With nearly 175,000 described species serving as herbivores, pollinators and prey, Lepidoptera affect humans as agricultural pests and essential pollinators for production of many food crops, said co-author Akito Kawahara, assistant curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity on the UF campus.

“The new study provides one of our best estimates of the evolutionary relationships of butterflies and moths,” Kawahara said. “When trying to conserve a butterfly or moth species, the biology of that particular species might not be well known because it’s so rare, but if you have a family tree, you can infer these traits based on closely related species.”

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Assembling the Tree of Life program, was authored by 16 researchers from five countries. The researchers collected and analyzed DNA sequences of 483 taxa spanning 115 families of the Ditrysia group, which comprises about 98 percent of described butterfly and moth species. Each specimen was chosen to represent a major family of butterflies or moths.

Kawahara collected specimens and assisted with DNA sequence analysis as a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland. Published online in the journal PLOS One March 12, the study shows molecular evidence broadly supports the relationships determined by analyzing physical features, but more extensive data is needed to gain complete understanding of Lepidoptera evolution, Kawahara said.

“A big chunk of the tree is still largely uncertain,” Kawahara said. “The collaborative team has made major headway, but there’s still more to do.”

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With the help of University of Florida mechanical engineering professor W. Gregory Sawyer and UF postdoctoral researcher Brandon Krick, Florida State University paleobiologist Gregory Erickson determined the teeth of hadrosaurs — an herbivore from the late Cretaceous period — had six tissues in their teeth instead of two. The results were published in the journal Science Oct. 5.

“When something has been in the ground 65 million years, by and large we pick it up and we look at it and say, ‘oh, look at what has been preserved.’ But we don’t mechanically interrogate fossils to see if there is other information,” Sawyer said. “When we started to mechanically interrogate these teeth, what we found was all of these properties were preserved, and one other thing: these teeth were a lot more complicated than we thought.”

For years, Erickson, who has a background in biomechanical engineering and studies bone biomechanics as a paleobiologist, had thought so. So he turned to the UF Tribology Laboratory, which researches the science of friction and surface wear.

Engineers don’t often see the interesting paleontological questions, Sawyer said. One look at the surface of the dinosaur teeth piqued his interest, however, because he is intrigued by how wear occurs across surfaces with different materials. The shape of the tooth made him think it was much more complex than previously thought.

From an engineering perspective, Sawyer said his lab often works with composites that contain different material properties that wear differently, so the question was whether just two materials — enamel and dentine — would wear the way the hadrosaur teeth did. Sawyer and Krick thought not, and turned to nanoindenters and microtribometers.

Just a decade ago, a paleontologist might not have asked engineers for help, and they could not have helped him. In the last 10 years, however, Sawyer said advances in engineering — tribology and nanoscience, in particular — make it possible to test more materials, even those millions of years old.

Erickson said reptilian dinosaurs have been dismissed as simplistic creatures in their feeding and dental structure. They were herbivores, their teeth composed of enamel and dentine. The fossil record did little to contradict that.

Testing with nanoindenters and microtribometers, however, proved the conventional wisdom wrong.

“Hadrosaurs’ teeth were incredibly complicated, among the most complex of any animal,” Sawyer said. “These dinosaurs had developed a lot of tricks.”

The duck-billed hadrosaur was a toothy creature with up to 1,400 teeth, Erickson said. The teeth migrated across the chewing surface, with sharp, enamel-edged front teeth moving sideways to become grinding teeth as the teeth matured. The adaptation allowed hadrosaurs to bite off chunks of bark and stems and chew them to a digestible mush, leading Erickson to describe them as “walking pulp mills.” The teeth wore down at the rate of 1 millimeter per day, cycling through the jaw like a conveyor belt, before falling out or being swallowed. The dinosaurs lost about 1,800 teeth a year, leaving behind plenty of fossils for testing.

When the fossils emerged from batteries of tests, the researchers found six tissues in the tooth structure, not two.

“Modern tools told us there were different materials in there,” said Sawyer, who is also a UF Research Foundation Professor and Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

Erickson said the work could not have been accomplished without Sawyer’s lab, “arguably the best tribological lab in the world,” and said he is excited about the possibilities for new avenues of research. There are drawers full of fossils in collections around the world that may have more information to yield.

Sawyer agrees, and says that more engineering data could well be buried in fossils.

“Perhaps now it makes sense to take some of that fossil record, when we have other pieces of the record, and start to do things like sectioning and histology,” Sawyer said. “There are opportunities now with modern scientific tools to probe their mechanical and tribological properties. If we treat a fossil as a modern material, what happens? Do the mechanical properties track?”

The collaborative nature of the Florida university system was a key to getting the work done, Sawyer said, as was the funding his research gets from the University of Florida Foundation.

“It took us five years to do this because it was always a side project and wasn’t funded. We could chew on it at our own pace,” Sawyer said. “This is exactly what you hope for when you endow research, that people will take those funds and do things that are scientifically significant.”

The study published online today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology addresses the century-long debate among scientists about whether human and mammal remains found at Vero Beach in the early 1900s date to the same time period. Using rare earth element analysis to measure the concentration of naturally occurring metals absorbed during fossilization, researchers show modern humans in North America co-existed with large extinct mammals about 13,000 years ago, including mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths.

