Leopard shot dead after killing child in Uttarakhand, India.

A Leopard has been shot dead by Forest Department marksmen following the death of a child earlier this month. The Animal attacked and killed an eight-year-old girl in the village of Deval in Tehri Gharwal District on Monday 3 August 2020, and had evaded attempts to capture it since. Following a number of further attacks around Human settlements, in which three Cows and a Dog were killed (indicative of an Animal that has become acclimated to Humans, and is likely to continue to present a threat to Human life as well as livestock), the decision was taken to euthanise the Leopard, which was subsequently shot dead by a sniper at about 11.30 pm local time on Friday 21 August.

 

A Leopard spotted in Devprayag in Tehri Garwhal District in July this year. Indian Forest Services.

Leopards are considered to be Vulnerable under the terms of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species, with the Indian subspecies, Panthera pardus fusca, considered to be particularly vulnerable due to India's rapidly rising Human population, which has resulted in agriculture and other Human activities expanding into many former wilderness areas. For this reason, the Indian Forest Service usually try to relocate Leopards that come into conflict with Humans to more remote areas, preferably within national parks, though the extent to which local people co-operate is variable.

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Eremogone ali-gulii: A new species of Eremogone from eastern Turkey.

Eremogones are small perennial flower in the Carnation family, Caryophyllaceae. They have thread-like leaves and small white (or sometimes pink) flowers, and tend to grow in thick clumps from woody horizontal stems. Ergomogones favour warm, dry climates. 

In a paper published in the journal PhytoKeys on 25 February 2016, Murat Koç of the Department of Biology and Animal Production High School at Bozok University and Ergin Hamzaoğlu of the Department of Elementary Education at Gazi University describe a new species of Eremogone from Erzurum Province in eastern Turkey.

The new species is named Eremogone ali-gulii in honour of the hydrobiologist Ali Gül of the Gazi Faculty of Education at Gazi University. It is a tufted perennial herb reaching 10-18 cm in height, producing white flowers from June to July. The plant was found growing on serpentine soils (nutrient poor non-calcitic alkaline soils, typically derived from volcanic or metamorphic rocks) at two sites, one on Kop mountain between Bayburt and Aşkale and the other near Karasu village between Erzurum and Erzincan.

Eremogone ali-gulii, whole plant. Koç & Hamzaoğlu (2016).

Eremogone ali-gulii  has been found growing only at two locations, both of which are prone to human disturbances such as grazing animals or land-use change. For this reason Koç and Hamzaoğlu recommend that it be classed as Endangered under the terms of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.

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Two new species of Oxalis from Northern Cape Province, South Africa.                             Plants of the genus Oxalis are found in South America, where there are around 250 species of herbs, shrubs and vines, and Southern Africa, where there are around 210 species, all of which are bulbous perennials...

A new species of Burr Marigold from Rapa in the Austral Islands, French Polynesia.            The Austral Islands are a group of eight volcanic islands to the south of the Society Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean. Rapa is the second largest of these...

A new species of Tulip from Anhui Province in eastern China.                                        Tulips of the genus Amana are found in eastern Asia. They are very similar to the Tulips of Western Asia and Europe, which are placed in the genus Tulipa, differing only in the presence of bracts on the upper part of...

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Prolyda dimidia and Prolyda elegantula: Two new species of Xyelyid Sawflies from the Middle Jurassic of Inner Mongolia.

Sawflies, Symphyta, are thought to be the oldest group of Hymenopterans, with a fossil record dating back to the Triassic, and the oldest group of Sawflies are considered to be the Xyeloids. The Xyeloids are considered to be paraphyletic (i.e. not everything descended from the last common ancestor of all Xyeloids is classifies as a Xyeloid), and can be split into two groups, the Xyelids, from which all other Sawflies are thought to be derived, and the Xyphidrids, which are thought to have been ancestral to the Wood Wasps, and thence all other Wasps, Ants and Bees, though the relationships between early members of these groups is unclear, and it is likely that this classification system will be replaced with something quite different in the future.

In a paper published in the journal ZooKeys on 26 February 2016, Chen Wang and Chungkun Shih of the College of Life Sciences at Capital Normal University, Alexandr Rasnitsyn of the PaleontologicalInstitute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Invertebrate Palaeontology Department at the Natural History Museum, and Mei Wang, also of the College of Life Sciences at Capital Normal University, describe two new species of Xyelyid Sawfly from the Middle Jurassic Jiulongshan Formation of Inner Mongolia. Both new species are placed in the genus Prolyda, which was erected by Alexandr Rasnitsyn in 1968 to describe Sawflies from the Jurassic of Kazakhstan.

