Apparently this is the first video footage of a live Hispaniolan Solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus), a secretive Caribbean mammal known primarily for being:

• Endangered
• Venomous
• Along with the Cuban Solenodon (S. cubanus), the last remnant of a distinct lineage of mammals going back 76 million years

More information about this footage (and higher quality video) can be found at this press release from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, or the related BBC story.

Although the project is still in its early stages (only about 45 specimens are listed as of this posting), it is already showing signs of becoming an amazingly useful resource. It is great to see someone using the open-source Simile widgets to organize natural history specimens—the Timeline component definitely has a lot of potential for paleonotological content. I’m particularly excited about the following planned feature:

• Embeddable snippets of fossils to be used in blogs, websites, etc.

I’m eager to see how this will be implemented—not only would it be handy to have a collection of ‘stock’ images and info for hominin specimens at one’s disposal, it might also be a great guide for researchers and institutions interested in creating embeddable content for specimens and objects in all kinds of collections.

Tip of the Hairy Museum toupee to Afarensis for bringing this to my attention.

From this story in the San Diego Union-Tribune, I learned of the life-sized (or larger) sculptures of Ricardo Breceda, who is in the process of installing an entire zoo of sheet metal megafauna on the Galleta Meadows Estate in Borrego Springs, California. The project appears to be a collaboration between sculptor Breceda, who was inspired to start sculpting prehistoric animals after watching Jurassic Park, and landowner Dennis Avery, who came up with the idea of “of adding ‘free standing art’ to his property” to recreate the area’s prehistoric inhabitants.

It’s hard not to be impressed with ambitious scope of this project, and Breceda’s sculptures seem to be a perfect fit for the arid landscape around Borrego Springs. I’m particularly fond of the character and detailing seen in the Gomphotherium (shown above) and the smaller ground sloths, like this little fella.

The NM Friends of Paleontology are meeting Monday, Nov. 17 at 7:00pm at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. This month’s meeting includes a talk by Larry Rinehart on some of the recent work he’s done on the allometry, growth, dimorphism and population structure of Coelophysis bauri from Ghost Ranch. The NMFOP meetings are free and open to the public.

On Thursday the 20th, geologist David Love and paleontologist Gary Morgan will be giving a talk on a 10 million year old oreodont recently unearthed at the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge. The talk will begin at 3:30pm in the Macey Center auditorium at New Mexico Tech in Socorro (admission $5). More info about this find is online here.

• Albertonykus and the Myrmecophagous Alvarezsaurs at When Pigs Fly Returns
• I, Priodontes, the tatuasu at Tetrapod Zoology

This Saturday, she’ll make serious headway towards that goal by drawing 24 mammals in 24 hours as a fundraiser for Defenders of Wildlife. Donate at least $25, pick a mammal, and Jennifer will add it to her schedule on December 22. And she’ll send you the drawing! Support art, wildlife, and mammalian diversity all in one fell swoop. Not too shabby.

1. These are the first terrestrial mammals known from the island nation before the arrival of humans, excepting bats (who were able to fly there),
2. The remains are tantalizingly primitive, closer in developmental “grade” to mammals that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs than most of its Miocene contemporaries.

Put together, these facts suggest that New Zealand was home to a heretofore unkown lineage of mammals that split off from the rest of the mammal-bearing world during the Cretaceous Period, when New Zealand split off from eastern Australia and began its lonely journey across the South Pacific.

The discovery of a relatively recent member of a group believed to be long extinct implies what is known as a ghost lineage—a series of ancestors whose fossils have yet to be found (or possibly were never preserved). The concept of a ghost lineage is perhaps easiest to envision in a diagram that combines a timeline with a family tree:

So here we have a grotesquely simplified family tree of mammals from the Middle Jurassic to the present day. I’ve left out quite a few critters, and I may be a bit off on some of the branching dates, but for a rough outline, it should suffice. On the right, the major players in today’s mammalian fauna, the placentals and marsupials, which split apart from each other about 125,000,000 years ago. Moving down the family tree we run into the long extinct aegialodontids, dryolestoids, and multituberculates. According to the new paper, the branch leading to the new New Zealand mammals split off before the aforementioned groups, but after earlier mammals like eutriconodonts, monotremes, and docodonts.

The dotted lines represent ghost lineages (to which I’ve added little ghosts to reinforce the point). Provided the family tree is correctly interpreted, these are paths of evolution that most certainly existed despite gaps in the fossil record. There are undoubtedly gaps in this diagram that I’ve neglected to portray, but hopefully the main points are clear.

Islands seem particularly prone to ghost lineages, perhaps because their isolated faunas often contain species whose relatives have met with extinction elsewhere in the world. Monotremes, for example, are today only found in Australia and some nearby islands. These modern-day monotremes (three species of echidna and the platypus) are island-dwelling relicts of a group of mammals that started down their own path sometime in the Jurassic Period. Geographically isolated and only distantly related to other living groups, their fossil record contains several long gaps with ghost lineages filling in the blanks. Viewed in this light, New Zealand seems like quite a likely spot to uncover a mammal with a 60 to 140 million year gap in its pedigree.

One more note about ghost lineages. The HMNH has been suffering gaps in its own record of late, and for that I apologize. (An interesting admission is that we’ve had more visitors lately than during periods of regular posting, which I hope isn’t a commentary on my writing.) Hopefully this post will mark the end of this particular ‘ghost lineage,’ and, with any luck, the Hairy Museum will regain its typical, punctuated equilibrium as we head into 2007!

Further reading:

Worthy, T. H., Tennyson, A. J. D., Archer, M., Musser, A. M., Hand, S. J., Jones, C., Douglas, B. J., McNamara, J. A., and Beck, R. M. D. 2006. Miocene mammal reveals a Mesozoic ghost lineage on insular New Zealand, southwest Pacific. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, published online; doi:10.1073/pnas.0605684103. PDF. Press release.

Afarensis has the story, as does Palaeoblog.

And Darren Naish notes that this find inspired two earlier stories on unexpectedly long-lineaged synapsids over at Tetrapod Zoology.