“The Vero site is still the only site where there was an abundance of actual human bones, not just artifacts, associated with the animals,” said co-author Barbara Purdy, UF anthropology professor emeritus and archaeology curator emeritus at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “Scientists who disputed the age of the human remains in the early 20th century just did not want to believe that people were in the Western Hemisphere that early. And 100 years later, every single book written about the prehistory of North America includes this site and the controversy that still exists.”

Following discovery of the fossils in South Florida between 1913 and 1916, some prominent scientists convinced researchers the human skeletons were from more recent burials and not as old as the animals, a question that remained unanswered because no dating methods existed.

“The uptake of rare earth elements is time-dependent, so an old fossil is going to have very different concentrations of rare earth elements than bones from a more recent human burial,” said lead author Bruce MacFadden, Florida Museum vertebrate paleontology curator. “We found the human remains have statistically the same concentrations of rare earth elements as the fossils.”

The little information known about the first humans to appear in North America is primarily based on bone fragments and artifacts, such as stone points used for hunting. Other sites in California, Montana and Texas show human presence around the same time period based on artifacts, but two nearly complete human skeletons were discovered at the Vero Beach site.

As bones begin to fossilize they absorb elements from the surrounding sediment, and analysis is effective in distinguishing different-aged fossils deposited in the same locality. Instead of radiocarbon dating, which requires the presence of collagen in bones, researchers used mass spectrometry to compare rare earth elements in the specimens because a lack of collagen in the Vero Beach specimens made radiocarbon dating impossible, Purdy said.

Researchers analyzed samples from 24 human bones and 48 animal fossils in the Florida Museum’s collections and determined the specimens were all from the late Pleistocene Epoch about 13,000 years ago. While rare earth element analysis method is not as precise as radiocarbon dating, Purdy said the significance of human skeletons found in Vero Beach is unquestionable in terms of their presence in the Western Hemisphere.

“It is important to note that they [the authors] did not provide an absolute or chronometric date, rather the geochemistry shows that the trace elemental geochemistry is the same, thus the bones must be of the same age,” said Kenneth Tankersley, an assistant professor in the University of Cincinnati anthropology and geology departments.

Native fauna during the last ice age ranged from extinct jaguars and saber-toothed cats to shrews, mice and squirrels still present in Florida. Researchers speculate humans would have been wanderers much like the animals because there was less fresh water than in later years, Purdy said.

“Humans would have been following the animals for a food supply, but that’s about all we know,” Purdy said. “We know what some of their tools looked like and we know they were hunting the extinct animals but we know practically nothing about their family life, such as how these ancient people raised their children and grieved for their dead.”

Study co-authors include Krista Church of UF and the University of Texas, and Thomas Stafford Jr., of Stafford Research in Colorado and the University of Copenhagen.

“Vero is a historical context for the development of archaeology — these are the beginnings of the people of America,” MacFadden said. “The site is well-known in the literature but has been discounted, so we’re sort of reviving an understanding of this important locality and using newer techniques to revive the question about the antiquity of the humans.”

Appearing online this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the study is the first published description of a fossil mammal discovered as part of an international project in Panama. Funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation, UF paleontologists and geologists are working with the Panama Canal Authority and scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to make the most of a five-year window of excavations during Panama Canal expansions that began in 2009.

The discovery by Florida Museum of Natural History researchers extends the distribution of mammals to their southernmost point in the ancient tropics of Central America. The tropics contain some of the world’s most important ecosystems, including rain forests that regulate climate systems and serve as a vital source of food and medicine, yet little is known of their history because lush vegetation prevents paleontological excavations.

“We’re discovering this fabulous new diversity of animals that lived in Central America that we didn’t even know about before,” said co-author Bruce MacFadden, vertebrate paleontology curator at the Florida Museum on the UF campus and co-principal investigator on the NSF grant funding the project. “The family originated about 30 million years ago and they’re found widespread throughout North America, but prior to this discovery, they were unknown south of Mexico.”

Researchers described two species of ancient camels that are also the oldest mammals found in Panama: Aguascalietia panamaensis and Aguascalientia minuta. Distinguished from each other mainly by their size, the camels belong to an evolutionary branch of the camel family separate from the one that gave rise to modern camels based on different proportions of teeth and elongated jaws.

“Some descriptions say these are ‘crocodile-like’ camels because they have more elongated snouts than you would expect,” said lead author Aldo Rincon, a UF geology doctoral student. “They were probably browsers in the forests of the ancient tropics. We can say that because the crowns are really short.”

Rincon discovered the fossils in the Las Cascadas formation, unearthing pieces of a jaw belonging to the same animal over a span of two years, he said.

“When I came back to the museum, I started putting everything together and realized, ‘Oh wow, I have a nearly complete jaw,’ ” Rincon said.

The study shows that despite Central America’s close proximity to South America, there was no connection between continents because mammals in the area 20 million years ago all had North American origins. The Isthmus of Panama formed about 15 million years later and the fauna crossed to South America 2.5 to 3 million years ago, MacFadden said.

