Except for 1987, when there were no fatalities, the last year a single human death occurred from a shark attack was in 1985, said George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File housed at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. By comparison, there were four deaths each in 2005 and 2006, and seven in 2004.

“It’s quite spectacular that for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide spending hundreds of millions of hours in the water in activities that are often very provocative to sharks, such as surfing, there is only one incident resulting in a fatality,” he said. “The danger of a shark attack stays in the forefront of our psyches because of it being drilled into our brain for the last 30 years by the popular media, movies, books and television, but in reality the chances of dying from one are infinitesimal.”

Advances in medical treatment, greater attention to beach safety practices and increased public awareness about the danger of shark attacks are all likely reasons the fatality rate so far for the 21st century, at 7.6 percent, has been lower than the 12.3 percent recorded for the 1990s, Burgess said.

The number of shark attacks overall increased from 63 in 2006 to 71 in 2007, continuing a gradual upswing during the past four years, he said.

“One would expect there to be more shark attacks each year than the previous year simply because there are more people entering the water,” he said. “For baby boomers and earlier generations, going to the beach was basically an exercise in working on your suntan where a swim often meant a quick dunking. Today people are engaged in surfing, diving, boogie boarding and other aquatic activities that put them much closer to sharks.”

Occasionally, the number of attacks may drop in a particular year because of changes in meteorological or oceanographic conditions that affect water temperature and salinity, such as the frequency of hurricanes and tropical storms, Burgess said. But scientists don’t put too much stock in these year-to-year fluctuations, preferring to look at long-term trends, he said.

Traditionally, about half of the world’s attacks occur in United States mainland and Hawaiian waters, but the proportion was greater in 2007, Burgess said. Last year’s total of 50 attacks returned to 2000 and 2001 levels of 53 and 50, respectively, after dropping from 30 to 40 for each year between 2003 and 2006, he said.

Elsewhere, there were 12 attacks in Australia, up from seven in 2006 and 10 in 2005, but down slightly from the 13 attacks recorded in 2004. There were two attacks each last year in South Africa and New Caledonia, with single incidents reported in Fiji, Ecuador, Mexico and New Zealand.

There also was an upswing in attacks along the Florida coast, jumping from 23 in 2006 to 32 in 2007. There has been a gradual increase in human-shark skirmishes in the Sunshine State since they dropped from 37 in 2000 to an 11-year-low of 12 in 2004, he said.

Within Florida, Volusia County continued its dubious distinction as the world’s shark bite capital with 17 incidents, its highest yearly total since 2002, Burgess said. Attractive waves off New Smyrna Beach on the central Atlantic coast are popular with surfers, he said.

Additional U.S. attacks were recorded in Hawaii — seven — marking a five-year-high, along with South Carolina, five; California, three; North Carolina, two; and Texas, one.

Fifty-six percent of the 2007 victims were surfers and windsurfers; followed by swimmers and waders, 38 percent; and divers and snorkelers, 6 percent.

Last year’s Sept. 30 fatal attack involved a 23-year-old woman from France who was snorkeling off the Loyalty Islands archipelago in French New Caledonia and became separated from a friend, Burgess said. She was a nurse who had just finished a hospital contract in Noumea and was taking a brief vacation before flying home, he said.

“We advise not getting yourself isolated because there is safety in numbers,” he said. “Sharks, like all predators, tend to go after solitary individuals, the weak and the infirm, and are less likely to attack people or fish in groups.”

Last year had few spectacular attacks or heartwarming rescue stories, Burgess said. “It was mostly minor injuries,” he said. “There weren’t too many made-for-movie moments.”

“It’s kind of quirky that a parasite we love to hate can actually inform us how we traveled around the globe,” said David Reed, an assistant curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus and one of the study’s authors.

DNA sequencing found the strain of lice to be genetically the same as the form of body lice that spawns several deadly diseases, including typhus, which was blamed for the loss of Napoleon’s grand army and millions of other soldiers, he said.

The discovery of these parasites on 11th-century Peruvian mummies proves they were infesting the native Americans nearly 500 years before Europeans arrived, Reed said. His findings are published this week in an online edition of the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

“This definitely goes against the grain of conventional thought that all diseases were transmitted from the Old World to the New World at the time of Columbus,” he said.

It came as a surprise to Reed and his research team that the type of lice on the mummies was of the same genetic type as those found as far away as the highlands of Papua, New Guinea, instead of the form of head lice that is widespread in the Western Hemisphere, Reed said. This latter version, the bane of many school children, accounts for more than half the cases of lice that appear in the United States, Canada and Central America, he said.

“Given its abundance in the Americas on living humans, we thought for sure that this form of lice was the one that was here all along and had been established in the New World with the first peoples,” he said.

“We hope to be able to understand human migration patterns by investigating their parasites since people have carried these parasites with them as they moved around the globe,” he said. “Called a parascript, it’s a whole other transcript of our evolutionary history that can either add to what we know or in some cases inform us about things we didn’t know.”

Looking at evidence from parasites’ perspectives, for example, may yield valuable clues about when the first Americans arrived on the continent and which route they took, Reed said. Building upon this DNA sequencing work, scientists may be able to link the 1,000-year-old lice found in the Western Hemisphere with those in Siberia or Mongolia, confirming existing theories that America’s earliest residents originated there, he said.

Had these immigrants traveled by land masses, there was a very small window of time, about 13,000 years ago, when the glaciers retreated enough to allow passage through the Bering Strait on the way to South America, Reed said. Another proposed theory is a seafaring route, but this would have required sophisticated oceangoing vessels for which no evidence from the time exists, he said.

Being able to chart these early migration patterns would give insight into how these early immigrants lived, Reed said. “If you’re skirting the edge of glaciers, it’s obviously a very cold time period and humans would have needed certain creature comforts just to stay alive, such as tight clothing to maintain warmth,” he said.

Today, the people who don’t have the opportunity to change their clothes are the ones at risk for epidemic typhus, which along with the lesser-known diseases of relapsing fever and trench fever are carried by body lice, Reed said. These pests lay their eggs in clothing fibers and washing the clothes is all it takes to get rid of them, he said.

