̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Natural History Museum

AI takes flight to revolutionise forest monitoring

plc32 — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 14:43:32 +0000

Cambridge researchers are harnessing artificial intelligence to improve how forests are monitored. Associate Professor Dr Emily Lines and Research Associate Dr Harry Owen are using billions of laser-captured data points to measure biodiversity and make carbon accounting more accurate.

Earth’s earliest sea creatures drove evolution by stirring the water

jg533 — Fri, 17 May 2024 15:01:02 +0000

A study involving the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has used virtual recreations of the earliest animal ecosystems, known as marine animal forests, to demonstrate the part they played in the evolution of our planet.

Using state-of-the-art computer simulations of fossils from the Ediacaran time period - approximately 565 million years ago - scientists discovered how these animals mixed the surrounding seawater. This may have affected the distribution of important resources such as food particles and could have increased local oxygen levels.

Through this process, the scientists think these early communities could have played a crucial role in shaping the initial emergence of large and complex organisms prior to a major evolutionary radiation of different forms of animal life, the so-called Cambrian ‘explosion’.

Over long periods of time, these changes might have allowed life forms to perform more complicated functions, like those associated with the evolution of new feeding and movement styles.

̽��ֱ��study was led by the Natural History Museum and is published today in the journal Current Biology.

Dr Emily Mitchell at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, a co-author of the report, said: “It’s exciting to learn that the very first animals from 580 million years ago had a significant impact on their environment, despite not being able to move or swim. We’ve found they mixed up the water and enabled resources to spread more widely - potentially encouraging more evolution.”

Scientists know from modern marine environments that nutrients like food and oxygen are carried in seawater, and that animals can affect water flow in ways that influence the distribution of these resources.

To test how far back this process goes in Earth’s history, the team looked at some of the earliest examples of marine animal communities, known from rocks at Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, Canada. This world-famous fossil site perfectly preserves early life forms thanks to a cover of volcanic ash (sometimes referred to as an ‘Ediacaran Pompeii’).

Although some of these life forms look like plants, analysis of their anatomy and growth strongly suggests they are animals. Owing to the exceptional preservation of the fossils, the scientists could recreate digital models of key species, which were used as a basis for further computational analyses.

First author Dr Susana Gutarra, a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum, said: “We used ecological modelling and computer simulations to investigate how 3D virtual assemblages of Ediacaran life forms affected water flow. Our results showed that these communities were capable of ecological functions similar to those seen in present-day marine ecosystems.”

̽��ֱ��study showed that one of the most important Ediacaran organisms for disrupting the flow of water was the cabbage-shaped animal Bradgatia, named after Bradgate Park in England. ̽��ֱ��Bradgatia from Mistaken Point are among some of the largest fossils known from this site, reaching diameters of over 50 centimetres.

Through their influence on the water around them, the scientists believe these Ediacaran organisms might have been capable of enhancing local oxygen concentrations. This biological mixing might also have had repercussions for the wider environment, possibly making other areas of the sea floor more habitable and perhaps even driving evolutionary innovation.

Dr Imran Rahman, lead author and Principal Researcher at the Natural History Museum, said: “ ̽��ֱ��approach we’ve developed to study Ediacaran fossil communities is entirely new in palaeontology, providing us with a powerful tool for studying how past and present marine ecosystems might shape and influence their environment.”

̽��ֱ��research was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council and the US National Science Foundation.

Reference: Gutarra-Diaz, S. “Ediacaran marine animal forests and the ventilation of the oceans.” May 2024, Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.04.059

Adapted from a press release by the Natural History Museum

3D reconstructions suggest that simple marine animals living over 560 million years ago drove the emergence of more complex life by mixing the seawater around them

It’s exciting to learn that the very first animals from 580 million years ago had a significant impact on their environment, despite not being able to move or swim.

Emily Mitchell

Hugo Salais, Metazoa Studio

Artistic recreation of the marine animal forest

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

Six new species of tiny frog discovered in Mexico

jg533 — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 08:19:27 +0000

̽��ֱ��size of a thumbnail, they don't have a tadpole stage and live in a 'secret world' on the forest floor

Ambitious project launched to map genomes of all life in British Isles

jg533 — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:01:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��£9.4m funding will support a collaboration of ten research institutes, museums and associated organisations to launch the first phase of sequencing all the species on the British Isles. This will see the teams collect and ‘barcode’ around 8,000 key British species of animal, plant and fungi, and deliver high-quality genomes of 2,000 species.

