Science
Yukon gold miner unearths a mummified Ice Age wolf pup – Ars Technica
This Ice Age wolf puppy doesn’t look much like a fearsome predator, what with her tiny puppy teeth and soft little ears. According to her DNA, however, the mummified puppy, named Zhùr, came from a population that’s among the ancestors of all modern wolves. Canada’s permafrost freeze-dried her remains shortly after her death around 57,000 years ago.
“She’s the most complete wolf mummy that’s ever been found. She’s basically 100 percent intact—all that’s missing are her eyes,” said Des Moines University paleontologist Julie Meachen.
Puppy surprise
In July 2016, miner Neil Loveless of Favron Enterprises was searching for gold in Alaska’s famed Klondike gold fields. He was water-blasting the frozen mud along the banks of Last Chance Creek. It’s a process called “hydraulic thawing,” meant to thaw and soften the frozen permafrost so miners can search for gold in the streambed deposits, an approach called placer mining. But Loveless found something far stranger and even more interesting than Klondike gold: a frozen, mummified wolf puppy.
“We thank [Loveless] for his keen eye spotting Zhùr as she was melting out of the permafrost, ensuring she was kept safe in a freezer, and then reporting the discovery to Yukon Paleontology,” wrote Meachen and her colleagues in a recent paper in the journal Current Biology. Studying Pleistocene wildlife in the Yukon means working with gold-mining companies, whose workers might be the first to spot something like Zhùr. Scientists like Meachen also work very closely with the people who have called this region home for thousands of years, like the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation.
Members of the group gave the puppy her name, Zhùr, which means “wolf” in the Hän language. Zhùr is a culturally significant find for the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, but they were also interested in how much the frozen puppy could teach us about Pleistocene wolves. The First Nation agreed to display the mummy at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Center in Whitehorse, where she has been cleaned, conserved, and studied.
“We are grateful for the partnership with Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in in our shared role in protecting and preserving heritage resources in the Klondike,” wrote Meachen and her colleagues.
Taking tiny samples from a few of Zhùr’s incredibly well-preserved hair follicles, Meachen and her colleagues radiocarbon dated the frozen puppy and studied the chemical isotopes in her body, which offered clues about what she ate and the climate in which she lived. They also sequenced her mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material passed down directly from mother to offspring.
The ancestors of modern wolves
Zhùr probably lived around 57,000 years ago, but it took three different dating methods to figure that out.
Radiocarbon dating could only tell Meachen and her colleagues that the mummy was older than 50,000 years. The puppy’s genome suggested that she’d lived sometime between 75,000 and 56,000 years ago, based on the rate at which wolf DNA collects mutations over time. And the oxygen isotopes in her body suggested that she had lived during the relatively warm period of Marine Isotope Stage 3, when warmer conditions led to smaller ratios of the isotope oxygen-18 in marine sediment cores—and in Zhùr’s body. MIS 3 spanned a period 57,000 to 29,000 years ago.
All of those possible dates overlapped at one point: 57,000 to 56,000 years ago. At the time, sea levels were much lower than today, and a region of dry land called Beringia connected Siberia and Canada. Animals moved freely back and forth between the continents, which is why Pleistocene wolves unearthed across Eurasia and North America are all so closely related. Zhùr’s mitochondrial DNA fit right into that group of closely related animals, or clade, with a common ancestor that lived between 86,000 and 67,500 years ago.
Zhùr and her clade are the ancestors of every wolf in the world (except possibly the high-altitude Himalayan wolves, which have apparently been doing their own thing for hundreds of thousands of years, according to a study earlier in 2020).
But because mitochondrial DNA gets passed down directly from mother to puppy, Meachen and her colleagues could tell that Zhùr wasn’t a direct ancestor of the wolves that roam the Klondike today. Sometime in the last 56,000 years or so, the Klondike wolf population died out or left the area, and another group of wolves—one less closely related to Zhùr—replaced it. At the moment, there’s not enough data to tell if the newcomers drove off, outcompeted, or just absorbed Zhùr’s relatives, but the puppy’s DNA hints at an interesting story yet to be explored.