“The disease pops up primarily in refugees who have been displaced from their homeland with the clothes on their backs and nothing else,” he said. “They’re living in crowded conditions where hygiene is poor.”

Reed said he hopes the team’s lice research might someday increase human understanding of typhus by pinpointing where the disease originated.

Studying parasites to learn about their hosts’ history has been around for only about 20 years, Reed said. “By looking at things like tapeworms, pinworms, lice or bedbugs that humans have carried around for at least tens of thousands of years, and in some cases millions of years,” he said, “we can learn much more about human evolutionary history.”

The origins of when flowers managed to harness insects’ pollinating power has long been murky. But the new study, published online this week on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Web site and appearing in its Dec. 24 print edition, is the first to pinpoint a 96-million-year-old timeframe for a turning point in the evolution of basal angiosperm groups, or early flowering plants, by demonstrating they are predominantly insect-pollinated.

“Our study of clumping pollen shows that insect pollinators most likely have always played a large role in the evolution of flowering plants,” said David Dilcher, a graduate research professor of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “It was true 96 million years ago and we are seeing it today with the potential threat to our agricultural crops because of the collapse of the honeybee colonies. The insect pollinators provide for more efficient and effective pollination of flowering plants.”

The study provides strong evidence for the widely accepted hypothesis that insects drove the massive adaptive radiation of early flowering plants when they rapidly diversified and expanded to exploit new terrestrial niches. Land plants first appear in the fossil record about 425 million years ago, but flowering plants didn’t appear until about 125 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous period.

The study also is the first to describe the biological structure of pollen clumping in the early Late Cretaceous, which holds clues about the types of pollinators with which they were coevolving, said lead author Shusheng Hu, who started the study while at the Florida Museum but is currently at Indiana University Southeast. Hu said previous scientists found examples of early clumped pollen from a slightly earlier time period but these were interpreted as immature parts of anther from a flower, or dismissed as insect packaging activity or fecal pellets.

“We really had to jump out of the box and think in a new way on these widespread pollen clumps,” said Hu, who completed the research in 2006 as part of his UF doctoral work.

Today, flowers specialized for insect pollination disperse clumps of five to 100 pollen grains. Clumped grains are comparatively larger and have more surface relief than wind- or water-dispersed pollen, which tend to be single, smaller and smoother.

“These clumps represent an amazing new strategy in the evolution of flowering plants,” Dilcher said. “For me, the excitement here lies in the early times of these fossil flowers, when angiosperms were making these huge evolutionary steps. What we found with the fossil pollen clumps folds nicely into what has been suggested by molecular biologists that those plants that are basal in angiosperm evolutionary relationships seem to have been dominated by insect pollination.”

The nine species of fossil pollen clumps, combined with known structural changes occurring in flowering plants at this time, led the researchers to suggest that insect pollination was well established by the early Late Cretaceous — only a few million years before the explosion in diversity and distribution of flowering plant families. Known structural changes include early prototypes of stamen and anther, plant organs which lift pollen up and away from the plant, positioning the plants’ genetic material to be passed off to visiting insects.

The researchers sampled pollen from three sites in Minnesota’s Dakota Formation, which represents a time period when a shallow seaway covered North America’s interior.

Co-author David Jarzen, a Florida Museum pollen scientist, refined existing pollen processing techniques for extracting intact fossil pollen from the calcareous Minnesota limestone and silicate mudstone rock matrix. Co-author David Taylor, a botanist from Indiana University Southeast contributed a statistical analysis of pollination methods among living and early plants.

A Smithsonian Institution paleobiologist, Conrad Labandeira, who specializes in insect-plant associations, and who is unassociated with the study, said that the authors’ ability to demonstrate pollen clumping in basal angiosperms adds one more piece to the puzzle of several pollination types established in the mid-Cretaceous.

“These data are very comparable with parallel data such as flower structure, pollen structure, and insect mouthpart morphology, that now documents a wide variety of pollination types that occurred before the Cenomanian,” Labandeira said.

The unusual discovery of well-preserved fossils in a water-filled sinkhole called a blue hole revealed the bones of landlubbing crocodiles and tortoises that did not survive human encroachment, said David Steadman, a UF ornithologist and the lead author of a paper published this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The climate and environmental conditions back then weren’t much different from those of today,” said Steadman, who works at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “The big difference is us. When people got to the island, there was probably nothing easier to hunt than tortoises so they cooked and ate them. And they got rid of the crocodiles because it’s tough to have kids playing at the edge of the village where there are terrestrial crocodiles running around.”

The first entire fossilized skeletons of a tortoise and a crocodile found anywhere in the West Indies were uncovered from Sawmill Sink on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas, along with bones of a lizard, snakes, bats and 25 species of birds, as well as abundant plant fossils.

Radiocarbon analyses date the bones at between 1,000 and 4,200 years old with the youngest fossil being that of a human tibia, he said. The fossils are the best preserved of any ever found in the Bahamas because of their unusual location in the deep saltwater layer of the sinkhole that contains no oxygen, which normally would feed the bacteria and fungi that cause bones to decay, Steadman said. Expert diver Brian Kakuk and other skilled scuba divers retrieved the fossils from various places along the floor and walls of the blue hole, which contains salt water covered by a layer of freshwater.

“The fossils from Sawmill Sink open up unparalleled opportunities for doing much more sophisticated work than ever before in reconstructing the ancient plant and animal communities of the Bahamas,” Steadman said. “It helps us to understand not only how individual species evolve on islands, but how these communities changed with the arrival of people because we know that changes in the ecosystem are much more dramatic on islands than they are on continents.”

There are many blue holes on Abaco and other Bahamian islands, but this is the first to be the site of a sophisticated fossil excavation, Steadman said. Although the Bahamian government has gone to great lengths to protect its coastline, blue holes with their submerged cave passages have received little attention as a marine resource, he said.

The fossil site is especially valuable because of the presence of fossilized plants — leaves, twigs, flowers, fruits and seeds — pollen and spores, and vertebrates, giving evidence of both the island’s flora and fauna, Steadman said.

