The squidworm has ten tentacles along its body and its head stick out of it. The body part also comprises six pairs of curved nuchal organs allow the squidworm to taste and smell underwater. It controls the course and position by moving two body-length rows of thin, paddle-shaped protrusions. It also has the feature to swim upright with the fantastic headgear.

Scientist from Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts have named Squidworm as Teuthidodrilus samae, a new genus and species of deep pelagic communities.

Teuthidodrilus samae did not appeared to be a predator but it feeds on passing plankton and marine snow which is a mix of sinking microscopic plants and animals, faecal material and cast-off mucus. Karen Osborn the marine biologists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California had earlier discovered unknown animals in the Celebes Sea at a depth of 2.8 kilometers (1.7 miles) using a remotely-operated submersible. Karen Osborn expectation was something unattainable because the animal was different from other species discovered earlier.

Karen Osborn estimated that when exploring in deep sea water column more than half the animals are not yet identified and this discovery will be new to science. Till now under ocean exploration are unable to be reached since the tools used for collecting samples are either scrapped or severely mutilated or disfigured which leads to higher complication in recognizing the specimen when brought to the surfaces.

The Ediacara fossil: Fractofusus andersoni

Scientists have known for some time that most major groups of complex animals appeared in the fossils record during the Cambrian Explosion, a seemingly rapid evolutionary event that occurred 542 million years ago. Now Virginia Tech paleontologists, using rigorous analytical methods, have identified another explosive evolutionary event that occurred about 33 million years earlier among macroscopic life forms unrelated to the Cambrian animals. They dubbed this earlier event the “Avalon Explosion.”

The discovery, reported in the January 4 issue of Science, suggests that more than one explosive evolutionary event may have taken place during the early evolution of animals.

The Cambrian explosion event refers to the sudden appearance of most animal groups in a geologically short time period between 542 and 520 million years ago, in the early Cambrian Period. Although there were not as many animal species as in modern oceans, most (if not all) living animal groups were represented in the Cambrian oceans. “The explosive evolutionary pattern was a concern to Charles Darwin, because he expected that evolution happens at a slow and constant pace,” said Shuhai Xiao, associate professor of geobiology at Virginia Tech. “Darwin’s perception could be represented by an inverted cone with ever expanding morphological range, but the fossil record of the Cambrian Explosion and since is better represented by a cylinder with a morphological radiation at the base and morphological constraint afterwards.”

Darwin reckoned that there should be long and hidden periods of animal evolution before the Cambrian Explosion, Xiao said.

But paleontologists have not found such evidence, and recently scientists have learned that biological evolution has not been moving on a smooth road. “Accelerated rates may characterize the early evolution of many groups of organisms,” said Michal Kowalewski, professor of geobiology at Virginia Tech.

To test whether other major branches of life also evolved in an abrupt and explosive manner, Virginia Tech graduate students Bing Shen and Lin Dong, along with Xiao and Kowalewski, analyzed the Ediacara fossils: the oldest complex, multicellular organisms that had lived in oceans from 575 to 542 million years ago; that is, before the Cambrian Explosion of animals. “These Ediacara organisms do not have an ancestor-descendant relationship with the Cambrian animals, and most of them went extinct before the Cambrian Explosion,” said Shen. “And this group of organisms – most species – seems to be distinct from the Cambrian animals.”

But how did those Ediacara organisms first evolve, Shen asked. Did they also appear in an explosive evolutionary event, or is the Cambrian Explosion a truly unparalleled event”

“We identified 50 characters and mapped the distribution of these characters in more than 200 Ediacara species. These species cover three evolutionary stages of the entire Ediacara history across 33 million years,” said Shen.

The three successive evolutionary stages are represented by the Avalon, White Sea, and Nama assemblages (all named after localities where representative fossils of each stage can be found). The earliest Avalon stage was represented by relatively few species.

Surprisingly, however, as shown by Shen and colleagues, these earliest Ediacara life forms already occupied a full morphological range of body plans that would ever be realized through the entire history of Ediacara organisms. “In other words, major types of Ediacara organisms appeared at the dawn of their history, during the Avalon Explosion,” Dong said. “Subsequently, Ediacara organisms diversified in White Sea time and then declined in Nama time. But, despite this notable waxing and waning in the number of species, the morphological range of the Avalon organisms were never exceeded through the subsequent history of Ediacara.”

