Secrets of dinosaur gathering revealed by newly discovered footprints
A University of Edinburgh team analysed 131 footprints at Prince Charles's Point, on the island's Trotternish Peninsula, uncovering evidence of a diverse ecosystem.
Among the tracks were rare prints of megalosaurs – a jeep-sized theropod and cousin and ancestor of the T.Rex – alongside those of plant-eating sauropods - long-necked herbivores possibly two or three times the size of an elephant, identifiable by their large, circular footprints.
The footprints were once considered by geologists to have been resting burrows of fish.
The researchers said the site provides a 'fascinating insight' into the environmental preferences and behaviours of dinosaurs from the Middle Jurassic period.
Analysis of the multi-directional tracks and walking gaits, they explained, suggest the prehistoric beasts milled around the lagoon's margins, similar to how animals congregate around watering holes today.
They added that the tracks show that regardless of dominance, the meat-eating therapods and plant-eating sauropods habitually spent time in lagoons, as opposed to exposed, drier mudflats.
Research lead Tone Blakesley said: 'The footprints at Prince Charles's Point provide a fascinating insight into the behaviours and environmental distributions of meat-eating theropods and plant-eating, long-necked sauropods during an important time in their evolution.
'On Skye, these dinosaurs clearly preferred shallowly submerged lagoon environments over subaerially exposed mudflats.'
The first three footprints at the site were discovered five years ago by a University of Edinburgh student and colleagues during a visit to the shoreline.
Subsequent discoveries of other footprints in the area made it one of the most extensive dinosaur track sites in Scotland, with scientists saying they expect to find more.
The research team studied the tracks by taking thousands of overlapping photographs of the entire site with a drone, before using specialist software software to construct 3D models of the footprints via a technique called photogrammetry.
Steve Brusatte, personal chair of palaeontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh, reflected on the fact the remote bay on the Trotternish Peninsula was also where Bonnie Prince Charlie hid in 1746 while on the run from British troops.
'Prince Charles's Point is a place where Scottish history and prehistory blend together,' he said.
'It's astounding to think that when Bonnie Prince Charlie was running for his life, he might have been sprinting in the footsteps of dinosaurs.'
The research, published in PLOS One, was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and National Geographic Society.
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Edinburgh Reporter
6 hours ago
- Edinburgh Reporter
Fringe 2025: The Provocateurs: Compassion During Birth/Screw Up or Breakthrough?
The Provocateurs is The Stand's new series of debates, featuring academics who have to tell us about their research while making it fun – and provocative – all in the space of twenty minutes. And if that sounds familiar, it is. Last year these events were part of the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas sessions but, as our host Susan Morrison tells us, 'The Young People said we needed a rebrand.' Fortunately, even if (by her own admission), Morrison find 'provocateurs' a tricky word to get her Glaswegian tongue around, nothing else has really changed. We're still promised an interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking hour (with time for questions) from two researchers at the top of their game. On Thursday, our first speaker is Lucy Remnant (University of Edinburgh), a scientist studying DNA and chromosomes. But before she gets onto those, Remnant wants to tell us about scientific mistakes, of which it seems there are rather a lot. Is that a bad thing? 'NO!' Students are taught, says Lucy, to learn from their mistakes but not to repeat them – when in fact, looking at them and repeating them can sometimes lead to massive breakthroughs. Lucy cites Alexander Fleming. He discovered penicillin, right? What a genius! But if Fleming hadn't left a plate of bacteria out when he went on holiday, he'd never have found a fungus growing on that bacteria when he came back. That fungus was preventing the bacteria from growing. It was promptly named penicillin, and went on to have a stellar career of its own, saving the lives of many soldiers in World War One. In 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, a German physicist, was busy shooting cathode rays through chemicals. On a whim, he decided to shoot some through his own pelvis. He wasn't supposed to be doing this (who knew?) but ta-dah! He discovered X-Rays and they've been used to take photos of bones ever since. In her own field, Lucy tells us about Linus Pauling. He published what he thought was the chemical structure of DNA; a year later James Watson and Francis Crick found out he'd got it wrong – and by looking at where he'd gone wrong, they got it right. To illustrate her research, Lucy produces some knitted socks. Except they're not socks – they're tubes of chromosomes. Possibly… Each sock has a pair, except one sad one that gets left behind and feels uncomfortable. It's likely that 1% of the population has a different number of chromosomes from the standard 46. These are mistakes made by cells, and it's those mistakes – which may cause anything from Down's Syndrome to cancer and fertility problems – that Lucy's investigating. And a human mistake – or rather a failure to follow a protocol – has led to her lab's discovery of a new and simpler way to