Starting off the news this week, ESA’s Euclid space telescope has released its first test
images after being launched at the beginning of last month.
The telescope is designed specifically to take observations to help us gain further
understanding on the largely mysterious nature of dark matter and dark energy, two aspects
of the universe that we have yet to understand to any real degree.
These two phenomena make up an enormous amount of our universe’s matter and energy, and
yet, because they are not directly detectable, we know so little about them.
Euclid will try to use… less direct methods to help us understand these aspects of the
cosmos.
The images were released this Monday by the European Space Agency, and simply serve as
a test to check the functionality of the telescope is working as intended.
In other news, a study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews has described the
findings of footprints believed to be left by the extinct human species Homo heidelbergensis,
a species that is believed to be an ancestor to Homo sapiens.
These remarkable footprints, found with footprints of elephants and other herbivores, were taken
from Schöningen, a region in northern Germany that has yielded some incredible finds for
anthropology in the past, including the famous Schöninger’s Spears - also usually attributed
to Homo heidelbergensis.
The footprints analysed were taken from two different fossil localities, and the researchers
determined that they were about 300,000 years old.
It is of course difficult to pin down exactly what species it was, especially when such
things are under so much debate anyway, but the researchers believe the footprints most
likely came from a late form of Homo heidelbergensis before they became the early Neanderthal,
or Homo neanderthalensis.
Another fantastic find that will add to the treasure trove of reminders we have about
the complex history of our human ancestry.
Up next in the palaeontology news is the absolutely spectacular discovery of what might have been
the heaviest animal to ever live - a new genus and species of colossal prehistoric whale.
Named very appropriately as Perucetus colossus, this incredible animal lived during the Eocene
epoch about 38 to 39 million years ago and was discovered in a formation in Peru.
The fossil material found of this new species includes 13 vertebrae as well as four ribs
and some other elements, and they clearly indicate something very unusual about this
whale.
Perucetus is a member of the Basilosaurids, the grouping of prehistoric whales including
the famous serpentine Basilosaurus, but Perucetus possesses incredibly dense bones.
In fact, it’s the highest degree of bone mass increase known in any animal to date,
and the palaeontologists show that this is due to the ecology of the animal.
Perucetus would not have been able to return back to land as it would have been impossible
to support its own mass, and so the incredibly dense bones were likely used as buoyancy control
for a lifestyle in which it inhabited shallow waters and dove short distances down to forage
near the seafloor, similar to what we see with the very dense-boned, shallow-water inhabiting
manatees and dugongs.
The palaeontologists suggest that it’s unlikely Perucetus was feeding on just seagrasses or
seaweed like modern sea cows, though, as it would then be the only known herbivorous cetacean,
which seems unlikely.
Instead, it was probably eating bottom-dwelling animals such as crustaceans, molluscs and
fish that swim close to the seafloor - and they even propose that perhaps it was a scavenger
of carcasses that had fallen to the bottom, as this would be a very low-cost, high-energy
food source for such a massive animal.
The mass estimates for the skeleton of Perucetus put it at between 5.3 to 7.6 tonnes, which
would make it 2.0 to 2.9 times the weight of the skeleton of a 25-metre-long blue whale
- so that’s a little insane.
What an absolutely incredible discovery there, then, showing how much we still have to learn
about the evolution and diversification of prehistoric whales.
That’s it from us this week.
I do hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of 7 Days of Science, and we’ll see you next
week for more.