Kowalewski said their research team had not anticipated the discovery. “Using the scientific literature, we were trying to create a more rigorous reconstruction of the morphological history of Ediacara organisms,” he said.

It’s hard to read for us too, don’t worry.

The process involved adapting quantitative methods that had been used previously for studying morphological evolution of animals, but never applied to the enigmatic Ediacara organisms. “We think of diversity in terms of individual species. But species may be very similar in their overall body plan. For example, 50 species of fly may not differ much from one another in terms of their overall shape – they all represent the same body plan. On the other hand, a set of just three species that include a fly, a frog and an earthworm represent much more morphological variation. We can thus think of biodiversity not only in terms of how many different species there are but also how many fundamentally distinct body plans are being represented. Our approach combined both those approaches,” said Kowalewski.

“In addition, the method relies on converting different morphologies into numerical (binary) data. This strategy allows us to describe, more objectively and more consistently, enigmatic fossil life forms, which are preserved mostly as two-dimensional impressions and are not understood well in terms of function, ecology, or physiology,” Kowalewski said.

Scientists are still unsure what were the driving forces behind the rapid morphological expansion during the Avalon explosion, and why the morphological range did not expand, shrink, or shift during the subsequent White Sea and Nama stages.

“But, one thing seems certain — the evolution of earliest macroscopic and complex life also went through an explosive event before to the Cambrian Explosion,” Xiao said. “It now appears that at the dawn of the macroscopic life, between 575 and 520 million years ago, there was not one, but at least two major episodes of abrupt morphological expansion.”

The crystal structure of an RNA molecule bound to a protein.

The crystal structure of a molecule from a primitive fungus has served as a time machine to show researchers more about the evolution of life from the simple to the complex, as outlined in this recent study.

By studying the three-dimensional version of the fungus protein bound to an RNA molecule, scientists from Purdue University and the University of Texas at Austin have been able to visualize how life progressed from an early self-replicating molecule that also performed chemical reactions to one in which proteins assumed some of the work.

“Now we can see how RNA progressed to share functions with proteins,” said Alan Lambowitz, director of the University of Texas Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology. “This was a critical missing step.”

Results of the study were published in Thursday’s (Jan. 3) issue of the journal Nature.

“It’s thought that RNA, or a molecule like it, may have been among the first molecules of life, both carrying genetic code that can be transmitted from generation to generation and folding into structures so these molecules could work inside cells,” said Purdue structural biologist Barbara Golden. “At some point, RNA evolved and became capable of making proteins. At that point, proteins started taking over roles that RNA played previously – acting as catalysts and building structures in cells.”

In order to show this and learn more about the evolution from RNA to more complex life forms, Lambowitz and Paul Paukstelis, lead author and a research scientist at the Texas institute, needed to be able to see how the fungus’ protein worked. That’s where Golden’s team joined the effort and crystallized the molecule at Purdue’s macromolecular crystallization facility.

“Obviously, we can’t see the process of moving from RNA to RNA and proteins and then to DNA, without a time machine,” Golden said. “But by using this fungus protein, we can see this process occurring in modern life.”

Looking at the crystal, the scientists saw two things, Golden said. One was that this protein uses two completely different molecular surfaces to perform its two roles. The second is that the protein seems to perform the same job that RNA performed in other simple organisms.

“The crystal structure provides a snapshot of how, during evolution, protein molecules came to assist RNA molecules in their biological functions and ultimately assumed roles previously played by RNA,” Golden said.

Before the crystallization, Lambowitz, Paukstelis and their research team at The University of Texas at Austin were involved in a long-term project to study the function of the basic cellular workhorse protein and other evolutionary fossils from the fungus. In earlier work, the scientists studied a different protein that showed how biochemical processes could progress from a world with RNA and protein to DNA.

The protein, as found in the fungus, had adapted to take over some of the RNA molecule’s chemical reaction jobs inside cells. The protein stabilizes the RNA molecule – called an intron – so that the RNA can cut out non-functional genetic material and splice together the ends of a functional gene, Paukstelis said.