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A gold miner found the mummified puppy and preserved her in a freezer until paleontologists could collect her.
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Conservators cleaned the mummified pup and even carefully brushed her fur.
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The puppy’s remains are dried out but mostly intact thanks to being buried in permafrost.
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X-rays showed how fully the puppy’s bones had developed, which paleontologists used to estimate her age.
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The puppy’s teeth are mostly intact, as are the details of her lips and gums.
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Permafrost mummies are very fragile, and you should not boop the snoot.
Wolves eat fish, too
If Zhùr couldn’t tell Meachen and her colleagues exactly what happened to a whole population of Klondike wolves, she could at least tell quite a bit of her own story. Based on how her bones had developed, the puppy was about 7 weeks old when she died. Since modern wolves in the area usually give birth in early summer, that means Zhùr probably died in July or early August, around the same time Loveless washed her out of the permafrost 57,000 years later.
By then, Zhùr’s mother had probably weaned her pups from milk and started bringing them real food. Modern wolf puppies start eating solid food at around 5 or 6 weeks old. In Zhùr’s case, that seems to have included a lot of fish, according to the amount of the isotope nitrogen-15 in her body. Nitrogen isotopes offer clues about how far up the food chain an animal might have been and whether more of its food came from land or water.
Given all the fish, the puppy’s breath must have been atrocious. “Normally, when you think of wolves in the Ice Age, you think of them eating bison or musk oxen or other large animals on land,” said Meachen. “One thing that surprised us was that she was eating aquatic resources, particularly salmon.”
Modern wolves in the Alaskan interior have been known to chow down on fish, at least in seasons when they’re readily available. And Zhùr’s den wasn’t far from the Klondike River, where Chinook salmon spawn today. The fish swim up the Yukon River to the Klondike, where they would have been a veritable buffet for a mother wolf looking to feed her pups.
How to freeze-dry an Ice Age predator
Obviously things didn’t end well for Zhùr, or we wouldn’t have a ridiculously adorable canid ice mummy to study today. Her burial can offer a few clues about her untimely end and her uncannily good preservation over the intervening millennia. She must have died in just the right conditions and been buried quickly—a rare combination. “The animal has to die in a permafrost location, where the ground is frozen all the time, and they have to get buried very quickly, like any other fossilization process,” said Meachen.
Animals that get killed by predators don’t tend to form perfectly preserved ice mummies, and animals that die from sickness or exposure also don’t tend to get buried quickly enough to freeze and mummify. And isotopic analysis suggests the puppy was well-nourished, so whatever happened, she probably wasn’t sick and definitely wasn’t starving.
Meachen and her colleagues think Zhùr’s den collapsed, killing her instantly and burying the remains in the freezing ground. “We feel a bit better knowing the poor little girl didn’t suffer for too long,” said Meachen.
There’s another question that Zhùr will never be able to answer, however: why was she alone in the den? Wolf mothers usually have four to six puppies at a time, but only Zhùr was buried alongside Last Chance Creek; no sign of her mother or littermates has turned up. “It could be that she was an only pup, or the other wolves weren’t in the den during the collapse,” said Meachen. “Unfortunately, we’ll never know.”
A cautionary tail
Permafrost mummies of large mammals, like mammoths, bears, and even wolves, are rare finds for paleontologists. But smaller ones, like ground squirrels and ferrets, turn up more often in places like Siberia and the Yukon. Meachen and her colleagues speculate that animals who lived in burrows or dens, including wolf pups, may have had better odds of getting preserved in the permafrost, especially if they died in cave-ins.
Even large permafrost mummy finds are getting more common, though. A cave bear emerged from the Siberian permafrost earlier this year, and it’s one of several recent finds. “One small upside of climate change is that we’re going to find more of these mummies as permafrost melts,” said Meachen. “That’s a good way for science to reconstruct that time better, but it also shows us how much our planet is actually warming.”
Current Biology, 2020 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.11.011 (About DOIs).
