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      Fossils Show Giant Predatory Sea Scorpions Were Distance Swimmers

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      Specimens of what appear to be the largest eurypterid species found in Australia could shed light on the sudden extinction of the massive arthropods.Most modern scorpions would fit in the palm of your hand. But in the oceans of the Paleozoic era more than 400 million years ago, animals known popularly as sea scorpions were apex predators that could grow larger than people in size.“They were effectively functioning as sharks,” said Russell Bicknell, a paleobiologist at the American Museum of Natural History.New research by Dr. Bicknell and colleagues, published Saturday in the journal Gondwana Research and relying on Australian fossils, reveals that the biggest sea scorpions were capable of crossing oceans, a finding that is “absolutely pushing the limits of what we know arthropods could do,” he said.What are commonly known as sea scorpions were a diverse group of arthropods called eurypterids. They came in many shapes and sizes but are perhaps best known for their largest representatives, which could grow to more than nine feet long. With huge claws, a beefy exoskeleton and a strong set of legs for swimming, the larger sea scorpions most likely ruled the seas.However fearsome these arthropods must have been to Paleozoic prey, they went extinct without much of a bang. The fossil record of eurypterids peaked in the Silurian period, which started about 444 million years ago, and they then abruptly died out after the early Devonian period ended about 393 million years ago.That sudden turn of fate has left scientists bewildered.“They appear, they start doing really well, they get very big, and then they go extinct,” said James Lamsdell, a paleobiologist at West Virginia University who was not involved in the study. “For a while they were so dominant, and then they just burned out.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a Crisis for Vultures Led to a Human Disaster: Half a Million Deaths

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      The birds were accidentally poisoned in India. New research on what happened next shows how wildlife collapse can be deadly for people.To say that vultures are underappreciated would be putting it mildly. With their diet of carrion and their featherless heads, the birds are often viewed with disgust. But they have long provided a critical cleaning service by devouring the dead.Now, economists have put an excruciating figure on just how vital they can be: The sudden near-disappearance of vultures in India about two decades ago led to more than half a million excess human deaths over five years, according to a forthcoming study in the American Economic Review.Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs, which can carry rabies. It was “a really huge negative sanitation shock,” said Anant Sudarshan, one of the study’s authors and an economics professor at the University of Warwick in England.The findings reveal the unintended consequences that can occur from the collapse of wildlife, especially animals known as keystone species for the outsize roles they play in their ecosystems. Increasingly, economists are seeking to measure such impacts.A study looking at the United States, for example, has suggested that the loss of ash trees to the invasive emerald ash borer increased deaths related to cardiovascular and respiratory illness. And in Wisconsin, researchers found that the presence of wolves reduced vehicle collisions with deer by about a quarter, creating an economic benefit that was 63 times greater than the cost of wolves killing livestock.“Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning do matter to human beings,” said Eyal Frank, an economist at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of the new vulture study. “And it’s not always the charismatic and fuzzy species.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Reality Show Contestant Apologizes After Eating Protected Bird in New Zealand

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      A contestant on the reality show “Race to Survive: New Zealand” killed and ate a weka during filming. The contestant, who said he was hungry, has apologized for “disrespecting New Zealand.”Hunger was part of the challenge for contestants on the reality television show “Race to Survive: New Zealand.” As nine teams trekked, climbed and paddled their way through some of the country’s harshest terrain, they also had to forage and hunt for their own food.New Zealand officials have now issued warnings to the show’s producers, they said, after one contestant killed and ate a bird from a protected species during filming last October.The weka, a flightless bird known for its bold curiosity, is endemic to New Zealand and is considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which evaluates threatened species. They often roam around campsites and picnic areas and will sometimes steal crops, food and other small objects.The show, which began airing its second season on USA Network in May, follows nine pairs of adventurers, survivalists and athletes as they navigate around New Zealand’s South Island to compete for a $500,000 prize.The teams are allowed to bring only what they can carry, and the slowest to reach each camp is eliminated. They are not given food but can take detours to find food caches left for them on the island.Two contestants, Spencer Jones and Oliver Dev, were disqualified in the eighth episode. Producers appeared after they completed a leg and said that they broke a rule.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Mammoth DNA Discovery Helps Map an Ancient Genome in 3-D

