Latest news with #Taungurung
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Found Footprints That Push Humanity's Timeline Back By 40 Million Years
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn in this story: The common ancestor of all tetrapods (including humans) was previously thought to have emerged at the dawn of the Carboniferous period. Fossilized tracks from an early reptile are now the oldest known reptilian tracks, meaning the tetrapod ancestor most likely appeared earlier, during the Devonian period. These tracks were made by clawed feet—a characteristic of amniotes. Their appearance pushes back amniotes evolution by 35-40 million years. Between 359 and 350 million years ago, it rained. Lizard-like creatures crawled through the mud in what was once Gondwana (but is now Australia), leaving behind footprints that became frozen in time, fossilizing as mud turned to stone over the aeons. These tracks would later be unearthed in an excavation that questioned how far back in time our tetrapod ancestors walked on land. Tetrapods (meaning 'four legs' in Greek) include all amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, and are thought to originate from lobe-finned fish that made their way out of primeval seas on fins that functioned as primitive legs. Humans are tetrapods, and like all tetrapods (except amphibians), we are also amniotes, with eggs that protect developing embryos in amniotic sacs. Amniotes are thought to have diverged from amphibians at the dawn of the Carboniferous period, about 355 million years ago. Mammals would diverge from reptiles and birds only 30 million years later. The fossil footprints were discovered at the edge of an paleontological site in eastern Victoria known as Broken River (or Berrepit in Taungurung, the language spoken by local indigenous people). Whatever creature left imprints of its feet on the riverbank provides the first evidence of terrestrial life in this area, and claw marks from the footprints suggest it was an amniote—except that amniotes weren't supposed to have evolved so early in the Carboniferous period. 'This pushes back the likely origin of crown-group amniotes by at least 35-40 million years,' the Australian and Swedish team of researchers who excavated at the Berrepit site said in a study recently published in the journal Nature. '[Amniotes] cannot be much younger than the Devonian/Carboniferous boundary, and [the origin of tetrapods] must be located deep within the Devonian.' Before this find, the oldest known amniote fossils were tracks from Notalacerta and the bones of Hylonomus. Both species were sauropsids—part of a larger group of extant and extinct reptiles and birds that presumably lived during the late Carboniferous. The common ancestor of all tetrapods was thought to have emerged in the earliest years of the Carboniferous, but that changed when this team of experts came upon the mysterious tetrapod footsteps from Berrepit. They now think that the tetrapod ancestor appeared during the Devonian, and that amniotes began to diverge from them about 395 million years ago, 35 to 40 million years earlier than previously thought. It is evident that the footsteps came not just from a tetrapod, but from an amniote because almost all amniotes have claws or nails. Claw marks scratched the wet earth after a short rain shower, and there is no evidence of a body or tail dragged across the ground. While it is impossible to know what this animal actually looked like, the spacing between forefeet and hind feet indicates that it was about 17 cm (about 6.7 inches) from shoulder to hip, with neck, head, and tail lengths unknown. Using a modern water monitor as a proxy, the researchers determined it must have been about 80 cm (about 31.5 inches) total in length. Something else could possibly be demystified by the footprints—the end-Devonian mass extinction was thought to have such a catastrophic impact, it could explain why tetrapods don't appear in the fossil record for another 20 million years. Tetrapods dating to after the gap are much more diverse and advanced than their pre-gap predecessors. Early Carboniferous sauropsid tracks mean that tetrapods must have been branching out from their common ancestor sometime during the Devonian, meaning that the mass extinction had little effect on the evolution of tetrapods. 'The [fossil footprints] have a disproportionate impact on our understanding of early tetrapod evolution because of their combination of diagnostic amniote characteristics and early, securely constrained date,' the researchers said. 'They demonstrate, once more, the extraordinary importance of happenstance and serendipity in the study of severely under-sampled parts of the fossil record.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Fossil footprints found in Australia the oldest evidence of amniotes
Fossilised footprints found in Australia provide the oldest evidence for reptiles on Earth, a discovery that suggests the group evolved in the southern rather than the northern hemisphere, and some 35-40 million years earlier than thought. A 35cm trackway of clawed footprints found in sandstone on Taungurung country, near Mansfield in eastern Victoria, have been dated to between 354 and 358m years old in a paper published in Nature, making them the oldest on record. The previously oldest fossil records, from Europe and North America, are estimated at 318m years old
The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Bogong moths and the traditional owners scaling mountains to track them
Deberra, as the insects are known in the Taungurung language, are a vital food source for animals across Victoria's alpine country — so their rapid decline has implications for the entire ecosystem. The bogong moth is one of the more than 2,000 Australian species listed as being under threat in what scientists are calling an extinction crisis
