Early elephants were aquatic feeders

Elephants, even now, love water. And they come by it honestly. In the Eocene period, 37 million years ago, the ancestors of elephants spent time in the water probing with their proto-trunks for aquatic plants to eat. It’s possible that the elephant’s trunk developed initially for reaching deep into the water for forage.

Moeritherium (Luci Betti-Nash/Stony Brook University)

Two early proboscideans, Moeritherium andBarytherium, have left fragmentary remains. To tell what they ate, researchers looked at the distribution of isotopes in their teeth. The isotopes reflect a watery environment.

While carbon isotopes can give clues as to an animal’s diet, oxygen isotopes found in teeth come from local water sources – and variations in the ratios of these isotopes can indicate the type of environment the animal lived in. They compared the ratios of these isotopes to definitely terrestrial animals from the same period and these results – when combined with results from studies of embryology, molecular data, and sedimentology – lead them to believe that Moeritherium was semi-aquatic.

We already know that their closest relatives are the sirenians, or manatees and dugongs, which are fully aquatic. Researchers hope to look at other ancestors of elephants to find when they split off from sirenians and when they started feeding on land.

Republican support: non-Hispanic whites over 65

Democratic politics watcher 538 reports “Democrats do Better Among the Most and Least Educated.”

Someone has used mini-charts to allow quick comparison of data for who, in ethnic and age groupings, voted for the Republican presidential candidate in the U.S. 2008 national election. Each graph plots five educational levels: no secondary school, completed(?) secondary school, some college, completed a degree, post-graduate education.

The only group that stays aboove 50% in spite of education is whites over 65, although whites 30 – 44 and 45 – 64 are well up there. Support among blacks is subterranean and among Asians and “other” is low except for the oldest “other” (South Asian, aboriginal, and Aboriginal?).   As one commenter pointed out, “it’s hardly surprising that it [the Republican Party] does the best among those who are neither targeted for derision and discrimination by the Republicans, nor sophisticated enough to see through them.”

The article adds, “All but six of the dots in the graph are based on sample sizes greater than 30.” The size of the circles in the graphs reflects the number of people for that data point. The poll is based on raw Pew data.

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Currently reading: Entanglement

“I’m reviewing… the situation.”

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I borrowed a science book from the Ontario Centre for Inquiry to find out more than the trickle of obsolete popular science on elementary particles and quanta that I remember from my youth. Entanglement by Amir Aczel promises to explain one of the great mysteries of physics in layman’s terms. Not to answer it, but to explain the phenomena.

Amir D. Aczel is the author of many popular books on mathematics and physics, notably Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Origins of the swine flu pandemic

Research blogging from Not Exactly Rocket science:

In the time since the words “swine flu” first dominated the headlines, a group of scientists from three continents have been working to understand the origins of the new virus and to chart its evolutionary course. Today, they have published their timely results just as the World Health Organisation finally moved to phase six in its six-tier system, confirming what most of us already suspected – the world is facing the first global flu pandemic of the 21^st century.The team, led by Gavin Smith at the University of Hong Kong, compared over 800 viral genomes representing a broad spectrum of influenza A diversity. The viral menagerie included two samples of the current pandemic strain (the virus formerly known as swine flu and now referred to as swine-origin influenza virus (S-OIV)). Also in the mix were 15 newly sequenced swine strains from Hong Kong, 100 older swine strains, 411 from birds and 285 from humans.

The team used these genomes to build a viral family tree that shows the relationships between the strains and dates their origins. They found that S-OIV was borne of several viruses that circulate in pigs, with contributions from avian and human strains. The virus made the leap to humans several months before we twigged to its presence. It was spreading right under our noses, undetected because of our lack of surveillance of flu viruses in pigs.

Read more.

Evolutionary and phylogenetic trees

Casey Luskin seems to be stepping into Michael Behe’s clown shoes to perpetrate another round of “scientific analysis” based on inaccuracies. The Non-discovery blog analyzes why Luskin is wrong: Molecular evolution, retroviral evolution, and standard phylogeny give similar trees: “Why we know the tree is real.”

Hat tip to ERV: “Bort grows ERV and CytB trees!“