Barry Albright, a professor of earth science at the University of North Florida who studied the early Miocene fauna of the Gulf Coast Plain, said he was surprised by the similarity of the Central American fauna.

“To me, it’s slightly unexpected,” Albright said. “That’s a large latitudinal gradient between the Gulf Coastal Plain and Panama, yet we’re seeing the same mammals, so perhaps that tells us something about climate over that interval of time and dispersal patterns of some mammals over that interval of time.”
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Camels belong to a group of even-toed ungulates that includes cattle, goats, sheep, deer, buffalo and pigs. Other fossil mammals discovered in Panama from the early Miocene have been restricted to those also found in North America at the time. While researchers are sure the ancient camels were herbivores that likely browsed in forests, they are still analyzing seeds and pollen to better understand the environment of the ancient tropics.

“People think of camels as being in the Old World, but their distribution in the past is different than what we know today,” MacFadden said. “The ancestors of llamas originated in North America and then when the land bridge formed about 4 to 5 million years ago, they dispersed into South America and evolved into the llama, alpaca, guanaco and vicuña.”

Researchers will continue excavating deposits from the Panama Canal during construction to widen and straighten the channel and build new locks, expected to continue through 2014. The project is funded by a $3.8 million NSF grant to develop partnerships between the U.S. and Panama and engage the next generation of scientists in paleontological and geological discoveries along the canal. Study co-authors include Jonathan Bloch of UF, and Catalina Suarez and Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Recovered by recreational fishermen who found the creature floating on the surface about 12 miles offshore from Jensen Beach Sunday, museum scientists collected the specimen from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Tequesta Field Laboratory in Palm Beach County and returned to the Gainesville campus late Monday.

“It’s so rare to get these specimens and they’re such deep-water animals that we don’t know much about how they live,” said John Slapcinsky, Florida Museum malacology collection manager. “This specimen provides an excellent opportunity to learn things about these creatures we couldn’t find out any other way.”

Robert Benz, who was fishing with friends Joey Asaro and Paul Peroulakis, said they spotted the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, about 11 a.m. After realizing what it was, the men slid the dying squid onto the back of their 23-foot boat.

“I thought we definitely need to bring it in, because no one’s going to believe us if we don’t,” Benz said. “I didn’t want to leave it out there and just let the sharks eat it.”

Giant squid only reproduce once in their lifetime, and then often die slowly, after becoming lethargic, Slapcinsky said. The animal was likely in that state when the fishermen found it, he believes, because it was barely alive and near the surface in 170 feet of water.

Giant squid are one of the largest invertebrates, growing up to 60 feet long and weighing more than 1,000 pounds, but because they are seldom seen, little is known about their reproduction, ecology and life span. Depicted as sea monsters throughout history, squid are normally deep-water dwellers and some are known to spar with sperm whales, a common predator, Slapcinsky said.

“This is a pretty massive animal,” he said. “It took about six people to move it, and it wasn’t light.”

The animal is white with red skin containing chromatophores, or color-bearing cells. Squid can activate these pigment cells, rapidly changing their color and color intensity for communication and in some species camouflage, Slapcinsky said.

The specimen is from the same genus as the giant squid depicted in the Florida Museum‘s 2006 temporary exhibit, “In Search of Giant Squid.” The exhibit produced by the Smithsonian Institution focused on the fact the creature had never been witnessed alive in its natural habitat — a feat later accomplished by a Japanese film crew.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission scientists extracted genetic samples from the squid, which were brought with the specimen to UF. Scientists injected formalin into the body cavity before submerging the squid in a 10 percent solution of the preservative.

“It looks nice, it’s still in fabulous shape and it’s big,” Slapcinsky said. “It would be really cool to exhibit something like this, if it turns out that it preserves well enough and we can find a way to exhibit it so that it doesn’t damage the specimen.”

It will take about two weeks to complete the preservation process, after which researchers will further examine the squid to determine its sex and age and compare it with other specimens. Scientists hope to gain a greater understanding of the life of these elusive creatures, including their range, diet and how they reproduce.

The genetic data will be of particular interest to researchers trying to determine if there are one or more species of giant squid, said museum invertebrate paleontologist Roger Portell.

“We don’t really have a good handle on the biogeography of these critters, so this will add to that knowledge base,” Portell said. “Because they are so rare, we have so few samples where we get a fresh specimen and can actually do genetic work.”

The specimens formerly comprised the world’s second-largest collection of Florida vertebrate fossils. The museum will honor Lake Wales resident John Waldrop for the donation of his collection during the fourth annual meeting of the Southeastern Association of Vertebrate Paleontology at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Paramount Plaza Hotel in Gainesville.

“Over the decades, Waldrop has had a longstanding influence and impact on what we’ve been able to do, and it’s always been through his collections,” said Florida Museum vertebrate paleontology curator Bruce MacFadden. “He’s always been extremely generous and encouraged us to use his collection, but now it will be in the public domain forever, which sustains its value.”

