Palaeontologists have made the surprising evolutionary discovery that ancient Australian fish may have had abdominal muscles, previously thought to have only developed in land animals.
Researchers mapping the oldest fossilised vertebrate muscles ever seen — in Gogo fish thought to be 380 million years old — worked out the position of the muscles and the orientation of the muscle fibres. The fossil fish, found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, are enclosed in limestone nodules and are known for their exceptional preservation. In the study published in Science, the researchers prepared and analysed the muscles in a small number of specimens from three different species.
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‘Antarctic ice shelf loss due to warm ocean’
Washington: Ocean waters melting the undersides of Antarctic ice shelves, not icebergs calving into the sea, are responsible for most of the continent’s ice loss, a new study has found. The first comprehensive survey of all Antarctic ice shelves discovered that basal meltaccounted for 55 per cent of shelf loss from 2003 to 2008 - a rate much higher than previously thought.
Ice shelves, floating extensions of glaciers, fringe 75 per cent of the vast, frozen continent.
— PTI