“In a typical vertebrate fossil site, you identify the species of vertebrates — reptiles, birds or mammals — and based on that identification you speculate what the habitat might have been,” he said. “For the first time here in the West Indies, we have here on Abaco plant fossils right in with the vertebrates, so we can reconstruct the habitats in a much more sophisticated way.”

For instance, because bracken ferns are one of the first plants to recolonize after a fire, the presence of their spores would indicate regular burning in prehistoric times and indicate that an area was grassland. Evidence for this also comes from the numerous fossils of burrowing owls or meadow larks, which prefer open habitats, he said.

Among the excavation’s findings are that the land-roaming Cuban crocodile lived in the Bahamas until humans arrived, Steadman said. “People tend to think of crocodiles as aquatic and certainly most of them are, but in the Bahamas where there is no fresh water, the crocodile became a terrestrial predator,” he said.

The collaborative project includes Bahamian scientists Nancy Albury, Keith Tinker and Michael Pateman, as well as paleontologist Gary Morgan of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History.

In two papers set to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists report that the two largest groups of flowering plants are more closely related to each other than any of the other major lineages. These are the monocots, which include grasses and their relatives, and the eudicots, which include sunflowers and tomatoes.

Doug and Pam Soltis, a UF professor of botany and curator at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History, respectively, also showed that a stunning diversification of flowering plants they are referring to as the “Big Bang” took place in the comparatively short period of less than 5 million years — and resulted in all five major lineages of flowering plants that exist today.

“Flowering plants today comprise around 400,000 species,” said Pam Soltis. “So to think that the burst that gave rise to almost all of these plants occurred in less than 5 million years is pretty amazing — especially when you consider that flowering plants as a group have been around for at least 130 million years.”

The lead author of the UF paper is Michael Moore, a former postdoctoral associate in the Soltis lab and current faculty member at Oberlin College. Charles Bell, the fourth author, is another former Soltis postdoctoral associate, now at The University of New Orleans.

Robert Jansen, professor of integrative biology at The University of Texas at Austin, said the two papers set the stage for all future comparative studies of flowering plants.

“If you are interested in understanding the evolution of flowering plants, you can’t do that unless you understand their relationships,” he said.

Botanists predating Darwin have long recognized that flowering plants, which comprise at least 60 percent of all green plant species, diversified abruptly shortly after they appeared.

The details, and especially the cause of, this diversification — Darwin’s “abominable mystery” — has been a hot topic in botany ever since.

“One of the reasons why it’s been hard to understand evolutionary relationships among the major groups of flowering plants is because they diversified over such a short time frame,” Jansen said.

Seeking to distill the cloudy picture into a clear one, the UF and UT researchers analyzed DNA sequences from the completely sequenced genomes of the chloroplast. That organelle, responsible for plants’ ability to photosynthesize, is shared by all green plants.

Jansen and his UT Austin colleagues analyzed DNA sequences of 81 genes from the chloroplast genome of 64 plant species, while the UF researchers analyzed 61 genes from 45 species. The two groups also performed a combined analysis, which produced evolutionary trees that included all the major groups of flowering plants.

Assisting the effort at UF was a newly purchased rapid gene sequencing machine.

“UF was the first university to purchase this particular type of sequencing machine,” Doug Soltis said. “Where it would have taken months to sequence the chloroplast genome before, you can do it in a single day now.”

By laboriously arranging the sequences, the researchers slowly built a kind of family tree for plants — a diagram of relationships among plant lineages showing diversification over the eons. Based on known rates of genetic change double-checked against fossils of known ages, they established a time scale that revealed the dates of major branching events.

Based on the Soltises’ and their collaborators’ research in previous years, it was known that flowering plants split into three branches shortly after they appeared about 130 million years ago. That process was relatively gradual, at least compared with the rapid radiation that happened next. The details of that radiation have long been murky. The latest research clears the picture by showing that all plants fall into five major lineages that developed over the relatively short period of 5 million years, or possibly even less.

As for the diversification’s cause, it remains mysterious, Pam and Doug Soltis said.

It’s possible it was spurred by some major climatic event. It’s also possible that a new evolutionary trait — a water-conducting cell that transfers water up plant stems — proved so effective that it spurred massive plant species diversification. The cell is either not present, or is poorly developed, in the first three flowering plant lineages, Doug Soltis said. The earliest flowering plant lineages also did not have a completely fused ovary, which in later flowering plants may better protect the seeds, Pam Soltis said.

Additional evidence from Maya culture and social structure at the end of the Classic period (approximately 250 to 800 A.D) strongly supports this assertion. The study by Florida Museum of Natural History Assistant Curator of Environmental Archaeology Kitty Emery appears in the Oct. 31 issue of the Journal for Nature Conservation.

“We’re finding declines specifically in large-game species, and particularly in the species that were politically and socially important to the Maya,” Emery said. “The politically powerful elite Maya had preferential access to large game, and white-tailed deer were especially important to the Maya as food and for their symbolic power.”

Emery tracked the proportion of large-game animals to all vertebrate species over time, using 78,928 animal bones found at 25 Maya archaeological sites. To tease apart specific hunting effects, she also tracked the proportion of white-tailed deer to all vertebrates. Her samples spanned 2,500 years, from about 1000 B.C. to 1500 A.D.

This period includes the collapse of the lowland Maya political and social order and the final period of Spanish colonization. Her study, funded by the National Science Foundation, is the first regional analysis of this area to interpret how humans impacted animal populations based on archaeological data of animal use by humans. She used both her own original data and existing published data.

“The data suggests the game decline was caused primarily by hunting pressure since the reduction in numbers was recorded for large vertebrates as opposed to just animals sensitive to the disappearance of forest cover or those sensitive to climate changes,” Emery said. “But the effects of hunting pressure were undoubtedly exacerbated by deforestation and climate change since there is also documented evidence for these changes at the same time.”

Emery said not all sites showed large-game declines despite high human population, and that the declines were most noticeable at regional capitals and large cities.