isolate chromosomes, and so to the writing of a new, simpler, protocol. Lucy is all for students being taught not to fear mistakes, but how can this happen when, as Morrison points out, scientists may well be penalised for making them? Pressures of funding, the need to publish authoritative papers – even, as Lucy reminds us, the hyper sterile environments now demanded in labs, all conspire against the idea that short term failure can bring long term benefits. Lucy is part of a new network that plans to change things, 'It's the messy edges where breakthroughs can come through. It would be better to teach young people to fail often.' A tricky idea when the pressure to be perfect in all things has perhaps never been greater, but as Morrison suggest, all we need to do is be more cat. When something goes wrong, just walk away with the classic 'I meant to do that 'look. Because if anyone knows how to do nonchalance, it's definitely our feline friends. Our second speaker appears in an oversized hospital gown. Yvonne Kuipers is Professor of Midwifery at Edinburgh Napier University, an honorary professor at the University of Antwerp and an NMC Registered Midwife. Her research looks at women's experiences of birth and how these might be improved. Yvonne's presentation begins with voiceovers of comments passed on to interviewers by the women who were on the receiving end of them. Women are told to 'stop moaning' to 'be a good girl.' They are regularly told that they should be grateful they have a healthy baby, regardless of whether they've been ignored, mocked, cut, stitched, given medication without consent and totally traumatised. A pilot lands a plane safely; he gets a round of applause. Beyonce performs Crazy and gets a standing ovation, 'Childbirth is special, sacred…the women doing it should be honoured, applauded, given flowers, diamonds.' What happens to most women? They're left flailing on their backs under bright lights, with no privacy and a constant stream of medical staff coming in and out of the room. In 'normal' life, says Yvonne, the things done to women in childbirth would be classed as assault. In the labour ward, they're just 'routine procedure.' Women do not forget childbirth. Even if it all happened years ago, when Yvonne talks with them they remember it as if it were yesterday, and few of them see it as a positive experience. A 2004 report showed that there had been no improvement in birth outcomes in high income countries; this led to efforts being focused entirely on the reduction of neo-natal deaths, and blame for poor outcomes being directed at women. Mothers are labelled too fat, too thin, too old, too everything. If a woman in labour disagrees with a medical professional, what Yvonne calls 'the dead baby card' is swiftly played; you'd better accept what we say, you don't want to risk your baby's life, do you? Again and again, women are told to be 'grateful.' And it doesn't end at birth, says Yvonne. Women who feel traumatised by this lack of compassion can suffer post-natal depression; their relationship with their partner may deteriorate. They will be reluctant to go to their doctor with their problems because they have lost any hope of being listened to. The lack of compassion and dignity in birth silences women, and yet again they are told just to be 'glad your baby's healthy' – which of course makes them feel guilty for having any negative feelings at all. A traumatic birth full of intervention teaches a woman that her body is not her own, and leads to a wider, societal fear of childbirth. My own mother told me not to let my daughters watch Call the Midwife as 'it will put them off forever' – and that was the early series, when the same midwife visited the woman in her home and delivered her baby there too. Long gone are those halcyon days. Yvonne wants to change things. Compassion and dignity should not, she says, be optional; consent should never be non-negotiable. Childbirth has become over-medicalised and rife with protocols; it's very difficult for a midwife, no matter how empathetic, to do anything differently. There's a well-documented shortage of midwives, and an even better-documented lack of cash in the NHS coffers. Is change even feasible? Midwives work on an inflexible shift system which means they can rarely stay with a woman throughout labour. Hospitals want women in and out of beds as soon as possible – will there ever be space for a woman to take longer than her allocated time to deliver? The only people likely to be allowed that luxury are surely those who can afford to pay for it? Yvonne believes we have to try. Communication, or rather lack of it, is, she says, a big part of the problem in all medical care. Whilst there may not be time to get consent in an emergency, it would normally be perfectly possible to ask a woman if she agrees with the proposed course of action. Is there a way to build compassion into midwifery training? And even if there is, can it be put into practice given the constraints under which midwives work? This was an interesting talk and one that raised more questions than it answered. I'm sure most mothers, or women planning a pregnancy, would like to hear more about Yvonne's work in future, but much as I would like to see her views in action, I fear that nothing will change in our underfunded, overloaded, system for many years to come. The Provocateurs series continues throughout the Fringe at The Stand, York Place (venue numbers vary.) Please note many events, including these ones, take place in buildings other than The Stand's main venue, though still on York Place. On Monday 18 August at 11.25am Chris Purcell will speak on Learn with Your Body and Michael Leavitt on Knocks to the Head, followed at 5.40pm by Chris Elsden on Children's Money and Berengere Digard on Minds Eyes. Further talks include Urban Camping, Sleep Myths, Robot Romance, Brain Health Roulette, Gender Fears, Women in Iranian Cinema, and many more. For details visit The Stand's website and click on the Fringe tab. Like this: Like Related