Vertebrate paleontology collections manager Richard Hulbert said the specimens span the entire range of Florida’s fossil record, from about 10,000 to 40 million years old. The donation increases the museum’s collection by about 10 percent, and the fossils are especially valuable because Waldrop had been collecting since the 1960s and maintained detailed records about locality and age, Hulbert said.

Waldrop, a retired middle school science and community college teacher, said many of the fossils were collected in areas now covered by subdivisions.

“The collection could never be duplicated,” Waldrop said. “I felt it was a really important collection and I fully intended it to go to science. Richard Hulbert asked me one day if I would consider donating it and he caught me at the right time.”

For about 10 years, Waldrop focused his fieldwork first on phosphate mines in South Florida, then rivers, shell pits and quarries, some of which no longer exist, he said. One of his most productive sites was the Peace River, which Hulbert said has become a hotspot for hobbyists in the last 20 years.

“We don’t have many fossils from Peace River, but Waldrop very early on realized it was a problem, and he and his team got in there in the ‘70s before everyone,” Hulbert said

In addition to the vertebrate fossils, the donation includes about seven times as many invertebrate specimens.

“The real value of his collection isn’t yet known, but what we’ve picked up so far indicates there are many surprises,” said Florida Museum invertebrate paleontology collections manager Roger Portell. “I pulled out one box just to see what was inside, and with a brief look could tell there were dozens of species absent from our collections.”

When possible, Waldrop also collected materials stratigraphically, meaning he recorded the specific rock layers in which they were found, a method seldom used 20 years ago, Portell said. While he did not know the exact number of specimens in Waldrop’s invertebrate collection, Portell said there were up to 3,000 boxes, each containing a large number of fossils.

“We’re very happy to accept his collection because it will expand our holdings and give greater breadth to the number of taxa we have in our collections,” Portell said. “Most of his collection sites are no longer accessible, so it greatly enhances certain aspects of our collection, and what we have leftover will go to education. It’s all going to be useful.”

Although Waldrop’s collection was private, he said he was always willing to lend specimens to researchers from the 40-by-40-foot air-conditioned warehouse he dubbed the “Timberlane Research Organization” after the road on which it was located. He collected most of the specimens himself, with occasional assistance from his students at McLaughlin Middle School in Lake Wales and Polk Community College in Winter Haven.

Waldrop said his interest in paleontology began with a science assignment as a student at Gainesville High School. His project on shark teeth found in the creek near the school later led to his master’s in geology at UF and life’s ambition to understand the geology of Florida. As a teacher, he also helped influence some of his students to pursue paleontology.

“I wanted to know more about the geology of Florida than anybody else, and in some ways I think I achieved that,” Waldrop said.

The study, to be published in PLoS ONE on Dec. 16, shows that peradectids, a family of marsupials known from fossils mostly found in North America and Eurasia, are a sister group of all living opossums. The findings are based in part on high-resolution CT scans of a 55-million-year-old skull found in freshwater limestone from the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming.

“The extinction of the dinosaurs was a pivotal moment in the evolution of mammals,” said Jonathan Bloch, study co-author and associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. “We’re tracing the beginnings of a major group of mammals that began in North America.”

Opossum-like peradectids first appeared on the continent about 65 million years ago, at the time of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which killed the dinosaurs.

“North America is a critical area for understanding marsupial and opossum origins because of its extensive and varied fossil record,” said lead author Inés Horovitz, an assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Unfortunately, most of its species are known only from teeth.”

The study also analyzes two 30-million-year-old skeletons of Herpetotheriidae, the sister group of all living marsupials.

Based on fossil evidence from the skull and two skeletons, the study’s authors concluded the evolutionary split between the ancestor of opossums and the ancestor of all other living marsupials occurred at least 65 million years ago, Horovitz said.

Marsupials migrated between North and South America until the two continents separated after the end of the Cretaceous period. Marsupials in South America diversified and also migrated into Antarctica and Australia, which were still connected at that time, Bloch said.

North American marsupials went extinct during the early Miocene, about 20 million years ago. But after the Isthmus of Panama emerged to reconnect North and South America 3 million years ago, two marsupials made it back to North America: the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), a common resident in the Southeast today, and the southern opossum (Didelphis marsupialis), which lives as far north as Mexico.

The study describes a new peradectid species, Mimoperadectes houdei, based on a relatively complete fossil skull. The high-resolution CT scan of the skull gave researchers a large amount of information about the animal’s internal anatomy. The ear, in particular, provides researchers with information on skull anatomy and clues about the animal’s locomotion, Bloch said.

The scan showed the new species shared enough common traits with living opossums to indicate an evolutionary relationship. Some predictions about that relationship could have been made from fossil teeth, Bloch said, “but this provides a much stronger foundation for that conclusion.”

Most North American marsupials living in the Paleocene and early Eocene (56 million to 48 million years ago) were small-bodied animals. But M. houdei approached the body size of some opossums living today.

“You would probably recognize it as an opossum, but it wouldn’t look quite right,” Bloch said.

The skull came from the same limestone deposits in Wyoming as the primitive primate skull Bloch and other researchers used to map an early primate brain with CT scans in a study published earlier this year.