Exploring the genomes – the entire DNA - of these species will give an unprecedented insight into how life on Earth evolved. It will uncover new genes, proteins and metabolic pathways to help develop drugs for infectious and inherited diseases.

At a time when many species are under threat from climate change and human development, the data will also help characterise, catalogue and support conservation of global biodiversity for future generations.

“This project is the start of a transformation for biological research. It will change our relationship to the natural world by enabling us to understand life as never before,” said Professor Richard Durbin in Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Genetics, who will lead the ̽��ֱ��’s involvement in the collaboration. “It will create a knowledge resource for others to build on, just as we’ve seen with the Human Genome Project for human health.”

From the small fraction of the Earth’s species that have been sequenced, enormous advances have been made in knowledge and biomedicine. From plants, a number of lifesaving drugs have been discovered and are now being created in the lab – such as artemisinin for malaria and taxol for cancer.

Assembling the full genetic barcode of each species from the millions of genetic fragments generated in the sequencing process will rely on the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s expertise in computational analysis.

“Genome assembly is like doing a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. ̽��ֱ��genome revolution is all about information, and our ability to put the sequencing data together is based on cutting-edge computing techniques,” said Dr Shane McCarthy at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who will work on the project with Professor Durbin.

̽��ֱ��project will identify and collect specimens that will include plants from the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Botanic Garden. It will set up new pipelines and workflows to process large numbers of species through DNA preparation, sequencing, assembly, gene finding and annotation. New methods will be developed for high-throughput and high-quality assembly of genomes and their annotation, and data will be shared openly through existing data sharing archives and project specific portals.

̽��ֱ��10 institutes involved in the project are:

• ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge
• Earlham Institute (EI)
• ̽��ֱ�� of Edinburgh
• EMBL’s-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
• ̽��ֱ��Marine Biological Association (Plymouth)
• Natural History Museum
• Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
• Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
• ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford
• Wellcome Sanger Institute

̽��ֱ��consortium ultimately aims to sequence the genetic code of 60,000 species that live in the British Isles. Its work will act as a launchpad for a larger ambition to sequence all species on Earth, as part of the Earth Biogenome Project.

Dr Michael Dunn, Head of Genetics and Molecular Sciences at Wellcome, said, “ ̽��ֱ��mission to sequence all life on the British Isles is ambitious, but by bringing together this diverse group of organisations we believe that we have the right team to achieve it. We’ll gain new insights into nature that will help develop new treatments for infectious diseases, identify drugs to slow ageing, generate new approaches to feeding the world and create new bio-materials.”

Adapted from a press release by Wellcome.

An unprecedented insight into the diverse range of species on the British Isles will be made possible by Wellcome funding to the Darwin Tree of Life project.

This project is the start of a transformation for biological research.

Richard Durbin

Jim Haseloff

Liverwort (Pellia epiphylla)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Study identifies dinosaur ‘missing link’

sc604 — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 23:01:26 +0000

A bizarre dinosaur which looked like a raptor but was in fact a vegetarian may be the missing link between plant-eating dinosaurs and theropods, the group that includes carnivores such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor.

Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the Natural History Museum used a comprehensive dataset to analyse more than 450 anatomical characteristics of early dinosaurs and correctly place the creature, known as Chilesaurus, in the dinosaur family tree. Their results, reported in the journal Biology Letters, suggest that Chilesaurus effectively fills a large gap between two of the major dinosaur groups, and shows how the divide between them may have happened.

Chilesaurus, which was discovered in southern Chile, was first described in 2015. It lived during the Late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago, and has an odd collection of physical characteristics, which made it difficult to classify. For example, its head resembles that of a carnivore, but it has flat teeth for grinding up plant matter.

“Chilesaurus almost looks like it was stitched together from different animals, which is why it baffled everybody,” said Matthew Baron, a PhD student in Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences and the paper’s joint first author.