“The capital cities were home to a large and top-heavy ruling class who demanded that the regions’ hunters provide them with large quantities of the best cuts of favorite meats from large game, and particularly the white-tailed deer,” Emery said. “They also demanded large numbers of symbolically important species such as white-tailed deer and large wild cats like jaguar and puma, since these species were used as symbolic displays of their wealth and power, and were used in ritual interactions with the deities.”

Deer also were important theatrically because actors wore costumes to portray the predator-prey relationship.

The power of the noble classes and the king was based on their perceived abilities to control ecology, but Emery said several negative environmental situations converged simultaneously, likely contributing to the collapse of Maya political stability starting around 1,200 years ago. According to current Maya archaeological theory, Maya demand for wood used in building finishes such as lime plaster combined with an exploding population base that cleared more and more land for agriculture — resulting in deforestation. Concurrent climate change resulted in a 200-year drought which further curtailed forest regrowth.

“The rulers’ response to the environmental degradation may have been to demand more large game and more deer to use in feasts and rituals where they appealed to deities for help and also to prove their status,” Emery said. “As the valued resources became more scarce, they made more demands to obtain them to prove and reinforce their power.”

Their demand for large game was not extreme enough to cause extinction or local exterminations, an important finding. Emery said this indicates that over the 2,500 years of this study, the ancient Maya were generally careful of their animal resources.

Brown University ancient Maya scholar Stephen Houston said Emery’s “breadth of expertise” allowed her to tackle such an important review of Maya animal use.

“The lack of extinctions shows that the Maya impact on parts of their environment was not as profound as some have thought,” Houston said. “That is, we don’t see utter devastation to the extent that species disappeared entirely. But Emery also confirms that the Maya went after high-value, prestigious meats like deer and, through vigorous hunting, that they found such game harder and harder to find.”

Scientists at the University of Florida and the Museum of Natural History in Berlin made the landmark discovery that prehistoric aquatic critters such as beetles and small crustaceans unwittingly swim into resin flowing down into the water from pine-like trees. Their findings are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The resin with its entombed inhabitants settled to the bottom of the swamp was covered by sediment and after millions of years became amber, a bejeweled version of the tar pits that trapped saber-toothed tigers in what is now California, said David Dilcher, a UF paleo-botanist and one of the study’s researchers.

“People never understood how freshwater algae and freshwater protozoans could be incorporated in amber because amber is considered to have been formed on land,” said Dilcher, who works at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “We showed that it just as well could be formed from resin exuded in watery swamp environments. Later the swamps may dry up and the resin hardens.”

Dilcher and Alexander Schmidt, a researcher at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, replicated the prehistoric demise of the water bugs by taking a handsaw to a swamp on Dilcher’s property near Gainesville in north Central Florida. After they cut bark from some pine trees, the resin flowed into the water and they collected the goo and took it back to Dilcher’s lab on campus.

Stuck in the sticky sap were representatives of almost all the small inhabitants of the swamp ecosystem, Dilcher said. “We found beautiful examples of water beetles, mites, small crustaceans called ostracods, nematodes, and even fungi and bacteria living in the water,” he said.

The discovery not only solved the mystery of how swimming bugs could have been entombed in sticky sap from high up in a tree but could lead to new information about prehistoric, maybe even Jurassic, swamps, Dilcher said. Studying organisms that were trapped for millions of years in amber may help scientists to recreate prehistoric water ecosystems and learn how these life forms changed over time, he said.

While no one is claiming that the entombed bugs will be brought back to life through genetic splicing, the discovery may give clues about the evolution of microorganisms, he said.

“We all think of horses, elephants and people as having changed a great deal through time,” he said. “Have amoeba and other microscopic organisms changed much? Or have they found a niche or what we call a stasis in which their evolutionary lineage persists for many hundreds of millions of years? We don’t have the answers to those questions until we look at the fossil record.”

Insects such as bees, spiders, tics and fleas that become embedded in amber have received a great deal of attention because they are so abundant, Dilcher said. “Unfortunately, people have overlooked the little things while searching for the big bugs and the flowers in amber,” he said.

Microorganisms are important because they form relationships with higher organisms, making them the foundation of the pyramid of life, Dilcher said. “To understand more about their evolution adds an important step in our understanding of life itself,” he said.

Gene Kritsky, editor of the journal American Entomologist and a biology professor at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, said Dilcher has performed a great service in answering a question that has long puzzled scientists, the seemingly contradictory aspect of finding aquatic insects in tree resin.

“It’s been one of the strange things mentioned by biologists and entomologists for decades – how do you account for aquatic insects and organisms in what seemed to be an ancient terrestrial environment,” Kritsky said. “Dilcher examined this contradiction by creating the conditions that would cause sap deposits to flow into water to see what would happen. The results demonstrated that aquatic insects can be trapped in resin without leaving their aquatic world. Thus, the presence of aquatic organisms in amber is the result of a simple natural process.”

University of Florida researchers George Austin and Andrew Warren discovered the new species of owl butterfly earlier this year. The discovery is significant because the species is large and colorful, and is the first butterfly from this group to be named in more than 100 years. Most newly discovered species are small and unremarkable because the more noticeable ones were discovered long ago.

“It is extraordinarily uncommon for such a large, showy butterfly to have escaped detection until now,” said Warren, a post-doctoral associate at the Florida Museum’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. “This likely will be one of the last times such a large and beautiful butterfly is named.”

In what is believed to be the first time naming rights for a new butterfly species have been auctioned online in North America, the winning bidder will determine the species name following the public auction at iGavel.com, which starts Oct. 22 and ends Nov. 2.

“We realized this striking discovery represents an exceptional opportunity to raise funds for continued research on Mexican butterflies, by allowing rights to the species-level name to be auctioned,” said Austin, who is the McGuire Center collections manager.

Owl butterflies are some of the most familiar and best-known butterflies in the world due to their large size and striking wing eyespots. The new owl species belongs to the Opsiphanes group. It has a wingspan of about 4 inches and a beautiful orange color, and lives in the Sonoran Desert in northwestern Mexico.