The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Massive swarms of bogong moths once resembled rain clouds – then their numbers crashed to earth
The bogong moth was once so abundant it was mistaken for weather. During Sydney's Olympic Games in 2000, a swarm of bogong moths attracted by stadium lights was so huge that meteorologists mistook it for a rain cloud. But the species known as 'deberra' in Taungurung language – an insect with deep cultural and ecological importance, but which is smaller and lighter than a paperclip – has not returned to those numbers since the population collapsed by up to 99.5% in the two years before 2019. In February the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, decided against listing the species as threatened under federal conservation laws, citing gaps in data and uncertainties about the moth's population due to limited monitoring and its migratory nature. The bogong moth has been on the global endangered list compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature since 2021. Prof Brendan Wintle, a lead councillor at the Biodiversity Council and a conservation ecologist at the University of Melbourne, calls Plibersek's decision 'very disappointing' given that most experts agree the species is in trouble. Every spring, bogong moths migrate hundreds of kilometres to escape the summer heat, travelling from low-lying breeding grounds in southern Queensland and western New South Wales and Victoria to mountainous caves and rocky crevices in the Australian Alps. 'They do that without ever having done that before,' Wintle says. 'It's quite unique for such a small animal to travel such a long distance.' Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton's Clear Air column as an email While bogong moth numbers have improved, they remain well below levels recorded before the crash. Wintle says the shift from 'hyper abundant' to scarce could have catastrophic consequences for alpine ecosystems. The species is under pressure from the climate crisis, he says, and from land clearing for farming. Bogong moths rely on cold temperatures at the top of mountains for a period of dormancy to complete their life cycle. But those places are rapidly warming. The moths are widely known and recognised but scientists say there are 'fundamental knowledge gaps' about where they breed, how much their population has fluctuated and the threats they face. They are calling for significant funding to plug knowledge gaps and to work out how to protect the species. The population decline has ecological and cultural implications. Bogong moths are a crucial food source for the mountain pygmy possum, a critically endangered species and Australia's only hibernating marsupial. Sign up to Clear Air Australia Adam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisis after newsletter promotion Dr Marissa Parrott, a senior conservation biologist at Zoos Victoria, says the possums rely on the moths for important fats, proteins and nutrients after waking from five to seven months hibernating under snow. She says the species is critical to alpine ecosystems because its annual migration brings an influx of nutrients that nourished the soil, fungi, plants and animals. The bogong moth also is culturally significant to many First Nations people, including the Taungurung people of central Victoria. Matt Shanks, executive manager of bio-cultural landscapes at Taungurung Land & Waters Council, says the high-elevation sites where the moths spend the summer were also important ceremonial and meeting places for Taungurung and other First Nations people. Deberra feature in Indigenous stories stretching back tens of thousands of years. At the height of its population, the moths were recorded in every state and in the Australian Capital Territory. Wintle says this means saving the species will require nationwide coordination by governments, First Nations communities, land owners, researchers and citizen scientists – a project he says would be on a similar scale to that required to restore the Murray-Darling basin. A genetic analysis published in the journal Biological Conservation found high levels of genetic diversity in moth populations, suggesting they arrive in the Alps from a variety of breeding sites then mix randomly. Dr Collin Ahrens, a conservation geneticist and co-author of the paper, says it suggests site-specific conservation measures would be less useful than strategies that supported the species across its entire range, including work to understand and limit farming practices that could be contributing to its decline. Parrott says there is significant public enthusiasm for bogong moths, demonstrated by members of the public reporting nearly 2,000 moth sightings to a Zoos Victoria citizen science platform, Moth Tracker, between September and December. About half of the sightings have been verified as bogong moths. She says the data collected could improve understanding of the 'tiny but mighty' moths by tracking movements and population changes. Dr Kate Umbers, an associate professor in zoology at Western Sydney University and the managing director of Invertebrates Australia, says the moths' Australia-wide distribution is 'great, in a way, because it means everybody can be part of looking after it'. 'They have the potential to get agricultural and conservation scientists working together to solve these 'grand challenges' of biodiversity conservation, around how we manage land effectively, to both feed people and look after nature,' she says. But Umbers says it will be more challenging to fund and coordinate research and recovery efforts while the species is not recognised as threatened under federal law. In the short-term, she says the assessment process has identified areas in which more data is needed, and emphasised the need for the community to work together to protect the moth and its extraordinary migration.