Earlier research suggested that this peculiar dinosaur belonging to the group Theropoda, the ‘lizard-hipped’ group of dinosaurs that includes Tyrannosaurus, but the new study suggests that it was probably a very early member of a completely different group, called Ornithischia. This shuffling of the dinosaur family tree has major implications for understanding the origins of Ornithischia, the ‘bird-hipped’ group of dinosaurs that includes Stegosaurus, Triceratops and Iguanodon.

̽��ֱ��bird-hipped dinosaurs have several common physical traits: the two most notable of these are an inverted, bird-like hip structure and a beak-like structure for eating. ̽��ֱ��inverted hips allowed for bigger, more complex digestive systems, which in turn allowed larger plant-eaters to evolve.

While Chilesaurus has a bird-like hip structure, and has flat teeth for grinding up plants, it does not possess the distinctive ‘beak’ of many other bird-hipped dinosaurs, which is what makes it such an important find.

“Before this, there were no transitional specimens – we didn’t know what order these characteristics evolved in,” said Baron. “This shows that in bird-hipped dinosaurs, the gut evolved first, and the jaws evolved later – it fills the gap quite nicely.”

“Chilesaurus is one of the most puzzling and intriguing dinosaurs ever discovered,” said co-author Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum. “Its weird mix of features places it in a key position in dinosaur evolution and helps to show how some of the really big splits between the major groups might have come about.”

“There was a split in the dinosaur family tree, and the two branches took different evolutionary directions,” said Baron. “This seems to have happened because of change in diet for Chilesaurus. It seems it became more advantageous for some of the meat eating dinosaurs to start eating plants, possibly even out of necessity.”

Earlier this year, the same group of researchers argued that dinosaur family groupings need to be rearranged, re-defined and re-named. In a study published in Nature, the researchers suggested that bird-hipped dinosaurs and lizard-hipped dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus evolved from a common ancestor, potentially overturning more than a century of theory about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs.

Although their dataset has already thrown up some surprising results, the researchers say that as it currently analyses only early dinosaurs, there are probably many more surprises about dinosaur evolution to be found, once characteristics of later dinosaurs are added.

̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Reference:
Matthew G. Baron and Paul M. Barrett. ‘A dinosaur missing-link? Chilesaurus and the early evolution of ornithischian dinosaurs.’ Biology Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0220

A ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ dinosaur may be the missing link between two major dinosaur groups, plugging what was previously a big gap between them.

Chilesaurus almost looks like it was stitched together from different animals, which is why it baffled everybody.

Matthew Baron

Nobu Tamura

Life reconstruction of Chilesaurus diegosuarezi

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

New study shakes the roots of the dinosaur family tree

ps748 — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 17:16:55 +0000

For 130 years palaeontologists have been working with a classification system in which dinosaur species have been placed in to two distinct categories: Ornithischia and Saurischia. But now, after careful analysis of dozens of fossil skeletons and tens of thousands of anatomical characters, the researchers have concluded that these long-accepted familial groupings may, in fact, be wrong and that the traditional names need to be completely altered.

̽��ֱ��classification of dinosaurs dates back to Victorian times. Dinosaurs were first recognised as a unique group of fossil reptiles in 1842 as a result of the work of the anatomist, Professor Richard Owen (who later went on to found the Natural History Museum in London). Over subsequent decades, various species were named as more and more fossils were found and identified. During the latter half of the 19th century it was realised that dinosaurs were anatomically diverse and attempts were made to classify them into groups that shared particular features.

It was Harry Govier Seeley, a palaeontologist trained in Cambridge under the renowned geologist Adam Sedgwick, who determined that dinosaurs fell quite neatly into two distinct groupings, or clades; Saurischia or Ornithischia. This classification was based on the arrangement of the creatures’ hip bones and in particular whether they displayed a lizard-like pattern (Saurischia) or a bird-like one (Ornithischia).

As more dinosaurs were described it became clear that they belonged to three distinct lineages; Ornithischia, Sauropodomorpha and Theropoda. In 1887 Seeley placed the sauropodomorphs (which included the huge ‘classic’ dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Brontosaurus) together with the theropods (which included T. rex), in the Saurischia. ̽��ֱ��ornithischians and saurischians were at first thought to be unrelated, each having a different set of ancestors, but later study showed that they all evolved from a single common ancestor.