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Why antibiotics are like fossil fuels
In 1954, just a few years after the widespread introduction of antibiotics, doctors were already aware of the problem of resistance. Natural selection meant that using these new medicines gave an advantage to the microbes that could survive the assault – and a treatment that worked today could become ineffective tomorrow. A British doctor put the challenge in military terms: 'We may run clean out of effective ammunition. Then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.' More than 70 years later, that concern looks prescient. The UN has called antibiotic resistance 'one of the most urgent global health threats'. Researchers estimate that resistance already kills more than a million people a year, with that number forecast to grow. And new antibiotics are not being discovered fast enough; many that are essential today were discovered more than 60 years ago. The thing to remember is that antibiotics are quite unlike other medicines. Most drugs work by manipulating human biology: paracetamol relieves your headache by dampening the chemical signals of pain; caffeine blocks adenosine receptors and as a result prevents drowsiness taking hold. Antibiotics, meanwhile, target bacteria. And, because bacteria spread between people, the challenge of resistance is social: it's as if every time you took a painkiller for your headache, you increased the chance that somebody else might have to undergo an operation without anaesthetic. That makes resistance more than simply a technological problem. But like that British doctor in 1954, we still often talk as if it is: we need to invent new 'weapons' to better defend ourselves. What this framing overlooks is that the extraordinary power of antibiotics is not due to human ingenuity. In fact, the majority of them derive from substances originally made by bacteria and fungi, evolved millions of years ago in a process of microbial competition. This is where I can't help thinking about another natural resource that helped create the modern world but has also been dangerously overused: fossil fuels. Just as Earth's geological forces turned dead plants from the Carboniferous era into layers of coal and oil that we could burn for energy, so evolution created molecules that scientists in the 20th century were able to recruit to keep us alive. Both have offered an illusory promise of cheap, miraculous and never-ending power over nature – a promise that is now coming to an end. If we thought of antibiotics as the 'fossil fuels' of modern medicine, might that change how we use them? And could it help us think of ways to make the fight against life-threatening infections more sustainable? The antibiotic era is less than a century old. Alexander Fleming first noticed the activity of a strange mould against bacteria in 1928, but it wasn't until the late 1930s that the active ingredient – penicillin – was isolated. A daily dose was just 60mg, about the same as a pinch of salt. For several years it was so scarce it was worth more than gold. But after production was scaled up during the second world war, it ended up costing less than the bottle it came in. This abundance did more than tackle infectious diseases. Just as the energy from fossil fuels transformed society, antibiotics allowed the entire edifice of modern medicine to be built. Consider surgery: cutting people open and breaking the protective barrier of the skin gives bacteria the chance to swarm into the body's internal tissues. Before antibiotics, even the simplest procedures frequently resulted in fatal blood poisoning. After them, so much more became possible: heart surgery, intestinal surgery, transplantation. Then there's cancer: chemotherapy suppresses the immune system, making bacterial infections one of the most widespread complications of treatment. The effects of antibiotics have rippled out even further: they made factory farming possible, both by reducing disease among animals kept in close quarters, and by increasing their weight through complex effects on metabolism. They're one of the reasons for the huge increase in meat consumption since the 1950s, with all its concomitant welfare and environmental effects. Despite the crisis of resistance, antibiotics remain cheap compared with other medicines. Partly – as with fossil fuels – this is because the negative consequences of their use (so-called externalities) are not priced in. And like coal, oil and gas, antibiotics lead to pollution. One recent study estimated that 31% of the 40 most used antibiotics worldwide enter rivers. Once they're out there, they increase levels of resistance in environmental bacteria: one study of soil from the Netherlands showed that the incidence of some antibiotic-resistant genes had increased by more than 15 times since the 1970s. Another source of pollution is manufacturing, particularly in countries such as India. In Hyderabad, where factories produce huge amounts of antibiotics for the global market, scientists have found that the wastewater contains levels of some antibiotics that are a million times higher than elsewhere. Like the climate crisis, antibiotic resistance has laid global inequalities bare. Some high-income countries have taken steps to decrease antibiotic use, but only