As if they weren’t mean enough, now it emerges that sabertooths were probably pack animals

Sabertooths were frightening beasts. About the size of tigers (huge) and with enormous 20cm fangs these guys were mean. And if that isn’t enough, new research suggests that they were pack animals like modern lions (the Ice Age movies had it right).

How they worked that out is a little complex:

• Tar pits are spots where tar literally rises from the ground. They make excellent spots to find fossils because animals got stuck and were then well preserved
• Sabertooths are very common in tar pits. Probably because they responded to the distress calls of prey animals and themselves became stuck
• The researchers did a comparative study in Africa by playing the sounds of prey animals in distress
• They found that only pack animals (lions and hyenas) responded in any numbers

So basically, by comparing the ratios of sabertooth remains in the tar pits with the study in Africa the researchers could take an educated guess that sabertooths lived in packs.

China is an amazing place - massive, beautiful, and so different to what we Westerners are used to. It is a wonderfully beautiful country and I have blogged about it before.

National Geographic has this short photo essay of aerial photographs of China - “China From Above“. Below are some of the better images.

This one shows limestone pinnacles along the Li River

Blooming fields of rapeseed weaving through the hills. I like the way these steep hills look as if they regularly pop out of a flat landscape.

This one is interesting. They have planted rows of vegetation alongside the roads to keep the desert sands back. The buildings dotting the roadside every few miles house the workers who maintain the greenbelt.

It’s a good thing that being ‘green’ is becoming fashionable. We are hammering our environment so increased awareness is a good thing. That said, people don’t always think things through so sometimes their efforts don’t make the most sense. For instance in the past I have blogged that organic food is not necessarily good for the environment.

A fashionable way of eating green is to eat local foods - food bought from local producers. The idea is that buying local foods decreases ‘food miles’ - the distances that food must be transported by vehicles emitting greenhouse gasses.

However a study covered in a recent National Geographic article has shown that eating local doesn’t have much of an impact. The fact is that ‘food miles’ only contribute 11% of the total climate impact of foods. Eating beef 1 day a week less would be more effective that buying 100% of your food locally!

The reason for this is that producing cows is really tough on the environment. Cows need lots of grazing, and crucially produce a lot more methane. This impact is so significant that by reducing beef consumption you could easily benefit the environment more than by buying locally produced foods.

National Geographic Magazine has an interesting article on some of the smart animals that are being used to learn about intelligence and cognition. Most people who have had a pet ‘know’ that animals can think because of the way that they react to us – they sometimes seem almost human.

But for a long time this idea was seriously out of fashion – experts agreed that people were projecting human emotions and thoughts onto animals (known as anthropomorphism). For instance at school I had a friend who claimed that her goldfish was embarrassed – surely a case of anthropomorphism.

However, the view that intelligence and emotions are purely human is simplistic and a little arrogant. Intelligence (and emotions) has obvious evolutionary advantages for social and long-lived animals. Humans are also just animals – we arrived through the same evolutionary processes. Isn’t it more plausible that there are levels of intelligence with some species showing more or less?

Plenty of scientists agree with me and have been working with animals to show that many of the qualities supposedly unique to human intelligence are shared by animals. The article goes into a lot of detail with awesome examples involving dogs, chimps, bonobos, parrots, jays, crows, dolphins and others. I thought that I would extract a few of the stories about clever animals.

Alex the parrot was taught to pronounce English words and could understand several concepts. He was able to count, and distinguish shapes and colors. For instance when shown a group of toys and asked how many yellow ones there were he could tell you – ‘Five’. Alex even got impatient with other parrots who were getting their pronunciation wrong – calling out ‘Talk clearly!’ when they made mistakes.

Betsy the border collie understands more than 300 words and is able to learn new ones easily. One test involved putting several new toys (which Betsy had not seen before) in the kitchen. Betsy was then shown a picture of a Frisbee and told to fetch it from the kitchen. That she was able to do so shows that not only does she understand words like fetch and kitchen (something the testers already knew) but that she understands that a picture represents something in the real world.

Betty the New Caledonian crow was able to create and use tools. In one test Betty was shown into a room in which there was a treat in a basket down a tube - out of her reach. There were also two pieces of wire in the room, one with a hook and one straight. The researchers had expected Betty to use the hooked wire to get the basket out, but another crow had already removed it….

“Betty is undeterred. She looks at the meat in the basket, then spots the straight piece of wire. She picks it up with her beak, pushes one end into a crack in the floor, and uses her beak to bend the other end into a hook. Thus armed, she lifts the basket out of the tube.”

National Geographic has this article saying that Islam has now overtaken Catholicism as the world’s largest religion. According to the article this is the current breakdown (percentage of world population):

• Islamic: 19.2%
• Catholic: 17.4%

That said, Christians as a whole are still by far the largest religious group comprising 33% of the world population.

There is quite a lot of news at the moment about a large piece (a little smaller than Swaziland) of ice shelf that recently broke off Antarctica. You can read about it here: National Geographic, Wired, BBC.

Ice shelves are made of ice already floating on the ocean so this incident won’t raise sea levels, but these shelves are holding back glaciers which will raise see levels. As the floating ice shelves break away there is nothing to hold back the land based glaciers which run faster and do raise sea levels.

These ice shelves are notoriously sensitive to warming (another one broke off during a brief warming period around 1920) so they do act as good early indicators of global warming happening - apparently “average Antarctic temperatures have risen 3 degrees (Celsius) over the past 50 years!”

If you are interested there is an busy debate going on in the comments section of the Wired article. Even if you aren’t that interested, I think you should be worried.

National Geographic recently had this article about experiments showing that moths can remember some lessons that they learned while they were caterpillars. The whole of metamorphosis is amazing, weird and interesting, but this is a question that didn’t even occur to me.

Anyway, it turns out that a caterpillar brain gets completely reorganized during metamorphosis, but a small part does remain intact - “the brain is not completely taken apart and rebuilt from scratch”

The experiment involved teaching caterpillars to avoid a certain smell and then checking if they remembered the lesson as adults - which they did.

Not sure why I find this interesting, but it’s the kind of random fact that appeals to me…

I really like this photo from National Geographic showing a Bengal tiger jumping off a boat in India. The tiger had escaped the reserve she was from and landed up in a village bordering the park.

That didn’t go so well for her because the villagers got together and started throwing burning sticks and stones at her. In an effort to escape she hastily climbed a date palm where she was eventually tranquilized and captured by rangers (here is a video of the action - I haven’t watched it).

They saw to her wounds and then released her back into the reserve - which is what you are seeing above. Apparently there are only 1,400 Bengal tigers left in the wild so it’s cool that they saved this one - and she was pregnant!