“In parts of North America today, opossums are one of the most commonly observed mammals around,” Bloch said. “This fossil skull shows its roots going back to the extinction of the dinosaurs. This is literally the fossil that shows us the ancestry of that animal.”

The study’s examination of the two skeletons gives a first glimpse into the form and structure of primitive marsupials and shows that they were more terrestrial than modern opossums. The skeletons came from the late Oligocene and were found in the White River Badlands of Wyoming.

The international research team also included Thomas Martin (University of Bonn, Germany), Sandrine Ladevèze and Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra (University of Zurich, Switzerland), and Cornelia Kurz (Natural History Museum, Kassel, Germany). The study will be available online at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008278.

The genetic information collected by scientists from UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History is part of a whole-system approach that will be used to study ecological processes in depth across the entire island. Moorea’s coral reefs in particular are considered crucial indicators of how natural systems respond to climate change.

“Nobody has ever sequenced a single place to this level,” said Gustav Paulay, the project’s team leader for marine invertebrates and the Florida Museum’s curator of marine malacology. “And nobody has ever investigated coral reef biodiversity this thoroughly in one place.”

The three-year Moorea Biocode Project is now in its second year. Several Florida Museum researchers are in the field using scuba gear, snorkels and wading nets to collect specimens for the first-of-its-kind project.

The Florida Museum scientists are one of seven teams collecting specimens on everything from terrestrial vertebrates to algae. Marine invertebrates make up about 50 percent of the species on the island, which is about 37 miles in circumference and 11 miles from Tahiti.

Based at the UC Berkeley Richard B. Gump South Pacific Research Station on Moorea, the UF team collects specimens up to three times a day. The catch includes crabs, shrimp, plankton, mollusks and worms.

Back at the research station lab, the larger specimens are grouped by appearance. The researchers select individual specimens from each grouping to photograph and take tissue samples. The samples are sent to an on-site DNA extractor for immediate preparation, and the DNA is shipped to the Smithsonian Institution for sequencing.

“We can answer all these things in ecology and evolution and resource management if we have a dictionary to the DNA,” Paulay said. “We’re building that dictionary.”

Attempting to collect all species of marine invertebrates is a daunting task. To meet the challenge, Paulay’s team divides the works into three sizes: macro (anything longer than four-tenths of an inch), meso (smaller but visible) and micro (less than 1 mm in length).

Paulay hopes to effectively cover the macro fauna, but even that is impossible, he said. Rare things live in strange places. Other things migrate into the area every couple of years. Meso-organisms are even more difficult. Paulay’s team uses a number of extractive methods, such as shaking them out of sand and rock, to get as many unique specimens as possible.

Microfauna are the most challenging of all. The coral reefs are full of them, like microscopic plankton in sea water and minute worms in sand and rock. Paulay’s team is exploring methods of community DNA extraction. This approach involves running a simultaneous DNA analysis on all organisms found in a sample such as sand. Cluster patterns in the DNA sequences will help indicate individual species. Modern technology can sequence millions of genes at once, making the technique possible.

Larger invertebrates are easier to find, but they still provide plenty of surprises.

“You’re always expecting to see things you haven’t seen before,” Paulay said. “Just about every day there’s some really weird thing coming in.”

Paulay estimates more than 5 percent of the macrofauna his team collects are new genera and species. The team recently found a new species of crab in deep water that looks like a transition species between a hermit crab and a free-moving crab. It wears a clam shell instead of a snail shell, and its main body has a crab-like triangular shape.

“I knew enough about hermit crabs to know this was pretty special, “Paulay said. “So I e-mailed a picture of it to a specialist and got an answer back the next day.”

Having such a vast store of genetic information for Moorea is also bound to attract a lot of additional research, Paulay said. The island’s coral reefs are being studied under a long-term ecological research project funded by the National Science Foundation. And DNA information from the Moorea project is being uploaded to a global sequencing effort known as the Barcode of Life, which hopes to collect a DNA sequence for every living thing on the planet.

Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and UF, among others, found that many of the dominant plant families existing in today’s Neotropical rainforests — including legumes, palms, avocado and banana — have maintained their ecological dominance despite major changes in South America’s climate and geological structure.

The study, which appears this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined more than 2,000 megafossil specimens, some nearly 10 feet long, from the Cerrejón Formation in northern Colombia. The fossils are from the Paleocene epoch, which occurred in the 5- to 7-million-year period following the massive extinction event responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs.

“Neotropical rainforests have an almost nonexistent fossil record,” said study co-author Fabiany Herrera, a graduate student at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “These specimens allow us to actually test hypotheses about their origins for the first time ever.”

Herrera said the new specimens, discovered in 2003, also provide information for future studies that promise to provide an even stronger understanding of the plants that formed the earliest Neotropical communities.

Many previous assumptions and hypotheses on the earliest rainforests are based on studies of pollen fossils, which did not provide information about climate, forest structure, leaf morphology or insect herbivory.

The new study provides evidence Neotropical rainforests were warmer and wetter in the late Paleocene than today but were composed of the same plant families that now thrive in rainforests. “We have the fossils to prove this,” Herrera said. “It is also intriguing that while the Cerrejón rainforest shows many of the characteristics of modern equivalents, plant diversity is lower.”