Surprisingly, Austin came across the species while curating butterflies at the McGuire Center, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of Lepidoptera at more than 6 million specimens, and called Warren.

Austin said that as a result of ongoing museum and field research, it is not unusual for scientists to discover several new butterfly species each year. But most often, these new species are discovered among the smaller, less remarkable butterfly groups and are frequently confusingly similar in appearance to already described species.

Austin and Warren are lead authors of the original description, scheduled to appear in November’s Bulletin of the Allyn Museum, a peer-reviewed journal produced by the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Rather than naming the butterfly themselves, the customary practice when new species are discovered, Austin and Warren decided to auction the naming rights of the new species to raise money to support continued research on Mexican butterflies at the McGuire Center. Researchers at the Alfonso L. Herrera Zoology Museum at the National Autonomous University of Mexico are partners in the process.

The naming rights to other animal species have been successfully auctioned. In 2005, the Wildlife Conservation Society auctioned the rights to name a new species of monkey discovered in Bolivia for $650,000.

In September, an auction of rights to name 10 newly discovered fish species raised more than $2 million for conservation efforts in eastern Indonesia, setting a record for this type of event. Prices for the naming rights ranged from $500,000 for a Hemiscyllium shark from Cendrawasih Bay to $50,000 for the Pseudanthias fairy basslet.

The winning bidder for the new owl butterfly will have the name of his or her choice applied to the species’ formal description, following the rules of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. The name will then be used for this species in all future scientific publications and field guides. Proceeds from this auction qualify as a charitable contribution, deductible subject to IRS limitations.

John Calhoun, a research associate at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods, said some have worried that such auctions could have enormous ramifications if species are allowed to acquire commercial value, leading people to “discover” new species solely for the monetary potential.

“However, the rigorous process required to actually publish and validate new species makes this outcome less likely,” Calhoun said. “It must also be remembered that although a name may be purchased, the buyer maintains no ownership or regulatory authority over that species.”

New genera of living birds are rare discoveries — fewer than one per year is announced globally. David Steadman and Andrew Kratter, ornithologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History, turned up the surprising new discovery on a collecting expedition in the Solomon Islands. Theirs is the first frogmouth from these islands to be caught by scientists in more than 100 years. They immediately recognized it was something different.

Kratter and Steadman are co-authors to a study analyzing the frogmouth’s morphology, or physical form, and DNA in comparison to two other living genera of frogmouths. The findings are published in the April print edition of Ibis: The International Journal of Avian Science, in a paper that describes the bird as a new genus and species, now named Rigidipenna inexpectata.

“This discovery underscores that birds on remote Pacific islands are still poorly known, scientifically speaking,” Steadman said. “Without the help of local hunters, we probably would have overlooked the frogmouth.”

Originally, the bird was misclassified as a subspecies of the Australian Marbled Frogmouth, Podargus ocellatus. The blunder went undetected for decades, until a collecting trip led by Kratter in 1998 turned up a specimen on Isabel, a 1,500-square-mile island in the Solomons. Today, the only museum specimen of this bird in the world, with an associated skin and skeleton, is housed at the Florida Museum.

Frogmouths are predatory birds named for their strikingly wide, strong beak that resembles a frog’s mouth; but their beak also sports a small, sharp hook more like an owl’s. Steadman said their beaks are like no other bird’s in the world. They eat insects, rodents, small birds — and yes, even frogs.
For perspective on the scale of evolutionary difference between genera, consider that modern humans and Neanderthals are different species within the same genus (Homo), while chimpanzees are our living relatives from a closely related genus (Pan), but that we share the same taxonomic family (Hominidae) with our chimp cousins.

The Solomon Islands Frogmouth differs from other frogmouths in a number of significant ways. First, it is probably not as accomplished of a flier because its eight tail-feathers, instead of the typical 10 to 12 on other frogmouths, curtail its lift potential, and its much coarser feathers reduce maneuverability.

“These are island adaptations that work to keep the bird on the island,” Steadman said.

Second, it has distinct barring on the primary wing feathers and tail feathers, where other frogmouths are more uniform. Its speckles are larger, and the white spots on its breast and underbelly are more pronounced than on other frogmouths.

Two other genera of frogmouths exist: one in southeast Asia and the other in Australia and New Guinea. The Solomon Islands Frogmouth is known to inhabit three islands: Isabel, Bougainville and Guadalcanal.

Van Remsen, curator of birds at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, said that this new frogmouth genus serves as a poignant reminder that birds of the tropics, particularly from southeast Asia to Melanesia, have been paid scant attention by science.

“They’ve barely been studied, much of what we know comes from antiquated or casual observations,” Remsen said. “The biology of birds in these regions is, to a great extent, obscured by stale, hand-me-down classifications from an earlier era. A combination of detailed morphological and genetic analyses reveal that this frogmouth — formerly dismissed as just a race of an existing species — actually cannot be placed confidently in any existing genus, and so the data demand naming a new one.”

Storrs Olson, a senior zoologist with the Smithsonian Institution, said that frogmouths are an enigmatic group of birds to begin with.

“That this should prove to be such a distinctive new genus, which it unquestionably is, has profound biogeographical implications and represents a real breakthrough in elucidating the evolutionary history of the family,” Olson said.

Nigel Cleere of the The Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom is the lead author for the paper and additional co-authors include: Michael Braun and Christopher Huddleston of the Smithsonian Institution, Christopher Filardi of the University of Washington’s Burke Museum and Guy Dutson.

Rather than close encounters of the intimate kind, humans most likely got the gorilla’s lice from sleeping in their nests or eating the giant apes, said David Reed, assistant curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, one of the study’s authors. The research is published in the current edition of the BMC Biology journal.

“It certainly wouldn’t have to be what many people are going to immediately assume it might have been, and that is sexual intercourse occurring between humans and gorillas,” he said. “Instead of something sordid, it could easily have stemmed from an activity that was considerably more tame.”

