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 Evolutionary newsWhen Ruby Reynolds and her father found a fossil on an English beach, they didn’t know it belonged to an 82-foot ichthyosaur that swam during the days of the dinosaurs. April 17, 2024 In 1811, a 12-year-old girl named Mary Anning discovered a fossil on the beach near her home in southwestern England — the first scientifically identified specimen of an ichthyosaur, a dolphin-like, ocean-dwelling reptile from the time of the dinosaurs. Two centuries later, less than 50 miles away, an 11-year-old girl named Ruby Reynolds found a fossil from another ichthyosaur. It appears to be the largest marine reptile known to science. Ms. Reynolds, now 15, and her father, Justin Reynolds, have been fossil hunting for 12 years near their home in Braunton, England. On a family outing in May 2020 to the village of Blue Anchor along the estuary of the River Severn, they came across a piece of fossilized bone set on a rock. “We were both excited as we had never found a piece of fossilized bone as big as this before,” Mr. Reynolds said. His daughter kept searching the beach, he added, “and it wasn’t long before she found another much larger piece of bone.” They took home the fragments of bone, the largest of which was about eight inches long, and began their research. A 2018 paper provided a hint at what they’d found: In nearby Lilstock, fossil hunters had discovered similar bone fragments, hypothesized to be part of the jaw bone of a massive ichthyosaur that lived roughly 202 million years ago. However, the scientists who’d worked on the Lilstock fossil had deemed that specimen too incomplete to designate a new species. Mr. Reynolds contacted those researchers: Dean Lomax, at the University of Bristol, and Paul de la Salle, an amateur fossil collector. They joined the Reynolds family on collecting trips in Blue Anchor, digging in the mud with shovels. Ultimately, they found roughly half of a bone that they estimate would have been more than seven feet long when complete. Several features of the bone’s shape indicate that it came from an ichthyosaur’s jaw. To further confirm its identity, the researchers collaborated with Marcello Perillo, a paleontologist with the University of Bonn in Germany. Under a microscope, he found crisscrossed collagen fibers, an ichthyosaur trait. He also saw that despite the giant size of the jaw bone, the reptile hadn’t finished growing when it died. Taken together, the fossils from Blue Anchor and Lilstock offered evidence of something special. “Having two examples of the same bone that preserved all the same unique features, from the same geologic time zone, supported the identification that we’ve kind of toyed around with before, that it’s got to be something new,” Dr. Lomax said. “That’s when it got really exciting.” He and his co-authors of a paper describing the fossil in the journal PLOS One on Wednesday named it Ichthyotitan severnensis, the giant fish lizard of the Severn. Their estimates suggest Ichthyotitan could have been up to 82 feet long, rivaling the size of a blue whale and making it the largest marine reptile known to science. It lived right before a massive extinction that ended the Triassic Period. “Inevitably with big extinction events of course, it’s the big things that go first, and so in this case, literally the biggest things in the ocean, they are wiped out, and this entire family disappears,” Dr. Lomax said. Erin Maxwell, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History, Stuttgart in Germany who was not involved with the study, said that the find sheds light on ichthyosaur evolution. “Before, there were hints that there were these giant ichthyosaurs approaching the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, but the amount of evidence is becoming incontrovertible at this point,” she said. Dr. Lomax said that this discovery also highlighted the importance of amateur fossil collectors. “If you have a keen eye, if you have a passion for something like that, you can make discoveries like this,” he said. Ruby Reynolds said: “I didn’t realize when I first found the piece of ichthyosaur bone how important it was and what it would lead to. I think the role that young people can play in science is to enjoy the journey of exploring as you never know where a discovery may take you.” |
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Deep Learning AI Discovers Essential Antibiotics www.nature.com Oops, close but not right. Try this one: www.nature.com So by tracing evolution’s past, novel molecules from extinct species can be resurrected. Many of these attack the cytoplasm instead of the outer membrane, which I anticipate would make it tougher to evolve resistance. “Molecules serve as records of evolutionary history and may provide blueprints for therapeutic design. We recently introduced the term molecular de-extinction, referring to the resurrection of extinct molecules of life to tackle contemporary challenges such as antibiotic resistance. By uncovering a new sequence space of previously unexplored molecules, molecular de-extinction offers a promising approach to expand our vision of life’s molecular diversity while helping unveil molecules that may play a role in host immunity throughout evolution. Molecular de-extinction has already yielded preclinical antibiotic candidates such as neanderthalin-1 (A0A343EQH4-LAM11).” So would creationists or any of those who despise evolutionary science have ever hit on this technique? Highly unlikely. “Approaches of computational and artificial intelligence have recently been developed for antibiotic discovery. For example, machine-learning (ML) models have been used to generate antibiotics and to predict antimicrobial activity, haemolysis and antimicrobial resistance. Recently, computational methods have been developed to discover new antibiotics through proteome mining. We previously mined the human proteome as a source of antibiotics and identified encrypted peptides (EPs), fragments within proteins that possess antimicrobial properties. We hypothesized that EPs exist not only in modern humans but also throughout evolution. Thus, subsequently, through paleoproteome mining and ML, we identified similar molecules in ancient humans. Altogether, these recent computational efforts have greatly accelerated our ability to discover new preclinical antibiotic candidates.” Anyway, it is truly revolutionary research that stands to save millions of lives a year in the near future. Scientists have been claiming for decades the power of evolution in medical research, and this study certainly proves that yet again, most decisively. |