The Guardian
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Picnic at Hanging Rock review – a haunting, heady horror story
If you close your eyes, just for a second, and think of Hanging Rock, what comes to mind? Schoolgirls in long white dresses? Pan pipes? The 'geological marvel' of the rock itself, where four girls went missing on Valentine's Day in 1900 and only one came back? This year marks the 50th anniversary of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film based on Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel, and its images, motifs and mood, all fundamental to the Australian new wave, have burrowed into our cultural consciousness over the decades and become defining. But that story is a fiction, and the rock – Ngannelong – has memories, history, and legacy of its own that pre-exists the story of this nation. Ignore it at your own peril. Sydney Theatre Company's Picnic at Hanging Rock, written by Tom Wright and presented here in a remarkable production directed by Ian Michael, takes the mystery of the missing girls from Appleyard College and transforms it by focusing on the truth has been lurking inside of it all along: a trespass, a tragedy and a haunting. Ngannelong, for longer than we can imagine, was a site for men's ceremony and initiation for the Dja Dja Wurrung, the Woi Wurrung and the Taungurung, as well as a place for meeting and trade. If Picnic at Hanging Rock is a ghost story – and it is in this play, characters suddenly struck by something interior and unseen, lunging at one another as if possessed – it's no surprise. And there are more ghosts than just the girls of Appleyard College. The ensemble – Olivia De Jonge, Kirsty Marillier, Lorinda May Merrypor, Masego Pitso and Contessa Treffone – are all dressed in school uniforms and playing characters who share their names, at least at first. Their recitative storytelling, which pairs Wright's poetic, imagery-laden language with verbatim lines from Lindsay's book, is like a spell: words become story, stories become scenes and the ensemble, like a possession, become characters from the Picnic at Hanging Rock tale. Each is giving an excellent performance, full of detail and disappearing acts. They duck and weave through lines, events and characters: De Jonge becomes school headmistress Mrs Appleyard; Marillier is Irma, the sole missing girl returned; Treffone is young Englishman Fitzhubert, a witness so plagued by thoughts of the lost girls he sets out to look for them; Merrypor is the local constable; Pitso is Sara, a young student haunted by loss. These are characters suppressed, repressed and simmering. Sara cannot be seen to mourn Miranda, the lost student she deeply loved. Mrs Appleyard hides her rage and disgust under perfect posture and brandy. Fitzhubert and Albert, his coachman, are drawn to each other in the private moments that dissolve the restrictions of polite society – constraints that seem devastatingly pointless in the shadow of the rock. And we really are always at Ngannelong in this production. Elizabeth Gadsby's set keeps us there with a looming architectural white structure hovering overhead, marking out a smaller playing space on the Drama Theatre's letterbox stage with a carpet of leaves where each scene unfolds. We're trapped, like in any great Australian gothic, within the world of European civility imposed on stolen land. Michael's direction presents Wright's play so deftly and confidently that its narrative is skillfully playing on the surface while, beneath it, a second and more extraordinary thing is occurring. In his hands, this mystery becomes a horror story so slowly we're barely conscious of the evolution. This is an achievement of craft, tone and interpretation, and the production design marks each step of the way for the audience – we can feel the shifts before we see them. At first, lighting designer Trent Suidgeest paints with palettes you'd expect: a clarifying daylight, somber twilights. But after the girls' trespass, it changes, playing so effectively with shadow and blackouts that, when the sky is sliced open with a flash of stark horror-red, it's genuinely scary. Amplifying and supporting Michael's finely-wrought direction, too, is James Peter Brown's sound design and score. It wraps around your throat and squeezes, lacing the rising tension with distant drums and beautiful melodies that still somehow sound like warnings, mixed with ever-present reminders that someone, or something, is always there: the calling of birds, the rustling of leaves. This Picnic at Hanging Rock is beautifully handled, tender and then ferocious, funny and uncomfortable, a heady descent into terror and beauty. When you leave, you'll leave with ghosts – but if you listen closer, if you close your eyes, you'll realise the ghosts have been there all along. Picnic at Hanging Rock runs until 5 April at Sydney Opera House
