A mounted skeleton of the Buesching mastodon, based on casts of individual bones produced in fiberglass, on public display at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor. (E. Bronson, Michigan Photography)
CBC's Quirks & Quarks podcast has some interesting stories this week.
Origins of the Black Death... it didn't come from where everyone expected
A team of historians, archeologists and geneticists, including Philip Slavin from Stirling University in Scotland, has identified what they believe to be ground zero in the medieval bubonic plague pandemic known as the Black Death. They've found a graveyard in Kyrgyzstan where gravestones identify victims of a "pestilence," dating to just before the plague exploded around the world in the late 1340s. DNA recovered from the victims also has the fingerprint of the tell-tale plague bacteria. Their research was published in Nature.
Fossil Mastodon tusks left clues as to their life story
Scientists have used chemical analysis of the growth layers in the tusk of a 13,000 year-old mastodon fossil to reconstruct its life and migrations. Joshua Miller, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, matched chemical isotopes found in the tusk to particular geographic locations at particular times in the mastodon's life to map out where it travelled. It thrived in childhood, had a rough adolescence and annually migrated to mating sites as an adult, where it ultimately met its end in a fight as another mastodon's tusk punctured its skull. The study was published in the journal PNAS.
There are the other three stories:
- When we first kept chickens it was likely because they were pretty, not tasty
- Elephant seals feel their way to prey using whiskers in the deep, dark ocean
- How do birds smell? A new book says very well, and sometimes very good