About 3.3 million years ago, lice found on gorillas began to infest humans, Reed said. That they took up residence in the pubic region may have coincided with humans’ loss of hair on the rest of their bodies and the lack of any other suitable niche, he said.

Reed and his co-workers’ research stemmed from their fascination with humans’ unique position among primates in being host to two different kinds of lice: one on the head and body (Pediculus), which has become the bane of many schoolchildren, and pubic or crab lice (Pthirus). In contrast, chimps have only head lice and gorillas pubic lice.

Understanding the history of lice is important because the tiny insects give clues about the lifestyles of early hominids and evolution of modern humans, Reed said. Because the human fossil record is patchy and finding early DNA samples is extremely difficult, parasites such as head lice, pubic lice, tapeworms and pinworms that have existed for millions of years provide valuable clues, he said.

“These lice really give us the potential to learn how humans evolved when so many
parts of our evolutionary history are obscure,” he said. Lice also can serve as a model in understanding how parasites move from one species to another, Reed said.

“If you look at emerging infectious diseases that affect humans all over the world, most have their origins on some other host before threatening humans,” he said. “Studying what it takes for a parasite to be successful in switching hosts adds to our knowledge about what makes a good host for the spread of disease.”

Working with other scientists who collected lice from primates in Ugandan wildlife sanctuaries, the research team extracted DNA from the lice and used fossil data from humans and gorillas to estimate how long ago these two types of lice shared a common ancestor.

In particular, the researchers looked at whether pubic lice developed on their own in humans or whether humans acquired them from gorillas. They believed humans were more likely to have had lice all along because this was a simpler explanation than acquiring lice from gorillas, but they were proved wrong.

It is not unusual for lice to switch hosts, with this occurring in both birds and mammals, Reed said. Lice that lived on the passenger pigeon before it became extinct persist today because they switched to another species of pigeon, he said.

Lice need either direct physical contact or very recent contact to switch hosts, Reed said. In this specific case, the parasite might have been transmitted to humans sleeping in a depression in the ground where a gorilla had slept and nested the night before or even by humans feeding on gorillas, he said.

“Unfortunately, even today among modern humans there’s a bush meat trade where gorillas are killed for their meat,” he said. “If archaic humans were butchering or scavenging those animals 3.3 million years ago, it would be a simple thing to transfer those lice from prey to predator.”

Because humans and gorillas are so closely related and have so many potential interactions of a nonsexual nature, it would have been less likely for the lice to have been transmitted through sexual intercourse, he said.

Reed did the study with postdoctoral researcher Jessica Light at the Florida Museum of Natural History and zoology graduate students Julie Allen and Jeremy Kirchman.

“This paper makes one’s imagination run wild, giving graphic new meaning to that ‘800 pound gorilla,’” said Dale Clayton, a University of Utah biology professor. “However, as the authors point out, the inferred host switch of pubic lice from gorillas to humans did not require sexual contact. Human pubic or ‘crab’ lice get transmitted between people on bath towels all the time. So it is easy to imagine that gorilla lice could have transmitted to humans via shared sleeping quarters, or predation, as the authors suggest.”

Cowbirds have long been known to lay eggs in the nests of other birds, which then raise the cowbirds’ young as their own.

Sneaky, perhaps, but not Scarface.

Now, however, a University of Florida study finds that cowbirds actually ransack and destroy the nests of warblers that don’t buy into the ruse and raise their young.

Jeff Hoover, an avian ecologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is the lead author on the first study to document experimental evidence of this peeper payback — retaliation to encourage acceptance of parasitic eggs.

Findings will be published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences March 5.

“It’s the female cowbirds who are running the mafia racket at our study site,” said Hoover, who has a joint appointment with the Illinois Natural History Survey. “Our study shows many of them returned and ransacked the nest when we removed the parasitic egg.”

So-called “brood parasitic birds” lay eggs in the nests of host birds that raise the parasite’s offspring, usually at the expense of some of their own. The brown-headed cowbird parasitizes more than 100 host species, including many Neotropical migratory birds such as warblers, tanagers and vireos. Prothonotary warblers were used for this study because they almost always accept cowbird eggs, Hoover said.

Hosts that use their beaks to grasp or puncture parasitic eggs and remove them from the nest are called “ejecters.” “Accepter” hosts raise parasitic eggs.

“Retaliatory mafia behavior in cowbirds makes hosts’ acceptance of cowbird eggs a better proposition than ejection,” Hoover said. “The accepting warblers in our study produced more of their own offspring, on average, than those where we ejected cowbird eggs.”

Hosts may lose some, but not all, of their biological offspring by accepting parasitism. The retaliatory behavior of ransacking nests encourages warblers to raise the cowbirds’ offspring.

“We wanted to determine if the cowbirds were responsible for nest predation after we removed cowbird eggs from parasitized warbler nests,” Hoover said. To test for this, Hoover collaborated with Scott Robinson, Florida Museum Ordway eminent scholar and natural history chair, to manipulate cowbird access to warbler nests in the Cache River watershed of southern Illinois. The researchers monitored 182 predator-proofed nests over four breeding seasons.

Hoover and Robinson found that warbler nests were ransacked 56 percent of the time when researchers experimentally removed the parasitic eggs and cowbirds were allowed nest access, versus only 6 percent when the cowbird eggs were accepted and cowbirds had nest access. No nests were ransacked when researchers removed cowbird eggs and cowbirds were denied nest access. Together, these results implicate cowbirds and provide evidence of mafia behavior.

“We also found evidence for ‘farming’ behavior,” Hoover said. “Cowbirds ‘farm’ a non-parasitized nest by destroying its contents so that the host will build another. The cowbird then syncs its egg laying with the hosts’ ‘renest’ attempt.”

Hoover found that warbler nests that were never parasitized but that cowbirds had access to, were ransacked 20 percent of the time. “Cowbirds parasitized 85 percent of the renests, which is strong supporting evidence for both farming and mafia behavior,” he said.

Hoover and Robinson’s results imply that cowbirds actively monitor nests they parasitize — which supports the idea that cowbirds continue to visit nests they have parasitized to see the results of their handiwork.

