Back in Nanjing

Jiming temple, a photo by hallucygenia on Flickr.

I took this photo in the evening from the office opposite ours - our office has a fine view of the wall of the badminton court. The view is of the tower of the Buddhist temple next door to the institute. Having the temple next door is quite handy from our point of view, as we can buy vegetarian dumplings or noodles at lunchtime, go to the other restaurant for an occasional evening meal, and buy interesting fake meats at one of the temple shops. (The other temple shops sell jade, incense, candles and religious figurines. Buddhist monks and nuns might not be allowed money, but they can certainly run a successful business.)

September's fieldwork was quite eventful, with some extremely interesting finds. We have to keep quiet about them for a bit (it's a condition of the grant we got from National Geographic), but will be able to share them in due course.

And we will try to post on here more often...

Crinoids and taxonomic nightmares

new crinoids, a photo by joe with a camera on Flickr.

The wonderful world of crinoids
Morning all. It's about time we did some more fossils, so here's something a bit different. You're all familiar with starfish and sea urchins, right? Of course you are. Most of you might even know that they're closely related. They are both defined as classes within the subphylum Eleutherozoa, along with sea cucumbers, brittle-stars and concentricycloids. I’ll be impressed if many of you have heard of the Eleutherozoa, but you might well have come across the echinoderms – that’s the even broader group that they all belong to. It’s a marvellous phylum – lots of unique features, like pentaradial symmetry and a hydrostatic support system. The six modern classes cover a lot of ground in terms of variety, but they’re nothing compared with their ancestors.

At some point I’ll post photos of an edrioasteroid that Lucy brought back from Morocco for me – imagine a starfish on a cushion and… actually you’ll be nowhere near, but it’s a start. Anyhow, for today I wanted to introduce the other living class, and some other Moroccan fossils: the crinoids. Otherwise known as sea-lilies (when they’re known at all), these are delicate-looking animals consisting of a long stalk, a cup-like body (calyx), and an array of arms. The modern ones have in many cases lost the stalk, and swim around like a cross between a brittle-star and a jellyfish. (I must stop these daft analogies – I once told an undergrad to think of these as being like starfish on stalks, and one of my fellow students has never forgiven me…).

Crinoids have a pretty ancient history, going back to the base of the Ordovician. For a long time, the oldest one was Ramseyocrinus, from Ramsey Island in Pembrokeshire, but it’s been superseded by some amazing finds in the US. These rare discoveries are what we have to rely on, though – crinoids fall apart very rapidly when they die, so complete fossils rely on live burial (like so much else that we study). This means, of course, that our view of the early crinoid record is very sketchy indeed, with a few spectacular faunas, and a lot of gaps. Which brings us to Morocco.

A few years back I was invited to write up the crinoids from the Late Ordovician rocks of Morocco (these rocks have very famous echinoderm faunas that are being described en masse, but crinoids are relatively rare components of the fauna). I duly accepted, and now the time for submission is long overdue, so I’m desperately trying to finish them off. Just for once, it isn’t just me being lazy that’s caused the delay – in this case the number of crinoid specimens has been extremely low, and I’ve literally been waiting for specimens to describe. I had a few from the beginning, but most of them only as single specimens... which isn’t really enough to describe, as you need to see a lot of details for a meaningful description. Another problem is that they’re preserved in sandstone, with the grain size so coarse that is makes working out the arrangement of plates on the calyx very tricky, or just plain impossible. I’ve been making latex casts, cleaning and preparing, but in some cases there just isn’t enough information.

Finally, though, the end is in sight. Lucy came back from Morocco in the spring with a bunch of new specimens, some from a new site, and the preservation is just gorgeous. These I could do something with… and promptly set to work doing so. What I didn’t expect, though, was just how stonkingly, befuddlingly weird they all are. It has taken ages just to understand the things, work out what families they’re related to, and so on. There are some that simply don’t fit in known families, or have combinations of features from a whole stack of different ones. So how about the beautiful pair of specimens in the picture? Well, they’re clearly a new species of Euptychocrinus, a monobathrid camerate (honest). The problem is that they appear to be otherwise closest to an odd group of diplobathrids called the Opsiocrinidae – i.e. in a different suborder. This is the sort of result that makes you wonder whether the distinction between the suborders is reliable at all… which opens a whole can of worms about whether we’ve got the classification system right.

It’s never easy, eh? Every time you think you understand it a little bit, it just gets weirder. The fauna is a combination of groups known otherwise from North America, the UK, and elsewhere, and from well-known families or truly obscure genera. Some appear to be extremely primitive, and others most closely resemble things from the Devonian. What’s most surprising, though, is how diverse the fauna is. Although there are many, many fewer specimens of crinoids than of other groups (brittle-stars, cystoids), the diversity is (I think, although the formal descriptions aren’t out yet) even higher. There are no species with lots of specimens, and most of them are represented so far only by one or two. We see the same thing in the Builth Inlier in Wales, but in reverse: there the crinoids are relatively abundant, and it is the starfish that are extremely rare… but so far, every starfish specimen seems to be a different species. What is this telling us about ecology? No idea, but patterns like this are always interesting to ponder. Besides, it distracts me a bit from the taxonomic headaches that these amazing specimens generate every time I open the drawers.

Variegated yarn

daffodils, a photo by hallucygenia on Flickr.

I always like the look of variegated yarns before I start to knit with them – the colours contrast so nicely! However, they never seem to look as good knitted up, so I tend not to buy them. I made an exception for this lovely green and yellow sock yarn – I don’t normally go for yellow at all, but this particular yellow paired with this particular green did appeal. It has taken me some months to find a way of knitting with it where I liked the result.

This is really a four-part blog post, but as I can only post one picture at a time, it will have to be four separate posts. The posts should be read in reverse chronological order, i.e. variegated yarn, first attempt, second attempt, success.

First attempt

hedera socks, a photo by hallucygenia on Flickr.

I wanted to make a pair of socks with the yarn. I didn’t want to do a scarf or hat, because putting yellow next to my face doesn’t suit me, and I already have enough pairs of gloves. I choose this sock pattern. After a few inches, it was clear that the pattern and the yarn don’t work together. The colour variation obscures, rather than shows off, the lace pattern, and I didn’t like the way the colours were pooling. I do like the pattern, and will probably knit it again in a solid colour wool.

Second attempt

linen stitch sock first attempt, a photo by hallucygenia on Flickr.

For the second attempt, I found a pattern for socks using linen stitch. Linen stitch uses slipped stitches and brings the wool forward in front of some stitches, both of which mix up the colours a bit. I was hoping that this would get rid of the pooling but, as you can see, it didn’t. I rather like the part on the right, where the green and yellow are very mixed up, and if the rest of the sock had been like this I would have persevered.

Success!

green and yellow sock 2, a photo by hallucygenia on Flickr.

In the end I bought some more wool in a harmonising colour (the dark green), and did a simple plain striped sock. This works! The dark green breaks up the large areas of yellow, and the overall effect is bright and cheery. Now to knit a second sock, so I can wear the pair...

Japanese Rhinoceros Beetle

Japanese Rhinoceros Beetle a video by joe with a camera on Flickr.

Greetings all - if you still remember us. Sorry about the hiatus... one thing after another, and then we just got out of the habit. Anyhow, here's a good one to get back into the swing of things. If the video doesn't run automatically, click and it should take you to Flickr, where it does.

These little beauty was found on the way into work, on the pavement, upside-down. The previous day we'd found a female in the same place, and in the same rather undignified posture. Coming from a country where the bulkiest insect you can find is the stag beetle, this lumbering tank was quite a surprise.

For some reason, it didn't take long to work out it was Trypoxylus dichotomus, a relatively common species in the far east, but most typical of the northern areas. The larvae live in rotten wood for a few years before emerging (imagine the size of the hole... not great if you've got them in your furniture, I imagine), whereapon the males battle each other endlessly for the attention of the females. The ridiculous horns are perfct for flipping each other over, but can probably also inflict some serious damage on opposing appendages if twisted the right way. We found another male that was apparently unable to walk (or even stay upright - a common complaint, it seems), with one of its legs not working. It might not have been a rival... but it probably was.

These animals are apparently popular pets, and I can see why - they have so much personality. Inevitably, though, they're often made to fight each other... which is fine up to a point, of course, as that's what they do, but I imagine there's a natural limit to how often they encounter each other and choose to do battle. Less inevitably, they're apparently sold as pets in Japan... from vending machines. Yes, I'm sorry to say you read that right. Ho-hum.

A few interesting facts... I read on forum somewhere that the size of the adult depends on the quality of the food given to the larvae (reasonably enough). Those who tried feeding them an apparently nutrient-rich diet of leaves and mulch, however, ended up with smaller adults than those feeding them on wood alone. I guess their digestive system is geared towards wood, and they can get more from a twig than they could from a hefty Greek salad with added bamboo shoots.

Apparently (http://natureafield.com/?p=722) the enormous horn doesn't stop the males flying as far and as fast as the (hornless) females. To compensate for the weight, they've evolved larger muscles and so on, which presumably does require more energy... so I'm not sure exactly what the study really showed, to be honest. Interesting, though, and it must be quite fun sticking tiny radio transmitters onto them.

Finally... apparently they have quite a mainstream profile in Japanese media. If anyone has seen the classic (sort of)film "Godzilla vs. Megalon", you may notice some familiarity in Megalon's facial protuberances... yes indeedy, the god of Seatopia is apparently a giant bipedal mutated T. dichotomus... and yes, I really, really should leave it at that.