Nearly Extinct: Pherosphaera fitzgeraldii

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Nearly Extinct: Pherosphaera fitzgeraldii

Image by Poytr
Biologists tell us that extinction is a natural process, and that plants and animals either adapt to their situation or they die out. In Australia, there is a lot of extinction, particularly in the past 200 years after white man came along.

For instance, the state of South Australia has a terrible record animals dying out. Feral animals, weeds, and destruction of habitat sent many Australians off the edge, into the grave of extinction.

Lucky me to take this photo of a plant, right on the edge. On the edge of extinction. Photographed In the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. It was easy to identify as it's a little pine tree. And there's not too many pine species in this part of the world. The fern nearby is probably a Blechnum.

The evolution of plants is a slow process, and so is the extinction of plants.

The understanding of Australian flora and fauna is replete with interesting sights, anecdotes and scientific understanding. We wonder at the great botanists and biologists and their superb findings. They say there is only another plant in this genus, which grows in Tasmania. And both of these little pines are related to the more well known Huon Pine.

Australians tend to call any gymnosperm (conifer) "a pine". When others tend to say a pine is only in the genus pinus. They become irate about people like us calling the Wollemi Pine a pine. But so much for pedants.

To be an Australian plant or animal, you have to be tough. This country has so many harsh conditions. Drought, heatwave, flood, cold, wind, no food, no protection. Only the most tough, adaptable and resilient can survive. Many Australian plants and animals evolved from ancient times. If you are an Australian, you are top drawer, you are first class. You are a real survivor.

The little pine tree in the photo is of an ancient lineage. It is a relict of Gondwana. It's no tree, just a tiny little pine. They grow next to waterfalls in the splash zone. Where it is shaded and misty wet. It is not (yet) extinct. Still alive. It is a little miracle, still hanging on to existence.

There's just two hundred of these little plants growing in the Blue Mountains region, west of Sydney. They are hanging on. (Literally to the rocks at Wentworth Falls) and other nearby waterfalls. Pollution problems from urban runoff and sedimentation are of concern. So is the leaking of nutrients from sewer pipes, as it encourages excessive algal growth.

People employed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service are trying to stop this little plant from the inevitability of extinction. Let's hope we humans succeed in this particular quest. This impressive and ancient pine is worthy of our interest. The scientists call it
Pherosphaera fitzgeraldii. It's a real beauty, and it deserves to survive for thousands of years to come.

whc.unesco.org/en/list/917

Take me out and show me off, Put me on the scene

Image by Mark Witton
In recent days my place of residence, the small coastal city of Portsmouth, has been inundated with craploads of snow, freezing temperatures and icy conditions. This is really unusual: Portsmouthonians usually consider themselves lucky to see a few snowflakes, let alone four inches of the white stuff across pavements, parked cars and roadways. At first, this was undoubtedly the Best Thing Ever, with the closing of the university offering ample opportunity to engage in snowball fights, build nicotine-addicted snowmen, walk in virgin snowfalls to hear the neat crunching noise that snow makes underfoot and, well, do other snowy things. Four days on, however, our Winter Wonderland has transformed into a New Year Nuisance, with chief aggravator being the transformation of the soft, snowballable snow into packed, two-inch thick sheets of ice that adorn pavements and road surfaces around the city. While some main roads were gritted and cleared, the majority of the city’s streets have been left alone, making even a run to the supermarket far more adventurous than it need be. Even without the hazards of slipping over (which is mostly just an embarrassing annoyance, but something I’ve considered a little more seriously since seeing a blood-splatted, fractured ice sheet yesterday evening), it doesn’t half slow you down. I walk quickly, y’see – I’ve got things to do, places to be and regular need not to be late for work, after all – and become frustrated very easily when shopping crowds, ice or other dense, amorphous obstacles slow me down. I’m the walking equivalent of a reckless driver, moving too fast, cutting people up, performing risky overtaking manoeuvres and all: how can I do that when there’s all this ice around? I can’t, obviously, and it’s really getting on my nerves.

In this respect, the current state of Portsmouth is a metaphor for the early days of the Internet (yes, really). Remember that period back in the mid-nineties? Back when you had to listen to your modem whistling as it connected to your Internet provider, downloading your favourite Walking with Dinosaurs wallpaper in 1024 x 768 resolution took a month of Sundays and the entire Internet landscape was decorated with poorly animated GIFs? Moving around the Web was so slow: particularly image-intensive pages gave you enough to enjoy several cups of tea, listen to your favourite Suede CD and watch a classic, mid-nineties episode of The Simpsons whilst it downloaded. Still, armed with nothing more than a 56K modem and a big-assed monitor, we took our first turgid steps into the land of filth and procrastination that is the Internet and, back in those days, there were several big palaeontology sites that my gawky adolescent form liked to visit. Many of which have since become defunct, but I fondly remember wading around the Dinosauricon (including that fantastic art gallery), the embryonic Dinosaur Mailing List, early versions of Dinodata and Palaeos, Dinosauria.com and some, long forgotten place where I scored a bounty of Gregory S. Paul skeletal reconstructions in some weird format known as a ‘PDF’. It’ll never catch on, you know.