after benefiting from their abundance in the past. That makes it hard for them to take a moral stand against their use in other places, a dilemma that mirrors the situation faced by post-industrial nations urging developing nations to forgo the economic benefits of cheap energy. This may be where the similarities end. While we look forward to the day when fossil fuels are phased out completely, that's clearly not the case with antibiotics, which are always going to be part of medicine's 'energy mix'. After all, most deaths from bacterial disease worldwide are due to lack of access to antibiotics, not resistance. What we are going to need to do is make our approach to development and use much more sustainable. Currently, many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the search for new antibiotics: it's hard to imagine a more perfect anti-capitalist commodity than a product whose value depletes every time you use it. That means we need alternative models. One proposal is for governments to fund an international institute that develops publicly owned antibiotics, rather than relying on the private sector; another is to incentivise development with generously funded prizes for antibiotic discovery. And to address the issue of overuse, economists have suggested that health authorities could run 'subscription' models that remove the incentive to sell lots of antibiotics. In one pilot scheme in England, two companies are being paid a set amount per year by the NHS, regardless of how much of their product is actually used. Finally, we have to remember that antibiotics aren't the only game in town. Supporting other, 'renewable' approaches means we get to use the ones we do have for longer. Vaccines are vital to disease prevention – with every meningitis, diphtheria or whooping cough vaccine meaning a potential course of antibiotics forgone. And the 20th century's largest reductions in infectious disease occurred not because of antibiotics, but thanks to better sanitation and public health. (Even in the 2000s, the threat of MRSA was addressed with tried-and-tested methods such as handwashing and cleaning protocols – not new antibiotics.) Given that antibiotics themselves emerged unexpectedly, we should also be investing more in blue-skies research. Just as we no longer burn coal without a thought for the consequences, the era of carefree antibiotic use is now firmly in the past. In both cases, the idea that there wouldn't be a reckoning was always an illusion. But as with our slow waking up to the reality of the climate crisis, coming to appreciate the limits of our love affair with antibiotics may ultimately be no bad thing. Liam Shaw is a biologist at the University of Oxford, and author of Dangerous Miracle (Bodley Head). Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (Profile, £11.99) Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them by John S Tregoning (Oneworld, £10.99) Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History by Dorothy H Crawford (Oxford, £12.49)
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Why antibiotics are like fossil fuels
In 1954, just a few years after the widespread introduction of antibiotics, doctors were already aware of the problem of resistance. Natural selection meant that using these new medicines gave an advantage to the microbes that could survive the assault – and a treatment that worked today could become ineffective tomorrow. A British doctor put the challenge in military terms: 'We may run clean out of effective ammunition. Then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.' More than 70 years later, that concern looks prescient. The UN has called antibiotic resistance 'one of the most urgent global health threats'. Researchers estimate that resistance already kills more than a million people a year, with that number forecast to grow. And new antibiotics are not being discovered fast enough; many that are essential today were discovered more than 60 years ago. The thing to remember is that antibiotics are quite unlike other medicines. Most drugs work by manipulating human biology: paracetamol relieves your headache by dampening the chemical signals of pain; caffeine blocks adenosine receptors and as a result prevents drowsiness taking hold. Antibiotics, meanwhile, target bacteria. And, because bacteria spread between people, the challenge of resistance is social: it's as if every time you took a painkiller for your headache, you increased the chance that somebody else might have to undergo an operation without anaesthetic. That makes resistance more than simply a technological problem. But like that British doctor in 1954, we still often talk as if it is: we need to invent new 'weapons' to better defend ourselves. What this framing overlooks is that the extraordinary power of antibiotics is not due to human ingenuity. In fact, the majority of them derive from substances originally made by bacteria and fungi, evolved millions of years ago in a process of microbial competition. This is where I can't help thinking about another natural resource that helped create the modern world but has also been dangerously overused: fossil fuels. Just as Earth's geological forces turned dead plants from the Carboniferous era into layers of coal and oil that we could burn for energy, so evolution created molecules that scientists in the 20th century were able to recruit to keep us alive. Both have offered an illusory promise of cheap, miraculous and never-ending power over nature – a promise that is now coming to an end. If we thought of antibiotics as the 'fossil fuels' of modern medicine, might that change how we use them? And could it help us think of