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      In 2018 an international team of scientists — from labs in Houston, Copenhagen, Barcelona and beyond — got their hands on a remarkable biological specimen: a skin sample from a 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth that had been recovered from the permafrost in Siberia. They probed the sample with an innovative experimental technique that revealed the three-dimensional architecture of the mammoth’s genome. The resulting paper was published on Thursday in the journal Cell.Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in Canada, was “floored” — the technique had successfully captured the original geometry of long stretches of DNA, a feat never before accomplished with an ancient DNA sample. “It’s absolutely beautiful,” said Dr. Poinar, who reviewed the paper for the journal.The typical method for extracting ancient DNA from fossils, Dr. Poinar said, is still “kind of cave man.” It produces short fragments of code composed of a four-letter molecular alphabet: A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), T (thymine). An organism’s full genome resides in cell nuclei, in long, unfragmented DNA strands called chromosomes. And, vitally, the genome is three-dimensional; as it dynamically folds with fractal complexity, its looping points of contact help dictate gene activity.“To have the actual architectural structure of the genome, which suggests gene expression patterns, that’s a whole other level,” Dr. Poinar said.“It’s a new kind of fossil, a fossil chromosome,” said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a team member who is an applied mathematician, a biophysicist and a geneticist and directs the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Technically, he noted, it is a non-mineralized fossil, or subfossil, since it has not turned to stone.Erez Lieberman Aiden, director of the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York TimesThe trunk of a 39,000-year-old woolly mammoth nicknamed Yuka that also yielded fossil chromosomes in the study.Love Dalén/Stockholm UniversityWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      SpaceX’s Assault on a Fragile Habitat: Four Takeaways From Our Investigation

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      The development of Elon Musk’s facility in South Texas did not play out as local officials were originally told it would.When Elon Musk first eyed South Texas for a new base of space operations, he promised that SpaceX would have a small, eco-friendly footprint and that the surrounding area would be “left untouched.”A decade later, the reality is far different. An investigation by The New York Times shows how SpaceX’s ferocious growth in the area has dramatically changed the fragile landscape and has threatened the habitat that the U.S. government is charged with protecting there.More repercussions are likely coming, in South Texas and in other places where SpaceX is expanding. Mr. Musk has said he hopes to one day launch his Starships — the largest rocket ever manufactured — a thousand times a year.Executives from SpaceX declined repeated requests to comment. But Gary Henry, who until this year served as a SpaceX adviser on Pentagon launch programs, said the company was aware of concerns about SpaceX’s environmental impact and was committed to addressing them.Here are four takeaways from our investigation:Musk used preserved lands as a buffer for SpaceX operationsRocket launch sites in the U.S., such as Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, typically are enormous, secure facilities with tens of thousands of acres within their confines.Mr. Musk didn’t intend to buy up anything like that amount of land when he was looking at the area near Brownsville, Texas. Instead, he wanted to buy a tiny piece of property in the middle of public lands — what the team involved referred to as a “doughnut hole.” He figured the surrounding state parks and federal wildlife preserves would serve as natural buffers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Wildlife Protections Take a Back Seat to Elon Musk’s Ambitions

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      As Elon Musk’s Starship — the largest rocket ever manufactured — successfully blasted toward the sky last month, the launch was hailed as a giant leap for SpaceX and the United States’ civilian space program.Two hours later, once conditions were deemed safe, a team from SpaceX, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a conservation group began canvassing the fragile migratory bird habitat surrounding the launch site.The impact was obvious.The launch had unleashed an enormous burst of mud, stones and fiery debris across the public lands encircling Mr. Musk’s $3 billion space compound. Chunks of sheet metal and insulation were strewn across the sand flats on one side of a state park. Elsewhere, a small fire had ignited, leaving a charred patch of park grasslands — remnants from the blastoff that burned 7.5 million pounds of fuel.Most disturbing to one member of the entourage was the yellow smear on the soil in the same spot that a bird’s nest lay the day before. None of the nine nests recorded by the nonprofit Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program before the launch had survived intact.Egg yolk now stained the ground.“The nests have all been messed up or have eggs missing,” Justin LeClaire, a Coastal Bend wildlife biologist, told a Fish and Wildlife inspector as a New York Times reporter observed nearby.The outcome was part of a well-documented pattern.On at least 19 occasions since 2019, SpaceX operations have caused fires, leaks, explosions or other problems associated with the rapid growth of Mr. Musk’s complex in Boca Chica. These incidents have caused environmental damage and reflect a broader debate over how to balance technological and economic progress against protections of delicate ecosystems and local communities. More

