Ten million years of tickling

Should we ban animal-tickling? Apparently not. AP reports that upon comparison, the sounds evoked by tickling three human babies and 21 orangutans, gorillas, chimps, and bonobos, all appeared to be the same thing: laughter. I would have protested, but since they didn’t scream, strike out, and feel unendurably queasy, I think we can let this one pass. (Judge for yourself – videos below.)

Most importantly, researchers say the similarities suggest a common evolutionary origin, possibly back further than 10 million years. Other research has even shown a form of laughter in rats, and work continues outside the primate domain.

To see if they would cry, researchers fed the baby simians some red wine and showed them "The Notebook" starring Ryan Gosling.

Vids:

New Species! Leaping lemurs, sea creepies, a gecko in gay Paris

New species popping up all over the place!

From the treetops of Indochina and Sundaland will now be leaping three certifiably separate species of flying lemur, or "colugo." The colugos had been thought to comprise only two species, the Sunda colugo and the Philippine colugo. But upon comparison of DNA between Sunda colugos from mainland Indochina, Java, and Borneo, researches discovered each region had a unique species, having diverged as much as five million years ago.

Colugos glide using a membrane stretched between their appendages, like a flying squirrel. Apparently, their diversification "might be explained by the colugos' unusual way of getting around. While they have the most developed gliding membrane of any mammal, they are nearly helpless on the ground, leaving them incapable of crossing large open spaces that lack trees." Groups could easily have isolated themselves and had to settle down and speciate.

That's not to disparage these floating fellows, since they are the closest living group of mammals to ours, the primates.

Scientists from the seven year old Census of Marine Life met recently to discuss the 120,000 undersea species they'd documented thus far, including newly discovered blind lobsters, giant oysters, sea spiders the size of dinner plates, and the progenitor of many deep sea octopodes. Creepy pics, as usual, at Natty G.

Lastly, a new gecko with a dramatic tale, and the recently rediscovered pygmy tarsier from Indonesia, feared to be extinct since the 1920s.

Pics: Norman Lim, colugo; Sharon Gursky-Doyen, tarsier

World's Ugliest Animals

LiveScience.com has a feature up to rate the ugliness of some pretty horrid animals, and it includes some little tidbits and cheapshots in the captions.

But I really think they missed some. A simple Google image search turns up hundreds of thousands of hits, and though some pics are dubious and some are just of disheveled dogs or unkempt kitties, I heartily recommend wasting some time perusing them.


Somehow LiveScience.com passed over the little freak pictured above. The Aye-aye, or Daubentonia madagascariensis, is the largest nocturnal primate, hiding its shame among the treetops under cover of darkness, poking its elongated middle finger into holes that it gnaws in trees looking for grubs. It can barely stand to be seen even by others of its kind - it's a solitary forager.

Lastly, I think LiveScience.com was way out of line calling the Brushtail Possum ugly:


Look at it! What were they thinking?

New species this week: Big loud bats, long extinct

One of six new bat species recovered from fossils in Egypt may be the largest echolocating bat known to the animal kingdom. The species lived about 35 million years ago, and their discovery in Africa raises questions about the origin of their family.

Echolocating bats are called microbats, in contrast to the megabats which use smell to hunt, are on average larger, and comprise the fruit bats. The largest of the new species - whose names are as yet unreleased - could have had a two foot wingspan, while the largest megabat measures three feet across.

This vocal vespertilian would have been "loud" and "obnoxious" according to the study's lead scientist. "Just going by the large echolocating bats that I know that live today," he said, "many are very loud and very pushy and very boisterous...I am assuming these bats would have been, too."

It was hard choosing these long dead "boisterous bats" for the Species of the Week, especially with the discovery recently of a "thumb-sized" lemur-like monkey that lived even longer ago and ties extant primates for the title of smallest. The only living new species discovered recently was a Microbacterium that can live in hairspray, watch out!

Image: Bonnie Miljour