Natural Living Tips

When I came across this piece of news, my mind immediately fell to the Archaeopteryx. This was a bird/dinosaur combo that flew around 65 million years ago or so. It was purported to be the missing link between birds and reptiles. Apparently, they found another type of these flying reptiles in China.

“The extensive feathering of this specimen, particularly the attachment of long pennaceous feathers to the pes, sheds new light on the early evolution of feathers and demonstrates the complex distribution of skeletal and integumentary features close to the dinosaur-bird transition”, researchers from the Shenyang Normal University wrote.

The fossil is 160 million years old, and is the oldest of its kind to be found so far. At that date, it is millions of years older than the archaeopteryx, putting it at the forefront of being the missing link instead.

Discoveries before this one had put archaeologists in a little bit of a temporal pickle because the fossils found were younger than the fossils of birds they had found. So that didn’t really work out so well. What might have happened is birds and reptiles splitting off evolutionarily from this guy millions of years before, and then you’d have both the hybrids and the birds showing up in the fossil record after. The only thing that could mess up the chronology now would be a 160 million year old bird fossil.

The research findings will also be published in “Nature” magazine on Oct. 1. Take a look at it there for a more in depth survey.

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The IUCN red list of endangered species for 2008 has just been published.

It is obviously a very lengthy report covering the list of endangered species, from extinct and extinct in the wild to those that fall under the classification of not enough data.

A selective look of some of the results:
- 20% of reptiles are struggling to survive
- 20% + of mammals, including marine mammals, are also threatened with extinction
Of the nearly 50,000 species listed (fauna and flora) over 35% are threatened.

But there are a few other things I want to highlight.

The first is that people typically look at the extremes, for example those species that are extinct or critically endangered. Bad news sell newspapers as they say. And the more shocking the more they sell.

For endangered species this is a disservice as those species that may today be classified as least concerned can later on become critically endangered.

The list (and it is a very extensive list covering vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, mushrooms, and so on) does present species whose potential survival has deteriorated but also for those that have improved.

The overall message we should take from this, apart from recognizing the efforts of the IUCN, is that all species deserve our care, and this care is really reflected by respect and looking after the environment.

Anyone interested in living natural must take the environment seriously.

We have to be aware that species in the world are at risk due to many factors, in fact to many human created factors.

Amongst these are:
- habitat loss due to human settlement, agricultural expansion;
- hunting and poaching for skins and meat;
- depletion of food sources;
- habitat degradation coming from overgrazing;
- climate change;
- many others.

And now for some good news.

-Walia Ibex has shown an improvement in classification, moving from Critically Endangered (CR) to Endangered (EN)
- Przewalski’s Gazelle from CR to EN
- Pohnpei Flying Fox from CR to EN
- Black Lion Tamarin from CR to EN

The number of mammal species that showed an improvement is 37.

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