deepblue
07-01-2013, 04:36 PM
Wow!
Odd Looking Orca May Be a Distinct Species (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/07/odd-looking-orca-species/)
12222
A strange-looking and mysterious killer whale living in the heaving seas ringing Antarctica might be a distinct species. Known as Type D orcas, the whales are so seldom seen that scientists relied on a 60-year-old museum specimen to unravel their ancestral story.
The tale places the black-and-white toothed whales among the most genetically distinct orcas on the planet. Roughly 400,000 years ago, it concludes, Type D orcas diverged from the rest of the lineage. Their closest relatives are the transient, mammal-eating orcas of the north Pacific. Together, the two groups form a long branch in the evolutionary tree of killer whales and suggest that with more sequencing, more species will come.
“This is a great study,” said biologist Robin Baird (http://www.cascadiaresearch.org/robin/robin.htm), of the Cascadia Research Collective, about the work, recently published in Polar Biology (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00300-013-1354-0). “None of this would have been possible without that museum collection.”
Much much more at the link, which I found via https://www.facebook.com/AmericanCetaceanSociety
Odd Looking Orca May Be a Distinct Species (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/07/odd-looking-orca-species/)
12222
A strange-looking and mysterious killer whale living in the heaving seas ringing Antarctica might be a distinct species. Known as Type D orcas, the whales are so seldom seen that scientists relied on a 60-year-old museum specimen to unravel their ancestral story.
The tale places the black-and-white toothed whales among the most genetically distinct orcas on the planet. Roughly 400,000 years ago, it concludes, Type D orcas diverged from the rest of the lineage. Their closest relatives are the transient, mammal-eating orcas of the north Pacific. Together, the two groups form a long branch in the evolutionary tree of killer whales and suggest that with more sequencing, more species will come.
“This is a great study,” said biologist Robin Baird (http://www.cascadiaresearch.org/robin/robin.htm), of the Cascadia Research Collective, about the work, recently published in Polar Biology (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00300-013-1354-0). “None of this would have been possible without that museum collection.”
Much much more at the link, which I found via https://www.facebook.com/AmericanCetaceanSociety