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      44-Foot Whale Found Dead on Bow of Cruise Ship Coming Into New York

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      The endangered sei whale, usually found in deep waters, was discovered on the bow of a cruise ship as it arrived at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, marine authorities said.As the cruise ship approached New York on Saturday, it was found to be carrying a grim, and unexpected, catch: The corpse of a 44-foot-long endangered whale, draped across its bow.The whale, which marine authorities described as a sei whale, is known for its rapid swimming and preference for deep waters, far from the coast. Its body was discovered as the ship neared the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, and the authorities were “immediately notified,” said MSC Cruises, which owns the ship.A spokeswoman for the company said in an email that it had “comprehensive measures” in place to avoid such collisions, including training deck officers and altering itineraries in certain areas to avoid them. “We will continue to evaluate and update our procedures with our partners and the authorities,” she said.Marine authorities said that they had towed the animal, estimated to weigh some 50,000 pounds, from the bow, and transferred it by boat to a beach in Sandy Hook, N.J., where they conducted a necropsy on Tuesday.The investigation is continuing, but preliminary results — broken bones in the whale’s right flipper; tissue trauma along its right shoulder blade; a full stomach and decent layer of blubber — all pointed toward the animal having been in otherwise good health when it was likely struck and killed by the ship, said Robert A. DiGiovanni, the chief scientist of the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, which is leading the investigation.The whale was already “pretty decomposed” by the time scientists began the necropsy, he added, so they worked quickly to collect samples that could be tested for contaminants and other biotoxins that would indicate any other relevant health issues. “It looks like the animal was alive and it was hit by a vessel,” he said, noting that investigators had not ruled out other factors.Mr. Giovanni said that his conservation group, which is federally authorized to respond to marine mammal strandings in New York, had dealt with around 100 whales over the past several years, many of which had been entangled in nets or struck by vessels. Most of those whales were humpback and North Atlantic right whales, he added, noting that it was more uncommon to come across a sei whale.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dune’-like Sandworm Existed Millions of Years Longer Than Thought

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      Researchers examined fossils of the predatory worm and found a new species that persisted for 25 million years after it was believed to have become extinct.With a head covered in rows of curved spines, ancient Selkirkia worms could easily be confused with the razor-toothed sandworms that inhabit the deserts of Arrakis in “Dune: Part Two.”During the Cambrian Explosion more than 500 million years ago, these weird worms — which lived inside long, cone-shaped tubes — were some of the most common predators on the seafloor.“If you were a small invertebrate coming across them, it would have been your worst nightmare,” said Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist at Harvard. “It’s like being engulfed by a conveyor belt of fangs and teeth.”Thankfully for would-be spice harvesters, these ravenous worms disappeared hundreds of million years ago. But a trove of recently analyzed fossils from Morocco reveals that these formidable predators measuring only an inch or two in length, persisted much longer than previously thought.In a paper published today in the journal Biology Letters, Dr. Nanglu’s team described a new species of Selkirkia worm that lived 25 million years after this group of tube-dwellers was thought to have gone extinct.The newly described tubular worms were discovered when Dr. Nanglu and his colleagues sifted through fossils stored in the collection of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. The fossils hail from Morocco’s Fezouata Formation, a deposit dating back to the Early Ordovician period, which began around 488 million years ago and spanned nearly 45 million years. This was a dynamic era when holdovers from the Cambrian rubbed shoulders with evolutionary newcomers like sea scorpions and horseshoe crabs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More