(Press-News.org) GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- University of Florida researchers presenting new fossil evidence of an exceptionally well-preserved 55-million-year-old North American mammal have found it shares a common ancestor with rodents and primates, including humans.
The study, scheduled to appear in the Oct. 11 online edition of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, describes the cranial anatomy of the extinct mammal, Labidolemur kayi. High resolution CT scans of the specimens allowed researchers to study minute details in the skull, including bone structures smaller than one-tenth of a millimeter. Similarities in bone features with other mammals show L. kayi's living relatives are rodents, rabbits, flying lemurs, tree shrews and primates.
Researchers said the new information will aide future studies to better understand the origin of primates.
"The specimens are among the only skulls of apatemyids known that aren't squashed completely flat," said study co-author Jonathan Bloch, an associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. "They're preserved in three dimensions, which allows us to look at the morphology of the bones in a way that we never could before."
Scientists have disputed the relationships of Apatemyidae, the family that includes L. kayi, for more than a century because of their unusual physical characteristics. With can opener-shaped upper front teeth and two unusually long fingers, apatemyids have been compared to a variety of animals, from opossums to woodpeckers.
"There are only a few examples in the history of mammals where you get such an incredibly odd ecological adaptation," Bloch said.
Like a woodpecker's method of feeding, L. kayi used percussive foraging, or tapping on trees, to locate insects. It stood less than a foot tall, was capable of jumping between trees and looked like a squirrel with a couple of really long fingers, similar to the aye-aye, a lemur native to Madagascar, Bloch said.
Apatemyids have been preserved for tens of millions of years and are well known from Europe and North America.
The skeletons analyzed in the publication were recovered from freshwater limestone in the Bighorn Basin by co-author Peter Houde of New Mexico State University. Located just east of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the site is known as one of the best in the world for studying the evolution of mammals during the 10 million years following the extinction of the dinosaurs, Bloch said.
Mary Silcox, first author of the study and a research associate at the Florida Museum, said scans of the specimens began about 10 years ago, during her postdoctoral work at The Pennsylvania State University.
"It's not like medical CT, it's actually an industrial CT scanner," said Silcox, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. "Because this is a small animal, we needed to be able to study it at a very high resolution. The high resolution CT data were a critical part."
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Doug Boyer of Stony Brook University is also a co-author of the study, part of the team's larger research to understand the relationships of apatemyids to other mammals. Bloch and colleagues are currently writing a detailed analysis of L. kayi's skeleton.
John Wible, curator of mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and one of the researchers who reviewed the study, said it provides valuable information for understanding the evolutionary relationships of mammals.
"It is now clear that any assessment of the origins of primates in the future will have to include apatemyids," Wible said. "Apatemyids are not some freakish dead-end, but significant members of our own history."
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Two separate research groups are reporting groundbreaking measurements of the fluid flow that surrounds freely swimming microorganisms. Experiments involving two common types of microbes reveal the ways that one creature's motion can affect its neighbors, which in turn can lead to collective motions of microorganism swarms. In addition, the research is helping to clarify how the motions of microscopic swimmers produces large scale stirring that distributes nutrients, oxygen and chemicals in lakes and oceans. A pair of papers describing the experiments will appear in the ...
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1Nasser Hanna et al; "Randomized Phase III Trial of Pemetrexed versus Docetaxel in Patients with Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer ...
Deaf or blind people often report enhanced abilities in their remaining senses, but up until now, no one has explained how and why that could be. Researchers at The University of Western Ontario, led by Stephen Lomber of The Centre for Brain and Mind have discovered there is a causal link between enhanced visual abilities and reorganization of the part of the brain that usually handles auditory input in congenitally deaf cats. The findings, published online in Nature Neuroscience, provide insight into the plasticity that may occur in the brains of deaf people.
Cats ...
JUPITER, Fl, October 7, 2010 – Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have uncovered new evidence that challenges the current theory about a process key to the way modern drugs are designed and how they work in the human body.
The new study was published October 10, 2010 in an advance, online edition of the journal Nature Chemical Biology.
Currently, the theory about ligands – compounds that bind to proteins and trigger a specific biological action – and how they bind to proteins runs along the lines of a one person-one vote paradigm. Ligands are considered ...
SAN FRANCISCO, CA—October 10, 2010—Scientists at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology (GIVI) have found that an enzyme associated with the storage of fat in the liver is required for the infectious activity of the hepatitis C virus (HCV). This discovery may offer a new strategy for treating the infection.
More than 160 million people are infected throughout the world, and no vaccine is available to prevent further spread of the disease. Current treatments are not effective against the most common strains in the US and Europe. The study, published in the ...
Palo Alto, CA—Researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, with colleagues at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, observed for the first time a fundamental process of cellular organization in living plant cells: the birth of microtubules by studying recruitment and activity of individual protein complexes that create the cellular protein network known as the microtubule cytoskeleton—the scaffolding that provides structure and ultimately form and shape to the cell. These fundamental results could be important to agricultural research and are published in ...
Strasbourg, 11 October 2010 - A Europe-wide network of labs focusing on RNA research is needed to make the most of RNA's high potential for treating a wide range of diseases. The recommendation for this virtual research institute comes from a panel of biologists at the European Science Foundation in a report published today, 'RNA World: a new frontier in biomedical research'.
Ten years on from the human genome project, RNA (ribonucleic acid) has stolen some of DNA's limelight. The basic ingredient of our genes, DNA long outshone the other form of genetic material in our ...
An international consortium has made significant inroads into uncovering the genetic basis of obesity by identifying 18 new gene sites associated with overall obesity and 13 that affect fat distribution. The studies include data from nearly a quarter of a million participants, the largest genetic investigation of human traits to date. The papers, both from the GIANT (Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits) consortium – which consists of more than 400 scientists from 280 research institutions worldwide – will appear in Nature Genetics and are receiving early online ...
Geologists studying the Jan. 12 Haiti earthquake say the risk of destructive tsunamis is higher than expected in places such as Kingston, Istanbul, and Los Angeles.
Like Haiti's capital, these cities all lie near the coast and near an active geologic feature called a strike-slip fault where two tectonic plates slide past each other like two hands rubbing against each other.
Until now, geologists did not consider the tsunami risk to be very high in these places because when these faults rupture, they usually do not vertically displace the seafloor much, which is how ...
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Physicists at Rutgers University have discovered new properties in a material that could result in efficient and inexpensive plastic solar cells for pollution-free electricity production.
The discovery, posted online and slated for publication in an upcoming issue of the journal Nature Materials, reveals that energy-carrying particles generated by packets of light can travel on the order of a thousand times farther in organic (carbon-based) semiconductors than scientists previously observed. This boosts scientists' hopes that solar cells based on ...