“The RNA molecule in our study is capable of performing a specific chemical reaction on itself, but it requires a protein for this reaction to take place efficiently,” he said.

This basic scientific information eventually could lead to clinical applications.

“This work has potential applications in the development of antifungal drugs to battle potentially deadly pathogens; that’s one of the next steps,” Lambowitz said. “Another is to produce more detailed structures so that we can understand the ancient chemical reactions.”

This frog needs your help.

The year of 2008 has now been named among conservationists, the Year of the Frog in response to the impending doom in store for frogs, toads, newts, salamanders and caecilians across the planet. According to this article at Telegraph.co.uk, this is going to be the biggest mass extinction since the dinosaurs if something isn’t done about it soon.

“The spread of the parasitic fungus amphibian chytrid, which has proved deadly for hundreds of amphibian species, may have been made worse by the effects of global warming. The disease has so far proved unstoppable in the wild and can kill 80 per cent of native amphibians within months once it has taken hold.”

In the meantime, the Amphibian Conservation Action Plan (ACAP) is trying to find a way to protect the habitat of these threatened amphibious creatures. The biggest initiative proposed so far is the Amphibian Ark, which has a similar concept to Noah’s Ark, except instead of a “great flood,” it’s a deadly fungus.

“Widespread extinction of amphibians would be catastrophic,” said Jeffrey P. Bonner, chairman of Amphibian Ark and president and CEO of the St. Louis Zoo.

“In addition to their intrinsic value, they offer many benefits and are a critical part of a healthy world. They play an important role in the food web as both predator and prey, eating insects which benefits agriculture and minimizes disease spread. Their skin also has substances that protect them from some microbes and viruses, offering promising medical cures for a variety of human diseases.”

Conservation groups are hopeful these efforts will at least buy enough time to solve these issues before it’s too late. Ideally once the threats are removed, all the endangered amphibians would be reintroduced to their natural habitats.

Scientists at LS9, Inc. hard at work

A recent recent article on The Washington Post went into detail about how the idea creating artificial life forms through artificial DNA may be soon turned reality. Up until recently, even the most advanced laboratories couldn’t really do much more than add a few extra genes to something like a corn plant to make it more resistant to drought.

“Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to “boot itself up,” like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.”

It seems big corporations are already trying to patent these DNA creation technologies in hopes of monopolizing this potentially huge industry. You can’t help but make the comparison to the early days of computer programming. Pretty scary that a rogue DNA programmer might be able to create a malicious virus with this, except instead of infecting computers, it infects you.

A distraught kangaroo

“This is really the great, great, great, great grandfather of modern kangaroos,” a member of the Australian team that analysed the bones, La Trobe University paleontologist Ben Kear, told The Age newspaper.

The near-complete skeleton of the prehistoric kangaroo was found in Queensland state in the 1990s and represents a new species called nambaroo gillespieae, Dr Kear said.

The ancient animal is part of an extinct group of kangaroos known as the balbaridae, which is believed to have been replaced over time by the direct ancestors of modern kangaroos.

Dr Kear said the study found the nambaroo, which was about the size of a small dog and had canine fangs, had “big, muscly forearms” that showed it galloped or bounded like a brush-tailed possum.

The ancient kangaroo also had opposable “big” toes and flexible feet, a sign it had some climbing ability, like modern tree kangaroos.

It lived in dense forest, which suggests a diet of fruit and fungi.

“You’ve got this primitive kangaroo, imagine it’s climbing low branches, bounding around the forest floor, eating fungi, eating fallen fruit,” Dr Kear said.

“It’s very different to what we would imagine from your average kangaroo… that you see today.”

Dr Kear said the nambaroo skeleton would help scientists learn more about how climate change affected the evolution of kangaroos over millions of years.

It is thought kangaroos evolved into larger animals that hopped and ate grass as the landscape became drier and grassy plains appeared about 10 to 15 million years ago.

“Looking at a skeleton like this is the Rosetta Stone, it’s the quintessential fossil that will give you the beginning of the whole kangaroo radiation,” Dr Kear said.