I guess we can end the week with a little Snowcap. At @tapirvalley.bsky.social this morning.

I think this male is finishing up his transitional plumage into adulthood, as the full males don't have the white throat.

#birds #hummingbirds #costarica #nature

Perfectly kept dinosaur embryo from 66 million years ago found, in China :

In 2021, scientists have announced the discovery of an exquisitely preserved dinosaur embryo from at least 66 million years ago that was preparing to hatch from its egg just like a chicken...

The fossil was discovered in Ganzhou, southern China and belonged to a toothless theropod dinosaur, or oviraptorosaur, which the researchers dubbed “Baby Yingliang.”

"It is one of the best dinosaur embryos ever found in history," University of Birmingham researcher Fion Waisum Ma, who co-authored a paper in the journal iScience.

Ma and colleagues found Baby Yingliang’s head lay below its body, with the feet on either side and back curled – a posture that was previously unseen in dinosaurs, but similar to modern birds.

In birds, the behaviour is controlled by the central nervous system and called “tucking”. Chicks preparing to hatch tuck their head under their right wing in order to stabilise the head while they crack the shell with their beak. Embryos that fail to tuck have a higher chance of dying after a hatching that is unsucessful. “This indicates that such behaviour in modern birds first evolved and originated among their dinosaur ancestors,” said Ma.

An alternative to tucking might have been something closer to what is seen in modern crocodiles, which instead assume a sitting posture with the head bending upon the chest up to hatching.

Oviraptorosaurs, which means “egg thief lizards”, were feathered dinosaurs that lived in what is now Asia and North America during the Late Cretaceous period. They had variable beak shapes and diets and ranged in size from modern turkeys at the lower end to massive Gigantoraptors, that were 8m long. Baby Yingliang measures about 27cm long from head to tail and lies inside a 17cm long egg at the Yingliang Stone Nature History Museum.

Researchers believe the creature is between 72 and 66 million years old, and was probably preserved by a sudden mudslide that buried the egg, protecting it from scavengers for aeons. It would have grown 2-3m long if it had lived to be an adult, and would have likely fed on plants. The specimen was one of several egg fossils that were forgotten in storage for decades.

The research team suspected they might contain unborn dinosaurs, and scraped off part of Baby Yingliang’s eggshell to uncover the embryo hidden within.

“This dinosaur embryo inside its egg is one of the most beautiful fossils I have ever seen,” said Professor Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, part of the research team, in a statement.

Indian gov't is buying a subscription to 13,000 academic journals, and then making them all available to "18 million students, faculty, and researchers" for free.

The cost is $715 million over 3 years. It includes Elsevier, Nature, and AAAS.

Have any other countries done this?

Nature photographer Anzor Gasaev's camp alone with nature ...

Nature is the best life.

The magnificent beauty of nature ...

Just in:
@NASAPersevere
observed a rock with distinct features that may indicate that Mars hosted microbial life in its ancient past, but further research is needed. It contains a compelling detection of organic material, chemical signatures, and evidence of water interaction. https://go.nasa.gov/3WDv6kH

The magnificent beauty of nature ...

About 78 million years ago, a peculiar-looking dinosaur roamed the swamps and wetlands of what is now Montana. The huge plant eater boasted a splendid frill on its head, topped with spikes and two large horns which curved downward like blades. Two more horns jutted out from above its eyes. The dinosaur, described for the first time today in PeerJ, is so distinctive that researchers have declared it a new species and given it a name: Lokiceratops rangiformis, after the blade-wielding Norse god Loki.

But some scientists say the dinosaur could simply be a particularly ornate example of a previously described species. “It’s an interesting-looking animal,” says Jordan Mallon, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature who was not involved in the study. “I think it’s going to be a little contentious as to whether it represents a new species or not.”

The dinosaur’s skull and parts of its skeleton were discovered in 2019 in a Montana quarry, 3.6 kilometers south of the Canadian border, by commercial fossil hunter Mark Eatman. The Evolution Museum in Maribo, Denmark, bought the fossil pieces in 2021 and commissioned an international team of researchers to collaborate with the company Fossilogic to prepare, mount, and study the specimen in Utah.

Nature has a message for us…

FC Barcelona legend Gerard Pique has raised $65 million for his new soccer league, the Kings League, and everyone should be paying attention to this.

Rather than try to buy his own team, Pique developed an entirely new model.

Pique and his business partners bought an abandoned warehouse in Barcelona.

They then held open tryouts, drawing 11,000 applicants and eventually picking 180 players to enter a draft like in the NFL or the NBA.

The games are 7-on-7 (rather than 11-on-11).

The matches are shorter — 40 minutes vs. 90 minutes — and all of the games are held on Sunday (instead of spreading them throughout the week).

But the real genius is the league's distribution strategy.

Rather than creating a single entity structure where Pique and his partners run all the teams, they strategically picked streamers to partner with on the project.

Each streamer has millions of followers on platforms like Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and leveraging this audience has helped the Kings League grow to more than 13 million followers on digital platforms, too.

This streamer ownership model works so well because anyone in the world can watch Kings League matches for free.

That’s right, you don’t need cable TV, a streaming service, or pay-per-view packages.

Instead, the Kings League streams all of its matches for free on Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok, using its own channels while also simulcasting the matches (commercially free) on the streamer’s channels.

This helped the Kings League draw 800,000 viewers on Twitch and YouTube for its first-ever match.

In January 2023, the Kings League amassed 238 million views on TikTok and Twitch, more than every other traditional European football league combined.

And 92,000 people packed Barcelona's Camp Nou in 2023 for the league's championship match, paying anywhere between $10 to $65 to attend.

This is a promising start, but it's also just the beginning.

The Kings League has the chance to do something truly unique because the league's expansion is dependent on language rather than location.

So look for Pique to partner with English streamers, French Streamers, Arabic streamers, Portuguese streamers, Russian streamers, and Japanese streamers.

Each language will have its own league, immediately gaining millions of followers by leveraging the audience of the most popular streamers.

The incentives are aligned because the streamers get equity in the teams, and the global nature of soccer provides virtually unlimited demand.

Shoebill storks actually don’t look nice.

They are very solitary in nature, and even mating pairs will feed at opposite sides of their territory.

They are also known to eat ferocious creatures like crocodiles.