The site, one of the world’s largest open-pit coal mines, also yielded the fossil for the giant snake known as Titanoboa, described by UF scientists earlier this year.

“These new plant fossils show us that the forest during the time of Titanoboa, 58 million years ago, was similar in many ways to that of today,” said Florida Museum vertebrate paleontologist Jonathan Bloch, who described Titanoboa but was not part of the rainforest study. “Like Titanoboa, which is clearly related to living boas and anacondas, the ancient forest of northern Colombia had similar families of plants as we see today in that ecosystem. The foundations of the Neotropical rainforests were there 58 million years ago.”

Megafossils found at the Cerrejón site made it possible to use leaf structure to identify specimens down to the genus level. This resolution allowed the identification of plant genera that still exist in Neotropical rainforests. With pollen fossils, specimens can be categorized only to the family level.

Researchers were surprised by the relative lack of diversity found in the Paleocene rainforest, Herrera said. Statistical analyses showed that the plant communities found in the Cerrejón Formation were 60 percent to 80 percent less diverse than those of modern Neotropical rainforests. Evidence of herbivory also showed a low diversity level among insects.

The study’s authors say the relative lack of diversity indicates either the beginning of rainforest species diversification or the recovery of existing species from the Cretaceous extinction event.

The researchers estimate the Paleocene rainforest received about 126 inches of rainfall annually and had an average annual temperature greater than 86 degrees. The Titanoboa study, which used different methods, estimated an average temperature between 89 and 91 degrees. Today the region’s temperatures average about 81 degrees.

Herrera is now comparing fossils from the Cerrejón site to specimens from other Paleocene sites in Colombia to see how far the early rainforest extended geographically. He is also examining fossils from a Cretaceous site to determine differences in composition before and after the extinction event.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The story of Christopher Columbus and the people he encountered when he arrived in the Caribbean has yet to be truthfully conveyed in books used by elementary school students, a new University of Florida study finds.

Long before Columbus Day arrives Oct. 12, an overwhelming majority of books used by children in libraries and classrooms have presented outdated information and outright distortions about the explorer’s expeditions, said UF researcher Donna Sabis-Burns. She did the study for her doctoral dissertation in the school of teaching and learning in UF’s College of Education.

“Picture books are usually the first time children are exposed to the story of Columbus, so they need to be truthful,” she said. “Unfortunately, these books are telling our children a history that is filled with omissions and misrepresentations.”

Referring to the native people as savages when Columbus kidnapped hundreds into slavery and his shipmates raped local women are among the most glaring examples of falsehoods, said Sabis-Burns, who is now a team leader with the U.S. Department of Education’s School Support and Technology Program in Washington, D.C.

Within the sample, most of the books are widely outdated at more than 10 years old, Sabis-Burns said. Less than 2 percent of the volumes contain more readily available information that became increasingly visible in 1992 as scholars released new findings to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ first expedition to the New World, she said.

The week after Columbus Day in 2008, Sabis-Burns sent an online survey to school districts, teachers and national education listservs in 39 states about which reading materials they used on the explorer. She received responses from 189 teachers and 89 librarians, who provided a list of 182 books, which she analyzed for content.

Six out of 10 books failed to identify the native Taino people whom Columbus encountered by their tribal affiliation, calling them simply “Indians” or “natives” and even “gentle heathens” or “naked, red-skinned savages,” Sabis-Burns said.

“Without these people, Columbus never would have survived,” she said. “Had it not been for the Tainos, his voyages would not have been successful.”

The Tainos showered Columbus with much-needed food and showed him how to navigate the Caribbean islands, Sabis-Burns said.

Many of the books claim that the Tainos became extinct, even though about 600 descendants survive in small pockets of Cuba’s Guantanamo Mountains, she said.

While book publishers are beginning to release books for older children with more details about the Tainos, the practice has not extended to the picture book genre shared in today’s classrooms within the survey sample, she said.

Seventy-seven percent of picture books analyzed in the study use either oversimplified descriptions or primitive depictions of the native people, Sabis-Burns said. Less than half describe Taino trading items, traditional dress, agricultural practices or other aspects of their culture, many of which were never documented as belonging to the Taino, she said.

“It is not my intent to load picture books with men raping women or murdering them in the illustrations,” she said. “My point is that the books don’t tell what happened to the Taino at the hands of the Spanish.

“On his first voyage Columbus kidnapped several Tainos and shipped them back to Spain to be sold into slavery because he was afraid he would not have enough riches to compensate Spanish royalty for financing his trip,” she said.

On his next trip, Columbus seized hundreds more Tainos as slaves, many of whom died and were tossed overboard before his ships reached Spain, she said.

The Tainos killing of 39 men left behind after Columbus’ ship crashed into a reef on the island of Hispaniola was not unprovoked as presented in some of the sample picture books, Sabis-Burns said. Before Columbus returned a year later to the La Navidad settlement to find his men gone, the Europeans forced the Taino to work the fields and raped women, she said.

Sabis-Burns said the two most widely used books were written in 1980 and 1992, despite the publication of at least 150 picture books on Columbus since 1992.