The first new species is named Prolyda dimidia, meaning 'half', in reference to the pterostigma cell on the forewing, which has a darker posterior half. The species is described from a single specimen preserved in ventral viewon a slab from which the counterpart is not known. The specimen is about 11.4 mm in length, with a large, circular head.

Prolyda dimidia, photograph of only known specimen. Wang et al. (2016).

The second new species is named Prolyda elegantula, meaning 'graceful'. This species is also described from a single known specimen, again preserved on a slab with the counterpart missing. This specimen is 12 mm in length, with a massive and wide head.

Prolyda elegantula, photograph of only known specimen. Wang et al. (2016).

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Xyelydid Sawflies from the Middle Jurassic of Inner Mongolia.                                            The Xyelydidae are an extinct group of Sawflies, Pamphilioidea, known from the Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous of Eurasia. They are possibly ancestral to other members of the group, though their relationships are poorly understood, though since Sawflies...

An early Woodwasp from the Early Cretaceous of Brazil.                                   The Hymenoptera are one of the largest groups of insects, comprising Sawflies, Wasps, Ants and Bees. The earliest members of the group were Sawflies, which appeared around the beginning of the Late Triassic. Sawflies have caterpillar-like larvae...

 

 

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Giant bird from the Cretaceous of Kazakhstan.

This month a team lead by Darren Naish of the School of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth publish a paper in the journal Biology Letters in which they announce the discovery of a new giant bird from the Cretaceous of Kazakhstan. The bird has been identified from a from a fragmented lower jaw from the Late Cretaceous Bostobynskaya Formation, northeast of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan. It was named Samrukia nessovi in honor of the Samruk, a mythical, phoenix-like Kazakh bird and Lev Nessov, a Russian vertebrate palaeontologist who did much work in Central Asia.

The lower jawbone of Samrukia nessovi.

These fragments were initially reconstructed as the jaw of an oviraptosaur-like dinosaur and found there way to the Institut royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique in Brussels, where they were discovered in 2010 by palaeontologist Pascal Godefroit. Godefroit recognized that there was a problem with the way the jaw was reconstructed, and contacted dinosaur expert Darren Naish and Gareth Dyke, an expert on fossil birds from University College Dublin. Together they were able to determine that the oviraptosaur reconstruction was wrong; the only parts of the specimen that were diagnostic of an oviraptosaur type dinosaur were plaster additions, which did not match well with the actual fossil, once these were removed a proper analysis of the fossil could be made, confirming Godefroit's suspicion that this was in fact the jaw of a large bird.

The oviraptosaur reconstruction of the jawbone.

Birds are reasonably well known from the Cretaceous, but most specimens are small, chicken sized or less, whereas this was a much larger creature, with a lower jaw at least 30 cm in length. It is not possible to reconstruct a whole bird from a lower jawbone, but comparison with modern birds suggests a man-sized flightless bird or a flying bird with a wing-span of at least 4 m.

Two possible reconstructions of Samrukia, with a human and a more typical Cretaceous bird for comparison. By dinosaur artist John Conway.

There has been one other giant bird described from the Late Cretaceous; Gargantuavis philoinos, a large, flightless bird from southern France, was described in a paper in the journal Nature in 1995 by a team lead by Eric Buffetaut of the Laboratoire de Géologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure.

These birds add to a more diverse picture of Cretaceous megafauna (big animals). Traditionally the Cretaceous, with the Jurassic and the Triassic has been referred to as the 'Age of Dinosaurs' or the 'Age of Reptiles', and the most familiar large fossils from the period have been the dinosaurs, along with the flying pterosaurs and several groups of extinct marine reptiles. In addition we have long been aware of large crocodiles and turtles from the Cretaceous. More recently palaeontologists have uncovered giant Cretaceous snakes, and Repenomamus a dog sized mammal from China, which has been found with dinosaur remains in its stomach.

See also see also The Ashdown Maniraptoran, New 'oldest bird' found in China and Birds and Dinosaurs on Sciency Thoughts Youtube.