Stephen Rothstein, a zoology professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara, said other studies have shown evidence contrary to mafia and farming behaviors.

“Video surveillance would show the proportion of nest predation attributable to cowbirds,” Rothstein said. “The phenomenon may be perfectly true for these warblers, but that doesn’t mean it holds true for other species, especially those that aren’t nesting in special circumstances. Nevertheless, this new study may extend our knowledge of the extent to which parasitic cowbirds may have evolved tactics to facilitate their parasitism.”

Hoover said his future research includes video surveillance of individually banded female cowbirds and warbler nests.

University of Florida archaeologist Kathleen Deagan co-authored the study and led the fieldwork at La Isabela, founded in 1493 on modern day Dominican Republic’s north coast. Deagan collaborated with geoscientists and metallurgists to interpret a smelting operation at the site that appeared to have used nearly 200 pounds of galena, a silver-bearing lead ore.

Findings will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Feb. 27 print edition.

“We first thought they mined the galena locally to extract lead for weapons, such as lead shot and musket balls or ship sheathing,” said Deagan, a distinguished research curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “But an isotope analysis showed it was actually from Spain. And metallurgical analysis shows they were trying to extract silver. The archaeological evidence suggested just how desperate the last settlers at the colony were to get precious metal before abandoning the settlement.”

Columbus established La Isabela on his second expedition, which Deagan says was a quest for precious metals. Mining and metallurgy were central elements to the settlement of about 1,500 people — almost all men.

“Columbus really expected and needed to find gold,” she said. “Anytime we recovered evidence for metallurgy — like ore, slag or equipment for smelting — it was important.”

Deagan and her team excavated the galena inside a structure they identified as the royal storehouse, near the front entry. Just outside the entry, they excavated more than 440 pounds of metal slag material. Deagan said it was associated with a fire pit likely used for heating metals.

“All the galena was in the last stratigraphic layer of the storehouse,” Deagan said. “The smelting was one of the last activities to take place.”

Deagan collaborated with other researchers to understand how the settlers processed the materials. She contacted archaeometallurgist David Killick at the University of Arizona and provided samples and funding for his laboratory.

Alyson Thibodeau, a geosciences graduate student working with Killick and lead author of the paper, performed an isotope analysis.

“We found that the samples from La Isabela were extremely consistent with galena found in Spain near the port where the second expedition sailed from,” Thibodeau said.

Deagan was surprised to learn the galena was not mined locally. “So the question was: Why did they haul this heavy, unrefined lead ore all the way from Spain when they could have brought processed lead?” Deagan said.

By consulting with Spanish experts in medieval metallurgy, the team discovered other past uses for galena. In medieval times, they learned, galena was used as flux to draw precious metals from ore matrices and to test their purity. This is likely how La Isabela’s settlers used it.

Killick pieced together the settler’s unconventional use of the galena when he identified the excavated slag as lead silicate — the end product of an improvised smelting process. He discovered tiny specks of silver upon examining the lead silicate with optical and scanning electron microscopy.

“That’s when the penny dropped,” he said. “I realized they were wasting all the lead trying to separate out the silver.”

Deagan said the metal analysis showed the settlers didn’t quite know what they were doing. “They were clearly trying to get the silver out of it,” Deagan said. “But the byproducts showed they had too much of one chemical, but not enough of another. Someone knew a little bit, but not enough.”

Ann Ramenofsky, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico, reviewed the study.

“Given there was someone on the expedition who knew how to do these extractions suggests metallurgy was significant, even though Isabela ultimately failed,” Ramenofsky said. “Deagan deserves high praise for a beautiful excavation. It’s changed our understanding of the Spanish conquest of the Americas.”

Additional authors are Joaquin Ruiz, John Chesley and Ward Lyman of the University of Arizona; and José Cruxent of Universidad Nacional y Experimental Francisco de Miranda in Venezuela. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation, Direccion Nacional de Parques de la Republica Dominicana, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Geographic Society and the Keck Foundation.

The overwhelming majority of previous climate-change studies on the 400,000-year transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene epochs, about 33.5 million years ago, focus on marine environments, but University of Florida vertebrate paleontologist Bruce MacFadden and his colleagues turned their attention to fossils from the Great Plains.

The study will be published online Feb. 7 in the journal Nature and will appear in the Feb. 8 print edition.

“If a temperature change of this magnitude occurred today, Florida would have weather similar to Washington, D.C., or even farther north,” said MacFadden, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The Eocene-to-Oligocene transition is known in the fossil record as the Grande Coupure, the “Big Cut” in French, because it marks a massive extinction of life in both marine and land environments. Scientists believe the drop in temperature was likely due to changes in oceanic currents, MacFadden said.

“Fossil mammals are archives of ancient information,” MacFadden said. “Their teeth are like little time capsules that allow us to analyze chemicals captured millions of years ago within the animals’ skeletons.”

MacFadden said 49 of the 68 fossil teeth analyzed came from the Florida Museum’s vertebrate paleontology collection. Researchers analyzed oxygen and carbon isotopes in the preserved teeth and bones of primitive fossil horses and a primitive cloven-hoofed mammal called an oreodont. Isotopes are atoms of naturally occurring elements, characterized by varying numbers of neutrons but constant numbers of protons. Oxygen isotopes act as thermometers, telling scientists at what temperature they were formed; and carbon isotopes act as barometers, revealing relative humidity.

“A combined analysis of the isotope composition of bones and teeth is a new approach to studying this boundary in time,” said Alessandro Zanazzi, a doctoral student in geology at the University of South Carolina and lead author of the paper. “Tooth enamel has very low porosity and low organic matter, so it maintains the isotopic composition of when it was formed.”

Donald R. Prothero, a professor of geology at Occidental College and an expert on the Eocene-to-Oligocene transition, said, ”We have long known that there were some dramatic climatic changes in the earliest Oligocene based on the record of marine plankton and isotopes. But we didn’t know how much change there was in degrees, although the plant changes suggested it was indeed about 15 degrees.”