Nowadays, of course, the Internet is a very different place. The Interweb of the mid-nineties is like a meandering country lane compared to the superslick, ultrafast Web 2.0-Facebook-Myspace-full-streaming-HD-video-YEAH! motorway that we now browse on. The amount of palaeontology on the net has skyrocketed, a feat aided by the invention of blogs, the ease with which websites can be created and the way in which high-quality E-information can be passed around so readily. Of course, a lot of these sites are of suspect quality, containing out-of-date or sparse information or reflecting the opinions of the authors disguised as scientific fact, but there are several Palaeo-themed blogs and websites maintained by level-headed, knowledgeable folks that provide reliable information and intelligent analysis. Problem is, while there is a Pantheon of E-information available on dinosaurs, other fossil groups are really neglected online, including those most loveable of non-avian flying reptiles, pterosaurs. So far as I can remember, there has never really been any truly exceptional, dedicated pterosaur websites. There have been and, indeed, still are some very good ones, but most fall short in not keeping up-to-date with pterosaur science, provide really skimpy information about very interesting things and, crime of crimes, provide archaic, horrendous restorations of pterosaurs in life. As such, finding out things about pterosaurs online has always been difficult but, thankfully, this is all about to change. Well, maybe.

Y’see, some time ago – 2007, to be exact – the pterosaur yuppies of the world decided to unite and, rather than using their vast intellects and good looks for evil, cobble together a pterosaur website that would reflect up-to-date pterosaur research, provide information on more animals than just Pterodactylus and Quetzalcoatlus and use accurate reconstructions of their anatomy and life-appearance. The role call for this exercise included a bunch of household names in the pterosaur world: vertebrate palaeontologists Dave Hone, Darren Naish, Ross Elgin, Lorna Steel, Helmut Tischlinger, Dino Frey, Michael Habib and palaeoartists John Conway and Luis Rey offered to lend their pens, artwork and domain addresses to the cause and, somewhere along the line, I was offered some jobs too. The result is the appropriately titled Pterosaur.net, a compilation of articles, and images of all things pterosaur. The site is not entirely finished, but, seeing as it has already taken a couple of years to get this far, we figure that there’s enough there to cast our Internetvessel into the sea to see if she floats, with odds and ends to be added later.

So, if you cruise over to Pterosaur.net, what will you find? It’s all pretty self-explanatory, really, and easily navigable with the two menus at the top and bottom of every page. The main sections see Dave Hone introduce the group, give a run-down on pterosaur systematics and a brief glimpse at pterosaurs in popular culture; Mike Habib reviewing pterosaur anatomy and attributes of their flight; me giving a typically long-winded account of pterosaur terrestrial locomotion and palaeoecology; a variety of authors introducing select pterosaur genera; John Conway revealing how the life appearances of pterosaurs are restored from their fossil remains; and Darren Naish explaining how much of typical pterosaur portrayal in the press and fiction is pure bumph. But that’s not all, little chickadees: we have a fossil gallery that doesn’t just show you images of fantastically preserved, three-dimensional pterosaur remains, but also Helmut Tischlinger’s fantastic photographs of Solnhofen pterosaurs taken under UV light. There’s another set of pterosaur restorations by two of the top pterosaur artists of modern times, John Conway and Luis Rey, with my work in there to demonstrate just how good these guys are. Dave Hone has scoured the web to provide a list of half-decent pterosaur websites and you can read all about the aforementioned pterosaur yuppies with our short contributor biographies. Although it’s not up and running yet, there’s the beginning of a Pterosaur.net blog, too: while many members of the Pterosaur.net team already have their own internet soapboxes, this provides a place to post pterosaur-specific news. The best bit of all, though, is that we want to hear from you: following the methods provided in the 'Contact' section, you can E-mail Pterosaur.net’s creators and tell them what you think. The site has been designed to be constantly modifiable, so, if we receive constructive feedback, we can tinker with the site to make it more accessible and informative.

So, there you go, then: a new, pterosaur-specific website put together by people who, hopefully, have some idea about what they’re talking about. Of course, some folk may have already seen the site: it’s actually been live for a while, but today marks its ‘official’ launch where we’re directing the world to its figurative doorstep. If you have already paid a visit and perused our list of neat pterosaur taxa, you may have noticed the above image features alongside Ross Elgin’s words on Anurognathus: I’ve had this image knocking about for a while (it was commissioned back in July 2009 and, in the final version, it sits alongside a giant azhdarchid to demonstrate pterosaur size range) but, to date, had no time to do anything with it. It’s easily my best anuroganthid image yet – though that’s not saying much – and incorporates all the newest data on these critters afforded by a sexy new specimen from the Solnhofen limestones (check out the Fossil Gallery at Pterosaur.net to see a brilliant UV image of it, complete with glowing traces of it's muscles) would discuss these here but, frankly, I think this post is long enough as it is. Before I finish, though, I should say that while a lot of people worked hard to bring Pterosaur.net into being, two folks deserve a particularly large pat on the back: Dave Hone, the man who took the main organisational reigns of the project and John Conway, the guy responsible for building such a functional, fantastic-looking site and an editing platform that even dunderheads like me could log in and use. Thanks to them, then and, as for anyone still reading at this stage, I only have one question for you: why’re you still here?