Science
April 20: Why this Indigenous researcher thinks we can do science differently and more… – CBC.ca
Quirks and Quarks54:00Why this Indigenous researcher thinks we can do science differently, and more…
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Physicists exploring the nature of reality need ever more capable particle colliders, so they’re exploring a successor to the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. But that new machine is at least decades away. Tova Holmes, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is one of the physicists calling for a different kind of collider that can come online before the end of her career – or her life. This device would use a particle not typically used in particle accelerators: the muon.
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Conspiracy theories seem to have multiplied in the internet era and so far, we haven’t had much luck in debunking these beliefs. The preliminary findings of a new study on PsyArXiv, a site for psychology studies that have yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that artificial intelligence may have more success. Thomas Costello, a postdoctoral psychology researcher at MIT was the lead author on this study, and said their findings can provide a window into how to better debunk conspiracy beliefs.
An Indigenous scientist explores the medicine the Earth needs
Quirks and Quarks19:12An Indigenous ecologist on why we need to stop and listen to save the planet
Earth day is April 22. And Earth is not in great shape to celebrate the day. Overheated, overpopulated, overexploited – we’re not being particularly careful with our planet. We talk to Indigenous ecologist Jennifer Grenz of the University of British Columbia about her new book, which is part memoir, part prescription for the medicine our planet needs – a compound of science and traditional wisdom. Her book is Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A journey toward personal and ecological healing.
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In a remarkable development, NASA has given the green light to the Dragonfly mission, a revolutionary rotorcraft designed to investigate the complex chemistry of Saturn‘s moon Titan.
This confirmation allows the mission to proceed with the final design, construction, and testing of the spacecraft and its scientific instruments.
Deciphering the prebiotic chemistry on Titan
The Dragonfly mission, led by Dr. Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will carry a cutting-edge instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS).
This powerful tool will help scientists delve into the intricate chemistry at work on Titan, potentially shedding light on the chemical processes that led to the emergence of life on Earth, known as prebiotic chemistry.
“We want to know if the type of chemistry that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth is taking place on Titan,” explains Dr. Trainer, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist specializing in Titan.
Titan: Dragonfly’s target
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is shrouded in a dense nitrogen-rich atmosphere, bears a striking resemblance to Earth in many ways. With a diameter of 5,150 kilometers, Titan is the second-largest moon in our solar system, surpassed only by Jupiter’s Ganymede.
Dense atmosphere and unique climate
One of Titan’s most distinctive features is its thick atmosphere, which is composed primarily of nitrogen and methane. This dense atmosphere creates a surface pressure 1.5 times higher than Earth’s, making it the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere.
The presence of methane in Titan’s atmosphere leads to a fascinating hydrological cycle, similar to Earth’s water cycle, but with methane as the primary liquid.
Titan’s surface is dotted with numerous lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons, predominantly methane and ethane. These liquid bodies, some of which are larger than the Great Lakes on Earth, are the result of Titan’s unique climate and atmospheric conditions.
The Cassini mission, which explored the Saturn system from 2004 to 2017, provided stunning images and data of these extraterrestrial lakes and seas.
Dragonfly mission to search Titan for prebiotic chemistry and life
The complex chemistry occurring on Titan’s surface and in its atmosphere has drawn significant attention from astrobiologists.
With its abundant organic compounds and the presence of liquid methane, Titan is considered a prime candidate for studying prebiotic chemistry and the potential for life to emerge in environments different from Earth.
Beneath Titan’s icy crust lies another intriguing feature: a global subsurface ocean of liquid water and ammonia. This ocean, which is believed to be salty and have a high pH, may potentially host microbial life.
The presence of this subsurface ocean, along with the unique chemistry on Titan’s surface, makes this moon a fascinating target for future exploration and scientific research.
Pushing the boundaries of rotorcraft exploration
Nicky Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, emphasized the significance of the Dragonfly mission, stating, “Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth.”
Titan’s unique characteristics, including its abundant complex carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean, and past presence of liquid water on the surface, make it an ideal destination for studying prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment.
Innovative design and cutting-edge technology
The Dragonfly robotic rotorcraft will leverage Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere to fly between different points of interest on the moon’s surface, spanning several miles apart.
This innovative approach allows the entire suite of instruments to be relocated to new sites once the previous one has been thoroughly explored, providing access to samples from diverse geological environments.