This new analysis of dinosaurs and their near relatives, published today in the journal Nature, concludes that the ornithischians need to be grouped with the theropods, to the exclusion of the sauropodomorphs. It has long been known that birds (with their obviously ‘bird-like’ hips) evolved from theropod dinosaurs (with their lizard-like hips). However, the re-grouping of dinosaurs proposed in this study shows that both ornithischians AND theropods had the potential to evolve a bird-like hip arrangement- they just did so at different times in their history.

Lead author, Matthew Baron, says:

“When we started our analysis, we puzzled as to why some ancient ornithischians appeared anatomically similar to theropods. Our fresh study suggested that these two groups were indeed part of the same clade. This conclusion came as quite a shock since it ran counter to everything we’d learned.”

“ ̽��ֱ��carnivorous theropods were more closely related to the herbivorous ornithischians and, what’s more, some animals, such as Diplodocus, would fall outside the traditional grouping that we called dinosaurs. This meant we would have to change the definition of the ‘dinosaur’ to make sure that, in the future, Diplodocus and its near relatives could still be classed as dinosaurs.”

̽��ֱ��revised grouping of Ornithischia and Theropoda has been named the Ornithoscelida which revives a name originally coined by the evolutionary biologist, Thomas Henry Huxley in 1870.

Co-author, Dr David Norman, of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, says:

“ ̽��ֱ��repercussions of this research are both surprising and profound. ̽��ֱ��bird-hipped dinosaurs, so often considered paradoxically named because they appeared to have nothing to do with bird origins, are now firmly attached to the ancestry of living birds.”

For 130 years palaeontologists have considered the phylogeny of the dinosaurs in a certain way. Our research indicates they need to look again at the creatures’ evolutionary history. This is simply science in action. You draw conclusions from one body of evidence and then new data or theories present themselves and you have to suddenly reconsider and adapt your thinking. All the major textbooks covering the topic of the evolution of the vertebrates will need to be re-written if our suggestion survives academic scrutiny.”

While analysing the dinosaur family trees the team arrived at another unexpected conclusion. For many years, it was thought that dinosaurs originated in the southern hemisphere on the ancient continent known as Gondwana. ̽��ֱ��oldest dinosaur fossils have been recovered from South America suggesting the earliest dinosaurs originated there. But as a result of a re-examination of key taxa it’s now thought they could just as easily have originated on the northern landmass known as Laurasia, though it must be remembered that the continents were much closer together at this time.

Co-author, Prof Paul Barrett, of the Natural History Museum, says:

"This study radically redraws the dinosaur family tree, providing a new framework for unravelling the evolution of their key features, biology and distribution through time. If we're correct, it explains away many prior inconsistencies in our knowledge of dinosaur anatomy and relationships and it also highlights several new questions relating to the pace and geographical setting of dinosaur origins".

̽��ֱ��research was funded through a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) CASE studentship.

Matthew Baron et al: 'A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and early dinosaur evolution' Nature, 23 March 2017

10.1038/nature21700

A short video guide has been prepared by the Natural History Museum to accompany this paper.

More than a century of theory about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs has been turned on its head following the publication of new research from scientists at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Natural History Museum in London. Their work suggests that the family groupings need to be rearranged, re-defined and re-named and also that dinosaurs may have originated in the northern hemisphere rather than the southern, as current thinking goes.

This conclusion came as quite a shock since it ran counter to everything we'd learned

Matthew Baron

Pascal Godefroid

Kulindadromeus, a small bipedal ornithischian dinosaur that is now part of the new grouping Ornithoscelida and identified as more obviously sharing an ancestry with living birds

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

A 100 million-year partnership on the brink of extinction

sc604 — Tue, 24 May 2016 23:25:07 +0000

A relationship that has lasted for 100 million years is at serious risk of ending, due to the effects of environmental and climate change. A species of spiny crayfish native to Australia and the tiny flatworms that depend on them are both at risk of extinction, according to researchers from the UK and Australia.

Look closely into one of the cool, freshwater streams of eastern Australia and you might find a colourful mountain spiny crayfish, from the genus Euastacus. Look even closer and you could see small tentacled flatworms, called temnocephalans, each only a few millimetres long. Temnocephalans live as specialised symbionts on the surface of the crayfish, where they catch tiny food items, or inside the crayfish’s gill chamber where they can remove parasites. This is an ancient partnership, but the temnocephalans are now at risk of coextinction with their endangered hosts. Coextinction is the loss of one species, when another that it depends upon goes extinct.