“Dr. Sabis-Burns has brought this country’s deep resistance to correcting the story of Columbus taught to our children to the surface with her research,” said Nancy Rankie Shelton, an education professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “Year after year, schools across our nation celebrate Columbus Day with the youngest of our citizens, never once thinking about or teaching the destruction he caused the Taino people.”

Reed, an associate curator of mammalogy at the university’s Florida Museum of Natural History, will use the five-year, $934,498 grant to trace the evolutionary history of lice, and he hopes the study will shed light on human migration, development and evolution.

“Parasitic lice have evolved alongside, but much faster than their human hosts,” Reed said. “The lice have given researchers a more detailed look at the process of species migration and evolution.”

The study also will analyze genetic similarities between the evolution of lice and humans as they have evolved over time. Reed said human and chimpanzee lice branched from a single evolutionary line at about the same time their hosts did and the study will use DNA sequencing data to more closely examine other similarities between the two types of lice.

The study will require samples from around the world, collected with the help of medical professionals. The grant also provides funding to support a postdoctoral fellow, two graduate students and up to 10 undergraduates, and includes a training program to teach UF graduate students how to communicate their research to lay audiences.

“Scientists often lack the skills needed to translate their technical research findings into information that is relevant to a broad public audience, “which is why we are creating this graduate opportunity,” Reed said. “Being able to employ both graduate and undergraduate students is a real benefit to the department and the university.”

The research opportunities will provide training in skills such as collecting specimens, working in the molecular lab and conducting genetic analysis, allowing students to enter the work force with specialized skills.

Human lice have been a nuisance for centuries. The rapid changes that make lice ideal candidates for a study centered on evolutionary processes also play havoc on everyday life among the general human population.

Head lice in school children, one common form of parasitic lice, have built a resistance to insecticidal shampoos in developed countries, which is why their numbers are increasing in the U.S. In underdeveloped countries where insecticidal treatments are not widely used, lice are still susceptible and easily controlled with existing medicines, Reed said.

The grant also includes the purchase of a high definition imaging system to document, compare and study specimens collected worldwide for the project.

The National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 and currently funds about 20 percent of all federally supported research at U.S. colleges and universities. NSF creates about 10,000 new awards each year including the Faculty Early Career Development Award, which is given to researchers who exemplify the teacher-researcher role.

In a paper appearing this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, UF biology professor Brian McNab concludes that contrary to common belief, dinosaurs didn’t attain their colossal body sizes because they had more food to eat. Instead, McNab says, like Popeye with his spinach-induced bulging muscles, dinosaurs simply converted more of the energy in their food to body mass.

“Dinosaurs used energy in a different way than mammals use it. Mammals use much of their energy for body maintenance, temperature regulation and activity, and less of it for growth,” McNab says. “Dinosaurs used more energy for growth and less for maintenance.”

McNab argues that the conifers, ferns and other prehistoric plants that proliferated during the Mesozoic era ending 65 million years ago largely constituted “garbage food” that required a lot of energy to digest and provided little energy in return. Despite this limitation, dinosaurs were able to grow as much as eight times bigger than modern mammals, with the largest herbivores reaching weights of 40 to 80 tons or more – six to eight times an elephant’s weight of about 7 tons. (A large rhinoceros relative that lived in the Miocene weighed 11 to 15 tons and was the largest terrestrial mammal.)

Most of today’s herbivorous mammals can eat grasses, which were not present in the Mesozoic, and are a high-energy, more readily digestible forage, McNab noted. At the other end of the scale, plankton have a high energy content and are easy to digest, which is why the largest whales can reach weights of 160 tons, eclipsing the sizes of even the largest dinosaurs, he said.

McNab says dinosaurs attained their gigantic proportions because their biology apparently combined characteristics of modern warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals. On the one hand, they could regulate their own body temperature because of their large size and small relative surface area, he concludes. On the other, their metabolic rates were only about a quarter of those of mammals, but four times those of most reptiles.

Among modern animals, McNab says, those whose metabolisms most closely match those of dinosaurs are the varanid lizards, which include the Komodo dragon and other Monitor lizards.

“If you extrapolate varanid lizards’ metabolic rate up the metabolic rates of elephants, you get an animal that weighs 60 to 80 tons,” he says. “That’s the size of the biggest dinosaurs, the sauropods.”

The analysis of a well-preserved skull from 54 million years ago contradicts some common assumptions about brain structure and evolution in the first primates. The study also narrows the possibilities for what caused primates to evolve larger brain sizes. The study is scheduled to appear online the week of June 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The skull belongs to a group of primitive primates known as Plesiadapiforms, which evolved in the 10 million years between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the first traceable ancestors of modern primates. The 1.5-inch-long skull was found fully intact, allowing researchers to make the first virtual mold of a primitive primate brain.

“Most explanations on the evolution of primate brains are based on data from living primates,” said lead author Mary Silcox, an anthropologist at the University of Winnipeg and research associate at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. “There have been all these inferences about what the brains of the earliest primates would look like, and it turns out that most of those inferences are wrong.”

Researchers used CT scans to take more than 1,200 cross-sectional X-ray images of the skull, which were combined into a 3-D model of the brain.