Prothero also said gaps in the fossil record from Nebraska may have prevented researchers from obtaining detailed temperature data, and he hopes further studies will be completed at other sites such as Wyoming.

Additional co-authors include Matthew J. Kohn, associate professor of geology at the University of South Carolina and advisor to Zanazzi, and Dennis O. Terry Jr., assistant professor of geology at Temple University. The study was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

UF paleontologist Bruce MacFadden said his team used an established geochemical technique that analyzes rare earth elements in a new application to revise the ages of terror bird fossils in Texas and Florida, the only places in North America where the species has been found. Rare earth elements are a group of naturally occurring metallic elements that share similar chemical and physical properties.

“It was previously thought that Titanis immigrated to Texas across the Panamanian land bridge that formed about 3 million years ago connecting North and South America,” said MacFadden, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at UF. “But the rare earth element analysis of a fossil Titanis bone from Texas determines its age to be 5 million years old. This shows that the bird arrived 2 million years before the land bridge formed, probably across islands that formed what today is the Isthmus of Panama.”

The study will be published Jan. 23 in the online version of the journal Geology and featured in its February print edition.

The terror bird was carnivorous, weighed about 330 pounds, had powerful feet and a head larger than a man’s. It is known in the fossil record from a single toe bone in Texas, and in Florida by about 40 bone fragments from different skeletal regions. MacFadden’s team also analyzed six specimens from the Santa Fe River in north Central Florida.

“We found that the Titanis fossils were 2 million years old and not 10,000 years old as had been suggested,” MacFadden said. “This also shows the last known occurrence of Titanis in the fossil record and reflects its extinction.”

When an animal dies, its porous bones absorb groundwater as they fossilize. As the local groundwater conditions change, the rare earth elements’ concentrations change, resulting in a unique chemical signature.

“We used rare earth elements because they’re highly specific to certain time periods and different groundwater conditions,” MacFadden said. “This is the first time that the uptake of rare earth elements during the early stage of fossilization has been used to determine the age of fossils in North America.”

Geologists have used the technique to study igneous and metamorphic rocks, but only one other researcher worldwide has applied this technique to date the age of fossils: professor Clive Trueman from the University of Southampton in England.

“It is very difficult to assess the age of fossil bones directly as they are too old to be carbon dated,” Trueman wrote in an e-mail. “Bones can also be moved after death, further confusing their true age. MacFadden’s approach compares bones of disputed age with those of known age. If the chemistry matches, the bones are of the same age irrespective of their final resting place.”

David Grandstaff, a professor and chairman of the geology department at Temple University, said the technique is timely and important.

“If a fossil gets moved or reworked from its place of formation, it will have a fingerprint that is different from the others nearby,” Grandstaff said. “Who knew that all these fossils essentially have a tag that says ‘hey, I’m from over here!’ ”

Co-authors of the study include Richard Hulbert Jr. of the Florida Museum of Natural History; Joann Labs-Hochstein, who at the time of the study was a postdoctoral student of MacFadden’s; and Jon Baskin of Texas A&M University.

Published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and featured on the cover of its Jan. 23 print edition, the study offers compelling evidence that a group of archaic mammals called plesiadapiforms (please-ee-ah-dape-i-forms) are more closely related to modern primates than to flying lemurs, which previously had been proposed.

The two-part study examined specimens representing more than 85 modern and extinct species and provides evidence that plesiadapiforms are the most primitive primates. The team also discovered two 56-million-year-old fossils, the most primitive primate skeletons ever described.

“These fossil finds from Wyoming show that our earliest primate ancestors were the size of a mouse, ate fruit and lived in the trees,” said study leader Jonathan Bloch, a vertebrate paleontology curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “It is remarkable to think we are still discovering new fossil species in an area studied by paleontologists for over 100 years.”

Bloch discovered the new plesiadapiform species, Ignacius clarkforkensis and Dryomomys szalayi, just outside Yellowstone National Park in the Bighorn Basin with co-author Doug Boyer, a graduate student in anatomical science at Stony Brook University.

Ignacius previously was known to science only by skulls and isolated bones. Other scientists have proposed that the animal was not an archaic primate, but instead a gliding mammal related to flying lemurs. However, Bloch and his team debunked this idea based on an analysis of a more complete and well-preserved skeleton. The second species, Dryomomys, had a skull about the size of a grape with a body length of about 6 inches.

“The demise of the dinosaurs opened up ecological space for mammals to diversify, which they did—and quickly,” Bloch said. “The Paleocene, about 65 (million) to 55 million years ago, is the time period between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the first appearance of a number of undisputed members of the modern orders of mammals.”

Researchers previously hypothesized that plesiadapiforms may be the ancestors of modern primates, but this idea generated healthy debate within the paleontology community; Bloch’s team is the first to offer strong phylogenetic evidence supporting it. The team analyzed 173 characteristics of modern primates, tree shrews, flying lemurs with plesiadapiform skeletons to determine which species were most closely related.

“This collaboration is the first to bring together evidence from all regions of the skeleton, and offers a well-supported perspective on the structure of the earliest part of the primate family tree,” Bloch said.

Modern primates can be recognized by at least five characteristic features: relatively large brains, enhanced vision brought about in part by eyes that face forward, a specialized ability to leap, nails instead of claws on at least the first toes, and specialized grasping hands and feet. Plesiadapiforms have some but not all of these traits, and Bloch and his team argue that this group of early primates may have acquired these traits over 10 million years in incremental changes to exploit their environment.

Bloch said plesiadapiforms adapted to changes in flowering trees. As the trees evolved, the early primates became more efficient at utilizing their flowers, fruit and sap — and the insects attracted to these same food sources.

“Plesiadapiforms have long been one of the most controversial groups in mammalian phylogeny,” said Michael J. Novacek, curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. “First, they are somewhere near primates and us. Second, historically they have offered tantalizing, but very often incomplete, fossil evidence. But the specimens in their study are beautifully and spectacularly preserved.”

The team also includes anthropology professors Eric Sargis of Yale University and Mary Silcox from the University of Winnipeg.