ways to make the fight against life-threatening infections more sustainable? The antibiotic era is less than a century old. Alexander Fleming first noticed the activity of a strange mould against bacteria in 1928, but it wasn't until the late 1930s that the active ingredient – penicillin – was isolated. A daily dose was just 60mg, about the same as a pinch of salt. For several years it was so scarce it was worth more than gold. But after production was scaled up during the second world war, it ended up costing less than the bottle it came in. This abundance did more than tackle infectious diseases. Just as the energy from fossil fuels transformed society, antibiotics allowed the entire edifice of modern medicine to be built. Consider surgery: cutting people open and breaking the protective barrier of the skin gives bacteria the chance to swarm into the body's internal tissues. Before antibiotics, even the simplest procedures frequently resulted in fatal blood poisoning. After them, so much more became possible: heart surgery, intestinal surgery, transplantation. Then there's cancer: chemotherapy suppresses the immune system, making bacterial infections one of the most widespread complications of treatment. The effects of antibiotics have rippled out even further: they made factory farming possible, both by reducing disease among animals kept in close quarters, and by increasing their weight through complex effects on metabolism. They're one of the reasons for the huge increase in meat consumption since the 1950s, with all its concomitant welfare and environmental effects. Despite the crisis of resistance, antibiotics remain cheap compared with other medicines. Partly – as with fossil fuels – this is because the negative consequences of their use (so-called externalities) are not priced in. And like coal, oil and gas, antibiotics lead to pollution. One recent study estimated that 31% of the 40 most used antibiotics worldwide enter rivers. Once they're out there, they increase levels of resistance in environmental bacteria: one study of soil from the Netherlands showed that the incidence of some antibiotic-resistant genes had increased by more than 15 times since the 1970s. Another source of pollution is manufacturing, particularly in countries such as India. In Hyderabad, where factories produce huge amounts of antibiotics for the global market, scientists have found that the wastewater contains levels of some antibiotics that are a million times higher than elsewhere. Like the climate crisis, antibiotic resistance has laid global inequalities bare. Some high-income countries have taken steps to decrease antibiotic use, but only after benefiting from their abundance in the past. That makes it hard for them to take a moral stand against their use in other places, a dilemma that mirrors the situation faced by post-industrial nations urging developing nations to forgo the economic benefits of cheap energy. This may be where the similarities end. While we look forward to the day when fossil fuels are phased out completely, that's clearly not the case with antibiotics, which are always going to be part of medicine's 'energy mix'. After all, most deaths from bacterial disease worldwide are due to lack of access to antibiotics, not resistance. What we are going to need to do is make our approach to development and use much more sustainable. Currently, many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the search for new antibiotics: it's hard to imagine a more perfect anti-capitalist commodity than a product whose value depletes every time you use it. That means we need alternative models. One proposal is for governments to fund an international institute that develops publicly owned antibiotics, rather than relying on the private sector; another is to incentivise development with generously funded prizes for antibiotic discovery. And to address the issue of overuse, economists have suggested that health authorities could run 'subscription' models that remove the incentive to sell lots of antibiotics. In one pilot scheme in England, two companies are being paid a set amount per year by the NHS, regardless of how much of their product is actually used. Finally, we have to remember that antibiotics aren't the only game in town. Supporting other, 'renewable' approaches means we get to use the ones we do have for longer. Vaccines are vital to disease prevention – with every meningitis, diphtheria or whooping cough vaccine meaning a potential course of antibiotics forgone. And the 20th century's largest reductions in infectious disease occurred not because of antibiotics, but thanks to better sanitation and public health. (Even in the 2000s, the threat of MRSA was addressed with tried-and-tested methods such as handwashing and cleaning protocols – not new antibiotics.) Given that antibiotics themselves emerged unexpectedly, we should also be investing more in blue-skies research. Just as we no longer burn coal without a thought for the consequences, the era of carefree antibiotic use is now firmly in the past. In both cases, the idea that there wouldn't be a reckoning was always an illusion. But as with our slow waking up to the reality of the climate crisis, coming to appreciate the limits of our love affair with antibiotics may ultimately be no bad thing. Liam Shaw is a biologist at the University of Oxford, and author of Dangerous Miracle (Bodley Head). Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (Profile, £11.99) Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them by John S Tregoning (Oneworld, £10.99) Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History by Dorothy H Crawford (Oxford, £12.49)