“A large and complex brain has long been regarded as one of the major steps that sets primates apart from the rest of mammals,” said Florida Museum vertebrate paleontologist and study co-author Jonathan Bloch. “At our very humble beginnings, we weren’t so special. That happened over tens of millions of years.”

The animal, Ignacius graybullianus, represents a side branch on the primate tree of life, Bloch
said. “You can think of it as a cousin of the main line lineage that would have given rise ultimately to us.”

In previous research, Bloch and Silcox established that Plesiadapiforms were transitional species. Ignacius was similar to modern primates in terms of its diet and tree-dwelling but did not leap from tree to tree like modern fast-moving primates.

In many ways, the early primate behaved like living primates but with a brain that was one-half to two-thirds the size of the smallest modern primates. This means that factors such as tree-dwelling and fruit-eating can be eliminated as potential causes for primates evolving larger brain sizes, Silcox said, because “the smaller brained Ignacius was already doing those things.”

The mold suggests a “startling combination” of features in the early primate that requires a rethinking of primate brain evolution, said Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk, who was not involved in the study.

“Hypotheses about early primate brain evolution often link keen smell with nocturnal insect-eating, and a more recently evolved increase in visual processing with fruit-eating in arboreal habitats,” Falk said.

The move to larger brain size occurred during an evolutionary burst that happened 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. At that point, visual features in the brain became much more prominent while the olfactory bulbs became proportionately smaller.

More than likely, Bloch said, this change in brain structure and size was related to primates living in closed canopy forests that brought trees closer together and allowed for more leaping. But answering that will require the discovery and analysis of new fossils.

Changes in brain size and brain structure in the early stages of primate evolution have generated enormous debates for decades. But until now, fossil evidence has been lacking.

Many models of the ancestral primate brain are based on tree shrews, which come from southeast Asia and are distantly related to humans. But with some 70 million years of evolution between them and humans, “it turns out tree shrew brains are not a good model,” Silcox said.

Led by Florida Museum of Natural History vertebrate paleontologist Larisa DeSantis, researchers examined fossil teeth from mammals at two sites representing different climates in Florida: a glacial period about 1.9 million years ago and a warmer, interglacial period about 1.3 million years ago. The researchers found that interglacial warming resulted in dramatic changes to the diets of animal groups at both sites. The study appears in the June 3 issue of PLoS ONE.

“When people are modeling future mammal distributions, they’re assuming that the niches of mammals today are going to be the same in the future,” DeSantis said. “That’s a huge assumption.”

Co-author Robert Feranec, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the New York State Museum, said scientists cannot predict what species will do based on their current ecology.

“The study definitively shows that climate change has an effect on ecosystems and mammals, and that the responses are much more complex than we might think,” Feranec said.

The two sites in the study, both on Florida’s Gulf Coast, have been excavated quite extensively, DeSantis said. During glacial periods, lower sea levels nearly doubled Florida’s width, compared with interglacial periods. But because of Florida’s low latitude, no ice sheets were present during the glacial period. Despite the lack of glaciers in Florida, the two sites show dramatic ecological changes occurred between the two periods.

Both sites include some of the same animal groups, allowing DeSantis, Feranec and Bruce MacFadden, Florida Museum curator of vertebrate paleontology, to clarify how mammals and their environments responded to interglacial warming.

The research examined carbon and oxygen isotopes within tooth enamel to understand the diets of medium to large mammals, including pronghorn, deer, llamas, peccaries, tapirs, horses, mastodons, mammoths and gomphotheres, a group of extinct elephant-like animals.

Differences in how plants photosynthesize give them distinct carbon isotope ratios. For example, trees and shrubs process carbon dioxide differently than warm-season grasses, resulting in different carbon isotope ratios. These differences are incorporated in mammalian tooth enamel, allowing scientists to determine the diets of fossil mammals. Lower ratio values suggest a browsing diet (trees and shrubs) while a higher ratio suggests a grazing diet (grasses).

Animals at the glacial site were predominantly browsing on trees and shrubs, while some of those same animals at the warmer interglacial site became mixed feeders that also grazed on grasses. Increased consumption of grasses by mixed feeders and elephant-like mammals indicates Florida’s grasslands likely expanded during interglacial periods.

Tooth enamel locks in the chemical signatures of the plants and water an animal consumes, allowing paleontologists to understand the diets and associated climate of fossil specimens that are millions of years old. To find these signatures, researchers run samples of tooth enamel through a mass spectrometer.

DeSantis and her collaborators analyzed enamel samples from 115 fossil teeth. For two of the specimens she took serial samples, small samples that run perpendicular to the growth axis and give insight into how the diet and climate changed over a specific period of time.

“That’s one of the cool things about using mammal teeth,” she said. “We can actually look at how variable the climate was within a year, millions of years ago.”

The study highlights the importance of the fossil record in understanding long-term ecological responses to changes over time, DeSantis said. While ecological studies of modern impacts can cover only limited spans of time, “this study emphasizes the importance of using the fossil record to look at how mammals and other animals responded to climate change in the past, also helping us gain a better understanding of how they might respond in the future.”