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When you cross a koala with a wombat, you get... She genuinely expected this article to be rejected because it stepped on too many vested interest toes, but it got through anyway. Now a prominent American academic has asked permission to pick it up and run with it. www.tandfonline.com |
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Bob |
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bobspringett I hope she receives all the recognition, fund's and credit for all of her hard work. |
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Patz 09:05 But she's not going to get any funding for this. She's not proposing any clinical trials or tests, just analysing studies done to date by others. It's costing her plenty of time, but not much cash. She wasn't the lead author in this paper, as she was in the previous one. Maree Flaherty, the lead author, agreed to participate in drafting the study because she is one of the most respected ophthalmologists in Australia. Jess has worked in her paediatric practice for twenty years now, first as a clinical orthoptist and now as her office manager. They thought that her heavy weight reputation gave them a better chance at publication. Most of the other authors are Jess' colleagues from Sydney University, where she lectures. The aim is not to gain funding for their own programme, but to encourage proper scientific research into these questions instead of the 'sales pitch' approach by the 'Behavioural' school. Even a skim through her article will show that the 'evidence' quoted by the Behavioural types is scientifically worthless, there rarely being any definition of exactly how what is being measured relates to the condition being diagnosed, the failure to provide double-blind methodology, self-selecting samples, reliance on self-reporting, and a host of other methodological flaws. Unfortunately (or probably fortunately), most practitioners already know this, and most researchers have better areas of study than to prove what is already the accepted understanding and will probably have no effect on the holdouts anyway because that's how they make their living. A bit like trying to logically show Trump supporters that the 2020 election was NOT stolen. If dyslexia could be 'cured' by increasing eye scan rates and reducing 'glare', then a good speed reader should be able to understand books in foreign languages! It is bleeding obvious even at that level that dyslexia is a cognitive problem, not a visual defect! Her point is that these 'behavioural' approaches are not only a waste of time and money (though she is disciplined enough to say only that they are 'without valid evidence'), but they also delay proper treatment for a condition in which the benefits of early intervention has been conclusively demonstrated. Delay means a permanent reduction in effectiveness. |
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riaannieman 08-Apr-25, 00:13 |
Deleted by riaannieman on 08-Apr-25, 00:41.
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Not to detract from the effort of Jessica Crippe and the rest of the team, I have come across the following article which piqued my interest. I have family that are involved in attempts to breed a facsimile of the extinct Cape Quagga, a zebra like animal with buff or brown hind quarters. It is accepted that the quagga which they are attempting to breed will not be a genetic copy, but rather a product of a carefully chosen breeding program which will resemble the quagga closely. I shall contact my cousin later today and share this article below with her, hoping that the scientific progress and techniques used by the team in the article will assist my cousin to return the quagga. (vredenheim.activitar.com vredenheim.co.za) They also breed lions for release into the wild, and they are involved in other breeding programs to help rescue endangered species. The nostalgic hope of returning to life such animals as the dire wolf, of which I read so much (long before I even knew of the author GRR Martin or his books in which the dire wolf played a role), as well as other fearsome and fierce beasts such as the sabre tooth cat, the Phorusrhacidae (Terror Birds), giant sloth, Haast's eagle, dodo and the thylacine has surfaced in my mind from time to time, purely for the opportunity to behold such majestic beasts alive myself. I mean, many of these animals we missed by a mere 10 000 to 15 000 years. That is a mere blink of the eye. Humankind has been directly responsible for many of these extinctions, and the opportunity to revive these species is a responsibility which we must shoulder. Just think about it: the Megalania wandering Australia again, the Woolly Mammoth back in Siberia and other northern parts of the world...... www.msn.com www.dailymail.co.uk |
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Life is Older than We Thought dailygalaxy.com |