In a new study, researchers from the UK and Australia reconstructed the evolutionary and ecological history of the mountain spiny crayfish and their temnocephalan symbionts to assess their coextinction risk. This study was based on DNA sequences from crayfish and temnocephalans across eastern Australia, sampled by researchers at James Cook ̽��ֱ��, sequenced at the Natural History Museum, London and Queensland Museum, and analysed at the ̽��ֱ�� of Sydney and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��results are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“We’ve now got a picture of how these two species have evolved together through time,” said Dr Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, the paper’s lead author. “ ̽��ֱ��extinction risk to the crayfish has been measured, but this is the first time we’ve quantified the risk to the temnocephalans as well – and it looks like this ancient partnership could end with the extinction of both species.”

Mountain spiny crayfish species diversified across eastern Australia over at least 80 million years, with 37 living species included in this study. Reconstructing the ages of the temnocephalans using a ‘molecular clock’ analysis showed that the tiny worms are as ancient as their crayfish hosts and have evolved alongside them since the Cretaceous Period.

Today, many species of mountain spiny crayfish have small geographic ranges. This is especially true in Queensland, where mountain spiny crayfish are restricted to cool, high-altitude streams in small pockets of rainforest. This habitat was reduced and fragmented by long-term climate warming and drying, as the continent of Australia drifted northwards over the last 165 million years. As a consequence, mountain spiny crayfish are severely threatened by ongoing climate change and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed 75% of these species as endangered or critically endangered.

“In Australia, freshwater crayfish are large, diverse and active ‘managers’, recycling all sorts of organic material and working the sediments,” said Professor David Blair of James Cook ̽��ֱ�� in Australia, the paper’s senior author. “ ̽��ֱ��temnocephalan worms associated only with these crayfish are also diverse, reflecting a long, shared history and offering a unique window on ancient symbioses. We now risk extinction of many of these partnerships, which will lead to degradation of their previous habitats and leave science the poorer.”

̽��ֱ��crayfish tend to have the smallest ranges in the north of Australia, where the climate is the hottest and all of the northern species are endangered or critically endangered. By studying the phylogenies (evolutionary trees) of the species, the researchers found that northern crayfish also tended to be the most evolutionarily distinctive. This also applies to the temnocephalans of genus Temnosewellia, which are symbionts of spiny mountain crayfish across their geographic range. “This means that the most evolutionarily distinctive lineages are also those most at risk of extinction,” said Hoyal Cuthill.

̽��ֱ��researchers then used computer simulations to predict the extent of coextinction. This showed that if all the mountain spiny crayfish that are currently endangered were to go extinct, 60% of their temnocephalan symbionts would also be lost to coextinction. ̽��ֱ��temnocephalan lineages that were predicted to be at the greatest risk of coextinction also tended to be the most evolutionarily distinctive. These lineages represent a long history of symbiosis and coevolution of up to 100 million years. However they are the most likely to suffer coextinction if these species and their habitats are not protected from ongoing environmental and climate change.

“ ̽��ֱ��intimate relationship between hosts and their symbionts and parasites is often unique and long lived, not just during the lifespan of the individual organisms themselves but during the evolutionary history of the species involved in the association,” said study co-author Dr Tim Littlewood of the Natural History Museum. “This study exemplifies how understanding and untangling such an intimate relationship across space and time can yield deep insights into past climates and environments, as well as highlighting current threats to biodiversity.”

Reference:
Jennifer F. Hoyal Cuthill et al. ‘Australian spiny mountain crayfish and their temnocephalan ectosymbionts: an ancient association on the edge of coextinction?’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2016). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.0585

A symbiotic relationship that has existed since the time of the dinosaurs is at risk of ending, as habitat loss and environmental change mean that a species of Australian crayfish and the tiny worms that depend on them are both at serious risk of extinction.

We’ve now got a picture of how these two species have evolved together through time, and it looks like this ancient partnership could end with the extinction of both species.

Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill

100-million year partnership on the brink of extinction

David Blair, James Cook ̽��ֱ��

Light microscope image of the five tentacle temnocephalan Temnosewellia c.f rouxi from cultured redclaw crayfish

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes