has survived for a set period of time.

The game, which is still being developed (a working prototype could be ready as soon as November 2006), is expected to be played over the Internet. As Adrian David Cheok, director of the Mixed Reality Lab, told Science News, “The game should provide new ways for people to have fun with their pets, even when they are out of town.”

Just ask psychiatrist Eric Nestler of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He and his coworkers have been spending their days intimidating little brown mice. While the myth is that little mice can frighten elephants, many are really mild-mannered and tend to avoid confrontations. But not in Nestler’s lab!

As described in the journal Science, Nestler and his fellow researchers placed little brown mice in the cage of a large, aggressive white mouse. The big mouse cornered the little mice, and the researchers let that situation remain for five minutes.

Next, the researchers placed a clear Plexiglas divider (with little holes in it) between the big mouse and the little ones -- so that the little mice could still see and smell the big one -- and let them interact for 24 hours. When that time was up, the researchers started over again, this time placing the little mouse in a new cage with a new bully. This process went on for 10 days. Whew!

So, what happened? The bullied mice turned into. . .well, scaredy-cats. Even after a month, the jittery little things fearfully withdrew from even, presumably, friendly little mice.

When the mice were under stress, a substance produced in the brain (called BDNF) increased. The production of BDNF coincided with the mice becoming socially withdrawn. And this, apparently, is good. “If you’re constantly subjected to something bad, like being beaten up,” Nestler says, “it makes sense to avoid what’s beating you up.”

However, after 10 days of stress and BDNF production, genetic changes in the brain started to occur! Too much BDNF, researchers concluded, can have long-term effects, such as depression, on animal behavior. Nestler’s research may hold a key to understanding people with major depression who have other mental illnesses, such as social fears and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Our message for bullies: “Try picking on someone your own size!”

A new species of birdlike dinosaur has been found in southern Utah. While that news may sound somewhat ordinary, it’s not, especially if you consider that this dinosaur was a real turkey!

Yep. The new species, which is described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, resembled a 7-foot-tall turkey. Lindsay Zanno -- the lead dino-digger from the University of Utah who found the fossil -- says that the two-legged creature was probably brightly colored, ran as fast as an ostrich (about 25 mph), and ate meat.

An illustration of Hagryphus Giganteus

While Zanno and her colleagues don’t know whether the big bird had a feather fan on the back of its tail, its close cousins did, so it’s possible. Scientists are not sure what purpose the feathers served, but they were not for flying. "It's quite different from modern birds," she says of the new creature.

Zanno named the dinosaur Hagryphus giganteus, or “giant, four-footed, birdlike god of the Western desert,” but we think that you can do better. Send your suggestion to “Thanksdigging Turkey,” ODYSSEY, 30 Grove St., Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458. Or email it to odyssey@cobblestone.mv.com. We’ll publish some of your choices in an upcoming issue.

. . . In a car! Well, at least that’s how you should sneak up on a wild cat says Canadian psychologist Niko Troje at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario, who specializes in animal vision and behavior.

In a study funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the German Volkswagen Foundation (hint, hint) . . . and published in a recent issue of Current Biology magazine, Troje and his German colleague Cord Westhoff (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) say that the reason you can approach an animal in the wild more easily from a car than on foot may be due to a finely tuned “life detector” wired into the animal’s brain -- one that is programmed to detect the visual movements of an approaching predator’s feet.

To study the effect, Troje placed small reflective markers on the central joints of cats, pigeons, and humans. Next the researcher used high-speed video cameras to capture the movements of just the illuminated markers. Observers were shown videos of the illuminated markers as they changed patterns, and then tested on whether they could tell the direction of the object’s movement.

How’d they do? Well, the test subjects performed just fine -- until the scientists inverted the image; that’s when the observers could not say if the animal was moving to the right or left. From this, Troje and his researchers concluded that foot movement is an independent, important visual cue that indicates another animal is nearby.

By the way, what would make a scientist get started on research like this? How about a question by his young daughter, who asked him why she could get so much closer to wild rabbits in their neighborhood while riding on her bicycle rather than on foot. So what’s the answer? “The observation that it is relatively easy to get close to wild animals in a car, a canoe, or a similar vehicle,” Troje says, “might be due to the absence of the typical movement of the feet."

For a demonstration of the motion capture techniques used in this and other studies, see the web site of the Queen’s Motion Capture Laboratory at: http://www.bml.psyc.queensu.ca

Scientists at the San Diego-based bio-technology company, Allerca, have bred the world’s first hypoallergenic kitties! Megan Young, Allerca’s chief executive officer, says, “For the first time, people who have been unable to own a cat because of their allergies can now enjoy a pet of their own without the associated risks and costs of allergy treatments.”

According to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, 30 million Americans suffer from some form of cat allergy. Cat allergens are many, but the most common is a protein called FEL D1, which is found in cat fur, saliva, urine, and skin glands. When released into the environment, it sticks to furniture, carpets, and clothing, turning homes into allergy traps.

Some cats, however, produce just one-thousandth the FEL D1 of a normal cat. Allerca simply took advantage of this characteristic. Using a technique known as genetic divergence, Allerca scientists first identified the genes of kittens with proteins that provide less of an allergic reaction in humans. They then selectively bred litters over several generations to end up with an allergy-friendly “super cat” -- the current stock is closest to the Ragamuffin breed.

Now, just because you have a hypoallergenic kitty doesn’t mean you won’t have allergies. While allergy-prone people who handled the genetic divergent kitties showed no symptoms, they did suffer allergies when exposed to normal cats. But, the “super cats” may not be much comfort to the “super-sensitive.” Still, it’s progress.

So, the question is, how much would you pay for a hypoallergenic kitty? Try about $4,000! Think no one would pay that much? Think again. Allerca already reports a two-year backlog! The company expects the first deliveries to occur in early 2007. And it expects to breed 10,000 of the cats every year by 2009.

Just when we thought that we had the history of ancient mammals cast in stone, along comes a beaver and breaks the mold. That’s right: The discovery of Castorocauda lutrasimilis, a furry, beaverlike animal that swam with the dinosaurs, has shattered more than a century of scientific thinking about Jurassic mammals.

The Swimming Beaver

Qiang Ji, of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing, discovered the remains in the Inner Mongolia region of China. The new animal, which lived 164 million years ago, is really a mishmash of modern animals. It has a flat, scaly tail like a beaver; vertebra like an otter; and teeth like a seal -- hence its name: Castoro, Latin for beaver; cauda, for tail; lutra, for river otter; and similis, for similar. Whew!

So, what’s the big deal? Thomas Martin of the Research Institute Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany, told National Geographic news that the discovery pushes back the mammal conquest of the waters by more than 100 million years. Before this find, the earliest semi-aquatic mammals dated to 55 million years ago.

Dinosaur digger Zhe-Xi Luo of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, PA, adds that for more than a century, the stereotype of Jurassic mammals has been of tiny, shrewlike creatures, scurrying about in the underbrush trying to avoid the giant creatures that dominated the planet. “It gives a hint that early mammals were not just these shadowy creatures at the time of dinosaurs,” Luo says.

And, yes, you guessed it. It’s time to send in your unofficial name for this new aquatic wonder. Send your suggestions to “Beaversaurus,” ODYSSEY, 30 Grove St., Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458, or email them to odyssey@cobblestone.mv.com.

Well, normal birds haven’t had teeth for 70 million years. But biologist John Fallon and graduate student Matthew Harris of the University of Wisconsin know of one modern mutant that’s got quite a bite.

The discovery came late one night as Harris was examining a mutant chicken embryo whose beak had fallen off. Looking closely at the part of the bird’s mouth that had been hidden by the beak, Harris saw small bumps and conical protuberances along its edge that looked just like embryonic alligator teeth. After three years of further study, the scientists recently announced their findings in the journal Current Biology. It turns out that the growth of teeth in both alligators and chickens is regulated by the same gene. And by signaling the gene to do its job, chicken embryos can grow teeth similar to those found in alligator embryos. In other words, chickens, scientists say, retain the ability to grow teeth, even though birds lost this ability long ago.

While no one knows what signaled the gene in the mutant chicken, the idea of alligator teeth being found in a chicken is not at all that bizarre. That’s because alligators are actually the closest living relative to modern birds. The two are, in fact, cousins, who descended from a common ancestor -- the archosaur.

Why don’t normal chickens grow teeth? Some scientists suggest that they lost their teeth in order to reduce weight and drag in flight.

But. . .a-hem!. . .do chickens fly?

In fact, they can -- for short distances. The reason that we don’t see chickens “flying the coop” (so to say) is because they are bred to be big (for food) -- so they are too heavy to lift off. And when all you’re eating is chicken feed, who needs big teeth?

We’ve often been told that if it “ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That saying is certainly true for things natural. Take the spider web, for instance. That marvel of silk engineering has been a very effective way for spiders to nab a meal on the fly (pun intended) for a very long time.

How long? Well scientists in Spain believe they have in their possession the world’s oldest known spider's web. How old is it ? The web, which has 26 strands -- the longest of which is 2 1/4 inches (5.7 millimeters) long -- was spun by an orb weaving spider 110 million years ago! What’s more, it still has insects trapped in it . . . well, actually insects and pieces of insects: a wasp leg, a mite, a fly and a beetle; apparently the spider sucked out the wasp’s guts.

But how can something that old and frail still be hanging around (another pun intended)? You’ve probably guessed the answer. The web, you see has been preserved in a piece of amber. It was found in a pine forest near what is now Teruel in eastern Spain. The find (which was actually made in 2003 but whose age has been just recently determined) shows that spiders spun their webs when the dinosaurs still populated the Earth.

Did you hear? A possible new and mysterious carnivore species was recently discovered in the jungles of central Borneo. No kidding! The source is a December 2005 press release from the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF).