Significant spill from Keystone XL Pipeline in South Dakota.

Part of the Keystone XL Pipeline has been closed down after a leak was discovered about 35 km to the south of the Ludden Pump Station in Marshall County, South Dakota, on Thursday 13 November 2017. The spill was detected by pipeline operators TransCanada, who noticed a drop in pressure in the pipeline and shut down flow while the situation was investigated.  The leak was originally thought to have been quite small, with about 210 000 barrels (333 900 000 litres) of oil having been lost, however inspection of the site has suggested a much larger loss, with current estimates running at 600 000 barrels (953 900 000 litres) and environmental groups concerned that the real figure will eventually be found to be much higher. This discrepancy is thought to have been caused by the dense nature of the bituminous oil running through the pipeline, which will have resulted in a slower drop in pressure that would happen with a lighter oil fraction.

The November 2017 South Dakota spill. TransCanada.

The Keystone XL Pipeline is intended to carry crude oil from tar sands deposits in Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois and Texas in the US. It been opposed at almost every stage by environmental groups concerned about the possibility of leaks such as this week's one in South Dakota, the environmentally destructive nature of extracting oil from tar sands, and the contribution of a major expansion in hydrocarbons production to atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming. These concerns led former American President Barrack Obama to halt the construction of the pipeline in 2015, however this order was rescinded by incoming President Donald Trump in March 2017. The pipeline currently pumps oil from Alberta to a refinery in Patola, Illinois, with construction of the final leg to Texas underway.

Protests against the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline in Washington DC in 2014. Kristina Banks/Huffington Post.

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Latiblattella avita; a fossil Cockroach from the Middle Eocene of northwestern Montana.

Despite being considered ubiquitous urban pests in many parts of the world, Cockroaches, Blattaria, are one of the smallest groups of extant Insects, with only about 5000 described living species. On the other hand the group have a long fossil record, dating back to the Palaeozoic, and modern Cockroaches are an extremely diverse group, with eusocial, jumping, aquatic, pollinating, troglobitic (cave dwelling) and bioluminescent species all known, suggesting modern Cockroaches may be relicts of a much more diverse group.

In a paper published in the journal Palaeontologica Electronica in April 2015, Dale Greenwalt of the Department of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History and Ľubomír Vidlička of the Instituteof Zoology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the Department of Zoology at ComeniusUniversity describe a new species of fossil Cockroach from the Middle Eocene Kishenehn Formation of northwestern Montana.

The new species is placed in the modern genus Latiblattella and given the specific name avita, meaning ancient or ancestral. The specimen comprises a forewing and leg preserved on a piece of oil-shale recovered from the Dakin Site on the Middle Fork of the Flathead Rivernear Pinnacle, Montana. The forewing is 15.1 mm in length, and as with many Insect groups Cockroaches are typically classified by the venation of their wings, so Greenwalt and Vidlička are confident with the assignment of the fossil.

Latiblattella avita.Tegmen (forewing) attached (?) to an intact middle leg. Scale bar equals 5 mm. Greenwalt & Vidlička (2015).

Modern members of the genus Latiblattella are extremely diverse, with species known that dwell in cracks in the bark of Pine trees, in Spanish Moss and regular Bromeliads, in the flowers of Yuccas and along the banks of rivers. The single known specimen of Latiblattella avita was discovered in a lake deposit, and appears to be the result of a predation event (i.e. it was dropped by a Bird or other predator consuming the body of the animal). This makes it impossible to determine the environment occupied by the living animal, though the diverse range of habitats in which modern members of the genus are found does imply that the common ancestor of all its members did live a long time ago, so an Eocene specimen is not a surprise. Modern members of the genus are known from Central America, Cuba, Mexico, the Bahamas, Florida and Arizona, all considerably to the south of Montana, and suggesting that the group requires a warmer climate than is found in Montana today, which is consistent with the warmer climates known to have existed in the Eocene.

Only one modern Cockroach genus has fossils known from the Cretaceous, but many have now been found in Eocene deposits, suggesting that the group underwent a significant expansion in the aftermath of the End Cretaceous Extinction. Interestingly many of these genera show the same pattern as Latiblattella, with fossil specimens from what are now temperate areas of North America and living members restricted to the American tropics, suggesting that the modern distributions of many Cockroaches have been determined by cooling climates in the Quaternary.

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A fossil Cockroach from the earliest Late Carboniferous of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region of northwestern China. Cockroaches (Blattodea or Blattida) are highly successful non-metamorphic Insects (i.e. their young resemble the adults, there is no distinctive larval stage with a separate morphology) related to Termites and Mantises. Cockroaches are found across the globe, but...

A fossil Cockroach from the Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, China.                                                 Cockroaches (Blattida) are an ancient group of Insects which first appeared in the Carboniferous. They are closely related to Mantises (Mantodea) and...

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A fossil Bird from the Eocene of Guangdong Province China.

Birds, on the whole, do not have a good fossil record, as they tend to be small, have delicate skeletons, and do not typically live in environments with good preservational potential. As a rule birds will not enter the fossil record unless they are rapidly buried anoxic sediments, which is tricky as such sediments are typically only found under water, and dead birds tend to float.

In a paper published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica on 25 June 2012, Min Wang, Jiangyong Zhang and Zhonghe Zhou of the Key Laboratory of Evolutionary Systematics of Vertebrates at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Gerald Mayr of the Sektion Ornithologie at Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg describe a new species of Bird from a single leg found in the black oil shales of the Middle Eocene Huayong Formation of the Sanshui Basin in Guangdong Province, southern China.

 The new specimen is named Sanshuiornis zhangi, where Sanshuiornis means 'bird from Sanshui' and zhangi honours Xianqiu Zhang, a local geologist, who discovered the locality. the species is described from the reasonably intact bones of a single right leg. The limb resembles that of a Ciconid Bird (Heron or Bittern) but after careful examination of the limb, Wang et al. did not feel able to place the limb precisely within the Ciconiidae with any confidence, and instead choose to place it within a larger grouping that includes the Ciconiidae, as well as the Threskiornithidae (Ibises and Spoonbills) and the Phoenicopteridae (Flamingos).

Photograph (top) and interpretive line drawing (bottom) of Sanshuiornis zhangi. Wang et al. (2012).

See also Fossil Owls from the La Brea Tar Pits, Was Archaeopteryx black? A new fossil bird from the Palaeocene of Brazil, How did raptors use their claws? (and did it help them learn to fly?) and Birds on Sciency Thoughts YouTube.

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