Discover, January 31, 1995

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“We take crayfish for granted,” says Steven Hasiotis, a paleontologist at the University of Colorado. “People have grown up with them, chased them around, put them in their aquariums, gotten yelled at by their moms for keeping them. I knew two or three people who had to flush theirs down the toilet.” But at a Geological Society of America meeting last May, Hasiotis reported a new reason to respect these commonplace crustaceans. Crayfish were once thought to have originated 140 million years ago, but Hasiotis has discovered 220-million-year-old specimens that are almost identical to modern ones. He thinks crayfish may be as much as 300 million years old. That would put them in a class with roaches and sharks as some of the most enduring animals in history.

Continue reading “Back to the sea II” →

Discover, January 31, 1995

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If evolution is a movie, it’s the job of paleontologists to look for the lost footage. This past year they came out of the vaults with an awesome director’s cut of one of the strangest films ever made: A Whale Is Born.

For decades researchers have claimed that whales are descended from an extinct hyenalike land mammal, called a mesonychid, that walked back into the sea between 50 and 60 million years ago. (Mesonychids and all other land mammals are themselves descended from a fish that crawled out of the sea much earlier.) By 40 million years ago the transition from four-legged land animal to fishlike ocean dweller was almost complete.

Continue reading “Back to the sea” →

Discover, January 31, 1995

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Every few years the people of Peru endure a trial. Normally the trade winds blow west across the Pacific, pushing warm surface water toward the Philippines. That allows cool water to well up from the ocean depths off the coast of South America, bringing nutrients that support the Peruvian fishery. But every few years the trade winds collapse, and the warm water sloshes back east in a vast, slow wave that caps the supply of cold water and crushes fish populations. Because it often happens around Christmas, the disturbance has been dubbed El Nino–the Little One, in reference to the infant Jesus–but over the past 15 years researchers have discovered just how inapt that name is.

Continue reading “El Grande” →

Discover, January 31, 1995

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Walter Lyons says he saw the Angel of Death last summer. It towered over a nighttime Nebraska thunderstorm, its head reaching 50 miles into the sky, its wings extending out into the stratospheric darkness. Then, after a few hundredths of a second, it disappeared.

Lyons isn’t given to mystical hallucinations. He’s an atmospheric scientist at Mission Research Corporation in Fort Collins, Colorado, and he has a contract from NASA to look for enigmatic flashes of light. Lyons and his co-workers have found hundreds of them, and they sometimes give names to the wild shapes. “We’ve got the Angel of Death, we’ve got one called the Bird, one called the Blessed Trinity,” Lyons says. “And then we’ve got the Dancing Carrots.”

Continue reading “Carrots over Nebraska” →

Discover, January 18, 1995

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