DraMS, developed by the same team responsible for the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard the Curiosity rover, will analyze surface samples using techniques tested on Mars.
Dr. Trainer emphasized the benefits of this heritage, stating, “This design has given us an instrument that’s very flexible, that can adapt to the different types of surface samples.”
Dragonfly mission challenges and funding
The Dragonfly mission successfully passed its Preliminary Design Review in early 2023. However, due to funding constraints, the mission was asked to develop an updated budget and schedule.
The revised plan, presented and conditionally approved in November 2023, hinged on the outcome of the fiscal year 2025 budget process.
With the release of the president’s fiscal year 2025 budget request, Dragonfly is now confirmed with a total lifecycle cost of $3.35 billion and a launch date set for July 2028.
This reflects a cost increase of approximately two times the initially proposed cost and a delay of more than two years from the original selection in 2019.
Despite the challenges posed by funding constraints, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, and an in-depth design iteration, NASA remains committed to the Dragonfly mission.
Additional funding has been provided for a heavy-lift launch vehicle to shorten the mission’s cruise phase and compensate for the delayed arrival at Titan.
Rigorous testing and validation
To ensure the success of the Dragonfly mission, researchers on Earth have conducted extensive testing and validation of the designs and models for the nuclear-powered, car-sized drone.
The mission team has carried out test campaigns at NASA’s Langley Research Center, utilizing the Subsonic Tunnel and the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel (TDT) to validate computational fluid dynamics models and gather data under simulated Titan atmospheric conditions.
Ken Hibbard, Dragonfly mission systems engineer at APL, emphasized the importance of these tests, stating, “All of these tests feed into our Dragonfly Titan simulations and performance predictions.”
As the Dragonfly mission progresses, it marks a new era of exploration and scientific discovery. Dr. Trainer expressed her excitement, saying, “Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission.”
Turning science fiction into fact with the Dragonfly mission
In summary, the Dragonfly mission embodies the essence of human curiosity and the relentless pursuit of knowledge. As NASA prepares to send this revolutionary rotorcraft to the alien world of Titan, we stand on the brink of a new era of exploration and discovery.
With its innovative design, cutting-edge technology, and the unwavering dedication of the mission team, Dragonfly will unlock the secrets of prebiotic chemistry and shed light on the potential for life beyond Earth.
As we eagerly await the launch of this titanic mission, we can only imagine the wonders that await us on Saturn’s enigmatic moon. The Dragonfly mission is a testament to the indomitable human spirit and our boundless capacity to push the frontiers of knowledge.
In the words of Ken Hibbard, “With Dragonfly, we’re turning science fiction into exploration fact,” and that fact will undoubtedly inspire generations to come.
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Science
Marine plankton could act as alert in mass extinction event: UVic researcher – Langley Advance Times
A University of Victoria micropaleontologist found that marine plankton may act as an early alert system before a mass extinction occurs.
With help from collaborators at the University of Bristol and Harvard, Andy Fraass’ newest paper in the Nature journal shows that after an analysis of fossil records showed that plankton community structures change before a mass extinction event.
“One of the major findings of the paper was how communities respond to climate events in the past depends on the previous climate,” Fraass said in a news release. “That means that we need to spend a lot more effort understanding recent communities, prior to industrialization. We need to work out what community structure looked like before human-caused climate change, and what has happened since, to do a better job at predicting what will happen in the future.”
According to the release, the fossil record is the most complete and extensive archive of biological changes available to science and by applying advanced computational analyses to the archive, researchers were able to detail the global community structure of the oceans dating back millions of years.
A key finding of the study was that during the “early eocene climatic optimum,” a geological era with sustained high global temperatures equivalent to today’s worst case global warming scenarios, marine plankton communities moved to higher latitudes and only the most specialized plankton remained near the equator, suggesting that the tropical temperatures prevented higher amounts of biodiversity.
“Considering that three billion people live in the tropics, the lack of biodiversity at higher temperatures is not great news,” paper co-leader Adam Woodhouse said in the release.
Next, the team plans to apply similar research methods to other marine plankton groups.
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